Tag: Google

  • The AI takeover of Google Search starts now – The Verge

    This is the new look of Google’s search results page. It’s AI-first, it’s colorful, and it’s nothing like you’re used to. It’s powered by some of Google’s most advanced LLM work to date, including a new general-purpose model called PaLM 2 and the Multitask Unified Model (MUM) that Google uses to understand multiple types of media. In the demos I saw, it’s often extremely impressive. And it changes the way you’ll experience search, especially on mobile, where that AI snapshot often eats up the entire first page of your results. There are some caveats: to get access to these AI snapshots, you’ll have to opt in to a new feature called Search Generative Experience (SGE for short), part of an also-new feature called Search Labs. Not all searches will spark an AI answer — the AI only appears when Google’s algorithms think it’s more useful than standard results, and some sensitive subjects in categories like health and finances are currently set to avoid AI interference altogether.

  • In battle over A.I., Meta decides to give away its crown jewels – The New York Times

    As a race to lead A.I. heats up across Silicon Valley, Meta is standing out from its rivals by taking a different approach to the technology. Driven by its founder and chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, Meta believes that the smartest thing to do is share its underlying A.I. engines as a way to spread its influence and ultimately move faster toward the future. Its actions contrast with those of Google and OpenAI, the two companies leading the new A.I. arms race. Worried that A.I. tools like chatbots will be used to spread disinformation, hate speech and other toxic content, those companies are becoming increasingly secretive about the methods and software that underpin their A.I. products.

  • Google’s AI pitch is a recipe for email hell – The Verge

    And even worse, the AI generation reinforces the idea that overenthusiastic US business speak is the _required_ way to write, regardless of whether it’s a necessary skill for the job. I’ve seen thoughtful stories about people with dyslexia using ChatGPT to produce text that is — as a Washington Post article puts it — “unfailingly professional and polite.” But there’s an unspoken, simpler alternative: being willing to accept wider variations in how people communicate. I don’t begrudge anyone who uses AI writing to meet largely arbitrary standards, but at a society-wide level, it’s a linguistic arms race toward a more boring future.

  • Google says it did not train its AI chatbot Bard on your private emailsThe Register
    An AI researcher quizzed Bard on where its training data came from, and was surprised when it mentioned internal data from Gmail. The former Google employee, Blake Lamoine – who was fired for leaking company secrets and believing its large language model (LLM) LaMDA was sentient – claimed that it was, indeed, trained on text from Gmail. The Register asked Google for comment, and a representative told us in a statement: “Like all LLMs, Bard can sometimes generate responses that contain inaccurate or misleading information while presenting it confidently and convincingly. This is an example of that. We do not use personal data from your Gmail or other private apps and services to improve Bard.”

  • Will Google’s rush to join chatbot party with launch of Bard backfire?The Guardian
    With Bard, Google has to walk a tightrope: offer users an experience that can compete with the AI-powered Bing Chat and ChatGPT without cannibalising its enormously profitable search business in the process. And it has to do all that under the sort of scrutiny an upstart competitor may be able to avoid, but a market leader has to tackle head-on. It’s an interesting quirk when ChatGPT “hallucinates” false information, but it’s a very different feeling when AI backed by the third-largest company in the world does the same.

    At the bottom of every Bard conversation is a disclaimer: “Bard may display inaccurate or offensive information that doesn’t represent Google’s views.” For a company that once proudly described its vision as “organising the world’s information and making it universally accessible and useful”, it’s a bizarre reduction in ambition, like Tesco launching a new product range that may give you food poisoning or Ford warning that its latest car may fail to stop when brakes are applied.

  • A new era for AI and Google WorkspaceGoogle Workspace Blog
    Blank pages can stump the best of us. That’s why we’re embedding generative AI in Docs and Gmail to help people get started writing. Whether you’re a busy HR professional who needs to create customized job descriptions, or a parent drafting the invitation for your child’s pirate-themed birthday party, Workspace saves you the time and effort of writing that first version. Simply type a topic you’d like to write about, and a draft will instantly be generated for you. With your collaborative AI partner you can continue to refine and edit, getting more suggestions as needed. […] And if you’re in the mood to let AI try out a new playful voice altogether, you’ll be able to hit the “I’m feeling lucky” option in Gmail.

  • The next generation of AI for developers and Google WorkspaceGoogle Blog
    We’re now at a pivotal moment in our AI journey. Breakthroughs in generative AI are fundamentally changing how people interact with technology — and at Google, we’ve been responsibly developing large language models so we can safely bring them to our products. Today, we’re excited to share our early progress. Developers and businesses can now try new APIs and products that make it easy, safe and scalable to start building with Google’s best AI models through Google Cloud and a new prototyping environment called MakerSuite. And in Google Workspace, we’re introducing new features that help people harness the power of generative AI to create, connect and collaborate.

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