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  • With Gemini on Android, Google Points to Mobile Computing’s Future—and Past

    With Gemini on Android, Google Points to Mobile Computing’s Future—and Past

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    Nearly a decade ago, Google showed off a feature called Now on Tap in Android Marshmallow—tap and hold the home button and Google will surface helpful contextual information related to what’s on the screen. Talking about a movie with a friend over text? Now on Tap could get you details about the title without having to leave the messaging app. Looking at a restaurant in Yelp? The phone could surface OpenTable recommendations with just a tap.

    I was fresh out of college, and these improvements felt exciting and magical—its ability to understand what was on the screen and predict the actions you might want to take felt future-facing. It was one of my favorite Android features. It slowly morphed into Google Assistant, which was great in its own right, but not quite the same.

    Today, at Google’s I/O developer conference in Mountain View, California, the new features Google is touting in its Android operating system feel like the Now on Tap of old—allowing you to harness contextual information around you to make using your phone a bit easier. Except this time, these features are powered by a decade’s worth of advancements in large language models.

    “I think what’s exciting is we now have the technology to build really exciting assistants,” Dave Burke, vice president of engineering on Android, tells me over a Google Meet video call. “We need to be able to have a computer system that understands what it sees and I don’t think we had the technology back then to do it well. Now we do.”

    I got a chance to speak with Burke and Sameer Samat, president of the Android ecosystem at Google, about what’s new in the world of Android, the company’s new AI assistant Gemini, and what it all holds for the future of the OS. Samat referred to these updates as a “once-in-a-generational opportunity to reimagine what the phone can do, and to rethink all of Android.”

    Circle to Search … Your Homework

    The upgraded Circle to Search in action.

    Courtesy of Google

    It starts with Circle to Search, which is Google’s new way of approaching Search on mobile. Much like the experience of Now on Tap, Circle to Search—which the company debuted a few months ago—is more interactive than just typing into a search box. (You literally circle what you want to search on the screen.) Burke says, “It’s a very visceral, fun, and modern way to search … It skews younger as well because it’s so fun to use.”

    Samat claims Google has received positive feedback from consumers, but Circle to Search’s latest feature hails specifically from student feedback. Circle to Search can now be used on physics and math problems when a user circles them—Google will spit out step-by-step instructions on completing the problems without the user leaving the syllabus app.

    Samat made it clear Gemini wasn’t just providing answers but was showing students how to solve the problems. Later this year, Circle to Search will be able to solve more complex problems like diagrams and graphs. This is all powered by Google’s LearnLM models, which are fine-tuned for education.

    Gemini Gets More Contextual on Android

    Gemini is Google’s AI assistant that is in many ways eclipsing Google Assistant. Really—when you fire up Google Assistant on most Android phones these days, there’s an option to replace it with Gemini instead. So naturally, I asked Burke and Samat whether this meant Assistant was heading to the Google Graveyard.

    “The way to look at it is that Gemini is an opt-in experience on the phone,” Samat says. “I think obviously over time Gemini is becoming more advanced and is evolving. We don’t have anything to announce today, but there is a choice for consumers if they want to opt into this new AI-powered assistant. They can try it out and we are seeing that people are doing that and we’re getting a lot of great feedback.”

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  • How to Stop Your Data From Being Used to Train AI

    How to Stop Your Data From Being Used to Train AI

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    On its help pages, OpenAI says ChatGPT web users without accounts should navigate to Settings and then uncheck Improve the model for everyone. If you have an account and are logged in through a web browser, select ChatGPT, Settings, Data Controls, and then turn off Chat History & Training. If you’re using ChatGPT’s mobile apps, go to Settings, pick Data Controls, and turn off Chat History & Training. Changing these settings, OpenAI’s support pages say, won’t sync across different browsers or devices, so you need to make the change everywhere you use ChatGPT.

    OpenAI is about a lot more than ChatGPT. For its Dall-E 3 image generator, the startup has a form that allows you to send images to be removed from “future training datasets.” It asks for your name, email, whether you own the image rights or are getting in touch on behalf of a company, details of the image, and any uploads of the image(s). OpenAI also says if you have a “high volume” of images hosted online that you want removed from training data, then it may be “more efficient” to add GPTBot to the robots.txt file of the website where the images are hosted.

    Traditionally a website’s robots.txt file—a simple text file that usually sits at websitename.com/robots.txt—has been used to tell search engines, and others, whether they can include your pages in their results. It can now also be used to tell AI crawlers not to scrape what you have published—and AI companies have said they’ll honor this arrangement.

    Perplexity

    Perplexity is a startup that uses AI to help you search the web and find answers to questions. Like all of the other software on this list, you are automatically opted in to having your interactions and data used to train Perplexity’s AI further. Turn this off by clicking on your account name, scrolling down to the Account section, and turning off the AI Data Retention toggle.

    Quora

    Image may contain Page Text File and Webpage

    Quora via Matt Burgess

    Quora says it “currently” doesn’t use answers to people’s questions, posts, or comments for training AI. It also hasn’t sold any user data for AI training, a spokesperson says. However, it does offer opt-outs in case this changes in the future. To do this, visit its Settings page, click to Privacy, and turn off the “Allow large language models to be trained on your content” option. Despite this choice, there are some Quora posts that may be used for training LLMs. If you reply to a machine-generated answer, the company’s help pages say, then those answers may be used for AI training. It points out that third parties may just scrape its content anyway.

    Rev

    Rev, a voice transcription service that uses both human freelancers and AI to transcribe audio, says it uses data “perpetually” and “anonymously” to train its AI systems. Even if you delete your account, it will still train its AI on that information.

    Kendell Kelton, head of brand and corporate communications at Rev, says it has the “largest and most diverse data set of voices,” made up of more than 6.5 million hours of voice recording. Kelton says Rev does not sell user data to any third parties. The firm’s terms of service say data will be used for training, and that customers are able to opt out. People can opt out of their data being used by sending an email to [email protected], its help pages say.

    Slack

    All of those random Slack messages at work might be used by the company to train its models as well. “Slack has used machine learning in its product for many years. This includes platform-level machine-learning models for things like channel and emoji recommendations,” says Jackie Rocca, a vice president of product at Slack who’s focused on AI.

    Even though the company does not use customer data to train a large language model for its Slack AI product, Slack may use your interactions to improve the software’s machine-learning capabilities. “To develop AI/ML models, our systems analyze Customer Data (e.g. messages, content, and files) submitted to Slack,” says Slack’s privacy page. Similar to Adobe, there’s not much you can do on an individual level to opt out if you’re using an enterprise account.

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  • Apple's MM1 AI Model Shows a Sleeping Giant Is Waking Up

    Apple's MM1 AI Model Shows a Sleeping Giant Is Waking Up

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    A research paper quietly released by Apple describes an AI model called MM1 that can answer questions and analyze images. It’s the biggest sign yet that Apple is developing generative AI capabilities.

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