Articles

Chrome’s browser competitors Safari and Firefox have both been blocking third-party tracking cookies used by advertisers, by default, for over two years now. Google, the world’s largest advertising company, totally wants to match its competition and reduce user tracking; it will just take a little longer to do it. Google’s latest blog post details the second delay to the shutdown of third-party tracking cookies. Google says it will now support the tracking method until “the second half of 2024....

Today Google announced/released applications based on PaLM 2 , their new smol Language Model. While the trend had been larger models until a year ago, something reflected in our calling them LLMs, Large Language Models, since these have become useful we have actually seen a move to flip from research to engineering to get them to a stage they can go to billions of people without using every GPU on Earth....

Google wants to kill third-party tracking cookies used for ads in Chrome with the “Chrome Privacy Sandbox .” Since Google is also the world’s largest ad company, though, it’s not killing tracking cookies without putting something else in its place. Google’s replacement plan is to have Chrome locally build an ad interest profile for you, via a system called “FLoC” (Federated Learning of Cohorts). Rather than having advertisers collect your browsing history to build an individual profile of you on their servers, Google wants to keep that data local and have the browser serve a list of your interests to advertisers whenever they ask via an API so that you’ll still get relevant ads....

Google revealed a handful of milestones during its I/O 2019 developer conference in Mountain View today, but the biggest was undoubtedly that Android now powers 2.5 billion active devices. “We’re here to talk about Android version, 10, and we get to celebrate a milestone together,” Android product manager Stephanie Cuthbertson said onstage. “Today there are over 2.5 billion active Android devices.” The last time Google reported on this figure was also at I/O, in May 2017, when Android passed 2 billion monthly active devices ....

For ages now, every annual report on desktop operating system market share has had the same top two contenders: Microsoft’s Windows in a commanding lead at number one and Apple’s macOS in distant second place. But in 2020, Chrome OS became the second-most popular OS, and Apple fell to third. That’s according to numbers from market data firm IDC and a report on IDC’s data by publication GeekWire. Chrome OS had passed macOS briefly in individual quarters before, but 2020 was the first full year when Apple’s OS took third place....

One of the biggest challenges in natural language processing (NLP) is the shortage of training data. Because NLP is a diversified field with many distinct tasks, most task-specific datasets contain only a few thousand or a few hundred thousand human-labeled training examples. However, modern deep learning-based NLP models see benefits from much larger amounts of data, improving when trained on millions, or billions, of annotated training examples. To help close this gap in data, researchers have developed a variety of techniques for training general purpose language representation models using the enormous amount of unannotated text on the web (known as pre-training)....

Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, has been spending plenty of time at Microsoft recently; he posed for this photo on their Redmond, Wash. campus in 2019.IAN C. BATES/THE NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX In a rare interview, OpenAI’s CEO talks about AI model ChatGPT, artificial general intelligence and Google Search. As CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman captains the buzziest — and most scrutinized — startup in the fast-growing generative AI category, the subject of a recent feature story in the February issue of Forbes....

How to think of Generative AI Generative AI is really complex. Like every hour there seems to be a new breakthrough, with supercomputers and matrix multiplications and more. Except it isn’t really, the code is actually quite condensed and the operators not too bad (the best course if you’d like is fast.ai for existing developers to whet their beaks). When considering the impact of this technology, how it applies to you and your world, there is a really easy comparator I have found....

SAN FRANCISCO — For years, tech industry financiers showed little interest in start-up companies that made computer chips. How on earth could a start-up compete with a goliath like Intel, which made the chips that ran more than 80 percent of the world’s personal computers? Even in the areas where Intel didn’t dominate, like smartphones and gaming devices, there were companies like Qualcomm and Nvidia that could squash an upstart....

Today’s AI-based image generators aren’t self-aware. But Forbes asked Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion and OpenAI’s DALL-E—to attempt to visualize themselves, using an identical prompt: “an artistic portrait of the artificial intelligence called X, created by the artificial intelligence X.” These were the authors’ favorites of the resulting self-portrait attempts. DreamStudio/DALL-E Artificial intelligence will be 2023’s hottest topic, and one subject to debate. That’s what Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates told Forbes in an exclusive conversation about the suddenly exploding field....