Apple AAPL 1.46%increase; **green up pointing triangle** and Nvidia NVDA -6.38%decrease; **red down pointing triangle** are in talks to invest in OpenAI, a move that would strengthen their ties to a partner integral to their efforts in the artificial-intelligence race.

Google is on a determined mission to make Gemini an indispensable part of our daily routines. With deeper integrations into popular apps like Spotify and the Pixel 9 series shipping with Gemini as the default assistant, it’s clear that Google has ambitious plans for its AI model. The tech giant has been strategically enhancing Gemini’s functionality with new extensions. After adding extensions for Google apps like Keep, Tasks, and Calendar, along with YouTube and YouTube Music, recent findings suggest even more exciting additions are on the horizon. An APK teardown helps predict features that may arrive on a service in the future based on work-in-progress code. However, it is possible that such predicted features may not make it to a public release. In the Google app version 15.34.32.29.arm64 beta, we could enable the toggles for new Gemini extensions for WhatsApp, Google Messages, and Android system notifications. While they aren’t working just yet, their official descriptions provide a glimpse into what they might offer.

The founder and CEO of Rumble — a YouTube alternative billing itself as “immune to cancel culture” — said he has “departed” from Europe after Pavel Durov, the CEO of encrypted messaging app Telegram, was arrested. “I’ve just safely departed from Europe,” Chris Pavlovski, a Canadian national, posted on X on Sunday, Aug. 25. He claimed France had “threatened Rumble” and had “crossed a red line” by arresting Telegram’s Durov. In November 2022, Rumble blocked access to French users, claiming the country’s government asked it to remove “certain Russian news sources,” which it said it would legally challenge. In May, Pavlovski also claimed Russia blocked Rumble because it “refused to comply with their censorship demands.”

Wind turbines and solar panels have overtaken fossil fuels to generate 30% of the European Union’s electricity in the first half of the year, a report has found. Power generation from burning coal, oil and gas fell 17% in the first six months of 2024 compared with the same period the year before, according to climate thinktank Ember. It found the continued shift away from polluting fuels has led to a one-third drop in the sector’s emissions since the first half of 2022. Chris Rosslowe, an analyst at Ember, said the rise of wind and solar was narrowing the role of fossil fuels. “We are witnessing a historic shift in the power sector, and it is happening rapidly.”

These announcements were made at TSMC’s US Technology Symposium earlier this year. The symposium is a roadshow, covering continents and key markets for the company. Just before the EU Symposium, I had a chance to catch up with Dr. Kevin Zhang, SVP and Deputy Co-COO of TSMC for an interview. We covered a wide range of topics, from Kevin’s thoughts on Moore’s Law, to how the market has changed under the weight of AI (also, the activations of AI). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isjeYKLBffs Here is a video of this interview, or a transcript is available below

Meta on Tuesday announced the release of Llama 3.1, the latest version of its large language model that the company claims now rivals competitors from OpenAI and Anthropic. The new model comes just three months after Meta launched Llama 3 by integrating it into Meta AI, a chatbot that now lives in Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp and also powers the company's smart glasses. In the interim, OpenAI and Anthropic already released new versions of their own AI models, a sign that Silicon Valley’s AI arms race isn’t slowing down any time soon. Meta said that the new model, called Llama 3.1 405B, is the first openly available model that can compete against rivals in general knowledge, math skills and translating across multiple languages. The model was trained on more than 16,000 NVIDIA H100 GPUs, currently the fastest available chips that cost roughly $25,000 each, and can beat rivals on over 150 benchmarks, Meta claimed.

Mistral NeMo 12B is the name of the new AI model, presented this week by Nvidia and Mistral. “We are fortunate to collaborate with the NVIDIA team, leveraging their top-tier hardware and software,” said Guillaume Lample, cofounder and chief scientist of Mistral AI. “Together, we have developed a model with unprecedented accuracy, flexibility, high-efficiency and enterprise-grade support and security thanks to NVIDIA AI Enterprise deployment.” The promise of the new AI model is significant. Whereas previous LLMs were tied to datacenters, Mistral NeMo 12B moves to workstations. And it does this without sacrificing performance, or well, that’s the promise.

Google is launching its new Vids productivity app in Workspace Labs with the idea that “if you can make a slide, you can make a video in Vids.” Announced in April, Vids allows users to drop docs, slides, voiceovers, and video recordings into a timeline to create a presentation video to share with coworkers. Making it available in the Workspace Labs preview allows Workspace admins to opt in users to try out the AI-powered video maker. While you can generate video in Vids, it’s not to be confused with AI tools like OpenAI’s Sora, which can create lifelike footage from a prompt. Instead, Vids is about generating a presentation by describing what you want Gemini to create and then letting you alter the video afterward.

When is an ad an advertisement and not a recommendation? Microsoft clearly likes to use the term recommendation for what others may see as an advertisement. There are recommendations in the Start menu, Settings app, Lock screen, File Explorer, Get Help app, and other areas of the operating system already. These are often not that useful. App recommendations in the Start menu are limited to Microsoft Store apps. Now, Microsoft is testing recommendations in the Microsoft Store app. If you never use the app, you won't be exposed to these. If you do, you may notice recommendations popping up when you try to use the built-in search. First spotted by phantomofearth on X, two or three recommendations are shown whenever search is activated in the official Microsoft Store app.

Microsoft has fixed a known issue causing restart loops and taskbar problems on Windows 11 systems after installing the June KB5039302 preview update. "This issue was resolved in updates released July 9, 2024 (KB5040442) and later," the company said in an update added to the Windows release health page on Tuesday. "We recommend you install the latest security update for your device. It contains important improvements and issue resolutions, including this one." The known issue only impacts systems running Windows 11 23H2 and Windows 11 22H2, with users of Windows Home edition less likely to experience it because virtualization is less common in home environments. This fix comes after Redmond was forced to pull the update on June 27 after reports that it was causing some Windows devices to restart repeatedly while others failed to start altogether.

On Wednesday, June 26, 2024, TeamViewer, a leading provider of remote access software, announced that attackers had compromised its internal corporate IT environment. The company’s security team detected an “irregularity” in their internal systems, prompting an immediate response. TeamViewer activated its incident response procedures and brought in external cybersecurity experts to investigate and implement remediation measures. In a statement, TeamViewer emphasized that its corporate IT environment is “completely independent” from its product environment. The company stated there is no evidence that the breach affected customer data or the TeamViewer product itself. However, investigations are still ongoing.

NASA has selected SpaceX to develop a vehicle that will bring the International Space Station to a fiery end when the time comes. The space agency first asked U.S. aerospace companies for proposals in March 2023 and then again in September of that year. The request was for a "space tug" vehicle that could help deorbit the U.S. sections of the International Space Station (ISS) safely. On Wednesday (June 26), the agency issued a statement announcing that SpaceX has been selected to develop and deliver the "U.S. Deorbit Vehicle" as it's known. The contract is worth up to $843 million; that total does not include any launch costs, however, and is for the vehicle development only. The vehicle will be responsible for disposing of the space station "in a controlled manner after the end of its operational life in 2030," the statement adds.

To say that Prusa Research is moving toward industrial 3D printing with the launch of the new Prusa Pro HT90 would be reductive and ultimately incorrect. All you need to do is look at the company’s 3D printing farm located inside its Prague HQ to understand that very few companies in the world have similar additive production capabilities. Hundreds of printers, all working at the same time and producing end-use parts for more printers as well as many other types of final parts. What the HT90 represents for Prusa is an opportunity to move to the next level in terms of high-temperature, high-strength, engineering materials. All at an ultra-competitive price and without sacrificing the quality that has made Prusa printers a fan favorite for over a decade. To officially launch the next HT90 3D printer, Prusa invited a selected group of journalists from leading trade media publications – a strategy that we at VoxelMatters strongly support and recommend – to visit its headquarters in Prague. The tour was organized down to the smallest detail by CMO Rudolf Krcmar and his team and it enabled journalists to visit the facility, meet and exchange a few words with founder and 3D printing celebrity Joseph Průša, see up close and learn everything about the new HT90 system and enjoy the beautiful Czech capital.

The world's top two AI startups are ignoring requests by media publishers to stop scraping their web content for free model training data, Business Insider has learned. OpenAI and Anthropic have been found to be either ignoring or circumventing an established web rule, called robots.txt, that prevents automated scraping of websites. TollBit, a startup aiming to broker paid licensing deals between publishers and AI companies, found several AI companies are acting in this way and informed certain large publishers in a Friday letter, which was reported earlier by Reuters. The letter did not include the names of any of the AI companies accused of skirting the rule. OpenAI and Anthropic have stated publicly that they respect robots.txt and blocks to their specific web crawlers, GPTBot and ClaudeBot. However, according to TollBit's findings, such blocks are not being respected, as claimed. AI companies, including OpenAI and Anthropic, are simply choosing to "bypass" robots.txt in order to retrieve or scrape all of the content from a given website or page. A spokeswoman for OpenAI declined to comment beyond pointing BI to a corporate blogpost from May, in which the company says it takes web crawler permissions "into account each time we train a new model." A spokesperson for Anthropic did not respond to emails seeking comment. Robots.txt is a single bit of code that's been used since the late 1990s as a way for websites to tell bot crawlers they don't want their data scraped and collected. It was widely accepted as one of the unofficial rules supporting the web.

May 5, 2024, marked the first-ever leak of the most comprehensive collection of Google Search API ranking factors in the history of search engines – a truly historical moment we might not have seen if Erfan Azimi, founder & CEO of an SEO agency, hadn't spotted Google's documents that were mistakenly released on Github on March 27, 2024, and were just forgotten to be deleted. The irony is that they were published under the Apache 2.0 license, allowing anyone accessing the documents to use, edit, and distribute them. As such, sharing the documents with two of the most reputable SEO experts, Rand Fishkin and Mike King – the next step Erfan Azimi took after spotting the leak – was within the legal boundaries of the license. Both released the documents and accompanying analysis on May 27. Navboost is a Google ranking algorithm that was revealed during the company's antitrust trial with the U.S. Department of Justice. It enhances search results for navigation queries by utilizing various signals like user clicks to identify the most relevant outcomes. Navboost retains past clicks for queries up to 13 months old and differentiates results based on localization and device type (mobile or desktop). This ranking signal is crucial for SEO professionals to understand and optimize for, as it can significantly impact a website's visibility in search results. Clicks are a primary ranking signal, indeed Google has denied for years that clicks belong to a primary ranking factor. Its representatives, including Gary Illyes, have consistently emphasized that click-through rate (CTR) is a "very noisy signal" and that using clicks directly in rankings would be problematic due to the potential for manipulation. They have explained that while click data is used for evaluation and experimentation purposes to assess changes in the search algorithm, it is not a primary factor in determining search rankings. The leaked documents prove otherwise. It does matter how many clicks a website can generate. The more on-page optimization and continuous content marketing you do, the more traffic you'll attract, resulting in more clicks, higher rankings, and higher conversion rates. Google representatives have consistently misdirected and misled us about how their systems operate, aiming to influence SEO behavior. While their public statements may not be intentional lies, they are designed to deceive potential spammers—and many legitimate SEO professionals—by obscuring how search results can be impacted. Gary Ilyes, an analyst on the Google Search Team, has reiterated this point numerous times. He's not alone; John Mueller, Google's Senior Webmaster Trends Analyst, and Search Relations team lead, once stated they don't have a website authority score. However, as the data leak suggests, Google does have an overall domain authority measure. As part of the Compressed Quality Signals stored on a per-document basis, Google computes a feature called "siteAuthority." According to Mike King, Founder and CEO of iPullRank, while this measure's specific computation and application in downstream scoring functions remain unclear, we now definitively know that Google's domain authority exists and is used in the Q* ranking system. The recent Google Search API leak revealed the existence of white lists that are used to ensure the quality and reliability of information, particularly for sensitive topics like health and news, where misinformation could have drastic implications on public well-being.

3D printing’s primary role in supply chains revolves around manufacturing. Many manufacturers use it for small-batch or custom orders because of its fast turnaround time. Its popularity in warehousing and distribution is rising, too, since it’s a relatively versatile technology. Logistics companies use it to bridge the gap between the digital and physical worlds. While many people associate 3D printing products and services with do-it-yourself projects and fun, worthless trinkets, it’s not just for consumers. In the logistics sector, its penetration rate is high — which isn’t surprising, given its global market value is set to reach $35.6 billion in 2024, achieving a compound annual growth rate of 22.5% from 2020 to 2024. Since this technology can accelerate typical production and backend processes, it has become a large part of logistics. Already, 74% of supply chain companies report spending $5-$10 million on additive manufacturing technology, and another 18% spend up to $50 million. As its penetration rate increases and investments grow, decision-makers will uncover new use cases. Manufacturers use 3D printing to shift from mass production to on-demand. For example, medical equipment manufacturers use it to craft tailor-made prosthetics. Some facilities have established local hubs where they produce, assemble, and ship products from decentralized centers instead of relying on distributors to distribute from one central location.

CATANIA, Italy May 31 (Reuters) - The European Commission on Friday approved Italian state aid for chipmaker STMicroelectronics (STMPA.PA), to build a 5 billion euro ($5.4 billion) plant in Catania, Sicily, to make specialist microchips that boost energy efficiency in electric cars. Chipmakers across the globe are investing billions of dollars in new plants, encouraged by rising use of semiconductors in everyday devices as well as U.S. and EU subsidies aimed at keeping the West ahead of China in the race for cutting-edge technology. The aid approved by the EU executive will be a direct grant of about 2 billion euros to support STMicro's production of chips made from silicon carbide, which is more energy-efficient than standard silicon.

The next time you’re sitting through a company-wide meeting, half-listening to a leader drone on about updates or product launches (and hoping they don’t announce layoffs or budget cuts), remember this: at least they’re not rapping. That’s what happened at Canva Create, a summit held in Los Angeles last week, in honor of Canva, a graphic design company known for helping non-designers produce good-enough flyers to advertise a yard sale or middle school talent show. In LA, Melanie Perkins, co-founder of the $40bn Australian brand, spoke to attendees about “brand-building, maintaining a strong company culture and scaling operations”, per Variety. (Something she knows a lot about: Disney’s CEO, Bob Iger, who also spoke at the summit, is an investor and board member of the platform.) After run-of-the-mill talks and discussions, the team decided to put on a show. Two presenters – and a cast of backup breakdancers, all of whom were most certainly regretting their respective life paths in the moment – performed a “rap battle” that they used to describe updates the tech company has made to the design app. Sample bars included: “You can redesign your work / Canva got that glow up / We redesign errything / From the floor up.” On the topic of AI, which is known to steal art from actual human workers, one performer dropped: “We don’t train on your work without your permission / Safe and securrrrrr if that’s what you’re wishing.”

Observe Israel definitely not being an Apartheid state.

Who even needs investigative journalists with hidden cameras when there's Israeli state television