“Google will use artificial intelligence to return summarized responses to search engine queries from US users as it continues to infuse generative AI into its most widely used products.

The company has been testing ‘AI overviews’ that appear at the tops of search results, summaries created by its Gemini AI model that appear alongside the traditional link-based search results.

The featured has also been tested in the UK but will be rolled out across the US beginning on Tuesday, Google announced at its annual I/O developer conference Tuesday in California. Google Search head Liz Reid said AI Overviews would become available to ‘more than a billion people’ by the end of the year.”

From The Guardian.

Summary: Tesla‘s “Full Self Driving” feature is boasting safety numbers far surpassing the average US vehicle. By learning exponentially, Tesla leverages real-time data collection and analysis to fuel continuous innovation. Tesla is best thought of not just as a car manufacturer, but as a knowledge company at the forefront of shaping the future of transportation.

Elon Musk is pushing the envelope hard. His companies include SpaceX, StarLink, Tesla, X, the Boring Company, and Neuralink. Tesla has been advancing on two fronts: electric-powered vehicles and self-driving vehicles. Tesla’s autopilot Full Self Driving (FSD) feature may be the most valuable contribution to providing more life to enjoy. In terms of miles driven per accident, Teslas without FSD tend to be around 2.5 times safer than the average US vehicle. Adding FSD increases that difference to 7.8 times safer. While driving is getting safer in general, Tesla’s autopilot vehicles are getting safer faster. The safety rate has doubled in the last five and a half years, indicating a compound annual growth rate of around 13.4 percent a year. One reason has to be the real-time data collection and analysis that Tesla vehicles can perform.

Tesla is on an exponential learning curve. It has data on more than nine billion miles driven with autopilot engaged. Every Tesla vehicle is connected, which allows them to immediately analyze and understand the different ways that accidents happen. Software can be updated over the air to incorporate new safety features and enhancements.

Tesla understands that wealth is knowledge, and that growth is learning. That is why Tesla is really a knowledge company with cars as its data source. In April Tesla began offering a free 30-day FSD trial to all compatible cars, a fleet estimated at 1.8 million vehicles. Before the free offer it took Tesla three years to collect a billion miles of data. Now they get a billion miles every two to three months. Data has increased by a factor of 14 (2.5 months versus 36 months). Tesla can also now convert this data into valuable knowledge much faster with artificial intelligence.  

The future is between entrepreneurs who continuously seek to discover, create, share, and value knowledge, and bureaucrats who protect the status quo by limiting this wealth creation activity. Elon Musk clearly has an entrepreneurial vision and has invested billions to build this future. We describe the process of transforming scarcities into abundances in our new book, Superabundance, which can be ordered from Amazon or your independent local book store. You can read more at superabundance.com.

This article was published at Gale Winds on 5/15/2024.

“In April, the 21-year-old got her old voice back. Not the real one, but a voice clone generated by artificial intelligence that she can summon from a phone app. Trained on a 15-second time capsule of her teenage voice — sourced from a cooking demonstration video she recorded for a high school project — her synthetic but remarkably real-sounding AI voice can now say almost anything she wants.

She types a few words or sentences into her phone and the app instantly reads it aloud.”

From Associated Press.

“Published in the journal Technology, Mind and Behaviour, the study describes how Przybylski and Dr Matti Vuorre, of Tilburg University in the Netherlands, analysed data collected through interviews involving about 1,000 people each year from 168 countries as part of the Gallup World Poll.

Participants were asked about their internet access and use as well as eight different measures of wellbeing, such as life satisfaction, social life, purpose in life and feelings of community wellbeing.

The team analysed data from 2006 to 2021, encompassing about 2.4 million participants aged 15 and above.

The researchers employed more than 33,000 statistical models, allowing them to explore various possible associations while taking into account factors that could influence them, such as income, education, health problems and relationship status.

The results reveal that internet access, mobile internet access and use generally predicted higher measures of the different aspects of wellbeing, with 84.9% of associations between internet connectivity and wellbeing positive, 0.4% negative and 14.7% not statistically significant.”

From The Guardian.