Hasta La Gadget!

Google CEO Sundar Pichai addressed the company’s recent issues with its AI-powered Gemini image generation tool after it started overcorrecting for diversity in historical images. He called the turn of events “unacceptable” and said that the company’s “working around the clock” on a fix, according to an internal employee memo published by Semafor.

“No AI is perfect, especially at this emerging stage of the industry’s development, but we know the bar is high for us and we will keep at it for however long it takes,” Pichai wrote to staffers. “And we’ll review what happened and make sure we fix it at scale.”

Pichai remains optimistic regarding the future of the Gemini chatbot, formerly called Bard, noting that the team has already “seen substantial improvement on a wide range of prompts.” The image generation aspect of Gemini will remain paused until a fix is fully worked out.

This started when Gemini users began noticing that the generator began cranking out historically inaccurate images, like pictures of Nazis and America’s Founding Fathers as people of color. This quickly became a big thing on social media, with the word “woke” being thrown around a whole lot.

Prabhakar Raghavan, Google’s senior vice president for knowledge and information, did not lay the blame on wokeness, but rather a series of tuning errors. Basically, the model was fine-tuned to allow for diverse groups of people in pictures, but “failed to account for cases that should clearly not show a range.” This led to controversial images like people of color showing up as Vikings and Native American Catholic Popes.

Raghavan also said that the model became more cautious over time, occasionally refusing to answer certain prompts after wrongly interpreting them as sensitive. This accounts for reports that the model refused to generate images of white people.

It sounds like the company was trying to both please a global audience and ensure the model didn’t fall into some of the traps of rival products, like creating sexually explicit images or depictions of real people. Tuning these AI models is extremely delicate work and the software can easily be led to make ridiculous errors. It’s what they do. In any event, I’d prefer a historically inaccurate Catholic Pope over unexpected violent imagery any day of the week. Chalk this up as yet another reminder that AI still has a long way to go. 

As for Gemini, the company promises the image generator will return in the near future, but it still requires a suite of fixes and tests to make sure this never happens again, including “structural changes, updated product guidelines, improved launch processes, robust evals and red-teaming and technical recommendations.”

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/google-ceo-says-gemini-image-generation-failures-were-unacceptable-163748934.html?src=rss

Google CEO Sundar Pichai addressed the company’s recent issues with its AI-powered Gemini image generation tool after it started overcorrecting for diversity in historical images. He called the turn of events “unacceptable” and said that the company’s “working around the clock” on a fix, according to an internal employee memo published by Semafor.

“No AI is perfect, especially at this emerging stage of the industry’s development, but we know the bar is high for us and we will keep at it for however long it takes,” Pichai wrote to staffers. “And we’ll review what happened and make sure we fix it at scale.”

Pichai remains optimistic regarding the future of the Gemini chatbot, formerly called Bard, noting that the team has already “seen substantial improvement on a wide range of prompts.” The image generation aspect of Gemini will remain paused until a fix is fully worked out.

This started when Gemini users began noticing that the generator began cranking out historically inaccurate images, like pictures of Nazis and America’s Founding Fathers as people of color. This quickly became a big thing on social media, with the word “woke” being thrown around a whole lot.

Prabhakar Raghavan, Google’s senior vice president for knowledge and information, did not lay the blame on wokeness, but rather a series of tuning errors. Basically, the model was fine-tuned to allow for diverse groups of people in pictures, but “failed to account for cases that should clearly not show a range.” This led to controversial images like people of color showing up as Vikings and Native American Catholic Popes.

Raghavan also said that the model became more cautious over time, occasionally refusing to answer certain prompts after wrongly interpreting them as sensitive. This accounts for reports that the model refused to generate images of white people.

It sounds like the company was trying to both please a global audience and ensure the model didn’t fall into some of the traps of rival products, like creating sexually explicit images or depictions of real people. Tuning these AI models is extremely delicate work and the software can easily be led to make ridiculous errors. It’s what they do. In any event, I’d prefer a historically inaccurate Catholic Pope over unexpected violent imagery any day of the week. Chalk this up as yet another reminder that AI still has a long way to go. 

As for Gemini, the company promises the image generator will return in the near future, but it still requires a suite of fixes and tests to make sure this never happens again, including “structural changes, updated product guidelines, improved launch processes, robust evals and red-teaming and technical recommendations.”

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/google-ceo-says-gemini-image-generation-failures-were-unacceptable-163748934.html?src=rss

In a tense moment for space safety, two satellites—NASA’s TIMED spacecraft and the defunct Russian Cosmos 2221—came alarmingly close to smashing into each other above Earth, prompting concerns about the risks of space debris.

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If you work over public Wi-Fi, need to access geo-restricted content or just want to add an extra layer of privacy to your internet connection, you may want to use a VPN service. NordVPN is one of the most popular providers out there and right now, a digital code giving you a year of access to NordVPN Plus is going for $55 at Amazon. The plan also throws in one of our top password managers, NordPass. For comparison, right now a year of the Plus service is $72 directly from Nord. Of course, the best deals the company offers is on its two-year plans. Right now two years of the Plus service is $60 from Nord — so you’re still saving $5 with Amazon’s deal, plus you’re not locked into a full two-year commitment. 

If you just want the VPN coverage without the password manager, you can get the standard service. It’s $45 for a year of access, a savings of $15 over buying from Nord directly. And if you’re just interested in the password manager, two-years of NordPass is down to $35, which is $5 less than going through Nord’s site. 

We named Nord’s password manager one of the best for cross-platform use in our guide to those services. The service keeps your credentials safe while making it easy to access your vault from whichever device or operating system you happen to be on. It also allows for biometric sign ins, making it even easier to get at your saved passwords. 

As for Nord’s VPN, like all such services, it masks your IP address and encrypts your data to and from its destination. It also blocks your ISP from seeing data about your browsing. Just keep in mind that VPNs can’t protect against other security risks like phishing and identity theft. Nord’s VPN service didn’t make the cut in our testing of such services, partly because we thought the price was a bit too high for the features provided. This deal removes some of the hesitation and we did find the service to be speedy and like that it’s based on WireGuard, one of the more secure protocols. But the lack of open source software for most of its products and a less-than-stellar record of customer data privacy prevents it from being the best we can recommend. The service that did top our list was ProtonVPN. It’s currently $72 for one year of the service alone. A bundle that includes a password manager, email and other services is currently $120 for the year. 

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This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/a-year-of-nordvpn-plus-is-just-55-right-now-165142120.html?src=rss

A new climate intervention strategy aims to decrease the amount of water vapor in the stratosphere by injecting it with ice-forming nuclei. The idea is that, by reducing the water content, more heat in the form of infrared radiation would leak out into space.

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