Ahead of the big Google I/O keynote later today, we have this segment of The Vergecast, as Nilay, David, and Alex discuss some of the issues facing the tech giant (like setting a YouTube promo ad for the Pixel Fold to premiere at the correct time) and how it might address them with AI news revealed during today’s event.
Update: And now the full episode is available.
Ahead of the I/O keynote speech later today, Google shared this I/O Flip card game as an example of what its tools are capable of, using generative AI tools for the art and descriptions that say things like “Dash the Wizard lives in a castle with his pet dragon. He loves to cast spells and make people laugh.”
Images were pre-generated using two technologies pioneered out of Google Research: Muse, a text-to-image AI model from the Imagen family of models, and DreamBooth,
Card descriptions were prototyped in MakerSuite and pre-generated using the PaLM API which accesses Google’s large language models.
In March, we wondered why no one could find any mention of the Twitter ad revenue split Elon Musk had advertised a month earlier as a reason to buy Twitter Blue.
Now, while saying that Tucker Carlson hasn’t signed a deal with Twitter for his new show, Musk acknowledged Twitter is “still working on the software” to make the split happen. He didn’t mention whether any subscribers will get their $8 per month fees refunded.
Abbott left Apple in March, where he was the VP of engineering for Apple Cloud Services, over iCloud and Apple’s tech behind stuff like iMessage and the App Store.
CNBC reports that GM, which is openly working to pull drivers away from Apple CarPlay and Android Auto to experiences it controls (and can profit from), will put three segments together under Abbott: software-defined vehicle and operating systems; information and digital technology; and the company’s digital business,
Push alerts sent to LA residents via the Citizen app in 2021 offered a cash reward — that eventually reached $30,000 — with a picture of a man erroneously tabbed as an arson suspect. Hosts on Citizen’s livestream told viewers to “hunt this guy down.”
Vice has put together a two-hour documentary based on its reporting on the incident. You can see the trailer below and watch the entire documentary for free on Tubi.
If your job hasn’t banned plugging company data into an AI chatbot, then go ahead. You’ll still need to join the waitlist though — the results of our first tests from March are right here, and we also tried Bard head-to-head with Bing and ChatGPT.
We’ll see what kind of updates Google I/O brings tomorrow, but maybe it’s better to hold off writing this week’s report with the tool Google employees reportedly called “worse than useless” and “a pathological liar.”
[Google Workspace Updates]
Google announced the Pixel Watch a year ago during its I/O event and launched the wearable last fall, delivering what Victoria Song called “a good-but-not-yet-great smartwatch for Android users.”
Maybe we’ll see more Wear OS updates this week during I/O 2023, but 9to5Google is already citing a source saying the Pixel Watch 2 will launch this fall along with the Pixel 8 and 8 Pro smartphones.
Citing data scraped by independent researcher Travis Brown (you can have a look at his setup on Github), Mashable reports, “Out of about 150,000 early subscribers to Twitter Blue, just around 68,157 have stuck around and maintained a paid subscription as of April 30.”
Brown says his process gets data for about 90 percent of Blue subscribers. We’ll see if Elon ever releases any official numbers regarding the subscription to confirm or refute what’s accessible and estimated via scraping.
