Google brings Gemini-powered search history and Lens to Chrome desktop

Google Thursday said that it is introducing new Gemini-powered features for Chrome’s desktop version, including Lens for desktop, tab compare for shopping assistance, and natural language integration for search history. Years after introducing and evolving Google Lens on mobile, the feature

The EU’s AI Act is now in force

It’s official: The European Union’s risk-based regulation for applications of artificial intelligence has come into force starting Thursday, August 1, 2024. This starts the clock on a series of staggered compliance deadlines that the law will apply to different types of AI developers a

Zuckerberg says Meta will need 10x more computing power to train Llama 4 than Llama 3

Meta, which develops one of the biggest foundational open source large language models, Llama, believes it will need significantly more computing power to train models in the future. Mark Zuckerberg said on Meta’s second-quarter earnings call on Tuesday that to train Llama 4, the company wil

OpenAI pledges to give U.S. AI Safety Institute early access to its next model

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says that OpenAI is working with the U.S. AI Safety Institute, a federal government body that aims to assess and address risks in AI platforms, on an agreement to provide early access to its next major generative AI model for safety testing. The announcement, which Altman mad

Google releases new ‘open’ AI models with a focus on safety

Google has released a trio of new, “open” generative AI models that it’s calling “safer,” “smaller” and “more transparent” than most — a bold claim, to be sure. They’re additions to Google’s Gemma 2 family of generative models

Copyright Office tells Congress: ‘Urgent need’ to outlaw AI-powered impersonation

The U.S. Copyright Office has issued the first part of a report on how AI may affect its domain, and its first recommendation out of the gate is: we need a new law right away to define and combat AI-powered impersonation. “It has become clear that the distribution of unauthorized digital rep

This Week in AI: Companies are growing skeptical of AI’s ROI

Hiya, folks, welcome to technewss's regular AI newsletter. This week in AI, Gartner released a report suggesting that around a third of generative AI projects in the enterprise will be abandoned after the proof-of-concept phase by year-end 2025. The reasons are many — poor data quality,

Airtable acquihires onboarding startup Dopt for AI talent

Airtable today announced that it has acquired Dopt, a startup focused on helping other startups build product onboarding experiences for new users. Earlier this year, Dopt introduced a number of features that helped users add AI-based assistance tools to their respective services — those ar

Friend’s $99 necklace uses AI to help combat loneliness

AI hardware is all the rage in startup land — though receptions have thus far been mixed. Two notable examples, Rabbit and Humane, released devices to disappointing results. a16z-backed Limitless and Exor-backed Bee AI, meanwhile, are working on their own screenless AI wearables. Avi Schiff

EU calls for help with shaping rules for general-purpose AIs

The European Union has kicked off a consultation on rules that will apply to providers of general-purpose AI models (GPAIs) — such as Anthropic, Google, Microsoft and OpenAI — under the bloc’s AI Act, its risk-based framework for regulating applications of artificial intelligence. Lawmake

Apple brings Apple Intelligence with iOS 18.1 dev beta, but there are a lot of limitations

Users who have signed up for iOS 18’s developer beta can now get the first taste of Apple Intelligence as the company has released some features of its AI suite via an update released on Monday. The company revealed Apple Intelligence at its Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) in June, but

New U.S. Commerce Department report endorses ‘open’ AI models

The U.S. Commerce Department on Monday issued a report in support of “open-weight” generative AI models like Meta’s Llama 3.1, but recommended the government develop “new capabilities” to monitor such models for potential risks. Authored by the Commerce DepartmentR

Apple says it took a ‘responsible’ approach to training its Apple Intelligence models

Apple has published a technical paper detailing the models that it developed to power Apple Intelligence, the range of generative AI features headed to iOS, macOS and iPadOS over the next few months. In the paper, Apple pushes back against accusations that it took an ethically questionable approa

Zuckerberg touts Meta’s latest video vision AI with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang

Meta had a palpable hit last year with Segment Anything, a machine learning model that could quickly and reliably identify and outline just about anything in an image. The sequel, which CEO Mark Zuckerberg debuted on stage Monday at SIGGRAPH, takes the model to the video domain, showing how fast th