Lifeboat Foundation

Google is shutting down Duplex on the Web, its AI-powered set of services that navigated sites to simplify the process of ordering food, purchasing movie tickets and more. According to a note on a Google support page, Google on the Web and any automation features enabled by it will no longer be supported as of this month.

“As we continue to improve the Duplex experience, we’re responding to the feedback we’ve heard from users and developers about how to make it even better,” a Google spokesperson told TechCrunch via email, adding that Duplex on the Web partners have been notified to help them prepare for the shutdown. “By the end of this year, we’ll turn down Duplex on the Web and fully focus on making AI advancements to the Duplex voice technology that helps people most every day.”

Google introduced Duplex on the Web, an outgrowth of its call-automating Duplex technology, during its 2019 Google I/O developer conference. To start, it was focused on a couple of narrow use cases, including opening a movie theater chain’s website to fill out all of the necessary information on a user’s behalf — pausing to prompt for choices like seats. But Duplex on the Web later expanded to passwords, helping users automatically change passwords exposed in a data breach, as well as assist with checkout for e-commerce retailers, flight check-in for airline sites and automatic discount finding.

Google said today it is testing end-to-end encryption for RCS-based group chats on its Messages app — RCS stands for Rich Communication Services. The company noted that in the coming weeks it will be rolling out this feature to select users that are part of the app’s open beta program.

This comes after a bunch of Redditors noticed that Google was testing end-to-end encryption for group chats in October. The company’s latest announcement makes it official.

The search giant first started testing end-to-end encryption for individual RCS chats in 2020. In June, it rolled out the feature to all users of its Messages app.

It’s probably not a secret to those doing a lot of focused work in the space, but when it comes to generative AI, it’s quickly becoming apparent that how a user interfaces with generative models and systems is at least as important as the underlying training and inference technology. The latest, and I think best example, comes via OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which launched as a free research preview for anyone to try this week.

In case you haven’t seen the buzz around ChatGPT yet, it’s basically an implementation of their new GPT-3.5 natural language generation technology, but implemented in such a way that you just chat with it in a web browser as if you were slacking with a colleague or interacting with a customer support agent on a website.

OpenAI has already made waves with its DALL-E image generation technology, and its GPT series has drawn attention with each successive release (and occasional existential dread on the part of writers). But the latest chat-style iteration has seemingly broadened its appeal and audience, in some ways moving the conversation from “wow, undergrads are going to use this to submit bad but workable term papers” to “wow, this could actually help me debug code that I intend to put in production.”

On Nov. 16, Mayo Clinic in Arizona was able to celebrate a first in this practice and transplanted a heart into a patient following the natural circulatory death of the donor.

“Mayo Clinic is the only one in Arizona to have used this new ‘heart in a box’ technology,” the hospital said.

With this advancement, donors will be able to give the gift of life much sooner than before. Thousands of people are awaiting heart transplants and sadly, many do die while waiting.

Imagine you are at a museum. After a long day admiring the exhibitions, you are exiting the museum. But to be able to get out, you will need to exit through the gift shop. The layout of the gift shop can be set up in several ways. Maybe you can take a short and direct path to the exit, maybe there are long winding corridors stuffed with merchandise you need to pass through. If you take the longer path, you are more likely to lose more of your money before you get outside. The scientists at the CMS collaboration have recently observed a similar phenomenon in high-energy heavy ion collisions, as those illustrated in the event display.

The life of the tiniest particles making up ordinary matter — quarks and gluons — is governed by the laws of quantum chromodynamics. These laws require quarks and gluons to form bound states, like protons and neutrons, under normal conditions. However, conditions like in the early universe, when the energy density and temperature far exceeded those of ordinary matter, can be achieved in giant particle accelerators. In the Large Hadron Collider at CERN this is done by colliding lead nuclei that are accelerated close to the speed of light. In these conditions, a new state of matter, called the quark-gluon plasma, is formed for a tiny fraction of a second. This new state of matter is special, since within the volume of the matter, quarks and gluons act as free particles, without the need to form bound states.

Figure 1: A schematic presentation of a non-central (left) and central (right) heavy ion collision. The outlines of the ions are presented by dashed lines, while the overlap region in which the quark-gluon plasma is produced is colored in orange. The red star shows a position where two quarks might scatter, and green and blue arrows are alternative paths the scattered quark can take to escape the quark-gluon plasma.

Here’s how it did:

An enhanced quantum manipulation technique is demonstrated, allowing fast and precise control of multicomponent atomic matterwave.

The UK government has announced that artificial intelligence algorithms that come up with new technologies will not be able to patent their inventions.

The Intellectual Property Office said on Tuesday that it also plans to tweak existing laws to make it easier for people and institutions to use AI, machine learning and data mining software in order to rapidly advance research and innovation without requiring extensive permissions from copyright owners.

“The risk of developing ALCL is actually much lower than the risk of experiencing a relapse of breast cancer,” says lead author Connor J. Kinslow, MD, a resident in radiation oncology at the Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons.

“Based on our findings, we do not believe that women should be dissuaded from having implant-based breast reconstruction after mastectomy solely due to the risk of ALCL.”

The new study was designed to provide women with accurate information about risk and is the first to look at rates of ALCL in breast cancer survivors who’ve had breast implants after mastectomy.