Tag Archives: language|en-US

The Morning After: The cost of generating AI images

Posted on by

Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and AI startup Hugging Face collaborated to see the carbon footprint of all those whimsical AI images we’ve generated over the last few years. They discovered that creating an image using artificial intelligence uses the same energy as charging a smartphone. Generating text, whether a conversation with a chatbot or cleaning up an essay, predictably requires much less energy. The researchers examined 13 tasks, ranging from summarization to text classification, and measured the carbon dioxide produced per every 1,000 grams.

The researchers urge machine learning scientists and practitioners to “practice transparency regarding the nature and impacts of their models, to enable better understanding of their environmental impacts.” Take ChatGPT, OpenAI’s chatbot. It has upward of 10 million users per day and 100 million monthly active users. That’s a lot of energy.

— Mat Smith

​​You can get these reports delivered daily direct to your inbox. Subscribe right here!​​

The biggest stories you might have missed

Kiss’ final show ended with a performance by digital avatars made to immortalize the band

Inside the ‘arms race’ between YouTube and ad blockers

Sci-fi RTS sequel Homeworld 3 will arrive on March 8 2024

Tesla’s Cybertruck is a dystopian fantasy

The iPhone’s computational photography made this confusing image

You can replicate it quite easily. But I’m not sure why you would.

TMA
Instagram

One woman, writer-comedian Tessa Coates, stood in front of a mirror, but with three different arm positions. How? Well, it’s likely she was moving at the instant the photo was taken, so the algorithm stitched the photo together from multiple images — exactly what the iPhone and other phones do to capture more information and synthesize better images. It appears the algo considered each figure a separate woman, capturing her at different points at different places in the image. But it’s no blue-or-gold-dress conundrum, is it?

Continue reading.

The perennial Game Awards question: What does indie mean?

Even if millions are spent.

One title nominated for Best Independent at The Game Awards this year, Dave the Diver, was produced by Nexon, one of the largest video game studios in South Korea. Fans quickly pointed out the error and reignited the debate over what “indie” means. Engadget’s Jessica Conditt lays out her thoughts on the matter.

Continue reading.

A big Analogue Pocket restock is coming

But cart adapters are delayed again.

TMA
Analogue

The Analogue Pocket multi-system portable handheld console is an indie hit and has been sold out for weeks. Analogue just announced a major restock, with consoles available to buy on December 4 at 11AM ET. So... now. The company promises these orders will arrive in time for the holidays. However, this only applies to the original black and white designs — not those limited edition colorways.

Continue reading.

Google is reportedly pushing the launch of its Gemini AI to 2024

Its GPT-4 rival was announced at I/O 2023.

Google has canceled its Gemini launch events scheduled for next week and now plans to launch its GPT-4 competitor in January, according to The Information. The company teased Gemini at I/O 2023, touting it as a foundational model with “impressive multimodal capabilities”

The new AI is intended to handle various applications, combining data types, like images and text, for more advanced tasks. However, sources told The Information that Gemini was struggling with non-English queries, prompting CEO Sundar Pichai to delay its release.

Continue reading.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-morning-after-the-cost-of-generating-ai-images-121549213.html?src=rss

Google’s Pixel Watch 2 falls to a new low of $300

Posted on by

Google's Pixel Watch 2 just came out in October but we're already seeing the first substantial discount. You can pick up the WiFi model at Amazon for just $300, for a discount of 14 percent ($50) over the list price. And if you don't want to be encumbered by your smartphone, the LTE model is also on sale for $350, a 13 percent discount off the regular price. 

The Pixel Watch 2 has a longer-lasting battery, with a full 24 hours between charges even with the always-on display enabled, while the original model struggled to go a full day. Google has also doubled down on the Fitbit integration, with a new multi-path heart rate sensor that uses both photodiodes and LEDs to get better estimates of your pulse. Fitbit stress management features use various sensors to potentially identify tense moments in your day and suggests actions such as mood logging or guided breathing and walking sessions. 

New safety features include Safety Check which can alert friends, family or even emergency services if needed and Emergency Sharing lets your circle of people see your real-time whereabouts. Fall detection and Emergency SOS were already released earlier this year for the Pixel Watch but will come standard on the Pixel Watch 2. The housing is made from 100 percent recycled aluminum and the AMOLED screen is covered in 3D Corning Gorilla Glass 5. Many fitness features like workouts and Daily Readiness Score live behind Fitbit's paywall, but the watch comes with six months of the subscription for free.

The main downside is the crown that sticks out a bit too far and may pinch your wrist during certain activities. All told, though, it's a solid update over the original thanks to the extra features, lighter weight and improved design. $300 is a great price for an all-new smartwatch and would be a great compliment to a Pixel or other Android smartphone. 

Follow @EngadgetDeals on Twitter and subscribe to the Engadget Deals newsletter for the latest tech deals and buying advice.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/googles-pixel-watch-2-falls-to-a-new-low-of-300-102522276.html?src=rss

Spotify is laying off 1,500 employees, who will be notified later today

Posted on by

Spotify is cutting jobs for the third time this year. In a pre-holiday shocker, Spotify is laying off 1,500 workers, or 17 percent of its workforce, CEO Daniel Ek announced in a press release on Monday. The cuts are being made due to what Ek called "the challenges ahead" and he elected to make them immediately instead of doing smaller reductions over time. Affected employees will be notified later today, he added. 

"I realize that for many, a reduction of this size will feel surprisingly large given the recent positive earnings report and our performance," Ek wrote. "We debated making smaller reductions throughout 2024 and 2025. Yet, considering the gap between our financial goal state and our current operational costs, I decided that a substantial action to right-size our costs was the best option to accomplish our objectives. While I am convinced this is the right action for our company, I also understand it will be incredibly painful for our team."

Ek went on to note that the company expanded considerably in 2020 and 2021 due to the lower cost of capital. "These investments generally worked, contributing to Spotify’s increased output and the platform’s robust growth this past year," he said. And despite reductions made last year — the company laid off 6 percent of its workforce early in 2023 and another 2 percent in May — "our cost structure for where we need to be is still too big," Ek said. 

Follow those rounds of layoffs, Spotify had around 9,000 employees, so the latest cuts will see around 1,500 employees losing their jobs (4,300 of those jobs were in the US as of 2022). To soften the blow, Ek said Spotify will pay an average of five months severance, cover healthcare during that time and provide immigration/career support. 

Ek said that for the company's next phase, "being lean is not just an option but a necessity." Last month, Spotify announced a revamped royalty model, which is supposed to give "working artists" a bigger cut, while reducing fraudulent streams. 

Spotify has seen consistent growth since it launch and now counts 574 million monthly active users, up 26 percent over the same period last year. The company has always struggled to make a profit, though with its last quarter being a rare exception. Ek promised more information about what the changes will mean "in the days and weeks ahead" — but all that will be cold comfort to employees suddenly finding themselves unemployed just before the holidays. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/spotify-is-laying-off-1500-employees-081521615.html?src=rss

Meta’s latest AI suite makes speech translation more seamless and expressive

Posted on by

Back in August, Meta unveiled its multimodal AI translation model, SeamlessM4T, which supports nearly 100 languages for text and 36 for speech. With an updated "v2" architecture, the tech giant is now expanding on this tool to make conversational translations more spontaneous and expressive — the latter a missing key to an authentic conversation across languages.

The first of the two new features is "SeamlessExpressive" which, as you can tell by the name, ports your expressions over to your translated speech. These include your pitch, volume, emotional tone (excitement, sadness or whispers), speech rate and pauses. Considering how translated speeches had always sounded robotic until now, this breakthrough is potentially a game-changer — both in our daily lives and also in content production. Supported languages include English, Spanish, German, French, Italian and Chinese, though the demo page is missing Italian and Chinese at the time of writing this article.

The second feature is "SeamlessStreaming," which starts translating a speech while the speaker is still talking, thus allowing others to hear a translation faster. There's still a short latency of just under two seconds, but at least you won't have to wait until someone finishes a sentence. According to Meta, the challenge here is that different languages have different sentence structures, so it had to develop an algorithm dedicated to studying partial audio input, in order to decide whether there's enough context to start generating a translated output, or whether to keep listening.

Meta's latest development on this "Seamless Communication" suite seems to be an impressive one — more so than the mobile interpreter tools offered by the likes of Google and Samsung. There's no word on when the public will be able to utilize these new features, but I can already imagine Meta baking them into its smart glasses some day, making them even more practical than ever.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/metas-latest-ai-suite-makes-speech-translation-more-seamless-and-expressive-060043686.html?src=rss

Kiss’ final show ended with a performance by digital avatars made to immortalize the band

Posted on by

Kiss’ final live performance at Madison Square Garden in New York last night also turned out to be the first for the band’s successors — four digital avatars that will play on in the real members’ retirement from physical shows. Kiss concluded the last show of its “The End of the Road” tour by introducing the new virtual band, which then performed “God Gave Rock And Roll To You.”

The avatars weren’t just straight replicas of the current band members — Paul Stanley, Gene Simmons, Tommy Thayer and Eric Singer — but interpretations of them “as fantasy-based superheroes,” said Pophouse Entertainment, which partnered with George Lucas’ Industrial Light & Magic for their creation. And, it says that’s just “one of the many and varied ways in which Kiss will live on as digital performers through their avatars in the future.” Industrial Light & Magic also created the digital avatars of ABBA (or ABBAtars) for the ongoing ABBA Voyage show in London.

No specific plans for the virtual band have been announced just yet, but it wouldn’t be surprising to see similar Kiss experiences pop up in the near future. Gene Simmons, who founded Kiss alongside Paul Stanley, said the move will keep the band “forever young and forever iconic,” while Stanley called it a way to “see Kiss immortalized” and take the group “to a completely different level beyond being just a music band.”

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/kiss-final-show-ended-with-a-performance-by-digital-avatars-made-to-immortalize-the-band-210024877.html?src=rss

Google is reportedly pushing the launch of its Gemini AI to 2024

Posted on by

Google has canceled its Gemini launch events scheduled for next week and now plans to launch its GPT-4 competitor in January, according to The Information. The company teased Gemini at I/O 2023, touting it then as a foundational model with “impressive multimodal capabilities” early in its training.

Google initially planned to debut it before the end of the year in an unusually timed launch between the holidays — which it didn’t publicly announce — but sources told The Information that Gemini was struggling with non-English queries, prompting CEO Sundar Pichai to delay its release. Gemini is intended to be able to handle a broad range of applications, combining different types of data like images and text for more advanced tasks. In May, Google said, “Once fine-tuned and rigorously tested for safety, Gemini will be available at various sizes and capabilities.”

Gemini is expected to bring improvements to Google’s existing AI and AI-enhanced products too, like Bard, Google Assistant and Search. But, given the significance of this release and the dominance rival OpenAI already has in the space, it seems Google isn’t going to risk rushing Gemini out the door.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/google-is-reportedly-pushing-the-launch-of-its-gemini-ai-to-2024-173444507.html?src=rss

Amazon is swallowing its pride to ensure its internet satellites get to orbit on time

Posted on by

Amazon announced on Friday that it’s signed a contract with SpaceX to deliver batches of its Project Kuiper satellites to low Earth orbit in 2025. SpaceX is undoubtedly Amazon’s biggest competitor as it breaks into the satellite internet space, and already has a constellation of over 4,000 Starlink satellites in operation. It’s also a rival of Blue Origin, the aerospace company founded by Jeff Bezos that has its own rockets in development. But when it comes to launches, SpaceX’s pace and the reliability of its Falcon 9 rocket is unmatched.

The contract with SpaceX is for three Falcon 9 launches, Amazon said in a blog post. They’re expected to lift off in mid-2025. Amazon is planning to start customer pilots of its Project Kuiper satellite internet service by the end of next year, and will soon start deploying the fleet that will support it. It launched its first two prototype satellites in October. The company already has deals for upcoming launches on United Launch Alliance’s (ULA) Vulcan rocket, Arianespace’s Ariane 6 and Blue Origin’s New Glenn — all of which have been hit by development delays and may or may not make their first flights between this year and next.

Amazon said in its announcement that “the additional launches with SpaceX offer even more capacity to support our deployment schedule.” The company has said its Project Kuiper constellation will consist of 3,236 satellites, at least half of which must be in operation by summer 2026 to comply with its FCC license.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/amazon-is-swallowing-its-pride-to-ensure-its-internet-satellites-get-to-orbit-on-time-222906412.html?src=rss

23andMe hackers accessed ancestry information on millions of customers using a feature that matches relatives

Posted on by

An SEC filing has revealed more details on a data breach affecting 23andMe users that was disclosed earlier this fall. The company says its investigation found hackers were able to access the accounts of roughly 0.1 percent of its userbase, or about 14,000 of its 14 million total customers, TechCrunch notes. On top of that, the attackers were able to exploit 23andMe’s opt-in DNA Relatives (DNAR) feature, which matches users with their genetic relatives, to access information about millions of other users. A 23andMe spokesperson told Engadget that hackers accessed the DNAR profiles of roughly 5.5 million customers this way, plus Family Tree profile information from 1.4 million DNA Relative participants.

DNAR Profiles contain sensitive details including self-reported information like display names and locations, as well as shared DNA percentages for DNA Relatives matches, family names, predicted relationships and ancestry reports. Family Tree profiles contain display names and relationship labels, plus other information that a user may choose to add, including birth year and location. When the breach was first revealed in October, the company said its investigation “found that no genetic testing results have been leaked.” 

According to the new filing, the data “generally included ancestry information, and, for a subset of those accounts, health-related information based upon the user’s genetics.” All of this was obtained through a credential-stuffing attack, in which hackers used login information from other, previously compromised websites to access those users’ accounts on other sites. In doing this, the filing says, “the threat actor also accessed a significant number of files containing profile information about other users’ ancestry that such users chose to share when opting in to 23andMe’s DNA Relatives feature and posted certain information online.”

Following the discovery of the breach, 23andMe instructed affected users to change their passwords and later rolled out two-factor authentication for all of its customers. In another update on Friday, 23andMe said it had completed the investigation and is notifying everyone who was affected. The company also wrote in the filing that it “believes that the threat actor activity is contained,” and is working to have the publicly-posted information taken down.

Update, December 2 2023, 7:03PM ET: This story has been updated to include information provided by a 23andMe spokesperson on the scope of the breach and the number of DNA Relative participants affected.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/23andme-hackers-accessed-ancestry-information-from-thousands-of-customers-and-their-dna-relatives-205758731.html?src=rss

Amazon just dropped the first teaser trailer for its Fallout series

Posted on by

Amazon has released the first official teaser trailer for Fallout, its upcoming live-action series based on the best-selling video games. The clip gives us a look at Amazon’s take on the post-apocalyptic wasteland, and Yellowjackets actor Ella Purnell emerging from Vault 33 to meet it for the first time. The series will be set in Los Angeles 200 years after a nuclear war brought Earth to ruins.

The trailer arrives a few days after Amazon released stills from the show, now showing a deeper look at the characters and the horrors they’ll encounter in the wastes. And it so far seems a promising indication of how the series will approach its well-loved source material. 

Starring alongside Purnell, Fallout also features Walton Goggins (The Hateful Eight) as a breakout ghoul, Aaron Moten (Emancipation) as a member of the Brotherhood of Steel and Kyle MacLachlan (Twin Peaks) as a vault overseer. There’s also a dog named CX404, which we see in the video and in marketing materials toting around a severed hand. Fallout comes out on Prime Video on April 12 next year.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/amazon-just-dropped-the-first-teaser-trailer-for-its-fallout-series-182055521.html?src=rss

OpenAI’s GPT Store won’t be released until 2024

Posted on by

OpenAI is pushing the launch of its GPT Store to early 2024, according to an email seen by The Verge. The company introduced its GPT Builder tool in early November at its first developer conference, giving subscribers an easy way to create their own custom AI bots. At the time, OpenAI also said it would soon release the GPT Store for users to list their GPTs and potentially make money from them. It was initially slated for a November launch. But, with the surprise ouster of OpenAI’s since-reinstated CEO Sam Altman, the month didn’t quite pan out as planned.

“In terms of what’s next, we are now planning to launch the GPT Store early next year,” OpenAI said in its email to GPT Builder users on Friday. “While we had expected to release it this month, a few things have been keeping us unexpectedly busy!” The email also notes that the company has been making improvements to GPTs based on users’ feedback, and says some updates to ChatGPT are on the way.

OpenAI has been in the process of reorganizing its leadership following the turmoil of the past few weeks. The company confirmed on Wednesday that Altman was back as CEO, with Mira Murati now in place as CTO and Greg Brockman as President. It also announced the formation of a new initial board, which includes representation from Microsoft — its biggest investor — as a non-voting observer.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/openais-gpt-store-wont-be-released-until-2024-162113991.html?src=rss