Research teams across Google and Alphabet are exploring new ways that machine learning can assist software developers and

“Actions such as his could come only from a robot, or from a very honorable and decent human being. But you see, you can’t differentiate between a robot and the very best of humans.” – Isaac Asimov, I, Robot Science fiction writer Isaac Asimov was among the first to consider a future in which humanity […]

Google’s LaMDA software (Language Model for Dialogue Applications) is a sophisticated AI chatbot that produces text in response to user input. According to software engineer Blake Lemoine, LaMDA has achieved a long-held dream of AI developers: it has become sentient. Lemoine’s bosses at Google disagree, and have suspended him from work after he published his […]

Alan Turing first proposed a test for machine intelligence in 1950, but now researchers at Google and their partners have created a suite of 204 tests to replace it, covering subjects such as mathematics, linguistics and chess

Google engineer Blake Lemoine was suspended for sharing transcripts of a conversation with the AI system LaMDA, which he claims is sentient.

Blake Lemoine, an engineer at Google, has claimed that the firm's LaMDA artificial intelligence is sentient, but the expert consensus is that this is not the case

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. The dark secret behind those cute AI-generated animal images Another month, another flood of weird, wonderful and cute images generated by an artificial intelligence. In April, OpenAI showed off its new picture-making neural…

We speak to sci-fi icon Amanda Tapping, Stargate showrunner Brad Wright, and Google's AI lead Laurence Moroney about the latest Stargate AI screen read.

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Google is failing to enforce its own ban on ads for stalkerware Google Search displays advertisements for stalkerware services that boast real-time monitoring of romantic partners and spouses, despite the company’s self-imposed ban…

Google Search displays advertisements for stalkerware services that boast real-time monitoring of romantic partners and spouses, despite the company’s self-imposed ban on such ads.  According to research by mobile security firm Certo Software and confirmed by MIT Technology Review, Google Search queries related to tracking partners such as a wife or girlfriend commonly return ads…

A US body in charge of choosing new encryption algorithms that can withstand quantum computers has delayed announcing them due to undisclosed legal reasons, while a team at Google is calling for an immediate switch

Two University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign researchers are developing resources for studying the Deseret Alphabet, which was created by the Mormons and used briefly in the 19th century.

A weird circular shape on Google Earth has ocean-floor UFO hunters crying "alien."

The great enforced global experiment in working from home is coming to an end, as vaccines, the Omicron variant and new therapeutic drugs bring the COVID-19 crisis under control.

The latest news and headlines from Yahoo! News. Get breaking news stories and in-depth coverage with videos and photos.

Technology has quickly infiltrated almost every aspect of our lives, but the way we interface with our devices is still less than ideal. From hunching over our computer screens (because if you’re anything like me, it’s pretty much impossible to maintain good posture for more than a few minutes at a time) to constantly looking […]

A Google image search for a job title like "CEO" might show more women than in the past, but what if you add a location?

A Google image search for a job title like "CEO" might show more women than in the past, but what if you add a location?

Software can analyse millions of static photographs taken in city streets and create a realistic 3D model that users can smoothly navigate

An incredible quantity of archaeological reports are stored in digital archives. If you want to search for information in them, you have to do this manually. And that is a real chore. Archaeologist Alex Brandsen has now used deep learning, a form of artificial intelligence, to develop a search engine that can search very precisely through all the data. His Ph.D. defense is on 15 February.

Google has a new plan to replace cookies, the files that track us when we browse the internet, but it is controversial with advertisers and privacy campaigners

The pioneering work of physicist Stephen Hawking is honored in a Google Doodle today (Jan. 8).

Another major conference planned for January, the World Economic Forum, announced Monday it would delay its annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, due to Omicron.

Researchers found ads placed by Google on sites that falsely call global warming a hoax. The revenue those sites earn from the ads can fund further misinformation.

Machine learning creates algorithm that avoids large errors in solutions to certain problems

Courtesy of Google Earth, check out some strange highlights of our planet, in lieu of a whirlwind trip round the world.

Myanmar, March 2021. A month after the fall of the democratic government. In 2015, six of the 10 websites in Myanmar getting the most engagement on Facebook were from legitimate media, according to data from CrowdTangle, a Facebook-run tool. A year later, Facebook (which recently rebranded to Meta) offered global access to Instant Articles, a…

AI research wunderkind, DeepMind, has long been all fun and games. The London-based organization, owned by Google parent company Alphabet, has used deep learning to train algorithms that can take down world champions at the ancient game of Go and top players of the popular strategy video game Starcraft. Then last year, things got serious […]

AI research wunderkind, DeepMind, has long been all fun and games. The London-based organization, owned by Google parent company Alphabet, has used deep learning to train algorithms that can take down world champions at the ancient game of Go and top players of the popular strategy video game Starcraft. Then last year, things got serious […]

The latest news and headlines from Yahoo! News. Get breaking news stories and in-depth coverage with videos and photos.

We may be losing the ability to perceive our own intelligence because we can quickly google the answer to just about any question.

The new rules could put pressure on Facebook to take similar steps -- Read more on ScientificAmerican.com

The latest news and headlines from Yahoo! News. Get breaking news stories and in-depth coverage with videos and photos.

The latest news and headlines from Yahoo! News. Get breaking news stories and in-depth coverage with videos and photos.

It’s crunch time on climate change. The IPCC’s latest report told the world just how bad it is, and…it’s bad. Companies, NGOs, and governments are scrambling for fixes, both short-term and long-term, from banning sale of combustion-engine vehicles to pouring money into hydrogen to building direct air capture plants. And one initiative, launched last week, […]

A little over a year ago, Google’s Project Loon launched in Kenya, 35 giant balloons with solar-powered electronics inside beaming a 4G signal to the central and western parts of the country. The project was ambitious; each balloon, when fully extended, was the size of a tennis court, and the plan was for them to […]

The crystals neatly sidestep some of physics' most iron-clad laws.

Google is shutting down its controversial Streams app, which used machine learning to analyse medical records and was found to have failed to comply with UK data protection laws

The sudden collapse of Afghanistan’s government has led to a frantic attempt to accelerate online relief and evacuation efforts. These attempts, organized largely via Google Forms, WhatsApp and private social media groups, are trying to fill the void left by the US government’s failure to protect vulnerable Afghans. These efforts could be the only lifeline for…

An analysis of malicious apps discovered on the Google Play Store found that after being detected they remain available to users for 77 days on average before being removed

A time crystal is a unique phase of matter that flips between two states with no energy input necessary – first proposed in 2012, this type of matter has now been created inside a quantum computer built by Google

Tech titan Facebook put out similar word on Wednesday, saying that as its offices re-open, only vaccinated workers will be welcomed.

One of the biggest barriers standing in the way of useful quantum computers is how error-prone today’s devices are. Now, Google has provided an experimental demonstration of how to correct this problem and scale it up for much larger devices. The power of quantum computers comes from their ability to manipulate exotic quantum states, but […]

Google has shown that its Sycamore quantum computer can detect and fix computational errors, an essential step for large-scale quantum computing, but its current system generates more errors than it solves

A team in China has demonstrated that it has the world's most powerful quantum computer, leapfrogging the previous record holder, Google

Have you ever hit a surprise pothole or other road obstruction? Do you wish your navigation app could

When a photographer snapped the moment a herring gull caught a french fry midair, the image quickly went viral. Now, the photo is appearing on Google billboards in Ireland and the U.K.

Internet giants Google and Facebook have discovered they are experiencing computer chip failures that can corrupt data or make it difficult to unlock encrypted files

A set of sinuous lines found in the Thar Desert of India may be the largest geoglyph ever discovered.

AI has finally come full circle. A new suite of algorithms by Google Brain can now design computer chips—those specifically tailored for running AI software—that vastly outperform those designed by human experts. And the system works in just a few hours, dramatically slashing the weeks- or months-long process that normally gums up digital innovation. At […]

The latest news and headlines from Yahoo! News. Get breaking news stories and in-depth coverage with videos and photos.

Google creates custom processors to run its various artificial intelligence algorithms, and now it has tasked an AI with speeding up the process of designing more efficient chips

An online animal catalogue lets you decode communications and other behaviors for everyone’s favorite pachyderm -- Read more on ScientificAmerican.com

A team including researchers at Google took a cubic millimetre of a woman's brain, sliced it incredibly thin and scanned it to create the most detailed map yet of the connections within our brain

Last Tuesday, teams from Google and Harvard published an intricate map of every cell and connection in a cubic millimeter of the human brain. The mapped region encompasses the various layers and cell types of the cerebral cortex, a region of brain tissue associated with higher-level cognition, such as thinking, planning, and language. According to […]

When he was unjustly fired from his job as an astronomer in 1957, Frank Kameny took up a lifelong struggle for the civil rights of gay people

Self-driving cars are taking longer to come to market than initially predicted by industry insiders, as a New York Times article highlighted this week. Indeed, it turns out that having a complex, interconnected set of cameras, sensors, lidar, and software safely navigate a vehicle through busy streets is a lot harder than we thought it […]

The end of the pandemic seems to be in sight, but it has likely brought lasting changes to the way we work, live, and connect with each other. As traveling starts to take off again and many employees return to their offices, others are choosing to stay put, both in their home towns and inside […]

Imagine a collection of books—maybe millions or even billions of them—haphazardly tossed by publishers into a heaping pile in a field. Every day the pile grows exponentially. Those books are brimming with knowledge and answers. But how would a seeker find them? Lacking organization, the books are useless. This is the raw internet in all […]

Elon Musk's SpaceX announced Thursday that Google would team up with its Starlink satellite internet service to deliver cloud computing services to business customers.

Google and Tel Aviv University (TAU) recently launched “AI for Social Good,” a program for promoting artificial intelligence-related multidisciplinary research

Android alerts will first run in New Zealand and Greece

Satellites are doing all kinds of amazing new things lately, from beaming high-speed internet to remote areas to capturing high-resolution images through clouds to taking 24 million images of every part of the Earth to show how it’s changed over the last 37 years. Wait, what? Yes, that’s right: 24 million images taken over 37 […]

An alphabetic inscription written on a jar fragment found at the site of Tel Lachish in Israel and dating back around 3,450 years may provide a "missing link" in the history of the alphabet.

One of the primary capabilities separating human intelligence from artificial intelligence is our ability to be creative—to use nothing but the world around us, our experiences, and our brains to create art. At present, AI needs to be extensively trained on human-made works of art in order to produce new work, so we’ve still got […]

Google runs some of the most venerated cybersecurity operations on the planet: its Project Zero team, for example, finds powerful undiscovered security vulnerabilities, while its Threat Analysis Group directly counters hacking backed by governments, including North Korea, China and Russia. And those two teams caught an unexpectedly big fish recently: an “expert” hacking group exploiting…

Sticking with human names will lessen confusion and distraction -- Read more on ScientificAmerican.com

A team including researchers at Google has used one of the search giant's underwater fibre optic cables to detect earthquakes and ocean waves generated by storms, without needing any extra equipment

Open repository will give free access to more than 160 million data points with details about individual infections -- Read more on ScientificAmerican.com

The latest news and headlines from Yahoo! News. Get breaking news stories and in-depth coverage with videos and photos.

In December 2018, researchers at Google detected a group of hackers with their sights set on Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Even though new development was shut down two years earlier it’s such a common browser that if you can find a way to hack it, you’ve got a potential open door to billions of computers. The…

The number of people searching online for topics that are related to boredom, loneliness and worry rose sharply at the beginning of the first lockdown, a new study shows.

We’ve all been there by now: surfing the web and bumping into ads with an uncanny flavor. How did they know I was thinking about joining a gym? Or changing careers? Or that I need a loan? You might wonder if Google can read your mind. Google even boasts that it knows you better than…

Forty attorneys general representing both Republican and Democratic-led states and territories have filed a new antitrust lawsuit against Google claiming that the company has “virtually untrammeled power over internet search traffic,” as a result of its “overwhelming and durable monopoly in general internet searches.” The move comes one day after  another complaint filed by Texas…

Lots of researchers are working to demonstrate quantum advantage, that is, to perform calculations on quantum computers that

Nine members of the US Congress have sent a letter to Google asking it to clarify the circumstances around its former ethical AI co-lead Timnit Gebru’s forced departure. Led by Representative Yvette Clarke and Senator Ron Wyden, and co-signed by Senators Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker, the letter sends an important signal about how Congress…

So what happened?  Texas and nine other Republican-led states have filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google, alleging that the company has monopolized digital advertising—including through anti-competitive agreements with Facebook.  Google, the suit alleges,  not only connects ad buyers and sellers, it operates the exchange and manipulates the rules and algorithms to favor its own results.…

By now, we’ve all heard some version of the story. On December 2, after a protracted disagreement over the release of a research paper, Google forced out its ethical AI co-lead, Timnit Gebru. The paper was on the risks of large language models, AI models trained on staggering amounts of text data, which are a…

Deep-learning network AlphaFold2’s perfomance at predicting how proteins fold has caused great excitement in the scientific community

On the evening of Wednesday, December 2, Timnit Gebru, the co-lead of Google’s ethical AI team, announced via Twitter that the company had forced her out.  Gebru, a widely respected leader in AI ethics research, is known for coauthoring a groundbreaking paper that showed facial recognition to be less accurate at identifying women and people…

On December 2, the AI research community was shocked to learn that Timnit Gebru had been fired from her post at Google. Gebru, one of the leading voices in responsible AI research, is known among other things for her groundbreaking work in revealing the discriminatory nature of facial recognition, cofounding the Black in AI affinity…

An artificially intelligent pilot created by Google and Loon can keep huge stratospheric balloons in the air for hundreds of days at a time to act as floating cell towers in remote areas

Sleuthing with satellites images has revealed a substantial and undocumented expansion to a suspected nuclear processing plant in Pakistan, a possible sign the country is boosting capacity for its nuclear weapons programme

Los Angeles and Google have struck a partnership to track canopy density in the huge metropolis to determine which neighborhoods need more trees as a means of fighting extreme temperatures.

Machine learning helps to perform various computer vision tasks. However, understanding objects in 3D is still a challenging

The Human BioMolecular Atlas Program has brought together 18 research teams, including collaborators from Vanderbilt, Harvard, CalTech, Stanford and others

Throughout his campaign to win the White House, president-elect Joe Biden has been relatively quiet about the technology industry.  In a revealing January 2020 interview with The New York Times editorial board, Biden said that he wanted to revoke Section 230; suggested that he disagreed with how friendly the Obama administration became with Silicon Valley;…