Top news this week, 26th of February – 1st of March 2024

Top interesting announcements

Google is reportedly paying publishers thousands of dollars to use its generative AI to write at least three articles a day

According to Adweek, Google launched a private program giving independent news organizations access to a beta generative artificial intelligence platform. In exchange for this access, Google asks for feedback from these publishers. Publishers in the program are apparently not required to disclose their use of AI, nor are the aggregated websites informed that their content is being used to create AI-written stories on other sites.
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Alibaba’s new AI system ‘EMO’ can create realistic videos from photos

Alibaba’s Institute for Intelligent Computing launched EMO, an AI platform capable of animating still portrait photos into lifelike videos. To develop EMO, researchers trained the system using a dataset of over 250 hours of talking head videos curated from various sources such as speeches, films, TV shows, and singing performances. The system employs an AI technique known as a diffusion model.
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Microsoft announced a new partnership with French start-up Mistral AI

Mistral’s large language models will be available on Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform. Through this partnership, the two companies will build applications for governments across Europe and “use the AI models to address public sector-specific needs“. Mistral also released a public test version of its own chatbot, called Le Chat.
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Wikipedia downgrades CNET’s credibility as an information source due to AI-generated content issues

The incident that led to Wikipedia’s reassessment of CNET began when the publication introduced AI-generated articles under the guise of efficiency and innovation. This decision highlights the need for transparency and accountability in how AI tools are deployed in journalism and the potential consequences for news outlets that fail to uphold these principles.
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Microsoft offered to sell Bing to Apple in 2018

Court documents, from Google’s antitrust case against the U.S. Justice Department, unveiled that Microsoft also allegedly proposed a secondary plan where the company and Apple would launch a joint venture with Bing. Apple’s senior vice president of services stated then that he was unimpressed with the search quality for Bing.
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Top new products

Samsung Galaxy A55 5G

Galaxy A55 will have a 6.6-inch AMOLED screen, Exynos 1480 processor, 6 GB or 8 GB of RAM and up to 256 GB of storage. It will come with a 5,000mAh battery.
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Samsung Galaxy Book 4 Ultra

Galaxy Book 4 Ultra has a 16-inch display, Intel Core Ultra 7 processor and 1TB of storage. The price starts at 2,399 USD in the US.
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Honor Magic 6 RSR

Honor Magic 6 RSR will have a 6.8-inch OLED display and Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 processor. It will be launched in March 2024.
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