Meta got an emergency arbitration ruling to stop the memoir’s author from talking about her time at the company.

The ESA probe spotted the moon while en route to witness the aftermath of NASA’s asteroid deflection test.

The best AirPods yet come with state of the art hearing protection and spatial audio, and they’re nearly $80 off their usual $249 price.

OpenAI is hoping that Donald Trump’s AI Action Plan, due out this July, will settle copyright debates by declaring AI training fair use—paving the way for AI companies’ unfettered access to training data that OpenAI claims is critical to defeat China in the AI race.

Currently, courts are mulling whether AI training is fair use, as rights holders say that AI models trained on creative works threaten to replace them in markets and water down humanity’s creative output overall.

OpenAI is just one AI company fighting with rights holders in several dozen lawsuits, arguing that AI transforms copyrighted works it trains on and alleging that AI outputs aren’t substitutes for original works.

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Researchers in Spain have unearthed several important factors that likely helped Maria Branyas Morera live for over a century, one of which is particularly unusual.

Microsoft is preparing to launch an AI-powered Copilot for Gaming soon that will guide Xbox players through games and act as an assistant to download and launch games. From a report: Copilot for Gaming, as Microsoft is branding it, will be available through the Xbox mobile app initially and is designed to work on a second screen as a companion or assistant.

Microsoft is positioning Copilot for Gaming as a sidekick of sorts, one that will accompany you through games, offering up tips and guides and useful information about a game world. During a press briefing, Sonali Yadav, product manager for gaming AI, demonstrated several scenarios for what Copilot for Gaming could be used for. One involved a concept demo of Copilot assisting an Overwatch 2 player by coaching them on the mistakes they made when trying to push without teammates.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Before Edward Snowden, Mark Klein blew the whistle on NSA internet spying.

After being one of the first companies to roll out a Deep Research feature at the end of last year, Google is now making that same tool available to everyone. Starting today, Gemini users can try Deep Research for free in more than 45 languages — no Gemini Advanced subscription necessary. For the uninitiated, Deep Research allows you to ask Gemini to create comprehensive but easy-to-read reports on complex topics. 

Compared to say Google’s new AI Mode, Deep Research works slower than your typical chatbot, and that’s by design. Gemini will first create a research plan before it begins searching the web for information that may be relevant to your prompt. When Google first announced Deep Research, it was powered by the company’s powerful but expensive Gemini 1.5 Pro model. With today’s expansion, Google has upgraded Deep Research to run on its new Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking Experimental model — that’s mouthful of a name that just means it’s a chain-of-thought system that can break down problems into a series of intermediate steps.

“This enhances Gemini’s capabilities across all research stages — from planning and searching to reasoning, analyzing and reporting — creating higher-quality, multi-page reports that are more detailed and insightful,” Google says of the upgrade. 

If Deep Research sounds familiar, it’s because of a variety of chatbots now offer the feature, including ChatGPT. Google, however, has been ahead of the curve. Not only was it one of the first to offer the tool, but it’s now also making it widely available to all of its users ahead of competitors like OpenAI.     

Separately, Google announced today the rollout of a new experimental feature it calls Gemini with personalization. The same Flash Thinking model that is allowing the company to bring Deep Research to more people will also allow Gemini to inform its responses based on information from Google apps and services you use. 

“With your permission, Gemini can now tailor its responses based on your past searches, saving you time and delivering more precise answers,” says Google. In the coming months, Gemini will be able to pull context from additional Google services, including Photos and YouTube. “This will enable Gemini to provide more personalized insights, drawing from a broader understanding of your activities and preferences to deliver responses that truly resonate with you.”

To enable the feature, select “Personalization (experimental)” from the model drop-down menu in the Gemini Apps interface. Google explains Gemini will only leverage your Search history when it determines that information may be useful. A banner with a link will allow you to easily turn off the feature if you find it’s invasive. Gemini and Gemini Advanced users can begin using this feature on the web starting today, with mobile availability to follow.   

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/googles-gemini-deep-research-is-now-available-to-everyone-160043485.html?src=rss

DC and Clover Press are teaming up for The DC Art of Jorge Jiménez, collecting some of the artist’s most famous work from the last decade and a half of comics.

Your digital life can get just as cluttered and chaotic as your “IRL” life if you’re not too careful. And if you work remote even some of the time, that can add to the massive amount of online information you’re juggling on a regular basis. That’s why many of us on the Engadget team have done a lot of trial and error with a bunch of digital tools to see if any of them can help us keep things organized personally and professionally. Thankfully, there are tons of good productivity tools out there — these are some of our favorites, many of which are free or have free tiers that you can dive into if you’re keen on trying them out.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/apps/the-engadget-teams-favorite-productivity-tools-to-get-things-done-160025276.html?src=rss

Google is announcing a slew of new Gemini features today, this time aimed squarely at its free users. Features that were previously only available with the $20 per month Advanced plan will now be accessible to the public.

Gems

Gems are Gemini’s little AI helpers that you can create for any task. You can start with pre-made ones like Google’s Career guide. But you can create a Gem for any purpose. You can create one for repeated tasks, or to help you research a topic with very specific prompts. Previously, the Gems feature was exclusive to Gemini Advanced users, but now Google is making them to available to all users.

You’ll find Gems in the sidebar, where you can easily get started with premade Gems.

Deep Research

Google, too, has a Deep Research feature. But unlike with Perplexity, it was previously behind a paywall. Now, Google is making its Deep Research feature available for free to all users.

Deep Research is an AI feature where the AI model takes some time to think through your question using a reasoning model, and then goes out in the open web, collating sources, figuring issues out in depth, and then presenting you with a detailed report instead of the simple bullet-point answers that regular AI chatbots provide.

In addition to making Deep Research free, Google is also adding its Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking Experimental model to Deep Research. The new thinking model will help with the every step of research, including planning, reasoning, analyzing, and reporting. Deep Research will be available in more than 45 languages, and can be accessed using the drop-down menu in the Prompt box.

In material shared with press, Google wasn’t clear how many Deep Research queries free users get per day, though the company did promise expanded access for Gemini Advanced users.

Updates to the Gemini 2.0 Flash model

The Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking (Experimental) model is also getting an upgrade. You can now upload files for it to use while answering prompts, and Google says it has improved the model’s performance and introduced advanced reasoning capabilities.

Gemini Advanced users will also now have access to a 1 million token context window, enabling users to solve more complex problems.

Your Google Search history comes to Gemini

Google is adding a new experimental feature called Gemini with personalization, powered by the Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking model. This allows Gemini to connect with your Google apps and services. The company is starting with Google Search, but will expand to Photos and YouTube in coming months.

This means that Gemini will have more context about you, based on your Google Searches, but only if you choose to enable the Personalization (experimental) model from the model picker drop-down menu. Google also says that the new feature will only use your search history when Gemini’s advanced models deem that it’s needed.

More powerful connections with Google apps

With the 2.0 Flash Thinking model, Gemini is now better able to tackle complex requests that involve multiple Google services, including Calendar, Notes, Tasks, and now Photos.

According to Google, you can use a single prompt like “check my Calendar to find that gelato place Ezra and I went to back in May, save its address to my notes, and text it to Lauren and suggest we go there” instead of jumping between multiple apps, or asking three different questions to Gemini.

The annual Game Developers Conference is about to kick off, and even though Stadia is dead and buried, Google has a lot of plans for games. It’s expanding tools that help PC developers bring premium games to Android, and games are heading in the other direction, too. The PC-based Play Games platform is expanding to bring every single Android game to Windows. Google doesn’t have a firm timeline for all these changes, but 2025 will be an interesting year for the company’s gaming efforts.

Google released the first beta of Google Play Games on PC back in 2022, allowing you to play Android games on a PC. It has chugged along quietly ever since, mostly because of the anemic and largely uninteresting game catalog. While there are hundreds of thousands of Android games, only a handful were made available in the PC client. That’s changing in a big way now that Google is bringing over every Android game from Google Play.

Starting today, you’ll see thousands of new games in Google Play Games on PC. Developers actually have to opt out if they don’t want their games available on Windows machines via Google Play Games. Google says this is possible thanks to improved custom controls, making it easy to map keyboard and gamepad controls onto games that were designed for touchscreens (see below). The usability of these mapped controls will probably vary dramatically from game to game.

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