Artificial Intelligence

The Google Home extension for Gemini is now available on Android, and the AI-powered features for Google Nest cameras are rolling out to select Nest Aware Plus users in Public Preview today and will come to more users in the next few weeks.

Google also announced a new customizable Member access feature for sharing select devices with friends and family.

A neurology ICU nurse relates the unsettling feeling of watching AI tech take over:

“Efficiency” is a buzzword in Silicon Valley, but get it out of your mind when it comes to healthcare. When you’re optimizing for efficiency, you’re getting rid of redundancies. But when patients’ lives are at stake, you actually want redundancy. You want extra slack in the system. You want multiple sets of eyes on a patient in a hospital. 

Anthropic co-founder Darius Amodei said on Lex Fridman’s podcast yesterday that, “if you believe the straight-line extrapolation,” we’ll have artificial general intelligence “in 2026 or 2027.” He also indicates that’s a big if, listing reasons why (which don’t include that LLMs might not be the way to AGI).

Makes sense — after all, according to growth trends, I should have been the size of a dinosaur by age 10.

Spokesperson Elijah Lawal tells The Verge that the company is rolling out a pilot of the app in the Philippines. 9to5Google reported that a user was able to download the app.

Gemini has a standalone app for Android, and from that app, you can access the Gemini Live voice mode.

The VP running Google News, Shailesh Prakash, has resigned, according to The Wall Street Journal, which notes his exit “comes amid a continuing rift between Google and news outlets.”

As I reported last year, Prakash’s org was one of the first inside Google to get hit by rolling layoffs. He told employees at the time that there was a “reckoning” due to the company hiring too many senior workers during the pandemic.

Reverse engineer Alessandro Paluzzi dug up a menu within the app showing the option to “create An AI profile picture.” While you can already upload an AI-generated profile picture to Instagram, this would streamline the process.

Meta’s other apps — Facebook and WhatsApp — have been spotted working on a similar feature.

A piece of artwork called “A.I. God. Portrait of Alan Turing,” created in part by AI-equipped robot Ai-Da, went for almost $1.1 million at auction, writes The New York Times.

There was a lot of human involvement, starting with combining the bot’s paintings of parts of Turing’s face:

The works were then photographed and uploaded to a computer that used Ai-Da’s language model to decide on the assembly of a single painting, which was then completed using a 3-D textured printer; studio assistants helped to create a more realistic finished product on the canvas. Ai-Da then added marks and textures to the portrait to complete it.

Caitlin Kalinowski will lead robotics and consumer hardware at OpenAI, according to a post on LinkedIn. Kalinowski also worked at Apple as a hardware product design engineer.

Jony Ive — also, famously, formerly of Apple — recently confirmed that he’s working with on an AI hardware project with OpenAI.

Utility planning documents show rising costs for customers in some regions of the US as tech companies build out energy-hungry data centers, the Washington Post reports:

“A lot of governors and local political leaders who wanted economic growth and vitality from these data centers are now realizing it can come at a cost of increased consumer bills,” said Neil Chatterjee, former chair of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

Meta wanted to build a nuclear-powered AI data center in the US — until a rare species of bee was found at the site, according to the Financial Times.

Tech giants have inked a string of nuclear energy deals lately to try to meet growing electricity demand for AI data centers.

Disney co-chairman Alan Bergman announced the Office of Technology Enablement in an email seen by Reuters:

The pace and scope of the advances in AI and XR (extended reality) are profound and will continue to impact consumer experiences, creative endeavors and our businesses for years to come - making it critical that Disney explore the exciting opportunities and navigate the potential risks.

Disney CTO Jamie Voris, who helped create the Disney Plus Vision Pro app, will reportedly helm the new division. The company eliminated its metaverse unit last year.

Google’s Gemini will be accessible from the side panel in Google Chat, meaning you can ask for things like summaries or generate action items. Could be a useful way to catch up on things, but you might not want to rely on it too much for important work.