Science and Technology

Liz Reid, Google's recently promoted head of search, wrote in a blog post Thursday that the company has pared back its AI overviews in certain ways, implementing "additional opt-in refinements" to provide more health-conscious responses, disabling misleading advice and limiting the inclusion of satire and user responses from forums like Reddit. “We will continue to improve when and how we show AI insights and strengthen our protections,” he wrote, adding that Google is working on updates to improve broad sets of search results. Ashley Thompson, a spokeswoman for Google, said in a statement Friday that the company has made more…

The bot then spawned an even bigger Waldo. Subbarao Kambhampati, a professor and AI researcher at Arizona State University, also put the chatbot through some testing and said he didn't notice any notable improvements in reasoning compared to the latest version. He presented ChatGPT with a puzzle involving blocks: The answer is that it is impossible to arrange the blocks under these conditions, but, just as with previous versions, ChatGPT-4o consistently found a solution that involved moving block C. With this and other reasoning tests, ChatGPT was occasionally able to take feedback to get the right answer, which is antithetical…

Every smartphone has an expiration date. There comes that day when software updates stop arriving and you start missing out on new apps and security protections. With most phones, this happened after just three years. But things are finally starting to change. The new number is seven. I first noticed this change when I reviewed Google's $700 Pixel 8 smartphone in October. Google told me that it was committed to providing software updates for the phone for seven years, compared to the previous three years for the Pixels, because it was the right thing to do. I was skeptical that…

What are some examples of open source software? Some of the most popular software systems are open source, such as Linux, the operating system on which Google's Android mobile system was built. Among the best-known open source products is Firefox, the free downloadable Web browser created by the Mozilla Foundation. So, what is the open and closed debate and how does it relate to artificial intelligence? Tech companies like Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic have spent billions of dollars creating “closed,” or proprietary, AI systems. People who don't work for these companies can't see or tinker with the underlying source code,…

Connected media - Related media Memory, Now and Five Years Ago Chris Nilan is a quintessential Bostonian of a certain time and demographic, the kind they make movies about: A tough, working-class hockey player of Irish descent, hundreds, if not thousands, of local kids yearned to be just like him. He was born on Feb. 9, 1958, at the Faulkner Hospital in West Roxbury, Mass., the son of Henry and Leslie Nilan, a hard-working, blue collar couple who raised their four children in a strict household. Chris still found his way into scraps as a kid, and soon discovered he…