We are quickly barreling toward an age of viable Arm-powered Windows laptops with the upcoming launch of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite CPU. Hardware options are great, but getting useful computers out of them will require a lot of new software, and a big one has just launched: Chrome for Windows on Arm.
Google has had a nightly “canary” build running since January, but now it has a blog post up touting a production-ready version of Chrome for “Arm-compatible Windows PCs powered by Snapdragon.” That’s right, Qualcomm has a big hand in this release, too, with its own press announcement touting Google’s browser release for its upcoming chip. Google promises a native version of Chrome will be “fully optimized for your PC’s [Arm] hardware and operating system to make browsing the web faster and smoother.”
Apple upended laptop CPU architecture when it dumped Intel and launched the Arm-based Apple Silicon M1. A few years later and Qualcomm is ready to answer—mostly by buying a company full of Apple Silicon veterans—with the upcoming launch of the Snapdragon X Elite chip. Qualcomm claims the X Elite will bring Apple Silicon-class hardware to Windows, but the chip isn’t out yet—it’s due for a “mid-2024” release. Most of the software you’ll be running will still be written in x86 and need to go through a translation layer, which will slow things down, but at least it won’t have to be your primary browser.
Google says the release will be out this week. Assuming you don’t have an Arm laptop yet, you can visit “google.com/chrome,” scroll all the way down to the footer, and click “other platforms,” which will eventually show the new release.
Enlarge/ Google’s generative search results turn the normally stark-white results page into a range of pastels.
Google
Last year Google brought its new obsession with AI-powered chatbots to Google Search with the launch of the “Search Generative Experience,” or “SGE.” If you opted in, SGE intercepted your Google search queries and put a giant, screen-filling generative AI chatbot response at the top of your search results. The usual 10 blue links were still there, but you had to scroll past Google’s ChatGPT clone to see them. That design choice makes outgoing web links seem like a legacy escape hatch for when the chatbot doesn’t work, and Google wants to know why more people haven’t opted in to this.
Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Land reports that Google is going to start pushing SGE out to some users, even if they haven’t opted in to the “Labs experiment.” A Google spokesperson told the site SGE will be turned on for a “subset of queries, on a small percentage of search traffic in the US.” The report says “Google told us they want to get feedback from searchers who have not opted into SGE specifically. This way they can get feedback and learn how a more general population will find this technology helpful.”
Citing his conversation with Google, Schwartz says some users automatically see Chatbot results for queries where Google thinks a chatbot “can be especially helpful.” Google will turn on the feature for “queries that are often more complex or involve questions where it may be helpful to get information from a range of web pages—like ‘how do I get marks off painted walls.'”
I don’t think anyone has spotted one of these non-opt-in SGE pages in the wild yet, so it’s unclear what the presentation will be. As an opt-in, SGE has a huge explanation page of how your search results will change. The chatbot is easily Google Search’s biggest format change ever, and having that happen automatically would be awfully confusing!
It’s also unclear if you can opt out of this. Today SGE is not compatible with Firefox, so that might be one way to skip Google’s AI obsession for now. Google Search has recently undergone a big leadership shuffle, with Liz Reid taking over as the new head of Search. Reid previously led—wait for it—the SGE team, so the prevailing theory is that we’re going to get way more AI stuff in search going forward.
Enlarge/ EU Commissioner for Internal Market Thierry Breton talks to media about non-compliance investigations against Google, Apple, and Meta under the Digital Markets Act (DMA).
Not even three weeks after the European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) took effect, the European Commission (EC) announced Monday that it is already probing three out of six gatekeepers—Apple, Google, and Meta—for suspected non-compliance.
Apple will need to prove that changes to its app store and existing user options to swap out default settings easily are sufficient to comply with the DMA.
Similarly, Google’s app store rules will be probed, as well as any potentially shady practices unfairly preferencing its own services—like Google Shopping and Hotels—in search results.
Finally, Meta’s “Subscription for No Ads” option—allowing Facebook and Instagram users to opt out of personalized ad targeting for a monthly fee—may not fly under the DMA. Even if Meta follows through on its recent offer to slash these fees by nearly 50 percent, the model could be deemed non-compliant.
“The DMA is very clear: gatekeepers must obtain users’ consent to use their personal data across different services,” the EC’s commissioner for internal market, Thierry Breton, said Monday. “And this consent must be free!”
In total, the EC announced five investigations: two against Apple, two against Google, and one against Meta.
“We suspect that the suggested solutions put forward by the three companies do not fully comply with the DMA,” antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager said, ordering companies to “retain certain documents” viewed as critical to assessing evidence in the probe.
The EC’s investigations are expected to conclude within one year. If tech companies are found non-compliant, they risk fines of up to 10 percent of total worldwide turnover. Any repeat violations could spike fines to 20 percent.
“Moreover, in case of systematic infringements, the Commission may also adopt additional remedies, such as obliging a gatekeeper to sell a business or parts of it or banning the gatekeeper from acquisitions of additional services related to the systemic non-compliance,” the EC’s announcement said.
“These are the cases where we already have concrete evidence of possible non-compliance,” Breton said. “And this in less than 20 days of DMA implementation. But our monitoring and investigative work of course doesn’t stop here,” Breton said. “We may have to open other non-compliance cases soon.
Google and Apple have both issued statements defending their current plans for DMA compliance.
“To comply with the Digital Markets Act, we have made significant changes to the way our services operate in Europe,” Google’s competition director Oliver Bethell told Ars, promising to “continue to defend our approach in the coming months.”
“We’re confident our plan complies with the DMA, and we’ll continue to constructively engage with the European Commission as they conduct their investigations,” Apple’s spokesperson told Ars. “Teams across Apple have created a wide range of new developer capabilities, features, and tools to comply with the regulation. At the same time, we’ve introduced protections to help reduce new risks to the privacy, quality, and security of our EU users’ experience. Throughout, we’ve demonstrated flexibility and responsiveness to the European Commission and developers, listening and incorporating their feedback.”
A Meta spokesperson told Ars that Meta “designed Subscription for No Ads to address several overlapping regulatory obligations, including the DMA,” promising to comply with the DMA while arguing that “subscriptions as an alternative to advertising are a well-established business model across many industries.”
The EC’s announcement came after all designated gatekeepers were required to submit DMA compliance reports and scheduled public workshops to discuss DMA compliance. Those workshops conclude tomorrow with Microsoft and appear to be partly driving the EC’s decision to probe Apple, Google, and Meta.
“Stakeholders provided feedback on the compliance solutions offered,” Vestager said. “Their feedback tells us that certain compliance measures fail to achieve their objectives and fall short of expectations.”
Apple and Google app stores probed
Under the DMA, “gatekeepers can no longer prevent their business users from informing their users within the app about cheaper options outside the gatekeeper’s ecosystem,” Vestager said. “That is called anti-steering and is now forbidden by law.”
Stakeholders told the EC that Apple’s and Google’s fee structures appear to “go against” the DMA’s “free of charge” requirement, Vestager said, because companies “still charge various recurring fees and still limit steering.”
This feedback pushed the EC to launch its first two probes under the DMA against Apple and Google.
“We will investigate to what extent these fees and limitations defeat the purpose of the anti-steering provision and by that, limit consumer choice,” Vestager said.
These probes aren’t the end of Apple’s potential app store woes in the EU, either. Breton said that the EC has “many questions on Apple’s new business model” for the app store. These include “questions on the process that Apple used for granting and terminating membership of” its developer program, following a scandal where Epic Games’ account was briefly terminated.
“We also have questions on the fee structure and several other aspects of the business model,” Breton said, vowing to “check if they allow for real opportunities for app developers in line with the letter and the spirit of the DMA.”
Enlarge/ The Android 15 logo. This is “Android V,” if you can’t tell from the logo.
Google
Android 15 continues its march toward release with the Android 15 Developer Preview 2. Android 15 won’t be out until around October, but the first preview shipped a month ago. It’s time for another one!
Android’s satellite messaging support has been in the works for about a year now, and it sounds like Android 15 is going to launch the feature for apps. The new OS is including notifications and better status bar indicators for when you’re connected to space. A “NonTerrestrialNetwork” API will let apps know when they’re limited to barely there satellite connectivity. Google says Android 15 will let third-party SMS and MMS applications tap into the satellite connectivity APIs, but enhanced messaging with RCS support will be limited to “preloaded” applications only. It seems incredible that Google doesn’t have public APIs for third-party RCS apps, but here’s your confirmation that Android 15 will continue locking out Play Store apps from RCS.
Android 15’s new satellite messaging UI.
Google
The new PDF reader.
Google
Android’s PDF support can be all over the place depending on what device you have, so Android 15 is including making some big improvements to the built-in PDF render. First it’s going to end up as a module so it can be updated via the Play Store. Google says this Android 15 version is getting “advanced features such as rendering password-protected files, annotations, form editing, searching, and selection with copy.”
Flip phone-style foldables are upending the Android app ecosystem with tiny little screens that are too small to work with normal Android apps, and Google is trying to do something about them with Android 15. Today devices like the Motorola Razr and Samsung Galaxy Z Flip, with ~3-inch-square front screens, are mostly limited to the packed-in apps.
For now it looks like Google is only standardizing the opt-in flag, with a “cover screen support” property. Google says: “These screens are too small to be considered as compatible targets for Android apps to run on, but your app can opt-in to supporting them, making your app available in more places.” As for how exactly a developer is supposed to support a bunch of proprietary, ultra-tiny screens, it sounds like Google isn’t ready to help with that yet. At some point, Android needs framework, IDE, and Play Store app listing support for cover screens.
The second developer preview is available today for the Pixel 6, 7, 8, Fold, and Pixel Tablet. There’s no beta program yet, so you’ll need to grab a cable and flash it yourself if you’re on the stable Android version. As always, these early releases are just low-level developer-facing additions (we skipped a lot of font and SQL changes). The exciting new features—if there are any—should be announced on May 14 at Google I/O.
Google has agreed to pay 250 million euros (about $273 million) to settle a dispute in France after breaching years-old commitments to inform and pay French news publishers when referencing and displaying content in both search results and when training Google’s AI-powered chatbot, Gemini.
According to France’s competition watchdog, the Autorité de la Concurrence (ADLC), Google dodged many commitments to deal with publishers fairly. Most recently, it never notified publishers or the ADLC before training Gemini (initially launched as Bard) on publishers’ content or displaying content in Gemini outputs. Google also waited until September 28, 2023, to introduce easy options for publishers to opt out, which made it impossible for publishers to negotiate fair deals for that content, the ADLC found.
“Until this date, press agencies and publishers wanting to opt out of this use had to insert an instruction opposing any crawling of their content by Google, including on the Search, Discover and Google News services,” the ADLC noted, warning that “in the future, the Autorité will be particularly attentive as regards the effectiveness of opt-out systems implemented by Google.”
To address breaches of four out of seven commitments in France—which the ADLC imposed in 2022 for a period of five years to “benefit” publishers by ensuring Google’s ongoing negotiations with them were “balanced”—Google has agreed to “a series of corrective measures,” the ADLC said.
Google is not happy with the fine, which it described as “not proportionate” partly because the fine “doesn’t sufficiently take into account the efforts we have made to answer and resolve the concerns raised—in an environment where it’s very hard to set a course because we can’t predict which way the wind will blow next.”
According to Google, regulators everywhere need to clearly define fair use of content when developing search tools and AI models, so that search companies and AI makers always know “whom we are paying for what.” Currently in France, Google contends, the scope of Google’s commitments has shifted from just general news publishers to now also include specialist publications and listings and comparison sites.
The ADLC agreed that “the question of whether the use of press publications as part of an artificial intelligence service qualifies for protection under related rights regulations has not yet been settled,” but noted that “at the very least,” Google was required to “inform publishers of the use of their content for their Bard software.”
Regarding Bard/Gemini, Google said that it “voluntarily introduced a new technical solution called Google-Extended to make it easier for rights holders to opt out of Gemini without impact on their presence in Search.” It has now also committed to better explain to publishers both “how our products based on generative AI work and how ‘Opt Out’ works.”
Google said that it agreed to the settlement “because it’s time to move on” and “focus on the larger goal of sustainable approaches to connecting people with quality content and on working constructively with French publishers.”
“Today’s fine relates mostly to [a] disagreement about how much value Google derives from news content,” Google’s blog said, claiming that “a lack of clear regulatory guidance and repeated enforcement actions have made it hard to navigate negotiations with publishers, or plan how we invest in news in France in the future.”
What changes did Google agree to make?
Google defended its position as “the first and only platform to have signed significant licensing agreements” in France, benefiting 280 French press publishers and “covering more than 450 publications.”
With these publishers, the ADLC found that Google breached requirements to “negotiate in good faith based on transparent, objective, and non-discriminatory criteria,” to consistently “make a remuneration offer” within three months of a publisher’s request, and to provide information for publishers to “transparently assess their remuneration.”
Google also breached commitments to “inform editors and press agencies of the use of their content by its service Bard” and of Google’s decision to link “the use of press agencies’ and publishers’ content by its artificial intelligence service to the display of protected content on services such as Search, Discover and News.”
Regarding negotiations, the ADLC found that Google not only failed to be transparent with publishers about remuneration, but also failed to keep the ADLC informed of information necessary to monitor whether Google was honoring its commitments to fairly pay publishers. Partly “to guarantee better communication,” Google has agreed to appoint a French-speaking representative in its Paris office, along with other steps the ADLC recommended.
According to the ADLC’s announcement (translated from French), Google seemingly acted sketchy in negotiations by not meeting non-discrimination criteria—and unfavorably treating publishers in different situations identically—and by not mentioning “all the services that could generate revenues for the negotiating party.”
“According to the Autorité, not taking into account differences in attractiveness between content does not allow for an accurate reflection of the contribution of each press agency and publisher to Google’s revenues,” the ADLC said.
Also problematically, Google established a minimum threshold of 100 euros for remuneration that it has now agreed to drop.
This threshold, “in its very principle, introduces discrimination between publishers that, below a certain threshold, are all arbitrarily assigned zero remuneration, regardless of their respective situations,” the ADLC found.
Google closed its Fitbit acquisition in 2021. Since then, the tech behemoth has pushed numerous changes to the wearable brand, including upcoming updates announced this week. While Google reshapes its fitness tracker business, though, some long-time users are regretting their Fitbit purchases and questioning if Google’s practices will force them to purchase their next fitness tracker elsewhere.
Generative AI coming to Fitbit (of course)
As is becoming common practice with consumer tech announcements, Google’s latest announcements about Fitbit seemed to be trying to convince users of the wonders of generative AI and how that will change their gadgets for the better. In a blog post yesterday, Dr. Karen DeSalvo, Google’s chief health officer, announced that Fitbit Premium subscribers would be able to test experimental AI features later this year (Google hasn’t specified when).
“You will be able to ask questions in a natural way and create charts just for you to help you understand your own data better. For example, you could dig deeper into how many active zone minutes… you get and the correlation with how restorative your sleep is,” she wrote.
DeSalvo’s post included an example of a user asking a chatbot if there was a connection between their sleep and activity and said that the experimental AI features will only be available to “a limited number of Android users who are enrolled in the Fitbit Labs program in the Fitbit mobile app.”
Google shared this image as an example of what future Fitbit generative AI features could look like.
Fitbit is also working with the Google Research team and “health and wellness experts, doctors, and certified coaches” to develop a large language model (LLM) for upcoming Fitbit mobile app features that pull data from Fitbit and Pixel devices, DeSalvo said. The announcement follows Google’s decision to stop selling Fitbits in places where it doesn’t sell Pixels, taking the trackers off shelves in a reported 29 countries.
In a blog post yesterday, Yossi Matias, VP of engineering and research at Google, said the company wants to use the LLM to add personalized coaching features, such as the ability to look for sleep irregularities and suggest actions “on how you might change the intensity of your workout.”
Google’s Fitbit is building the LLM on Gemini models that are tweaked on de-identified data from unspecified “research case studies,” Matias said, adding: “For example, we’re testing performance using sleep medicine certification exam-like practice tests.”
Gemini, which Google released in December, has been criticized for generating historically inaccurate images. After users complained about different races and ethnicities being inaccurately portrayed in prompts for things like Nazi members and medieval British kings, Google pulled the feature last month and said it would release a fix “soon.”In a press briefing, Florence Thng, director and product lead at Fitbit, suggested that such problems wouldn’t befall Fitbit’s LLM since it’s being tested by users before an official rollout, CNET reported.
Other recent changes to Fitbit include a name tweak from Fitbit by Google, to Google Fitbit, as spotted by 9to5Google this week.
Meanwhile, customers, especially Charge 5 users, are questioning whether their next fitness tracker will come from Fitbit Google Fitbit.
For example, in January, we reported that users were claiming that their Charge 5 suddenly started draining battery rapidly after installing a firmware update that Fitbit released in December. As of this writing, one thread discussing the problem on Fitbit’s support forum has 33 pages of comments. Google told BBC in January that it didn’t know what the problem was but knew that it wasn’t tied to firmware. Google hasn’t followed up with further explanation since. The company hasn’t responded to multiple requests from Ars Technica for comment. In the meantime, users continue experiencing problems and have reported so on Fitbit’s forum. Per user comments, the most Google has done is offer discounts or, if the device was within its warranty period, a replacement.
“This is called planned obsolescence. I’ll be upgrading to a watch style tracker from a different company. I wish Fitbit hadn’t sold out to Google,” a forum user going by Sean77024 wrote on Fitbit’s support forum yesterday.
Others, like 2MeFamilyFlyer, have also accused Fitbit of planning Charge 5 obsolescence. 2MeFamilyFlyer said they’re seeking a Fitbit alternative.
The ongoing problems with the Charge 5, which was succeeded by the Charge 6 on October 12, has some, like reneeshawgo on Fitbit’s forum and PC World Senior Editor Alaina Yee saying that Fitbit devices aren’t meant to last long. In January, Yee wrote: “You should see Fitbits as a 1-year purchase in the US and two years in regions with better warranty protections.”
For many, a year or two wouldn’t be sufficient, even if the Fitbit came with trendy AI features.
YouTube is rolling out a new requirement for content creators: You must disclose when you’re using AI-generated content in your videos. The disclosure appears in the video upload UI and will be used to power an “altered content” warning on videos.
Google previewed the “misleading AI content” policy in November, but the questionnaire is now going live. Google is mostly concerned about altered depictions of real people or events, which sounds like more election-season concerns about how AI can mislead people. Just last week, Google disabled election questions for its “Gemini” chatbot.
As always, the exact rules on YouTube are up for interpretation. Google says it’s “requiring creators to disclose to viewers when realistic content—content a viewer could easily mistake for a real person, place, or event—is made with altered or synthetic media, including generative AI,” but doesn’t require creators to disclose manipulated content that is “clearly unrealistic, animated, includes special effects, or has used generative AI for production assistance.”
Google gives examples of when a disclosure is necessary, and the new video upload questionnaire walks content creators through these requirements:
Using the likeness of a realistic person: Digitally altering content to replace the face of one individual with another’s or synthetically generating a person’s voice to narrate a video.
Altering footage of real events or places: Such as making it appear as if a real building caught fire, or altering a real cityscape to make it appear different from reality.
Generating realistic scenes: Showing a realistic depiction of fictional major events, like a tornado moving toward a real town.
Google’s video upload questionnaire.
YouTube
Take note of the super-tiny message at the bottom, denoting “altered or synthetic content.”
YouTube
You can expand the description for slightly more info.
YouTube
Google says the labels will start rolling out “across all YouTube surfaces and formats in the weeks ahead, beginning with the YouTube app on your phone, and soon on your desktop and TV.” The company says it’s also working on a process for people who are the subject of an AI-manipulated video to request its removal, but it doesn’t have details on that yet.
Enlarge/ The Google Phone’s Play Store listing still touts Nearby Places as a major feature.
Google
9to5Google reports that Google has killed off the Google Phone app’s “nearby places” feature. Google announced the impending death of the feature in February, saying: “We’ve found only a very small number of people use this feature, and the vast majority of users go to Google Search or Maps when seeking business-related phone numbers.” Now it’s really dead.
The “Nearby Places” feature in the Google Phone app seemed like a useful and common-sense feature. It connected the power of Google Maps to the phone app, allowing the phone search bar to not only look through your contacts but also businesses listed in Google Maps. When you want to call the local pizza place, just type in the name, rather than some arcane string of numbers, and hit “dial.”
The feature has been around on Pixel phones since at least the Pixel 2 and has been generally available to anyone who downloaded the “Phone by Google” app in the Play Store for the past few years. It was a perfect “Google” feature, combining the company’s OS, breadth of online data, and search into a useful function. Google has made its AI-infused phone app a primary selling point of Pixel phones over the years, so stripping it of features is weird.
Google claims that the feature is being killed because it was used by a “very small number of people,” but it also might be shutting it down because it hasn’t worked reliably for a while now. It looks like Google broke the Nearby Places search around August 2023. Here’s a bug report from around that time with 100 comments, and there are several Reddit and Google forum posts out there. Even new phones were shipping with the feature disabled. One reason for Google’s apparent disinterest in the feature is that the phone app’s Nearby Places searches took traffic away from Google Maps. Maps shows ads in the search results, and the phone app didn’t.
On Monday, Bloomberg reported that Apple is in talks to license Google’s Gemini model to power AI features like Siri in a future iPhone software update coming later in 2024, according to people familiar with the situation. Apple has also reportedly conducted similar talks with ChatGPT maker OpenAI.
The potential integration of Google Gemini into iOS 18 could bring a range of new cloud-based (off-device) AI-powered features to Apple’s smartphone, including image creation or essay writing based on simple prompts. However, the terms and branding of the agreement have not yet been finalized, and the implementation details remain unclear. The companies are unlikely to announce any deal until Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference in June.
Gemini could also bring new capabilities to Apple’s widely criticized voice assistant, Siri, which trails newer AI assistants powered by large language models (LLMs) in understanding and responding to complex questions. Rumors of Apple’s own internal frustration with Siri—and potential remedies—have been kicking around for some time. In January, 9to5Mac revealed that Apple had been conducting tests with a beta version of iOS 17.4 that used OpenAI’s ChatGPT API to power Siri.
As we have previously reported, Apple has also been developing its own AI models, including a large language model codenamed Ajax and a basic chatbot called Apple GPT. However, the company’s LLM technology is said to lag behind that of its competitors, making a partnership with Google or another AI provider a more attractive option.
Google launched Gemini, a language-based AI assistant similar to ChatGPT, in December and has updated it several times since. Many industry experts consider the larger Gemini models to be roughly as capable as OpenAI’s GPT-4 Turbo, which powers the subscription versions of ChatGPT. Until just recently, with the emergence of Gemini Ultra and Claude 3, OpenAI’s top model held a fairly wide lead in perceived LLM capability.
The potential partnership between Apple and Google could significantly impact the AI industry, as Apple’s platform represents more than 2 billion active devices worldwide. If the agreement gets finalized, it would build upon the existing search partnership between the two companies, which has seen Google pay Apple billions of dollars annually to make its search engine the default option on iPhones and other Apple devices.
However, Bloomberg reports that the potential partnership between Apple and Google is likely to draw scrutiny from regulators, as the companies’ current search deal is already the subject of a lawsuit by the US Department of Justice. The European Union is also pressuring Apple to make it easier for consumers to change their default search engine away from Google.
With so much potential money on the line, selecting Google for Apple’s cloud AI job could potentially be a major loss for OpenAI in terms of bringing its technology widely into the mainstream—with a market representing billions of users. Even so, any deal with Google or OpenAI may be a temporary fix until Apple can get its own LLM-based AI technology up to speed.
Enlarge/ Google’s safe browsing warning is not subtle.
Google
Google Chrome’s “Safe Browsing” feature—the thing that pops up a giant red screen when you try to visit a malicious website—is getting real-time updates for all users. Google announced the change on the Google Security Blog. Real-time protection naturally means sending URL data to some far-off server, but Google says it will use “privacy-preserving URL protection” so it won’t get a list of your entire browsing history. (Not that Chrome doesn’t already have features that log your history or track you.)
Safe Browsing basically boils down to checking your current website against a list of known bad sites. Google’s old implementation happened locally, which had the benefit of not sending your entire browsing history to Google, but that meant downloading the list of bad sites at 30- to 60-minute intervals. There are a few problems with local downloads. First, Google says the majority of bad sites exist for “less than 10 minutes,” so a 30-minute update time isn’t going to catch them. Second, the list of all bad websites on the entire Internet is going to be very large and constantly growing, and Google already says that “not all devices have the resources necessary to maintain this growing list.”
If you really want to shut down malicious sites, what you want is real-time checking against a remote server. There are a lot of bad ways you could do this. One way would be to just send every URL to the remote server, and you’d basically double Internet website traffic for all of Chrome’s 5 billion users. To cut down on those server requests, Chrome is instead going to download a list of known good sites, and that will cover the vast majority of web traffic. Only the small, unheard-of sites will be subject to a server check, and even then, Chrome will keep a cache of your recent small site checks, so you’ll only check against the server the first time.
When you’re not on the known-safe-site list or recent cache, info about your web URL will be headed to some remote server, but Google says it won’t be able to see your web history. Google does all of its URL checking against hashes, rather than the plain-text URL. Previously, Google offered an opt-in “enhanced protection” mode for safe browsing, which offered more up-to-date malicious site blocking in exchange for “sharing more security-related data” with Google, but the company thinks this new real-time mode is privacy-preserving enough to roll out to everyone by default. The “Enhanced” mode is still sticking around since that allows for “deep scans for suspicious files and extra protection from suspicious Chrome extensions.”
Enlarge/ Google’s diagram of how the whole process works.
Google
Interestingly, the privacy scheme involves a relay server that will be run by a third party. Google says, “In order to preserve user privacy, we have partnered with Fastly, an edge cloud platform that provides content delivery, edge compute, security, and observability services, to operate an Oblivious HTTP (OHTTP) privacy server between Chrome and Safe Browsing.”
For now, Google’s remote checks, when they happen, will mean some latency while your safety check completes, but Google says it’s “in the process of introducing an asynchronous mechanism, which will allow the site to load while the real-time check is in progress. This will improve the user experience, as the real-time check won’t block page load.”
The feature should be live in the latest Chrome release for desktop, Android, and iOS. If you don’t want it, you can turn it off in the “Privacy and security” section of the Chrome settings.
Enlarge/ Even hunt-and-fetch quests are better with a little AI help.
At this point in the progression of machine-learning AI, we’re accustomed to specially trained agents that can utterly dominate everything from Atari games to complex board games like Go. But what if an AI agent could be trained not just to play a specific game but also to interact with any generic 3D environment? And what if that AI was focused not only on brute-force winning but instead on responding to natural language commands in that gaming environment?
Those are the kinds of questions animating Google’s DeepMind research group in creating SIMA, a “Scalable, Instructable, Multiworld Agent” that “isn’t trained to win, it’s trained to do what it’s told,” as research engineer Tim Harley put it in a presentation attended by Ars Technica. “And not just in one game, but… across a variety of different games all at once.”
Harley stresses that SIMA is still “very much a research project,” and the results achieved in the project’s initial tech report show there’s a long way to go before SIMA starts to approach human-level listening capabilities. Still, Harley said he hopes that SIMA can eventually provide the basis for AI agents that players can instruct and talk to in cooperative gameplay situations—think less “superhuman opponent” and more “believable partner.”
“This work isn’t about achieving high game scores,” as Google puts it in a blog post announcing its research. “Learning to play even one video game is a technical feat for an AI system, but learning to follow instructions in a variety of game settings could unlock more helpful AI agents for any environment.”
Learning how to learn
Google trained SIMA on nine very different open-world games in an attempt to create a generalizable AI agent.
To train SIMA, the DeepMind team focused on three-dimensional games and test environments controlled either from a first-person perspective or an over-the-shoulder third-person perspective. The nine games in its test suite, which were provided by Google’s developer partners, all prioritize “open-ended interactions” and eschew “extreme violence” while providing a wide range of different environments and interactions, from “outer space exploration” to “wacky goat mayhem.”
In an effort to make SIMA as generalizable as possible, the agent isn’t given any privileged access to a game’s internal data or control APIs. The system takes nothing but on-screen pixels as its input and provides nothing but keyboard and mouse controls as its output, mimicking “the [model] humans have been using [to play video games] for 50 years,” as the researchers put it. The team also designed the agent to work with games running in real time (i.e., at 30 frames per second) rather than slowing down the simulation for extra processing time like some other interactive machine-learning projects.
Animated samples of SIMA responding to basic commands across very different gaming environments.
While these restrictions increase the difficulty of SIMA’s tasks, they also mean the agent can be integrated into a new game or environment “off the shelf” with minimal setup and without any specific training regarding the “ground truth” of a game world. It also makes it relatively easy to test whether things SIMA has learned from training on previous games can “transfer” over to previously unseen games, which could be a key step to getting at artificial general intelligence.
For training data, SIMA uses video of human gameplay (and associated time-coded inputs) on the provided games, annotated with natural language descriptions of what’s happening in the footage. These clips are focused on “instructions that can be completed in less than approximately 10 seconds” to avoid the complexity that can develop with “the breadth of possible instructions over long timescales,” as the researchers put it in their tech report. Integration with pre-trained models like SPARC and Phenaki also helps the SIMA model avoid having to learn how to interpret language and visual data from scratch.
Like many of us, Google Gemini is tired of politics. Reuters reports that Google has restricted the chatbot from answering questions about the upcoming US election, and instead, it will direct users to Google Search.
Google had planned to do this back when the Gemini chatbot was still called “Bard.” In December, the company said, “Beginning early next year, in preparation for the 2024 elections and out of an abundance of caution on such an important topic, we’ll restrict the types of election-related queries for which Bard and [Google Search’s Bard integration] will return responses.” Tuesday, Google confirmed to Reuters that those restrictions have kicked in. Election queries now tend to come back with the refusal: “I’m still learning how to answer this question. In the meantime, try Google Search.”
Google’s original plan in December was likely to disable election info so Gemini could avoid any political firestorms. Boy, did that not work out! When asked to generate images of people, Gemini quietly tacked diversity requirements onto the image request; this practice led to offensive and historically inaccurate images along with a general refusal to generate images of white people. Last month that earned Google wall-to-wall coverage in conservative news spheres along the lines of “Google’s woke AI hates white people!” Google CEO Sundar Pichai called the AI’s “biased” responses “completely unacceptable,” and for now, creating images of people is disabled while Google works on it.
The start of the first round of US elections in the AI era has already led to new forms of disinformation, and Google presumably wants to opt out of all of it.
