Author Archives: Danzig

Google’s Top Autocomplete Suggestion for "How to Edge" Is Wild

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If you search the words

It is our somber duty to report, dear reader, that if you search the words "how to edge" on Google, the top autocomplete suggestion isn't how to edge a beard, or a lawn, or a snowboard.

Instead, Google suggests that its users are looking for how to edge "in class."

For those blessedly innocent enough to not know what the colloquial term "edging" means, let us elucidate you: as WebMD explains, edging occurs when a person — often a cisgender man, though not exclusively — gets aroused just to the brink or edge of an orgasm, but then backs off stimulation so as not to achieve one too quickly. It's a way to prevent premature ejaculation, essentially, and to lengthen the experience of pleasure.

While that's all fine and good, it's obviously unacceptable to edge oneself in public, much less a classroom. Nevertheless, not only does Google Search pull it up as a top query, but the company's generative AI-assisted search option returns both a YouTube video and a Change.org petition about it. What gives?

Per our not-so-scientific research — eg, just Googling around a bit — it appears that "how to edge in class and not get caught" is something of a TikTok meme. As such, people looking for explainers on the video streaming platform could, theoretically speaking, be using Google to make those searches happen.

As one might expect, the hopefully facetious videos are seemingly filmed by horny boys advising viewers to watch a bunch of porn — they often describe Pornhub as "the black and yellow site" or "yellow YouTube" to circumvent TikTok's censorship algorithms — wear bulky jackets, and sit in the back of the classroom.

Despite there not being all that many videos on the topic, edging in class seems to have become a meme in 2023, coinciding with the uptick in jokes about "gooning," a form of prolonged masturbation in which one gets into the ecstatic arousal state before orgasm for hours on end. Tantra, eat your heart out.

As with other Manosphere-adjacent memes like looksmaxxing and bone-smashing, any "edging in class" content should be taken with a heaping of salt, as the people behind these joke hoaxes traffic in convincing those without context into thinking they're legit.

That said, Google may want to take a look at why its search engine and AI are surfacing info about this dumbass viral trend.

More on memes: GameStop Stock Is Crashing Catastrophically After Meme Hype

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Google's Top Autocomplete Suggestion for "How to Edge" Is Wild

Machine Learning Researcher Links OpenAI to Drug-Fueled Sex Parties

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An ML researcher is claiming to have knowledge of kinky drug-fueled orgies linked to OpenAI in Silicon Valley's storied hacker houses.

A machine learning researcher is claiming to have knowledge of kinky drug-fueled orgies in Silicon Valley's storied hacker houses — and appears to be linking those parties, and the culture surrounding them, to OpenAI.

"The thing about being active in the hacker house scene is you are accidentally signing up for a career as a shadow politician in the Silicon Valley startup scene," begins the lengthy X-formerly-Twitter post by Sonia Joseph, a former Princeton ML researcher who's now affiliated with the deep learning institute Mila Quebec.

What follows is a vague and anecdotal diatribe about the "dark side" of startup culture — made particularly explosive by Joseph's reference to so-called "consensual non-consent" sex parties that she says took place within the artificial general intelligence (AGI) enthusiast community in the valley.

The jumping off point, as far as we can tell, stems from a thread announcing that OpenAI superalignment chief Jan Leike was leaving the company as it dissolved his team that was meant to prevent advanced AI from going rogue.

At the end of his X thread, Leike encouraged remaining employees to "feel the AGI," a phrase that was also ascribed to newly-exited OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever during seemingly cultish rituals revealed in an Atlantic exposé last year — but nothing in that piece, nor the superalignment chief's tweets, suggests anything having to do with sex, drugs, or kink.

Still, Joseph addressed her second viral memo-length tweet "to the journalists contacting me about the AGI consensual non-consensual (cnc) sex parties." And in the post, said she'd witnessed "some troubling things" in Silicon Valley's "community house scene" when she was in her early 20s and new to the tech industry.

"It is not my place to speak as to why Jan Leike and the superalignment team resigned. I have no idea why and cannot make any claims," wrote the researcher, who is not affiliated with OpenAI. "However, I do believe my cultural observations of the SF AI scene are more broadly relevant to the AI industry."

"I don't think events like the consensual non-consensual (cnc) sex parties and heavy LSD use of some elite AI researchers have been good for women," Joseph continued. "They create a climate that can be very bad for female AI researchers... I believe they are somewhat emblematic of broader problems: a coercive climate that normalizes recklessness and crossing boundaries, which we are seeing playing out more broadly in the industry today. Move fast and break things, applied to people."

While she said she doesn't think there's anything generally wrong with "sex parties and heavy LSD use," she also charged that the culture surrounding these alleged parties "leads to some of the most coercive and fucked up social dynamics that I have ever seen."

"I have seen people repeatedly get shut down for pointing out these problems," Joseph wrote. "Once, when trying to point out these problems, I had three OpenAI and Anthropic researchers debate whether I was mentally ill on a Google document. I have no history of mental illness; and this incident stuck with me as an example of blindspots/groupthink."

"It’s likely these problems are not really on OpenAI but symptomatic of a much deeper rot in the Valley," she added. "I wish I could say more, but probably shouldn’t."

Overall, it's hard to make heads or tails of these claims. We've reached out to Joseph and OpenAI for more info.

"I'm not under an NDA. I never worked for OpenAI," Joseph wrote. "I just observed the surrounding AI culture through the community house scene in SF, as a fly-on-the-wall, hearing insider information and backroom deals, befriending dozens of women and allies and well-meaning parties, and watching many them get burned."

More on OpenAI: Sam Altman Clearly Freaked Out by Reaction to News of OpenAI Silencing Former Employees

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Blue Origin Astronauts Trapped by Foliage After Capsule Touchdown

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When the Blue Origin space capsule touched down on Earth after a flight to the edge of space, it landed in a thicket of bushes.

Bush League

By all accounts, billionaire Jeff Bezos' space outfit Blue Origin had a successful crewed roundtrip flight to the edge of space on Sunday — with everything happening as expected except for one little problem that the company's aerospace engineers and scientists probably didn't foresee: some pesky shrubbery.

When the capsule finally touched down on Earth with its six passengers, it landed in a thicket of bushes in the middle of West Texas scrubland.

In live streaming footage of the roundtrip flight, Blue Origin staffers at the 50 minute mark are seen trying to stamp down some stubborn shrubbery around the capsule with the space tourists inside, peering from the windows. Two staffers brought along a blue metal two-step ladder for the crew members to use to disembark, but it took several long minutes for the team to kick back the shrubs surrounding the vessel and position the ladder on the uneven ground.

Finally, when the ladder was in place and the shrubs briefly tamed, the space tourists exited the hatch, with arms raised in triumph.

 

Feeling Blue

Some in the online peanut gallery took the opportunity to gently poke fun at the shrub incident. In r/SpaceXMasterrace, one Redditor posted a meme with two pictures: a Blue Origin rocket launching into space and an image capture of the capsule on Sunday surrounded by shrubbery. The meme is titled "Who would win? Giant Dick Ship [versus] A Few Planty Bois." The Redditor labeled the post: "Unexpected Foliage Contingency."

Besides the foliage issue, this flight made history because one of its crew members, Ed Dwight, became the oldest astronaut in human history at 90 years old. He was also at one time the first Black astronaut candidate for America's space program back in the 1960s, but was passed over, making Sunday his chance for a spectacular redo.

The Sunday flight was also a triumph for Blue Origin after a hiatus of two years. The company had temporarily grounded operations in 2022 after its reusable rocket, New Shepard, suffered a booster malfunction mid-flight and was forced to eject its capsule of NASA experiments. Thankfully, the flight had no passengers.

The incident drew the scrutiny of the Federal Aviation Administration, which issued "21 corrective actions," including a redesign to some engine parts.

More on Blue Origin: Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin Rocket Tests Spew Enough Methane to Be Spotted From Space

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Blue Origin Astronauts Trapped by Foliage After Capsule Touchdown

Man Drinks Poison Oak Smoothie in Bid to Develop Resistance

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Jeff Horwitz, reporter for The Wall Street Journal, has developed an immunity to poison oak after eating the leaves in smoothies.

How far would you go to avoid a rash from a common pest on hikes?

Well, one reporter for The Wall Street Journal has gone as far as to blend poison oak into smoothies and mix them into his salad bowl — all in a bid to develop an immunity towards the chemical irritants found in the plant's leaves.

Jeff Horwitz, who usually reports on technology, wrote about his slightly mad mission for a feature article in the Saturday newspaper.

"I started eating poison oak in January, when the first buds began to swell on the hazardous plant’s bare stems," he wrote, explaining that he was sick of getting poison oak rashes during mushroom foraging trips in California.

And surprisingly, despite some stern written warnings he came across during his research, Horwitz's newfound habit of eating poison oak seems to have built up a resistance to the shrub and its plant resin urushiol, also found in poison ivy and sumac, and which causes the rash.

After ingesting an increasing amount of poison oak leaves in his smoothies and salads — the "taste of young poison oak is surprisingly mild, grassy and only a little bit tart," he notes — he didn't get any signs in his body that it was stressed out from the experiment, except for red rashes here and there. He also experienced an itchy butt — presumably from pooping out the remnants.

At the end of his experiment, Horwitz says he could rub a poison oak leaf on his skin and not experience any rash breakouts.

"My poison-oak salad days are over, but I do intend to nibble a few leaves here and there when hiking around the Bay Area in an effort to maintain my resistance on a permanent basis," he wrote.

Horwitz got his idea from reading about how California's indigenous tribes would make tea from poison oak roots and eat the leaves to develop immunity. He also read online forums where outdoors enthusiasts discussed noshing on poison ivy or poison oak helped them develop a resistance, though much of literature he consulted warned not to eat the plants.

In the first half of the 20th Century, pharmaceutical companies capitalized on this folk remedy and sold to the public poison ivy pills and shots in order to prevent spring and summertime rashes, according to Horwitz. But for unknown reasons, Big Pharma stopped making these urushiol extract medicines, making the larger public forget there's a preventative treatment for the rash beyond a good shower, antihistamine pills or hydrocortisone cream.

But before you reach for your blender or visit Erewhon and ask them to drop a couple of poison oak leaves into your smoothie order, Horwitz reports that pharmacologist Mahmoud ElSohly, who has been working with medical startup Hapten Sciences, has developed a new urushiol drug that would prevent poison ivy or poison oak rashes.

The medication could be available to the public as soon as 2026.

More on poisons: Venomous vs Poisonous: What Is the Difference Between Venom, Poison, and Toxins?

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OpenAI Removing Voice From ChatGPT That Sounds Too Much Like Scarlett Johansson

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The latest ChatGPT update drew comparisons to the film

Movie Madness

OpenAI is apparently not feeling too flattered about those comparisons to the movie "Her" anymore. On Sunday, the Microsoft-backed startup announced that it was pausing the use of Sky, a voice available for the latest version of ChatGPT that can have spoken conversations in realtime, after users pointed out that it sounded a lot like the actress Scarlett Johansson.

In "Her," Johansson voices an AI chatbot named Samantha that the film's melancholic protagonist, played by Joaquin Phoenix, falls in love with after talking to her through his phone and computer.

Those parallels didn't go unnoticed by users of GPT-4o's flagship "Voice Mode," who have joked that the Sky voice should be called Samantha. But OpenAI, in its latest blog post, insisted that the similarities are merely a coincidence.

"We believe that AI voices should not deliberately mimic a celebrity's distinctive voice — Sky's voice is not an imitation of Scarlett Johansson but belongs to a different professional actress using her own natural speaking voice," the blog post read. "To protect their privacy, we cannot share the names of our voice talents."

We’ve heard questions about how we chose the voices in ChatGPT, especially Sky. We are working to pause the use of Sky while we address them.

Read more about how we chose these voices: https://t.co/R8wwZjU36L

— OpenAI (@OpenAI) May 20, 2024

Coy Copycat

The denial raises more questions than it answers. If Sky isn't an imitation of ScarJo, then why pause the use of the voice? It would seem that this is less a case of buckling to community scrutiny, and more of OpenAI walking on legal eggshells. Johansson, after all, hasn't balked at suing companies as massive as Disney in the past.

OpenAI points to the fact that Sky is voiced by a different actress as evidence of its innocence. Of course, that doesn't preclude the actress having been directed to evoke Johannson's likeness in the performance.

Whether that's the case, OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman has only fueled the comparisons. He's spoken about how "Her" is one of his favorite sci-fi movies, calling it "incredibly prophetic." And on the day that GPT-4o was released with "Voice Mode," Altman cheekily tweeted the single word "her" — directly linking the update with the movie.

We suspect that if there are any legal troubles brewing related to this — the company's plausible-deniability-speak may be evidence of that — OpenAI will want to handle this behind closed doors. It certainly already has enough lawsuits on its plate already.

More on OpenAI: Machine Learning Researcher Links OpenAI to Drug-Fueled Sex Parties

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Tesla Employees "Walking on Eggshells" as Furious Musk Continues Layoffs

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Amid recurring rounds of layoffs, Tesla workers are dreading their own terminations — and it's unclear when the cuts are going to end.

Around and Around

Amid recurring rounds of layoffs, Tesla workers are now dreading their own terminations — exacerbated by the company not saying when the cuts are going to end.

Insider sources tell Bloomberg that the rolling layoffs, which are part of CEO Elon Musk's plans to cut upwards of 10 percent of staff to save money, will likely continue until at least June.

For those who've already borne the brunt of the reductions, the horror doesn't yet seem to be over.

"It's difficult to imagine the feeling of walking on eggshells every day at work, uncertain whether or not you'll be able to pay your bills or feed your family," former Tesla sales rep Michael Minick wrote in a LinkedIn post. "For those of us who were part of the first wave of layoffs, it was almost like waking up to a bandaid being ripped off."

Laid off in April, Minick expressed solidarity with those still at the company as they await their fates.

"Is it too much to ask for a company to hold some accountability and put an end to the uncertainty?" he continued. "It would be a relief to know that they can breathe and focus on their work, without the gray cloud of uncertainty looming over. People deserve clarity if an end to the layoffs will have a stop date."

Cut It Up

At this point, it's unclear just how many rounds of layoffs Tesla has done since it began job-slashing in April and announced its 10 percent global workforce cut. By our count, there have been at least four, but as news of them hit our feeds, it's unclear which round we're even talking about anymore. What proportion of its workforce has been affected is hazy at this point.

Hanging over these cuts are Tesla's massive sales woes as it struggles to recapture the already-depressed electric vehicle market, which it once dominated. As Reuters reports, the company's latest forte in its crisis control mode is offering discounts to European car rental companies in hopes of making at least some sales.

With shares down, as Bloomberg notes, by 29 percent this year, things are looking very bad for Tesla — and as usual, the workers who built the company are bearing the brunt of its problems.

More on Tesla: Man Buys Used Tesla, Discovers Horrendous Issue

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Neuralink Jamming Wires Deeper Into Second Patient’s Brain

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Despite issues manifesting in its first implantee, the FDA has given Neuralink the green light to implant a brain chip in a second patient.

Despite issues manifesting in its first implantee, the Food and Drug Administration has given Neuralink the green light to implant a brain chip in a second human test subject.

As the Wall Street Journal reports, Neuralink appears to have gotten the go-ahead because it proposed a fix for the problems suffered by its first patient, 29-year-old quadriplegic Noland Arbaugh.

As previous reports indicate, a majority of the 64 thread-like wires connected to Arbaugh's chip began to come loose, causing him to lose some of the implant's functionality just a month after it was inserted earlier this year.

To fix it, an anonymous insider told the newspaper, the Elon Musk-owned company plans to jam the wires, each thinner than a human hair, even deeper into the next subject's brain — which yes, sounds pretty gruesome to us, especially considering the monkey death toll associated with the company.

Despite how freaky all of that sounds, the description of what's happening to Neuralink's first test subject are more emotionally tragic than physically disturbing, and there appears to be some hope that the fix for the second implant might improve upon the failures of the first go-round.

In interviews with Bloomberg and the WSJ, Arbaugh described the incredible highs of having experiences restored to him, such as being able to better communicate with friends and play video games using his mind, only to start unexpectedly losing them.

"[Neuralink] told me that the threads were getting pulled out of my brain," Arbaugh told Bloomberg. "It was really hard to hear. I thought I’d gotten to use it for maybe a month, and then my journey was coming to an end."

As he noted in both interviews, that rapid loss of functionality so soon after it had been bestowed upon him took a huge emotional toll.

"I was on such a high and then to be brought down that low. It was very, very hard," he told the WSJ. "I cried."

According to Bloomberg, Neuralink has implemented algorithmic workarounds to better interpret the data from Arbaugh's implant, as only 15 percent of the threads remain intact and continue transmitting data remotely.

With FDA approval in place, the company's next steps will be to approve one of the more than 1,000 applicants who've applied, according to the WSJ's source. The company hopes to do the implantation sometime in June, that insider added.

While it's good that things haven't gone worse for Arbaugh, it's clear now that Neuralink is applying Silicon Valley's "move fast and break things" adage, coined by Musk's nemesis Mark Zuckerberg, to its approach to human test subjects.

More on Neuralink: Neuralink Knew Its Implant Likely to Malfunction in First Human Patient, Did Brain Surgery Anyway

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Microplastics Found in Every Human Testicle

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No ifs, ands, or nuts about it — microplastics are everywhere, including in every human testicle tested for a new study.

What do the pyramids, the oceans, the blood of newborns, and human and canine testicles all have in common?

They've all been found to be host to cancer-causing microplastics — which may also, scientists hypothesize, be why sperm counts have been diminishing for decades.

A new paper published in the journal Toxological Science describes alarming results from a study that tested testicle samples from 23 humans and 47 pet dogs, finding microplastics in every single subject: 330 micrograms of microplastics per gram of tissue and 123 micrograms found in the dogs.

"At the beginning, I doubted whether microplastics could penetrate the reproductive system," paper coauthor Xiaozhong Yu told The Guardian. "When I first received the results for dogs I was surprised. I was even more surprised when I received the results for humans."

Besides the jarring prevalence, the team was also concerned about the heightened concentration of polyethylene and PVC found in the human samples, which came from postmortem subjects ranging in age from 16 to 88.

Though this isn't the first study to find microplastics in human testes and semen, the comparative concentrations between the human and canine samples is novel — and not in a good way.

Though the correlation isn't yet perfectly understood, some recent mice studies have found a link between reduced sperm counts and microplastics exposure, and the chemicals released by the pollutants may also be associated with some hormonal abnormalities and disruptions as well.

That's likely because PVC in particular is, well, super freakin' toxic.

"PVC can release a lot of chemicals that interfere with spermatogenesis," Yu explained, "and it contains chemicals that cause endocrine disruption."

More research is needed, but one thing's for sure: our degradation of the environment has come home to our own bodies, and we're only starting to understand how that will affect us all.

More on nuts: Scientists Grow Teeny Tiny Testicles in Laboratory

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Girl Awestruck After Capturing Brilliant Blue Comet By Chance on Camera

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In Portugal, a comet shot through the sky and illuminated it turquoise — and one lucky girl captured the entire thing on camera.

Shine Bright

In Portugal, a comet shot through the sky and illuminated the whole sky turquoise — and one lucky girl captured the entire extravaganza on camera.

Posted on X-formerly-Twitter and Instagram, the stunning fireball footage from Portuguese content creator Milena Refacho has gone incredibly viral, with her original post garnering more than six million views as netizens marveled with her at the spectacle.

O meteorito na tuga pic.twitter.com/4ZxJ50ZFIo

— ???? ???????????? ? (@milarefacho) May 19, 2024

In the video, the 19-year-old Refacho's friends can be heard exclaiming to the heavens — and, in one hilarious instance, to hell — in Portuguese at the surprise light show.

Later, the European Space Agency confirmed that a comet fragment had indeed paraded through the skies of Portugal and Spain, and that it appeared to have burnt up in the atmosphere, resulting in the fantastical blue-green explosion that lit up the sky at nearly midnight local time. It's unlikely that any of the fragments survived the fiery crash, the ESA added.

Comet Conundrum

While it's certainly not uncommon for such space projectiles to leave brilliant tails behind them as they burn up in our planet's atmosphere, this comet fragment's descent was extra-bright, the New York Times explains, because it was careening at around 100,000 miles per hour. That's twice the average speed of a rocky asteroid, which seems to have made it twice as bright, too.

As the NYT adds in its write-up, the ice-rock composure of most comets suggests they were born at the dawn of our Solar System, which makes this one's incredible final display all the more special.

In an interview with the newspaper, planetary astronomer Meg Schwamb of Queen's University in Belfast said that although there are "notable meteor showers throughout the year, which are the result of the Earth crossing debris clouds of specific comets," the brilliance of this comet may tell scientists something about its size.

This chunk, Schwamb said, "is likely a bit bigger than a good fraction of the meteors we see during meteor showers, so this just made a bigger light show."

"It’s an unexpected interplanetary fireworks show," the astronomer added.

More on hunks of space: Giant Piece of Space Junk Crashes Down on Farm of Canadian, Who Intends to Sell It and Spend Money on Hockey Rink

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The New ChatGPT Has a Huge Problem in Chinese

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A data training failure has resulted in OpenAI's new GPT-4o model spitting out spam and porn-littered Chinese-language responses.

Dirty Data

A pollution problem with OpenAI training data has rendered its new chatbot's Chinese outputs chock-full of porn and spam, the MIT Technology Review reports.

Last week, OpenAI released GPT-4o, a decidedly flirty new large language model (LLM) equipped with new and advanced capabilities — for example, the ability to "see" through users' device cameras, as well as the power to converse out loud in real-time. But for all of GPT-4o's apparent advancements, it seems to have at least one massive blindspot: the Chinese language.

To train AI models, you need tokens, or units of data that represent information that an AI uses to "read" and learn. According to MIT Tech, AI researchers were quick to discover that nearly all of the 100 longest Chinese-language tokens used by the AI to decipher Chinese prompts were comprised of spammy porn and gambling content — resulting in bizarre, smut- and spam-ridden responses to completely run-of-the-mill queries.

"This is sort of ridiculous," Tianle Cai, an AI researcher and PhD candidate at Princeton, wrote in a Github post showcasing the polluted tokens.

Unforced Error

The worst part? According to experts, the problem of uncleaned data is a well-known AI training hurdle — and likely wouldn't have been too hard to fix.

"Every spam problem has a solution," Deedy Das, an AI investor at Menlo Ventures who formerly worked on Google's Search team, told MIT Tech, adding that just auto-translating tokenized content to detect certain problematic keywords could feasibly "get you 60 percent of the way" to a clean dataset.

"At the end of the day," he continued, "I just don't think they did the work in this case."

"The English tokens seem fine," Cai, the Princeton researcher, told MIT Tech, "but the Chinese ones are not."

In other words, the likeliest reason for OpenAI's error is that ensuring its Chinese-language tokens were mostly free of porn and gambling spam just didn't make the to-do list.

It's a bad look for OpenAI. The Chinese language has the most native speakers on the planet. And numbers aside, if the future of our internet will indeed center on AI-generated material — as opposed to human-created and built websites, communities, and worlds — errors like not ensuring that a premier chatbot can parse the native language of over one billion humans means that people, not to mention entire cultures, inherently get left out.

That is to say, let's hope this is a learning moment.

More on AI and non-English languages: Huge Proportion of Internet Is AI-Generated Slime, Researchers Find

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Man Steals Cybertruck, Leads Cops on World’s Lamest Car Chase

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The accused, 41-year-old Corey Cohee, allegedly stole the Cybertruck but was quickly located by cops using the vehicle's tracking app.

Cyber Crimes

Chalk it up to media scrutiny or whatever, but it sure seems like Cybertruck drivers get caught up in a lot of stupid stuff. This time though, the owner wasn't to blame: on Saturday morning, a man in Delaware allegedly stole one of those distinctly shaped Tesla pickups, resulting in what must have been a comical-looking car chase that proved short-lived.

The accused is 41-year-old Corey Cohee, who allegedly jacked the Cybertruck from someone's home in the small town of Lincoln, Sussex County. The truck had a temporary New Jersey registration permit, so it must've been brand new. Extra bad luck for the owner.

Per a statement from the Delaware State Police, state troopers responded to a stolen car report around 8 am. Once they arrived at the property, the cops were able to make use of the Cybertruck's tracking app, a standard feature of Teslas, to locate the vehicle.

They found it on a dirt road not much later. But the thief hadn't bailed; he was still inside the car, just idling there for some reason. But when the cops approached, he sped off in the Cybertruck, perhaps feeling invincible inside the minimalist confines of the "bulletproof" behemoth.

Grand Heft Auto

And so a chase ensued. The police said the driver ignored all signals to pull over. One imagines the otherworldly-looking stainless steel coffin, which weighs close to 7,000 pounds, piggishly bumbling its way across unpaved roads with powerful jerks of acceleration, gracing those backwoods like a meandering UFO.

But with the cops in hot pursuit, the driver, later identified as Cohee, apparently decided to give up. He pulled over, and the cops arrested him "without incident." Cohee has been committed to Sussex Correctional Institution on a $4,002 secured bond, the police statement said. It's unclear if the Cybertruck was damaged.

Needless to say, this was a pretty hare-brained crime, audacious as it was. You couldn't name a more conspicuous looking vehicle on the road right now to steal, never mind one that can be easily tracked with an app. But there's just something about the Tesla's bold styling that provokes even bolder behavior, it seems.

More on Tesla: Tesla Video Showing Cybertruck Beating Porsche 911 While Towing Porsche 911 Was a Lie, Independent Test Demonstrates

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Godfather of AI Says There’s an Expert Consensus AI Will Soon Exceed Human Intelligence

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Geoffrey Hinton fears that we aren't doing enough to ensure the safe development of AI, with military applications posing the biggest threat.

Impending Gloom

Geoffrey Hinton, one of the "godfathers" of AI, is adamant that AI will surpass human intelligence — and worries that we aren't being safe enough about its development.

This isn't just his opinion, though it certainly carries weight on its own. In an interview with the BBC's Newsnight program, Hinton claimed that the idea of AI surpassing human intelligence as an inevitability is in fact the consensus of leaders in the field.

"Very few of the experts are in doubt about that," Hinton told the BBC. "Almost everybody I know who is an expert on AI believes that they will exceed human intelligence — it's just a question of when."

Rogue Robots

Hinton is one of three "godfathers" of AI, an appellation he shares with Université de Montréal's Yoshua Bengio and Meta's Yann LeCun — the latter of whom Hinton characterizes in the interview as thinking that an AI superintelligence will be "no problem."

In 2023, Hinton quit his position at Google, and in a remark that has become characteristic for his newfound role as the industry's Oppenheimer, said that he regretted his life's work while warning of the existential risks posed by the technology — a line he doubled down on during the BBC interview.

"Given this big spectrum of opinions, I think it's wise to be cautious" about developing and regulating AI, Hinton said.  "I think there's a chance they'll take control. And it's a significant chance — it's not like one percent, it's much more," he added. "Whether AI goes rogue and tries to take over, is something we may be able to control or we may not, we don't know."

As it stands, military applications of the technology — such as the Israeli Defense Forces reportedly using an AI system to pick out airstrike targets in Gaza — are what seem to worry Hinton the most.

"What I'm most concerned about is when these [AIs] can autonomously make the decision to kill people," he told the BBC, admonishing world governments for their lack of willingness to regulate this area.

Jobs Poorly Done

A believer in universal basic income, Hinton also said he's "worried about AI taking over mundane jobs." This would boost productivity, Hinton added, but the gains in wealth would disproportionately go to the wealthy and not to those whose jobs were destroyed.

If it's any consolation, Hinton doesn't think that a rogue AI takeover of humanity is a totally foregone conclusion — only that AI will eventually be smarter than us. Still, you could argue that the profit-driven companies that are developing AI models aren't the most trustworthy stewards of the tech's safe development.

OpenAI, which has a history of ethical flip-flopping, was recently criticized by a former safety worker after he lost faith that the company would responsibly develop a superintelligent AI. So even if  Hinton is a little guilty of doom and gloom, he's certainly not alone.

More on AI: The New ChatGPT Has a Huge Problem in Chinese

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Godfather of AI Says There's an Expert Consensus AI Will Soon Exceed Human Intelligence

Generative AI Is Totally Shameless. I Want to Be It – WIRED

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AI has a lot of problems. It helps itself to the work of others, regurgitating what it absorbs in a game of multidimensional Mad Libs and omitting all attribution, resulting in widespread outrage and litigation. When it draws pictures, it makes the CEOs white, puts people in awkward ethnic outfits, and has a tendency to imagine women as elfish, with light-colored eyes. Its architects sometimes seem to be part of a death cult that semi-worships a Cthulu-like future AI god, and they focus great energies on supplicating to this immense imaginary demon (thrilling! terrifying!) instead of integrating with the culture at hand (boring, and you get yelled at). Even the more thoughtful AI geniuses seem OK with the idea that an artificial general intelligence is right around the corner, despite 75 years of failed precedentthe purest form of getting high on your own supply.

So I should reject this whole crop of image-generating, chatting, large-language-model-based code-writing infinite typing monkeys. But, dammit, I cant. I love them too much. I am drawn back over and over, for hours, to learn and interact with them. I have them make me lists, draw me pictures, summarize things, read for me. Where I work, weve built them into our code. Im in the bag. Not my first hypocrisy rodeo.

Theres a truism that helps me whenever the new big tech thing has every brain melting: I repeat to myself, Its just software. Word processing was going to make it too easy to write novels, Photoshop looked like it would let us erase history, Bitcoin was going to replace money, and now AI is going to ruin society, but its just software. And not even that much software: Lots of AI models could fit on a thumb drive with enough room left over for the entire run of Game of Thrones (or Microsoft Office). Theyre interdimensional ZIP files, glitchy JPEGs, but for all of human knowledge. And yet they serve such large portions! (Not always. Sometimes I ask the AI to make a list and it gives up. You can do it, I type. You can make the list longer. And it does! What a terrible interface!)

What I love, more than anything, is the quality that makes AI such a disaster: If it sees a space, it will fill itwith nonsense, with imagined fact, with links to fake websites. It possesses an absolute willingness to spout foolishness, balanced only by its carefree attitude toward plagiarism. AI is, very simply, a totally shameless technology.

As with most people on Earth, shame is a part of my life, installed at a young age and frequently updated with shame service packs. I read a theory once that shame is born when a child expects a reaction from their parentsa laugh, applauseand doesnt get it. Thats an oversimplification, but given all the jokes Ive told that have landed flat, it sure rings true. Social media could be understood, in this vein, as a vast shame-creating machine. We all go out there with our funny one-liners and cool pictures, and when no one likes or faves them we feel lousy about it. A healthy person goes, Ah well, didnt land. Felt weird. Time to move on.

AI is like having my very own shameless monster as a pet.

But when you meet shameless people they can sometimes seem like miracles. They have a superpower: the ability to be loathed, to be wrong, and yet to keep going. We obsess over themour divas, our pop stars, our former presidents, our political grifters, and of course our tech industry CEOs. We know them by their first names and nicknames, not because they are our friends but because the weight of their personalities and influence has allowed them to claim their own domain names in the collective cognitive register.

Are these shameless people evil, or wrong, or bad? Sure. Whatever you want. Mostly, though, theyre just big, by their own, shameless design. They contain multitudes, and we debate those multitudes. Do they deserve their fame, their billions, their Electoral College victory? We want them to go away but they dont care. Not one bit. They plan to stay forever. They will be dead before they feel remorse.

AI is like having my very own shameless monster as a pet. ChatGPT, my favorite, is the most shameless of the lot. It will do whatever you tell it to, regardless of the skills involved. Itll tell you how to become a nuclear engineer, how to keep a husband, how to invade a country. I love to ask it questions that Im ashamed to ask anyone else: What is private equity? How can I convince my family to let me get a dog? It helps me understand whats happening with my semaglutide injections. It helps me write codehas in fact renewed my relationship with writing code. It creates meaningless, disposable images. It teaches me music theory and helps me write crappy little melodies. It does everything badly and confidently. And I want to be it. I want to be that confident, that unembarrassed, that ridiculously sure of myself.

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Verizon Expects to Double Network Thanks to AI Demand – PYMNTS.com

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Verizon Communicationsis reportedly placing a significant bet on artificial intelligence (AI) as its next major growth driver.

The company, which is the largest retail wireless carrier in the United States, believes in the potential of AI to double its network over the next five years, Verizon Consumer CEOSowmyanarayan Sampathtold Bloomberg in aninterviewposted Tuesday (May 14).

While video traffic has been the primary driver of growth for Verizons network in recent years, Sampath foresees AI demand surpassing it soon, according to the report. The massive amounts of data generated by AI tools require efficient transmission from data centers to end-users for analysis and back to data centers. To meet this increased demand, Verizon aims to provide a robust network infrastructure.

Verizon also expects AI to transform various aspects of its operations, the report said.

The company has already integrated AI software fromGoogleinto its customer service operations. This technology has been deployed to empower 40,000 customer relations agents, enabling them to better serve customers, perthe report.

For instance, the AI tool listens in on representatives calls, tracking human sentiment and tone. If a customer appears frustrated, a supervisor can receive a notification and intervene to assist, according to the report.

In addition, routine processes like bill inquiries and payment details will be automated, allowing customer service agents to focus on more complex tasks, such as assisting customers with international travel or account changes, the report said.

Verizon also plans to leverage AI to offer personalized recommendations and curated offers to customers in real-time, per the report.

The company has strategically positioned its infrastructure to handle the anticipated surge in AI-related traffic, the report said. It has invested in spectrum acquisition to support the increased demand for data transmission.

During the companys most recent earnings call, which was held April 22, Verizon CEOHans Vestbergfocused in part on the companysAI strategy, saying that it needs to create an AI-centric revenue stream by commercializing the companys networks mobile edge computing capabilities.

Generative AI workloads represent a great long-term opportunity for us, Vestberg said. As we expand our network and increase our performance advantage, were also making Verizon a more efficient organization.

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Verizon Expects to Double Network Thanks to AI Demand - PYMNTS.com

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Google unveils Project Astra chatbot tech and brings ‘AI overview’ to search for all U.S. users – Fortune

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Google showed off new AI chatbot technology dubbed Project Astra, along with a series of announcements infusing artificial intelligence throughout its catalogue of products, as company executives took the stage at its annual developers conference on Tuesday.

Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai announced Tuesday that Google will roll out AI capabilities in its flagship search product to all U.S. users this week, while Demis Hassabis, the head of Googles DeepMind AI unit unveiled Project Astra, a universal AI agent that can understand the context of a users environment.

In a video demonstration of Astra, Google showed how users can point their phone camera to nearby objects and ask the AI agent relevant questions such as What neighborhood am I in? or Did you see where I left my glasses? Astra technology will come to the Gemini app later this year, the company said.

Speaking on stage near Alphabets headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., Pichai, Hassabis, and a parade of executives sought to show the companys progress in the high-stakes AI competition against BigTech rivals such as Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon, as well as richly-funded startups like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Perplexity.

Google said that its Gemini technology is now incorporated, in some way or another, in all of Googles key products those that boast more than 2 billion users, including YouTube and Search. And Google unveiled a new, standalone Gemini app for users to play with the latest AI features.

Google Search has already answered billions of queries with Gemini technology, Pichai said. We are encouraged not only to see an increase in search usage, but also in customer satisfaction.

In the coming weeks, Google will add multi-step reasoning in search, in which Gemini can answer long, multi-part questions. For example, it can find the best-rated yoga studios in Los Angeles, calculating the walking distance from each and offering the cost per class, all from one search query.

Google search is generative AI at the scale of human curiosity, Pichai said.

*Sixth generation of Trillium GPUs. Available to Google Cloud customers in late 2024, the new chips boast a 4.7x improvement in compute performance from the previous version.

*Veo, a generative video model available to use in VideoFX. Some Veo features will become available to select developers soon, and the wait list is open now.

*Google DeepMind and YouTube are building Music AI Sandbox, or a group of AI tools that can help artists create music.

*A new, dedicated Gemini smartphone app, which will offer all of the AI models features in one place. In the next few months, Gemini will also become available as an assistant on Android, as an overlay on whatever app a user is on, so they dont have to switch apps to use Gemini.

*Google is also rolling out a new feature to customize Gemini in the coming months. With what Google is calling Gems, users can curate what they want to see from the AI model.

*Gemini for Workspace side panel, an AI helper that lives on the side of the screen in Google Workspace applications, will be available next month.

*Data Q&A rolling out to Labs users in September, in which Gemini can help users organize spreadsheets.

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Google unveils Project Astra chatbot tech and brings 'AI overview' to search for all U.S. users - Fortune

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Google’s new LearnLM AI model focuses on education – The Verge

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LearnLM, a family of AI models based on Googles other large language mode, Gemini, was built to be an expert in subjects, find and present examples in different ways like a photo or video, coach students while studying, and, in Googles words, inspire engagement.

Google has already integrated LearnLM into its products, bundling it with other services like Google Search, Android, YouTube, and the Gemini chatbot. For example, customers can use Circle to Search on Android to highlight a math or physics word problem, and LearnLM will help solve the question. On YouTube, while watching a lecture video, viewers can ask questions about the video, and the model will respond with an explanation.

Google says LearnLM was specifically fine-tuned to only respond and find answers based on educational research. In other words, LearnLM will not help someone plan a trip or find a restaurant.

Google says its working with educators in a new pilot program on Google Classroom so they can use LearnLM to simplify lesson planning. The company is also experimenting with Illuminate, a platform that will break down research papers into short audio clips with AI-generated voices. Ideally, this will help students understand complex information better.

Google also partnered with Columbias Teachers College, Arizona State University, NYU Tisch, and Khan Academy to provide feedback to LearnLM.

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Google I/O just showed me how to live the laziest life through AI – TechRadar

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The dirty secret about Google Gemini (and probably all AI) is that it's built for lazy people like me. At the Google I/O keynote on Tuesday, Google spent hours showing us the myriad ways Gemini and its associated technologies could pick up the slack for us or, more specifically, me, the laziest person you'll ever meet.

I know what you're thinking, "No, no, Lance, you seem like a real hardworking guy." It's a lie. I've spent my decades-long career finding shortcuts - and AI is my white whale. Instead of riding a giant vessel into an uncertain fate, Google has handed me the whale...er...AI on a platter the size of a typical smartphone.

In Google's developing vision, there are so many things I no longer have to do for myself. This is laziness nirvana.

It starts simply. If I don't want to remember my license plate number (because why would I?), Google's new AskPhotos function can look through your massive photo library and use AI to identify your license plate for you. Walking around to the back of my car and checking the plate (or maybe just looking out the front window at the car parked in my driveway) is for people far more energetic than me.

Around 2011, I realized I had too much email to ever read, let alone understand. So much goes unread because I'm too lazy to go through it. My buddy Google Gemini slides up next to me, gives me a nudge and a grin, and promises to read it, summarize it, and create responses. This is the email of my lazy dreams.

As I write this, I'm about to head off on vacation. I hate planning vacations. I find it tedious and confusing, and I'm too lazy to get it done (my wife is the exact opposite). Gemini will let you tell it where you want to go, along with a few other details I may or may not have, and then it cooks up a shockingly complete travel itinerary (in a related vein, Gemini seems ready to manage an equally challenging move to, say, a new state).

I used to try to help my kids with their math problems and mostly failed, mainly because I was taught "old math" and they were taught "new math." Google's new Circle to Search for text problems, including math and formulas, would've soothed my lazy psyche into a blissful state of incompetence. Perhaps if my kids saw me doing this, simply just circling the thing I do not understand, they would've assumed I was being super helpful instead of what I am: super lazy.

I'm an "artist." I put it in quotes because my drawing skills are just above average. Worse, when faced with a drawing task, I often fight the impulse to not start at all. That's not just laziness, it's avoidance of possible disappointment because I couldn't create the thing. Google's latest image model, Imagine 3, is so good I realize there's no point in trying to create anything. I could never draw a wolf, wooden owl, yarn elephant, or people enjoying the golden hour sun that well. Enabling "lazy mode" and putting the pen down.

Hi, my name is Lance, and I'm a TikToker. For some reason I can't explain, TechRadar lets me shoot and post TikTok videos on its channel. Imagine Grandpa explaining tech, and you get the idea. It's a lot of work and sometimes, I'd rather visit our kitchen's snack bins. Google's Veo video model looks every bit as powerful as OpenAI's Sora. I bet that with a little training, it could create the TikToks for me and possibly include an AI-generated someone who looks vaguely like me (a thumb with glasses would do). Ooooh, Cheetos.

Now, this one's a bit dangerous. Google showed how you could pour all your research into Gemini, and it'll spit out at least an outline. You know reporting, which is hard work, by the way, is all research, right? Keep this lazy tool away from me.

Recently, we hired a new guy. It was a lot of work. Yes, worth the effort, but the work part I can do without. I had no idea Google would let me create a Virtual Teammate, one I can even name. He, she, or they can hang out in our chat rooms and engage like a real coworker. Gosh, this is so easy.

One of the big, overarching messages of Google I/O was to let Google do the Googling for you. In other words, if you need to perform a search, even a big, multi-part one, don't put much effort into it.

Don't tell Google, but I already do this. I'm usually too lazy to carefully parse out my prompt, so I type whatever is in my head into the search field and leave it to the search engine to figure it out.

It appears Google's been reading my lazy brain and just turned up the proactive search capabilities to 11. I mean, they are really owning the phrase, "Google will do the Googling for you." Music to my lazy heart.

I've done my share of tinkering and troubleshooting, and it doesn't always go well. What if I didn't? Google Project Astra is so peppy and proactive. All I have to do is film something, ask Google, "What the hell; is wrong with this?" and go take a nap while it spits out the answer.

An extension of this is Google Gemini's growing ability to explain everything I look at. Why should I expend the mental energy to interpret the images my eyes deliver to my brain? My Pixel 8 Pro has a "brain." I'll let it and Gemini doi it.

There are, it seems, no limits to what Google and its powerful AIs will do for you. If I want to find a couch and park myself there for a day or more, Google's upcoming AI Agents will be there to reason, plan, memorize, and think steps ahead. These little bits of AI are for you or rather me.

I'd share more, but, well, laziness.

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Chinese firms make headway in producing high bandwidth memory for AI chipsets – Yahoo! Voices

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By Fanny Potkin and Eduardo Baptista

SINGAPORE/BEIJING (Reuters) -Two Chinese chipmakers are in the early stages of producing high bandwidth memory (HBM) semiconductors used in artificial intelligence chipsets, according to sources and documents.

The progress in HBM - even if only in older versions of HBM - represents a major step forward in China's efforts to reduce its reliance on foreign suppliers amid tensions with Washington that have led to restrictions on U.S. exports of advanced chipsets to Chinese firms.

CXMT, China's top manufacturer of DRAM chips, has developed sample HBM chips in partnership with chip packaging and testing company Tongfu Microelectronics, according to three people briefed on the matter. The chips are being shown to clients, two of them said.

Tongfu Microelectronics' shares surged 8% in Wednesday trade.

In another example, Wuhan Xinxin is building a factory that will be able to produce 3,000 12-inch HBM wafers a month with construction slated to have begun in February this year, documents from corporate database Qichacha show.

CXMT and other Chinese chip firms have also been holding regular meetings with South Korean and Japanese semiconductor equipment firms to buy tools to develop HBM, said two of the people.

The sources were not authorised to speak on the matter and declined to be identified. Hefei-based CXMT or ChangXin Memory Technologies and Tongfu Microelectronics did not respond to requests for comment.

Wuhan Xinxin, which has flagged to regulators that it is interested in going public, and its parent company did not respond to requests for comment. The parent company is also the parent of NAND memory specialist YMTC or Yangtze Memory Technologies. YMTC said it did not have the capability to mass produce HBM.

Both CXMT and Wuhan Xinxin are private companies which have received local government funding to advance technologies as China pours capital into developing its chip sector.

Wuhan's local government also did not respond to requests for comment.

Separately, Chinese tech behemoth Huawei - which the U.S. has deemed a national security threat and is subject to sanctions - is aiming to produce HBM2 chips in partnership with other domestic companies by 2026, according to one of the sources and a separate person with knowledge of the matter.

The Information reported in April that a Huawei-led group of companies aiming to make HBM includes Fujian Jinhua Integrated Circuit, a memory chip maker also under U.S. sanctions.

Huawei, which has seen demand soar for its Ascend AI chips, declined to comment. It is not clear where Huawei procures HBM. Fujian Jinhua did not respond to a request for comment.

LONG JOURNEY AHEAD

HBM - a type of DRAM standard first produced in 2013 in which chips are vertically stacked to save space and reduce power consumption - is ideal for processing massive amounts of data produced by complex AI applications and demand has soared amid the AI boom.

The market for HBM is dominated by South Korea's SK Hynix - until recently the sole HBM supplier to AI chip giant Nvidia according to analysts - as well as Samsung, and to a lesser extent U.S. firm Micron Technology. All three manufacture the latest standard - HBM3 chips - and are working to bring fifth-generation HBM or HMB3E to customers this year.

China's efforts are currently focused on HBM2, according to two of the sources and a separate person with direct knowledge of the matter.

The U.S. has not put restrictions on exports of HBM chips per se but HBM3 chips are made using American technology that many Chinese firms including Huawei are barred from accessing as part of the curbs.

Nori Chiou, an investment director at White Oak Capital and a former analyst who looked at the IT sector, estimates that Chinese chipmakers lag their global rivals by a decade in HBM.

"China faces a considerable journey ahead, as it currently lacks the competitive edge to rival its Korean counterparts even in the realm of traditional memory markets," he said.

"Nonetheless, (CXMT's) collaboration with Tongfu represents a significant opportunity for China to advance its capabilities in both memory and advanced packaging technologies within the HBM market."

Patents filed by CXMT, Tongfu and Huawei indicate that plans to develop HBM domestically date back at least three years when China's chip industry increasingly became the target of U.S. export controls.

CXMT has filed almost 130 patents in the United States, China, and Taiwan for different technical issues related to the manufacturing and functionalities of HBM chips, according to Anaqua's AcclaimIP database. Of those, 14 were published in 2022, 46 in 2023, and 69 in 2024.

One Chinese patent, published last month, shows the company is looking at advanced packaging techniques like hybrid bonding to create a more powerful HBM product. A separate filing shows that CXMT is also investing in developing technology needed to create HBM3.

(Reporting by Fanny Potkin in Singapore and Eduardo Baptista in Beijing; Additional reporting by Heekyong Yang and Joyce Lee in Seoul; Editing by Brenda Goh and Edwina Gibbs)

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Google will let you create personalized AI chatbots – The Verge

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Google is adding a bunch of new features to its Gemini AI, and one of the most powerful is a personalization option called Gems that allows users to create custom versions of the Gemini assistant with varying personalities.

Gems lets you create iterations of chatbots that can help you with certain tasks and retain specific characteristics, kind of like making your own bot in Character.AI, the service that lets you talk to virtualized versions of popular characters and celebrities or even a fake psychiatrist. Google says you can make Gemini your gym buddy, sous-chef, coding partner, creative writing guide, or anything you can dream up. Gems feels similar to OpenAIs GPT Store that lets you make customized ChatGPT chatbots.

You can set up a gem by telling Gemini what to do and how to respond. For instance, you can tell it to be your running coach, provide you with a daily run schedule, and to sound upbeat and motivating. Then, in one click, Gemini will make a gem for you as youve described. The Gems feature is available soon to Gemini Advanced subscribers.

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Google will let you create personalized AI chatbots - The Verge

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Google now offers ‘web’ search and an AI opt-out button – The Verge

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This is not a joke: Google will now let you perform a web search. Its rolling out web searches now, and in my early tests on desktop, its looking like it could be an incredibly popular change to Googles search engine.

The optional setting filters out almost all the other blocks of content that Google crams into a search results page, leaving you with links and text and Google confirms to The Verge that it will block the companys new AI Overviews as well.

Isnt every search a web search? What is Google Search if not the web? you might rightfully ask.

But independent websites like HouseFresh and Retro Dodo have pointed out how their businesses have gotten buried deep beneath sponsored posts, Quora advice from 2016, best-of lists from big media sites, and no less than 64 Google Shopping product listings, in the words of HouseFresh managing editor Gisele Navarro.

Now, with one click, a bunch of those blockers seemingly disappear.

Search for best home arcade cabinets, one of Retro Dodos bread-and-butter queries, and its no longer buried it appears on page 1. (Drag our image slider to see the difference.)

HouseFresh still doesnt get page 1 billing for best budget air purifiers but its higher up, and youre no longer assaulted by an eye-popping number of Google Shopping results as you scroll:

If you search for Wyze cameras, youll now get a hint about their lax security practices on page 2 instead of page 3:

Im not sure its an improvement for every search, partly because Googles modules can be useful, and partly because the company isnt giving up on self-promotion just because you press the web button. Here, you can see Google still gives itself top billing for Google AR glasses either way, and its Top stories box is arguably a helpful addition:

Which of these results helps you better learn about the Maui wildfires? Im genuinely not sure:

And when you ask Google who wrote The Lord of the Rings, is there any reason you wouldnt want Googles full knowledge graph at your disposal?

Admittedly, its an answer that Google isnt likely to get wrong.

As far as I can tell, the order of Googles search results seem to be the same regardless of whether you pick web or all. It doesnt block links to YouTube videos or Reddit posts or SEO factories... and I still saw (smaller!) sponsored ads from Amazon and Verkada and Wyze push down my search results:

Web is just a filter that removes Googles knowledge panels and featured snippets and Shopping modules and Googles new AI Overviews as well, Google spokesperson Ned Adriance confirms to The Verge. AI Overviews are a feature in Search, just like a knowledge panel or a featured snippet, so they will not appear when someone uses the web filter for a search.

It doesnt magically fix some of the issues facing Googles search engine. But it is a giant opt-out button for people whove been aggravated by some of the companys seemingly self-serving moves, and a way to preserve the spirit of the 10 blue links even as Googles AI efforts try to leave them behind.

Danny Sullivan, Googles Public Liaison for Search, says hes been asking for something like this for years:

As a next step, Id like to see Google promote the button to make it more visible. Right now, the company warns that it may not always appear in the primary carousel on desktop at all you may need to click More first and then select Web.

Heres hoping this all works well on mobile, too; Im not seeing it on my phone yet.

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