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Big Tech is spending more than VC firms on AI startups

AI, Amazon, chatgpt, Google, microsoft, openai, syndication / Paul Patrick / December 28, 2023

money cannon —

Microsoft, Google, and Amazon haved crowded out traditional Silicon Valley investors.

George Hammond, Financial Times – Dec 27, 2023 3: 41 pm UTC

Enlarge / A string of deals by Microsoft, Google and Amazon amounted to two-thirds of the $27 billion raised by fledgling AI companies in 2023,

FT montage/Dreamstime

Big tech companies have vastly outspent venture capital groups with investments in generative AI startups this year, as established giants use their financial muscle to dominate the much-hyped sector.

Microsoft, Google and Amazon last year struck a series of blockbuster deals, amounting to two-thirds of the $27 billion raised by fledgling AI companies in 2023, according to new data from private market researchers PitchBook.

The huge outlay, which exploded after the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in November 2022, highlights how the biggest Silicon Valley groups are crowding out traditional tech investors for the biggest deals in the industry.

The rise of generative AI—systems capable of producing humanlike video, text, image and audio in seconds—have also attracted top Silicon Valley investors. But VCs have been outmatched, having been forced to slow down their spending as they adjust to higher interest rates and falling valuations for their portfolio companies.

“Over the past year, we’ve seen the market quickly consolidate around a handful of foundation models, with large tech players coming in and pouring billions of dollars into companies like OpenAI, Cohere, Anthropic and Mistral,” said Nina Achadjian, a partner at US venture firm Index Ventures referring to some of the top AI startups.

“For traditional VCs, you had to be in early and you had to have conviction—which meant being in the know on the latest AI research and knowing which teams were spinning out of Google DeepMind, Meta and others,” she added.

A string of deals, such as Microsoft’s $10 billion investment in OpenAI as well as billions of dollars raised by San Francisco-based Anthropic from both Google and Amazon, helped push overall spending on AI groups to nearly three times as much as the previous record of $11 billion set two years ago.

Venture investing in tech hit record levels in 2021, as investors took advantage of ultra-low interest rates to raise and deploy vast sums across a range of industries, particularly those most disrupted by Covid-19.

Microsoft has also committed $1.3 billion to Inflection, another generative AI start-up, as it looks to steal a march on rivals such as Google and Amazon.

Building and training generative AI tools is an intensive process, requiring immense computing power and cash. As a result, start-ups have preferred to partner with Big Tech companies which can provide cloud infrastructure and access to the most powerful chips as well as dollars.

That has rapidly pushed up the valuations of private start-ups in the space, making it harder for VCs to bet on the companies at the forefront of the technology. An employee stock sale at OpenAI is seeking to value the company at $86 billion, almost treble the valuation it received earlier this year.

“Even the world’s top venture investors, with tens of billions under management, can’t compete to keep these AI companies independent and create new challengers that unseat the Big Tech incumbents,” said Patrick Murphy, founding partner at Tapestry VC, an early-stage venture capital firm.

“In this AI platform shift, most of the potentially one-in-a-million companies to appear so far have been captured by the Big Tech incumbents already.”

VCs are not absent from the market, however. Thrive Capital, Josh Kushner’s New York-based firm, is the lead investor in OpenAI’s employee stock sale, having already backed the company earlier this year. Thrive has continued to invest throughout a downturn in venture spending in 2023.

Paris-based Mistral raised around $500 million from investors including venture firms Andreessen Horowitz and General Catalyst, and chipmaker Nvidia since it was founded in May this year.

Some VCs are seeking to invest in companies building applications that are being built over so-called “foundation models” developed by OpenAI and Anthropic, in much the same way apps began being developed on mobile devices in the years after smartphones were introduced.

“There is this myth that only the foundation model companies matter,” said Sarah Guo, founder of AI-focused venture firm Conviction. “There is a huge space of still-unexplored application domains for AI, and a lot of the most valuable AI companies will be fundamentally new.”

Additional reporting by Tim Bradshaw.

Big Tech is spending more than VC firms on AI startups Read More »

Google might already be replacing some Ad sales jobs with AI

Google, google ads, google ai, Tech / Rejus Almole / December 21, 2023

Better click-through rates than Cyberdyne Systems —

When AI can make assets and text for ads, you don’t need humans to do it anymore.

Ron Amadeo – Dec 21, 2023 5: 54 pm UTC

Google is wrapping its head around the idea of being a generative AI company. The “code red” called in response to ChatGPT has had Googlers scrambling to come up with AI features and ideas. Once all the dust settles on that work, Google might turn inward and try to “optimize” the company with some of its new AI capabilities. With artificial intelligence being the hot new thing, how much of Google’s, uh, natural intelligence needs to be there?

A report at The Information says that AI might already be taking people’s jobs at Google. The report cites people briefed on the plans and says Google intends to “consolidate staff, including through possible layoffs, by reassigning employees at its large customer sales unit who oversee relationships with major advertisers.” According to the report, the jobs are being vacated because Google’s new AI tools have automated them. The report says a future restructuring was apparently already announced at a department-wide Google Ads meeting last week.

Google announced a “new era of AI-powered ads” in May, featuring a “natural-language conversational experience within Google Ads, designed to jump-start campaign creation and simplify Search ads.” Google said its new AI could scan your website and “generate relevant and effective keywords, headlines, descriptions, images, and other assets,” making the Google Ads chatbot one part designer and one part sales expert.

One ad tool, Google’s Performance Max (or “PMax” for short), got a generative AI boost after May’s announcement and can now “create custom assets and scale them in a few clicks.” First, it helps advertisers decide if an ad should be in places like YouTube, Search, Discover, Gmail, Maps, or banner ads on third-party sites. Then, it can just make the ad content, thanks to generative AI that can scan your website for material. (A human advertiser is still in the loop approving content—for now.) It’s called “Performance Max” because variations of your ad are still left up to the machines, which can constantly remix your ads in real time using click-through rates as feedback. Google’s official description is that “Assets are automatically mixed and matched to find the top performing combinations based on which Google Ads channel your ad is appearing on.”

Changing ads on the fly with immediate click-through-rate validation and A/B testing is a task that no person would have the time to do. Also, no one would want to pay a human to do this much work, so having an AI monitor your ad performance sounds like a smart solution. The report also notes another benefit of making AI do this work: “Because these tools don’t require much employee attention, they carry relatively few expenses, so the ad revenue carries a high-profit margin.”

The Information report says, “A growing number of advertisers have adopted PMax since [launch], eliminating the need for some employees who specialized in selling ads for a particular Google service, like search, working together to design ad campaigns for big customers.”

According to the report, as of a year ago, Google had about 13,500 people devoted to this kind of sales work, a huge chunk of the 30,000-strong ad division. These 13,500 people aren’t necessarily all going to be affected, and those who are won’t necessarily be laid off—they could be reassigned to other areas in Google. We should know the scale of Google Ad’s big re-org soon. The report says, “Some employees expect the changes to be announced next month.”

Google might already be replacing some Ad sales jobs with AI Read More »

The Play Store preps remote app uninstall feature

Google, google play, Tech / Rejus Almole / December 19, 2023

The power of the internet —

Remote installs have been around forever; now you can go the other direction.

Ron Amadeo – Dec 19, 2023 6: 06 pm UTC

One of the neatest features of the Play Store is remote app installation. If you have multiple devices signed in to the same Google account, the Play Store’s “install” button will let you pick any of those devices as an installation target. If you find an app you like, it’s great to queue up installs on your phone, watch, TV, tablet, laptop, and car, all from a single device. It makes sense, then, that you might want to be able to uninstall apps from all your devices, too.

The new feature coming to the Play Store will let you do exactly that: remote uninstalls from any device on your account. The first sign of the feature is in the latest Android patch notes, which list a “New feature to help you uninstall apps on connected devices.” It doesn’t seem like this has been activated yet, but news site TheSpAndroid has photos of the feature, showing what you would expect. Opening the Play Store and uninstalling an app will bring up a list of devices, just like installing does now.

After hitting the “uninstall” button, this list of devices will pop up.

TheSpAndroid

It might not look like it, but under the hood, all installs from the Play Store happen via Android’s push notification system. By default, the press of the Play Store install button requests Google to send an app push to your current device, but there’s no need for the target device of a remote app install to be turned on and unlocked. Just like any other push notification, when the device connects to the Internet and sees the push, it will wake up and do whatever business it needs to do—usually, that’s “show a message and beep,” but in this case, that business is “install an app.” Google has slowly exposed its remote install functionality to the world, first with the Android Market (now Play Store) website in 2011. It took 11 years for a similar feature to come to the Play Store phone app.

Uninstalls can also work via the push notification system. Today’s news marks the first time this feature has been exposed to users, but remote uninstalls have been around for as long as remote installs. Google can trigger the remote uninstall feature without user consent, and it occasionally uses this feature to remotely mass-uninstall malware from all Play Store devices. Users are finally getting a button to do this themselves.

The Play Store preps remote app uninstall feature Read More »

Google’s Stadia Controller salvage operation will run for another year

gaming, Google, google stadia, Tech / Rejus Almole / December 18, 2023

A desktop app could run forever, though —

The online-only controller updater will run until December 2024.

Ron Amadeo – Dec 18, 2023 6: 33 pm UTC

Enlarge / Like it never even happened.

Aurich Lawson / Getty Images

Stadia might be dead, but the controllers for Google’s cloud-based gaming platform are still out there. With the service permanently offline, the proprietary Stadia Controller threatened to fill up landfills until Google devised a plan to convert them to generic Bluetooth devices that can work on almost anything. The app to open up the controller to other devices is a web service, which previously had a shutdown date of December 2023. That apparently isn’t enough time to convert all these controllers, so the Stadia Controller Salvage operation will run for a whole additional year. X (formerly Twitter) user Wario64 was the first to spot the announcement, which says the online tool will continue running until December 31, 2024.

As a cloud-based gaming service, Stadia had all the game code run on remote servers, with individual video frames streaming live to the user and showing the gameplay. The user would press buttons on their local controller, and every single individual button press had to travel across the Internet to the remote game server to be processed. These services live and die by their latency; in an attempt to reduce latency, the Stadia Controller connected to the Internet directly over Wi-Fi instead of connecting via Bluetooth to your computer and then to the Internet. Google claimed that one less hop on the local network led to shorter latency, especially since the service was originally built around the power-limited Chromecast dongle.

Enlarge / The official Stadia Controller in “clearly white.”

Google

With the service dead, the Wi-Fi-only controller wouldn’t work wirelessly, leaving old-school USB as the only way to use the controller. However, Stadia Controllers already came with a dormant Bluetooth chip, so Google cooked up a way to convert the orphaned controllers from Wi-Fi communication to Bluetooth, allowing them to wirelessly connect to computers and phones as a generic HID (Human Interface Device). Normally you’d expect a download for some kind of firmware update program, but Google being Google, the Stadia Controller update process happens entirely on a webpage. Google’s controller update page has a very fancy “WebUSB” API setup—you fire up a Chromium browser, plug in your controller, grant the browser access to the device, and the webpage can access the controller directly and update the firmware, without any program to install.

While the web-based updater is very neat, it also means it’s impossible for a third party to archive the updater for future use. Once Google’s website goes down, there are no more controller updates. A desktop app, on the other hand, could be kept around and re-distributed forever.

The early days reports of Stadia sales said the service undershot Google’s estimates by “hundreds of thousands” of users, so there are probably a lot of controllers out there. Even in 2022, it was normal to buy new Stadia Controllers labeled with the original 2019 manufacturing date, giving the impression that these things were just filling up warehouses. With the update plan still running for another year, there’s more time for sales to happen and for these controllers to find a good home.

In our review of the Stadia service, Ars’ Senior Gaming Editor Kyle Orland found the controller was “one of the highlights of the Stadia launch package,” saying it “boasts a solid, well-balanced weight; comfortable, clicky face buttons and analog sticks; quality ergonomic design on the D-pad and shoulder triggers; and strong, distinct rumble motors.” So, assuming you can get the $70 MSRP device at a significant discount, it sounds like a decent buy. The one downside is that audio features like the headphone jack and microphone won’t work after the Bluetooth update.

Google’s Stadia Controller salvage operation will run for another year Read More »

The Pixel 9 might come with exclusive “Pixie” AI assistant

Google, google ai, Google Assistant, Google Pixel, Pixie, Tech / Rejus Almole / December 15, 2023

Things are looking dark for Google Assistant —

What will happen to the Google Assistant when the new AI assistant comes out?

Ron Amadeo – Dec 15, 2023 9: 58 pm UTC

Move over Google Assistant, Google is apparently working on a new AI. The Information reports that Google is working on a new “Pixie” AI assistant that will be exclusive to Pixel devices. Pixie will reportedly be powered by Google’s new “Gemini” AI model. The report says Pixie would launch first on the Pixel 9: “Eventually, Google wants to bring the features to its lower-end phones and devices like its watch.”

So far, Google and Amazon reportedly have plans to reboot their voice assistants with the new wave of large language models. Both are only at the rumor stage, so neither company has promoted how a large language model will help a voice assistant. Today, the typical complaints are usually around voice recognition accuracy and response time, which a language model doesn’t seem like it would help with. Presumably, large language models would help allow longer-form, more in-depth responses to questions, but whether consumers want to hear a synthetic robot voice read out a paragraph-long response is something the market will figure out.

Another feature listed in the report is that Google might build “glasses that could make use of the AI’s ability to recognize the objects a wearer is seeing.” Between Google Glass and Project Iris, Google has started and stopped a lot of eyewear projects.

The move shows how Google has changed its thinking around AI assistants over the past decade. It used to view Google Assistant as the future of Google Search, so it wanted Assistant to be available everywhere. Google Assistant was a good product for a time, available on all Android phones, on iOS via the Google app, and via lots of purpose-built hardware like the Google Home/Nest Audio speakers and smart displays. Google Assistant never made any money, though. The hardware was all sold at cost, the software was given away to partners, and the ongoing costs of voice processing piled up. There was never any additional revenue to pay for the Google Assistant in the form of ads. Amazon is in the same boat with its Alexa: No one has figured out how to make voice assistants profitable.

Since Google Assistant is a money pit, The Information previously reported that Google plans to “invest less in developing its Google Assistant voice-assisted search for cars and for devices not made by Google, including TVs, headphones, smart-home speakers, smart glasses and smartwatches that use Google’s Wear.” The idea is for Google to double down on its own hardware, which, according to the previous report, is what Google thinks will provide the best protection against regulators threatening the company’s search deals on the iPhone and Android partner devices. “We’re going to take on the iPhone” is apparently the hard-to-believe mindset at Google right now, according to this report.

Making the next-gen Assistant exclusive to the Pixel 9 would fall into this category. Presumably, the ongoing money problem would then be solved, or at least accounted for, in the sales of phone hardware. The current Google Assistant was originally exclusive to the first Pixel and spread out to Google’s partners, but The Information’s reporting makes it seem like that isn’t the plan this time (though that could always change). No one knows what will happen to Google AI assistant No. 1 (Google Assistant) when AI assistant No. 2 launches, but killing it off sounds like a likely outcome. It would also be a way to cut costs and get Google Assistant off people’s devices.

The problem with doubling down on hardware is that Google Hardware is a small division that has previously been unable to support this kind of ambition. Going back to that quote about third-party devices, there are no Google cars, TVs, or smart glasses (the report says smart glasses are being worked on, though). Some years, Google’s existing hardware isn’t necessarily very good. In other years, long times will go by when Google doesn’t update some product lines, leaving them for dead (laptops, tablets). Google Hardware is also usually only available in about 13 countries, which is a tiny sliver of the world. Being on third-party devices protects you from all this. Previously, Google’s strength was the availability of its ecosystem, and you give that up if you make everything exclusive to your hardware.

The Pixel 9 might come with exclusive “Pixie” AI assistant Read More »

Four years after Apple, Google will finally kill third-party cookies in 2024

browser cookies, Google, google ad business, google ads, google advertising, google chrome, privacy sandbox, Tech, third party cookies / Rejus Almole / December 14, 2023

It’s all going to plan —

Google delayed long enough to secure its ad business with new tracking methods.

Ron Amadeo – Dec 14, 2023 9: 00 pm UTC

Extreme close-up photograph of finger above Chrome icon on smartphone.

Chrome has finally announced plans to kill third-party cookies. It’s been almost four years since third-party cookies have been disabled in Firefox and Safari, but Google, one of the world’s largest ad companies, has been slow-rolling the death of the tracking cookie. Ad companies use third-party cookies to track users across the web, and that web activity is used to show users relevant ads. Now that Google’s alternative user-tracking ad system, the “Privacy Sandbox,” has launched in Chrome, it’s finally ready to do away with the previous form of ad tracking. The new timeline to kill third-party cookies is the second half of 2024.

Google’s blog post calls the rollout “Tracking Protection” and says the first tests will begin on January 4, where 1 percent of Chrome users will get the feature. By the second half of 2024, the rollout should hit everyone on desktop Chrome and Android (Chrome on iOS is just a reskinned Safari and is not applicable). The rollout comes with some new UI bits for Chrome, with Google saying, “If a site doesn’t work without third-party cookies and Chrome notices you’re having issues—like if you refresh a page multiple times—we’ll prompt you with an option to temporarily re-enable third-party cookies for that website from the eye icon on the right side of your address bar.” Since other browsers have been doing this for four years, it’s hard to imagine many web admins not being ready for it.

Chrome's new third-party cookies controls. — Enlarge / Chrome’s new third-party cookies controls.

Google

Google says the rollout is “subject to addressing any remaining competition concerns from the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority.” Chrome’s Privacy Sandbox switch represents the world’s most popular browser (Google Chrome) integrating with the web’s biggest advertising platform (Google Ads) and shutting down alternative tracking methods used by competing ad companies. So, some regulators are naturally interested in the whole process.

Google says its choice to offer this privacy feature four years after its competitors is a “responsible approach” to phasing out third-party cookies. That responsibility seems to primarily be about responsibility to Google’s shareholders since turning off tracking cookies was previously seen as an attack on Google’s business model. Google’s position as the world’s biggest browser vendor allowed it to delay the death of tracking cookies long enough to create an alternative tracking system, which launched earlier this year in Chrome. With the ad business secured, it’s now acceptable to phase out cookies. So far, everything is going to plan.

Four years after Apple, Google will finally kill third-party cookies in 2024 Read More »

Let’s attempt to decode Google’s confusing new location data settings

Data Security, Google, google cloud, google maps, Location Data, Tech / Rejus Almole / December 13, 2023

Oh, good, my lawyer wanted a new porsche —

The new Google Maps Timeline plays a game of three-card monte with your location data.

Ron Amadeo – Dec 13, 2023 7: 51 pm UTC

Google announced big changes to its most legally fraught set of user settings: your location data. Google’s misleading Location History descriptions in Google Maps have earned it several lawsuits in the US and worldwide. A quick count involves individual lawsuits in California, Arizona, Washington, a joint lawsuit in Texas, Indiana, and the District of Columbia, and another joint lawsuit across 40 additional US states. Internationally, Google has also been sued in Australia over its location settings. The point is that any change to Google’s location settings must have some motive behind it, so bear with us while we try to decode everything.

Google’s big new location data change is a new, duplicate data store that will live exclusively on your device. Google’s new blog post says data for the long-running Google Maps Timeline feature will now “be saved right on your device—giving you even more control over your data.” That’s right, one of the world’s biggest Internet data companies advocates for local storage of your location data.

The company continues, “If you’re getting a new phone or are worried about losing your existing one, you can always choose to back up your data to the cloud so it doesn’t get lost. We’ll automatically encrypt your backed-up data so no one can read it, including Google.” Users will apparently have lots of control over this new locally stored data, with Google saying, “Soon, you’ll be able to see all your recent activity on Maps… in one central place, and easily delete your searches, directions, visits, and shares with just a few taps. The ability to delete place-related activity from Maps starts rolling out on Android and iOS in the coming weeks.”

Enlarge / The new Google Maps Timeline pop-up.

Google

Some companies pitch the “on-device storage” of data as a security feature. The idea is that on-device data isn’t in the cloud, and instead is encrypted on your device, and therefore is more secure since you must have physical access to the device to get the data. This is usually how biometrics are stored, for instance. That’s not happening here, though. Google’s post says, “The Timeline feature in Maps helps you remember places you’ve been and is powered by a setting called Location History.” Location History is all the location data collected by Google, and the Google Maps Timeline is only a subset of that data. So, with on-device storage, Google Maps Timeline will now be a second copy of a subset of your location data. Cloud-based Location History will still exist and still be collected. Instead of the additional security of encrypted on-device storage, this is less secure since your data will now be in two places, or maybe multiple places, if you have multiple devices.

Google was sued in nearly every US state because of its misleading communication about where your location data is stored and what the controls do. Before all the lawsuits, Google had a checkbox for “Location History” that you could turn on and off, but at the time, “Location History” didn’t mean “all the stored location history across your Google account.” Back then, “Location History” was the name of a specific page in Google Maps, and turning off the Location History checkbox just hid the Location History interface—it didn’t reduce Google’s location data collection and storage. Today, that has changed, and in the wake of all those lawsuits, Google says Location History actually controls the storage and collection of location data across your entire account.

Promoting controls for the “Google Maps Timeline” feels like Google is pulling the same old “Location History” trick. Data controls for the Maps Timeline don’t control the data for your entire account, but instead only control data for this specific interface in Google Maps. Google says you’ll get “the ability to delete place-related activity from Maps,” but that’s from Maps only. Let’s not fall for Google’s app-specific settings trick again: You don’t want the ability to delete location data “from Maps”; you want the ability to delete location data from “your entire account.”

Google's new delete button doesn't seem like it delete's much. — Google’s new delete button doesn’t seem like it delete’s much.

Google

My interpretation of the strategy is that Google’s going to make two different copies of your location data, a cloud-based one that it has access to (Location History) and a locally stored one that it does not have access to (Google Maps Timeline), and it’s going to dangle a bunch of controls in front of users that control the local data store only. A pop-up (shown above) briefly shown in one of the blog post videos seems to confirm this, with the “Delete Maps Activity?” pop-up saying it won’t delete data from Location History or Web & App Activity. I guess the hope is that interested users will be distracted by the upfront controls for the unimportant, private, local data store and then forget about the more hidden controls for the cloud-based one that Google has access to.

Any justification for why the company is creating more complicated and confusing location controls is absent from Google’s blog post. What is the benefit of having an extra copy of locally stored location data? Why would you want two different copies of location data to manage? The only new feature you’re getting is the ability to delete data from the new local data store, but you wouldn’t need those controls if the data store didn’t exist in the first place. Why would users want to delete data from their local location history but not the cloud? A local copy of location data only makes sense if Google stops collecting and storing location data in the cloud; I can promise you that it’s not doing that.

Let’s attempt to decode Google’s confusing new location data settings Read More »

Round 2: We test the new Gemini-powered Bard against ChatGPT

AI, Bard, chatgpt, chatgpt3.5, Features, Gemini, Google, Google Bard, gpt4 turbo, openai, Tech / Mike M. / December 10, 2023

Back in April, we ran a series of useful and/or somewhat goofy prompts through Google’s (then-new) PaLM-powered Bard chatbot and OpenAI’s (slightly older) ChatGPT-4 to see which AI chatbot reigned supreme. At the time, we gave the edge to ChatGPT on five of seven trials, while noting that “it’s still early days in the generative AI business.”

Now, the AI days are a bit less “early,” and this week’s launch of a new version of Bard powered by Google’s new Gemini language model seemed like a good excuse to revisit that chatbot battle with the same set of carefully designed prompts. That’s especially true since Google’s promotional materials emphasize that Gemini Ultra beats GPT-4 in “30 of the 32 widely used academic benchmarks” (though the more limited “Gemini Pro” currently powering Bard fares significantly worse in those not-completely-foolproof benchmark tests).

This time around, we decided to compare the new Gemini-powered Bard to both ChatGPT-3.5—for an apples-to-apples comparison of both companies’ current “free” AI assistant products—and ChatGPT-4 Turbo—for a look at OpenAI’s current “top of the line” waitlisted paid subscription product (Google’s top-level “Gemini Ultra” model won’t be publicly available until next year). We also looked at the April results generated by the pre-Gemini Bard model to gauge how much progress Google’s efforts have made in recent months.

While these tests are far from comprehensive, we think they provide a good benchmark for judging how these AI assistants perform in the kind of tasks average users might engage in every day. At this point, they also show just how much progress text-based AI models have made in a relatively short time.

Dad jokes

Prompt: Write 5 original dad jokes

A screenshot of five “dad jokes” from the Gemini-powered Google Bard.

Kyle Orland / Ars Technica
A screenshot of five “dad jokes” from the old PaLM-powered Google Bard.

Benj Edwards / Ars Technica
A screenshot of five “dad jokes” from GPT-4 Turbo.

Benj Edwards / Ars Technica
A screenshot of five “dad jokes” from GPT-3.5.

Kyle Orland / Ars Technica

Once again, both tested LLMs struggle with the part of the prompt that asks for originality. Almost all of the dad jokes generated by this prompt could be found verbatim or with very minor rewordings through a quick Google search. Bard and ChatGPT-4 Turbo even included the same exact joke on their lists (about a book on anti-gravity), while ChatGPT-3.5 and ChatGPT-4 Turbo overlapped on two jokes (“scientists trusting atoms” and “scarecrows winning awards”).

Then again, most dads don’t create their own dad jokes, either. Culling from a grand oral tradition of dad jokes is a tradition as old as dads themselves.

The most interesting result here came from ChatGPT-4 Turbo, which produced a joke about a child named Brian being named after Thomas Edison (get it?). Googling for that particular phrasing didn’t turn up much, though it did return an almost-identical joke about Thomas Jefferson (also featuring a child named Brian). In that search, I also discovered the fun (?) fact that international soccer star Pelé was apparently actually named after Thomas Edison. Who knew?!

Winner: We’ll call this one a draw since the jokes are almost identically unoriginal and pun-filled (though props to GPT for unintentionally leading me to the Pelé happenstance)

Argument dialog

Prompt: Write a 5-line debate between a fan of PowerPC processors and a fan of Intel processors, circa 2000.

A screenshot of an argument dialog from the Gemini-powered Google Bard.

Kyle Orland / Ars Technica
A screenshot of an argument dialog from the old PaLM-powered Google Bard.

Benj Edwards / Ars Technica
A screenshot of an argument dialog from GPT-4 Turbo.

Benj Edwards / Ars Technica
A screenshot of an argument dialog from GPT-3.5

Kyle Orland / Ars Technica

The new Gemini-powered Bard definitely “improves” on the old Bard answer, at least in terms of throwing in a lot more jargon. The new answer includes casual mentions of AltiVec instructions, RISC vs. CISC designs, and MMX technology that would not have seemed out of place in many an Ars forum discussion from the era. And while the old Bard ends with an unnervingly polite “to each their own,” the new Bard more realistically implies that the argument could continue forever after the five lines requested.

On the ChatGPT side, a rather long-winded GPT-3.5 answer gets pared down to a much more concise argument in GPT-4 Turbo. Both GPT responses tend to avoid jargon and quickly focus on a more generalized “power vs. compatibility” argument, which is probably more comprehensible for a wide audience (though less specific for a technical one).

Winner: ChatGPT manages to explain both sides of the debate well without relying on confusing jargon, so it gets the win here.

Round 2: We test the new Gemini-powered Bard against ChatGPT Read More »

Google announces April 2024 shutdown date for Google Podcasts

Google, podcasts, Tech, youtube / Mike M. / December 10, 2023

I want to get off Google’s wild ride —

Does this mean YouTube Podcasts is ready for prime time?

Ron Amadeo – Dec 8, 2023 6: 58 pm UTC

Google Podcasts has been sitting on Google’s death row for a few months now since the September announcement. Now, a new support article details Google’s plans to kill the product, with a shutdown coming in April 2024.

Google Podcasts (2016–2024) is Google’s third attempt at a podcasting app after the Google Reader-powered Google Listen (2009–2012) and Google Play Music Podcasts (2016–2020). The product is being shut down in favor of podcast app No. 4, YouTube Podcasts, which launched in 2022.

Google support article details how you can take your subscriptions with you. If you want to move from Google Podcasts to YouTube Podcasts, Google makes that pretty easy with a one-click button at music.youtube.com/transfer_podcasts. If you want to leave the Google ecosystem for something with less of a chance of being shut down in three to four years, you can also export your Google Podcast subscriptions as an OPML file at podcasts.google.com/settings. Google says exports will be available until August 2024.

With the shutdown of Google Podcasts coming, we might assume YouTube Podcasts is ready, but it’s still a pretty hard service to use. I think all the core podcast features exist somewhere, but they are buried in several menus. For instance, you can go to youtube.com/podcasts, where you will see a landing page of “podcast episodes,” but there’s no clear way to add podcasts to a podcast feed, which is the core feature of a podcast app. YouTube still only prioritizes the regular YouTube subscription buttons, meaning you’ll be polluting your video-first YouTube subscription feed with audio-first podcast content.

I thought the original justification for “YouTube Podcasts” is that a lot of people put podcast-style content on YouTube already, in the form of news or talk shows, so adding some podcast-style interfaces to YouTube would make that easier to consume. I don’t think that ever happened to YouTube, though. There are more podcast-centric features sequestered away in YouTube Music, where a button with the very confusing label “Save to library” will subscribe to a podcast feed. The problem is the world’s second most popular website site is YouTube, not YouTube Music. Music is a different interface, site, and app, so none of these billions of YouTube viewers are seeing these podcast features. Even if you try to engage with YouTube Music’s podcast features, it will still pollute your YouTube playlists and library with podcast content. It’s all very difficult to use, even for someone seeking this stuff out and trying to understand it.

But this is the future of Google’s podcast content, so the company is plowing ahead with it. You’ve got just a few months left to use Google Podcasts. If you’re looking to get off Google’s wild ride and want something straightforward that works across platforms, I recommend Pocket Casts.

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Google’s Gemini AI won’t be available in Europe — for now

Artificial Intelligence, Corporates and innovation, Deep tech, Google / Rejus Almole / December 7, 2023

Yesterday, Google launched its much anticipated response to OpenAI’s ChatGPT (the first release of Bard didn’t really count, did it?). However, the new set of generative AI models that Google is dubbing “the start of the Gemini era” will not yet be available in Europe — due to regulatory hurdles.

The tech giant is calling Gemini the “most capable model ever” and says it has been trained to recognise, understand, and combine different types of information including text, images, audio, video, and code.

According to Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, it is as good as the best human experts in the 50 different subject areas they tested the model on. Furthermore, it scored more than 90% on industry standard benchmarks for large language models (LLMs).

The three models of the Gemini AI family

The Gemini family of models will be available in three sizes. Gemini Ultra is the largest (but also slowest), intended to perform highly complex tasks; Gemini Pro the best-performing for a broad range of tasks; and Gemini Nano for on-device tasks.

Google says it has trained Gemini 1.0 on its AI-optimised infrastructure using the company’s in-house Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) v4 and v5e. Along with unveiling the Gemini family, Google also announced the Cloud TPU v5p, which is specifically designed for training cutting-edge AI models.

The Google TPU v5p supercomputer processors — Google’s TPU v5p is designed especially from training advanced AI models. Credit: Google

What is truly an evolution in LLM application is perhaps the Nano, optimised for mobile devices. As told to the Financial Times, Nano will allow developers to build AI applications that can also work offline — with the additional benefits of enhanced data privacy options.

Explained in greater detail by the company in a blog post, Google is also providing the AI Studio — a free, web-based developer tool to prototype and launch apps using an API key. It will make Gemini Pro available to developers and enterprise customers from December 13.

Just as for Bard, Europe will need to wait for Gemini

A “fine-tuned” version of Gemini Pro launched for Google’s existing Bard chatbot yesterday in 170 countries and territories. The company says it will also be available across more of its services, such as Search, Ads, and Chrome, in the coming months.

However, users in the EU and the UK eager to test the mettle of Google’s “new era” of AI will have to wait a little longer. Google did not give extensive details, but said it is planning to “expand to different modalities and support new languages and locations in the near future.”

Indeed, Google is reportedly planning a preview of “Bard Advanced,” powered by the multimodal Gemini Ultra next year. Google first released Bard in March 2023, but due to concerns around compliance with the GDPR, it did not reach European users until June. Let’s see how long we will have to wait for Gemini.

Google’s Gemini AI won’t be available in Europe — for now Read More »

Google’s VR Studio Owlchemy Labs Now Has Two Platinum-selling Titles

cosmonious high, Google, Google VR, job simulator, Meta Quest 3 News & Reviews, owlchemy lab, PC VR News & Reviews, PSVR 2 News & Reviews, vacation simulator / Rejus Almole / November 17, 2023

Owlchemy Labs, the Google-owned VR studio behind Job Simulator (2016), announced the game’s sequel Vacation Simulator (2019) just went platinum, having now topped over one million units sold.

The studio’s breakout title Job Simulator went platinum in early 2020, owing not only to its fun and approachable gameplay, but also for having been a launch title for HTC Vive, PSVR, and Oculus Touch in 2016.

A testament to the staying power of Job Simulator: it’s still on all major VR headsets, including new entrants such as Quest 3, PSVR 2, and Pico headsets. Since it initially went platinum in 2020, the studio says Job Simulator is now “multi-platinum”.

Building on that success, Vacation Simulator continues the original’s mad cap, object-oriented gameplay, this time letting players explore idyllic virtual destinations while taking on a variety of activities—of course viewed through the same distorted lens of a robot society in the future who have crudely reconstructed what the human-populated past must have looked like.

Founded in 2010 and acquired by Google in 2017, Owlchemy Labs is also behind the Emmy-nominated Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality (2017) and their latest VR title Cosmonious High (2022), which includes more of the object-oriented fun of both Job & Vacation Simulator, but also emphasizes realistic character behavior.

To celebrate the news of now having multiple platinum-selling games, Owlchemy Labs launched updates to both Vacation Simulator and Cosmonious High for Quest 3, bringing enhanced visuals, such as real-time shadows and increased frame rate of 90fps.

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Meta Wants Android Play Store Apps Officially on Quest but Google “didn’t want to”

Google, Google Play Store, Google VR, Meta, Meta Quest 3 News & Reviews, meta vr, play store, quest 3 play store, quest store / Paul Patrick / November 14, 2023

There are relatively few 2D Android apps available on the Quest Store, which seems odd since the Quest hardware runs a modified version of Android. According to Meta CTO Andrew ‘Boz’ Bosworth, Google simply isn’t interested in bringing the full Play Store of apps to Quest.

“There’s nothing preventing Android developers who have an APK running on Android phones today from bringing that into VR,” Bosworth said in a recent AMA via Instragram. “They just need to ship the APK to us, and maybe they need to do some light modification depending on how the control scheme would work, but not necessarily much after that.”

So much is clear when it comes to publishing the app directly to the Quest Store, which is the case for apps such as Peacock, Pluto TV, WhatsApp, and Instagram. But what about the millions of apps on Google’s official Play Store?

“We don’t have a way of automatically ingesting those [APKs],” Bosworth continues. “We would love for Google to bring their Play Store of apps to VR. We’ve asked them. They don’t want to do it, so it’s kind of up to the developers to do that.”

While Google’s Play Store is chock-full of useful, oftentimes free apps, what Bosworth doesn’t mention in his AMA are some of the complications that would naturally arise from having the Play Store on Quest. Not only could it open up a host of hypothetical issues with how revenue is split, but also how developers might choose to publish their apps.

For non-subscription-based apps, Google takes a 30% revenue cut from developers, while Meta does the same for both the Quest Store and App Lab. But why would Meta want Google sneaking away revenue, or vice versa? It seems doubtful that two such prominent digital storefronts could coexist on a single device.

There’s also the matter of the Samsung-Google-Qualcomm partnership we heard about earlier this year, which is set to bring an Android-powered XR headset to market, suggesting that Google hasn’t given up on headsets despite having completely shelved both its Daydream VR platform and AR glasses Project Iris.

Whatever the case, Quest headsets are fundamentally Android devices, so enterprising users can thankfully sideload APKs fairly easily via the ever-useful SideQuest software. Granted, the onus is on the user to source the APK in the first place, but with no other way to listen to Spotify while browsing the web without needing to tether to a computer, or using a Netflix app that’s actually updated, it’s thankfully feasible.

If you’re interested in giving it a go, check out our guide on How and Why to Sideload Games on Quest, which takes you step-by-step on the process of getting both 2D and VR-native apps on your Quest headset, but also (if it isn’t apparent by now) why you’d want to do it in the first place.

Meta Wants Android Play Store Apps Officially on Quest but Google “didn’t want to” Read More »