The Ridgewood Blog Brings a Free Market Laissez-faire Point of View to Local, New Jersey State and National Issues.
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Ridgewood NJ, Google CEO Sundar Pichai has announced an experimental conversational AI service called Bard. The ChatGPT competitor can answer users’ queries and take part in conversations. It is now available to a group of trusted testers and will be released more widely in the coming weeks. Bard will draw on information from the web to provide high-quality responses.
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Trenton NJ, Attorney General Matthew J. Platkin today joined seven other Attorneys General and the United States Department of Justice (“DOJ”) in filing suit against Google over its efforts to eliminate competition in the digital advertising marketplace and create a monopoly for the company over all advertising bought and sold on the internet.
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Ridgewood NJ, Microsoft announced yesterday it is expanding its partnership with OpenAI, the start-up behind the viral ChatGPT chatbot (see overview), with a multiyear, multibillion-dollar investment. Specific financial terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, but reports say Microsoft is expected to invest $10B, in addition to the $3B it has already invested since 2019.
Continue reading Microsoft Announces New Multibillion-dollar Investment in Artificial intelligence
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Ridgewood NJ, Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced the layoffs yesterday in an email to staff, which would account for about 6% of the company.
Continue reading Google to lay off 12,000 people ,6% of its workforce
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Ridgewood NJ, Google is working on a tool that uses machine learning to train code to write, fix, and update itself. The project started inside Alphabet’s X research unit. Codenamed Pitchfork, the project is now part of a new group at Google Labs named the AI Developer Assistance team. Its original goal was to build a tool that could update Google’s Python codebase to a newer version. What could possibly go wrong with that ?
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Trenton NJ, Attorney General Matthew J. Platkin announced today that New Jersey has entered into a settlement with Google resolving a multistate investigation into allegations that the online search engine platform violated consumers’ privacy by misleading consumers about its location data collection practices.
Continue reading Google Settles Over Location Tracking Practices
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Ridgewood NJ, Google showed off its Pixel 7, Pixel 7 Pro, and Pixel Watch and offered more details on its upcoming Pixel Tablet at its big fall event. Both Pixel 7 phones are now available for preorder for an October 13 release. The Pixel 7 starts at $599 and the Pixel 7 Pro will cost $899. The Pixel Watch will start at $349.99. The Pixel Tablet will be released in 2023. Many more details about the new devices are available in the article.
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Ridgewood NJ, Google is launching a cross-device software development kit that will allow apps to play across Android devices and eventually non-Android devices as well. It lets apps discover nearby devices, establish secure connections between devices, and host app experiences across multiple devices. The SDK uses Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and ultra-wideband for multi-device connectivity. It is in developer preview and only works with Android devices for now.
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Ridgewood NJ, PaLM-SayCan is a language model from Google that gives robots a broader understanding of the world. It allows robots to respond to complex human requests. Google aims to explore and understand the capabilities robots can provide before developing a robot for commercial release. It is unlikely to release a robot anytime soon.
Continue reading Google is teaching robots to think for themselves , Well Maybe
file photo of Jim Jones before the Kool-Aid
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Ridgewood NJ, we always thought to many people in silicon valley have been drinking the kool-aid . A group called the Fellowship of Friends may be controlling the hiring at Google. The group believes that most people exist in a state of ‘waking sleep’ and its founder claims to have been contacted by angelic incarnations of deceased art figures. The group allegedly built its influence by running a hiring agency that hired contractors from the sect. A previous case in 2008 awarded an employee $6.5 million in damages for failing to be promoted for not being a Fellowship member.
Continue reading Google Allegedly Infiltrated by “Cult-Like Religious Sect”
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Ridgewood Nj, a Google engineer has been placed on paid administrative leave for violating the company’s confidentiality policy after he claimed that Google’s LaMDA AI had become sentient. The engineer had presented his conclusions to Google’s vice president and head of Responsible Innovation, but his claims were dismissed. A Google spokesperson says that there is no evidence that LaMDA is sentient and that there was a lot of evidence against the idea.
Continue reading Google Engineer Claims AI Program is Sentient
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Ridgewwood NJ, Apple, Google, and Microsoft have launched a joint effort to kill the password and replace it with the passkey standard. The passkey standard allows users to log in to apps and websites through an authentication request sent to the user’s phone. It will use Bluetooth to verify physical proximity. Passkeys can be backed up to cloud services to make it easy to authenticate new devices and sync passkeys across devices. Users can set up multiple devices as authenticators.
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Ridgewood NJ, it looks like the the age of Netflix and chill is over. Netflix is, of course, the N company in the super-tech quintet of FAANG titans which includes Facebook, Amazon, Apple, and Google.
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Ridgewood NJ, Google search results are dying as most of the web has become too inauthentic to trust. Most people now use Google to search through Reddit posts for answers. Serving ads creates misaligned incentives for search engines, SEO has resulted in poor quality sites surfacing to the top of search results, people lookup and AI now tries to figure out what the user wants rather than through only search terms. Reddit results are more authentic as people discuss what they think without the commercial aspect other websites have.
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Ridgewood NJ, Roku customers will no longer be allowed to download the YouTube or YouTube TV apps to their devices after December 9. Customers who already have the apps installed will still be able to use those apps normally. Roku claims that Google is using its dominant market power to force unfavorable terms on a competitor. Google had demanded special access to data from Roku customers as a condition for allowing its apps to be installed on the devices. A variety of bills have been introduced to prevent digital platforms from abusing their power.
