Enlarge / The Google Gemini logo. (credit: Google)

On Wednesday, Google announced Gemini, a multimodal AI model family it hopes will rival OpenAI’s GPT-4, which powers the paid version of ChatGPT. Google claims that the largest version of Gemini exceeds “current state-of-the-art results on 30 of the 32 widely used academic benchmarks used in large language model (LLM) research and development.” It’s a follow-up to PaLM 2, an earlier AI model that Google hoped would match GPT-4 in capability.

A specially tuned English version of its mid-level Gemini model is available now in over 170 countries as part of the Google Bard chatbot—although not in the EU or the UK due to potential regulation issues.

Like GPT-4, Gemini can handle multiple types (or “modes”) of input, making it multimodal. That means it can process text, code, images, and even audio. The goal is to make a type of artificial intelligence that can accurately solve problems, give advice, and answer questions in a variety of fields—from the mundane to the scientific. Google says this will power a new era in computing, and it hopes to tightly integrate the technology into its products.

Enlarge (credit: Dilok Klaisataporn | iStock / Getty Images Plus)

In a letter demanding that the Department of Justice update or repeal policies prohibiting companies from informing the public about these covert government requests, Wyden warned that “Apple and Google are in a unique position to facilitate government surveillance of how users are using particular apps.”

Push notifications are used to provide a wide variety of alerts to app users. A friendly ding or text alert on the home screen notifies users about new text messages, emails, social media comments, news updates, packages delivered, gameplay nudges—basically any app activity where notifications have been enabled could be tracked by governments, Wyden said.

Enlarge / It takes proficiency in quite a few disciplines, a pick-and-place machine, a 3D printer, and lots of little solder points to get a candle looking this cool. (credit: mitxela)

The latest device crafted by the prolific maker going by mitxela comprises an LED matrix board, “a bunch of electronics” underneath it, an infrared sensor, a coin battery, and the motor from a CD drive. It’s a deceptively simple bill of goods for a rather elegant DIY project the size of a tea light candle.

Typical volumetric displays are tricky things, given the need to send data and power to rapidly spinning things. Mitxela’s solution: make everything spin, including the battery. Creeping up on the infrared sensor with his finger, mitxela coaxed the tiny spinning board to create collapsing stars, pouring liquid, and the candle flames for which it was originally designed.

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Source: Ars Technica – Volumetric LED candle looks the same from any angle—and looks like amazing work

Enlarge (credit: Getty)

The Verge experienced the problem on Tuesday, reporting that while doing a Google search, Reddit results that came up had a URL that looked like this: “https://2goback-[slur].reddit.com/r/[the rest of the URL]”.

One Reddit user posted about the problem on Monday, and other Redditors also noticed the issue (examples here and here).

Enlarge / This image reveals intricate details of the Herbig Haro object number 797 (HH 797). (credit: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, T. Ray (Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies))

Welcome to the Daily Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light, a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We’ll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we’re going to take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe that is filled with stars and wonder.

Enlarge / The British car company Morgan is unashamedly throwback in many regards, but it hasn’t forgotten about electrification. (credit: Morgan)

The UK’s Morgan Motor Company is best known for making new cars that look like old cars. Not only that, but barring a false start with an electric take on the Three Wheeler, the EV3, it’s all gas, all the time. Perhaps that won’t be the case forever, as it’s revealed its latest development vehicle, XP-1: a Super 3 with an electric heart.

Where the production Super 3 has a 1.5 L Ford three-cylinder engine under the hood, XP-1 gets a 33 kWh battery pack hooked up to a 136 hp (100 kW) 251lb-ft (340 Nm) electric motor that sits in the transmission tunnel. It weighs 132 lbs (60 kg) more than the gas car and comes with a lot more torque.

A happy side effect of that weight is a real-world economy of about 4 miles/kWh (15.5 kWh/100 km), giving a non-homologated range of roughly 132 miles/212 km). Oh, and Morgan’s thrown in fast charging—up to 50kW—so it can get itself a full charge in less than an hour.

Enlarge / A crane is attached to one of several Starship test vehicles at SpaceX’s Starbase facility in South Texas. This vehicle, called Ship 28, could launch on the next Starship test flight.

NASA is keen on demonstrating orbital refueling technology, an advancement that could lead to propellant depots in space to feed rockets heading to distant destinations beyond Earth orbit. In 2020, NASA announced agreements with four companies—Lockheed Martin, United Launch Alliance, SpaceX, and a Florida-based startup named Eta Space—to prove capabilities in the area of refueling and propellant depots using cryogenic propellants.

These cryogenic fluids—liquid hydrogen, methane, and liquid oxygen—must be kept at temperatures of several hundred degrees below zero, or they turn into a gas and boil off. Russian supply freighters regularly refuel the International Space Station with hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide, room-temperature rocket propellants that can be stored for years in orbit, but rockets using more efficient super-cold propellants have typically needed to complete their missions within hours.

Enlarge / Dispensers for Charged Lemondade, a caffeinated lemonade drink, at Panera Bread, Walnut Creek, California, March 27, 2023. (credit: Getty | Smith Collection/Gado)

According to a lawsuit filed by family members Monday, 46-year-old Dennis Brown fell dead on a sidewalk from cardiac arrest while walking home from a Panera in Florida on October 9. Before he left the restaurant, he had ordered a Charged Lemonade and had two refills.

In September, college student Sarah Katz, 21, went into cardiac arrest after drinking a Charged Lemonade from a Panera in Philadelphia. Katz had a heart condition called long QT syndrome type 1 and had avoided energy drinks because of it, according to a lawsuit filed in October by her family.

Enlarge / Sam Altman, president of Y Combinator and co-chairman of OpenAI, seen here in July 2016. (credit: Drew Angerer / Getty Images News)

When Sam Altman was suddenly removed as CEO of OpenAI—before being reinstated days later—the company’s board publicly justified the move by saying Altman “was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities.” In the days since, there has been some reporting on potential reasons for the attempted board coup, but not much in the way of follow-up on what specific information Altman was allegedly less than “candid” about.

Now, in an in-depth piece for The New Yorker, writer Charles Duhigg—who was embedded inside OpenAI for months on a separate story—suggests that some board members found Altman “manipulative and conniving” and took particular issue with the way Altman allegedly tried to manipulate the board into firing fellow board member Helen Toner.

Board “manipulation” or “ham-fisted” maneuvering?

Toner, who serves as director of strategy and foundational research grants at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, allegedly drew Altman’s negative attention by co-writing a paper on different ways AI companies can “signal” their commitment to safety through “costly” words and actions. In the paper, Toner contrasts OpenAI’s public launch of ChatGPT last year with Anthropic’s “deliberate deci[sion] not to productize its technology in order to avoid stoking the flames of AI hype.”

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Benj Edwards)

In an editorial for Slate published Monday, renowned security researcher Bruce Schneier warned that AI models may enable a new era of mass spying, allowing companies and governments to automate the process of analyzing and summarizing large volumes of conversation data, fundamentally lowering barriers to spying activities that currently require human labor.

In the piece, Schneier notes that the existing landscape of electronic surveillance has already transformed the modern era, becoming the business model of the Internet, where our digital footprints are constantly tracked and analyzed for commercial reasons. Spying, by contrast, can take that kind of economically inspired monitoring to a completely new level:

“Spying and surveillance are different but related things,” Schneier writes. “If I hired a private detective to spy on you, that detective could hide a bug in your home or car, tap your phone, and listen to what you said. At the end, I would get a report of all the conversations you had and the contents of those conversations. If I hired that same private detective to put you under surveillance, I would get a different report: where you went, whom you talked to, what you purchased, what you did.”

Enlarge / Myth: You own the digital content you buy. (credit: MythBusters/YouTube)

The company recently announced that all Discovery content purchased on the PlayStation Store will be erased before 2024. The brief notice, signed by the PlayStation Store, says:

As of 31 December 2023, due to our content licensing arrangements with content providers, you will no longer be able to watch any of your previously purchased Discovery content and the content will be removed from your video library.

We sincerely thank you for your continued support.

PlayStation Network started selling TV shows and movies with 2008’s PlayStation 3, and at the time you were allowed to transfer content to different Sony devices, Kotaku noted. That feature went away with the PlayStation 4. With the growth of streaming TV apps, many of which could be accessed through a PlayStation, the PlayStation Store stopped selling movies and TV shows in 2021.

The OnePlus is doing its usual early flagship launch in China. The OnePlus 12 is official there, but won’t be released in the US until 2024. We can still fire up Google Translate and go over it, though.

This will be one of the first devices on the market with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, Qualcomm’s new SoC for 2024. This uses an Arm Cortex X4 CPU and a novel 1:5:2 core arrangement, all built on a 4 nm process. That’s one big X4 core, five “medium” A720 cores, and two A530 cores for background processing. The base model has 12GB of RAM and 256 GB of storage, while higher tiers will let you go up to 24GB of RAM and 1TB of storage. The phone is only IP65 rated for dust and water resistance; in other words, it can’t be submerged in water like most other flagships.

The battery is getting a big boost beyond the usual 5000 mAh capacity phones have been stuck at for years and is now up to 5400 mAh. The Chinese version has 100 W wired quick charging (this will probably be downgraded to 80 W in the US) and sees the return of 50 W wireless charging. Both will need proprietary OnePlus chargers. The display is a 6.82-inch, 3168×1440 120 Hz OLED that can hit 4,500 nit peak brightness. Unlike some other flagships that are dumping curved displays, this one is still curved.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

AI face detection now counts among the tools that could be used to help adult sites effectively estimate UK user ages and block minors from accessing pornography, the UK’s Office of Communications (Ofcom) said in a press release on Tuesday.

The only foreseeable problem, Ofcom noted: There’s little evidence that the AI method of age estimation will be fair, reliable, or effective.

The UK’s legal age to watch porn is 18. To enforce that restriction, under the Online Safety Act, Ofcom will soon require all apps and sites displaying adult content to introduce so-called “age assurance” systems that verify and/or estimate user ages. Sites and apps risk potential fines if they fail to “ensure that children are not normally able to encounter pornography on their service.”

Enlarge / The Fiat 500e returns to the US early in 2024. (credit: Fiat)

We’ve known for some time that the 500e was US-bound; Fiat broke that news in 2022. But it’s now released a lot more information on the 500e, which is coming here at first as a (RED) edition, meaning it might match your iPhone or iPod. Fiat says it’s incorporating a “product drop” strategy, so expect other special editions accompanied by as much hype as the automaker can generate, presumably.

Regarding specs, it looks like Fiat used the Mini Cooper SE as the benchmark and then set out to beat it in various attributes. The 500e has a curb weight of 2,952 lbs (1,342 kg), which Fiat says makes it the lightest passenger EV in the segment, so it’s about one small adult lighter than the Mini.

Enlarge / “Oobleck” is a classic kitchen science example of a shear-thickening non-Newtonian fluid. (credit: Screenshot/PBS)

Oobleck has long been my favorite example of a non-Newtonian fluid, and I’m not alone. It’s a hugely popular “kitchen science” experiment because it’s simple and easy to make. Mix one part water to two parts corn starch, add a dash of food coloring for fun, and you’ve got oobleck, which behaves as either a liquid or a solid, depending on how much stress is applied. Stir it slowly and steadily, and it’s a liquid. Punch it hard, and it turns more solid under your fist. You can even fill small pools with the stuff and walk across it since the oobleck will harden every time you step down—a showy physics demo that naturally shows up a lot on YouTube.

The underlying physics principles of this simple substance are surprisingly nuanced and complex, and thus fascinating to scientists. Molecular engineers at the University of Chicago have used dense suspensions of piezoelectric nanoparticles to measure what is happening at the molecular level when oobleck transitions from liquid to solid behavior, according to a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Toward the end of his life, Isaac Newton laid out the properties of an “ideal liquid.” One of those properties is viscosity, loosely defined as how much friction/resistance there is to flow in a given substance. The friction arises because a flowing liquid is essentially a series of layers sliding past one another. The faster one layer slides over another, the more resistance there is; the slower one layer slides over another, the less resistance there is. But the world is not an ideal place.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | SOPA Images)

“I don’t think the hardware is ready and the software is ready,” ex-Tesla employee Lukasz Krupski said. “It affects all of us because we are essentially experiments in public roads. So even if you don’t have a Tesla, your children still walk in the footpath.”

The nonprofit group Blueprint for Free Speech recently awarded Krupski with its Whistleblowing Prize. “In late 2021, Lukasz realised that—even as a service technician—he had access to a shockingly wide range of internal data at Tesla,” the group’s prize announcement said. “Not only did access controls seem almost entirely absent, other lapses were evident in the data Lukasz was seeing: serious lapses that risked putting Tesla’s customers, and those sharing the roads with them, in danger.” Those safety risks included sudden accelerations and braking.

Enlarge (credit: Microsoft)

As it has done for other stubbornly popular versions of Windows, though, Microsoft is offering a reprieve for those who want or need to stay on Windows 10: three additional years of security updates, provided to those who can pay for the Extended Security Updates (ESU) program.

The initial announcement, written by Windows Servicing and Delivery Principal Product Manager Jason Leznek, spends most of its time encouraging users and businesses to upgrade to Windows 11 rather than staying on 10, either by updating their current computers, upgrading to new PCs or transitioning to a Windows 365 cloud-based PC instead.