Tech Roundup: AI Arms Race, TikTok Sreen Limits & More

[A recurring feature on the latest in Science & Technology.]

• Snapchat releases new AI bot "My AI" that's powered by ChatGPT; apologises in advance for its many definicies and says it's "prone to hallucination and can be tricked into saying just about anything."
• Meta says it plans to develop "AI personas" for Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp, becoming the latest company after OpenAI, Microsoft and Google to throw its weight behind generative AI.
• A new study from Mozilla finds that the privacy labels for Android apps on the Google Play Store are often inaccurate or misleading, thereby providing users with a false sense of security.
• Telecom giant Nokia changes its iconic logo for the first time in 60 years to better reflect its current status as a "business-to-business technology innovation leader pioneering the future where networks meet cloud."
• Meta debuts LLaMA, a large language model (LLM) that "works by taking a sequence of words as an input and predicts a next word to recursively generate text"; says more work is needed to "address the risks of bias, toxic comments, and hallucinations in large language models."
• Smartphone Xiaomi debuts 13 and 13 Pro Android handsets; kills off short-form video app Zili, which it launched in 2018, and unveils prototype augmented reality glasses.
• Popular videoconferencing solution Zoom reports 213,000 enterprise customers in Q4 2022, up 12% YoY.
• Google announces new features for Android, ChromeOS, and Wear OS, including Fast Pair support for Chromebooks, Keep shortcuts, and Wear OS accessibility modes.
• Reddit rolls out new feature that allows users to search for comments within a single post across all platforms.
• Meta, OnlyFans and Pornhub team up for a new initiative called Take It Down that enables users to "remove online nude, partially nude, or sexually explicit photos and videos taken before you were 18."
• Indian fintech company CRED, which has over 16 million users, debuts a buy now and pay later service and a tap to pay feature as the company broadens its offerings to boost engagement and monetization on the platform.

• Spotify consolidates the heart and the "Add to playlist" icons into a single plus button, allowing users to save all songs, albums, playlists, audiobooks, podcasts or episodes to their library with one tap.
• Microsoft releases Windows 11 update that integrates "AI-powered Bing directly into the taskbar," weeks after expanding it to Bing's mobile apps and Skype; also brings support for tabs in Notepad and previews Phone Link for iOS, allowing users to send and receive iMessages.
• While the "new Bing" clearly isn't ready for mass adoption, it's impressive how well Microsoft appears to have planned this rollout, catching Google off guard. With more than 500 million people using the Windows search box each month, the change could drive the use of Bing once the feature is more broadly launched. It also comes at a time when OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, is attracting criticism on its own for pivoting from a non-profit to a company that's closed-source and "powered by speed and profit."
• Google debuts optional fall detection feature on Pixel Watch; announces a number of optimisations to its Chrome web browser for macOS to preserve battery life and tests a new option that allows users to add notes to any website. (It will be great if it can be integrated with Google Keep!)
• Twitter introduces a new violent speech policy that prohibits users from expressing "wishes of harm" and similar sentiments.
• The European Commission raises concerns about Apple's anti-steering obligations in Apple Music; questions the "contractual restrictions that Apple imposed on app developers which prevent them from informing iPhone and iPad users of alternative music subscription options at lower prices outside of the app and to effectively choose those."
• Magazine app Flipboard adds Mastodon integration, enabling users to visually flip through their timeline to view posts.
• Robinhood launches a standalone Robinhood Wallet app globally on iOS, with Polygon and Ethereum network support.
• OpenAI launches a ChatGPT API for businesses, with dedicated capacity plans, priced at US$ 0.002/~750 words, allowing developers to integrate AI capabilities into their apps and services; says that it won't use any data submitted through its API for "service improvements," including AI model training, unless a customer or organisation opts in.
• Models like ChatGPT are nothing more than mathematical machines built on predefined rules of play, and the fact that they are prone to prompt-based injection attacks (i.e., malicious adversarial prompts that are used to trigger unexpected behaviour) and hallucinations highlights the need for continuous improvement.
• TikTok adds new well-being features for teens and others, including 60-minute daily screen time limits and expanded Family Pairing for teen users.
• Microsoft researchers unveil Kosmos-1, a multimodal LLM that can understand image content, pass visual IQ tests and accept a variety of input formats.