Tech Roundup: OpenAI SearchGPT, Proton Wallet & More

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

• Switzerland enacts the "Federal Law on the Use of Electronic Means for the Fulfillment of Government Tasks" (EMBAG), mandating open-source software (OSS) in the public sector to enhance transparency, security and efficiency.
• The United Nations calls on the Bangladesh Government to "immediately end the violent crackdown against protesters and political opponents, fully restore access to the Internet and social media and ensure accountability for human rights violations."
• Online dating app Grindr disables location features for users within the Olympic village of the Paris Games to protect LGBTQ+ athletes.
• Google Research details NeuralGCM, a model that combines machine learning and existing weather forecasting to make a breakthrough in accurate long-term climate predictions.
• The E.U. opens an in-depth investigation into Delivery Hero and its Spanish subsidiary Glovo to determine if they may have illegally colluded with each other.
• Russia begins throttling YouTube loading speeds on computers by 70% as "a consequence of the anti-Russian policy of the host"; says it's building its own homegrown alternatives such as Rutube and VK Video.
• New research from Mozilla and AI Forensics finds that TikTok Lite, a low-bandwidth Android alternative to its flagship app, lacks controls to filter offensive content and unwanted keywords and provides no warning labels or banners on a range of potentially harmful content, from dangerous prank videos and graphic content to health and elections-related misinformation and AI-generated content."
• Google puts the brakes on its plans to deprecate third-party cookies in Chrome and will instead keep working on "privacy-preserving alternatives" via Privacy Sandbox APIs. (The proposals, since their announcement in early 2020, have been riding on a rollercoaster of delays and regulatory setbacks. That said, the company's decision to continue allowing third-party cookies, despite other major browsers blocking them for years, is a direct consequence of their advertising-driven business model.)
• Meta faces new setback in the European Union after the Commission says its "pay or consent" model for Facebook and Instagram may violate consumer protection laws; gives Meta until September 1 to propose changes.
• OpenAI takes on Google Search and Perplexity with SearchGPT, a search tool powered by GPT-4 that can organise links and summarise its findings, as a prototype.
• Music streamer Spotify confirms it's working on a deluxe tier with improved controls; hits 626 million monthly active users and paying subscribers top 246 million in Q2 2024.
• Meta plans to roll out its AI assistant to the Quest in August for U.S. and Canada users, after debuting it on the Ray-Ban smart glasses earlier this January; warns that the E.U.'s approach to regulating AI is creating the "risk" that the continent is cut off from accessing cutting-edge services.
• Adobe launches new tools and generative AI features to its Illustrator and Photoshop design software to help speed up creative workflows.
• Amazon begins rolling out a new user interface for Prime Video to help distinguish content included with Prime, alongside personalised recommendations powered by generative AI and updates to its navigation bar and for managing subscriptions. (The development comes amid a report from The Wall Street Journal that said the company's business unit that focuses on Alexa-powered gadgets lost US$ 25 billion between 2017 and 2021, prompting the e-commerce giant to reportedly work on a subscription-based Alexa that uses generative AI technology to drive profits.)
• Samsung says it will no longer pre-install Samsung Messages on its Galaxy smartphones in the U.S. as it switches to Google Messages.
• X reverts its water pistol emoji back to a firearm on the web, after Twitter originally switched the pistol emoji from a realistic-looking handgun in 2018; activates a setting, on by default, that gives it permission to train Grok on user's posts (The setting can be turned off on the web but not in the mobile app.)
• Privacy-focused company Proton debuts a self-custody bitcoin wallet, its first cryptocurrency product, as part of efforts to "introduce Bitcoin safely to newcomers."
• Microsoft unveils Bing generative search, which shows AI-generated answers with the sources used to create them, to a small subset of users.
• Apple launches Apple Maps on the web in beta that's compatible with Safari and Chrome on Mac and iPad, and Chrome and Edge on Windows PCs.

• Reddit begins blocking search engines barring Google from surfacing content originating from its platform; comes after Reddit updated its robots.txt file to prevent search engines and AI tools from crawling the site. (The exception granted to Google stems from the fact that it signed a US$ 60 million/year deal with Reddit to use the social network's content to train its AI models. It's also a sign that the open web is steadily being walled off in pursuit of AI.)
• Airtable launches Cobuilder, which can generate apps from text prompts and match them to relevant data and customer information already stored within the service.
• Google updates the Play Store on Android to add categorised "Collections" that show installed app content on the home screen, partners with Japanese comic publishers to launch a new curated space for comics in the country, adds new games to its Play Pass subscription service, and debuts a new feature for Google Play Games on PC that allows players to have two games running at the same time.
• Amazon-owned Twitch introduces new policy and moderation updates to curb sexual harassment, including making its policy "easier to understand" and adding moderation tools.
• The Overture Maps Foundation, backed by Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, TomTom, and others, releases four global open maps datasets.
• Italian luxury sports car manufacturer Ferrari plans to accept cryptocurrency payments for its cars at European dealers from the end of July, and internationally by the end of 2024.
• Instant messaging app Telegram surpasses 950 million active users, after touching 900 million mark in March 2024.
• Singapore ride-hailing and food delivery company Grab expands its services beyond ride and food delivery by acquiring dining reservation platform, Chope, for an undisclosed amount.
• Google's YouTube tests a new change that replaces its classic minimised player within its mobile app with a new picture-in-picture mode that can be resized and moved around the display; updates its Gemini chatbot with Gemini 1.5 Flash and a 32K-token context window in its free tier
• Google DeepMind debuts breakthrough models AlphaProof and AlphaGeometry 2 that are designed to solve advanced reasoning problems in mathematics; says "these systems solved four out of six problems from this year's International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO), achieving the same level as a silver medalist in the competition for the first time."
• Meta says "open-source AI is the path forward," as it debuts new Llama 3.1 model that increases the context window to 128,000 tokens (The largest version has 405 billion parameters, in comparison to OpenAI GPT-4's 1.5 trillion parameters); says it will allow developers to use the outputs from Llama models, including Llama 3.1 405B, to improve other models for the first time.
• Mistral unveils Large 2, the new generation of its flagship model with improved code generation, mathematics and reasoning capabilities, Stability AI releases Stable Video 4D, a model based on its Stable Video Diffusion model that takes video input and generates videos from eight new perspectives, and Nvidia launches new AI Foundry service with an aim to help businesses create and deploy custom large language models tailored to their specific needs.
• The development comes amid studies that using "synthetic" data, created by AI systems to train LLMs, could lead to the rapid degradation of AI models and a collapse over time.
• Separately, Freelancer.com, iFixit, and others have accused Anthropic of aggressively scraping their websites, potentially breaching their terms of service.
• Previous public reporting has revealed that OpenAI and Anthropic have been ignoring robots.txt, put in place by news publishers to block their web content being freely scraped for AI training data. Quora's Chatbot Platform Poe, in the meanwhile, was found to allow users to download paywalled articles.
• China's smartphone shipments rise 10% YoY in Q2 2024; Huawei's shipments jump 41%, as Apple's market share drops to 14%, down from 16% in Q2 2023; vivo, OPPO, HONOR, Huawei and Xiaomi take the top five spots, marking the first time local vendors have dominated the list.
• Meta-owned WhatsApp surpasses 100 million monthly active users in the U.S.
• Epic Games announces plans to bring its mobile games to AltStore on iOS in the E.U.; removes its games from the Galaxy Store due to Samsung blocking sideloading by default.
• Newsletter platform Substack adds the ability for writers to draft and publish new posts directly from their phone via its iOS app. (Android support is on the way.)
• Apple faces new antitrust headache in Spain after the country's competition authority, the CNMC, opens an investigation into its App Store, citing concerns the iPhone maker could be imposing unfair trading conditions on developers who use its store to distribute their software to iOS users.
• Chipmaker Intel confirms any degradation to 13th or 14th Gen Intel Core desktop processors is irreversible and that a microcode update designed to address the crash due to the CPUs experiencing an "elevated operating voltage" won't fix it.
• ByteDance-owned TikTok follows YouTube and Shazam with a new feature called Sound Search that lets users find songs by singing or humming them.