Tech Roundup: Anthropic System Prompts, Roblox's Paedophile Problem & More

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

• France conducts a trial that bans smartphones for children under the age of 15 in an attempt to give them a "digital pause."
• Snap-owned Snapchat launches new safety tools and resources for U.S. educators, as the popular social media platform surpasses 20 million U.S. teen users; debuts a native Snapchat app for iPad, 13 years after launching on iOS.
• X updates its AI chatbot Grok to direct users to Vote.gov for U.S. election queries following concerns that the service is spreading election misinformation; takes on Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams with a native video conferencing tool.
• Meta allows users add text to photos right from its post editor on Instagram; also makes it possible to add more photos as stickers on top of a photo.
• Google tests a new Android feature that will automatically launch apps right after they are installed them from the Play Store; launches a Google Meet AI feature that automatically takes notes during meetings conducted in spoken English and makes available a new picture-in-picture mode on Chrome for desktop when switching tabs in the web browser.
• AI company Anthropic launches Claude Artifacts generally for all users across its Free, Pro and Team tiers, as well as its availability on the official Claude iOS and Android mobile apps; publishes a changelog for the system prompts of its Sonnet, Opus and Haiku models, becoming the first major AI vendor to do so.
• Meta and Spotify team up for deeper music integration in Instagram that would allow users to continuously share what music they're listening to through Instagram Notes; comes as Apple and Google partner to make it easy for their respective subscribers to port playlists to the other service.
• Google plans to roll out image generation of people to Gemini paid users, after suspending the feature in February amid criticism about racial depictions; releases Imagen 3 to all Gemini users and Gems, which allows the creation of custom Gemini chatbots, to Gemini Advanced, Business, and Enterprise users, and readies to launch an opt-in AI-powered summaries feature to "show AI-generated summaries of files containing text."

• Meta-owned Threads lets users see and like fediverse replies on other posts besides their own; to syndicate posts submitted via Threads API to the fediverse; confirms it's experimenting with ephemeral posts that disappear after 24 hours for limited users.
• Yelp sues Google, alleging Google used its dominance in general search to gain an unfair advantage in local search services and local search advertising markets.
• Productivity and note-taking app Notion announces plans to suspend its service in Russia in response to U.S. government sanctions that prohibit access to certain software products and services in the country.
• Steam hits more than 37 million concurrent users on August 25, 2024, for the first time, up from the previous record of nearly 33.7 million in January 2024.
• Samsung plans to bring some Galaxy AI features to select mid-range smartphones as well, including the Galaxy A35 and Galaxy A55, as it bets big on AI across its product portfolio.
• SpaceX, Tesla and X chief executive Elon Musk revives his OpenAI lawsuit, filing a complaint in the U.S. state of California to allege that OpenAI, Sam Altman, and Greg Brockman breached OpenAI's founding contract.
• ByteDance's TikTok adds in-app hubs for videos about movies and TV shows as part of a new feature called TikTok Spotlight; company calls it a "new promotional solution that allows the entertainment industry to harness the power of TikTok fan communities to promote films, TV series and franchises."
• Chinese internet search giant Baidu appears to have started blocking the online search engines of Alphabet's Google and Microsoft's Bing from scraping content derived out of the mainland firm's Wikipedia-style service, Baike.
• Midjourney opens the platform to let all users to generate AI images on the platform, removing a restriction that limited it to users who generated over 10,000 images on Discord; Inflection announces plans to cap free access to its AI chatbot Pi in the coming months and let users export their conversations, as the startup focuses on enterprise products.
• Apple announces a September 9 event at Apple Park to unveil the iPhone 16 lineup, as well as new Apple Watch and AirPods models.
• A new investigation from Bloomberg shows how paedophiles groom children using Roblox, a problem exacerbated by the virtual gaming platform not collecting any personal information beyond a user's age.