Tech Roundup: Bluetooth Tracking Alerts, Slack GPT & More

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

• The World Wide Web (WWW) officially turns 30 years old after it was released into the public domain on April 30, 1993.
  
• OpenAI's ChatGPT returns to Italy after agreeing to terms and conditions set by the country's data protection watchdog; comes as the company says it doesn't plan on training its AI models on customer data. (That said, OpenAI and other companies dabbling in generative AI are likely to face more regulatory scrutiny owing to issues with lack transparency regarding training data, misinformation, copyright and data protection. While open sourcing AI models allow third-parties to scrutinize the systems for faults, OpenAI has expressed concerns that it could make it easier for rivals to copy their work and potentially permit malicious actors to take advantage of them for nefarious ends.)
• Twitter plans to let media publishers charge users on a per-article basis, with one click, starting in May 2023; comes as former Twitter head Jack Dorsey criticizes Elon Musk's tumultuous takeover that has led to sweeping policy and feature changes, claiming "it all went south" and that he should have paid the US$ 1 billion "breakup" fee to ditch the deal.
• Mastodon announces a new onboarding experience that makes mastodon.social the default server choice, instead of requiring users to pick from thousands of instances.
• Microsoft partners with PayPal, Stripe and GoDaddy to launch a payments system inside Teams to let businesses in the U.S. and Canada collect payments for appointments, classes, one-on-one sessions and webinars.
• Apple's Safari overtakes Microsoft Edge to become the world's second most popular desktop browser; Google Chrome leads with 65.77%, down from 67.35% in August 2022.
• Match Group reports 15.9 million subscribers across its dating apps in Q1 2023, down 3% YoY.
• Twitter restores free API access for verified government or publicly owned services tweeting weather alerts, transportation updates and other emergency notifications.
• Meta adds Reels to the top of the Facebook Watch tab and introduces controls that let users customize the types of content "you want to see more or less of."
• Apple and Google join hands for a proposed industry specification to help combat unwanted location tracking by Bluetooth devices.
• Neighborhood social network Nextdoor introduces new features powered by generative AI, including a new Assistant feature powered by OpenAI's ChatGPT that helps users write better posts.
• Amazon announces plans to add over 100 original Prime Video titles to Freevee, the company's free ad-supported streaming option.
• Mozilla acquires Fakespot, a New York-based AI startup that helps users identify fake or unreliable reviews.
• TikTok's parent ByteDance refutes allegations it applies word lists to detect or suppress content, following a new investigation from Forbes reveals; comes as the Wall Street Journal reports that TikTok kept tabs on users who watched LGBT content in an effort to boost engagement and serve targeted ads, with the company noting that the access has since been restricted and that it doesn't infer users' sexual orientation or race based on their watching history.
• Microsoft's LinkedIn tests out a feature for its paying subscribers that auto-generates personalised messages to hiring managers based on a user's specific profile.
• Samsung bans use of generative AI tools like ChatGPT after sensitive data from the company was accidentally leaked to the chatbot last month; comes as cloud service provider Box partners with OpenAI to bring generative AI features to the platform and Microsoft considers a privacy-focused version of ChatGPT for enteprises that runs on dedicated cloud servers.
• Snap announces plans to bring ads to its My AI chatbot as part of an early experiment to serve "relevant" sponsored links based on the conversation.

Source: CERN

• Airbnb announces Rooms, single rooms averaging US$ 67 per night, alongside new options that allows users to view more information about the host, their ratings, reviews, and other interests.
• Google adds blue checkmarks to Gmail for senders from verified brands that adopted the company's Brand Indicators for Message Identification email specification.
• Bytedance makes its music streaming service Resso premium-only starting May 11, 2023, in India, Brazil and Indonesia.
• Salesforce-owned Slack announces new generative AI feature Slack GPT to summarise conversations, offer writing assistance and allow developers build AI-driven experiences on the platform.
• Microsoft doubles down on AI to compete with Google, as it opens up Bing Chat to all users with a Microsoft Account and debuts new features like multimodal search, support for build third-party plugin and the ability to retain users' chat histories to easily return to previous chats.
• Khan Academy pilots a carefully managed version of OpenAI's GPT-4 called Khanmigo to help students with math problems, debugging code and brainstorming on various topics without cheating.
• Popular messaging platform Discord announces new change that requires all its users to change their usernames to "make it a lot easier for you and all the new users coming to Discord to connect and hang out with friends."
• Hugging Face and ServiceNow Research release StarCoder, a free alternative to code-generating AI systems like GitHub Copilot.
• The U.K. Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) launches an official review of artificial intelligence industry to "guide the development of foundation models and their use in the future."
• The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) proposes new clauses that prohibit Meta from monetising data of children and teens under 18, pause the launch of new services without a privacy assessment and obtain users' affirmative consent for any future uses of facial recognition technology.
• Meta's WhatsApp adds option to create single-vote polls and forward media with captions or add captions to documents.
• Amazon expands Inspire, its TikTok-like video and photo feed in the Shopping app that lets users buy from influencer and brand content, to all U.S. customers.
• Apple services revenue (the segment includes the App Store, Apple Pay, iCloud and subscription services) touches an all-time high of US$ 20.9 billion for Q2 2023, as the company surpasses 975 million paid subscribers.