Why ‘Multimodal AI’ Is the Hottest Thing in Tech Right Now

After new feature tells people to eat rocks or add glue to pizza sauce, company to restrict which searches return summariesGoogle announced on Thursday that it would refine and retool its summaries of search results generated by artificial intelligence, posting a blog explaining why the feature was returning bizarre and inaccurate answers that included telling people to eat rocks or add glue to pizza sauce. The company will reduce the scope of searches that will return an AI-written summary.Goog

Showrunner will let users generate episodes with prompts, which could be an alarming next step or a fleeting noveltyOne of the key strategies of streaming services is to keep you in front of a screen for as long as possible. As soon as one episode of a show you’re watching ends, the next one pops up automatically. But this approach has its limits. After all, when a series ends, Netflix will try and autoplay another series that it thinks you’ll like, but it has a terrible success rate

Networks in China and Iran also used AI models to create and post disinformation but campaigns did not reach large audiencesOpenAI on Thursday released its first ever report on how its artificial intelligence tools are being used for covert influence operations, revealing that the company had disrupted disinformation campaigns originating from Russia, China, Israel and Iran.Malicious actors used the company’s generative AI models to create and post propaganda content across social media pl

AI expected to help researchers unlock two-way communication, say team that includes Tel Aviv UniversityIn the Dr Dolittle books and films, the ability to “talk to the animals” captured the imagination. Now scientists are being offered a $10m prize to create real conversations.The Coller Dolittle Challenge for Interspecies Two-Way Communication has been launched by the Jeremy Coller Foundation and Tel Aviv University. While the use of AI is not obligatory, the team say the technology

Cloud-based software firm could lose $48bn in market value if losses hold, amid fear rival AI offerings are hampering demandSalesforce shares slumped about 18% on Thursday, after its lowest-ever quarterly revenue growth forecast raised fears that high interest rates and rival AI offerings were hampering demand at the cloud-based software firm.The company could lose more than $48bn in market value if losses hold, as it also reported quarterly revenue that was below expectations for the first time

Celebrity posts of graphic following IDF strike help make it among most-shared content of Israel-Gaza warIsrael-Gaza war – live updatesAn image depicting refugee tents spelling out the phrase “all eyes on Rafah” has become one of the most-shared pieces of content relating to the Israel-Gaza war, spreading rapidly on social media this week. The graphic, which was generated using artificial intelligence, had been shared on Instagram more than 45m times by Wednesday.The image and

Big tech is playing its part in reaching net zero targets, but its vast new datacentres are run at huge cost to the environmentMariana Mazzucato is professor of economics at UCL, and director of the Institute for Innovation and Public PurposeWhen you picture the tech industry, you probably think of things that don’t exist in physical space, such as the apps and internet browser on your phone. But the infrastructure required to store all this information – the physical datacentres hou

It’s been a busy week in the world of artificial intelligence. OpenAI found itself in hot water with Scarlett Johansson after launching its new chatbot Sky, drawing comparisons to the Hollywood star’s character in the sci-fi film Her. In South Korea the second global AI summit took place, and a report published yesterday by the Alan Turing Institute explored how artificial intelligence could influence elections. The Guardian’s UK technology editor, Alex Hern, tells Madeleine Fi

Javier Milei to hold private talks with Sundar Pichai and Sam Altman as Argentina faces worst economic crisis in decadesJavier Milei, Argentina’s president, is set to meet with the leaders of some of the world’s largest tech companies in Silicon Valley this week. The far-right libertarian leader will hold private talks with Sundar Pichai of Google, Sam Altman of OpenAI, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta and Tim Cook of Apple.Milei also met last month with Elon Musk, who has become one of the S

US tech startup says committee will advise on ‘critical safety and security decisions’OpenAI says it is setting up a safety and security committee and has begun training a new AI model to supplant the GPT-4 system that underpins its ChatGPT chatbot.The San Francisco startup said in a blogpost on Tuesday that the committee will advise the full board on “critical safety and security decisions” for its projects and operations. Continue reading...

One day and six (very long) agreements later, can we call the meeting to hammer out the future of AI regulation a success?• Don’t get TechScape delivered to your inbox? Sign up hereWhat does success look like for the second global AI summit? As the great and good of the industry (and me) gathered last week at the Korea Institute for Science and Technology, a sprawling hilltop campus in eastern Seoul, that was the question I kept asking myself.If we’re ranking the event by the qu

One day and six (very long) agreements later, can we call the meeting to hammer out the future of AI regulation a success?• Don’t get TechScape delivered to your inbox? Sign up hereWhat does success look like for the second global AI summit? As the great and good of the industry (and me) gathered last week at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology, a sprawling hilltop campus in eastern Seoul, that was the question I kept asking myself.If we’re ranking the event by the qua

UK touts ‘Bletchley effect’ of safety institutes, but division remains over whether to limit AI abilitiesBig tech has distracted world from existential risk of AI, says top scientistThe Bletchley Park artificial intelligence summit in 2023 was a landmark event in AI regulation simply by virtue of its existence.Between the event’s announcement and its first day, the mainstream conversation had changed from a tone of light bafflement to a general agreement that AI regulation may

Funding round values artificial intelligence startup at $18bn before investment, says multibillionaireElon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI has closed a $6bn (£4.7bn) investment round that will make it among the best-funded challengers to OpenAI.The startup is only a year old, but it has rapidly built its own large language model (LLM), the technology underpinning many of the recent advances in generative artificial intelligence capable of creating human-like text, pictures

Hollywood star’s claim ChatGPT update used an imitation of her voice highlights tensions over rapidly accelerating technologyWhen OpenAI’s new voice assistant said it was “doing fantastic” in a launch demo this month, Scarlett Johansson was not.The Hollywood star said she was “shocked, angered and in disbelief” that the updated version of ChatGPT, which can listen to spoken prompts and respond verbally, had a voice “eerily similar” to hers. Continu

The 96th Scripps National Spelling Bee, which begins Tuesday, is a celebration of discipline and focus in a world where those things appear to be in vanishing supplyA question that I perennially encounter when I tell people that I am a professional spelling bee tutor is: “Why bother with spelling bees when we have spell check?” It’s an eminently understandable response, especially when it comes from people who have never watched a bee. Cell phones and computers have no problem

One computer scientist says we should embrace human-machine relationships, but other experts are more cautiousHollywood may have warned about the perils of striking up relationships with artificial intelligence, but one computer scientist says we may be missing a trick if we do not embrace the positives that human-machine relationships have to offer.Despite the travails of Joaquin Phoenix’s introverted and soon-to-be-divorced protagonist in the 2013 movie Her, one professor says we should

OpenAI’s unsubtle approximation of the actor’s voice for its new GPT-4o software was a stark illustration of the firm’s high-handed attitude On Monday 13 May, OpenAI livestreamed an event to launch a fancy new product – a large language model (LLM) dubbed GPT-4o – that the company’s chief technology officer, Mira Murati, claimed to be more user-friendly and faster than boring ol’ ChatGPT. It was also more versatile, and multimodal, which is tech-speak fo

Max Tegmark argues that the downplaying is not accidental and threatens to delay, until it’s too late, the strict regulations neededBig tech has succeeded in distracting the world from the existential risk to humanity that artificial intelligence still poses, a leading scientist and AI campaigner has warned.Speaking with the Guardian at the AI Summit in Seoul, South Korea, Max Tegmark said the shift in focus from the extinction of life to a broader conception of safety of artificial intell

Firm’s AI overviews feature has been rolled out to users in US, but many have reported strange responsesGoogle’s new AI overviews feature for search results has reportedly told users who asked questions about depression to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge, recommended glue as a pizza ingredient and has apparently sourced some of its information from the satirical news site the Onion.Last week, Google announced at its I/O developer conference that the feature would be rolled out to use

Steve Kramer charged in New Hampshire for AI-generated impersonation of Biden that urged residents not to vote in primarySteve Kramer, a political consultant who admitted that he deepfaked Joe Biden’s voice in a robocall that was sent out to thousands of US voters in January 2024, has been indicted and fined $6m.The robocall, which went out ahead of the first Democratic presidential primary in the US in New Hampshire, used artificial intelligence to fake Biden’s voice telling voters

Steve Kramer charged in New Hampshire for AI-generated impersonation of Biden that urged residents not to vote in primarySteve Kramer, a political consultant who admitted to NBC News that he deepfaked Joe Biden’s voice in a robocall that was sent out to thousands of New Hampshire voters in January 2024, has been indicted.The robocall, which went out ahead of the first Democratic presidential primary in the US, in New Hampshire, used artificial intelligence to fake Biden’s voice telli