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YouTube was down for thousands of users in the US

Engadget

Samsung Galaxy Unpacked 2026 is Feb. 25 Valve's Steam Machine: Everything we know It was also down in some other countries. YouTube is experiencing an outage across the United States, with users in other countries like Canada, India, the Philippines, Australia and Russia also having problems with accessing the website. The issue seems to have started at around 8 PM Eastern time and reached 338,000 reports on Downdetector before starting to taper down. More users reported having issues accessing the app, but I personally lost access to the web homepage first. As of 9:22 PM, users are still reporting being unable to access YouTube on Reddit .


BBC director general to depart in April after resignation

BBC News

The BBC's director general is to leave the broadcaster in April, five months after he announced his resignation amid a storm about the way Panorama edited a Donald Trump speech. Tim Davie stayed in his post after announcing his resignation in November, but will depart on 2 April. He will be replaced by an interim DG, Rhodri Talfan Davies, who has been director of nations since 2021 and is currently leading the BBC's work on generative AI. The search is under way for a permanent director general, one of the most demanding jobs in the British media. Davie has been responsible for dealing with a series of scandals and crises since becoming the BBC's 17th director general in 2020.


Google AI Overviews cite YouTube more than any medical site for health queries, study suggests

The Guardian

No hospital network, government health portal, medical association or academic institution came close to YouTube's number of citations, the researchers said. No hospital network, government health portal, medical association or academic institution came close to YouTube's number of citations, the researchers said. How the'confident authority' of AI Overviews is putting public health at risk Google's search feature AI Overviews cites YouTube more than any medical website when answering queries about health conditions, according to research that raises fresh questions about a tool seen by 2 billion people each month. The company has said its AI summaries, which appear at the top of search results and use generative AI to answer questions from users, are "reliable" and cite reputable medical sources such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Mayo Clinic. However, a study that analysed responses to more than 50,000 health queries, captured using Google searches from Berlin, found the top cited source was YouTube .


YouTube CEO promises more AI features in 2026

Engadget

Bungie's Marathon arrives on March 5 How to claim Verizon's $20 outage credit You'll soon be able to create Shorts using an AI-generated version of yourself. YouTube is just as wary of the rise of AI slop as you, and that's why more AI-generated content is coming to the platform in the near future. In a lengthy outlining YouTube's 2026 plans, CEO Neal Mohan said the company will continue to embrace this new creative frontier by soon allowing its creators to throw together Shorts using their AI-generated likeness. Mohan didn't elaborate further about how this feature will work when it launches, but acknowledged the critical issue of deepfakes currently polluting the web, and reaffirmed his company's support for new such as the NO FAKES Act. YouTube also allows its own creators to protect themselves against unauthorized use of their likeness using a detection feature that scans newly uploaded videos for matches. Other fresh AI (note: in no way slop) features referenced in the post include the currently-in-beta no-code platform, which lets you make games using Gemini 3 with a single text prompt, as well as new music creation tools.


From shrimp Jesus to erotic tractors: how viral AI slop took over the internet

The Guardian

Clockwise from top left: Shrimp Jesus, Nayib Bukele, Justin Bieber and Super Cat League. Clockwise from top left: Shrimp Jesus, Nayib Bukele, Justin Bieber and Super Cat League. In the algorithm-driven economy of 2025, one man's shrimp Jesus is another man's side hustle. AI slop - the low-quality, surreal content flooding social media platforms, designed to farm views - is a phenomenon, some would say the phenomenon of the 2024 and 2025 internet. Merriam-Webster's word of the year this year is "slop", referring exclusively to the internet variety.


Quilt-1M: One Million Image-Text Pairs for Histopathology

Neural Information Processing Systems

Recent accelerations in multi-modal applications have been made possible with the plethora of image and text data available online. However, the scarcity of analogous data in the medical field, specifically in histopathology, has slowed comparable progress. To enable similar representation learning for histopathology, we turn to YouTube, an untapped resource of videos, offering $1,087$ hours of valuable educational histopathology videos from expert clinicians.From YouTube, we curate QUILT: a large-scale vision-language dataset consisting of $802, 144$ image and text pairs.QUILT was automatically curated using a mixture of models, including large language models, handcrafted algorithms, human knowledge databases, and automatic speech recognition.In comparison, the most comprehensive datasets curated for histopathology amass only around $200$K samples.We combine QUILT with datasets from other sources, including Twitter, research papers, and the internet in general, to create an even larger dataset: QUILT-1M, with $1$M paired image-text samples, marking it as the largest vision-language histopathology dataset to date. We demonstrate the value of QUILT-1M by fine-tuning a pre-trained CLIP model. Our model outperforms state-of-the-art models on both zero-shot and linear probing tasks for classifying new histopathology images across $13$ diverse patch-level datasets of $8$ different sub-pathologies and cross-modal retrieval tasks.


YouTube is letting creators make playable games with a Gemini 3 tool

Engadget

Don't expect the next Clair Obscur, though. Google's at it again, once more insisting that AI is something people need or want more of in their lives. The latest move comes from YouTube Gaming, which announced an open beta for a project called Playables Builder. This allows select YouTube Creators to use a prototype web app built using Gemini 3 to make bite-sized games, no coding required. YouTube is launching a closed Beta test for Playables Builder, a prototype web app built using Gemini 3 where users create games with short text, video or image prompts. YouTube was testing the addition of small-scale games to its desktop and mobile platforms back in 2023, then added multiplayer capability to Playables last year.


Google pulls AI-generated videos of Disney characters from YouTube in response to cease and desist

Engadget

Google seems to be cracking down on the use of Disney characters in AI-generated videos on YouTube after it was hit with a cease and desist letter. The company on Friday that will bring Disney characters to Sora and ChatGPT, and bring AI-generated shorts from Sora to Disney+. By subscribing, you are agreeing to Engadget's Terms and Privacy Policy . By subscribing, you are agreeing to Engadget's Terms and Privacy Policy .


The Adoption and Usage of AI Agents: Early Evidence from Perplexity

Yang, Jeremy, Yonack, Noah, Zyskowski, Kate, Yarats, Denis, Ho, Johnny, Ma, Jerry

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This paper presents the first large-scale field study of the adoption, usage intensity, and use cases of general-purpose AI agents operating in open-world web environments. Our analysis centers on Comet, an AI-powered browser developed by Perplexity, and its integrated agent, Comet Assistant. Drawing on hundreds of millions of anonymized user interactions, we address three fundamental questions: Who is using AI agents? How intensively are they using them? And what are they using them for? Our findings reveal substantial heterogeneity in adoption and usage across user segments. Earlier adopters, users in countries with higher GDP per capita and educational attainment, and individuals working in digital or knowledge-intensive sectors -- such as digital technology, academia, finance, marketing, and entrepreneurship -- are more likely to adopt or actively use the agent. To systematically characterize the substance of agent usage, we introduce a hierarchical agentic taxonomy that organizes use cases across three levels: topic, subtopic, and task. The two largest topics, Productivity & Workflow and Learning & Research, account for 57% of all agentic queries, while the two largest subtopics, Courses and Shopping for Goods, make up 22%. The top 10 out of 90 tasks represent 55% of queries. Personal use constitutes 55% of queries, while professional and educational contexts comprise 30% and 16%, respectively. In the short term, use cases exhibit strong stickiness, but over time users tend to shift toward more cognitively oriented topics. The diffusion of increasingly capable AI agents carries important implications for researchers, businesses, policymakers, and educators, inviting new lines of inquiry into this rapidly emerging class of AI capabilities.


EU opens investigation into Google's use of online content for AI models

The Guardian

Google runs the Gemini AI model and is owned by Alphabet. Google runs the Gemini AI model and is owned by Alphabet. EU opens investigation into Google's use of online content for AI models Tue 9 Dec 2025 05.06 ESTFirst published on Tue 9 Dec 2025 03.48 EST The EU has opened an investigation to assess whether Google is breaching European competition rules in its use of online content from publishers and YouTube creators for artificial intelligence. The European Commission said on Tuesday it will examine whether the US tech company, which runs the Gemini AI model and is owned by Alphabet, is putting rival AI owners at a "disadvantage". "The investigation will notably examine whether Google is distorting competition by imposing unfair terms and conditions on publishers and content creators, or by granting itself privileged access to such content, thereby placing developers of rival AI models at a disadvantage," the commission said.