Starting this week millions will see AI-generated answers in Google's search results by default. But the announcement Tuesday at Google's annual developer conference suggests a future that's "not without its risks, both to users and to Google itself," argues the Washington Post: For years, Google has been shielded for liability for linking users to bad, harmful or illegal information by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. But legal experts say that shield probably won't apply when its AI answers search questions directly. "As we all know, generative AIs hallucinate," said James Grimmelmann, professor of digital and information law at Cornell Law School and Cornell Tech. "So when Google uses a generative AI to summarize what webpages say, and the AI gets it wrong, Google is now the source of the harmful information," rather than just the distributor of it...

Adam Thierer, senior fellow at the nonprofit free-market think tank R Street, worries that innovation could be throttled if Congress doesn't extend Section 230 to cover AI tools. "As AI is integrated into more consumer-facing products, the ambiguity about liability will haunt developers and investors," he predicted. "It is particularly problematic for small AI firms and open-source AI developers, who could be decimated as frivolous legal claims accumulate." But John Bergmayer, legal director for the digital rights nonprofit Public Knowledge, said there are real concerns that AI answers could spell doom for many of the publishers and creators that rely on search traffic to survive — and which AI, in turn, relies on for credible information. From that standpoint, he said, a liability regime that incentivizes search engines to continue sending users to third-party websites might be "a really good outcome."

Meanwhile, some lawmakers are looking to ditch Section 230 altogether. [Last] Sunday, the top Democrat and Republican on the House Energy and Commerce Committee released a draft of a bill that would sunset the statute within 18 months, giving Congress time to craft a new liability framework in its place. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Reps. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) and Frank Pallone Jr. (D-N.J.) argued that the law, which helped pave the way for social media and the modern internet, has "outlived its usefulness."

The tech industry trade group NetChoice [which includes Google, Meta, X, and Amazon] fired back on Monday that scrapping Section 230 would "decimate small tech" and "discourage free speech online."
The digital law professor points out Google has traditionally escaped legal liability by attributing its answers to specific sources — but it's not just Google that has to worry about the issue. The article notes that Microsoft's Bing search engine also supplies AI-generated answers (from Microsoft's Copilot). "And Meta recently replaced the search bar in Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp with its own AI chatbot."

The article also note sthat several U.S. Congressional committees are considering "a bevy" of AI bills...

"Albert Einstein was right," reports CNN. "There is an area at the edge of black holes where matter can no longer stay in orbit and instead falls in, as predicted by his theory of gravity."

The proof came by combining NASA's earth-orbiting NuSTAR telescope with the NICER telescope on the International Space Station to detect X-rays: A team of astronomers has for the first time observed this area — called the "plunging region" — in a black hole about 10,000 light-years from Earth. "We've been ignoring this region, because we didn't have the data," said research scientist Andrew Mummery, lead author of the study published Thursday in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. "But now that we do, we couldn't explain it any other way."
Mummery — also a Fellow in Oxford's physics department — told CNN, "We went out searching for this one specifically — that was always the plan. We've argued about whether we'd ever be able to find it for a really long time. People said it would be impossible, so confirming it's there is really exciting."

Mummery described the plunging region as "like the edge of a waterfall." Unlike the event horizon, which is closer to the center of the black hole and doesn't let anything escape, including light and radiation, in the "plunging region" light can still escape, but matter is doomed by the powerful gravitational pull, Mummery explained. The study's findings could help astronomers better understand the formation and evolution of black holes. "We can really learn about them by studying this region, because it's right at the edge, so it gives us the most information," Mummery said...

According to Christopher Reynolds, a professor of astronomy at the University of Maryland, College Park, finding actual evidence for the "plunging region" is an important step that will let scientists significantly refine models for how matter behaves around a black hole. "For example, it can be used to measure the rotation rate of the black hole," said Reynolds, who was not involved in the study.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: There's a big debate in the tech world over whether artificial intelligence models should be "open source." Elon Musk, who helped found OpenAI in 2015, sued the startup and its chief executive, Sam Altman, on claims that the company had diverged from its mission of openness. The Biden administration is investigating the risks and benefits of open source models. Proponents of open source A.I. models say they're more equitable and safer for society, while detractors say they are more likely to be abused for malicious intent. One big hiccup in the debate? There's no agreed-upon definition of what open source A.I. actually means. And some are accusing A.I. companies of "openwashing" -- using the "open source" term disingenuously to make themselves look good. (Accusations of openwashing have previously been aimed at coding projects that used the open source label too loosely.)

In a blog post on Open Future, a European think tank supporting open sourcing, Alek Tarkowski wrote, "As the rules get written, one challenge is building sufficient guardrails against corporations' attempts at 'openwashing.'" Last month the Linux Foundation, a nonprofit that supports open-source software projects, cautioned that "this 'openwashing' trend threatens to undermine the very premise of openness -- the free sharing of knowledge to enable inspection, replication and collective advancement." Organizations that apply the label to their models may be taking very different approaches to openness. [...]

The main reason is that while open source software allows anyone to replicate or modify it, building an A.I. model requires much more than code. Only a handful of companies can fund the computing power and data curation required. That's why some experts say labeling any A.I. as "open source" is at best misleading and at worst a marketing tool. "Even maximally open A.I. systems do not allow open access to the resources necessary to 'democratize' access to A.I., or enable full scrutiny," said David Gray Widder, a postdoctoral fellow at Cornell Tech who has studied use of the "open source" label by A.I. companies.

Karl Bode writes via Techdirt: Tired of being underserved and overbilled by shitty regional broadband monopolies, back in 2002 a coalition of local Utah governments formed UTOPIA -- (the Utah Telecommunication Open Infrastructure Agency). The inter-local agency collaborative venture then set about building an "open access" fiber network that allows any ISP to then come and compete on the shared network. Two decades later and the coalition just announced that 18 different ISPs now compete for Utah resident attention over a network that now covers 21 different Utah cities. In many instances, ISPs on the network are offering symmetrical (uncapped) gigabit fiber for as little as $45 a month (plus $30 network connection fee, so $75). Some ISPs are even offering symmetrical 10 Gbps fiber for around $150 a month: "Sumo Fiber, a veteran member of the UTOPIA Open Access Marketplace, is now offering 10 Gbps symmetrical for $119, plus a $30 UTOPIA Fiber infrastructure fee, bringing the total cost to $149 per month."

It's a collaborative hybrid that blurs the line between private companies and government, and it works. And the prices being offered here are significantly less than locals often pay in highly developed tech-centric urban hubs like New York, San Francisco, or Seattle. Yet giant local ISPs like Comcast and Qwest spent decades trying to either sue this network into oblivion, or using their proxy policy orgs (like the "Utah Taxpayer Association") to falsely claim this effort would end in chaos and inevitable taxpayer tears. Yet miraculously UTOPIA is profitable, and for the last 15 years, every UTOPIA project has been paid for completely through subscriber revenues. [...] For years, real world experience and several different studies and reports (including our Copia study on this concept) have made it clear that open access networks and policies result in faster, better, more affordable broadband access. UTOPIA is proving it at scale, but numerous other municipalities have been following suit with the help of COVID relief and infrastructure bill funding.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian, written by Caroline Haskins: On May 7th and 8th in Washington, D.C., the city's biggest convention hall welcomed America's military-industrial complex, its top technology companies and its most outspoken justifiers of war crimes. Of course, that's not how they would describe it. It was the inaugural "AI Expo for National Competitiveness," hosted by the Special Competitive Studies Project -- better known as the "techno-economic" thinktank created by the former Google CEO and current billionaire Eric Schmidt. The conference's lead sponsor was Palantir, a software company co-founded by Peter Thiel that's best known for inspiring 2019 protests against its work with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) at the height of Trump's family separation policy. Currently, Palantir is supplying some of its AI products to the Israel Defense Forces.

The conference hall was also filled with booths representing the U.S. military and dozens of its contractors, ranging from Booz Allen Hamilton to a random company that was described to me as Uber for airplane software. At industry conferences like these, powerful people tend to be more unfiltered – they assume they're in a safe space, among friends and peers. I was curious, what would they say about the AI-powered violence in Gaza, or what they think is the future of war?

Attendees were told the conference highlight would be a series of panels in a large room toward the back of the hall. In reality, that room hosted just one of note. Featuring Schmidt and the Palantir CEO, Alex Karp, the fire-breathing panel would set the tone for the rest of the conference. More specifically, it divided attendees into two groups: those who see war as a matter of money and strategy, and those who see it as a matter of death. The vast majority of people there fell into group one. I've written about relationships between tech companies and the military before, so I shouldn't have been surprised by anything I saw or heard at this conference. But when it ended, and I departed DC for home, it felt like my life force had been completely sucked out of my body. Some of the noteworthy quotes from the panel and convention, as highlighted in Haskins' reporting, include:

"It's always great when the CIA helps you out," Schmidt joked when CIA deputy director David Cohen lent him his microphone when his didn't work.

The U.S. has to "scare our adversaries to death" in war, said Karp. On university graduates protesting Israel's war in Gaza, Karp described their views as a "pagan religion infecting our universities" and "an infection inside of our society."

"The peace activists are war activists," Karp insisted. "We are the peace activists."

A huge aspect of war in a democracy, Karp went on to argue, is leaders successfully selling that war domestically. "If we lose the intellectual debate, you will not be able to deploy any armies in the west ever," Karp said.

A man in nuclear weapons research jokingly referred to himself as "the new Oppenheimer."

Emilia David reports via The Verge: OpenAI has signed a deal for access to real-time content from Reddit's data API, which means it can surface discussions from the site within ChatGPT and other new products. It's an agreement similar to the one Reddit signed with Google earlier this year that was reportedly worth $60 million. The deal will also "enable Reddit to bring new AI-powered features to Redditors and mods" and use OpenAI's large language models to build applications. OpenAI has also signed up to become an advertising partner on Reddit.

No financial terms were revealed in the blog post announcing the arrangement, and neither company mentioned training data, either. That last detail is different from the deal with Google, where Reddit explicitly stated it would give Google "more efficient ways to train models." There is, however, a disclosure mentioning that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is also a shareholder in Reddit but that "This partnership was led by OpenAI's COO and approved by its independent Board of Directors." "Reddit has become one of the internet's largest open archives of authentic, relevant, and always up-to-date human conversations about anything and everything. Including it in ChatGPT upholds our belief in a connected internet, helps people find more of what they're looking for, and helps new audiences find community on Reddit," Reddit CEO Steve Huffman says.

Reddit stock has jumped on news of the deal, rising 13% on Friday to $63.64. As Reuters notes, it's "within striking distance of the record closing price of $65.11 hit in late-March, putting the company on track to add $1.2 billion to its market capitalization."

necro81 writes: Robert Dennard was working at IBM in the 1960s when he invented a way to store one bit using a single transistor and capacitor. The technology became dynamic random access memory (DRAM), which when implemented using the emerging technology of silicon integrated circuits, helped catapult computing by leaps and bounds. The first commercial DRAM chips in the late 1960s held just 1024 bits; today's DDR5 modules hold hundreds of billions.

Dr. Robert H. Dennard passed away last month at age 91. (alternate link)

In the 1970s he helped guide technology roadmaps for the ever-shrinking feature size of lithography, enabling the early years of Moore's Law. He wrote a seminal paper in 1974 relating feature size and power consumption that is now referred to as Dennard Scaling. His technological contributions earned him numerous awards, and accolades from the National Academy of Engineering, IEEE, and the National Inventor's Hall of Fame.

Microsoft plans a major shakeup of its videogame sales strategy by releasing the coming installment of Call of Duty to its subscription service instead of the longtime, lucrative approach of only selling it a la carte. WSJ: The plans, which mark the biggest change to Microsoft's gaming division since it closed the $75 billion takeover of Activision Blizzard, are expected to be announced at the company's annual Xbox showcase next month, according to people familiar with the matter. Call of Duty is one of the most successful entertainment properties ever, generating over $30 billion in lifetime revenue. Activision, which makes it, has long released new editions annually, selling about 25 million copies on average, selling for around $70 each in recent years.

Before the Microsoft deal last year, Activision was reluctant to fully embrace subscription-based models for a game that still attracts a premium price. Microsoft's subscription service, Game Pass, costs $9.99 to $16.99 a month, and provides access to hundreds of games from Microsoft and dozens of other companies.

Data center construction levels are at an all-time high. And more than ever, companies that need them have already called dibs. From a report: In the first quarter of 2024, what amounts to about half of the existing supply of data center megawattage in the US is under construction, according to real estate services firm CBRE. And 84% of that is already leased. Typically that rate had been about 50% the last few years -- already notably higher than other real estate classes. "I'm astonished and impressed by the demand for facilities yet to be fully constructed," CBRE Data Center Research Director Gordon Dolven told Sherwood.

That advanced interest means that despite the huge amount of construction, there's still going to be a shortage of data centers to meet demand. In other words, data center vacancy rates are staying low and rents high. Nationwide the vacancy rates are near record lows of 3.7% and average asking rent for data centers was up 19% year over year, according to CBRE. It was up 42% in Northern Virginia, where many data centers are located. These sorts of price jumps are "unprecedented" compared with other types of real estate. For comparison, rents for industrial and logistics real estate, another hot asset class used in e-commerce, is expected to go up 8% this year.

Michael Larabel reports via Phoronix: Following Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund providing significant funding for GNOME, Rust Coreutils, PHP, a systemd bug bounty, and numerous other free software projects, the FFmpeg multimedia library is the latest beneficiary to this funding from the Germany government. The Sovereign Tech Fund notes that the FFmpeg project is receiving 157,580 euros for 2024 and 2025.

An announcement on the FFmpeg.org project site notes: "The FFmpeg community is excited to announce that Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund has become its first governmental sponsor. Their support will help sustain the [maintenance] of the FFmpeg project, a critical open-source software multimedia component essential to bringing audio and video to billions around the world everyday."

After shutting down its awards system last July, Reddit announced that it is bringing it back, with much of the same and some new features. There'll be "a new design for awards, a new award button under eligible posts and a leaderboard showing top awards earned for a comment or a post," reports TechCrunch. From the report: The company sunset its awards program last year along with the ability for users to purchase coins. At the same time, Reddit introduced "Golden Upvotes," which were purchased directly through cash. In a new post, the company said the system wasn't as expressive as awards. "While the golden upvote was certainly simpler in theory, in practice, it missed the mark. It wasn't as fun or expressive as legacy awards, and it was unclear how it benefited the recipient," the social network said.

Users who want to give awards to posts and comments will need to buy "gold," which kind of replaces coins. On a support page, the company mentioned that, on average, awards cost anywhere between 15 to 50 gold. Gold packages in Reddit's mobile apps currently start at $1.99 for 100 gold. Users can buy as much as 2,750 gold for $49.99. The company is also adding some safeguards to the awards system, such as disabling awards in NSFW subreddits, trauma and addiction support subreddits, and subreddits with mature content. Additionally, users will be able to report awards to avoid them being used for moderator removals.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Techdirt, written by Mike Masnick: If you're a fan of chaos, well, the TikTok ban situation is providing plenty of chaos to follow. Ever since the US government made it clear it was seriously going to move forward with the obviously unconstitutional and counterproductive plan to force ByteDance to divest from TikTok or have the app effectively banned from the U.S., various rich people have been stepping up with promises to buy the app. There was former Trump Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin with plans to buy it. Then there was "mean TV investor, who wants you to forget his sketchy history" Kevin O'Leary with his own TikTok buyout plans. I'm sure there have been other rich dudes as well, though strikingly few stories of actual companies interested in purchasing TikTok.

But now there's another billionaire to add to the pile: billionaire real estate/property mogul Frank McCourt (who has had some scandals in his own history) has had an interesting second act over the last few years as a big believer in decentralized social media. He created and funded Project Liberty, which has become deeply involved in a number of efforts to create infrastructure for decentralized social media, including its own Decentralized Social Networking Protocol (DSTP).

Over the past few years, I've had a few conversations with people involved in Project Liberty and related projects. Their hearts are in the right place in wanting to rethink the internet in a manner that empowers users over big companies, even if I don't always agree with their approach (he also frequently seems to surround himself with all sorts of tech haters, who have somewhat unrealistic visions of the world). Either way, McCourt and Project Liberty have now announced a plan to bid on TikTok. They plan to merge it into his decentralization plans. "Frank McCourt, Founder of Project Liberty and Executive Chairman of McCourt Global, today announced that Project Liberty is organizing a bid to acquire the popular social media platform TikTok in the U.S., with the goal of placing people and data empowerment at the center of the platform's design and purpose," reads a press release from Project Liberty.

"Working in consultation with Guggenheim Securities, the investment banking and capital markets business of Guggenheim Partners, and Kirkland & Ellis, one of the world's largest law firms, as well as world-renowned technologists, academics, community leaders, parents and engaged citizens, this bid for TikTok offers an innovative, alternative vision for the platform's infrastructure -- one that allows people to reclaim agency over their digital identities and data by proposing to migrate the platform to a new digital open-source protocol. In launching the bid, McCourt and his partners are seizing this opportunity to return control and value back into the hands of individuals and provide Americans with a meaningful voice, choice, and stake in the future of the web."

Kylie Robison reports via The Verge: Hugging Face, one of the biggest names in machine learning, is committing $10 million in free shared GPUs to help developers create new AI technologies. The goal is to help small developers, academics, and startups counter the centralization of AI advancements. [...] Delangue is concerned about AI startups' ability to compete with the tech giants. Most significant advancements in artificial intelligence -- like GPT-4, the algorithms behind Google Search, and Tesla's Full Self-Driving system -- remain hidden within the confines of major tech companies. Not only are these corporations financially incentivized to keep their models proprietary, but with billions of dollars at their disposal for computational resources, they can compound those gains and race ahead of competitors, making it impossible for startups to keep up. Hugging Face aims to make state-of-the-art AI technologies accessible to everyone, not just the tech giants. [...]

Access to compute poses a significant challenge to constructing large language models, often favoring companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, which secure deals with cloud providers for substantial computing resources. Hugging Face aims to level the playing field by donating these shared GPUs to the community through a new program called ZeroGPU. The shared GPUs are accessible to multiple users or applications concurrently, eliminating the need for each user or application to have a dedicated GPU. ZeroGPU will be available via Hugging Face's Spaces, a hosting platform for publishing apps, which has over 300,000 AI demos created so far on CPU or paid GPU, according to the company.

Access to the shared GPUs is determined by usage, so if a portion of the GPU capacity is not actively utilized, that capacity becomes available for use by someone else. This makes them cost-effective, energy-efficient, and ideal for community-wide utilization. ZeroGPU uses Nvidia A100 GPU devices to power this operation -- which offer about half the computation speed of the popular and more expensive H100s. "It's very difficult to get enough GPUs from the main cloud providers, and the way to get them -- which is creating a high barrier to entry -- is to commit on very big numbers for long periods of times," Delangue said. Typically, a company would commit to a cloud provider like Amazon Web Services for one or more years to secure GPU resources. This arrangement disadvantages small companies, indie developers, and academics who build on a small scale and can't predict if their projects will gain traction. Regardless of usage, they still have to pay for the GPUs. "It's also a prediction nightmare to know how many GPUs and what kind of budget you need," Delangue said.

Google and Samsung used to update smartphone software for only three years. That has changed. From a report: Every smartphone has an expiration date. That day arrives when the software updates stop coming and you start missing out on new apps and security protections. With most phones, this used to happen after about only three years. But things are finally starting to change. The new number is seven. I first noticed this shift when I reviewed Google's $700 Pixel 8 smartphone in October. Google told me that it had committed to provide software updates for the phone for seven years, up from three years for its previous Pixels, because it was the right thing to do.

I was skeptical that this would become a trend. But this year, Samsung, the most profitable Android phone maker, set a similar software timeline for its $800 Galaxy S24 smartphone. Then Google said it would do the same for its $500 Pixel 8A, the budget version of the Pixel 8, which arrived in stores this week. Both companies said they had expanded their software support to make their phones last longer. This is a change from how companies used to talk about phones. Not long ago, tech giants unveiled new devices that encouraged people to upgrade every two years. But in the last few years, smartphone sales have slowed down worldwide as their improvements have become more marginal. Nowadays, people want their phones to endure.

Samsung and Google, the two most influential Android device makers, are playing catch-up with Apple, which has traditionally provided software updates for iPhones for roughly seven years. These moves will make phones last much longer and give people more flexibility to decide when it's time to upgrade. Google said in a statement that it had expanded its software commitment for the Pixel 8A because it wanted customers to feel confident in Pixel phones. And Samsung said it would deliver seven years of software updates, which increase security and reliability, for all its Galaxy flagship phones from now on.

In an op-ed on Windows Central, the site's co-managing editor Jez Corden laments Microsoft's "short-sighted" decision-making and "inconsistent" investment in its products and services, which he argues has led to a loss of trust among customers and missed opportunities in the tech industry. Despite Microsoft's advancements in AI and cloud computing, the company has made "baffling" decisions such as shutting down Windows Phone, under-investing in Xbox, and canceling promising Surface products.

The author argues that Microsoft's lack of commitment to security, customer support, and long-term quality has "damaged" its reputation and hindered its potential for growth. Examples include recent hacking scandals, poor customer service experiences, and the aggressive promotion of Microsoft Edge at the expense of user choice. The author also expresses concern over Microsoft's handling of the Xbox brand, particularly the decision to release exclusive games on PlayStation, which could undermine the reasons for customers to choose Xbox. The op-ed concludes that while Microsoft has the potential to be a leader in the tech industry, its pattern of short-sighted decisions and failure to learn from past mistakes has led to a growing sense of doubt among its customers and observers.