Technology

Liz Reid, Google's recently promoted head of search, wrote in a blog post Thursday that the company has narrowed down its AI overviews in certain ways, implementing "additional opt-in refinements" to provide more health-conscious responses, disabling misleading advice and limiting the inclusion of satire and user responses from forums like Reddit. “We will continue to improve when and how we show AI insights and strengthen our protections,” he wrote, adding that Google is working on updates to improve broad sets of search results. Ashley Thompson, a spokeswoman for Google, said in a statement Friday that the company has made more…

The bot then spawned an even bigger Waldo. Subbarao Kambhampati, a professor and AI researcher at Arizona State University, also put the chatbot through some testing and said he didn't notice any notable improvements in reasoning compared to the latest version. He presented ChatGPT with a puzzle involving blocks: The answer is that it is impossible to arrange the blocks under these conditions, but, just as with previous versions, ChatGPT-4o consistently found a solution that involved moving block C. With this and other reasoning tests, ChatGPT was occasionally able to take feedback to get the right answer, which is antithetical…

If you don't have a Pixel phone, there's the similar "Talk to a Live Representative" experiment from Google Research Labs. It is available in the Google app for iOS and Android; tap the laboratory flask icon in the top left corner to access Search Labs. “Talk to a Live Representative,” active through the end of 2024, lists the 1-800 numbers of several airlines and other companies and lets you request a call and call you back when the representative is there. It's still experimental, however, and may not work consistently. Don't miss calls If you need to turn off the…

Every smartphone has an expiration date. There comes that day when software updates stop arriving and you start missing out on new apps and security protections. With most phones, this happened after just three years. But things are finally starting to change. The new number is seven. I first noticed this change when I reviewed Google's $700 Pixel 8 smartphone in October. Google told me that it was committed to providing software updates for the phone for seven years, compared to the previous three years for the Pixels, because it was the right thing to do. I was skeptical that…

What are some examples of open source software? Some of the most popular software systems are open source, such as Linux, the operating system on which Google's Android mobile system was built. Among the best-known open source products is Firefox, the free downloadable Web browser created by the Mozilla Foundation. So, what is the open and closed debate and how does it relate to artificial intelligence? Tech companies like Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic have spent billions of dollars creating “closed,” or proprietary, AI systems. People who don't work for these companies can't see or tinker with the underlying source code,…

TikTok may be adding a new skill to its resume: the disco time machine. The social platform, normally populated by countless Gen Z dancers – mostly in short choreographed routines that have been practiced and perfected – has recently been infused with the energy of a surprising demographic: their Gen X parents. In viral videos, adult children ask their parents to dance as they would to the 1984 song “Smalltown Boy,” by British synth-pop band Bronski Beat. Most of the posts are tagged #momdancechallenge, #daddancechallenge or #80sdancechallenge and have amassed tens of millions of views. The reactions were perhaps unexpected,…