The Google parent’s moonshot factory X this week officially unveiled Project Bellwether, its latest bid to apply technology to some of our biggest problems.
Here that means using AI tools to identify natural disasters like wildfire and flooding as quickly as possible.
“Right now, our analysts have to spend time sorting through images to find the ones that cover the areas most affected by natural disasters,” the Guard’s Col. Brian McGarry notes.
Google has been exploring the use of machine learning models and AI to predict natural disasters for some time now.
Project Bellwether’s partnership with the National Guard could well prove an important validation of that work.
Spotify has revealed plans to increase subscription fees in France, in response to a new tax directed at music-streaming services operating in the country.
While all the impacted companies are opposing the new law, Spotify has been the most vociferous, largely due to the fact it is the biggest player in the country.
The company wrote in a blog post today:“With the creation of this new tax, Spotify would be required to give approximately two-thirds of every euro it generates to music to rights holders and the French government.
What’s perhaps the most telling part of this whole episode is how important France is to Spotify in terms of market traction.
With regards to France, Spotify is conveying as much — if not more — grievance with the new tax as it did with Uruguay, yet it has given no indication that it will exit the country.
Streaming music service Deezer is joining Spotify in cheering the European Union’s €1.84 billion fine imposed on Apple for breaking antitrust rules in the streaming music market.
Apple’s new DMA rules, introduced in January, are a complicated means of providing a path forward for app developers to distribute apps from alternative app marketplaces.
Deezer is among those developers who drafted an open letter to the EC last week, claiming Apple was making a “mockery” of the DMA.
So far, we’ve only heard from MacPaw, the maker of a subscription service for apps, Setapp, which announced it was switching to Apple’s DMA terms last week.
However, larger developers, like Apple critics Spotify and Epic Games, as well as tech companies like Meta, Mozilla, and Microsoft have criticized Apple’s new rules.
An Indian state government has fixed security issues impacting its website that exposed the sensitive documents and personal information of millions of residents.
The bugs existed on the Rajasthan government website related to Jan Aadhaar, a state program to provide a single identifier to families and individuals in the state to access welfare schemes.
One of the bugs allowed anyone to access personal documents and information with knowledge of a registrant’s phone number.
The state’s Jan Aadhaar portal, which launched in 2019, says it has more than 78 million individual registrants and 20 million families.
The portal aims to offer “One Number, One Card, One Identity” to residents in the northern state of Rajasthan for accessing state government welfare schemes.
OpenAI has responded to a letter sent by the Congressional Black Caucus that flagged the lack of diversity on its board.
OpenAI’s response letter, which TechCrunch saw, was dated January 5 and signed by CEO Sam Altman and Chairman of the Board Bret Taylor.
The OpenAI board has received criticism for its lack of gender and racial diversity since its reconfiguration after Altman’s ousting and prompt return in November.
In mid-December, CBC Chairs Rep. Emanuel Cleaver and Rep. Barbara Lee sent a letter to OpenAI, asking it to “move expeditiously” in diversifying its board.
OpenAI did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment regarding its response letter or its plans to diversify its board.
It looks like X, the company formerly known as Twitter, has a Verified bot problem.
It does appear that at least some of the bot accounts are older, according to the “join date” that’s displayed on their X profile.
While a few were from real people joking about the bot problem, the majority were AI responses.
It appears that the Verified bots are largely X accounts created in the November 24-26, 2023 timeframe.
The company admitted last summer it had a Verified spammer problem when it announced new DM settings.
In late December, The New York Times sued OpenAI and its close collaborator and investor, Microsoft, for allegedly violating copyright law by training generative AI models on Times’ content.
Today, OpenAI published a public response in which the startup — unsurprisingly — claims that the case is without merit.
“Interestingly, the regurgitations The New York Times [cite in its lawsuit] appear to be from years-old articles that have proliferated on multiple third-party websites,” OpenAI writes.
The Times is only the latest copyright holder to sue OpenAI over what it believes is a clear violation of IP rights.
Actress Sarah Silverman joined a pair of lawsuits in July that accuse Meta and OpenAI of having “ingested” Silverman’s memoir to train their AI models.
Spotify is pulling support for two music festivals in protest against a controversial new tax directed at music-streaming platforms operating in France, and threatened more action will follow in the coming months.
While all the major music-streaming platforms have come together in opposition to the new law, including Apple, Google’s YouTube, and local player Deezer, Spotify has been the most vocal.
In the wake of the announcement last week, Spotify said that the move was a “real blow to innovation,” and that it was evaluating its next moves.
The company later pulled a 180-degree turn when the government gave assurances that music-streaming platforms wouldn’t be expected to cover any extra costs resulting from the law.
“Spotify will have the means to absorb this tax, but Spotify will disinvest in France and will invest in other markets,” Monin said in an interview with FranceInfo last week.
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