gadget lab podcast - CybAI news

17 Oct

All of Our Gadgets Just Keep Talking

stp2y0 CommentsGenAIartificial intelligence, chatbots, gadget lab podcast, podcasts

Everybody wants to talk to their pet. Or to try to get them to listen, anyway. So it’s no wonder that some startups think the way to break through the communication barrier between you and your pooch is with a nice big helping of technology. Welcome to a world with AI-enabled dog and cat collars that try to interpret a pet’s needs and then share those wishes with their human. The only problem with these devices is that the pet won’t actually be a part of the conversation, as the collar is just guessing at what the pet is thinking—but…

10 Oct

How Should We Feel About Ring?

stp2y0 CommentsGenAIamazon, artificial intelligence, gadget lab podcast, podcasts, privacy, security, smart home

Ring cameras have come a long way. Since the security camera brand launched 11 years ago, its video doorbells and cams have become vigilant, constant surveyors of patios, porches, and vestibules everywhere. Amazon now owns the company, and has ushered it through controversies over privacy concerns, security breaches, incidents of vigilantism, and the company’s cozy relationship with law enforcement. The drama has not slowed growth; over 10 million Rings have been installed, and the cameras currently blanket our urban and suburban landscape, filming the movements of you, your family, and any strangers who wander near your door.That makes for a…

26 Sep

Is AI More Sustainable if You Generate it Underwater?

stp2y0 CommentsAIartificial intelligence, climate change, energy, environment, gadget lab podcast, podcasts

AI data centers are so hot right now. Each time generative AI services churn through their large language models to make a chatbot answer one of your questions, it takes a great deal of processing power to sift through all that data. Doing so can use massive amounts of energy, which means the proliferation of AI is raising questions about how sustainable this tech actually is and how it affects the ecosystems around it. Some companies think they have a solution: running those data centers underwater, where they can use the surrounding seawater to cool and better control the temperature…

12 Sep

How Useful Will Apple Intelligence Be? The Next iPhone Will Tell Us

stp2y0 CommentsAIapple, artificial intelligence, gadget lab podcast, iphone, phones, podcasts

On Monday, Apple held one of its splashy media events. This one was used to show off its next round of iPhones, AirPods, and Apple Watches. These are three of its biggest products, and all of the design tweaks feel very familiar to the current Apple universe. But Apple has also trotted out some new tricks, like sleep apnea detection in the Apple Watch and a new feature that instantly turns a pair of AirPods Pro into hearing aids. And of course, the company is also very keen to get consumers hyped up about the iPhone’s new Apple Intelligence features—even…

15 Aug

Your Photos Aren’t Real

stp2y0 CommentsAIandroid, artificial intelligence, gadget lab podcast, google, photography, podcasts

At a splashy media event this week at its headquarters in Mountain View, California, Google announced four new Pixel phones. But the most important stuff unveiled at the Made By Google event wasn’t the hardware itself, but rather all of the generative AI tools packed into the devices.Most notable are some AI-powered camera features that allow Pixel owners to easily add their own image to a group shot after they’ve taken the photo, or to alter a photo entirely by changing night to day and adding objects that were never really there. It’s an exploration of our limits—how convincingly technology…

08 Aug

Good Luck Selling Your AI Startup

stp2y0 CommentsGenAIantitrust, apple, artificial intelligence, gadget lab podcast, google, podcasts

There is no wilder time than the present to build a company around artificial intelligence. The server bills are astronomical, for one. Also the market for talent is red hot, and you’ll end up paying through the nose for good people. Even if you do get funding, staff up, get the product off the ground, and start making headway in a crowded field, there’s the specter of Big Tech looming overhead. The hypercarnivorous raptors of Silicon Valley—Google, Apple, Amazon, and Meta—will fix their steely eyes on the plump prey of your best employees and your intellectual property.But they can’t just buy…

18 Jul

The Blurred Reality of AI’s ‘Human-Washing’

stp2y0 CommentsAIartificial intelligence, chatbots, gadget lab podcast, podcasts

This week, we examine the trend among generative AI chatbots to flirt, stammer, and try to make us believe they’re human—a development that some researchers say crosses an ethical line. Source link lol

20 Jun

Good Search Borrows, Great Search … Steals?

stp2y0 CommentsGenAIartificial intelligence, gadget lab podcast, google, journalism, podcasts, search

Web crawling—the act of indexing information across the internet—has been around for decades. It has primarily been used by search engines like Google and nonprofits like Internet Archive and Common Crawl to catalog the contents of the open internet and make it searchable. Until recently, the practice of web crawling has rarely been seen as controversial, as websites depended on the process as a way for people to find their content. But now crawling tech has been subsumed by the great AI-ening of everything, and is being used by companies like Google and Perplexity AI to absorb whole articles that…

13 Jun

Thinking Different About Apple AI

stp2y0 CommentsAIapple, artificial intelligence, gadget lab podcast, iphone, podcasts, wwdc

Apple executives used the keynote address of this week's annual WWDC developers conference to debut all of the artificial intelligence capabilities that are coming to iPhones, iPads, and Macs. The team showed off how generative tools will help users write emails, clean up iPhone photos, illustrate presentations, and make custom emoji characters.Adding AI to everything is par for the course in 2024, as all of the big tech companies have been loading up their software with similar generative features. But Apple is late to this particular party. The company has been perceived as being “behind” in generative AI, since OpenAI,…

06 Jun

Learning to Live With Google’s AI Overviews

stp2y0 CommentsAIalgorithms, artificial intelligence, gadget lab podcast, google, podcasts, search

Google has spent the past year lustily rolling out AI features across its platforms. But with each launch, it is becoming more clear that some of these so-called enhancements should have simmered a little longer. The latest update to stoke equal parts excitement and ridicule is AI Overviews, the new auto-generated summary boxes that appear at the top of some Google search results.In theory, AI Overviews are meant to answer questions and neatly summarize key information about people's search queries, offering links to the sources the summaries were pulled from and making search more immediately useful. In reality, these AI…