Tech Roundup: Google DeepMind, Proton Pass & More

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

• Google announces Google DeepMind, a unit combining DeepMind's team and Google Research's Brain team in a major reshuffle, as it looks to "turbocharge" AI efforts amid intense competition from Microsoft and OpenAI.
• Decentralised Twitter alternative Bluesky comes to Android, after first launching on iOS in February 2023; continues to remain invite-only.
• Online image hosting service Imgur to revise its Terms of Service on May 15, 2023, to prohibit nudity, pornography and sexually explicit content; to also delete "old, unused, and inactive content" that's not tied to a user account.
• Microsoft announces plans to drop Twitter support from its Smart Campaigns advertising platform on April 25, effectively preventing its customers from using the service to access their Twitter accounts or create and publish tweets; comes days before Twitter's plans to shut down its old API in favour of new subscription tiers that start at US$ 42,000 per month for enterprises, prompting many indie developers to shut down their Twitter-based applications.
• Atlassian launches Atlassian Intelligence, an AI assistant that uses the company's LLMs and OpenAI's, to offer AI features for Confluence and Jira in the cloud.
• Snap expands its My AI chatbot to all users for free and integrates it within group chats to surface recommendations and other activities; debuts new Story modes, as its Snapchat+ paid plan surpasses 3 million users, representing less than 1% of the 375 million daily active users on the platform.
• Google begins widely rolling out end-to-end encryption (E2EE) support for group chats in its RCS-based Messages app for Android; rebrands Fi to Fi Wireless and adds support for smartwatches.

• Skyrocketing popularity of OpenAI's ChatGPT (the privacy and regulatory scrutiny aside) leads to Stack Overflow witnessing a steady decline in user traffic in recent months, as users increasingly ChatGPT to produce code snippets; comes as Stack Overflow becomes the latest company to demand compensation to charge large AI developers for access to its large repository of questions and answers as soon as mid-2023.
• The development also follows an announcement by Reddit that it will begin charging some AI developers to access its own content starting in June. It also comes in the middle of broader concerns about companies behind tools such as ChatGPT scraping content off the web to train their models.
• If anything, the number of companies, which have accumulated huge troves of data on the internet for many years, that will require AI products to license datasets will only grow going forward. Don't be surprised if platforms like Quora, Tripadvisor and Foursquare follow suit.
• Stability AI, the company funding the development of open source generative AI models like Stable Diffusion and Dance Diffusion, launches its StableLM suite of language models.
• News aggregation platform Flipboard extends its presence on Mastodon with curated News, Tech, Culture and Science desks on the social network.
• Google announces plans to enable alternative in-app billing system for purches made through the Play Store in the U.K.
• Meta tests support for animated emoji in WhatsApp, following the footsteps of other messaging apps like iMessage and Google Messages; also adds option to save disappearing messages (but only with sender's approval).

• Proton, the Swiss company between Proton Mail, expands its privacy ecosystem with a new end-to-end encrypted password manager Proton Pass.
• Apple introduces a new feature that allows users to resolve subscription payment issues from within the apps.
• Google updates its generative AI tool Bard to add support for programming, debug code and explain code snippets in over 20 programming languages, including C++, Go, Java, JavaScript and Python.
• Twitter drops labels for both government officials and state-affiliated media (including those from China, Iran and Russia), a feature that was introduced in 2020; says advertisers must now have "a verified checkmark or subscribe to either Twitter Blue or Verified Organisations" or spend over US$ 1,000 a month to keep running ads on the platform.
• Apple is reportedly working on a journaling app for iOS that could allow users to compile their daily activities, while also integrating with location services, contacts, and health information stored on the device; to position the app as a "mental health tool" to combat depression and anxiety.
• Apple's pattern of sherlocking well-established third-party apps with its own in-house competitors is not new. It also speaks to how Apple can choose to put user privacy and security at the centre of the design so as to differentiate itself from Google and Meta, while also limiting third-party apps from having the same kind of access to user data that it does.
• Swedish commercial VPN service Mullvad reveals that it was subjected to a unsuccessful search warrant by law enforcement to "seize computers with customer data" which, per the company, "did not exist" due to its no-logging policy.
• Cheap Chromebooks, due to their short lifespans and lack of repairability, are less sustainable and more expensive for schools than pricier devices, a report from the U.S. Public Interest Research Group Education Fund finds.