even when they're powered off or the battery is dead, thanks to some "specialized Pixel...

exceed that of all humans, Musk predicted on Monday during an interview on X with Nicolai Tangen, the chief executive of Norges Bank Investment Management. Musk has been consistently bullish on the development of so-called artificial general intelligence, AI tools so powerful they can beat the most capable individuals in any domain. But Monday's prediction is ahead of schedules he and others have previously forecast. Last year, he predicted "full" AGI would be achieved by 2029. Some of Musk's boldest predictions, such as rolling out self-driving Teslas and landing a rocket on Mars, have not yet been fulfilled. A number of AI breakthroughs over the past 18 months, including the launch of video generation tools capable chatbots, have pushed the frontier of AI forward faster than expected. Demis Hassabis, the co-founder of Google's DeepMind, predicted earlier this year that AGI could be achieved by 2030. The pace of development has been slowed by a bottleneck in the supply of microchips, particularly those produced by Nvidia, which are essential for training and running AI models. Those constraints were easing, Musk said, but new models are now testing other data centre equipment and the electricity grid. "Last year it was chip constrained ... people could not get enough Nvidia chips. This year it's transitioning to a voltage transformer supply. In a year or two [the constraint is] just electricity supply," he said. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

recycled ). Google announced it was discontinuing Nest Secure in 2020 , so you??????ve had plenty of time to shop for an alternative. But if you??????ve been putting off the giant pain of switching out a home security system until the last minute, that last minute is here. So, what are your options? When it announced it was killing Nest Secure, Google, a substantial investor in ADT ,... Continue reading???

performance it has been looking for to push Windows on Arm much more aggressively. Microsoft is now betting big on Qualcomm's upcoming Snapdragon X Elite processors, which will ship in a variety of Windows laptops this year and Microsoft's latest consumer-focused Surface hardware. Microsoft is so confident in these new Qualcomm chips that it's planning a number of demos that will show how these processors will be faster than an M3 MacBook Air for CPU tasks, AI acceleration, and even app emulation. Microsoft claims, in internal documents seen by The Verge, that these new Windows AI PCs will have "faster app emulation than Rosetta 2" -- the application compatibility layer that Apple uses on its Apple Silicon Macs to translate apps compiled for 64-bit Intel processors to Apple's own processors. App emulation has been a big problem for Windows on Arm over the past decade, but Microsoft did deliver x64 app emulation for Windows 11 more than two years ago. This helps ensure apps can run on Windows on Arm devices when there isn't a native ARM64 version. Native Arm apps are key for improved performance on upcoming Windows on Arm laptops, and Google has just recently released its own ARM64 version of Chrome ready for these upcoming devices. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

tool will cause them to ring at your command and their location will pop up on a map. This map data works even if the items are offline. Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro smartphones will appear on the map if theyre powered off or if the battery is completely dead. That sounds pretty handy. The technology isnt yet available for everyday items, but thats coming soon. Bluetooth tracker tags from Chipolo and Pebblebee will get integrated into the Find My Device app in May. This will let users locate just about anything, including car keys, purses, wallets and, hopefully, wandering felines . The upcoming tags are being built specifically for the network. Google The Pebblebee offerings include tags, clips and slim cards for wallets. They hit store shelves in late May or early June. Chipolo is making versions of its One Point and Card Point trackers for Android devices, which will arrive in May. Google says more trackers are coming later this year, including products made by Motorola and eufy. Googles Find My Device service also integrates with Nest smart home gadgets. If you lose something in the home, the Find My Device app will show you the location of the item in relation to pre-existing Nest devices. This should help provide an easy reference point to snatch them back up. Finally, theres a nifty feature that lets you share the location of an item with other people, so friends and family can keep an eye on precious belongings. Google says itll let folks easily divide and conquer if something goes missing. The new Find My Device tracking technology works on devices running Android 9 and above. That OS came out in 2018, so it means a whole lot of people will have access to this service. As for compatible products beyond Android devices and Bluetooth tags, the company says future software updates will allow integration with a full range of headphones from JBL and Sony. Of course, there are the usual privacy concerns with this kind of thing. Google says that users can opt out of the service via a web portal if they feel uncomfortable, according to a story by The Verge . Reports indicate that the technology has been ready for a while, but Google delayed it until Apple implemented tracking protections into iOS to address stalking concerns . To that end, both companies announced a partnership last year to develop industry standards to fight the misuse of tracking devices. Apple applied updated protections against stalking in iOS 17.5, which is still in beta. This article originally appeared on Engadget at ...src=rss

watching (and recording) the total eclipse in North America later today. The best chance of good viewing along the path of eclipse totality is still in northeastern parts of the US (Buffalo, NY, Burlington, VT) and southeast Canada (Niagara Falls and Montreal). Mat Smith The biggest stories you might have missed iOS music apps in the EU can now send users to external websites for purchase Best Buys Geek Squad agents say they were hit by mass layoffs this week Meta asks a judge to throw out an FTC antitrust case Polestar 4 first look: When no rear window means a better car You can get these reports delivered daily direct to your inbox. Subscribe right here! OpenAI and Google may have transcribed YouTube videos to train their AI models If so, they violated YouTube creators copyrights. OpenAI and Google trained their AI models using text transcribed from YouTube videos, potentially violating creators copyrights, according to a report from The New York Times . The report centers on how OpenAI, Google and Meta have attempted to maximize the data they can feed to their AIs and cites numerous people with knowledge of the companies practices. Not that these companies relied on the auto-generated (hit-and-miss) auto-transcriptions provided by YouTube itself. Reportedly, OpenAI used its Whisper speech recognition tool to transcribe more than a million hours of YouTube videos to train GPT-4. The report, however, claims people at Google knew but did not act because Google was doing the same to train its own AI models. Google told NYT it only uses video content from creators who have agreed to it. Continue reading. Tesla will unveil a robotaxi on August 8 Musk made the announcement on X. Hours after Reuters published a report about the automaker scrapping its plans to produce a low-cost EV, Tesla boss Elon Musk took to X to say the company would unveil a robotaxi on August 8. The same report said Musks directive was to go all in on robotaxis built on the companys small-vehicle platform. In response to the report, the Tesla chief tweeted Reuters is lying (again). Given he confirmed the robotaxi plans, he could have meant a more affordable Tesla EV was still on the table, at least for now. Continue reading. One of these concept lunar vehicles could join NASAs next moon mission Three companies are in the running. NASA Three companies are pitching lunar vehicle designs to support NASAs upcoming Artemis missions. The space agency announced this week that its chosen Intuitive Machines, Lunar Outpost and Venturi Astrolab to develop their lunar terrain vehicles (LTV) in a feasibility study over the next year. The LTV will need to function as both a crewed and uncrewed vehicle, serving sometimes as a mode of transportation for astronauts and other times as a remotely operated explorer. NASA says itll contract the chosen vehicle for lunar services through 2039. Take a look at the options. Continue reading. This article originally appeared on Engadget at ...tml?src=rss

corners but as we've learned in our testing, they dont all perform the same. We tested over a dozen models for both indoors and out to find ones that are easy to set up and perform reliably within your chosen smart home ecosystem so you can pick the best smart plug for you. What to consider when buying a smart plug Before you buy one, it helps to know how a smart plug works best. They are designed for things that have an on/off switch, making them great for turning lamps into smart lights. If you want a plug-in fan to move some air around before you get home, a smart plug can help. You can load a basic coffee maker with grounds and water the night before and wake up to a fresh pot in the morning. And instead of an air purifier running all day, you could set it to just run when youre away. But gadgets that needs to be programmed further, or requires a stand-by mode, isnt ideal. If you want to control built-in lights, youll need smart switches, which are more involved than smart plugs as they can involve installation. Some smart plugs can even monitor how much energy they use and display those figures within their companion app. That might not be much use on its own, as lamps with LED bulbs consume very little energy, but it could help you keep tabs on your overall energy consumption. Setup and use Adding a smart plug to your home is relatively simple. Youll use the manufacturers app to initially connect, after which you can add the plug to a compatible smart home ecosystem so you can use voice control and other features. Both the brands app and your smart home app will let you name the plug, set schedules and program routines which provide automation for multiple smart devices at once. But as you can guess, a manufacturers app only lets you control products from that brand. If you want whole-home automation, operating, say, a plug from TP-Links Kasa, a bulb from GEs Cync and a camera from Arlo without switching apps, youll need to use a smart home platform, which means youll need to consider compatibility. Compatibility Smart home devices connect through wireless protocols, often using more than one to communicate with your phone, smart speaker, router and in some cases, one another. The majority of smart plugs use Wi-Fi, but some have recently incorporated Matter , a relatively new wireless standard intended to solve integration issues between different brands and manufacturers, while also improving security and reliability. More of these smart plugs are coming to market and, for now, most Matter devices work via Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and a low-power mesh network called Thread. Matter requires a controller that stays at home, like a hub or smart speaker, to manage things when youre out and about. As for Bluetooth, most plugs, including all Matter plugs, use the short-range protocol to get the device set up for the first time. Some can continue to run on Bluetooth in the absence of another option, but the connection isnt as reliable and you wont be able to control the plug when youre away from home, or perhaps even just on the other side of the apartment. Because Matter is relatively new, it may be easier to consider the manufacturers system youd use the most. There are four major branded smart home platforms: Amazons Alexa, Google Home, Apples HomeKit and Samsungs SmartThings. The first two work with the widest range of brands and are compatible with both iOS and Android devices. HomeKit not only limits app access to Apple devices, but its also compatible with fewer plugs. You can also turn to open-source software like Home Assistant or go with the larger functionality of IFTTT if you want to, say, have your lights turn off when your Uber arrives. For the purposes of our testing, we stuck with the four big players. Nearly every plug we looked at clearly stated which platforms it works with, both on the packaging and retail product pages. Of course, theres no rule that says you have to stick with one home assistant. You might have an Echo Dot in the basement, a HomePod in the living room and a Google Nest Mini in the kitchen, each controlling any compatible devices. My kid has a great time telling Alexa to turn on a light then asking the Google Assistant to turn it back off. Photo by Amy Skorheim / Engadget Hubs and smart plugs All of our top picks recommended here dont require a hub and connect directly to your homes Wi-Fi router. That means if you already have wireless internet and a smartphone or tablet, you can quite literally plug and play. The exception is Apples HomeKit. If you want to pair up a compatible plug with that platform, youll need a HomePod speaker, Apple TV or an iPad that stays in your home to enable remote control when youre away. Some smart plugs require a hub regardless of which platform you use. For our guide, we focused on the simplicity (and lower cost) of options that work on their own, but hub-dependent devices may make sense in certain situations. Some companies, like Aqara for example, make a vast range of smart home products, adding automatic shades, window sensors, smart locks and air quality monitors to the more traditional cameras and plugs. If youre going all-in on one brand and plan to get a plethora of connected devices, a hub can keep your Wi-Fi network from getting too crowded and provide a more seamless setup with reliable connectivity. We tested the Aqara plug and hub and, while we found the connectivity was good and the proprietary app to be helpfully configurable, its tough to recommend the nearly $100 combo to anyone who isnt planning to get a complete Aqara smart home setup. Sharing Once a plug is set up with your platform and voice assistant of choice, anyone can control the plug just by talking. If someone else wants to control things with their phone, things get more complicated. Google makes it easiest, allowing you to invite another person just by tapping the + button within the Home app. Whomever you invite will have full access to your connected devices including cameras so this is only for people you trust the most. HomeKit makes it similarly easy to grant app access to someone else, but as with most things Apple, it only works for other iOS users. Amazon only allows you to share access to your Echo, not your connected home devices. Many smart plug manufacturers allow you to share control through their app by inviting another person via email. But this only grants access to devices of that brand. Hopefully as Matter expands, multi-admin features will become more widespread. How we tested the best smart plugs Before we decided which smart plugs to test, we considered brands Engadget staffers have had the best experiences with, both in review capacity and personally. We also checked out other online reviews. We then looked at factors like price, compatibility and relative popularity. I got ahold of ten indoor smart plugs and four outdoor versions from eight manufacturers. I set up each one using its companion app, then added it to all compatible smart home platforms. Plugging in a cadre of lamps and string lights, I tested the plugs using an iPhone 11, Galaxy S10e, Echo Dot, HomePod mini and Nest Mini. I accessed the plugs via the apps and through voice commands and controlled them in my home and away from it. I programmed schedules and routines and moved the plugs to different outlets, including ones in the basement to gauge range. For the outdoor devices, I plugged them into an outlet in the garage (approximately 85 feet from my Wi-Fi router) and an outlet attached to the back of the house. Heres every smart plug tested before settling on our top picks: Amazon Smart Plug Emporia Smart Outlet * GE Cync Indoor Wyze Plug Roku Indoor Smart Plug SE Belkin Wemo smart plug with Thread TP-Link Kasa EP25 TP-Link Kasa Ultra Mini EP10 Meross Wi-Fi Dual TP-Link Kasa KP125M (Matter) Eve Energy (Matter) Aqara Smart Plug (hub required) AmazonBasics Outdoor Smart Plug (outdoor) Wyze Plug Outdoor (outdoor) TP-Link Kasa Outdoor EP40A (outdoor) TP-LINK Outdoor Dimmer KP405 (outdoor) *Emporia issued a recall on its smart plugs purchased before August 1, 2023 due to a potential fire risk, though no incidents were reported. The plugs have since been updated to resolve the issue and are back on sale. Well be testing the revised version for an upcoming update to this guide. Honorable mentions GE Cync Indoor My main concern with the Cync plug is the way the scheduling works within the proprietary app. Instead of programming when an outlet should turn on , you tell it when it should turn off . Despite my best efforts, I could not figure out how to program the Cync-connected lamp to come on at sunset, as I did with every other plug. Other than that, the app is very elegant, set up is easy and reliability is spot on. It only works with Alexa and Google Home, not HomeKit or SmartThings, but at $15, its a couple bucks cheaper than the Wyze plug that has the same compatibility. The best outdoor smart plugs Most people will likely use outdoor plugs for two things: patio lighting and holiday string lights. The devices are designed for the outdoors with ingress protection rating of IP64 or higher, which means theyre impervious to dust and can handle splashing water from rain and sprinklers. They have a longer Wi-Fi range than indoor plugs, for obvious reasons, and many have dual outlets, with individual control over each one. Setup is the same as for indoor plugs: youll use your phone to help the plug find your Wi-Fi using its companion app. The only tricky part is getting your phone within Bluetooth range of the plug (which it uses to initialize setup) and in Wi-Fi range at the same time. I had to awkwardly stand at a triangulated point in the middle of my driveway to get things communicating properly. Once set up, the plugs will communicate using your router for voice and app control and your phone neednt be anywhere near the plug. This article originally appeared on Engadget at ...

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information into that dimension. While we normally avoid mixing data from multiple sites, those rules are changed to allow that. Sites can then process that data in order to select advertisements. However, no one can see into this dimension, except you. Sites can only open a window for you to peek into that dimension, but only to see the ads they chose... Protected Audience might be flawed, but it demonstrates real potential. If this is possible, that might give people more of a say in how their data is used. Rather than just have someone spy on your every action then use that information as they like, you might be able to specify what they can and cannot do. The technology could guarantee that your choice is respected. Maybe advertising is not the first thing you would do with this newfound power, but maybe if the advertising industry is willing to fund investments in new technology that others could eventually use, that could be a good thing. But here's some of the blog post's key criticisms: "[E]ntities like Google who operate large sites, might rely less on information from other sites. Losing the information that comes from tracking people might affect them far less when they can use information they gather from their many services... [W]e have a company that dominates both the advertising and browser markets, proposing a change that comes with clear privacy benefits, but it will also further entrench its own dominance in the massively profitable online advertising market..." "[T]he proposal fails to meet its own privacy goals. The technical privacy measures in Protected Audience fail to prevent sites from abusing the API to learn about what you did on other sites.... Google loosened privacy protections in a number of places to make it easier to use. Of course, by weakening protections, the current proposal provides no privacy. In other words, to help make Protected Audience easier to use, they made the design even leakier..." "A lot of these leaks are temporary. Google has a plan and even a timeline for closing most of the holes that were added to make Protected Audience easier to use for advertisers. The problem is that there is no credible fix for some of the information leaks embedded in Protected Audience's architecture... In failing to achieve its own privacy goals, Protected Audience is not now and maybe not ever a good addition to the Web." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

to Ezra Klein??????s podcasts about AI , seeing if 5K Runner can finally make me like running, and playing altogether too much Retro Goal . I also have for you a lot of people??????s smart thoughts on AI, a bunch of new AI tools in web browsers, a fun new newsletter about good stuff on the... Continue reading???

legislation 16 different U.S. states have, "and state legislatures have already introduced more than 400 AI bills across the U.S. this year, six times the number introduced in 2023." Many of the bills are targeted both at the developers of AI technologies and the organizations putting AI tools to use, says Goli Mahdavi, a lawyer with global law firm BCLP, which has established an AI working group. And with populous states such as California, New York, Texas, and Florida either passing or considering AI legislation, companies doing business across the US won't be able to avoid the regulations. Enterprises developing and using AI should be ready to answer questions about how their AI tools work, even when deploying automated tools as simple as spam filtering, Mahdavi says. "Those questions will come from consumers, and they will come from regulators," she adds. "There's obviously going to be heightened scrutiny here across the board." There's sector-specific bills, and bills that demand transparency (of both development and output), according to the article. "The third category of AI bills covers broad AI bills, often focused on transparency, preventing bias, requiring impact assessment, providing for consumer opt-outs, and other issues." One example the article notes is Senate Bill 1047, introduced in the California State Legislature in February, "would require safety testing of AI products before they're released, and would require AI developers to prevent others from creating derivative models of their products that are used to cause critical harms." Adrienne Fischer, a lawyer with Basecamp Legal, a Denver law firm monitoring state AI bills, tells CIO that many of the bills promote best practices in privacy and data security, but said the fragmented regulatory environment "underscores the call for national standards or laws to provide a coherent framework for AI usage." Thanks to Slashdot reader snydeq for sharing the article. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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default for Pixel phones, other Android owners can download it. The new Lookup button lives with other options, like ??????Block?????? and ??????History,?????? that you see when you tap on a recent call in the Phone app. In an age where so much spam comes from spoofed phone numbers made to look like local calls,... Continue reading???

required for students to be successful in this new realm of automated software engineering. It will take a few iterations to understand exactly what kind of praxis students need in this new era of LLMs to develop sufficient code sense, but now is the time to experiment." Long-time Slashdot reader theodp notes it's not the first time the Google executive has had to consider "iterating" curriculum: The CACM article echoes earlier comments Google's Education VP made in a featured talk called The Future of Computational Thinking at last year's Blockly Summit. (Blockly is the Google technology that powers drag-and-drop coding IDE's used for K-12 CS education, including Scratch and Code.org). Envisioning a world where AI generates code and humans proofread it, Johnson explained: "One can imagine a future where these generative coding systems become so reliable, so capable, and so secure that the amount of time doing low-level coding really decreases for both students and for professionals. So, we see a shift with students to focus more on reading and understanding and assessing generated code and less about actually writing it. [...] I don't anticipate that the need for understanding code is going to go away entirely right away [...] I think there will still be at least in the near term a need to understand read and understand code so that you can assess the reliabilities, the correctness of generated code. So, I think in the near term there's still going to be a need for that." In the following Q, Johnson is caught by surprise when asked whether there will even be a need for Blockly at all in the AI-driven world as described and the Google VP concedes there may not be. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

using content from news articles. Conde Nast IAC, and NBC are among the big media names that have allegedly been in talks with Apple about licensing their content. Apple is expected to make some major announcements about its efforts to add more AI technologies into its operating systems this June, at WWDC . Though often perceived as being behind its rivals in AI integration, Apple has made some innovations of its own. Continue Reading on AppleInsider Discuss on our Forums

videos to train its new text-to-video generator, Sora, would go against the platforms policies . According to the NYT , OpenAI used its Whisper speech recognition tool to transcribe more than one million hours of YouTube videos, which were then used to train GPT-4. The Information previously reported that OpenAI had used YouTube videos and podcasts to train the two AI systems. OpenAI president Greg Brockman was reportedly among the people on this team. Per Googles rules, unauthorized scraping or downloading of YouTube content is not allowed, Matt Bryant, a spokesperson for Google, told NYT , also saying that the company was unaware of any such use by OpenAI. The report, however, claims there were people at Google who knew but did not take action against OpenAI because Google was using YouTube videos to train its own AI models. Google told NYT it only does so with videos from creators who have agreed to this. Engadget has reached out to Google and OpenAI for comment. The NYT report also claims Google asked a team to tweak its privacy policy in June 2023 to more broadly cover its use of publicly available content, including Google Docs and Google Sheets, to train its AI models and products. The changes, which Google says were made for clarity's sake, were published in July. Bryant told NYT that this type of data is only used with the permission of users who opt into Googles experimental features tests, and that the company did not start training on additional types of data based on this language change. The change added Bard as an example of what that data might be used for. Correction, April 6, 2024, 3:45PM ET: This story originally stated that Google updated its privacy policy in June 2022. The policy update was actually made in 2023. We apologize for the error. This article originally appeared on Engadget at ...n-their-ai-models-163531073.html?src=rss