Google outpaces rivals as Big Tech’s AI spending plans rise to $725bn

The $100 Fitbit Air is available for preorder today.

The Fitbit Air can be preordered today and will be available starting May 26th. | Image: Google It's a Whoop dupe. That was my first thought when I saw the new $99 Google Fitbit Air. You can hardly blame me. The band is screenless with a metallic fabric clasp. My eyes flickered between the Fitbit Air and my wrist, where I'm wearing a Whoop MG. Was I not seeing double? But as my press briefing went on, my opinion started changing. The Air is sort of like the OG Fitbits that Whoop then duped once Fitbit went all in on smartwatches. Think back to 2012, when the Fitbit One could clip to your pants, be turned into a pendant, or dangle from a keychain. That device was mostly a pedometer, whereas the Air is more of a modern, modular sensor t … Read the full story at The Verge.

Google’s A.I. search technology is far from perfect (don’t count on it for celebrity news), but it excels at tasks like picking out groceries and detecting scams.

Google is updating its AI-powered search experience to surface richer context alongside results, including previews from public online discussions, social media, and firsthand community sources. Links will now display additional metadata such as creator names and community handles to help users evaluate credibility before clicking. The update also highlights links from a user’s existing news […]

MRC (Multipath Reliable Connection) is a new open networking protocol developed by OpenAI in partnership with AMD, Broadcom, Intel, Microsoft, and NVIDIA that improves GPU networking performance and resilience in large-scale AI training clusters by spreading packets across hundreds of paths simultaneously, recovering from network failures in microseconds, and enabling supercomputers with over 100,000 GPUs to be built using only two tiers of Ethernet switches. The post OpenAI Introduces MRC (Multipath Reliable Connection): A New Open Networking Protocol for Large-Scale AI Supercomputer Training Clusters appeared first on MarkTechPost.

Partnership between top startup DeepL and Amazon comes amid concern about Silicon Valley’s monopoly over digital infrastructure AI companies in Europe risk losing their world-leading status in the field of machine translation, industry figures have said, after the decision by one of the continent’s leading startups to partner with Amazon’s cloud computing division provoked alarm. While businesses in the EU have generally lagged behind the US and China in AI adoption, a small group of European companies have cornered the global market for high-quality machine translations for professional use. Continue reading...

The Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI), a division of the US Department of Commerce, has signed agreements with Google DeepMind, Microsoft, and xAI that would give the agency the ability to vet AI models from these organizations and others prior to their being made publicly available. According to a release from CAISI, which is part of the department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), it will “conduct pre-deployment evaluations and targeted research to better assess frontier AI capabilities and advance the state of AI security.” The three join Anthropic and OpenAI, which signed similar agreements almost two years ago during the Biden administration, when CAISI was known as the US Artificial Intelligence Safety Institute. An August 2024 release about those agreements indicated that the institute planned to provide feedback to both companies on “potential safety improvements to their models, in close collaboration with its partners at the UK AI Safety In

Deal follows others with Microsoft, Amazon, and more.