Google is expanding its AI-generated search summaries, known as AI Overviews, to six new countries: Brazil, India, Indonesia, Japan, Mexico, and Britain. This follows a previous rollout in the US, which faced criticism for inaccuracies such as incorrect information and misleading content. The company has since refined the feature, adding restrictions to improve accuracy and reducing reliance on user-generated content from sites like Reddit.
The updated AI Overviews now include more hyperlinks to relevant websites, displayed alongside the AI-generated answers, with plans to integrate clickable links directly within the text. Google aims to balance user experience with publisher traffic, responding to concerns from the media industry about potential impacts on referral traffic.
Hema Budaraju, a senior director at Google, reported improved user satisfaction based on internal data, noting that users of the feature tend to engage more deeply with search queries. These updates come at a time when Google faces legal challenges and competition from AI advancements by rivals like Microsoft-backed OpenAI.
Ridley Scott, the acclaimed director behind the original Gladiator, is raising the stakes with Gladiator II, promising some of the biggest action sequences of his career. In a recent interview with Empire Magazine, Scott revealed that the film begins with an enormous action scene, surpassing even his work on Napoleon. Paul Mescal stars in the sequel, alongside Pedro Pascal and Denzel Washington, taking audiences on a thrilling new adventure two decades after the Oscar-winning original.
Scott embraces advanced technology, including AI, to bring his vision to life. One of the standout sequences features Paul Mescal’s character, Lucius, facing off against a massive rhino. Scott shared that he used a combination of computerisation and AI to create a lifelike model of the rhino, which was mounted on a robotic platform capable of impressive movements, adding a new layer of realism to the film’s action.
The director’s shift in attitude towards AI is notable, given his earlier concerns about the technology. Last year, Scott expressed fears about AI’s potential to disrupt society, but now he acknowledges its role in filmmaking. Despite his previous reservations, Scott seems to have found a balance between caution and innovation, using AI to push the boundaries of what’s possible on screen.
A decentralised blockchain and AI startup, Sahara AI, has successfully raised $43 million in a Series A funding round. The round saw significant backing from prominent investors including Pantera Capital, Binance Labs, and Polychain Capital. Samsung NEXT also joined the funding alongside Matrix Partners, dao5, and Geekcartel.
The funds will be utilised to expand Sahara AI’s global team, improve the platform’s performance, and grow its developer ecosystem. By leveraging its decentralised platform, Sahara AI aims to reward users, data sources, and AI trainers, rather than just the companies that create AI models. The company’s approach is seen as a shift from the traditional model, promoting transparency and fair compensation.
Founded in April 2023, Sahara AI has already partnered with leading tech firms such as Microsoft, Amazon, and Snap. These collaborations highlight the startup’s rapid growth and the increasing interest in its unique decentralised approach to AI.
As the use of AI continues to rise, concerns around data privacy, copyright, and ethical issues have become more pronounced. Sahara AI’s approach seeks to address these challenges by ensuring transparency and fairness in how AI models are developed and utilised.
Singapore’s National University Health System (NUHS) is leveraging advanced AI technologies to enhance efficiency and reduce administrative workloads in healthcare. Through the RUSSELL-GPT platform, which integrates large language models (LLMs) via Amazon Web Services (AWS) Bedrock, over a thousand clinicians now benefit from automated tasks such as drafting referrals and summarising patient data, reducing administrative time by 40%.
The NUHS team is working on event-driven Generative AI models that can perform tasks automatically when triggered by specific events, such as drafting discharge letters without needing any prompts. This approach aims to streamline processes further and reduce the administrative burden on healthcare staff.
Ensuring patient data security is a top priority for NUHS, with robust measures in place to keep data within Singapore and comply with local privacy laws. RUSSELL-GPT also includes features to mitigate the risks of AI hallucinations, with mandatory training for users on recognising and managing such occurrences.
Despite the promise of LLMs, NUHS acknowledges that these models are not a cure-all. Classical AI still plays a critical role in tasks like clustering information and providing predictive insights, underlining the need for a balanced use of it in healthcare.
The English Premier League is set to enhance offside decision-making with new technology from Genius Sports. Multiple iPhones, paired with advanced machine-learning models, will assist referees in making more accurate offside calls. Traditional Video Assistant Referee (VAR) systems have faced criticism for slow reviews and inconsistent decisions, leading to this shift.
Genius Sports developed ‘Semi-Assisted Offside Technology’ (SAOT) as part of its GeniusIQ system. Up to 28 iPhones will be placed around the pitch to generate 3D models of players, offering precise offside line determinations. Expensive 4K cameras will be replaced by iPhones, which capture between 7,000 and 10,000 data points per player.
Strategically positioned on custom rigs, iPhones will cover optimal areas of the pitch. Data collected will be processed by the GeniusIQ system, using predictive algorithms to assess player positions even when obscured. High framerate recording and local processing capabilities further enhance the system’s accuracy.
Genius Sports plans to fully implement the system in the Premier League by the end of the year. While the exact date remains unconfirmed, this marks a significant advancement in football technology, promising a more precise and consistent approach to offside rulings.
Government agencies in Australia must disclose their use of AI within six months under a new policy effective from 1st September. The policy mandates that agencies prepare a transparency statement detailing their AI adoption and usage, which must be publicly accessible. Agencies must also designate a technology executive responsible for ensuring the policy’s implementation.
The transparency statements, updated annually or after significant changes, will include information on compliance, monitoring effectiveness, and measures to protect the public from potential AI-related harm. Although staff training on AI is strongly encouraged, it is not a mandatory requirement under the new policy.
The policy was developed in response to concerns about public trust, recognising that a lack of transparency and accountability in AI use could hinder its adoption. The government in Australia aims to position itself as a model of safe and responsible AI usage by integrating the new policy with existing frameworks and legislation.
Minister for Finance and the APS, Katy Gallagher, emphasised the importance of the policy in guiding agencies to use AI responsibly, ensuring Australians’ confidence in the government’s application of these technologies.
Two teams from Singapore have secured gold medals in the first-ever International Olympiad in AI, held in Bulgaria. The competition, which ran from 9 to 15 August 2024, gathered high school students from around the globe, with Singapore emerging as a top contender in the scientific round.
Students were selected through a rigorous test held on 28 April 2024 at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. The successful candidates were then flown to Bulgaria to compete in various AI-related challenges, including natural language processing, machine learning, and computer vision.
Both Singaporean teams, Team Singapore 1 and Team Singapore 2, claimed gold medals, showcasing the country’s strong capabilities in AI. The teams were comprised of students Shah Mahir Hitesh, Kabir Jain, Ng Shi Yu, Wang Zerui, Glenn Wu, Wang Jiayu, Lam Eu Ler, and Chong Jia Shuo.
Besides Singapore, Poland also earned gold in the scientific round, while China and Vietnam received silver medals. Malaysia was among the teams awarded bronze, highlighting the competitive nature of the event.
The Hollywood actors’ union, SAG-AFTRA, has agreed with the online talent marketplace Narrativ, allowing actors to sell the rights to digitally replicate their voices using AI. The following deal addresses growing concerns among performers about the potential theft of their likenesses through AI, providing them with a way to earn income and retain control over how their voice replicas are used. Actors can set the price for their digital voice, ensuring it meets at least the union’s minimum pay standards, and advertisers must obtain consent for each use.
SAG-AFTRA has praised this agreement as a model for the ethical use of AI in advertising, emphasising the importance of safeguarding performers’ rights in the digital age. The issue of AI-driven voice replication has been a significant concern in Hollywood, highlighted by actress Scarlett Johansson’s accusations against OpenAI for the unauthorised use of her voice. That concern was also central to last year’s Hollywood strike and remains a key issue in ongoing labour disputes involving video game voice actors and motion-capture performers.
In response to the rise of AI-generated deepfakes and their potential misuse, the NO FAKES Act has been introduced in Congress, aiming to make unauthorised AI copying of a person’s voice and likeness illegal. The bill has gained support from major industry players, including SAG-AFTRA, Disney, and The Recording Academy, reflecting widespread concern over the implications of AI in entertainment and beyond.
Google has unveiled its latest lineup of Pixel smartphones, marking a significant shift towards deeper integration of artificial intelligence in its hardware. Unlike previous years, the company chose to announce the new models in the summer, positioning itself ahead of competitors as it races to incorporate AI technology across its products.
The new Pixel devices feature innovative AI-powered tools, including a unique function that allows users to search for information within screenshots. Additionally, Google’s chatbot, Gemini, can now be accessed as an overlay on other apps, offering assistance and generating content. The launch event, held at Alphabet’s Bay View campus, showcased these advancements, with Google’s senior vice president of devices and services, Rick Osterloh, emphasising the company’s commitment to practical AI applications.
With AI taking centre stage, Google’s event impressed industry experts, with some noting it as one of the most comprehensive presentations the company has ever held. This early release strategy comes as Google aims to stay ahead of its rivals, particularly Apple, which is expected to launch new AI features in its products later this year.
The Pixel 9 series includes several models, with the base version priced at $799, $100 more than its predecessor. The devices will start shipping in August, with the Pixel 9 Pro and Pixel 9 Pro Fold set for release in September, further highlighting Google’s push to lead in the AI-driven smartphone market.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced the finalists for its AI Cyber Challenge (AIxCC) at DEF CON, a competition that rewards teams for training large language models (LLMs) to identify and fix vulnerabilities in open-source code. BigTech companies like Google, Microsoft, Anthropic, and OpenAI supported participants with AI model credits. The challenge saw about 40 teams submit projects, which were tested on their ability to detect and remediate injected vulnerabilities in open-source coding projects.
Experts say that generative AI can help automate the detection and patching of security flaws in code, and this development can be critical as unsophisticated yet harmful cyberattacks increasingly target critical facilities such as hospitals and water systems. Automating basic cybersecurity practices, such as scanning and fixing code bugs, could significantly reduce these incidents.
Despite running these tests in a controlled, sandboxed environment, the semifinalists’ LLM projects managed to discover 22 unique vulnerabilities and automatically patch 15 of them. DARPA, which has invested over $2 billion in AI research since 2018, plays a unique role in cybersecurity innovation: it created a mock city under cyberattack within DEF CON, attracting over 12,500 visitors. The seven finalist teams will compete in the challenge’s final round at next year’s DEF CON conference, with government officials hoping these AI tools will soon be applied to protect real-life critical infrastructure.
Anne Neuberger, the Biden administration’s deputy national security advisor for cyber and emerging technology, emphasised the goal of using AI for defense as swiftly as adversaries use it for offense. The White House is already collaborating with the Department of Energy to explore deploying these AI tools within the energy sector and hopes to eventually apply them to proprietary company code.
