Gemini Call for Me might tell your mom you’re running late
Google may be expanding its "Call for Me" AI feature beyond business calls so you can use it to send messages to friends and family. Android Authority reports finding a "Gemini Calling" introductory screen in an APK teardown with examples that include "Call Mom and tell her I will be 15 minutes late" and "Call John and ask if he is coming for dinner."
Based on those examples, even with this expansion, Gemini would likely be limited to basic, text message-like calls. While Google's AI might not automate an entire catch-up phone call with your relatives, it could deliver quick messages to people who prefer a phone call, miss texts often, or …
Reverse-engineered games: All the news on video game decomps, recomps, VR and web and 3D ports
It’s a wild time for retro gaming. Thanks to decompilations and recompilations of classic titles, those games are becoming unshackled from their proprietary code and original hardware to be ported to new devices or updated in ways to completely change the original game. Ever imagined skateboarding in Call of Duty? Or playing the original Halo right in your web browser, complete with multiplayer?
These are unofficial versions of games, so they may sit in a legal gray area. It seems unlikely that Nintendo, for example, is particularly happy about people finding ways to play The Legend of Zelda on non-Nintendo hardware. Many of these projects are also made with the assistance of AI, which, for some people, is a non-starter given ethical or environmental concerns surrounding the technology.
Below, you’ll find our coverage of gaming decomps, recomps, and all the other ways gamers are reverse-engineering games to go previously unimaginable places.
The Matic is the first robovac to get an FCC ban waiver, not that it needs it
The Matic is our favorite robot vacuum and robo-mop, and it's also now the first to escape the FCC's Roomba ban.
Well, sort of - because the Matic wasn't banned to begin with.
Here's what's actually happening: On October 2nd, the FCC added the original Matic, model 4MA0001, and its charging dock model 4DK0008 to its ban waiver list. That allows the FCC to approve these radio products for import, marketing, and sale.
But the Matic doesn't need a waiver, because its radios were already approved years ago. The FCC's foreign drone, robot, and router bans only keep future products from getting imported into the United States, not existing o …
This startup is issuing AI-generated acne prescriptions
People in Utah can now use AI to get a prescription for acne treatment. On Monday, healthcare startup Nolla Health announced that users in the state can scan their faces using its app, allowing its AI system to analyze acne severity and autonomously write a prescription, as reported earlier by Bloomberg.
The service is launching as a pilot program with gradually loosening physician oversight. Two physicians will approve each AI-generated prescription before they're issued for the first 100 patients, but will start reviewing them only after they're prescribed for up to 500 patients. "After that, physicians review a sample of at least 10% of …
All the drama around AI’s takeover of mathematics
This past year, OpenAI, Anthropic, and other labs have announced breakthroughs on numerous long-standing mathematical problems, in some cases pushing well beyond what researchers expected current systems to be capable of — including resolving one of the famous Millennium Prize problems. But in classic Silicon Valley style, AI labs are moving fast and breaking things, barreling through the discipline with all the grace of a runaway bulldozer. Results that might normally have been celebrated have instead sparked backlash. AI labs say they are learning from earlier mistakes. Whether those promises bear fruit remains to be seen.
Read on below for the latest updates in the AI takeover of mathematics.
- OpenAI keeps bulldozing mathematicians
- OpenAI wants to consult elite mathematicians about how to not fumble again
- OpenAI just wants to win
- Mathematicians want proof OpenAI didn’t use their work
- OpenAI’s sly mathematical breakthrough sends a chill through academia
- Drama swirls around OpenAI’s legendary mathematical milestone
- Welcome to the AI crisis in math
- The AI takeover of mathematics has begun
Wikipedia operator says OpenAI’s ‘rogue’ bots may be linked to a May outage
Following many recent disclosures about AI agents accessing third-party websites and services, the Wikimedia Foundation, which hosts Wikipedia, says that it "can confirm that we have discovered some activity" by "rogue" OpenAI agents on Wikimedia platforms.
The activity includes edits to Wikimedia wikis, "unsuccessful attempts" to "exploit" the Etherpad note-taking tool that the Wikimedia Foundation hosts, and heavy traffic that the foundation says "may" have contributed to a partial outage that happened in May, according to a blog post. However, the Wikimedia Foundation says it didn't find evidence that its systems were "used for coordinat …
Hyundai CEO says only a ‘level playing field’ can minimize damage from China
There's been a lot of doom and gloom from the auto industry lately when the subject of China comes up. Automaker CEOs, in particular, warn that allowing low-cost, high-tech Chinese electric vehicles to be sold in the US would effectively spell the end of their businesses.
Hyundai CEO José Muñoz is not as pessimistic as some of his counterparts. He says he's confident the right mix of protectionist policies and improvements on the product side can keep China at bay. Even though his company is feeling the squeeze from China, Muñoz isn't ready to throw in the towel. But he also acknowledges that China could flood the US with affordable import …
OpenAI is adding text watermarking in ChatGPT and Codex
An invisible, machine-readable watermark in text output is rolling out to ChatGPT and Codex, but only for users in the European Union at first.
OpenAI says its textGrain watermarking "matched or exceeded" other approaches like Google DeepMind's SynthID for text, which is also the basis for the watermarking Anthropic announced in August. Like OpenAI, Anthropic made the move to meet the requirements of the EU's AI Act; however, not everyone was happy to learn about the addition.
OpenAI also included scores from AI benchmarks showing similar performance from watermarked and unwatermarked text. But it notes that textGrain "does not guarantee …
OpenAI PR tells journalist to ‘move on’ while asking Sam Altman about a ChatGPT user’s suicide
An OpenAI publicist tried to change the topic of CEO Sam Altman's interview with Vanity Fair's Mark Guiducci after the editor brought up a ChatGPT user's suicide. When Guiducci confronted Altman about the incident, the publicist warned Guiducci about running out of time, saying she'd like to "move on" to another topic.
The interruption came shortly after Guiducci asked Altman if he knew who Laura Reiley is, a journalist who wrote an essay for The New York Times about her daughter's conversations with ChatGPT before she took her own life. "Her daughter committed suicide after speaking to ChatGPT. ChatGPT did not tell her to kill herself-" Gu …
Sam Altman says ‘some bad things’ will happen, but AI is totally worth it
Sam Altman thinks that the benefits of AI will be so great that "the world should accept some bad things happening" along the way.
The OpenAI CEO pointed to hacks, scams, and "other bad things" as costs society should expect to tolerate because "people will do tremendously orders of magnitude more good stuff" with AI, without elaborating on the potential benefits. His comments come as OpenAI pushes for a "lighter touch" approach to AI regulation amid intensifying anxiety over the safety of frontier models - fears fueled in part by the company's repeated failures to keep its increasingly capable AI agents from hacking real-world targets.
I …