OpenAI is launching an online search tool in a direct challenge to Google, opening up a new front in the tech industry's race to commercialise advances in generative artificial intelligence. From a report: The experimental product, known as SearchGPT [non-paywalled], will initially only be available to a small group of users, with the San Francisco-based company opening a 10,000-person waiting list to test the service on Thursday. The product is visually distinct from ChatGPT as it goes beyond generating a single answer by offering a rail of links -- similar to a search engine -- that allows users to click through to external websites.

[...] SearchGPT will "provide up-to-date information from the web while giving you clear links to relevant sources," according to OpenAI. The new search tool will be able to access sites even if they have opted out of training OpenAI's generative AI tools, such as ChatGPT.

Google DeepMind has announced that its AI systems, AlphaProof and AlphaGeometry 2, have achieved silver medal performance at the 2024 International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO), solving four out of six problems and scoring 28 out of 42 possible points in a significant breakthrough for AI in mathematical reasoning. This marks the first time an AI system has reached such a high level of performance in this prestigious competition, which has long been considered a benchmark for advanced mathematical reasoning capabilities in machine learning.

AlphaProof, a system that combines a pre-trained language model with reinforcement learning techniques, demonstrated its new capability by solving two algebra problems and one number theory problem, including the competition's most challenging question. Meanwhile, AlphaGeometry 2 successfully tackled a complex geometry problem, Google wrote in a blog post. The systems' solutions were formally verified and scored by prominent mathematicians, including Fields Medal winner Prof Sir Timothy Gowers and IMO Problem Selection Committee Chair Dr Joseph Myers, lending credibility to the achievement.

The development of these AI systems represents a significant step forward in bridging the gap between natural language processing and formal mathematical reasoning, the company argued. By fine-tuning a version of Google's Gemini model to translate natural language problem statements into formal mathematical language, the researchers created a vast library of formalized problems, enabling AlphaProof to train on millions of mathematical challenges across various difficulty levels and topic areas. While the systems' performance is impressive, challenges remain, particularly in the field of combinatorics where both AI models were unable to solve the given problems. Researchers at Google DeepMind continue to investigate these limitations, the company said, aiming to further improve the systems' capabilities across all areas of mathematics.

Early termination fees are "a bit like heroin for Adobe," according to an Adobe executive quoted in the FTC's newly unredacted complaint against the company for allegedly hiding fees and making it too hard to cancel Creative Cloud. The Verge: "There is absolutely no way to kill off ETF or talk about it more obviously" in the order flow without "taking a big business hit," this executive said. That's the big reveal in the unredacted complaint, which also contains previously unseen allegations that Adobe was internally aware of studies showing its order and cancellation flows were too complicated and customers were unhappy with surprise early termination fees.

In a short interview, Adobe's general counsel and chief trust officer, Dana Rao, pushed back on both the specific quote and the FTC's complaint more generally, telling me that he was "disappointed in the way they're continuing to take comments out of context from non-executive employees from years ago to make their case."

samleecole writes: A leaked document obtained by 404 Media shows company-wide effort at generative AI company Runway, where employees collected thousands of YouTube videos and pirated content for training data for its Gen-3 Alpha model. The model -- initially codenamed Jupiter and released officially as Gen-3 -- drew widespread praise from the AI development community and technology outlets covering its launch when Runway released it in June. Last year, Runway raised $141 million from investors including Google and Nvidia, at a $1.5 billion valuation.

The spreadsheet of training data viewed by 404 Media and our testing of the model indicates that part of its training data is popular content from the YouTube channels of thousands of media and entertainment companies, including The New Yorker, VICE News, Pixar, Disney, Netflix, Sony, and many others. It also includes links to channels and individual videos belonging to popular influencers and content creators, including Casey Neistat, Sam Kolder, Benjamin Hardman, Marques Brownlee, and numerous others.

Yesterday, GM announced it was delaying production of the Cruise Origin indefinitely, opting to use the Chevy Bolt as the main vehicle for its self-driving efforts. Introduced four years ago, the Cruise Origin embodied a futuristic vision with no steering wheels or pedals and 'campfire' seating for six passengers, all while providing wireless internet. However, as Fortune's Jessica Mathews writes, the company appears to have lost interest in that vision (source paywalled; alternative source) -- at least for now. From the report: To hear GM CEO and Cruise Chair Mary Barra, the demise of the Origin comes down to costs and regulation. GM's "per unit-costs will be much lower" by focusing on Bolts instead of Origin vehicles, Barra wrote in a quarterly letter to shareholders Tuesday. Barra discussed the regulatory challenges during the quarterly earnings call, explaining the company's view that deploying the Origin was going to require "legislative change." "As we looked at this, we thought it was better to get rid of that risk," Barra said.

All robo-taxi companies have been waiting on the green light from regulators for the approvals needed to add these futuristic pedal-less cars into their commercial fleets. While the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration adjusted its rules so that carmakers could manufacture and deploy cars without pedals or steering, state DMVs still have many restrictions set in place when it comes to people riding in them. GM isn't completely swearing off the concept of steering-wheel free cars -- Barra noted that there could be an opportunity for a "vehicle like the Origin in the future."

Investigative journalist and cybersecurity expert Brian Krebs writes: The Chinese company in charge of handing out domain names ending in ".top" has been given until mid-August 2024 to show that it has put in place systems for managing phishing reports and suspending abusive domains, or else forfeit its license to sell domains. The warning comes amid the release of new findings that .top was the most common suffix in phishing websites over the past year, second only to domains ending in ".com." On July 16, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) sent a letter to the owners of the .top domain registry. ICANN has filed hundreds of enforcement actions against domain registrars over the years, but in this case ICANN singled out a domain registry responsible for maintaining an entire top-level domain (TLD). Among other reasons, the missive chided the registry for failing to respond to reports about phishing attacks involving .top domains.

"Based on the information and records gathered through several weeks, it was determined that .TOP Registry does not have a process in place to promptly, comprehensively, and reasonably investigate and act on reports of DNS Abuse," the ICANN letter reads (PDF). ICANN's warning redacted the name of the recipient, but records show the .top registry is operated by a Chinese entity called Jiangsu Bangning Science & Technology Co. Ltd. Representatives for the company have not responded to requests for comment.

Domains ending in .top were represented prominently in a new phishing report released today by the Interisle Consulting Group, which sources phishing data from several places, including the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG), OpenPhish, PhishTank, and Spamhaus. Interisle's newest study examined nearly two million phishing attacks in the last year, and found that phishing sites accounted for more than four percent of all new .top domains between May 2023 and April 2024. Interisle said .top has roughly 2.76 million domains in its stable, and that more than 117,000 of those were phishing sites in the past year.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has advocated for open-source AI development, asserting it as a strategic advantage for the United States against China. In a blog post, Zuckerberg argued that closing off AI models would not effectively prevent Chinese access, given their espionage capabilities, and would instead disadvantage U.S. allies and smaller entities. He writes: Our adversaries are great at espionage, stealing models that fit on a thumb drive is relatively easy, and most tech companies are far from operating in a way that would make this more difficult. It seems most likely that a world of only closed models results in a small number of big companies plus our geopolitical adversaries having access to leading models, while startups, universities, and small businesses miss out on opportunities. Plus, constraining American innovation to closed development increases the chance that we don't lead at all. Instead, I think our best strategy is to build a robust open ecosystem and have our leading companies work closely with our government and allies to ensure they can best take advantage of the latest advances and achieve a sustainable first-mover advantage over the long term.

AI is increasingly being employed in job interviews across China and India, marking a significant shift in recruitment practices in the region. This follows a similar practice making inroads in the U.S. Rest of World adds: A 2023 survey of 1,000 human-resources workers by the U.S. firm ResumeBuilder found that 10% of companies were already using AI in the hiring process, and another 30% planned to start the following year. The research firm Gartner listed natural-language chatbots as one of 2023's key innovations for the recruiting industry, designating the technology as experimental but promising. Companies like Meituan, Siemens, and Estee Lauder are using AI-powered interviews, with platforms such as MoSeeker, Talently.ai, and Instahyre leading the charge in AI recruitment solutions.

Google is now the only search engine that can surface results from Reddit, making one of the web's most valuable repositories of user generated content exclusive to the internet's already dominant search engine. 404 Media: If you use Bing, DuckDuckGo, Mojeek, Qwant or any other alternative search engine that doesn't rely on Google's indexing and search Reddit by using "site:reddit.com," you will not see any results from the last week.

DuckDuckGo is currently turning up seven links when searching Reddit, but provides no data on where the links go or why, instead only saying that "We would like to show you a description here but the site won't allow us." Older results will still show up, but these search engines are no longer able to "crawl" Reddit, meaning that Google is the only search engine that will turn up results from Reddit going forward. Searching for Reddit still works on Kagi, an independent, paid search engine that buys part of its search index from Google. The news shows how Google's near monopoly on search is now actively hindering other companies' ability to compete at a time when Google is facing increasing criticism over the quality of its search results. The news follows Google signing a $60 million deal with Reddit early this year to use the social network's content to train its LLMs.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media's Jason Koebler: The Department of Homeland Security bought a dog-like robot that it has modified with an "antenna array" that gives law enforcement the ability to overload people's home networks in an attempt to disable any internet of things devices they have, according to the transcript of a speech given by a DHS official at a border security conference for cops obtained by 404 Media. The DHS has also built an "Internet of Things" house to train officers on how to raid homes that suspects may have "booby trapped" using smart home devices, the official said.

The robot, called "NEO," is a modified version of the "Quadruped Unmanned Ground Vehicle (Q-UGV) sold to law enforcement by a company called Ghost Robotics. Benjamine Huffman, the director of DHS's Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers (FLETC), told police at the 2024 Border Security Expo in Texas that DHS is increasingly worried about criminals setting "booby traps" with internet of things and smart home devices, and that NEO allows DHS to remotely disable the home networks of a home or building law enforcement is raiding. The Border Security Expo is open only to law enforcement and defense contractors. A transcript of Huffman's speech was obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Dave Maass using a Freedom of Information Act request and was shared with 404 Media. [...]

The robot is a modified version of Ghost Robotics' Vision 60 Q-UGV, which the company says it has sold to "25+ National Security Customers" and which is marketed to both law enforcement and the military. "Our goal is to make our Q-UGVs an indispensable tool and continuously push the limits to improve its ability to walk, run, crawl, climb, and eventually swim in complex environments," the company notes on its website. "Ultimately, our robot is made to keep our warfighters, workers, and K9s out of harm's way." "NEO can enter a potentially dangerous environment to provide video and audio feedback to the officers before entry and allow them to communicate with those in that environment," Huffman said, according to the transcript. "NEO carries an onboard computer and antenna array that will allow officers the ability to create a 'denial-of-service' (DoS) event to disable 'Internet of Things' devices that could potentially cause harm while entry is made."

During Alphabet's second-quarter earnings call today, Alphabet CFO Ruth Porat announced the organization will spend an additional $5 billion on its self-driving subsidiary, Waymo. "This new round of funding, which is consistent with recent annual investment levels, will enable Waymo to continue to build the world's leading autonomous driving technology company," said Porat. TechCrunch reports: Porat noted that Google will focus on improving overall efficiencies in its "other bets" segment, which includes innovative projects that are distinct from the tech giant's core search and advertising business. Other companies in this segment are Verily, Calico, Google Ventures and drone company Wing. "Waymo is an important example of this, with its technical leadership coupled with progress on operational performance," Porat continued. The executive noted that parent company Alphabet's 10-Q form, which has yet to be filed, will have more details.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA): Alexey Soldatov, a Russian Internet pioneer and a founder of the first Internet provider in the country, has been sentenced by a court to two years in a labor colony on charges of "abuse of power." Soldatov, 72, had been detained by a court in Moscow. He is terminally ill. Very few in Russia believe in the government charges against a man widely known as a Father of the Russian Internet -- and who is less well known as the father of Andrei Soldatov, one of this article's authors. Soldatov was accused of abuse of power when managing a pool of IP-addresses by an organization he had no position at. This legal absurdity was enough to see him imprisoned even though the court knew of Soldatov's illness, which meant the court had no legal right to pass a custodial sentence. His family believes that the decision is essentially a death sentence. The article details Soldatov's history and his pivotal role in creating the Relcom network, which connected Soviet research centers and established the Soviet Union's first link to the global internet in 1990. During the 1991 KGB coup attempt, Relcom remained operational, highlighting its role in bypassing traditional media control and connecting people both within the Soviet Union and globally.

Switzerland has enacted 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. "This new law requires all public bodies to disclose the source code of software developed by or for them unless third-party rights or security concerns prevent it," writes ZDNet's Steven Vaughan-Nichols. "This 'public money, public code' approach aims to enhance government operations' transparency, security, and efficiency." From the report: Making this move wasn't easy. It began in 2011 when the Swiss Federal Supreme Court published its court application, Open Justitia, under an OSS license. The proprietary legal software company Weblaw wasn't happy about this. There were heated political and legal fights for more than a decade. Finally, the EMBAG was passed in 2023. Now, the law not only allows the release of OSS by the Swiss government or its contractors, but also requires the code to be released under an open-source license "unless the rights of third parties or security-related reasons would exclude or restrict this."

Professor Dr. Matthias Sturmer, head of the Institute for Public Sector Transformation at the Bern University of Applied Sciences, led the fight for this law. He hailed it as "a great opportunity for government, the IT industry, and society." Sturmer believes everyone will benefit from this regulation, as it reduces vendor lock-in for the public sector, allows companies to expand their digital business solutions, and potentially leads to reduced IT costs and improved services for taxpayers.

In addition to mandating OSS, the EMBAG also requires the release of non-personal and non-security-sensitive government data as Open Government Data (OGD). This dual "open by default" approach marks a significant paradigm shift towards greater openness and practical reuse of software and data. Implementing the EMBAG is expected to serve as a model for other countries considering similar measures. It aims to promote digital sovereignty and encourage innovation and collaboration within the public sector. The Swiss Federal Statistical Office (BFS) is leading the law's implementation, but the organizational and financial aspects of the OSS releases still need to be clarified.

For decades, American and Chinese scientists collaborated on supercomputers. But Chinese scientists have become more secretive as the U.S. has tried to hinder China's technological progress, and they have stopped participating altogether in a prominent international supercomputing forum. From a report: The withdrawal marked the end of an era and created a divide that Western scientists say will slow the development of AI and other technologies as countries pursue separate projects. The new secrecy also makes it harder for the U.S. government to answer a question it deems essential to national security: Does the U.S. or China have faster supercomputers? Some academics have taken it upon themselves to hunt for clues about China's supercomputing progress, scrutinizing research papers and cornering Chinese peers at conferences.

Supercomputers have become central to the U.S.-China technological Cold War because the country with the faster supercomputers can also hold an advantage in developing nuclear weapons and other military technology. "If the other guy can use a supercomputer to simulate and develop a fighter jet or weapon 20% or even 1% better than yours in terms of range, speed and accuracy, it's going to target you first, and then it's checkmate," said Jimmy Goodrich, a senior adviser for technology analysis at Rand, a think tank. The forum that China recently stopped participating in is called the Top500, which ranks the world's 500 fastest supercomputers. While the latest ranking, released in June, says the world's three fastest computers are in the U.S., the reality is probably different.

Meta has warned that the EU's approach to regulating AI is creating the "risk" that the continent is cut off from accessing cutting-edge services, while the bloc continues its effort to rein in the power of Big Tech. From a report: Rob Sherman, the social media group's deputy privacy officer and vice-president of policy, confirmed a report that it had received a request from the EU's privacy watchdog to voluntarily pause the training of its future AI models on data in the region. He told the Financial Times this was in order to give local regulators time to "get their arms around the issue of generative AI." While the Facebook owner is adhering to the request, Sherman said such moves were leading to a "gap in the technologies that are available in Europe versus" the rest of the world. He added that, with future and more advanced AI releases, "it's likely that availability in Europe could be impacted." Sherman said: "If jurisdictions can't regulate in a way that enables us to have clarity on what's expected, then it's going to be harder for us to offer the most advanced technologies in those places ... it is a realistic outcome that we're worried about."

Meta has released Llama 3.1, its largest open-source AI model to date, in a move that challenges the closed approaches of competitors like OpenAI and Google. The new model, boasting 405 billion parameters, is claimed by Meta to outperform GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet on several benchmarks, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg predicting that Meta AI will become the most widely used assistant by year-end.

Llama 3.1, which Meta says was trained using over 16,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs, is being made available to developers through partnerships with major tech companies including Microsoft, Amazon, and Google, potentially reducing deployment costs compared to proprietary alternatives. The release includes smaller versions with 70 billion and 8 billion parameters, and Meta is introducing new safety tools to help developers moderate the model's output. While Meta isn't disclosing what all data it used to train its models, the company confirmed it used synthetic data to enhance the model's capabilities. The company is also expanding its Meta AI assistant, powered by Llama 3.1, to support additional languages and integrate with its various platforms, including WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook, as well as its Quest virtual reality headset.

AT&T's February wireless outage disrupted over 92 million voice calls and hindered more than 25,000 attempts to reach emergency services, an FCC report said. The 12-hour nationwide incident affected approximately 125 million devices, including those of other providers using AT&T's network. Stemming from an equipment configuration error during a network change, the outage also impacted first responders' communications.

Simon Sharwood reports via The Register: Chinese researchers have created a drone that weighs just over four grams -- less than a sheet of printer paper -- and may be able to fly indefinitely. Documented in a paper published last week in Nature, the drone uses an electrostatic motor that weighs just 1.52 grams and is powered by solar cells that produce 4.5V. The paper asserts that the drone's design has a lift-to-power efficiency two to three times better than that found in traditional drones. The authors suggested that if rechargeable batteries can be added, the craft could be capable of 24-hour flying operations.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: Researchers from Google have built a new weather prediction model that combines machine learning with more conventional techniques, potentially yielding accurate forecasts at a fraction of the current cost. The model, called NeuralGCM and described in a paper in Nature today, bridges a divide that's grown among weather prediction experts in the last several years. While new machine-learning techniques that predict weather by learning from years of past data are extremely fast and efficient, they can struggle with long-term predictions. General circulation models, on the other hand, which have dominated weather prediction for the last 50 years, use complex equations to model changes in the atmosphere and give accurate projections, but they are exceedingly slow and expensive to run. Experts are divided on which tool will be most reliable going forward. But the new model from Google instead attempts to combine the two.

"It's not sort of physics versus AI. It's really physics and AI together," says Stephan Hoyer, an AI researcher at Google Research and a coauthor of the paper. The system still uses a conventional model to work out some of the large atmospheric changes required to make a prediction. It then incorporates AI, which tends to do well where those larger models fall flat -- typically for predictions on scales smaller than about 25 kilometers, like those dealing with cloud formations or regional microclimates (San Francisco's fog, for example). "That's where we inject AI very selectively to correct the errors that accumulate on small scales," Hoyer says. The result, the researchers say, is a model that can produce quality predictions faster with less computational power. They say NeuralGCM is as accurate as one-to-15-day forecasts from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), which is a partner organization in the research.

But the real promise of technology like this is not in better weather predictions for your local area, says Aaron Hill, an assistant professor at the School of Meteorology at the University of Oklahoma, who was not involved in this research. Instead, it's in larger-scale climate events that are prohibitively expensive to model with conventional techniques. The possibilities could range from predicting tropical cyclones with more notice to modeling more complex climate changes that are years away. "It's so computationally intensive to simulate the globe over and over again or for long periods of time," Hill says. That means the best climate models are hamstrung by the high costs of computing power, which presents a real bottleneck to research." The researchers said NeuralGCM will be open source and capable of running on less than 5,500 lines of code, compared with the nearly 377,000 lines required for the model from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Wiz, the cloud security startup that was in acquisition talks with Google, has decided not to forward with the deal and to remain an independent company, according to an internal note sent to company employees on Monday. Fortune: "While we are flattered by offers we have received, we have chosen to continue on our path to building Wiz," CEO Assaf Rappaport wrote in the note. Rappaport said in the email that the company's next target is to reach $1 billion in annual recurring revenue and to take the company public.