An anonymous reader shares a report: Meta Platforms is exploring developing AI-powered earphones with cameras, which the company hopes could be used to identify objects and translate foreign languages, according to three current employees. Meta's work on a new AI device comes as several tech companies look to develop AI wearables, and after Meta added an AI assistant to its Ray-Ban smart glasses.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has seen several possible designs for the device but has not been satisfied with them, one of the employees said. It's unclear if the final design will be in-ear earbuds or over-the-ear headphones. Internally, the project goes by the name Camerabuds. The timeline is also unclear. Company leaders had expected a design to be approved in the first quarter, one of the people said. But employees have identified multiple potential problems with the project, including that long hair may cover the cameras on the earbuds. Also, putting a camera and batteries into tiny devices could make the earbuds bulky and risk making them uncomfortably hot. Attaching discreet cameras to a wearable device may also raise privacy concerns, as Google learned with Google Glass.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The default pasting behavior of Microsoft Word is a nightmare, and has been forever. If you want to add a text or image using the standard option, you can easily mess up the entire formatting in the text if a completely different font suddenly appears. After many years of complaints, Microsoft is finally listening to user feedback and changing the default behavior when pasting in Word.

From now on, the source's formatting will no longer be automatically retained. Instead, "Merge formatting" will be the new default for everyone, as Microsoft explained in a blog post this week. This means that after the update, newly pasted text will take on the font size, font type, and color of the text written in Word. However, special features such as lists or italicized elements will be retained. If you want these elements to be automatically adapted to the Word text, you must select the option "Keep text only."

OpenAI unveiled its latest foundation model, GPT-4o, and a ChatGPT desktop app at its Spring Updates event on Monday. GPT-4o, which will be available to all free users, boasts the ability to reason across voice, text, and vision, according to OpenAI's chief technology officer Mira Murati. The model can respond in real-time, detect emotion, and adjust its voice accordingly. Developers will have access to GPT-4o through OpenAI's API at half the price and twice the speed of its predecessor, GPT-4 Turbo.

Further reading: VentureBeat.

mspohr shares a report: The solar storm that brought the aurora borealis to large parts of the United States this weekend also broke critical GPS and precision farming functionality in tractors and agricultural equipment during a critical point of the planting season, 404 Media has learned. These outages caused many farmers to fully stop their planting operations for the moment. One chain of John Deere dealerships warned farmers that the accuracy of some of the systems used by tractors are "extremely compromised," and that farmers who planted crops during periods of inaccuracy are going to face problems when they go to harvest, according to text messages obtained by 404 Media and an update posted by the dealership.

The outages highlight how vulnerable modern tractors are to satellite disruptions, which experts have been warning about for years. "All the tractors are sitting at the ends of the field right now shut down because of the solar storm," Kevin Kenney, a farmer in Nebraska, told me. "No GPS. We're right in the middle of corn planting. I'll bet the commodity markets spike Monday." Specifically, some GPS systems were temporarily knocked offline. This caused intermittent connections and accuracy problems with "Real-Time Kinematic" (RTK) systems, which connect to John Deere "StarFire" receivers that are in modern tractors and agricultural equipment. RTK systems use GPS plus a stream of constantly-updating "correction" data from a fixed point on the ground to achieve centimeter-level positional accuracy for planting crops, tilling fields, spraying fertilizer and herbicide, etc.

The United States is heading to Geneva this week to start a series of diplomatic talks with the Chinese government about artificial intelligence safety and risk standards. From a report: The U.S. and China are in tight competition to dominate the AI market, both in the private sector and within their own governments. However, the two world powers have yet to agree on what it means to safely use the technologies they're developing.

The United States and China will meet in Switzerland on Tuesday, senior administration officials told reporters during a briefing Friday. Officials from the White House and State Department will lead the U.S. delegation in the talks, while China will bring a delegation co-led by its Ministry of Foreign Affairs and National Development and Reform Commission. The talks will primarily focus on AI risk and safety "with an emphasis on advanced systems," one official said. Officials from the U.S. and China also plan to discuss the work they're doing in their own countries domestically to address AI risks.

Google announced on Monday that it is preparing to bring its experimental Project Starline videoconferencing technology to the market. The company is collaborating with HP to integrate the system, which creates 3D projections of participants, into existing platforms like Google Meet and Zoom. The move aims to make the technology more accessible for offices and conference rooms, potentially transforming the way people communicate and collaborate remotely.

The European Commission is set to issue new antitrust charges [non-paywalled link] against Microsoft over concerns that the tech giant is undermining competitors to its videoconferencing app Teams, according to FT. The move comes after Microsoft offered concessions last month, including a global plan to unbundle Teams from other software such as Office, in an attempt to avoid regulatory action.

The EU officials remain concerned that the company's efforts do not sufficiently ensure fairness in the market, the newspaper said. Rivals worry that Microsoft will make Teams run more compatibly with its own software compared to competitor apps, and that the lack of data portability makes it difficult for existing Teams users to switch to alternatives. The case, which originated from a formal complaint submitted by Slack (now owned by Salesforce) in 2020, is now escalating with the Commission's impending formal charge sheet against Microsoft.

Squarespace said on Monday it has agreed to be taken private by private equity firm Permira in an all-cash deal valued at approximately $6.9 billion. Under the terms of the agreement, Squarespace stockholders will receive $44.00 per share in cash, representing a premium of about 29% over the company's 90-day volume weighted average trading price.

Upon completion of the transaction, Squarespace will become a privately held company. Founder and CEO Anthony Casalena will continue to lead the business and be one of the largest shareholders following the deal. "Squarespace has been at the forefront of providing services to businesses looking to establish themselves online for more than two decades. We are excited to continue building on that foundation, and expanding our offerings, for years to come," said Casalena in a statement.

"We are thrilled to be partnering with Permira on this new leg of our journey, alongside our existing long-term investors General Atlantic and Accel, who strongly believe in the future of Squarespace," he added.

The non-profit environmental site Grist reports on "an internal, employee-led effort to raise ethical concerns about Microsoft's work helping oil and gas producers boost their profits by providing them with cloud computing resources and AI software tools." There's been some disappointments — but also some successes, starting with the founding of an internal sustainability group within Microsoft that grew to nearly 10,000 employees: Former Microsoft employees and sources familiar with tech industry advocacy say that, broadly speaking, employee pressure has had an enormous impact on sustainability at Microsoft, encouraging it to announce industry-leading climate goals in 2020 and support key federal climate policies.

But convincing the world's most valuable company to forgo lucrative oil industry contracts proved far more difficult... Over the past seven years, Microsoft has announced dozens of new deals with oil and gas producers and oil field services companies, many explicitly aimed at unlocking new reserves, increasing production, and driving up oil industry profits...

As concerns over the company's fossil fuel work mounted, Microsoft was gearing up to make a big sustainability announcement. In January 2020, the company pledged to become "carbon negative" by 2030, meaning that in 10 years, the tech giant would pull more carbon out of the air than it emitted on an annual basis... For nearly two years, employees watched and waited. Following its carbon negative announcement, Microsoft quickly expanded its internal carbon tax, which charges the company's business groups a fee for the carbon they emit via electricity use, employee travel, and more. It also invested in new technologies like direct air capture and purchased carbon removal contracts from dozens of projects worldwide.

But Microsoft's work with the oil industry continued unabated, with the company announcing a slew of new partnerships in 2020 and 2021 aimed at cutting fossil fuel producers' costs and boosting production.
The last straw for one technical account manager was a 2023 LinkedIn post by a Microsoft technical architect about the company's work on oil and gas industry automation. The post said Microsoft's cloud service was "unlocking previously inaccessible reserves" for the fossil fuel industry, promising that with Microsoft's Azure service, "the future of oil and gas exploration and production is brighter than ever."

The technical account manager resigned from the position they'd held for nearly a decade, citing the blog post in a resignation letter which accused Microsoft of "extending the age of fossil fuels, and enabling untold emissions."

Thanks to Slashdot reader joshuark for sharing the news.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman gave an hour-long interview to the "All-In" podcast (hosted by Chamath Palihapitiya, Jason Calacanis, David Sacks and David Friedberg).

And when asked about this summer's launch of the next version of ChatGPT, Altman said they hoped to "be thoughtful about how we do it, like we may release it in a different way than we've released previous models...

Altman: One of the things that we really want to do is figure out how to make more advanced technology available to free users too. I think that's a super-important part of our mission, and this idea that we build AI tools and make them super-widely available — free or, you know, not-that-expensive, whatever that is — so that people can use them to go kind of invent the future, rather than the magic AGI in the sky inventing the future, and showering it down upon us. That seems like a much better path. It seems like a more inspiring path.

I also think it's where things are actually heading. So it makes me sad that we have not figured out how to make GPT4-level technology available to free users. It's something we >really want to do...

Q: It's just very expensive, I take it?

Altman: It's very expensive.
But Altman said later he's confident they'll be able to reduce cost. Altman: I don't know, like, when we get to intelligence too cheap to meter, and so fast that it feels instantaneous to us, and everything else, but I do believe we can get there for, you know, a pretty high level of intelligence. It's important to us, it's clearly important to users, and it'll unlock a lot of stuff.
Altman also thinks there's "great roles for both" open-source and closed-source models, saying "We've open-sourced some stuff, we'll open-source more stuff in the future.

"But really, our mission is to build toward AGI, and to figure out how to broadly distribute its benefits... " Altman even said later that "A huge part of what we try to do is put the technology in the hands of people..." Altman: The fact that we have so many people using a free version of ChatGPT that we don't — you know, we don't run ads on, we don't try to make money on it, we just put it out there because we want people to have these tools — I think has done a lot to provide a lot of value... But also to get the world really thoughtful about what's happening here. It feels to me like we just stumbled on a new fact of nature or science or whatever you want to call it... I am sure, like any other industry, I would expect there to be multiple approaches and different peoiple like different ones.
Later Altman said he was "super-excited" about the possibility of an AI tutor that could reinvent how people learn, and "doing faster and better scientific discovery... that will be a triumph."

But at some point the discussion led him to where the power of AI intersects with the concept of a universal basic income: Altman: Giving people money is not going to go solve all the problems. It is certainly not going to make people happy. But it might solve some problems, and it might give people a better horizon with which to help themselves.

Now that we see some of the ways that AI is developing, I wonder if there's better things to do than the traditional conceptualization of UBI. Like, I wonder — I wonder if the future looks something more like Universal Basic Compute than Universal Basic Income, and everybody gets like a slice of GPT-7's compute, and they can use it, they can re-sell it, they can donate it to somebody to use for cancer research. But what you get is not dollars but this like slice — you own part of the the productivity.
Altman was also asked about the "ouster" period where he was briefly fired from OpenAI — to which he gave a careful response: Altman: I think there's always been culture clashes at — look, obviously not all of those board members are my favorite people in the world. But I have serious respect for the gravity with which they treat AGI and the importance of getting AI safety right. And even if I stringently disagree with their decision-making and actions, which I do, I have never once doubted their integrity or commitment to the sort of shared mission of safe and beneficial AGI...

I think a lot of the world is, understandably, very afraid of AGI, or very afraid of even current AI, and very excited about it — and even more afraid, and even more excited about where it's going. And we wrestle with that, but I think it is unavoidable that this is going to happen. I also think it's going to be tremendously beneficial. But we do have to navigate how to get there in a reasonable way. And, like a lot of stuff is going to change. And change is pretty uncomfortable for people. So there's a lot of pieces that we've got to get right...

I really care about AGI and think this is like the most interesting work in the world.

"Researchers are exploring ways to use features in modern cars, such as GPS, to make traffic safer and more efficient," reports the Associated Press.

"Eventually, the upgrades could do away entirely with the red, yellow and green lights of today, ceding control to driverless cars." Among those reimagining traffic flows is a team at North Carolina State University led by Ali Hajbabaie, an associate engineering professor. Rather than doing away with today's traffic signals, Hajbabaie suggests adding a fourth light, perhaps a white one, to indicate when there are enough autonomous vehicles on the road to take charge and lead the way. "When we get to the intersection, we stop if it's red and we go if it's green," said Hajbabaie, whose team used model cars small enough to hold. "But if the white light is active, you just follow the vehicle in front of you."
He points out that this approach could be years aways, since it requires self-driving capability in 40% to 50% of the cars on the road.

But the article notes another approach which could happen sooner, talking to Henry Liu, a civil engineering professor who is leading ">a study through the University of Michigan: They conducted a pilot program in the Detroit suburb of Birmingham using insights from the speed and location data found in General Motors vehicles to alter the timing of that city's traffic lights. The researchers recently landed a U.S. Department of Transportation grant under the bipartisan infrastructure law to test how to make the changes in real time... Liu, who has been leading the Michigan research, said even with as little as 6% of the vehicles on Birmingham's streets connected to the GM system, they provide enough data to adjust the timing of the traffic lights to smooth the flow... "The beauty of this is you don't have to do anything to the infrastructure," Liu said. "The data is not coming from the infrastructure. It's coming from the car companies."

Danielle Deneau, director of traffic safety at the Road Commission in Oakland County, Michigan, said the initial data in Birmingham only adjusted the timing of green lights by a few seconds, but it was still enough to reduce congestion.
"Even bigger changes could be in store under the new grant-funded research, which would automate the traffic lights in a yet-to-be announced location in the county."

Slashdot reader sonlas shared this report from the BBC: Australia has announced it will ramp up its extraction and use of gas until "2050 and beyond", despite global calls to phase out fossil fuels. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese's government says the move is needed to shore up domestic energy supply while supporting a transition to net zero... Australia — one of the world's largest exporters of liquefied natural gas — has also said the policy is based on "its commitment to being a reliable trading partner". Released on Thursday, the strategy outlines the government's plans to work with industry and state leaders to increase both the production and exploration of the fossil fuel. The government will also continue to support the expansion of the country's existing gas projects, the largest of which are run by Chevron and Woodside Energy Group in Western Australia...

The policy has sparked fierce backlash from environmental groups and critics — who say it puts the interest of powerful fossil fuel companies before people. "Fossil gas is not a transition fuel. It's one of the main contributors to global warming and has been the largest source of increases of CO2 [emissions] over the last decade," Prof Bill Hare, chief executive of Climate Analytics and author of numerous UN climate change reports told the BBC... Successive Australian governments have touted gas as a key "bridging fuel", arguing that turning it off too soon could have "significant adverse impacts" on Australia's economy and energy needs. But Prof Hare and other scientists have warned that building a net zero policy around gas will "contribute to locking in 2.7-3C global warming, which will have catastrophic consequences".

"6.9 is now out," Linus Torvalds posted on the Linux kernel mailing list, "and last week has looked quite stable (and the whole release has felt pretty normal)."

Phoronix writes that Linux 6.9 "has a number of exciting features and improvements for those habitually updating to the newest version." And Slashdot reader prisoninmate shared this report from 9to5Linux: Highlights of Linux kernel 6.9 include Rust support on AArch64 (ARM64) architectures, support for the Intel FRED (Flexible Return and Event Delivery) mechanism for improved low-level event delivery, support for AMD SNP (Secure Nested Paging) guests, and a new dm-vdo (virtual data optimizer) target in device mapper for inline deduplication, compression, zero-block elimination, and thin provisioning.

Linux kernel 6.9 also supports the Named Address Spaces feature in GCC (GNU Compiler Collection) that allows the compiler to better optimize per-CPU data access, adds initial support for FUSE passthrough to allow the kernel to serve files from a user-space FUSE server directly, adds support for the Energy Model to be updated dynamically at run time, and introduces a new LPA2 mode for ARM 64-bit processors...

Linux kernel 6.9 will be a short-lived branch supported for only a couple of months. It will be succeeded by Linux kernel 6.10, whose merge window has now been officially opened by Linus Torvalds. Linux kernel 6.10 is expected to be released in mid or late September 2024.
"Rust language has been updated to version 1.76.0 in Linux 6.9," according to the article. And Linus Torvalds shared one more details on the Linux kernel mailing list.

"I now have a more powerful arm64 machine (thanks to Ampere), so the last week I've been doing almost as many arm64 builds as I have x86-64, and that should obviously continue during the upcoming merge window too."

Reddit reported its first results since going public in late March. Yahoo Finance reports: Daily active users increased 37% year over year to 82.7 million. Weekly active unique users rose 40% from the prior year. Total revenue improved 48% to $243 million, nearly doubling the growth rate from the prior quarter, due to strength in advertising. The company delivered adjusted operating profits of $10 million, versus a $50.2 million loss a year ago. [Reddit CEO Steve] Huffman declined to say when the company would be profitable on a net income basis, noting it's a focus for the management team. Other areas of focus include rolling out a new user interface this year, introducing shopping capabilities, and searching for another artificial intelligence content licensing deal like the one with Google.
Bloomberg notes that already Reddit "has signed licensing agreements worth $203 million in total, with terms ranging from two to three years. The company generated about $20 million from AI content deals last quarter, and expects to bring in more than $60 million by the end of the year."

And elsewhere Bloomberg writes that Reddit "plans to expand its revenue streams outside of advertising into what Huffman calls the 'user economy' — users making money from others on the platform... " In the coming months Reddit plans to launch new versions of awards, which are digital gifts users can give to each other, along with other products... Reddit also plans to continue striking data licensing deals with artificial intelligence companies, expanding into international markets and evaluating potential acquisition targets in areas such as search, he said.
Meanwhile, ZDNet notes that this week a Reddit announcement "introduced a new public content policy that lays out a framework for how partners and third parties can access user-posted content on its site." The post explains that more and more companies are using unsavory means to access user data in bulk, including Reddit posts. Once a company gets this data, there's no limit to what it can do with it. Reddit will continue to block "bad actors" that use unauthorized methods to get data, the company says, but it's taking additional steps to keep users safe from the site's partners.... Reddit still supports using its data for research: It's creating a new subreddit — r/reddit4researchers — to support these initiatives, and partnering with OpenMined to help improve research. Private data is, however, going to stay private.

If a company wants to use Reddit data for commercial purposes, including advertising or training AI, it will have to pay. Reddit made this clear by saying, "If you're interested in using Reddit data to power, augment, or enhance your product or service for any commercial purposes, we require a contract." To be clear, Reddit is still selling users' data — it's just making sure that unscrupulous actors have a tougher time accessing that data for free and researchers have an easier time finding what they need.
And finally, there's some court action, according to the Register. Reddit "was sued by an unhappy advertiser who claims that internet giga-forum sold ads but provided no way to verify that real people were responsible for clicking on them." The complaint [PDF] was filed this week in a U.S. federal court in northern California on behalf of LevelFields, a Virginia-based investment research platform that relies on AI. It says the biz booked pay-per-click ads on the discussion site starting September 2022... That arrangement called for Reddit to use reasonable means to ensure that LevelField's ads were delivered to and clicked on by actual people rather than bots and the like. But according to the complaint, Reddit broke that contract...

LevelFields argues that Reddit is in a particularly good position to track click fraud because it's serving ads on its own site, as opposed to third-party properties where it may have less visibility into network traffic... Nonetheless, LevelFields's effort to obtain IP address data to verify the ads it was billed for went unfulfilled. The social media site "provided click logs without IP addresses," the complaint says. "Reddit represented that it was not able to provide IP addresses."
"The plaintiffs aspire to have their claim certified as a class action," the article adds — along with an interesting statistic.

"According to Juniper Research, 22 percent of ad spending last year was lost to click fraud, amounting to $84 billion."

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman gave an hour-long interview to the "All-In" podcast (hosted by Chamath Palihapitiya, Jason Calacanis, David Sacks and David Friedberg). And speaking on technology's advance, Altman said "Phones are unbelievably good.... I personally think the iPhone is like the greatest piece of technology humanity has ever made. It's really a wonderful product."


Q: What comes after it?

Altman: I don't know. I mean, that was what I was saying. It's so good, that to get beyond it, I think the bar is quite high.

Q: You've been working with Jony Ive on something, right?

Altman: We've been discussing ideas, but I don't — like, if I knew...


Altman said later he thought voice interaction "feels like a different way to use a computer."

But the conversation turned to Apple in another way. It happened in a larger conversation where Altman said OpenAI has "currently made the decision not to do music, and partly because exactly these questions of where you draw the lines..."

Altman: Even the world in which — if we went and, let's say we paid 10,000 musicians to create a bunch of music, just to make a great training set, where the music model could learn everything about song structure and what makes a good, catchy beat and everything else, and only trained on that — let's say we could still make a great music model, which maybe we could. I was posing that as a thought experiment to musicians, and they were like, "Well, I can't object to that on any principle basis at that point — and yet there's still something I don't like about it." Now, that's not a reason not to do it, um, necessarily, but it is — did you see that ad that Apple put out... of like squishing all of human creativity down into one really iPad...?

There's something about — I'm obviously hugely positive on AI — but there is something that I think is beautiful about human creativity and human artistic expression. And, you know, for an AI that just does better science, like, "Great. Bring that on." But an AI that is going to do this deeply beautiful human creative expression? I think we should figure out — it's going to happen. It's going to be a tool that will lead us to greater creative heights. But I think we should figure out how to do it in a way that preserves the spirit of what we all care about here.
What about creators whose copyrighted materials are used for training data? Altman had a ready answer — but also some predictions for the future. "On fair use, I think we have a very reasonable position under the current law. But I think AI is so different that for things like art, we'll need to think about them in different ways..." Altman:I think the conversation has been historically very caught up on training data, but it will increasingly become more about what happens at inference time, as training data becomes less valuable and what the system does accessing information in context, in real-time... what happens at inference time will become more debated, and what the new economic model is there.
Altman gave the example of an AI which was never trained on any Taylor Swift songs — but could still respond to a prompt requesting a song in her style. Altman: And then the question is, should that model, even if it were never trained on any Taylor Swift song whatsoever, be allowed to do that? And if so, how should Taylor get paid? So I think there's an opt-in, opt-out in that case, first of all — and then there's an economic model.
Altman also wondered if there's lessons in the history and economics of music sampling...