Science and Technology

Liz Reid, Google's recently promoted head of search, wrote in a blog post Thursday that the company has pared back 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…

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,…

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,…

Samsung and Google, the two most influential makers of Android devices, are trying to catch up with Apple, which has traditionally provided software updates for iPhones for about seven years. These moves will make phones last much longer and give people more flexibility in deciding when it's time to upgrade. Google said in a statement that it expanded its software commitment to the Pixel 8A because it wanted customers to feel confident in Pixel phones. And Samsung said it will now provide seven years of software updates, which will increase security and reliability, for all of its Galaxy flagship phones.…