Chris
June 19, 2024
FEATURED
Big tech companies trip in race to take AI mainstream
Recent high-profile stumbles by Microsoft and Google in the corporate rush to deploy generative AI are the result of known flaws, not surprise problems.
Join our AI & tools
news weekly newsletter!
Why it matters:
The more half-baked AI features and products tech giants unleash upon the public, the less the public is going to trust and embrace the new technology.
Driving the news:
Microsoft late last week delayed the broad release of its Recall feature over privacy and security concerns.
- Google has faced blowback over its move to widely incorporate AI summaries atop search results, and has reportedly ramped down the volume of AI-generated summaries it's providing users.
In both cases,
the products' problems were predictable.
- The snapshots of user activity that Recall takes are a form of surveillance, even if they're meant to help users find and remember things. It's no surprise that the public harbors deep doubts about ubiquitous AI tracking.
- Google's AI Overview has been in public testing for months in many users' search results, and it has had problems all along delivering accurate, relevant results and crediting sources for the texts it often rewrites or lifts.
The big picture:
Today's genAI — even with its many limitations — is capable of doing important work, but it can be unstable and inconsistent, and its impacts cut across disciplines and markets. Responsibility requires extended testing and thoughtful pacing of rollouts.
- It's hard to imagine there weren't people inside each company making the case for caution.
Zoom in:
Recall takes frequent screenshots of users' work and stores both the optical character recognition of the text in images of the screen and a description of other images.
- Microsoft made things worse by initially storing the records unencrypted in an easily accessible database. It also planned to have the feature be "on" by default, rather than letting users turn it on if they chose.
Zoom out:
Hundreds of billions of dollars are pouring into the AI market, and those investments are driving a competitive frenzy that's causing companies to floor the pedal on product rollouts.
- Microsoft saw an opportunity to add a Windows-only twist to the venerable PC and offer buyers something they couldn't get from Apple or anyone else.
- Google's move to rapidly deploy AI overviews across the U.S. market was likely intended to head off challengers, like Perplexity and others, that hope to unseat traditional search with AI tools.
The other side:
Plenty of tech executives believe that getting to market quickly and early is so important that doing so trumps everything else.
- In this view, there's always time to apologize and fix bugs.
What we're watching:
Apple has yet to allow the public to get its hands on the Apple Intelligence features it showed last week — some of which will only show up over the course of the next year.
- Apple's use of genAI is more targeted, but it's too soon to say that it won't encounter challenges of its own.
Latest Posts
News (Products)
AMD has turned out a real rocket. Powerful Ryzen AI 9 HX 370! Tops 5950X, near-RTX 3050 graphics.
And this is all at a TDP of 54W New benchmark results for the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 processor have appeared on the web, and they look much more impressive than the previous ones.
Chris
June 18, 2024
News (Apps)
TECH OpenAI sends internal memo releasing former employees from controversial exit agreements
OpenAI on Thursday backtracked on a controversial decision to, in effect, make former employees choose between signing a non-disparagement agreement that would never expire, or keeping their vested equity in the company.
Chris
May 23, 2024
News (Products)
Google's AI Feature Suggested Using Glue to Keep Cheese on a Pizza
The tool, which gives AI-generated summaries of search results, appeared to instruct a user to put glue on pizza when they searched "cheese not sticking to pizza."
Chris
May 23, 2024
News (Tutorial)
Meta Creates Group to Advise on AI Products
The Meta Advisory Group is composed of outside advisors that Meta's management team will periodically consult with on strategic opportunities related to our technology and product roadmap.
Chris
May 22, 2024
News (Apps)
A new way to generate basketball analytics through tracking with computer vision and AI
In honor of the playoffs, I’d like to showcase what we’ve been working on here at Nexavision — a new way to generate basketball analytics through tracking with computer vision and AI:
Chris
May 23, 2024
News (Products)
Amazon plans to give Alexa an AI overhaul — and a monthly subscription price
Amazon is planning to unveil a souped-up version of its decade-old voice assistant this year and will charge a monthly fee, sources say.
Chris
May 23, 2024
News (Tutorial)
Adobe brings Firefly AI-powered Generative Remove to Lightroom
Adobe announced on Tuesday the addition of a Generative Remove feature for Lightroom. Built atop Firefly, the GenAI feature makes it possible to seamlessly edit objects out of photos. The feature arrives on Tuesday as early access.
Chris
May 22, 2024
:format(webp)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25379248/247075_Humane_AI_pin_AKrales_0120.jpg)
News (Apps)
Humane is looking for a buyer after the AI Pin’s underwhelming debut
The startup apparently thinks it’s worth between $750 million and $1 billion despite the deep software flaws and hardware issues of its first product.
Chris
May 22, 2024
News (Products)
Meta introduces Chameleon, a state-of-the-art multimodal model
The architecture of Chameleon can unlock new AI applications that require a deep understanding of both visual and textual information.
Chris
May 22, 2024
News (Tutorial)
In Seoul summit, heads of states and companies commit to AI safety
Government officials and AI industry executives agreed on Tuesday to apply elementary safety measures in the fast-moving field and establish an international safety research network.
Polish 
English