Science and technology

The tech ethics group Center for Artificial Intelligence and Digital Policy is asking the U.S. Federal Trade Commission to stop OpenAI from issuing new commercial releases of GPT-4, which has wowed some users and caused distress for others with its quick and human-like responses to queries. In a complaint to the agency on Thursday, which is on the group’s website, the Center for Artificial Intelligence and Digital Policy called GPT-4 “biased, deceptive, and a risk to privacy and public safety.” OpenAI, which is based in California and backed by Microsoft Corp. (MSFT.O), unveiled the fourth iteration of its GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) AI program in early March, which has excited users by engaging them in human-like conversation, composing songs and summarizing lengthy documents. The formal complaint to the FTC follows an open letter signed by Elon Musk, artificial intelligence experts and industry executives that called for a six-month pause in developing systems more p

SAN FRANCISCO: The microblogging website, Twitter on Friday has blocked the Pakistani government’s official account in India. According to details, the social networking site Twitter blocked the Pakistani government’s official Twitter account @GovtofPakistan for the third time in India. Twitter said in a notice that the official account of the Pakistani government has been blocked in India ، The company’s guidelines force it to withhold accounts in response to authoritative legal demand۔ The notice said that the account of the Government of Pakistan is active in other countries including the United States and Canada۔ Read more: India blocks Twitter accounts of several Pakistani embassies Pakistan’s IT ministry has not made any comments on the issue yet, nor contacted the Twitter۔ Earlier, in July and October last year, the Pakistan government’s Twitter account was blocked۔ from Science and Technology News - Latest science and technology news https://ift.tt/gzXfyRA

Google Cloud has accused Microsoft of anti-competitive cloud computing practices and criticised imminent deals with European cloud vendors, saying these do not solve broader concerns about its licensing terms. In Google Cloud’s first public comments on Microsoft and its European deals its Vice President Amit Zavery told Reuters the company has raised the issue with antitrust agencies and urged European Union antitrust regulators to take a closer look. In response, Microsoft referred to a  blogpost  in May last year where its president Brad Smith said it ‘has a healthy number two position when it comes to cloud services, with just over 20 percent market share of global cloud services revenues’. “We are committed to the European Cloud Community and their success,” a Microsoft spokesperson told Reuters on Thursday. There is intense rivalry between the two U.S. tech giants in the multi-billion-dollar cloud computing business, where Google trails market leader Amazon and Microsof

After the availability of ChatGPT on Siri, Apple Watch and other places, now WhatsApp users can also use the AI bot on the app without any complicated steps. By following the below-mentioned simple steps the ChatGPT can easily be used on Whatsapp. 1. On your mobile, visit the official Shmooz AI  website  using the link here. Tap the “Start Shmoozing” button, and your WhatsApp will automatically open. 2. Here, tap the “Continue to chat” button, and you will be led to the chat screen right away. 3. A message will be auto-typed in the message box for you. Simply send it, and the bot will respond. 4. And that’s it! You can now talk to Shmooz AI in WhatsApp like you would with ChatGPT, and it will respond. Use ChatGPT on Whatsapp Without Complicated Steps We hope this guide helped you in setting up ChatGPT on your WhatsApp account without any problems. As mentioned above, you have 20 free messages so make them count! Once done there, hop on to your PC and have fun with the

PARIS: One of the largest black holes ever recorded has been discovered using a new technique that could spot thousands more of the insatiable celestial monsters in the coming years, according to astronomers. The ultramassive black hole, one of just four ever observed, is more than 30 billion times the mass of the Sun, a new study said. It is the first black hole ever observed using a phenomenon called gravitational lensing, in which light travelling towards us from a distant galaxy appears to magnify and bend inwards, giving away the presence of a dark giant. James Nightingale, an astronomer at the UK’s Durham University and the study’s lead author, told AFP the process was “similar to shining light through the base of a wine glass”. He said it was “very fortuitous” that the light of a galaxy in the distant universe travelled extremely close to this black hole, which is roughly two billion light years from Earth. It could even be the biggest black hole ever recorded, but it was

The number of children using TikTok and Snapchat rose last year in Britain, according to research published by media regulator Ofcom. Around half of those aged between 3 and 17 use TikTok and Snapchat, figures collected as part of the watchdog’s annual survey of children’s and parents’ online attitudes showed. The study found a slight increase in both apps’ popularity in the past year, with TikTok now being used by 53% of children (up from 50%), and Snapchat by 46% (up from 42%). Both companies have faced mounting pressure over user safety in recent months. Various governments around the world have  banned TikTok from official devices , citing anxieties over its relationship with the Chinese state, while Snapchat  has been criticised  for not removing more underage users from its platform. Ofcom’s annual report on attitudes towards media found children’s usage of YouTube, Whatsapp and Instagram remained steady (88%, 55% and 41%, respectively), while the popularity of Meta’s  (MET

Researcher Anna Vanderbruggen peers into a vat of dark bubbling liquid, the result of a process she has developed to recover graphite from old lithium-ion batteries. Although graphite represents up to a quarter of the weight of the batteries, no one has yet come up with a viable plan to recycle it, according to Vanderbruggen. The 29-year-old researcher is still fine-tuning her method but has already received an award from the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT) for her efforts. #Germany Car battery recycling market gears up for future boom Jens Schlueter #AFP pic.twitter.com/zMbZzrYAND — AFP Photo (@AFPphoto) March 29, 2023 As Europe shifts gear from fossil fuel vehicles to electrified cars, recycling graphite as well as other elements in batteries is gradually becoming a major focus. All the more so as the continent seeks to wean itself off its reliance on countries like China for raw materials. “Battery manufacturers were not interested” in recycled

Elon Musk and a group of artificial intelligence experts and industry executives are calling for a six-month pause in developing systems more powerful than OpenAI’s newly launched GPT-4, in an open letter  citing potential risks to society and humanity. The letter, issued by the non-profit Future of Life Institute and signed by more than 1,000 people including Musk, called for a pause on advanced AI development until shared safety protocols for such designs were developed, implemented and audited by independent experts. “Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable,” the letter said. The letter detailed potential risks to society and civilization by human-competitive AI systems in the form of economic and political disruptions, and called on developers to work with policymakers on governance and regulatory authorities. Co-signatories included Stability AI CEO Emad Mostaque, researchers at

Apple on Tuesday launched its “buy now, pay later” (BNPL) service in the United States, a move that threatens to disrupt the fintech sector dominated by firms like Affirm Holdings and Swedish payments company Klarna. The service, Apple Pay Later, will allow users to split purchases into four payments spread over six weeks with no interest or fees, the company said. It will initially be offered to select users, with plans of a full roll-out in the coming months. Users can get loans between $50 and $1,000 for online and in-app purchases made on iPhones and iPads with merchants that accept Apple Pay, according to the company. More than 85% of U.S. retailers accept Apple Pay, the company said. “Apple Pay Later will absolutely wallop some of the other players. Other companies would’ve taken a look at Apple’s announcement today because they are an ubiquitous name. This will take a bite out of the market share of other players,” said Danni Hewson, head of financial analysis at AJ Bell.

Elon Musk said on Monday that only verified Twitter accounts would be eligible to vote in polls starting April 15, a move that the social media company’s CEO believes will address advanced AI bot swarms. Musk also said only verified accounts will be eligible to be in Twitter’s For You recommendations, which displays a stream of tweets from accounts on Twitter. Twitter did not immediately respond to a Reuters’ request for comment. Last year, Musk had  said  Twitter would restrict voting on policy-related polls to paying Twitter Blue subscribers. from Science and Technology News - Latest science and technology news https://ift.tt/xWNG6Su

WASHINGTON: The United States (US) and Japan on Tuesday announced a trade deal on electric vehicle battery minerals that is key to strengthening their battery supply chains and granting Japanese automakers wider access to a new $7,500 US EV tax credit. The swiftly negotiated agreement prohibits the two countries from enacting bilateral export restrictions on the minerals most critical for EV batteries, according to senior Biden administration officials. The minerals include lithium, nickel, cobalt, graphite and manganese. The deal also aims to reduce US-Japanese dependence on China for such materials by requiring collaboration to combat “non-market policies and practices” of other countries in the sector and on conducting investment reviews of foreign investments in their critical minerals supply chains. Minerals-focused trade deals are one way that the Biden administration hopes to open up access for trusted allies to the $7,500 per vehicle EV tax credits in last year’s climate-fo

An 11-year-old Indian girl broke the internet after developing an Artificial Intelligence-based application that detects eye diseases via iPhone. Watch ARY News live on  live.arynews.tv According to the Indian news agency, Leena Rafeeq from Kerala was working on the application ‘Ogler Eye Scan’ since she was 10 years old. The “self-taught coder” shared her feat on LinkedIn.  The girl studied different subjects including computer vision, algorithms, machine learning models, eye conditions and advanced levels of Apple iOS development for six months to create the application. She claimed that her application can detect Arcus, Melanoma, Pterygium, and Cataracts.  Related – Father creates app that forces teens to reply to parent’s texts Netizens lauded her achievements after her post went viral. “It’s impressive to hear about your achievement of creating an AI mobile app that can diagnose potential eye diseases and conditions,” a user wrote. A second wrote, “You deserve a huge cong

Elon Musk’s brain implant company Neuralink has approached one of the biggest US neurosurgery centers as a potential clinical trials partner as it prepares to test its devices on humans once regulators allow for it, according to six people familiar with the matter. Neuralink has been developing brain implants since 2016 it hopes will eventually be a cure for intractable conditions such as paralysis and blindness. It suffered a blow in early 2022, when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration rejected its application to progress to human trials, citing major safety concerns, Reuters reported earlier this month. The company has since been working to address the agency’s concerns, and it is unclear if and when it will be successful. Neuralink has been talking to Barrow Neurological Institute, a Phoenix, Arizona-based neurological disease treatment and research organization, to help carry out the human trials, the sources said. The talks may not result in a team-up. Neuralink has also

Chinese search engine Baidu on Monday shared pre-recorded videos of its AI-powered chatbot Ernie summarising financial statements and producing powerpoint presentations, among other industry-focused capabilities. According to images shared by a Baidu spokesperson in a media-facing group on WeChat, China’s most widely used messaging service, the Chinese chatbot has a wider range of skills than previously displayed when it was launched almost two weeks ago. Back then the ChatGPT-like product was shown to be competent at generating images with text prompts, composing poetry and producing audio in Chinese dialects. The videos shared on Monday show the chatbot, powered by generative artificial intelligence (AI), producing travel itineraries and virtual, human-like livestreamers that can advertise products using scripts tailored to the user’s needs. These videos were from a closed-door meeting hosted by Baidu’s AI Cloud division for the first batch of companies that are testing an indu

Some parts of Twitter’s source code have been leaked and the social media platform owned by billionaire Elon Musk is seeking information on the person responsible, a legal filing showed. According to the filing, “various excerpts” of Twitter’s source code, which is used to run the company online, were posted on Github, a Microsoft-owned platform for sharing code for software development, by a user named ‘FreeSpeechEnthusiast’. Github said it took down the code on Friday at Twitter’s request. Twitter has asked the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California to order Github to produce “All identifying information” associated with the ‘FreeSpeechEnthusiast’ user name, the March 24 filing showed. Github did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment on whether it has supplied such information. It also did not comment on how long Twitter’s source code had been publicly available. Twitter also did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The news

Twitter Inc CEO Elon Musk has offered the social-media company’s employees stock grants at a valuation of nearly $20 billion, the Information reported on Saturday, citing a person familiar with an email Musk sent to Twitter staff. The reported valuation is less than half of the $44 billion that Musk paid to acquire the social media platform, pointing to a drop in Twitter’s value. Read more: Meta working on potential Twitter rival Twitter did not immediately respond to a Reuters’ emailed request for a comment. Musk said in December that Twitter is on track to be “roughly cash flow break-even” in 2023 as top advertisers slashed their spending on the social-media platform after the billionaire’ s takeover. from Science and Technology News - Latest science and technology news https://ift.tt/w9fNnhA

Microsoft Corp has threatened to cut off access to its internet-search data, which it licenses to rival search engines, if they do not stop using it as the basis for their own artificial intelligence chat products, Bloomberg News reported on Friday. The company has told at least two customers that using its Bing search index – a map of the internet that can be scanned in real time – to feed their AI chat tools violates the terms of their contract, the news agency said, citing people familiar with the dispute. Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft may also terminate licenses providing access to its search index, Bloomberg added. Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for a comment. The maker of the Windows operating system had said in February it was revamping its Bing search engine and Edge Web browser with artificial intelligence, signaling its ambition to retake the lead in consumer technology markets where it has fallen behind. The  upgraded  Bing search engine was r

PARIS: A large asteroid will safely zoom between Earth and the Moon on Saturday, a once-in-a-decade event that will be used as a training exercise for planetary defence efforts, according to the European Space Agency. The asteroid, named 2023 DZ2, is estimated to be 40 to 70 metres (130 to 230 feet) wide, roughly the size of the Parthenon, and big enough to wipe out a large city if it hit our planet. At 19:49 GMT on Saturday it will come within a third of the distance from the Earth to the Moon, said Richard Moissl, the head of the ESA’s planetary defence office. Though that is “very close”, there is nothing to worry about, he told AFP. Small asteroids fly past every day, but one of this size coming so close to Earth only happens around once every 10 years, he added. The asteroid will pass 175,000 kilometres (109,000 miles) from Earth at a speed of 28,000 kilometres per hour (17,400 miles per hour). The moon is roughly 385,000 kilometres away. An observatory in La Palma, one of

Databricks, a San Francisco-based startup last valued at $38 billion, on Friday released open-source code that it said companies could use to create their own chatbots along the lines of OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The code is an AI model, an algorithm that is trained on sets of data and can then learn from new data to perform a variety of tasks. Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi said the release was aimed at demonstrating a viable alternative to training a kind of AI model called a large language model with enormous resources and computing power. A large language model underpins OpenAI’s viral chatbot ChatGPT. OpenAI, valued at $29 billion, trains its AI models with huge troves of data on a supercomputer from investor Microsoft. The computing costs are “eye-watering”, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said. OpenAI charges business for access to its models for their own applications and has projected $1 billion in sales by 2024. Databricks’ effort comes with caveats. Ghodsi told Reuters that, while the op

Utah Governor Spencer Cox on Thursday signed two laws intended to restrict social media use by minors, becoming the first US state to require parental permission for anyone under 18 to use such platforms as Instagram, TikTok and Facebook.   View this post on Instagram   A post shared by Utah Gov. Spencer J. Cox (@govcox) The two bills, passed earlier this month by Utah’s Republican-controlled legislature, are also meant to make it easier to sue social media companies for damages. The impact of social media on children has been the subject of a growing national debate in the United States, where service providers are largely protected from liability over their content under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. “We’re no longer willing to let social media companies continue to harm the mental health of our youth,” Cox, a Republican, said in a message on Twitter. The bills, which the tech industry opposes, requires all users to subm

ChatGPT-owner OpenAI said on Wednesday it had fixed a bug that caused a “significant issue” of a small set of users being able to see the titles of others’ conversation history with the viral chatbot. As a result of the fix, users will not be able to access their chat history between 1 am and 10 am on March 20, Chief Executive Sam Altman said in a tweet. we had a significant issue in ChatGPT due to a bug in an open source library, for which a fix has now been released and we have just finished validating. a small percentage of users were able to see the titles of other users’ conversation history. we feel awful about this. — Sam Altman (@sama) March 22, 2023 ChatGPT has seen a meteoric growth rate after its launch late last year as people worldwide got creative with prompts that the conversational chatbot uses to create everything from poems and novels to jokes and film scripts. Last week, Microsoft Corp-backed OpenAI launched its artificial intelligence (AI) model GPT 4, a

Web browser company Opera has announced to add ChatGPT and Al summariziation features to its platform to transform users’ browsing experience. These new tools are available in early access across all desktop platforms, according to the company. AI Prompts, a native feature in the Opera Browser, will help users shorten a long confusing text or explain it to them, whether it’s a paragraph, a whole article, or even a website. “Accessible when you highlight text or directly from the address bar, AI Prompts is your new, go-to tool to interpret, to summarise, and to explore the web, offering you an experience that’s tailored to your interests and needs,” Opera said in a blogpost. Besides the new AI Prompts feature, users now also have access to the web versions of ChatGPT and ChatSonic right in the sidebar of the Opera browser. The company said these two new features will help generate ideas, summaries, translations, and itineraries, plus users can write code, learn music, get help on

California-based cultivated meat company GOOD Meat has received clearance from the US Food and Drug Administration to bring its lab-grown chicken to market, according to agency documents released on Tuesday.   View this post on Instagram   A post shared by GOOD Meat (@goodmeatinc) Several companies are working to bring cultivated meat to market in the United States, and must receive approval from both the FDA and the U.S. Department of Agriculture before they can sell their products. GOOD Meat’s chicken is the second cultivated meat product to receive a “no-questions” letter from the FDA after California-based UPSIDE Foods got the regulator’s  green light  for its cultivated chicken breast last November. The letter means the FDA accepts the company’s conclusion that its product is safe for humans to eat. “We have no questions at this time regarding GOOD Meat’s conclusion that foods comprised of or containing cultured chicken cell material [