Bard, Bing and Baidu: How big tech’s AI race will transform searches

by Hansraj Agrawal | Feb 10, 2023 | Technology

Welcome to the AI race!

Microsoft responded swiftly to Google, saying it would incorporate the ChatGPT chatbot into its search engine, Bing.

ChatGPT has already been added to Microsoft’s Teams software. You can expect it to turn up soon in Word, where it will write paragraphs for you. In Outlook it will compose entire emails, and in PowerPoint it will help you prepare slides for your next talk.

Chinese web giant Baidu has also sprung into action. It recently announced its latest chatbot would be released in March. Baidu’s chatbot is will be trained on 50 per cent more parameters than ChatGPT, and will be bilingual. Its share price jumped 15 per cent in response.

AI-driven search

Google, along with the other tech giants, has been using AI in search for many years already. The difference now is that instead of searching based on the words you type, these new search engines will try to ‘understand’ questions. And instead of sending links, they’ll try to answer the questions, too.

But new chatbot technology is far from perfect. ChatGPT sometimes just makes stuff up. Chatbots can also be tricked into saying things that are inappropriate, offensive or illegal – although researchers are working hard to reduce this.

Existential risk

For Google, this has been described by the New York Times not just as an AI race, but a race to survive.

Advertising revenue from Google Search results contributes about three-quarters of the $283 billion annual revenue of Alphabet, Google’s parent company. If people start using AI chatbots to answer their questions rather than Google Search, what will happen to that income? Even if Google users stick with Google, but get their answers directly from the Bard, how will Google make money when no links are being clicked anymore? Microsoft may see this as an opportunity for its search engine, Bing, to overtake Google.

Will the AI race lead to cutting corners? There are a host of risks associated with big tech’s rush to cement the future of AI search.

For one, if tech companies won’t make as much money from selling links, what new income streams will they create?

A new interface

Perhaps the biggest impact from AI-driven search tools will be on how we interact with the myriad ever-smarter devices in our lives. We will stop pointing, clicking and touching, and will instead start having entire conversations with our devices.

(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)

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India in talks with 4 semiconductor companies to set up fabs here: Report

by Hansraj Agrawal | Feb 10, 2023 | Technology

Four global semiconductor companies are in talks with the Centre to set up fabs in India, a report in the Economic Times (ET) said. The Centre is also likely to invite a second round of applications for setting up such a facility under the $10 billion incentive package by mid-March.

Among the countries that have shown interest are New York-based GlobalFoundries and a “major” Korean semiconductor firm.

“Apart from applications that the government has at this point, there are four large opportunities, which are in the final stage. So, as and when we open the second window, they will come,” a person aware of the matter told ET.

The Centre invited proposals for setting up semiconductor facilities in India last year. In December 2021, it announced a $10 billion package to incentivise the manufacturing of chips in India. The India Semiconductor Mission (ISM) was made the nodal agency of the program.

The Centre is offering a 50 per cent subsidy on fab units, and states are offering a 10-25 per cent subsidy over and above the central share.

In the first round of applications, five companies had shown interest in setting up chip factories in India. This included three proposals for chip manufacturing, including by the International Semiconductor Consortium (ISMC) consortium led by Abu-Dhabi-based Next Orbit Ventures. The other two applicants are Singapore-based IGSS Ventures and the Vedanta-Foxconn combine. Rajesh Exports and Vedanta-Foxconn proposed to set up display fabs.

Out of these, ISMC, IGSS Venture and Rajesh Exports are unlikely to get the approval, sources told ET.

The report added that the Centre is keen to have Taiwan’s Foxconn set up a manufacturing plant in India. Moreover, it wants Foxconn to take the lead in its venture with Vedanta.

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Realme’s upcoming GT Neo 5 to support industry-leading 240W charging tech

by Hansraj Agrawal | Feb 9, 2023 | Technology

Chinese smartphone maker Realme on Thursday announced that it will start the mass production of the 240W fast charging technology, which would debut in the Realme GT Neo 5. This super-fast wired charging is said to be the first in the industry. The Realme GT 3 with 240W fast charging features will be launched in the global market soon, said the company.

“Continuing with our commitment to empowering the youth through leap-forward technologies, we have always offered at least one leap-forward feature with every flagship product. And this time, we are excited to announce that the 240W fast charging technology will be introduced in the global market soon with realme’s next flagship smartphone realme GT 3, said Madhav Sheth, CEO, Realme India.

The Realme GT Neo 5 is said to have a transparent RGB lighting system on the back. According to Realme, with a charging capacity 10 times faster than standard charging, the realme GT Neo 5 will just need 30 seconds of charging for two hours of continuous phone calls. The 240W fast wired charging on the phone would be enabled through 12A charging cable and 240W dual GaN mini charger.

Powering the smartphone would be 4,600 mAh 10C ultra-thin electrode battery, which is said to be certified by TUV Rheinland for battery longevity. To ensure a safe charging system, the certification also includes over 60 layers of safety protection. The smartphone is said to offer more than 80 per cent of battery capacity even after 1600 charging cycles, which is double than the industry standard.

As for the design, there would be a transparent RGB pulse lighting interface on the back of the smartphone. Through the transparent window, users will be able to see the chipset with a customised logo design, a part of the mainboard, an NFC sensor, and a C-shaped RGB lighting ring. The lighting system on the back would be customisable for charging, gaming, notifications, etc.

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US to China, tech giants hit the tracks in race for AI one-upmanship

by Hansraj Agrawal | Feb 9, 2023 | Technology

Applications based on generative artificial intelligence (AI) are set to be the new frontier for big tech companies. Soon after the US-based OpenAI kicked off the race with its conversational styled chatbot service named ChatGPT, Microsoft announced fresh investment of $10 billion in a multi-year multi-dollar deal with the company. It later announced ChatGPT integration in two of its offerings – Edge browser and Bing search.

In a quick succession, another US-based tech major, Google, announced Bard – a generative AI-based chatbot for its search engine. Joining the race soon would be China’s Baidu and Alibaba, which are working on similar offerings.

So how is the space shaping up? Let us take a look:

Microsoft

Microsoft has been associated with OpenAI since its early days, building the artificial general intelligence (AGI). The company invested $1 billion in OpenAI in 2019, followed by another round of investment in 2021. The $10-billion investment this January is its most recent.

On February 7, the company announced upgrading its Edge browser and Bing search with AI. These two are its first consumer-facing services to leverage OpenAI’s large language model, which is said to be more powerful than ChatGPT and customised specifically for search.

Microsoft said the new Bing brings a unified experience to deliver better search, more complete answers, a new chat experience and the ability to generate content. Starting with the search function, the new Bing search result page has been reworked to show a sidebar on the right for comprehensive answers with annotation for easy references, and webpage results listings on the left for familiar experience.

For complex questions, such as planning a detailed trip itinerary, for which there is not a precise answer and search alone is not good enough, there is a new Chat experience in Bing. It is similar to conversational-styled chatbots where you input queries and continue the conversation until you get exactly what you are looking for.

Coming to the Edge browser, it gets new AI capabilities besides cosmetic changes for things to look for. The AI powers two new functions on the browser – chat and compose. The Chat function is designed to help users get meaningful takeaways from web pages. The Compose function enables users to write posts, emails, blogs, and more.

The core difference between OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s offering is that the former works on a database with information until 2021, but the latter also leverages the web to show results that are up to date.

ChatGPT was considered a threat to search engines, including Bing. With AI integration, Microsoft seems to have made it future-proof. Parallelly, it ups the game by bringing new AI capabilities to the Edge browser that may give it a first-move advantage in time to come.

The new Bing is available in a limited preview on desktop with wide-scale availability planned in the coming weeks. Microsoft said the Bing mobile experience will be in preview soon.

Google

Google advanced in the conversational AI race with the launch of its own AI large language model in 2021 called Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA). But it missed the opportunity to introduce its own consumer-facing product based on LaMDA, which it now hopes to change.

A day before Microsoft announced the new Bing and Edge, Google announced Bard – its generative AI chatbot that will be integrated in Google Search. Google said, “Bard draws on information from the web to provide fresh, high-quality responses.” In this regard, Bard is expected to be more similar to Microsoft’s Bing than OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

Google is yet to come out with details about Bard, though.

In the promotional video showing Bard in action, the chatbot responds to a question about what to tell a 9-year-old about new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), saying that the JWST was used to take pictures of a planet outside the Milky Way. This is not true and the error was spotted by Reuters ahead of the Bard announcement. This, apparently, made Google parent Alphabet lose $100 billion in market value in the regular trading hours on February 8.

Baidu and Alibaba

Baidu introduced its AI-powered large language model called Ernie in 2019. According to the company, it is able to perform tasks including language understanding, language generation, and text-to-image generation. The company’s generative AI-based chatbot is expected to launch in March, according to Reuters.

Joining Baidu in China would be the Alibaba Group, which on Wednesday said it is developing a ChatGPT-style tool that is currently being tested internally, according to Reuters.

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Nokia extends manufacturing of fibre broadband equipment to India

by Hansraj Agrawal | Feb 9, 2023 | Technology

Telecom equipment maker Nokia on Thursday said it will extend manufacturing of PON optical line terminals (OLTs) to its factory in Sriperimbudur near Chennai to cater to rising demand from local customers in India and global markets.

PON stands for Passive Optical Network.

In a statement announcing the latest move, Nokia said shifts in consumer behaviour, from home working to data-rich entertainment services, are driving demand for broadband.

“This demand is matched by strong institutional support with significant funding from governments and private equity funds around the world that are driving investments in broadband and fibre connectivity,” according to the company.

Nokia is currently a participant in the government’s production-linked incentive (PLI) scheme and is extending its production capacity into Chennai in response to growing demand.

Demand for fibre is also shifting to new regions with the Asia-Pacific region witnessing strong demand in markets like Japan, India and Southeast Asia.

Much of this demand will be seen in the form of fibre to the home (FTTH) but there is also significant demand from mobile network operators (MNOs) as they deploy 5G and need next-generation fibre in their transport networks to carry the expected surge in data traffic.

“Nokia’s planned production of PON OLTs in India will give a boost to expand the company’s production base and geographic reach,” it said.

Sanjay Malik, Senior Vice President and Head of the India Market at Nokia, observed that India is seeing massive demand for fibre connectivity from both fixed and mobile operators.

“OLT production at our Chennai plant will offer a timely boost to meeting this demand in a timely way. Service providers in India will benefit from the increased availability of both existing Lightspan product lines as well as upcoming GPON access nodes, which offer smaller lower-density OLTs to suit a range of conditions and requirements,” Malik added.

(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)

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Netflix rolls out paid password sharing service to 4 more countries

by Hansraj Agrawal | Feb 9, 2023 | Technology

Streaming giant Netflix on Thursday announced that it is rolling out paid password sharing, otherwise known as a crackdown on password sharing, to four more countries — Canada, New Zealand, Portugal and Spain.

Previously, the company tested paid password sharing in select markets, including Chile, Costa Rica, Peru and elsewhere in Latin America.

“So over the last year, we’ve been exploring different approaches to address this issue in Latin America, and we’re now ready to roll them out more broadly in the coming months, starting today in Canada, New Zealand, Portugal and Spain,” said Netflix.

The crackdown on password sharing feature allows users to set primary location, which the streaming giant says, “will help members set this up, ensuring that anyone who lives in their household can use their Netflix account”.

Moreover, subscribers can now easily manage who has access to their account from the new Manage Access and Devices page.

People using an account can now easily transfer a profile to a new account, which they pay for, keeping their personalised recommendations, viewing history, My List, saved games and more, said the company.

In December 2022, it was reported that Netflix was planning to put an end to its password-sharing feature in early 2023.

The company had long been aware that password sharing is a problem that negatively affects its earnings, but the rise in subscriptions in 2020 led the streaming giant to avoid addressing the issue.

Because of the revenue downfall last year and the platform’s first subscriber loss in 10 years, Hastings decided that it was time to take action on the issue.

–IANS

shs/ksk/

(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)

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