Google Pledges to Destroy Browsing Data to Settle ‘Incognito’ Lawsuit Google pledged to destroy data that reflects millions of users’ Web-browsing histories as part of a settlement of a lawsuit that accused the company of tracking people without their knowledge. The class action, filed in 2020, accused Google of misleading users about how Chrome tracked the activity of anyone who used the private “Incognito” browsing option. The settlement sets out the actions the company will take to change its practices around private browsing, including destroying billions of data points the lawsuit alleged it improperly collected. The Wall Street Journal; Erin Mulvaney; Miles Kruppa
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Google AI could soon use a person’s cough to diagnose disease Machine-learning system trained on millions of human audio clips shows promise for detecting COVID-19 and tuberculosis. A team led by Google scientists has developed a machine-learning tool that can help to detect and monitor health conditions by evaluating noises such as coughing and breathing. The artificial intelligence (AI) system1, trained on millions of audio clips of human sounds, might one day be used by physicians to diagnose diseases including COVID-19 and tuberculosis and to assess how well a person’s lungs are functioning. AI detects eye disease and risk of Parkinson’s from retinal images This is not the first time a research group has explored using sound as a biomarker for disease. The concept gained traction during the COVID-19 pandemic, when scientists discovered that it was possible to detect the respiratory disease through a person’s cough2. What’s new about the Google system — called Health Acoustic Repres
The Fight for AI Talent To attract workers with generative AI expertise, tech companies increasingly are offering million-dollar annual compensation packages with accelerated stock-vesting schedules. Others are poaching entire engineering teams. This comes as other areas of the tech industry have seen major layoffs. In high demand are those who have experience training large language models (LLMs) and AI salespeople. SBT Industries' Justin Kinsey said some candidates can be persuaded to switch companies with promises of autonomy over their work. The Wall Street Journal; Katherine Bindley (March 27, 2024)
The Global AI Talent Tracker 2.0 Since launching our talent tracker in 2020, artificial intelligence (AI) has taken the world by storm. Ostensible breakthroughs in large language models and machine learning methods, as well as staggering improvements in compute capabilities, have made the power and potential of AI demonstrably clear. While companies and institutions are racing to monetize the power of AI, the prospect of its full potential is also giving pause to governments around the world. Much uncertainty centers on how to balance AI’s power to solve a range of economic and social problems with curtailing the downsides of its potential. But what’s certain is that a large chunk of the tech world’s capital and talent will be deployed toward bringing AI applications to the real world. If anything, the competition among countries in this arena will be fiercer than ever—and much of that competition will be over the indispensable input of an AI ecosystem: talent. Talent also happens
Google DeepMind Unveils AI Football Coach Researchers at Google DeepMind collaborated with English Premier League club Liverpool to develop an AI football coach. The geometric deep learning model TacticAI was trained on a dataset of 7,176 corner kicks from the English Premier League from 2020 to 2023. After analyzing corner kicks with different player configurations, it can suggest positional improvements. In a study, experts including data scientists, a video analyst, and a coaching assistant chose TacticAI's recommendations over existing strategies 90% of the time. Financial Times; Michael Peel (March 19, 2024)
According to Sam Altman, the GPT-4 language model, launched almost a year ago and still considered one of the most effective, "kind of sucks", as he put it in this podcast. "I think it's our duty to live a few years into the future and remember that the tools we have today are going to suck a little bit, looking back, and that's how we make sure the future will be better," the entrepreneur assured. Sam Altman: OpenAI, GPT-5, Sora, Board Saga, Elon Musk, Ilya, Power & AGI | Lex Fridman Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvqFAi7vkBc
Abel Prize Awarded for Studies of Universe’s Randomness Michel Talagrand of France has credited a brush with blindness for leading to the work that resulted in his recognition by the math equivalent of the Nobel Prize. Share full article Michel Talagrand, a retired researcher at France’s National Center for Scientific Research, won the Abel Prize for advances in understanding randomness in the universe. Credit... Peter Bagde/Typos1/Abel Prize 2024 By Kenneth Chang Kenneth Chang has reported on the Abel Prize winners of 2018 , 2019 , 2020 , 2021 , 2022 and 2023 . March 20, 2024, 7:00 a.m. ET https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/20/science/abel-prize-mathematics-randomness.html