An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The trend of big touchscreens in cars has left many yearning for the not-so-distant days when most user interactions happened with physical buttons. But Rivian's chief software officer Wassym Bensaid believes using buttons in a car is an "anomaly." "It's a bug. It's not a feature," Bensaid said Wednesday at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024. "Ideally, you would want to interact with your car through voice. The problem today is that most voice assistants are just broken." To that end, Bensaid said that "every week" he's driving around an engineering vehicle that has an AI-powered voice assistant, though he did not specify which one. He mentioned earlier in his interview with TechCrunch's transportation editor Kirsten Korosec that Rivian has "partnerships that I cannot yet talk about."

"I think the car is actually a fantastic environment for AI," he said, while noting that latency and hallucinations are still very big problems that need to be solved. "The final north star I have is having voice [controls] become the primary means of interaction with the vehicle. The reality is that the vehicle is so feature-rich, that even if we do a fantastic job in the UI, there will always be prioritization that we need to do in terms of having things one or two menus behind," Bensaid told TechCrunch after he got off stage. Bensaid also said he's a big believer in the ability of AI-powered voice controls to handle complex requests. For instance, he said if a driver says "I'm hungry" the in-car assistant should be able to quickly direct them to a nearby restaurant that they might prefer. Bensaid said the company is committed to creating a unique, integrated user experienced tailored for Rivian owners -- one that won't include CarPlay.

CarPlay "takes over all the pixels in the screen, and it's a replacement of the entire experience, and we truly believe that with the technology capabilities that we have, we can offer a much more refined, integrated experience," he said.

Corporate resistance to AI tools is costing employees six hours per week in manual tasks that could be automated, according to research by recruitment firm SThree. Sixty-three percent of workers blame management's "digital illiteracy" for slow AI adoption, despite major companies rushing to tout AI initiatives since ChatGPT's launch. A 2023 tech.io study found two-thirds of business leaders barely use AI tools due to limited understanding.

Apple is taking a 20 percent stake in its iPhone satellite connectivity partner GlobalStar -- a stake worth $400 million -- as part of an expansion of its deal with the company. From a report: GlobalStar will also receive a prepayment of $1.1 billion from Apple that is intended to improve satellite infrastructure.

Apple relies on GlobalStar's satellites to enable to send emergency text messages, iMessage reactions, and more through the skies in areas with no cell signal. GlobalStar disclosed the details of the deal expansion in an SEC filing, which includes "a new satellite constellation, expanded ground infrastructure, and increased global [mobile satellite services] licensing."

Three months ago, Wall Street punished the world's largest technology firms for spending enormous amounts to develop artificial intelligence, only to deliver results that failed to justify the costs. Silicon Valley's response this quarter? Plans to invest even more. Bloomberg: The capital expenditures of the four largest internet and software companies -- Amazon, Microsoft, Meta and Alphabet -- are set to total well over $200 billion this year, a record sum for the profligate collective.

Executives from each company warned investors this week that their splurge will continue next year, or even ramp up. The spree underscores the extreme costs and resources consumed from the worldwide boom in AI ignited by the arrival of ChatGPT. Tech giants are racing to secure the scarce high-end chips and build the sprawling data centers the technology demands. To do so, the companies have cut deals with energy providers to power these facilities, even reviving a notorious nuclear plant.

Indonesia has banned sales of Google Pixel smartphones for failing to meet a 40% local content requirement, days after blocking Apple's iPhone 16 in Southeast Asia's biggest phone market. Google must obtain local content certification before resuming sales in Indonesia, Industry Ministry spokesman Febri Hendri Antoni Arief said. The move follows last week's iPhone 16 ban after Apple failed to fulfill a $95 million investment pledge.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Complaints about the brightness of modern headlights have become commonplace. On X, thousands of users have tweeted about headlights being too bright. The subreddit r/fuckyourheadlights has over 35,000 members who post blurry photos of offending high beams and LED headlights. Outlets like the New York Times and NBC News have written about the risks of headlight glare. Advocacy groups have called for bans on LED headlights. And the UK government launched a review into the dangers of headlight glare earlier this year, after many driver complaints. And yet, according to many experts, the problem with headlights is not that they're too bright -- it's that they're not bright enough. "We actually need more light on the road than what we have," says Greg Bannon, director of automotive engineering at the American Automobile Association (AAA). Only a minority of US roadways have overhead street lighting, as one 2019 AAA report noted. As a result, in many areas, headlights are the sole method of illumination when driving at night. But which is the safety bigger risk: inadequate illumination, or headlights that impair the vision of other drivers? The report notes that the U.S. standards set by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) haven't changed in decades and are much weaker than Europe's. Adaptive headlights, which automatically adjust brightness to avoid blinding other drivers, have been approved by NHTSA since 2022 but are still relatively rare due to differing standards and costs.

Google is rolling out a dedicated weather app on Pixel phones (model 6 and newer with Android 15) that integrates AI-generated summaries and customizable widgets. Ars Technica reports: There's a prominent "AI generated weather report" on top of the weather stack, which is a combination of summary and familiarity. "Cold and rainy day, bring your umbrella and hold onto your hat!" is Google's example; I can't provide another one, because an update to "Gemini Nano" is pending. You can see weather radar for your location, along with forecasted precipitation movement. The app offers "Nowcasting" precipitation guesses, like "Rain continuing for 2 hours" or "Light rain in 10 minutes."

The best feature, one seen on the version of Weather that shipped to the Pixel Tablet and Fold, is that you can rearrange the order of data shown on your weather screen. I moved the UV index, humidity, sunrise/sunset, and wind conditions as high as they could go on my setup. It's a trade-off, because the Weather app's data widgets are so big as to require scrolling to get the full picture of a day, and you can't move the AI summary or 10-day forecast off the top. But if you only need a few numbers and like a verbal summary, it's handy. Sadly, if you're an allergy sufferer and you're not in the UK, Germany, France, or Italy, Google can't offer you any pollen data or forecasts. There is also, I am sad to say, no frog. You can download the app here.

Former Google chief Eric Schmidt thinks the US Army should expunge "useless" tanks and replace them with AI-powered drones instead. From a report: Speaking at the Future Investment Initiative in Saudi Arabia this week, he said: "I read somewhere that the US had thousands and thousands of tanks stored somewhere," adding, "Give them away. Buy a drone instead."

The former Google supremo's argument is that recent conflicts, such as the war in Ukraine, have demonstrated how "a $5,000 drone can destroy a $5 million tank." In fact, even cheaper drones, similar to those commercially available for consumers, have been shown in footage on social media dropping grenades through the open turret hatch of tanks. Schmidt, who was CEO of Google from 2001 to 2011, then executive chairman to 2015, and executive chairman of Alphabet to 2018, founded White Stork with the aim of supporting Ukraine's war effort. It hopes to achieve this by developing a low-cost drone that can use AI to acquire its target rather than being guided by an operator and can function in environments where GPS jamming is in operation.

Notably, Schmidt also served as chair of the US government's National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI), which advised the President and Congress about national security and defense issues with regard to AI. "The cost of autonomy is falling so quickly that the drone war, which is the future of conflict, will get rid of eventually tanks, artillery, mortars," Schmidt predicted.

Google is advancing the release timeline for Android 16, shifting it to the second quarter of 2025 to better align with new device launches and accelerate access to its latest AI and machine learning resources. It should also "enable app creators and phone companies to prepare their products for the new software more quickly," reports CNET. From the report: [I]n a big-picture sense, the change could help facilitate a new wave of apps with more AI integration, considering developers will get access to Google's latest machine learning and AI resources even sooner. "We're in a once-in-a-generation moment to completely reimagine what our smartphones can do and how we interact with them," Google's Seang Chau, who took on the role of vice president and general manager of the Android Platform earlier this year, said in an interview with CNET. "It's a really exciting time for smartphones, and we've been putting a lot of thought into what we want to do next with them."

In addition to moving up the major release, Google will roll out a minor update in the fourth quarter of 2025 with feature updates, optimizations and bug fixes. It's a notable switch from Google's usual release timeline, but it's just one of several changes the company has made to the way it distributes Android updates in an effort to add features more frequently. [...] "Things are moving quite fast in the AI world right now," Chau said. "So we want to make sure that we get those developer [application programming interfaces], especially around machine learning and AI, available to our developers so they can build these capabilities faster and get them out to our users faster."

With Windows 10 support set to expire on October 14, 2025, Microsoft is offering a one-time, one-year Extended Security Updates plan for consumers. "For $30, you'll receive 'critical' and 'important' security updates -- basically security patches that will continue to protect your Windows 10 PC from any vulnerabilities," reports PCWorld. "That $30 is for one year's worth of updates, and that's the only option at this time." From the report: Microsoft has been warning users for years that Windows 10 support will expire in 2025, specifically October 14, 2025. At that point, Windows 10 will officially fall out of support: there will be no more feature updates or security patches. On paper, that would mean that any Windows 10 PC will be at risk of any new vulnerabilities that researchers uncover.

Previously, Microsoft had quietly hinted that consumers would be offered the same ESU protections offered to businesses and enterprises, as it did in December 2023 and again in an "editor's note" shared in an April 2024 support post, in which the company said that "details will be shared at a later date for consumers." That time is now, apparently.

Back in December 2023, Microsoft offered the ESU on an annual basis to businesses for three years, one year at a time. The fees would double each year, charging businesses hundreds of dollars for the privilege. Consumers won't be offered the same deal, as a Microsoft representative said via email that it'll be a "one-time, one-year option for $30."

Zoox, an Amazon-owned autonomous vehicle company, is set to roll out dozens of its purpose-built robotaxis in San Francisco and Las Vegas, starting with employee rides in San Francisco's SoMa neighborhood and the Las Vegas Strip. "We have achieved that internal safety readiness" required to launch the service, said co-founder and CTO Jesse Levinson on the TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 stage. TechCrunch reports: The announcement comes a decade after Zoox was founded and four years since it was acquired by Amazon and unveiled its purpose-built robotaxi. In that time, the nascent autonomous vehicle industry has gone through the full hype cycle that led to multi-billion-dollar valuations and later a wave of shutdowns and consolidation. "We still exist," Levinson said, in a nod to the tumult the industry has gone through in recent years.

Levinson said Zoox is going to take a "measured approach" to rolling out its robotaxi service, and noted that his company has been working closely with local and federal safety regulators. "I can say that in the next few weeks, we're actually going to have a couple dozen Zoox robotaxis across our Foster City, San Francisco and Las Vegas, geofences that will expand several fold over the next year," he said. "And then, you know, 2026 is when we're going to really start cranking out production vehicles at very large scale."

He also said Zoox will launch an "explorer" program of early riders who will be able to use the robotaxis for free before opening the service up to paying customers. (Rival Waymo operated a similar invite-only early rider program before opening its service to the paying public.) These early riders, or explorers, will gain access to the Zoox vehicles early next year starting with Las Vegas, Levinson said. The Zoox AVs will operate throughout the "most busy 16 hours" of the day, Levinson said, noting that it's "so boring at four in the morning, we don't think we would learn very much."

OpenAI on Thursday launched a search feature within ChatGPT, its viral chatbot, that positions the high-powered AI startup to better compete with search engines like Google, Microsoft's Bing and Perplexity. From a report: ChatGPT search offers up-to-the-minute sports scores, stock quotes, news, weather and more, powered by real-time web search and partnerships with news and data providers, according to the company. It began beta-testing the search engine, called SearchGPT, in July.

The release could have implications for Google as the dominant search engine. Since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, Alphabet investors have been concerned that OpenAI could take market share from Google in search by giving consumers new ways to seek information online.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg laid down the newest marker in generative AI training on Wednesday, saying that the next major release of the company's Llama model is being trained on a cluster of GPUs that's "bigger than anything" else that's been reported. From a report: Llama 4 development is well underway, Zuckerberg told investors and analysts on an earnings call, with an initial launch expected early next year. "We're training the Llama 4 models on a cluster that is bigger than 100,000 H100s, or bigger than anything that I've seen reported for what others are doing," Zuckerberg said, referring to the Nvidia chips popular for training AI systems. "I expect that the smaller Llama 4 models will be ready first."

Increasing the scale of AI training with more computing power and data is widely believed to be key to developing significantly more capable AI models. While Meta appears to have the lead now, most of the big players in the field are likely working toward using compute clusters with more than 100,000 advanced chips. In March, Meta and Nvidia shared details about clusters of about 25,000 H100s that were used to develop Llama 3.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Engadget: Last month at Meta Connect, Mark Zuckerberg said that Meta AI was "on track" to become the most-used generative AI assistant in the world. The company has now passed a significant milestone toward that goal, with Meta AI passing the 500 million user mark, Zuckerberg revealed during the company's latest earnings call. The half billion user mark comes just barely a year after the social network first launched its AI assistant last fall. Zuckerberg said the company still expects to become the "most-used" assistant by the end of 2024, though he's never specified how the company is measuring that metric. Zuck said that AI-driven improvements in feed and video recommendations have led to an 8% increase in time spent on Facebook and 5% increase on Instagram this year. Advertisers have also leveraged the company's AI tools to generate over 15 million ads in just the past month.

Separately, Meta's Threads app is gaining over a million new sign-ups daily, with nearly 275 million total monthly users.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Behind the Black: According to a new very detailed engineering analysis into the causes of the collapse of the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico in 2020, the failure was caused first by a surprising interaction between the radio electronics of Arecibo and the traditional methods used to anchor the cables, and second by a failure of inspections to spot the problem as it became obvious.

The surprising engineering discovery is illustrated [here (PNG)]. The main antenna of Arecibo was suspended above the bowl below by three main cables. The figure shows the basic design of the system used to anchor the cable ends to their sockets. The end of the cable bunches would be inserted into the socket, spread apart, and then zinc would be poured in to fill the gap and then act as a plug and glue to hold the cables in place. According to the report, this system has been used for decades in many applications very successfully.

What the report found however was at Arecibo over time the cable bunch and zinc plug slowly began to pull out of the socket, what the report labels as "zinc creep." This was noted by inspectors, but dismissed as a concern because they still believed the engineering margins were still high enough to prevent failure at this point. In fact, this is exactly where the structure failed in 2020, with the first cable separating as shown in August 2020. The second cable did so in a similar manner in November 2020.

The report concluded that the "only hypothesis the committee could develop that provides a plausible but unprovable answer to all these questions and the observed socket failure pattern is that the socket zinc creep was unexpectedly accelerated in the Arecibo Telescope's uniquely powerful electromagnetic radiation environment. The Arecibo Telescope cables were suspended across the beam of 'the most powerful radio transmitter on Earth.'"

First we had friends. Then we had influencers. And if Mark Zuckerberg is correct, the next big thing in our social media feeds will be AI generated content. Lots of it. Fortune: Zuckerberg described our future feeds during Facebook-parent company Meta's third quarter earnings conference call on Wednesday, describing it as a natural evolution. "I think were going to add a whole new category of content which is AI generated or AI summarized content, or existing content pulled together by AI in some way," the Meta CEO said. "And I think that that's gonna be very exciting for Facebook and Instagram and maybe Threads, or other kinds of feed experiences over time."

Zuckerberg touted the company's Llama large language model and the success of products it powers, such as the Meta AI chatbot that is now used by more than 500 million users every month. But Llama will increasingly play a role across Meta's business, Zuckerberg said, including tools for business customers and advertisers. As AI tools become more widespread, AI content will proliferate within social media feeds. Such feeds are actively being worked on inside Meta, Zuckerberg noted. "It's something we're starting to test different things around." "I don't know if we know what's exactly going to work really well yet, but some things are really promising," he added. "I have high confidence that over the next several years, this will be one of the important trends and one of the important applications."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Siemens will buy Altair Engineering for $10.6 billion, the American engineering software firm said on Wednesday, as the German company seeks to strengthen its presence in the fast-growing industrial software market. The offer price of $113 per share represents a premium of about 18.7% to Altair's closing price on Oct. 21, a day before Reuters first reported that the company was exploring a sale. The deal for Michigan-based Altair is Siemens's biggest acquisition since Siemens Healthineers bought medical device maker Varian Medical Systems for $16.4 million in 2020. [...]

The transaction is anticipated to add to Siemens' earnings per share in about two years from the deal's closing, which is expected in the second half of 2025. It will also increase Siemens' digital business revenue by about 8%, adding approximately 600 million euros ($651.36 million) to the company's digital business revenue in fiscal 2023. The transaction would have a revenue impact of about $500 million per year in the mid-term and more than $1 billion per year in the long term, Siemens said.

Comcast says the latest installment of Call of Duty, released on October 25th, resulted in a whopping 19 percent of its overall traffic last week. The ISP says it's the company's "biggest weak in internet history." The Verge reports: It's not really possible to quantify that further, given Comcast didn't provide any specific numbers -- either about how many customers were downloading the game or how big their downloads were. Ranging between 84.4GB for the PlayStation version and 102GB for the PC edition Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 is, in the grand tradition of Call of Duty games, a hefty download. It can be as much as 300GB if players choose to go ahead and download Modern Warfare II and III and all the associated content packs and languages, as Activision explained in June. The announcement underscores "just how restrictive its 1.2TB data cap can be in 2024," notes The Verge. "For any players who did download the whole massive 300GB package, they'll have wiped out a huge chunk of their 1.2TB Xfinity data cap in one fell swoop."

"If they used their internet as normal otherwise, that could put them right up against or even blow past that cap. Given that my family used nearly 800GB last month without any notably large game downloads, it wouldn't be that hard at all."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Intercept: Less than a year after OpenAI quietly signaled it wanted to do business with the Pentagon, a procurement document obtained by The Intercept shows U.S. Africa Command, or AFRICOM, believes access to OpenAI's technology is "essential" for its mission. The September 30 document lays out AFRICOM's rationale for buying cloud computing services directly from Microsoft as part of its $9 billion Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability contract, rather than seeking another provider on the open market. "The USAFRICOM operates in a dynamic and evolving environment where IT plays a critical role in achieving mission objectives," the document reads, including "its vital mission in support of our African Mission Partners [and] USAFRICOM joint exercises."

The document, labeled Controlled Unclassified Information, is marked as FEDCON, indicating it is not meant to be distributed beyond government or contractors. It shows AFRICOM's request was approved by the Defense Information Systems Agency. While the price of the purchase is redacted, the approval document notes its value is less than $15 million. Like the rest of the Department of Defense, AFRICOM -- which oversees the Pentagon's operations across Africa, including local military cooperation with U.S. allies there -- has an increasing appetite for cloud computing. The Defense Department already purchases cloud computing access from Microsoft via the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability project. This new document reflects AFRICOM's desire to bypass contracting red tape and buy immediatelyMicrosoft Azure cloud services, including OpenAI software, without considering other vendors. AFRICOM states that the "ability to support advanced AI/ML workloads is crucial. This includes services for search, natural language processing, [machine learning], and unified analytics for data processing." And according to AFRICOM, Microsoft's Azure cloud platform, which includes a suite of tools provided by OpenAI, is the only cloud provider capable of meeting its needs.

Microsoft began selling OpenAI's GPT-4 large language model to defense customers in June 2023. Earlier this year, following the revelation that OpenAI had changed its mind on military work, the company announced a cybersecurity collaboration with DARPA in January and said its tools would be used for an unspecified veteran suicide prevention initiative. In April, Microsoft pitched the Pentagon on using DALL-E, OpenAI's image generation tool, for command and control software. But the AFRICOM document marks the first confirmed purchase of OpenAI's products by a U.S. combatant command whose mission is one of killing. OpenAI's stated corporate mission remains "to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity." The AFRICOM document marks the first confirmed purchase of OpenAI's products by a U.S. combatant command whose mission is one of killing. "Without access to Microsoft's integrated suite of AI tools and services, USAFRICOM would face significant challenges in analyzing and extracting actionable insights from vast amounts of data," reads the AFRICOM document. "This could lead to delays in decision-making, compromised situational awareness, and decreased agility in responding to dynamic and evolving threats across the African continent." The document contains little information about how exactly the OpenAI tools will be used.

Visa customers with eligible debit cards will be able to deposit funds into their Coinbase accounts -- sometimes instantly -- via a partnership announced by the payments giant and crypto exchange. From a report: Coinbase already has millions of connections to customers' debit cards but this new development allows for the real-time flow of funds for customers in the US and European Union, according to the Tuesday statement.

Eligible Visa debit card holders can now "take advantage of trading opportunities day and night," said Yanilsa Gonzalez Ore, head of the Visa Direct business for North America. Visa, which powers the Coinbase debit card, said customers will also be able to buy cryptocurrencies on Coinbase with an eligible debit card and cash out their money from the platform to a bank account, also via the card.