Рубрика: AI

Google is opening up its generative AI search experience to teenagers Aisha Malik 12 hours

Google is opening up its generative AI search experience to teenagers, the company announced on Thursday. The company is also introducing a new feature to add context to the content that users see, along with an update to help train the search experience’s AI model to better detect false or offensive queries.

The AI-powered search experience, also known as SGE (Search Generative Experience), introduces a conversational mode to Google Search where you can ask Google questions about a topic in a conversational manner.

Starting this week, teens ages 13-17 in the United States who are signed into a Google Account will be able to sign up for Search Labs to access the AI search experience through the Google app or Chrome desktop.

“Generative AI can help younger people ask questions they couldn’t typically get answered by a search engine and pose follow-up questions to help them dig deeper,” wrote Senior Director of Product Management at Google Hema Budaraju in a blog post. “As we introduce this new technology to teens, we want to strike the right balance in creating opportunities for them to benefit from all it has to offer, while also prioritizing safety and meeting their developmental needs. Informed by research and experts in teen development, we’ve built additional safeguards into the experience.”

Image Credits: Google

Budaraju notes that Google has designed guardrails to prevent inappropriate or harmful content from surfacing. For instance, the company has placed stronger protections for “outputs related to illegal or age-gated substances or bullying.”

The expansion to teenagers comes as Google notes that since the launch of SGE, it’s found the experience is more popular among younger users. Google said the highest satisfaction scores are among those ages 18-24, who the company believes like to ask their questions in a more conversational manner.

In addition to opening up the AI search experience to teenagers, Google is introducing a new feature to give users more context about the content that they see. The company is adding an “About this result” notice, which has long been available in the standard Google Search experience, to the AI search experience. Google says the notices will give people context about how SGE generated the response, so they can get a better idea of how the technology works.

Google soon plans to add “About this result” to the individual links that are included in SGE responses, so people can understand more about the web pages that back up the information in AI-powered overviews.

Image Credits: Google

The company says it’s focused on making targeted improvements to the AI search experience. One area where it’s looking to improve is when a query includes a false or offensive premise, which can result in an AI-powered response that ends up validating the false or offensive claim. Google notes that this can happen even if the web pages themselves point to reliable information.

To help address this situation, Google is rolling out an update to help train the AI model to better detect these types of false or offensive premise queries, and respond with higher-quality, more accurate responses. The company is also working on solutions to use large language models to critique their own first draft responses on sensitive topics, and then rewrite them based on quality and safety principles.

Google has spent the last few months updating the AI search experience with things like support for videos and images, local info and travel recommendations, along with new tools to provide summaries and definitions. It has also started to experiment with ads that would appear next to the AI-generated responses.

Google’s AI-powered search expands outside US to India and Japan

Meta, previously known as Facebook, is spearheading innovative initiatives by introducing AI-powered assistant characters and novel creative tools. This endeavor aligns with the company’s mission to enrich user interaction across its suite of applications, with an initial focus on WhatsApp and Instagram.

Revolutionizing Interaction with AI Assistants

Meta’s latest development is poised to revolutionize interaction within its platforms by deploying AI-powered assistants. These characters will serve as interactive aids, designed to guide users through the multifarious features of the apps and assist them in navigating the platforms more intuitively.

The assistants aim to bring a more personal and engaging touch to user interactions, emphasizing ease-of-use and dynamic engagement. This unprecedented level of interactivity is expected to make platforms more user-centric, enabling users to explore and utilize the platforms’ functionalities with enhanced guidance and support.

Image: Meta

Elevating Creative Expression with Innovative Tools

Beyond interactive assistants, Meta has also unveiled a set of pioneering creative tools intended to allow users to express themselves more uniquely and vividly. These tools are focused on providing users with the means to create more immersive and personalized content, enhancing the overall user experience within Meta's platforms. They are structured to elevate the creative potential of users, allowing them to conceptualize and share their visions more fluidly and innovatively.

By combining state-of-the-art technology with innovative design principles, these tools are reshaping the boundaries of creative expression, enabling users to experience and create content in novel and exciting ways. This initiative underscores Meta’s commitment to fostering creativity and individuality within the digital sphere, providing users with the resources to explore and redefine artistic possibilities.

User-Centric Experience and Personalization

The inception of AI assistants and creative tools is a clear reflection of Meta’s strategy to center user experience and personalization. These advancements are architected to cater to the evolving needs and preferences of users, ensuring that interactions are more tailored and resonant. The AI assistants, in particular, are meticulously designed to understand and respond to individual user needs, enabling more personalized interactions and enhancing the overall user journey within the platforms.

The emphasis on user-centric experience is pivotal for Meta, as it seeks to build more coherent and adaptive platforms. The integration of AI and innovative tools is a testament to Meta’s dedication to optimizing user engagement and satisfaction, enhancing the interactive landscape of its platforms to accommodate and anticipate user needs more proficiently.

Enhanced Connectivity and Cohesiveness

Meta’s integration of AI assistant characters and creative tools is emblematic of its vision to foster enhanced connectivity and cohesiveness within the digital ecosystem. The emphasis on seamless interaction and enriched engagement is aligned with the company’s aspiration to build a more interconnected and harmonious digital environment. By facilitating more intuitive interactions and enabling elevated creative expressions, Meta is contributing to the realization of a more unified and inclusive digital world.

The unification of technology and creativity is driving the development of more enriched and diverse digital experiences, making platforms more accessible and inclusive. As Meta continues to innovate, the convergence of enhanced interactivity and creative expression is paving the way for a more interconnected and harmonious digital future.

Software giant Google is sending Gmail’s basic HTML view, a minimalist version of the popular email service to the graveyard. Starting in January 2024, all users of the HTML view will be automatically switched to the feature-rich “Standard” view, marking the end of an era for those who valued its simplicity and speed.

While the majority of Gmail users have long embraced the Standard view on their personal computers, the HTML version had its unique advantages. This stripped-down version offered lightning-fast loading times and accessibility for older machines or slower internet connections. Its lean design made it particularly valuable in situations where network conditions were less than ideal.

While the company will officially shut down the service in 2024, there are already reports of difficulties in setting the Basic HTML mode, even before the code’s formal deprecation date.

A Step Backward

The upcoming Gmail transition has its critics, particularly among visually impaired users. Pratik Patel, a blind technologist and advocate for accessibility, expressed concerns about the move. He argued that many blind individuals relied on Gmail’s HTML view for its efficiency and simplicity. The Standard view, according to Patel, posed usability challenges due to its complex design elements and inconsistent navigation patterns.

Patel emphasized that blind and partially sighted users often found it quicker to accomplish tasks using the HTML interface than the Standard one. He called on Google to engage with its users to address these usability issues and ensure that accessibility concerns were adequately considered.

While the long-loved HTML is being bid adieu to, for people using older hardware switching to lightweight clients like Mozilla Thunderbird and Microsoft Outlook is generally preferable to loading web-based platforms.

For people who need accessibility features, Thunderbird is known to work well with the Jaws, NVDA, and Windows Eyes screen readers and offers a range of display and text size adjustment options that enhance usability for people with visual impairments.

While progress is inevitable, it should not come at the cost of leaving users, especially those with specific accessibility needs, behind. The company’s decision to retire the HTML view underscores the choices tech giants make as they navigate the shifting terrain of user expectations and AI race.

Blinded by AI

A Google spokesperson defended the decision, stating that the HTML view was replaced by its modern counterpart over a decade ago and lacked many of the advanced features found in today’s Gmail.

But the HTML view was never intended to match the full functionality of modern email clients, and its retirement aligns with Google’s ongoing efforts to enhance Gmail’s capabilities through AI features.

Moving away from the early era of the internet, the decision to retire the minimal view is part of the company’s broader strategy to infuse AI-powered features into its products, including Gmail. In recent months, the company has launched AI features like Duet AI to assist users in composing emails and integrated the Bard chatbot into Google accounts for email-related inquiries.

With a focus on AI integration, the tech goliath’s move away from the simplified version reflects its ongoing evolution. However, some argue that the company’s reluctance to innovate meaningfully in recent years may have led to a loss of investor confidence.

While Google remains a profitable corporation, questions linger about its ability to adapt in an ever-changing tech landscape. The company has been on an AI innovation spree since the Microsoft-backed OpenAI gained popularity in Silicon Valley. Google has been trying to keep up with the AI wave but nothing has worked in its favour yet.

The retirement of Gmail’s basic view is the latest addition to Google’s growing graveyard of discontinued products and services, including the Pixel Pass phone upgrade program, Google Currents, and Nest Secure. As Google continues to refine its offerings, it continues to struggle balancing innovation with the needs of its diverse user base, including those who valued the simplicity of the now-retired HTML view.

The post Gmail will Become Less Accessible for Some from 2024 appeared first on Analytics India Magazine.

Big data has been around for some time now, becoming a more or less common concept in business. However, recent developments in AI technology have shaken up an already volatile field, inviting us to reconsider our projections of how the big data market will look in the future.

We can already see the signs that these developments have game-changing effects on the labor market, business data management, and entire organizational structures. Tracking these signs allows for a better understanding of this fast-paced evolution that we are witnessing.

Rapid developments in big data

Mostly driven by evolving web data gathering technologies, the recent breakthrough years in the big data sector have brought many positive changes. Complex machine-learning models have become more accessible, hardware and software solutions for ML algorithm training are now cheaper and more specialized, while tools for creating and optimizing the models are more readily available due to cloud technology.

Apart from the advancements in ML, two other important trends that significantly influence big data processing capabilities can be distinguished:

1. More powerful graphic processing units (GPUs) and enhanced precision with which AI performs tasks allows businesses to make the most of parallel processing. Two or more processing units solving different aspects of the same problem now produce better solutions faster, enlarging the scope of use cases for this method.
2. The rapid rise of MLops (machine learning operations) allows more effective ML model deployment, observability, and experimentation in production environments.

Companies of all sizes have come to realize that big data and ML algorithms based on it are going to be among the most growing and growth-inducing factors in business. This year’s incredibly high-valued acquisitions of very young tech companies go to show it. For example, Databricks paid $1.3 billion for just a few years old, 60-employee MosaicML because the latter has offered a novel and convenient method for training AI-based tools.

There is room for more innovation as current big data-based solutions are certainly not perfect. In the near future, we can expect developments in models for generating text and visuals, as well as improved tools for tasks related to communication.

On the other hand, there are legitimate concerns about biased and unethical decisions that AI can come up with when there is no human oversight. These concerns will continue to foster regulatory initiatives such as the European Union’s Artificial Intelligence Act (AIA).

Growing regulation will, most probably, force firms to look for new ways to collect or generate the necessary data. Furthermore, companies will also need more compliance specialists to oversee AI and big data-related procedures, which brings us to the next topic.

Employers’ perspective – the growing need for data specialists

As an increasing number of firms are getting interested in applying big data solutions, the demand for various kinds of data specialists is bound to continue growing. Along with the aforementioned compliance officers, big data experts capable of creating tools based on it are on top of the “most wanted” list.

Data engineering is at the center of professions in the big data sector. Data engineers are the ones responsible for obtaining data and its initial processing, enabling the creation of new models. Meanwhile, among emerging professions, the demand for MLops (machine learning operations) engineers is also growing fast. Without MLops engineers, companies usually cannot deploy or supervise machine learning models created by data scientists.

The demand for data specialists is being boosted even more by new AI-based tools, like ChatGPT, that attract huge public interest and media coverage. Up to a point, such tools might save a company’s time and increase productivity. Additionally, these tools foster interest in big data and the inception of new professions. For example, the position of prompt engineer, currently boasting potentially 6-figure salaries, has not even been heard of just a few years ago.

Data democratization is another trend affecting the labor market. Companies aim to remove data silos, enabling more business users to work with data directly in the course of carrying out their main tasks. This goes along with shifting some data analysis responsibilities from data teams to product, marketing, or other departments. Thus, it can be expected that the need for specialists who are skilled in both data analytics and one of the domains of business will grow in the future.

Employees’ perspective – getting the skills in demand

From the perspective of job seekers, the aforementioned developments mean two things.

1. The big data sector provides an increasing number of lucrative career opportunities.
2. Having skills in data analytics is a major advantage for specialists across the departments.

Naturally, this raises the interest in getting data-related skills among those thinking about their future career path. In terms of higher education, aside from study programs that explicitly have “data” or “AI” in their titles, future students can choose general subjects like mathematics and statistics to acquire a robust analytical background. Knowing specific programming languages, such as Python, would be beneficial, too, as data scientists and engineers today often need to automate processes (for example, data collection at scale).

Interestingly, getting the skills relevant to the big data market does not necessarily require going for the hard sciences. Social sciences, like psychology, are filled with courses on higher mathematics and statistical modeling while also training experts to interpret real-life social events and human actions.

Even humanities have perfect conditions to shine in today’s big data labor market. Background in linguistics and philology can be an advantage for prompt engineers and other specialists working with natural language processing tools. Meanwhile, philosophy has AI ethics as its subdiscipline and provides the fundamentals of the interdisciplinary theory of decision-making.

There are also plenty of opportunities outside formal education to learn data-related skills, suitable for both labor market beginners and seasoned workers looking to gain additional qualifications. Various online courses allow learning on your own time, making it easy to accommodate it with a day job or other responsibilities. Such accredited private institutions like Turing College remotely prepare data specialists specifically to have skills and practical knowledge currently in demand.

Willingness to learn constantly is perhaps the most important attribute when aiming for a career in the big data sector. It all begins with learning the fundamentals of statistics, databases, and programming languages like SQL and Python for data processing. When core knowledge is in place, it is important to keep track of technical innovations, new tools, models, and firms in the big data industry. Platforms like Substack provide access to numerous blogs and newsletters that allow one to conveniently stay on top of such news.

Finally, one should have an active interest in the principles of business and how it functions in order to solve its problems with the help of big data. After all, the main goal of data processing and analysis is finding new and better ways to do business.

In conclusion

Being able to work with big data and AI provides a continually growing advantage for both companies and employees. However, the big data market is so dynamic and fast-evolving that all future predictions should come with a disclaimer. Unforeseen innovations and developments can quickly give birth to new professions while making others obsolete. The key to feeling secure in such volatile conditions is effective learning – both companies and employees should be prepared to process and impart new knowledge as it is being created – nearly in real time.

In a surprise move, the highly anticipated Raspberry Pi 5 has made its debut, defying initial doubts. The latest iteration of the microcomputer, boasting significant enhancements, is now available, starting at an enticing $60.

Notably, the Raspberry Pi 5 not only promises improved performance over its predecessor but also marks the first time the device incorporates in-house silicon.

At the core of the Raspberry Pi 5 is a robust 64-bit quad-core Arm Cortex-A76 processor clocked at 2.4GHz, offering a substantial two to three-fold increase in performance compared to the aging Raspberry Pi 4, which was introduced four years ago. Additionally, the device houses an 800MHz VideoCore VII graphics chip, a feature lauded by the Raspberry Pi Foundation for its remarkable graphics performance boost.

The device reveals speedy boot times and swift webpage loading, particularly when compared to older models such as the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+. Notably, the device tends to generate significant heat, but Raspberry Pi has addressed this concern by supplying an active cooling component for direct board mounting.

Key features include:

• 2.4GHz quad-core 64-bit Arm Cortex-A76 CPU
• VideoCore VII GPU, supporting OpenGL ES 3.1, Vulkan 1.2
• Dual 4Kp60 HDMI® display output
• 4Kp60 HEVC decoder
• Dual-band 802.11ac Wi-Fi®
• Bluetooth 5.0 / Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE)
• High-speed microSD card interface with SDR104 mode support
• 2 × USB 3.0 ports, supporting simultaneous 5Gbps operation
• 2 × USB 2.0 ports
• Gigabit Ethernet, with PoE+ support (requires separate PoE+ HAT, coming soon)
• 2 × 4-lane MIPI camera/display transceivers
• PCIe 2.0 x1 interface for fast peripherals
• Raspberry Pi standard 40-pin GPIO header
• Real-time clock
• Power button

A noteworthy highlight of the Raspberry Pi 5 is the inclusion of a southbridge component, a critical part of the motherboard responsible for peripheral communication. Developed by the Raspberry Pi Foundation and dubbed the RP1 southbridge, this component introduces a substantial leap in peripheral performance and functionality. This enhancement translates to faster data transfer speeds to external UAS drives and other peripherals.

Furthermore, the Raspberry Pi 5 introduces two four-lane 1.5Gbps MIPI transceivers for connecting up to two cameras or displays, along with a single-lane PCI Express 2.0 interface, which, though available for the first time, requires a separate adapter like an M.2 HAT for full utilization.

In terms of connectivity, the Raspberry Pi 5 offers dual 4Kp60 HDMI display outputs with HDR support, a microSD slot, two USB 3.0 ports, two USB 2.0 ports, Gigabit Ethernet, and a 5V DC power connection via USB-C.

Additional features include Bluetooth 5.0 and Bluetooth Low Energy (LE) support, and peak SD card performance that is claimed to be “doubled” with the SDR104 high-speed mode. These enhancements solidify the Raspberry Pi 5 as a versatile choice for various applications, whether it’s serving as an ultra-budget desktop PC, a media server, or a DIY security system.

The Raspberry Pi 5 offers multiple RAM configurations at launch, with the 4GB version priced at $60 and the 8GB version at $80. While this places it slightly above the Raspberry Pi 4 in terms of cost, which is priced at $55 for 4GB of RAM and $75 for 8GB, it still maintains an attractive price point. Interested buyers can expect the Raspberry Pi 5 to be available for purchase before the end of October.

Read: Raspberry Pi: A timeline

The post Raspberry Pi 5 is Here appeared first on Analytics India Magazine.

Zapier launches Canvas, an AI-powered flowchart tool Frederic Lardinois @fredericl / 8 hours

Zapier today announced the launch of Canvas, a new tool that aims to help its users plan and diagram their business-critical processes — with a fair bit of AI sprinkled in there to help them turn those processes into Zapier-based automations. Canvas is now in early access.

In addition, the company also today announced that Tables, its automation-first database service, is now generally available to all users.

The eleven-year-old company is hosting its (virtual) ZapConnect user conference today. Over the years, Zapier has moved from offering its customers the basic tools to connect one web service to another to allowing them to build rather complex integrations and workflow automations. In a way, Zapier was low-code/no-code before that monicker ever became popular. Today, Zapier co-founder and CEO Wade Foster told me, people are building entire projects — and sometimes entire businesses — on top of Zapier. But that has also led to a number of challenges that the company is now trying to address with, among other things, Canvas and Tables.

Image Credits: Zapier

“One of the things we started to notice is that as you adopt these tools [you built with Zapier], you’re quite happy in the early days, because you’re like, ‘Wow, this is great. This is awesome. It was so fast. I didn’t need any help. This is great. This is awesome.’ And then, there’s this pit of success that comes next. Your project starts to grow and all of a sudden, you’re stitching together all these things, you’re starting to invite collaborators, a things start to get turned into a bit of a hairball. You’re like, ‘oh, no, what am I going to do?’ And Tables and Canvas both fit into helping solve this problem.”

Foster noted that currently, you can use Zapier’s virtual editor to visualize all of the components that you have stitched together in Zapier, but for most users, that only covers a part of their workflow. If it’s not connected to Zapier, it won’t show up there. With Canvas, the idea is to allow users to map out their entire workflows — no matter whether they are connected to Zapier or not.

Image Credits: Zapier

“Canvas is a visual diagramming tool where you can start to map out those processes end-to-end. And then the components that Zapier connects to, you can then actually edit those pieces within Canvas,” Foster explained. “Now, over time, the vision is that you can edit any of the components, whether they connect to Zapier or not, within the Canvas as well.”

That means there are essentially two components to Canvas: you can use it as a basic flowchart diagramming tool to document processes and — for the components that are already connected — it becomes the interface to edit those processes.

Of course, there is an AI component to this as well. You will also be able to tell Canvas what kind of problem you are trying to solve and then have the service generate a process for you, no matter whether you are planning an elaborate birthday party or setting up a complex business problem. Canvas will also include a more standard template library.

Image Credits: Zapier

Like virtually every other company, Zapier is looking into how it can build AI — and generative AI in particular — into its services. “LLMs are a good opportunity to go back and look at all the hardest problems you’ve had in your business, the things that you maybe haven’t quite been able to solve yet — and just see if an LLM can make this problem easier to solve,” Foster said about his overall philosophy of how he thinks about the use of AI.

In addition to the launch of Canvas and making Tables generally available, Zapier is also launching a number of smaller feature updates today. These include a new interactive editor that can handle up to 10 paths, new admin controls, and more integrations (which now number over 6,000).