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Is Google’s Gemini chatbot woke by accident, or by design? /The Economist/
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☑️ #116 May 14, 2024
Google I/O
io.google/2024 > Google Keynote (Google I/O ‘24)
What’s new in Google AI? > May 16 at 8 AM PT
UBS Note (via X): All I want for I/O is the iPhone
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☑️ #116 May 14, 2024 🟠 opinion
Why ChatGPT feels more “intelligent” than Google Search
freethink.com: [Excerpt] We will believe in AGI when it calls on Facetime.
First, Google Search clearly derives its answers from human sources, i.e., webpages. That doesn’t count as “knowing,” we chortle, even if the algorithms behind finding and delivering relevant results are fantastically sophisticated.
And second, even if it did “know things,” intelligence is about spotting patterns in what we know, drawing inferences and acting on them, not just “recalling” something.
I’ll come back to reasoning and taking actions in the world, but there is a final, crucial reason why no one considers the search bar to be intelligent — a reason that matters just as much, if not more, to our growing sense of language models being entities, rivals even, true AIs, and not just handy tools.
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☑️ #115 May 14, 2024
Share of U.S. TV-viewing time
@WSJ: In the competition for TV time in the U.S., YouTube is ascendant
https://www.wsj.com/business/media/youtube-viewership-cable-25bf3589
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☑️ #114 May 3-10, 2024
Google Cloud accidentally deleted a UniSuper's (one of Australia's largest superannuation funds) entire cloud environment
Via @UniSuperNews (5/6/24)
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@UniSuperNews: Regarding what caused the technology outage, many members have rightly asked what exactly happened. Google Cloud continues to investigate and gather information on the nature of this incident which caused an outage to our systems.
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@UniSuperNews: Let me stress that Google Cloud has provided clear assurance that this was not the result of a malicious act or cyber-attack, and UniSuper data has not been exposed to unauthorised parties because of this issue.
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@UniSuperNews: While a full root cause analysis is ongoing, Google Cloud has confirmed this is an isolated one-of-a-kind issue that has not previously arisen elsewhere. Google Cloud has confirmed that they are taking measures to ensure this issue does not happen again.
🔹Related content:
UniSuper services update [Excerpts]
A Statement from Google Cloud (7 May 2024):
"The disruption of UniSuper services was caused by a combination of rare issues at Google Cloud that resulted in an inadvertent misconfiguration during the provisioning of UniSuper’s Private Cloud, which triggered a previously unknown software bug that impacted UniSuper’s systems This was an unprecedented occurrence, and measures have been taken to ensure this issue does not happen again.
Google Cloud sincerely apologises for the inconvenience this has caused, and we continue to work around the clock with UniSuper to fully remediate the situation, with the goal of progressively restoring services as soon as possible. We would like to stress again that this was an isolated incident and not the result of a malicious behaviour or cyber-attack, and that no UniSuper data has been exposed to unauthorised parties."
A joint statement from UniSuper CEO Peter Chun, and Google Cloud CEO, Thomas Kurian (8 May 2024)
UniSuper and Google Cloud understand the disruption to services experienced by members has been extremely frustrating and disappointing. We extend our sincere apologies to all members.
While supporting UniSuper to bring its systems back online, Google Cloud has been conducting a root cause analysis.
Google Cloud CEO, Thomas Kurian has confirmed that the disruption arose from an unprecedented sequence of events whereby an inadvertent misconfiguration during provisioning of UniSuper’s Private Cloud services ultimately resulted in the deletion of UniSuper’s Private Cloud subscription.
This is an isolated, ‘one-of-a-kind occurrence’ that has never before occurred with any of Google Cloud’s clients globally. This should not have happened. Google Cloud has identified the events that led to this disruption and taken measures to ensure this does not happen again.
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☑️ #113 May 2, 2024
Google Cloud leveraging Nvidia could bring $2 billion sales bump
bloomberg.com: [Transcription] [Excerpt] Google Cloud could see a sales boost of at least $2 billion from training and inferencing generative-AI workloads in 2025, helping drive a faster-than-expected acceleration in profitability. The company appears well positioned to leverage a higher portion of its Nvidia processing-unit allocation for its enterprise customers vs. other hyperscalers such as Meta and Amazon.com.
Google Cloud could get sales boost of 400-500 Bps
Though Alphabet has half the allocation of Nvidia’s graphics processing units (GPUs) vs. hyperscalers including Meta and Microsoft, its internal use of GPU compute for training and inferencing workloads is far lower, based on our calculation. Google Cloud is already at an annual sales run rate of $35 billion, with AI workloads poised to contribute at least 400-500 bps in growth for the segment in 2025, excluding potential revenue contribution from Duet AI copilot and Gemini licensing and subscriptions.
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☑️ #112 Apr 16, 2024
Google Cloud launches new generative AI, cybersecurity, and data analytics trainings with employer partner the U.S. Department of the Treasury
cloud.google.com: [Transcription] [Excerpt]
"We are partnering with Google to provide the new Cloud Certificates training for our current and future employees to accelerate their careers in cybersecurity and data analytics,"
US Treasury Chief AI Officer Todd Conklin
🔹Related content:
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☑️ #111 Apr 9, 2024
Google Expands In-House Chip Efforts in Costly AI Battle
wsj.com: [Transcription] [Excerpt] Tech giant develops new chips to cut reliance on outside vendors as the AI arms race intensifies.
Google is making more of its own semiconductors, preparing a new chip that can handle everything from YouTube advertising to big data analysis as the company tries to combat rising artificial-intelligence costs.
The new chip, called Axion, is a type of chip commonly used in big data centers. It adds to Google’s efforts stretching back more than a decade to develop new computing resources, beginning with specialized chips used for AI work. Google has leaned into that strategy since the late 2022 release of ChatGPT kicked off an arms race that has threatened its dominant position as a gateway to the internet.
🔹Related content:
Google Research > Amin Vahdat, VP, Systems and Infrastructure at Google, told WSJ that this should be seen as a "basis for growing the size of the pie" rather than a competition.
Introducing Google Axion Processors, our new Arm-based CPUs (4/9/24): [Transcription] [Excerpt] Axion is but the latest in a long line of custom Google silicon. Since 2015 we’ve released five generations of Tensor Processing Units (TPU); in 2018 we released our first Video Coding Unit (VCU), achieving up to 33x more efficiency for video transcoding; in 2021, we doubled-down on custom compute by investing in “system on a chip” (SoC) designs, and released the first of three generations of Tensor chips for mobile devices.
The chip is based on Arm Holdings plc's system of circuits.
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☑️ #110 Mar 25, 2024
Non-compliance investigations against Alphabet under the Digital Markets Act
@vestager: Today we open 1st #investigations under the #DMA. We are concerned #Alphabet, @Apple & @Meta are not meeting their obligations e.g:
#Apple & #Alphabet still charge recurring fees to #app #developers
#Meta offers no real choice for users to opt out of #data combination
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☑️ #109 Mar 14, 2024
Our work to build a more sustainable future in Arizona
blog.google: [Transcription] [Excerpt] A new agreement brings wind and solar energy to the local electricity grid. Plus, we’re supporting local programs to plant trees and increase education opportunities.
As we work to responsibly grow our infrastructure to meet the increasing demand for Google products and services, sustainability is top of mind. Last year, construction started for our first Arizona data center in Mesa, which will use air-cooled technology in line with our climate-conscious approach to minimize net environmental impact across water and energy resources. Today, we’re announcing an energy supply agreement with Salt River Project (SRP) to support more than 430 megawatts of new-to-the-grid, carbon-free energy capacity in the state. Our current projections indicate the agreement will help our operations in Arizona reach at least 80% carbon-free energy (CFE) on an hourly basis by 2026.
🔹Related content:
Google builds data center in Mesa (9/6/23): Representatives from Google say the center will use no water to cool its equipment, opting to 'air-cool' instead.
Google opening new data center in Mesa (10/11/23): All right, Apple, Meta, all opening giant digital data centers right here in the valley…
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☑️ #108 Mar 1, 2024
Inside the Crisis at Google
Big Technology: Culture war narratives give Google's organizational coherence a bit too much credit. There's more to the story.
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☑️ #107 Feb 28, 2024
Ad Tech Claim
adtechclaim.eu: [Transcription] [Excerpt] February 2024 Case
A coalition of more than 30 European media organisations from 17 countries has filed a legal action against Google, seeking damages of more than EUR 2 billion. On this page, we will share any public updates on the case.
🔹Related content:
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☑️ #106 Feb 28, 2024
I want to address the recent issues with problematic text and image responses in the Gemini app (formerly Bard).
@PiratesWires: The first internal comms on Gemini from Sundar
From: Sundar Pichai
To: Google
"Hi everyone
I want to address the recent issues with problematic text and image responses in the Gemini app (formerly Bard). I know that some of its responses have offended our users and shown bias — to be clear, that's completely unacceptable and we got it wrong.
Our teams have been working around the clock to address these issues. We're already seeing a substantial improvement on a wide range of prompts. No Al is perfect, especially at this emerging stage of the industry's development, but we know the bar is high for us and we will keep at it for however long it takes. And we'll review what happened and make sure we fix it at scale.
Our mission to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful is sacrosanct. We've always sought to give users helpful, accurate, and unbiased information in our products. That's why people trust them. This has to be our approach for all our products, including our emerging Al products.
We'll be driving a clear set of actions, including structural changes, updated product guidelines, improved launch processes, robust evals and red-teaming, and technical recommendations. We are looking across all of this and will make the necessary changes.
Even as we learn from what went wrong here, we should also build on the product and technical announcements we've made in Al over the last several weeks. That includes some foundational advances in our underlying models e.g. our 1 million long-context window breakthrough and our open models, both of which have been well received.
We know what it takes to create great products that are used and beloved by billions of people and businesses, and with our infrastructure and research expertise we have an incredible springboard for the Al wave. Let's focus on what matters most: building helpful products that are deserving of our users' trust.
-Sundar"
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☑️ #105 Feb 25, 2024
Google's First Tensor Processing Unit : Origins
The Chip Letter: Why and how did Google build the first AI accelerator deployed at scale?
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☑️ #104 Feb 1, 2024
Bard’s latest updates: Access Gemini Pro globally and generate images
blog.google: [Transcription] [Excerpts] Last December, we brought Gemini Pro into Bard in English, giving Bard more advanced understanding, reasoning, summarizing and coding abilities. Today Gemini Pro in Bard will be available in over 40 languages and more than 230 countries and territories, so more people can collaborate with this faster, more capable version of Bard.
The Large Model Systems Organization, a leading evaluator of language models and chatbots across languages, recently shared that Bard with Gemini Pro is one of the most preferred chatbots available (with or without cost), noting that it has made a “stunning leap” forward. And blind evaluations with our third-party raters identified Bard with Gemini Pro as one of the top-performing conversational AIs, compared to leading free and paid alternatives.
📌 Notes
⇢ Why Google stores billions of lines of code in a single repository (archive)
Google’s monolithic repository provides a common source of truth for tens of thousands of developers around the world. (pdf) - July 2016
☑️ #103 Feb 1, 2024
Can This A.I.-Powered Search Engine Replace Google? It Has for Me.
nytimes.com: [Transcription] [Excerpts] A start-up called Perplexity shows what’s possible for a search engine built from scratch with artificial intelligence.
A win for users, a loss for publishers
Even though I enjoyed using Perplexity, and I’m likely to keep using it in tandem with Google, I’ll admit that I got a gnawing feeling in my stomach after seeing it spit out pristine, concise summaries of news stories, product reviews and how-to articles.
Much of today’s digital media economy still relies on a steady flow of people clicking on links from Google, and being served ads on publishers’ websites.
But with Perplexity, there’s usually no need to visit a website at all — the A.I. does the browsing for you and gives you all the information you need right there on the answer page.
💲 EARNINGS ANNOUNCEMENT: Jan 30, 2024
Alphabet Announces Fourth Quarter 2023 and Fiscal Year 2023 Results
“Alphabet: Cloud Rebounds”
☑️ #102 Jan 25, 2024
Hugging Face and Google partner for open AI collaboration
huggingface.co: [Transcription] [Excerpts] Today, we are thrilled to announce our strategic partnership with Google Cloud to democratize good machine learning. We will collaborate with Google across open science, open source, cloud, and hardware to enable companies to build their own AI with the latest open models from Hugging Face and the latest cloud and hardware features from Google Cloud.
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☑️ #101 Jan 13, 2024
A Comprehensive Guide to Access Google's New Gemini AI API with AIsBreaker
aisbreaker.org: [Transcription] [Excerpt] In December 2023, Google introduced its new AI model and API, "Gemini". This article offers a comprehensive guide on accessing API through a simple JavaScript program using the AIsBreaker client library.
AIsBreaker, a developer-friendly platform, simplifies access to a variety of generative AI services including OpenAI/ChatGPT, Google Gemini AI, and more. It effectively conceals the complexity of vendor-specific APIs, in this case, allowing seamless access to Google Gemini AI API via the Google Cloud Vertex AI environment.
🔹Related content:
Welcome to the Gemini era (12/6/23): [Transcription] [Excerpt] Our largest and most capable AI model.
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