Apple is looking to team up with Google for a mega-deal to leverage the Gemini AI model for features on iPhone, Bloomberg reported.
There is surmounting pressure on Apple to catch up with competitors in the AI field such as OpenAI, Microsoft, Anthropic, and even Google.
Later, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said that Gemini’s responses were “completely unacceptable”.
Earlier this year, the company partnered with Samsung to introduce Gemini-powered AI features on the Galaxy S24 series of devices.
We have reached out to Apple and Google for a comment, and we will update the story if we hear back from them.
India’s antitrust regulator has ordered an investigation into Alphabet’s Google, alleging the U.S. tech giant abused its dominant position in the country’s online market by imposing unfair terms and discriminatory practices in its popular app store.
The order came in response to complaint filed by multiple Indian app developers and industry groups, many of whom have also publicly raised concerns about what they allege is unfair practices by Google.
CCI’s allegations centre around Google’s billing system for in-app purchases and paid apps on its Play Store.
The watchdog’s decision is the latest headache for Google in India, its biggest market by users but one where it has long faced allegations of anti-competitive practices.
The U.S. giant has previously defended its Play Store policies, saying the service fee supports its investments in Android and Play Store, allowing it to provide developers with tools and a global platform to access billions of consumers around the world.
While the rest of you are out there touching the proverbial and literal grass, the world’s developers are jamming into conference halls to find out what the next year holds for AI and OSes.
Things kick off next week with NVIDIA’s GTC, with the next few months holding Microsoft Build, Apple’s WWDC and, of course, Google I/O.
Invites just dropped for the latter, which is set for May 14 and 15 at Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View, California — the usual spot.
We’ve still got two months to book travel, but we’ll be there (I might pack a hat this time).
While the show is aimed specifically at developers for Google’s various operating systems, things customarily kick off with a Sundar-led keynote.
Microsoft has revealed that it too will allow business customers to transfer data out of its Azure cloud infrastructure with no so-called “egress fees” attached, following hot on the heels of similar moves by cloud rivals AWS and Google.
The latter of these announced it was ditching egress fees in January, followed by AWS earlier this month.
Similar to rivals including AWS, Microsoft did already allow customers to transfer 100GB of data out of Azure each month for free.
This is notable, because a lot of companies will want to use some Azure services, without having to go all-in on it.
So data transfers from other Azure services, such as the Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN), will still include the standard charges.
Sharing URLs privatelyNow, if all of this sounds a bit familiar, then that’s likely because you are already familiar with the Safe Browsing Enhanced Mode.
The privacy server removes potential user identifiers and forwards the encrypted hash prefixes to the Safe Browsing server via a TLS connection that mixes requests with many other Chrome users.
The Safe Browsing server decrypts the hash prefixes and matches them against the server-side database, returning full hashes of all unsafe URLs that match one of the hash prefixes sent by Chrome.
This server sits between Chrome and Safe Browsing and strips out any identifying information from the browser request.
Thanks to all of this, Google’s Safe Browsing service should never see your IP address.
AI models that play games go back decades, but they generally specialize in one game and always play to win.
From this data — and the annotations provided by data labelers — the model learns to associate certain visual representations of actions, objects, and interactions.
AI agents trained on multiple games performed better on games they hadn’t been exposed to.
But of course many games involve specific and unique mechanics or terms that will stymie the best-prepared AI.
And simple improvised actions or interactions are also being simulated and tracked by AI in some really interesting research into agents.
Stashpad, a developer-focused “DM to yourself”-styled notebook app, is now pivoting to a docs app that you can use without logging in.
The company will still maintain its original notes app and call it “Stashpad Lists.”StashPad Docs is the company’s new offering that doesn’t require any login and supports Markdown formatting.
The product is browser first and document history is stored locally, so users can search for docs without querying the server.
They might do so even without fully acknowledging that Google Docs remains a big part of their workflow.”With this new product, Stashpad aims to attract both technical and non-technical users.
Plus, it sees a venture-sized opportunity for the docs product.
Google announced a bunch of new features for Google Play listings for games including AI-powered FAQs, displaying the latest YouTube videos, new immersive ad formats, and support for native PC game publishing.
These announcements were made at the Google Games Developer Summit held at San Fransisco.
Play Pass and Play PointsTo drive more in-app purchases, Google is now allowing developers to set discounts for users who have the company’s Play Pass subscription.
Support for PC gamesIn the last few years, Google has made its Play Games for PC program available in more than 120 countries.
Now, the company is set to allow publishers to put native PC games on the Play Store.
TechCrunch has learned that the search giant has started to restrict queries made Gemini when they relate to elections, in any market globally where elections are taking place.
The search giant confirmed to TechCrunch that it started rolling out the restrictions on Gemini to limit surfacing answers about election-related queries globally.
TechCrunch found the AI tool did show answers when passing on queries with typos.
The AI tool, responding to a query about whether Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was a fascist, responded that Modi had been accused of implementing policies that some had characterized as fascist.
It is unclear whether Google will unblock Gemini for answering election-related queries after the elections end later this year.
This new program allows Play Store developers to lead their users in the EEA outside their app, including to promote offers.
Google says this fee represents the value that Play provided in facilitating the initial user acquisition through the Play Store.
Google says this fee represents the value that Play provided in facilitating the initial user acquisition through the Play Store.
Developers, however, will still be responsible for reporting transactions involving those users who are continuing to receive Play Store services.
Separately from the External Offers program, Google also this week launched two other programs to allow alternative billing systems for in-app purchases.
