Alphabet’s Google is considering charging for premium features on its generative AI-powered search engine, the Financial Times reported on Wednesday, citing people familiar with the plan.

The tech giant is looking at a variety of options, including incorporating AI-powered search features to its premium subscription services, which already provides access to its new Gemini AI assistant in Gmail and Docs, the report said.

Twenty-twenty-three’s technology news has been … a little insane. We’ve seen some incredible tech developments, as well as many approaches to regulatory reform and at least a few tech sagas.

Surely, 2023 must be the year of AI. It’s the year we realized AI stopped being in the future and arrived in our here and now.

The year of AI started with ChatGPT building from 0 to 100 million users after just two months of operation and is now wrapping up with Australia’s ‘AI month’ (by the CSIRO), which ends in mid-December and showcases Australian industry, government and academic AI developments.

There has been a lot in between. We have seen discussions about what AI is and isn’t and witnessed immense hyperbole about what it will mean for society, including questioning the very future of humanity.

This year saw numerous efforts to regulate AI, from the Biden administration’s Executive Order on the Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of AI to the EU AI Act. Multilateral forums have tried their hands at AI principles and regulations, from the UK-hosted Bletchley Park AI Safety Summit to the G7 Leaders’ Statement on the Hiroshima AI Process, while AI was a key topic on the international stage, including ASEAN, the Quad and AUKUS.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, national responses trumped multilateral announcements when it came to depth and detail on AI regulation, including the more substantive US Executive Order on AI. Many nations formally supported an agreement on the Guardrails on Military use of AI, as it was observed on the battlefield in the Russian-Ukrainian Conflict and in the way Israel is targeting Hamas.

Then there was the speed of diffusion. Consumer technologies spread through society at an unprecedented rate. Threads broke the ChatGPT record to become the fastest-growing app ever, gaining over 100 million users in less than a week. Before that, TikTok held the record, reaching the mark in nine months, beating the years and nearly decades it took technologies like the internet, telephone and LinkedIn.

In November, it was announced that ChatGPT now has 100 million weekly active users, and is used by two million developers, including over 90 per cent of Fortune 500 companies. Yet, this announcement was rapidly followed by a chaotic four-day stoush between OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and the board, which I’ve dubbed the Sam Altman Saga.

OpenAI’s board sacked CEO and co-founder Sam Altman, for not being ‘consistently candid.’ co-founder Greg Brockman was removed as chair of the board and resigned from OpenAI. One interim CEO lasted less than 48 hours and another was installed as Microsoft offered Altman and Brockman and their unnamed colleagues a place within the company. More than 90$ of OpenAI employees signed a letter to the board threatening to quit. Days later, Altman was back as CEO.

The entire Sam Altman Saga was reported in real-time on X (formerly Twitter) showcasing that, despite the state propaganda and endless bots, the platform retains some utility.

October 2023 marked a year of Musk ownership of Twitter/X, which resulted in wiping out $4billion-$20 billion in value and committing ‘one of the biggest rebrand failures of all time.’ X was removed from Australia’s voluntary Code of Practice on Disinformation and Misinformation having removed the mechanism for reporting misinformation posted on its platform.

Musk also did a bunch of other crazy shit.

He endorsed an antisemitic conspiracy theory and on November 30 told Disney CEO Bob Iger — and other fleeing advertisers — not to advertise on X and to “Go Fuck Yourself”! The move could see a loss of $75 million in advertising revenue by the end of the year as dozens of major brands pause their marketing campaigns. While his Brain-Computer Interface company, Neuralink, was controversially approved for human trials, Musk ended the year with deliveries of the long-awaited Tesla Cybertruck — albeit with lower range and higher prices than promised.

Cyber ​​security has dominated the Australian landscape, with abundant cyber security incidents as well as the release of the 2023–2030 Australian Cyber ​​Security Strategy with lofty ambitions. A cyber-attack on DP World, Australia’s biggest port operator, halted operations of up to 40 per cent of the nation’s maritime freight, while an Optus outage that left millions of individuals and businesses without resulting connectivity in the CEO’s resignation.

What do we have ahead of us in tech in 2024? As Johanna Weaver and I conclude, 2024 will hopefully be the year of thinking about technology holistically. I anticipate a renewed focus on board governance, especially in the context of AI, cybersecurity and the ethical and privacy considerations arising from the implementation of technology.

In 2023, there has been widespread recognition that there is no AI without Big Tech. With few exceptions, every start-up, new entrant, and even AI research lab is dependent on the computing infrastructure of Microsoft, Amazon, and Google to train their systems, and for market reach to deploy and sell their AI products. I suspect then that 2024 will bring renewed vigor in understanding and challenging technological dependence, from a variety of perspectives, including national security.

With more than 50% of the world expected to hold an election in 2024, mis- and dis-information will continue to be a huge challenge. Unfortunately, the outlook for 2024 doesn’t appear great. We are witnessing what a UK author called a shift in our approach to trust in evidence and authority and US authors called the post-truth era. Undeniably, more work is needed to combat the susceptibility of our digital landscape to disinformation and interference, because global efforts to date have not worked.

There’s no doubt 2023 will be the year technology policy really entered the mainstream, and dinner table conversations, thanks to data breaches, cyber(in)security and the hype around AI. In 2024, I’m looking for a maturing of tech conversations to consider issues holistically that center on reducing harms, embracing opportunities, and improving governance mechanisms. The stakes couldn’t be higher. How we decide to embrace opportunities, innovate, fail and recover, learn and improve will shape the decades to come.

READ MORE:

Canberra leaps into AI without a working safety net

Naples, Italy — Beneath the honking horns and operatic yelling of Naples, the most blissfully chaotic city in Italy, archaeologist Raffaella Bosso descends into the deafening silence of an underground maze, zigzagging back in time roughly 2,300 years.

Before the Ancient Romans, it was the Ancient Greeks who colonized Naples, leaving behind traces of life, and death, inside ancient burial chambers, she says.

She points a flashlight at a stone-relief tombstone that depicts the legs and feet of those buried inside.

“There are two people, a man and a woman” in this one tomb, she explains. “Normally you can find eight or even more.”

This tomb was discovered in 1981, the old-fashioned way, by digging.

Now, archeologists are joining forces with physicists, trading their pickaxes for subatomic particle detectors about the size of a household microwave.

Thanks to breakthrough technology, particle physicists like Valeri Tioukov can use them to see through hundreds of feet of rock, no matter the apartment building located 60 feet above us.

“It’s very similar to radiography,” he says, as he places his particle detector beside the damp wall, still adorned by colorful floral frescoes.

Archeologists long suspected there were additional chambers on the other side of the wall. But just to peek, they would have had to break them down.

Thanks to this detector, they now know for sure, and they didn’t even have to use a shovel.

To understand the technology at work, Tioukov takes us to his laboratory at the University of Naples, where researchers scour the images from that detector.

Specifically, they’re looking for muons, cosmic rays left over from the Big Bang.

The muon detector tracks and counts the muons passing through the structure, then determines the density of the structure’s internal space by tracking the number of muons that pass through it.

At the burial chamber, it captured about 10 million muons in the span of 28 days.

“There’s a muon right there,” says Tioukov, pointing to a squiggle line he’s blown up using a microscope.

After months of painstaking analysis, Tioukov and his team were able to put together a three-dimensional model of that hidden burial chamber, closed to human eyes for centuries, now opened thanks to particle physics.

What seems like science fiction is also being used to peer inside the pyramids in Egyptchambers beneath volcanoes, and even treat cancer, says Professor Giovanni De Lellis.

“Especially cancers which are deep inside the body,” he says. “This technology is being used to measure possible damage to healthy tissue surrounding the cancer. It’s very hard to predict the breakthrough that this technology could actually bring into any of these fields, because we have never observed objects with this accuracy.”

“This is a new era,” he marvels.

Communicating when a traumatic brain injury, stroke, or disease has made speech impossible can be intimidating. Specialized eye-tracking technology uses eye movement to enable people living with disabilities to connect one-on-one over the phone or via the internet.

Eye-tracking systems for computers pinpoint a person’s gaze – where the eye is looking at a screen – by reflecting infrared light off the cornea and capturing it with a camera, using image-processing software to determine the eye’s orientation. The technology isn’t new, but it has become much more widely accessible, thanks in part to a collaboration between NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California and a Fairfax, Virginia-based company called Eyegaze Inc.

When the company built the first model in 1988, its computers were bulky, requiring three shipping boxes for equipment and a company staff member to set up the system. That cost limited access, and the learning process could be intimidating.

In 1998, NASA and Eyegaze entered a public-private partnership via Congressional funding to make the hardware smaller, more portable, and affordable without compromising efficiency. It also reduced the weight of the original system by six times and its volume by almost the same factor. Other advancements served as a springboard for two more decades of development. By collaborating with JPL, the two entities were able to miniaturize and improve the company’s Eyegaze Edge system and lower costs, eliminating barriers to ownership of this communications technology.

“Working with NASA, we were able to make the device less bulky,” said Preethi Vaidyanathan, an engineer with Eyegaze. “Since then, we integrated the external components into a small camera.” It mounts above or below a standard computer screen and requires less than 15 seconds to calibrate to an individual’s gaze.

Visual Surfing

Snapchat, with its latest update, has added a bunch of new features such as the ability to edit chats and set reminders. It has also gained a few more generative AI-powered features.

The update is currently rolling out to both Android and iOS users. Some of these features are limited to the paid Snapchat+ users, and are currently rolling out in phases. Snapchat+ users get the chat-editing capability. These users will now have up to five minutes to fix a typo in a text message after sending it.

Engineering and construction major Larsen & Toubro (L&T) Larsen & Toubro’s (L&T) board of directors on Wednesday, May 8, recommended a final dividend of Rs 28 per equity share for FY24, according to a stock market disclosure.

“The Board of Directors has recommended a final dividend of Rs. 28/- per share of the face value Rs. 2/- each (in addition to the special dividend of Rs. 6 per share paid in August 2023) for the financial year ended March 31, 2024 (previous year final dividend Rs. 24/- per share. The Company will arrange to pay the proposed Final Dividend after approval of the shareholders in the ensuing annual general meeting,” L&T said in a BSE filing.

The tech company has also announced a record date ie June 20, 2024, according to the regulatory filing.

L&T has also announced its financial results for the fourth quarter ended on March 31, 2024, along with a dividend announcement. The company reported a 10.2 per cent increase in consolidated net profit at Rs 4,396.12 crore in the March quarter on the back of higher income. It had posted a consolidated net profit of Rs 3,986.78 crore in the year-ago period. L&T’s consolidated income of the company rose to Rs 68,120.42 crore in the latest fourth quarter from Rs 59,076.06 crore recorded a year ago, L&T said in a stock exchange filing.

Meanwhile, shares of L&T closed trading at Rs 3,485.2 each, up 1.53 per cent on BSE today, May 8.

Also read: Canara Bank posts 18.4% jump in Q4 net profit, declares dividend of 16 per share

550% dividend: Balaji Amines announces Rs 11 dividend along with Q4 earnings

CNN
—

A finance worker at a multinational firm was tricked into paying out $25 million to fraudsters using deepfake technology to pose as the company’s chief financial officer in a video conference call, according to Hong Kong police.

The elaborate scam saw the worker duped into attending a video call with what he thought were several other members of staff, but all of whom were in fact deepfake recreations, Hong Kong police said at a briefing on Friday.

“(In the) multi-person video conference, it turns out that everyone [he saw] was fake,” senior superintendent Baron Chan Shun-ching told the city’s public broadcaster RTHK.

Chan said the worker had grown suspicious after he received a message that was purportedly from the company’s UK-based chief financial officer. Initially, the worker suspected it was a phishing email, as it talked about the need for a secret transaction to be carried out.

However, the worker put aside his early doubts after the video call because other people in attendance had looked and sounded just like colleagues he recognized, Chan said.

Believing everyone else on the call was real, the worker agreed to remit a total of $200 million Hong Kong dollars – about $25.6 million, the police officer added.

The case is one of several recent episodes in which fraudsters are believed to have used deepfake technology to modify publicly available video and other footage to cheat people out of money.

At the press briefing Friday, Hong Kong police said they had made six arrests in connection with such scams.

Chan said that eight stolen Hong Kong identity cards – all of which had been reported as lost by their owners – were used to make 90 loan applications and 54 bank account registrations between July and September last year.

On at least 20 occasions, AI deepfakes have been used to trick facial recognition programs by imitating the people pictured on the identity cards, according to police.

The scam involving the fake CFO was only discovered when the employee later checked with the corporation’s head office.

Hong Kong police did not reveal the name or details of the company or the worker.

Authorities across the world are growing increasingly concerned at the sophistication of deepfake technology and the nefarious uses it can be put to.

At the end of January, pornographic, AI-generated images of the American pop star Taylor Swift spread across social media, underscoring the potentially damaging posed by artificial intelligence technology.

The photos – which show the singer in sexually suggestive and explicit positions – were viewed tens of millions of times before being removed from social platforms.