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Welcome to the Week in Review. This week we look at GM’s decision to get out of the robotaxi business, Google hinting at the existence of multiple universes, and how you can make serious money by getting an AI bot to fall in love with you. Let’s enter.
General Motors will no longer finance commercial robotics business development and instead Cruise will win, is a self-driving car subsidiary, and combine that with the automaker’s efforts to develop driver assistance features and eventually fully autonomous personal vehicles. Several Cruise employees told TechCrunch “turned a blind eye” to the decision. GM bought Cruise for $1 billion in 2016 and has since poured more than $10 billion into the company’s efforts.
OpenAI is finally released the Real-time video capabilities for ChatGPT demonstrated about seven months ago. ChatGPT Plus, Team and Pro subscribers can use the app to point their phones at objects and have ChatGPT respond in near real-time. The feature can also understand what is on the device’s screen through screen sharing. There are several more announcements planned for the 12 Days of OpenAI stay up to date with our live blog.
Google introduced this week its first AI agent can take actions on the Internet. Called Project Mariner, the Gemini-powered agent controls your Chrome browser, moves the cursor on your screen, clicks buttons and fills out forms, allowing it to use and navigate websites like a human. While still a prototype of the DeepMind unit, it represents Google’s shift to move users away from directly interacting with websites.
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News
Duolingo joins the Squid Game: Ahead of the release of the next season of Squid Game, Netflix has teamed up with Duolingo to help viewers learn Korean. The companies also released an exclusive TikTok filter inspired by the show’s Red Light, Green Light game. Read more
Google soft multiverse presents: Google has announced its latest quantum computing chip, Willow. But a blog post about the chip claims that the chip is so fast that it must have borrowed computing power from other universes. Read more
What did you Google this year? Google has released its annual list of the most popular searches for 2024, including the CrowdStrike hack, late One Direction member Liam Payne and Dubai chocolate bars. Read more
RIP, Car Thing: Spotify has officially discontinued Car Thing, its in-car streaming device. If you bought one, you have a little over a month to provide proof of purchase and get a refund. Read more
Bluesky teases the paid subscription: Bluesky has published mockups on GitHub that tease the upcoming subscription tier. Bluesky appears to be considering paid features such as custom app icons, post analytics, and bookmark folders for the tier. Read more
Does Sora practice video games? Our tests with Sora, OpenAI’s video generator, reveal that at least some of the data it’s trained on can be derived from Twitch streams and gameplay. Legal experts say that could be a problem. Read more
Grok has a new image generator: Grok has released its latest image generator, codenamed Aurora, which is very unrestricted when it comes to reproducing public figures. This is of course indicative of my timeline, as I see a lot of AI pictures of Real Housewives cast members. Read more
Krispy Kreme under cyber attack: Donut chain Krispy Kreme has announced a security incident that caused “certain operational disruptions.” The company said its stores are open and there are no interruptions in deliveries to its retail and restaurant partners. Read more
Can you get an AI bot to fall in love with you? Freysa.ai poses challenges designed to influence people’s thinking about AI security. You could win tens of thousands of dollars if you’re the first person to successfully trick her AI character Freysa into saying “I love you.” Read more
Firefox gets rid of a useless feature: Mozilla’s Firefox browser has removed the “Tracking” feature. Since websites have no real reason to respect the signal, the setting is effectively useless (and misleading). Read more
You can now buy a car on Amazon: Amazon is expanding its online car sales market with the launch of Amazon Autos, an e-commerce business that allows customers to find, order and buy new cars, trucks and SUVs from dealers. Read more
