Former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, who was also one of the most influential early Google employees, has died at the age of 56 according to posts shared online by her husband Dennis Troper and Google CEO Sundar Pichai on Friday night. Wojicki led YouTube for nearly ten years and was one of the only women … Read more
Users worldwide reported Gmail and Google Drive outages on Friday morning, according to Down Detector. Sending and saving emails, connecting to the server, and even logging onto the Gmail website and Google Drive were all affected by the disruption, which has since been resolved. “Gmail is experiencing issues with attachment functionality,” Google said in a … Read more
Larry Page and Sergey Brin never liked hanging with reporters. “Larry can be a very sensitive and good person, but he has major trust issues and few social graces,” a former Google PR person once told me. “Sergey has social graces but doesn’t trust people who he thinks don’t approach his level of intelligence.” Still, … Read more
In late July, OpenAI began rolling out an eerily humanlike voice interface for ChatGPT. In a safety analysis released today, the company acknowledges that this anthropomorphic voice may lure some users into becoming emotionally attached to their chatbot. The warnings are included in a “system card” for GPT-4o, a technical document that lays out what … Read more
Google CEO Sundar Pichai testifies before the House Judiciary Committee at the Rayburn House Office Building on December 11, 2018 in Washington, DC. Alex Wong | Getty Images In ruling Monday that Google has held a monopoly in internet search, U.S. judge Amit Mehta invoked the company at the center of the most famous tech antitrust … Read more
But if Mehta pursues the approach, he should make some improvements on the EU’s rules, says Kamyl Bazbaz, senior vice president of public affairs at DuckDuckGo. Users should be prompted with the choice screen periodically, not just once, Bazbaz says. They shouldn’t have to deal with popups from Google urging them to switch the default … Read more
Google is now 0 for 2 in antitrust trials. US District judge Amit Mehta ruled on Monday that Google has unlawfully maintained its dominance in search by using anticompetitive deals to keep rivals from gaining traction. The ruling follows a weekslong trial in Mehta’s Washington, DC, courtroom last year in which the US Department of … Read more
Starting Monday, Zoom users will have the option to open a document tool from within their video calling app and create sharable files based on their meetings—but they’ll also be prompted to use generative AI to help them write and edit them. This new feature, essentially Zoom’s version of docs, is the latest effort to … Read more
Pavlo Gonchar | Lightrocket | Getty Images Founders of one of the hottest AI startups Character.AI are re-joining Google along with other team members. Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, in addition to certain members of Character.AI’s research team, are joining Google’s AI unit DeepMind, the companies said Friday. Character.AI uses large language models to … Read more
Google pulled an ad it showed during the Olympics that touted its AI chatbot Gemini writing a fan letter to an athlete. Google has pulled an Olympics ad for its chatbot Gemini from airwaves following backlash for the way it depicts a little girl using artificial intelligence to write a fan letter. The ad, titled … Read more
