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Google makes Gemini personalization available to free users

Engadget

After AI Pro and Ultra subscribers first got to first try the feature, now anyone in the US can enable it. Gemini's Personal Intelligence feature is now rolling out to more users in the US. At the start of the year, Google introduced Personal Intelligence, a Gemini feature that allows the chatbot to pull information from the user's other Google apps and services to generate personalized responses. After making the feature first available to Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers, the company is expanding availability to more users in the US. Google is kicking off the expansion with AI Mode.


Do you know the true cost of identity theft?

FOX News

Federal data shows identity theft losses can extend far beyond direct financial damage as victims spend weeks repairing credit files.


Federated Multi-Task Learning

Neural Information Processing Systems

Federated learning poses new statistical and systems challenges in training machine learning models over distributed networks of devices. In this work, we show that multi-task learning is naturally suited to handle the statistical challenges of this setting, and propose a novel systems-aware optimization method, MOCHA, that is robust to practical systems issues. Our method and theory for the first time consider issues of high communication cost, stragglers, and fault tolerance for distributed multi-task learning. The resulting method achieves significant speedups compared to alternatives in the federated setting, as we demonstrate through simulations on real-world federated datasets.


Online Learning of Optimal Bidding Strategy in Repeated Multi-Commodity Auctions

Neural Information Processing Systems

We study the online learning problem of a bidder who participates in repeated auctions. With the goal of maximizing his T-period payoff, the bidder determines the optimal allocation of his budget among his bids for $K$ goods at each period. As a bidding strategy, we propose a polynomial-time algorithm, inspired by the dynamic programming approach to the knapsack problem. The proposed algorithm, referred to as dynamic programming on discrete set (DPDS), achieves a regret order of $O(\sqrt{T\log{T}})$. By showing that the regret is lower bounded by $\Omega(\sqrt{T})$ for any strategy, we conclude that DPDS is order optimal up to a $\sqrt{\log{T}}$ term. We evaluate the performance of DPDS empirically in the context of virtual trading in wholesale electricity markets by using historical data from the New York market. Empirical results show that DPDS consistently outperforms benchmark heuristic methods that are derived from machine learning and online learning approaches.


WATCH: Wall-climbing robot swarms crawl US Navy warships as China's fleet surges

FOX News

Navy robots from Gecko Robotics will inspect U.S. warships in $71 million effort to reduce maintenance delays as only 60% of fleet remains operational amid China's naval expansion.


Senators tell ByteDance to shut down Seedance 2.0 AI video app 'immediately'

Engadget

They said the company'has shown it is willing to... steal the intellectual property ofAmerican creators.' After ByteDance suspended the global rollout of its new Seedance 2.0 AI video generator on the weekend, US senators have now told the company to immediately shut down the app. Seedance 2.0 poses a direct threat to the American intellectual property system and, more broadly, to the constitutional rights and economic livelihoods of our creative community, Senators Marsha Blackburn and Peter Welch wrote in a letter to the company . Responsible global companies follow the law and respect core economic rights, including intellectual property and personal likeness protections, the senators wrote. They cited Seedance AI examples including an AI generated Thanos and Superman battle, a rewritten ending and that famous (fake) Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt battle .


How Invisalign Became the World's Biggest User of 3D Printers

WIRED

Joe Hogan, Align Technology's plastics-nerd CEO, says you shouldn't eat with your aligners and that you don't need to wear your retainers every night. Joe Hogan sees a lot of smiles. When people ask him where he works, he responds with "Align Technology," which inevitably prompts the follow up, "What's that?" After months, sometimes years, the discrete rival to braces promises to give people smiles they will want to show off. Hogan gets a look at them all. And he's eager to see more. Align is embarking on its biggest manufacturing overhaul since it was founded by two Stanford Graduate School of Business classmates 29 years ago. The company is preparing to begin directly 3D printing the aligners at the core of its business, ditching what Hogan describes as a longer, more wasteful process that involves making molds. A successful transition could lower costs and make treatment more affordable in the long run, bringing Invisalign to more customers and boosting Align's profits. It also, according to Hogan, would entrench Align as the world's biggest user of 3D printers .


How to Set Up Your Own NAS Server for Backups and Content Streaming

WIRED

The app reads your email inbox and your meeting calendar, then gives you a short audio summary. It can help you spend less time scrolling, but of course, there are privacy drawbacks to consider.


Blood tech: The UK ambassador, the sex offender, Palantir, and Gaza

Al Jazeera

Ties between the US tech giant Palantir and the United Kingdom government are coming under increased scrutiny following the arrest of former UK ambassador to the US Peter Mandelson over his links to the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Despite its public criticism of both Palantir and Mandelson, the UK government has entered into extensive contracts with the US tech giant, signing a defence contract worth 240 million pounds ($323m) in January. The contract was awarded to Palantir directly, while another, worth 330 million pounds ($444m) and involving the UK's Ministry of Health, was awarded in November 2023 following a bidding process. The latter contract's contents, campaigners say, remain heavily redacted . In addition to its role supporting US President Donald Trump's immigration crackdown, which has resulted in killings and unlawful deportations, Palantir has partnered extensively with the Israeli military and its operations in Gaza and the occupied West Bank.


Sears Exposed AI Chatbot Phone Calls and Text Chats to Anyone on the Web

WIRED

Customer conversations with chatbots can include contact information and personal details that make it easier for scammers to launch phishing attacks and commit fraud.