Hasta La Gadget!

T-Mobile and SpaceX have announced a new technology alliance they’re calling “Coverage and Above and Beyond” that aims to end mobile deadzones. In an event at SpaceX’s Starbase facility, the companies have revealed that they’re working on integrating a slice of T-Mobile’s mid-band 5G spectrum into the second-gen Starlink satellites launching next year. It’s like putting a cellular tower in the sky, T-Mobile CEO Mike Sievert said during the event. He also said that they’re envisioning a future wherein if you have a clear view of the sky, you are connected on your mobile phone — even if it’s the middle of the ocean. No more getting worried that you won’t be able to get in touch with first responders or friends and family while driving or hiking in places where there’s typically no coverage. 

The companies are making it so that your existing phones can connect to the service, which will enter beta as soon as late next year. It will start with messaging (SMS, MMS and select messaging apps), allowing you to send and receive messages in real time, and Sievert said the companies will keep going until the service can also offer data and voice. While the partners didn’t exactly launch a product during the event, the T-Mobile CEO promised that the service will come free with T-Mobile’s popular plans. For low-cost plans that don’t include it, the carrier may charge for the service, but for far lower prices than satellite services do. 

SpaceX chief Elon Musk tweeted that connectivity will be 2 to 4 Megabits per cell zone, which isn’t a high bandwidth, but will work great for texting and for voice calls.

On stage, Musk said the service will save lives, as it will allow people to call for help even from the most remote places. When asked how his company had to tweak Starlink satellites for the service to work, Musk said SpaceX had to design a very big, extremely advanced antenna that has the ability to pick up very quiet signals from your cellphone. The company is still currently working on it in the lab, but Musk said SpaceX is confident that it’s going to work in the field. 

The company chiefs have issued an open invitation to carriers around the world to make the service available everywhere. In the US, international carriers can team up with T-Mobile so that visitors to the country will also be able to connect to Starlink satellites with their mobile devices.

Instagram will automatically switch on its most restrictive content filter for any new users who are under 16 years old — and recommend that existing teen users do the same, the platform announced today in a blog post. Instagram renamed its existing content settings earlier this summer, which are now categorized as “Less”, “Standard” and “More” and allow users to limit content containing violence, sexual imagery, cosmetic procedures and other “sensitive” subjects. Only users over the age of 18 years old can access the “More” setting, which offers up the least filtered version of Instagram available to the public. (Note: This may cause confusion for some users accustomed to Instagram’s older settings, where the “Limit Even More” option meant the strictest controls on content.)

Now, new Instagram users under 16 years old will have the “Less” setting turned on by default, which will affect the type of content they see throughout the platform, including in Search, Reels, suggested accounts, hashtags and in-feed recommendations. Instagram will also ask all existing teen users to perform a “settings check-up” and limit who can share their content, direct message them and what kind of content their followers can view. It’ll also ask teens if they want to update a feature that lets them limit the amount of time they spend on Instagram.

An Instagram spokesperson told Engadget that one example of the type of content that the “Less” setting would restrict (that the Standard setting would not) is video footage from a protest gone violent. The content settings only apply to accounts that teens don’t currently follow. 

Growing concern over the psychological and emotional toll of Instagram for its youngest users prompted a Senate panel last year to bring in head Adam Mosseri for questioning. Ahead of the hearing, the platform unveiled new teen safety features, including one that notified users if they were spending too much time on the app and an option to automatically report that objectionable content to their parents. And earlier this year, Instagram launched parental controls that allow guardians to monitor who their teen follows and impose time limits on the app. 

Mental health experts have warned that parental controls on social media can only go so far — especially given the fact that algorithms are known to slip up and reveal risky content. Tech-savvy teens can also easily bypass such parental controls or simply view the content of their choice on a different platform or on a friend’s phone.

This recent change likely won’t be too impactful for teen users whose parents or guardians already control their accounts through Instagram’s Family Center. And for teens who are allowed to roam free on Instagram, it’s hard to imagine how many will willingly switch on the most restrictive content settings — especially if many of their peers pick the more lenient filter.

At the I/O 2022 conference this past May, Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced that the company would, in the coming months, gradually avail its experimental LaMDA 2 conversational AI model to select beta users. Those months have come. On Thursday, researchers at Google’s AI division announced that interested users can register to explore the model as access increasingly becomes available.

Regular readers will recognize LaMDA as the supposedly sentient natural language processing (NLP) model that a Google researcher got himself fired over. NLPs are a class of AI model designed to parse human speech into actionable commands and are behind the functionality of digital assistants and chatbots like Siri or Alexa, as well as do the heavy lifting for realtime translation and subtitle apps. Basically, whenever you’re talking to a computer, it’s using NLP tech to listen.   

“I’m sorry, I didn’t quite get that” is a phrase that still haunts many early Siri adopters’ dreams, though in the past decade NLP technology has advanced at a rapid pace. Today’s models are trained on hundreds of billions of parameters, can translate hundreds of languages in real time and even carry lessons learned in one conversation through to subsequent chats.   

Google’s AI Test kitchen will enable beta users to experiment and explore interactions with the NLP in a controlled, presumably supervised, sandbox. Access will begin rolling out to small groups of US Android users today before spreading to iOS devices in the coming weeks. The program will offer a set of guided demos which will show users LaMDA’s capabilities. 

“The first demo, ‘Imagine It,’ lets you name a place and offers paths to explore your imagination,” Tris Warkentin, Group Product Manager at Google Research, and Josh Woodward, Senior Director of Product Management for Labs at Google, wrote in a Google AI blog Thursday. “With the ‘List It’ demo, you can share a goal or topic, and LaMDA will break it down into a list of helpful subtasks. And in the ‘Talk About It (Dogs Edition)’ demo, you can have a fun, open-ended conversation about dogs and only dogs, which explores LaMDA’s ability to stay on topic even if you try to veer off-topic.”  

The focus on safe, responsible interactions is a common one in an industry where there’s already a name for chatbot AIs that go full-Nazi, and that name in Taye. Thankfully, that exceedingly embarrassing incident was a lesson that Microsoft and much of the rest of the AI field has taken to heart, which is why we see such strident restrictions on what users can have Midjourney or Dall-E 2 conjure, or what topics Facebook’s Blenderbot 3 can discuss. 

That’s not to say the system is foolproof. “We’ve run dedicated rounds of adversarial testing to find additional flaws in the model,” Warkentin and Woodward wrote. “We enlisted expert red teaming members… who have uncovered additional harmful, yet subtle, outputs.” Those include failing “to produce a response when they’re used because it has difficulty differentiating between benign and adversarial prompts,” and producing “harmful or toxic responses based on biases in its training data.” As many AIs these days are wont to do.

The Democratic gubernatorial nominee released his first two general-election ads, which call out GOP Gov. Greg Abbott, on Thursday.

A small number of Bentley owners are only a few years away from moving into a luxury apartment complex that features private garages and car elevators.