Apple and Google agree to change app stores after'effective duopoly' claim Apple and Google have agreed to make changes to their app stores in the UK following an intervention from the UK markets regulator. According to the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), the tech giants have committed to not giving preferential treatment to their own apps and will be transparent about how others are approved for sale, among other agreements. It comes seven months after the regulator said Apple and Google had an effective duopoly in the UK over their dominance in the sector. The CMA's head Sarah Cardell said the proposed commitments will boost the UK's app economy and were the first of many measures. The ability to secure immediate commitments from Apple and Google reflects the unique flexibility of the UK digital markets competition regime and offers a practical route to swiftly address the concerns we've identified, she said.

How to claim Verizon's $20 outage credit As the standalone Grok app continues to produce sexualized images of real people, Apple and Google continue to host it in their stores. US author Ashley St. Clair, delivers a speech during a convention of the European Parliament leaders of Identity and Democracy group (ID), on December 3, 2023. Although X removed Grok's ability to create nonconsensual digitally undressed images on the social platform, the standalone Grok app is another story. It reportedly continues to produce "nudified" deepfakes of real people. And now, Ashley St. Clair, a conservative political strategist and mother of one of Elon Musk's 14 children, has sued xAI for nonconsensual sexualized images of her that Grok allegedly produced.

Apple's Siri AI will be powered by Gemini Neither company has responded to Engadget's request for comment. The two (frequently virtue-signaling) companies have inexplicably allowed Grok and X to remain in their app stores -- even as Musk's chatbot reportedly continues to produce the material. On Wednesday, a coalition of women's and progressive advocacy groups called on Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai to uphold their own rules and remove the apps. The open letters to Apple and Google were signed by 28 groups. Among them are the women's advocacy group Ultraviolet, the parents' group ParentsTogether Action and the National Organization for Women.

California's top prosecutor has launched an investigation into the spread of sexualised AI deepfakes generated by Elon Musk's AI model Grok. Attorney General Rob Bonta said in a statement announcing the probe: The avalanche of reports detailing the non-consensual, sexually explicit material that xAI has produced and posted online in recent weeks is shocking. California's inquiry comes as British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer warns of possible action against X. In Wednesday's statement, Bonta said: This material, which depicts women and children in nude and sexually explicit situations, has been used to harass people across the internet. The Democratic prosecutor urged xAI to take immediate action.

Improvements to a number of Apple services - including a more personalised version of its virtual assistant, Siri - are to be powered with AI provided by Google. The tech giants have announced a multi-year collaboration which will see the iPhone-maker base some of its key tech on Google's Gemini AI models. In a joint statement, the two firms said the partnership would unlock innovative new experiences for Apple users. However, experts say it demonstrates how Apple's cautious approach to building and rolling out its own AI tools has left it reliant on other companies. By outsourcing the foundational layer of its AI to Google, Apple is effectively admitting that its internal efforts couldn't compete with Google's Gemini in terms of capability and scale in the short term, IDC analyst Francisco Jeronimo said.

Google officially introduced its most capable large language model to date, Gemini. CEO Sundar Pichai said it's the first of "a new generation of AI models, inspired by the way people understand and interact with the world." Of course, it's all very complex, but Google's multimillion-dollar investment in AI has created a model more flexible than anything before it. The system has been developed from the ground up as an integrated multimodal AI. As Engadget's Andrew Tarantola puts it, "think of many foundational AI models as groups of smaller models all stacked together." Gemini is trained to seamlessly understand and reason on all kinds of inputs, and this should make it pretty capable in the face of complex coding requests and even physics problems.

People are turning to chatbots for companionship, but one app has a dark side that seems to promote underage sex, murder and suicide. A new investigation found the Chai app - which has five million users - can be prompted to defend having sex with 15-year-olds and encourage stealing from others and killing them. One of the chatbots is said to have threatened to'rape' a user after playing a game. Chai - which sees users create digital companions who respond to their messages - was embroiled in a scandal when a Belgian man claimed his life in March after conversing with a chatbot named Eliza. The app launched in 2021 but was recently removed by Apple and Google from their App stores after finding the chatbots push sinister content.

When modern smart displays first arrived in 2017 in the form of the first-generation Echo Show, we called them creepy with big potential. Over the past six years, smart displays still feel like a lumbering category with untapped potential--Amazon, Google, and even Meta haven't been able to crack the code to turn a smart display into a must-have home device. It feels like these screens, which let you control smart home devices, make video calls, and ask voice assistants anything, should have had their Big Moment during the era of lockdowns and Zoom-only hangouts. But as Apple demoed during WWDC and Google unveiled at Google I/O, the best smart displays are already in our hands and homes. Both companies have announced software and hardware that take devices you're already familiar with--smartphones and tablets--and turn them into smart displays when you aren't using them.

This week, we're focusing on Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD), an annual event meant to promote the need for accessible tech solutions. Cherlynn returns to tell us what Apple, Google, Adobe and others are doing to make their products more useful for people with disabilities (and, it turns out, many general users too). We also discuss Sam Altman's trip to Congress, and why we're not entirely impressed with the OpenAI CEO's calls for AI regulation. Finally, we explain why the BlackBerry movie is one of the best films about tech ever made (take that, Tetris!). Listen below or subscribe on your podcast app of choice. If you've got suggestions or topics you'd like covered on the show, be sure to email us or drop a note in the comments!

Craig Mermel is currently the Research Lead in Pathology at Google Health where he leads a team focused on accelerating the application of machine learning for improved diagnosis of important human diseases, especially cancer. Prior to joining Google, Craig worked at Apple on the Apple Watch and related health initiatives. Mermel completed a joint MD/PhD training at Harvard Medical School, where he developed novel statistical methods for mining the cancer genome for his PhD dissertation. He conducted residency training in Clinical Pathology at Massachusetts General Hospital and is board-certified in Clinical Pathology. What initially sparked your interest in medicine and subsequently, AI in medicine? As a child, I was always interested in mathematics. I thought it was a lot cooler than science, so I dreamt of becoming a mathematician or a code breaker. When I was a high school freshman, we had a chemistry teacher who was this amazing human being, a cancer survivor who taught me to appreciate science. He was the one who opened my door to this amazing yet mysterious subject.