The TechCrunch team is in Barcelona this week to bring you all the action going on at Mobile World Congress 2024.
So far, we’ve seen some big announcements from companies, including new Android features from Google, Lenovo’s new laptop concept and rollable phone concept and Xiaomi’s robotic dog.
Motorola’s rollable concept phoneWhat’s the maximum size of a device that you will wear on your wrist?
The company has designed what it’s calling a “rollable concept phone” for Motorola that folds around your wrist.
In addition to design, Xiaomi has developed the five core EV technologies: E-Motor, CTB Integrated Battery, Xiaomi Die Casting, Xiaomi Pilot Autonomous Driving, and Smart Cabin.
The TechCrunch team is in Barcelona this week to bring you all the action going on at Mobile World Congress 2024.
So far, we’ve seen some big announcements from companies, including new Android features from Google, Lenovo’s new laptop concept and Xiaomi’s robotic dog.
As MWC progresses, here’s how you can follow along with our team’s coverage.
Last week, Brian reported that “Battery is precisely the sort of thing OnePlus needs to lean into,” given that its first generation product only had about 25 hours of battery life.
Xiaomi’s CyberDogAfter years of reporting on Xiaomi’s CyberDog, Brian Heater was finally able to see the robotic dog up-close at MWC.
Google is hopeful it will soon be able to ‘unpause’ the ability of its multimodal generative AI tool, Gemini, to depict people, per DeepMind founder, Demis Hassabis.
The capability to respond to prompts for images of humans should be back online in the “next few weeks”, he said today.
Asked by moderator, Wired’s Steven Levy, to explain what went wrong with the image generation feature, Hassabis sidestepped a detailed technical explanation.
Instead he suggested the issue was caused by Google failing to identify instances when users are basically after what he described as a “universal depiction”.
The issue is “very complex”, he suggested — likely demanding a whole-of-society mobilization and response to determine and enforce limits.
Google announced a new set of features for phones, cars, and wearables today at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona.
The company said that starting this week, Google Messages will get a feature that lets you access Gemini in the app.
Google is also rolling out a feature for Android Auto that reads out summaries of long text messages and contextualizes group chats.
On the productivity front, Google is extending support for handwritten notes to docs on Android phones or tablets using just a finger or a stylus.
Google is also updating the Fitbit app with support to get data from different sources like AllTrails, Oura Ring, and MyFitnessPal.
Google releases new open LLMs, Rivian lays off staff and Signal rolls out usernamesWelcome, folks, to Week in Review (WiR), TechCrunch’s regular newsletter covering noteworthy happenings in the tech industry.
This week, Google launched two new open large language models, Gemma 2B and Gemma 7B, in its continued bid for generative AI dominance.
The company, which describes the LLMs as “inspired by Gemini,” its flagship family of GenAI models, made each available for commercial and research usage.
Change Healthcare hit: Change Healthcare, one of the largest healthcare tech companies in the U.S., confirmed that a cyberattack on its systems occurred recently.
YouTube triumphant: YouTube dominates TV streaming in the U.S., per Nielsen’s latest report.
This week in AI, Google paused its AI chatbot Gemini’s ability to generate images of people after a segment of users complained about historical inaccuracies.
Google’s ginger treatment of race-based prompts in Gemini didn’t avoid the issue, per se — but disingenuously attempted to conceal the worst of the model’s biases.
Yes, the data sets used to train image generators generally contain more white people than Black people, and yes, the images of Black people in those data sets reinforce negative stereotypes.
That’s why image generators sexualize certain women of color, depict white men in positions of authority and generally favor wealthy Western perspectives.
Whether they tackle — or choose not to tackle — models’ biases, they’ll be criticized.
Google’s proposed “Findings of Fact” filing documents the history of search competition, including Google’s own beginnings, its innovations, the competitive landscape, Google’s search ads business, distribution agreements, and more.
When shareholders sold stock to various VC firms, those funds were not used to improve the search engine, the filing argues.
But it contradicts this point, too, noting that a third of DuckDuckGo’s 50 employees in 2018 were working on improving the search engine, for example.
The search engine receives only about 2.5% of general search queries in the U.S., despite estimates that 10% of people in the U.S. claim to be users.
This, DuckDuckGo’s leadership had explained, is due to the fact that people often use its search engine for some, but not all of their search queries.
Google has apologized (or come very close to apologizing) for another embarrassing AI blunder this week, an image generating model that injected diversity into pictures with a farcical disregard for historical context.
While the underlying issue is perfectly understandable, Google blames the model for “becoming” over-sensitive.
But if you ask for 10, and they’re all white guys walking goldens in suburban parks?
Where Google’s model went wrong was that it failed to have implicit instructions for situations where historical context was important.
These two things led the model to overcompensate in some cases, and be over-conservative in others, leading to images that were embarrassing and wrong.
Google is sunsetting the Google Pay app in the US later this yearGoogle has announced that Google Pay is shutting down in the United States in June, as the standalone app has largely been replaced by Google Wallet.
Users can continue to access the app’s most popular features right from Google Wallet, which Google says is used five times more than the Google Pay app in the United States.
After June 4, users will no longer be able to send, request or receive money through the U.S. version of the Google Pay app.
Users who used the Google Pay app to find offers and deals can still so do using the new deals destination on Google Search, the company says.
Google says millions of people in over 180 countries use Google Pay to check out when shopping on desktop, mobile and in store.
Most will have been defaulted to the “new” Gmail view long ago, so unless you have been specifically requesting the “basic HTML” view, nothing should change for you.
The company is sunsetting Gmail’s basic HTML view, which allows users to look at their emails in a bare-bones state, starting January 2024.
“We’re writing to let you know that the Gmail Basic HTML view for desktop web and mobile web will be disabled starting early January 2024.
The Gmail Basic HTML views are previous versions of Gmail that were replaced by their modern successors 10+ years ago and do not include full Gmail feature functionality,” the email reads.
The HTML version lacks a lot of features such as chat, spell checker, search filters, keyboard shortcuts, and rich formatting.
