Golf balls will be altered so they don’t fly as far, under rules being introduced from 2028, as pros drive them further and further. CC-licensed photo by cretinbob on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. Clubbing together. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
Google just launched Gemini, its long-awaited answer to ChatGPT • WIRED
Will Knight:
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Gemini, a new type of AI model that can work with text, images, and video, could be the most important algorithm in Google’s history after PageRank, which vaulted the search engine into the public psyche and created a corporate giant.
An initial version of Gemini starts to roll out from Wednesday inside Google’s chatbot Bard for the English language setting. It will be available in more than 170 countries and territories. Google says Gemini will be made available to developers through Google Cloud’s API from December 13. A more compact version of the model will from today power suggested messaging replies from the keyboard of Pixel 8 smartphones. Gemini will be introduced into other Google products including generative search, ads, and Chrome in “coming months,” the company says. The most powerful Gemini version of all will debut in 2024, pending “extensive trust and safety checks,” Google says.
“It’s a big moment for us,” Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, told WIRED ahead of today’s announcement. “We’re really excited by its performance, and we’re also excited to see what people are going to do building on top of that.”
Gemini is described by Google as “natively multimodal,” because it was trained on images, video, and audio rather than just text, as the large language models at the heart of the recent generative AI boom are. “It’s our largest and most capable model; it’s also our most general,” Eli Collins, vice president of product for Google DeepMind, said at a press briefing announcing Gemini.
Google says there are three versions of Gemini: Ultra, the largest and most capable; Nano, which is significantly smaller and more efficient; and Pro, of medium size and middling capabilities.
From today, Google’s Bard, a chatbot similar to ChatGPT, will be powered by Gemini Pro, a change the company says will make it capable of more advanced reasoning and planning.
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You can use it in the Bard Chatbot right now if you want. The little video that went with it is… entertaining, but I still want something that will organise calendars, reply sensibly to emails for me, point to odd things happening which shouldn’t be in my electronic life. (But would you trust a chatbot with all of your life? There’s a Black Mirror episode waiting to be written.)
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Animate Anyone • Institute for Intelligent Computing, Alibaba Group
Li Hu and others:
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In this paper, we leverage the power of diffusion models and propose a novel framework tailored for character animation. To preserve consistency of intricate appearance features from reference image, we design ReferenceNet to merge detail features via spatial attention. To ensure controllability and continuity, we introduce an efficient pose guider to direct character’s movements and employ an effective temporal modeling approach to ensure smooth inter-frame transitions between video frames.
By expanding the training data, our approach can animate arbitrary characters, yielding superior results in character animation compared to other image-to-video methods. Furthermore, we evaluate our method on benchmarks for fashion video and human dance synthesis, achieving state-of-the-art results.
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You have to see the video clips, really, but this is the sort of thing that actors are concerned about: their images being used to create moving pictures, made to be doing anything.
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Governments spying on Apple, Google users through push notifications, US senator reveals • Reuters
Raphael Satter:
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Unidentified governments are surveilling smartphone users via their apps’ push notifications, a US senator warned on Wednesday.
In a letter to the Department of Justice, Senator Ron Wyden said foreign officials were demanding the data from Alphabet’s Google and Apple. Although details were sparse, the letter lays out yet another path by which governments can track smartphones.
Apps of all kinds rely on push notifications to alert smartphone users to incoming messages, breaking news, and other updates. These are the audible “dings” or visual indicators users get when they receive an email or their sports team wins a game. What users often do not realize is that almost all such notifications travel over Google and Apple’s servers.
That gives the two companies unique insight into the traffic flowing from those apps to their users, and in turn puts them “in a unique position to facilitate government surveillance of how users are using particular apps,” Wyden said. He asked the Department of Justice to “repeal or modify any policies” that hindered public discussions of push notification spying.
In a statement, Apple said that Wyden’s letter gave them the opening they needed to share more details with the public about how governments monitored push notifications. “In this case, the federal government prohibited us from sharing any information,” the company said in a statement. “Now that this method has become public we are updating our transparency reporting to detail these kinds of requests.”
Google said that it shared Wyden’s “commitment to keeping users informed about these requests.”
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Running Signal will soon cost $50 million a year • WIRED
Andy Greenberg:
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Signal was originally founded with money from the US government-funded Open Technology Fund, but the service has since turned to donations to keep afloat. When the Signal Foundation was created in 2018 and WhatsApp cofounder Brian Acton left Facebook to become its president, he donated $50m. But with Signal’s growing user base and staff, that donation wouldn’t cover much more than a year’s current budget for the company. Other major donors continue to cover the foundation’s costs, Whittaker says—Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey, for instance, has pledged $1m a year, and others Whittaker declines to name have given similarly large contributions.
But Signal hopes to increasingly rely on donations of as little as $3 that can be made through the app itself. Monthly donations of $5 or more are rewarded with a badge for the user’s account. Those small donations, Signal says, now account for 25% of its operating costs, up from 18% last year, the first full year after Signal enabled in-app contributions. But for Signal to continue to exist and grow without depending on a few wealthy individuals, Whittaker says small user donations will need to ramp up significantly.
With a nearly $50m annual budget, can Signal actually survive on those donations? “We have to,” says Whittaker. “Signal needs to find a way to survive in perpetuity because it is the tool that we have to ensure meaningfully private communications.”
Whittaker says that charging users has never been an option—Signal would never have grown its network to a degree that could compete with iMessage or WhatsApp if it hadn’t been free all along. Nor can Signal adopt a venture capital-funded business model that would leave the service vulnerable to investors or shareholders demanding a profitable exit. Exhibit one: Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter and his decisions that triggered an exodus of its users.
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What, another article about Signal and its funding? Yes, because it’s been pointed out to me (thanks, Paul C) that yesterday’s article was written by an author who could be thought of as unreliable in claiming that the CIA has suddenly cut funding. As this shows, that happened quite a while back. Anyway, if you use it, donate.
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iMessage will reportedly dodge EU regulations, won’t have to open up • Ars Technica
Ron Amadeo:
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The EU is deciding what should and shouldn’t be under the new rules set out by the “Digital Markets Act.” The idea is that Big Tech “gatekeepers” will be subject to certain interoperability, fairness, and privacy rules. So far the wide-ranging rules have targeted 22 different services, including app stores on iOS and Android, browsers like Chrome and Safari, the Android, iOS, and Windows OSes, ad platforms from Google, Amazon, and Meta, video sites YouTube and TikTok, and instant messaging apps like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger.
Google recently rolled out a campaign to implore the EU to qualify iMessage for regulation, as Android’s iMessage incompatibility is a big deal in the US. iMessage hasn’t made the list, though, and that’s despite meeting the popularity metrics of 45 million monthly active EU users. In the EU and most other parts of the world, the dominant messaging platform is WhatsApp, and with the Digital Market Act’s focus on business usage, not general consumers, iMessage will just squeak by. Right now the EU is “investigating” a handful of borderline additions to the Digital Markets Act, with a deadline in February 2024.
Qualifying for the law would have forced iMessage to allow interoperability with other services, so theoretically, you’d be allowed to log in to iMessage from WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and whatever else.
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The inside story of Microsoft’s partnership with OpenAI • The New Yorker
Charles Duhigg was embedded in OpenAI when Everything Happened:
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Some members of the OpenAI board had found Altman an unnervingly slippery operator. For example, earlier this fall he’d confronted one member, Helen Toner, a director at the Center for Security and Emerging Technology, at Georgetown University, for co-writing a paper that seemingly criticized OpenAI for “stoking the flames of AI hype.”
Toner had defended herself (though she later apologized to the board for not anticipating how the paper might be perceived). Altman began approaching other board members, individually, about replacing her. When these members compared notes about the conversations, some felt that Altman had misrepresented them as supporting Toner’s removal. “He’d play them off against each other by lying about what other people thought,” the person familiar with the board’s discussions told me. “Things like that had been happening for years.” (A person familiar with Altman’s perspective [it’s Altman – Overspill Ed] said that he acknowledges having been “ham-fisted in the way he tried to get a board member removed,” but that he hadn’t attempted to manipulate the board.)
… when four members of the board—Toner, D’Angelo, Sutskever, and Tasha McCauley—began discussing his removal, they were determined to guarantee that he would be caught by surprise. “It was clear that, as soon as Sam knew, he’d do anything he could to undermine the board,” the person familiar with those discussions said.
The unhappy board members felt that OpenAI’s mission required them to be vigilant about AI becoming too dangerous, and they believed that they couldn’t carry out this duty with Altman in place. “The mission is multifaceted, to make sure AI benefits all of humanity, but no one can do that if they can’t hold the C.E.O. accountable,” another person aware of the board’s thinking said. Altman saw things differently. The person familiar with his perspective said that he and the board had engaged in “very normal and healthy boardroom debate,” but that some board members were unversed in business norms and daunted by their responsibilities. This person noted, “Every step we get closer to AGI [artificial general intelligence], everybody takes on, like, ten insanity points.”
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So that seems to be the story: basically the board didn’t like Altman or his attitude about AGI. Nothing much more complicated than that.
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Is this the end of ‘Intel Inside’? • WSJ
Christopher Mims:
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The threats to Intel are so numerous that it’s worth summing them up: The Mac and Google’s Chromebooks are already eating the market share of Windows-based, Intel-powered devices. As for Windows-based devices, all signs point to their increasingly being based on non-Intel processors. Finally, Windows is likely to run on the cloud in the future, where it will also run on non-Intel chips.
Apple has moved almost entirely away from Intel’s chips, which it used for over a decade for all of its desktop and notebook computers. At the same time, its overall market share for desktops and notebooks has climbed from around 12% of devices in the US in 2013 to nearly one in three today, according to Statcounter.
These days, it’s not just Apple moving away from Intel’s chips. Microsoft is accelerating its yearslong effort to make Windows run on ARM-based processors, so that the entire PC ecosystem isn’t doomed by Intel’s failure to keep up with Apple and TSMC. Google’s Chrome OS, which works with either Intel or ARM-based chips, is also an emerging threat to Microsoft.
This means the threat to Intel comes from a whole ecosystem of companies with deep pockets and sizable profit margins, each trying to take their piece of the company’s market share. In many ways, it really is Intel versus the world—and “the world” includes nearly every tech giant you can name.
It wasn’t always this way. For decades, Intel enjoyed PC market dominance with its ride-or-die partner, Microsoft, through their “Wintel” duopoly.
It’s ironic, then, that Microsoft is one of the companies leading the charge away from Intel’s chips.
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That Statcounter figure seems quite optimistic; the caveat is that it’s only the US, and it’s measured via browsers (so that won’t include PCs used just on intranets without external connections). Intel, though, is in all sorts of trouble.
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Maybe we already have runaway machines • The New Yorker
Gideon Lewis-Kraust:
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One of the things that make the machine of the capitalist state work is that some of its powers have been devolved upon other artificial agents—corporations. Where [Cambridge professor David] Runciman compares the state to a general AI, one that exists to serve a variety of functions, corporations have been granted a limited range of autonomy in the form of what might be compared to a narrow AI, one that exists to fulfill particular purposes that remain beyond the remit or the interests of the sovereign body.
Corporations can thus be set up in free pursuit of a variety of idiosyncratic human enterprises, but they, too, are robotic insofar as they transcend the constraints and the priorities of their human members. The failure mode of governments is to become “exploitative and corrupt,” Runciman notes. The failure mode of corporations, as extensions of an independent civil society, is that “their independence undoes social stability by allowing those making the money to make their own rules.”
There is only a “narrow corridor”—a term Runciman borrows from the economists Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson—in which the artificial agents balance each other out, and citizens get to enjoy the sense of control that emerges from an atmosphere of freedom and security. The ideal scenario is, in other words, a kludgy equilibrium.
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This is a review of Runciman’s book, in which he points out that states and corporations have in effect been uncontrolled AIs of a sort for quite some time already; and so the concerns about the new machine-based AIs have already been rehearsed, just in a different context. (And how well, exactly, have we managed them?)
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New golf ball rules: R&A and USGA opt to limit distance ball will travel in air • BBC Sport
Iain Carter:
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Modern premium golf balls (which cost around £6 each) when struck with the latest large-headed drivers have never flown as far as they do today.
The PGA Tour’s biggest hitter, Rory McIlroy, is among several players whose drives average more than 320 yards, with 98 pros beating the circuit’s average of 299.9 yards last season.
In 2002 only one player, John Daly (306 yards), beat the 300 yard barrier. This year the Masters was forced to lengthen Augusta’s famous par-five 13th hole from 510 to 545 yards to make sure it remains an appropriate challenge.
The new measures come into force in January 2028 for the elite game, with a phased introduction for recreational golfers in 2030.
Golf balls must conform to the rules and pass strict testing protocols which determine their ‘Overall Distance Standard’. The playing characteristics of a ball can be altered through its composition and/or dimple patterns which in turn can affect spin rates that could limit the distance it flies.
Under current regulations, a ball struck by a robotic club swung in laboratory conditions at 120mph (193kph) is only allowed to travel 317 yards (289.9m) (with three yards/1m tolerance). The new rules will maintain the same distance outcome, but for a club swung at the increased rate of 125mph, which is the top end of the speed generated by pros.
“We feel very strongly that we need to act and update the rules for the modern game,” Slumbers said. “It is 20 years since we last updated the golf ball and a lot has changed in sport, and in golf, in that time.”
The St Andrews-based boss added: “We feel that [a reduction of] 15 yards for the longest hitters is fair and will have a meaningful impact.
“But it is very important to understand that for the average recreational golfer we will see an impact of less than five yards.”
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And what’s going to happen? Top golf pros will figure out how to swing their club faster – perhaps 140mph. Though 160 mph could be the top speed humanly possible. (But if you make the club longer…) I do like these tales of equipment being reined in to try to keep sports within their stadia.
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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified
The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 