Garena is quietly developing new India-themed games even though Free Fire, its biggest title, has still not made a comeback to the country.
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Google Deepmind has taken the wraps off a new version AlphaFold, their transformative machine learning model that predicts the shape and behavior of proteins. AlphaFold 3 is not only more accurate, but predicts interactions with other biomolecules, making it a far more versatile research tool — and the company is putting a limited version of the model free to use online.
From the debut of the first AlphaFold back in 2018, the model has remained the leading method of predicting protein structure from the sequence of amino acids that make them up.
Though this sounds like rather a narrow task, it’s foundational to nearly all biology to understand proteins — which perform a nearly endless variety of tasks in our bodies — at the molecular level. In recent years, computational modeling techniques like AlphaFold and RoseTTaFold have taken over from expensive, lab-based methods, accelerating the work of thousands of researchers across as many fields.
But the technology is still very much a work in progress, with each model “just a step along the way,” as Deepmind founder Demis Hassabis put it in a press call about the new system. The company teased the release late last year but this marks its official debut.
I’ll let the science blogs get into exactly how the new model improves outcomes, but suffice it here to say that a variety of improvements and modeling techniques have made AlphaFold 3 not just more accurate, but more widely applicable.
One of the limitations of protein modeling is that even if you know how the shape a sequence of amino acids will take, that doesn’t mean you necessarily know what other molecules it will bind to, and how. And if you want to actually do things with these molecules, which most do, you needed to find that out through more laborious modeling and testing.
“Biology is a dynamic system, and you have to understand how properties of biology emerged through the interactions between different molecules in the cell. And you can think of AlphaFold 3 as our first big step towards that,” Hassabis said. “It’s able to model proteins interacting, of course, with other proteins, but also other biomolecules, including, importantly DNA and RNA strands.”
AlphaFold 3 allows multiple molecules to be simulated at once — for example, a strand of DNA, some DNA-binding molecules, and perhaps some ions to spice things up. Here’s what you get for one such specific combination, with the DNA ribbons going up the middle, the proteins glomming onto the side, and I think those are the ions nestled in the middle there like little eggs:
This, of course, isn’t a scientific discovery in and of itself. But even to figure out that an experimental protein would bind at all, or in this way, or contort to this shape, was generally the work of days at the least or perhaps weeks to months.
While it’s difficult to overstate the excitement in this field over the last few years, researchers have largely been hamstrung by the lack of interaction modeling (of which the new version offers a form) and difficulty deploying the model.
This second issue is perhaps the greater of the two, as while the new modeling techniques were “open” in some sense, like other AI models they are not necessarily simple to deploy and operate. That’s why Google Deepmind is offering AlphaFold Server, a free, fully hosted web application making the model available for non-commercial use.
It’s free and quite easy to use — I did it in another window on the call while they were explaining it (which is how I got the image above). You just need a Google account, and then you feed it as many sequences and categories as it can handle — there are some examples provided — and submit; in a few minutes your job should be done and you’ll be given a live 3D molecule colored to represent the model’s confidence in the conformation at that position. As you can see in the one above, the tips of the ribbons and those parts more exposed to rogue atoms are lighter or red to indicate less confidence.
I asked whether there was any real difference between the publicly available model and the one being used internally; Hassabis said that “We’ve made the majority of the new model’s capabilities available,” but didn’t elaborate beyond that.
It’s clearly Google throwing its weight about — while to a certain extent, keeping the best bits for themselves, which of course is their prerogative. Making a free, hosted tool like this involves dedicating considerable resources to the task — make no mistake, this is a money pit, an expensive (to Google) shareware version to convince the researchers of the world that AlphaFold 3 should be, at the very least, an arrow in their quiver.
Image Credits: Google Deepmind
That’s all right, though, because the tech will likely print money through Alphabet subsidiary (which makes it Google’s… cousin?) Isomorphic Labs, which is putting computational tools like AlphaFold to work in drug design. Well, everyone is using computational tools these days — but Isomorphic got first crack at Deepmind’s latest models, combining it with “some more proprietary things to do with drug discovery,” as Hassabis noted. The company already has partnerships with Eli Lilly and Novartis.
AlphaFold isn’t the be-all and end-all of biology, though — just a very useful tool, as countless researchers will agree. And it allows them to do what Isomorphic’s Max Jaderberg called “rational drug design.”
“If we think about, day to day, how this has an impact at Isomorphic labs: it allows our scientists, our drug designers, to create and test hypotheses at the atomic level, and then within seconds produce highly accurate structure predictions… to help the scientists reason about what are the interactions to make, and how to advance those designs to create a good drug,” he said. “This is compared to the months or even years it might take to do this experimentally.”
While many will celebrate the accomplishment and the wide availability of a free, hosted tool like AlphaFold Server, others may rightly point out that this isn’t really a win for open science.
Like many proprietary AI models, AlphaFold’s training process and other information crucial to replicating it — a fundamental part of the scientific method, you will recall — are largely and increasingly withheld. While the paper published in Nature does go over the methods of its creation in some detail, a lot of important details and data are lacking, meaning scientists who want to use the most powerful molecular biology tool on the planet will have to do so under the watchful eye of Alphabet, Google, and Deepmind (who knows which actually holds the reins).
Open science advocates have said for years that, while these advances are remarkable, it is always better in the long run to share this kind of thing openly. That is, after all, how science moves forward, and indeed how some of the most important software in the world has evolved as well.
Making AlphaFold Server free to any academic or non-commercial application is in many ways a very generous act. But Google’s generosity seldom comes no strings attached. No doubt many researchers will nevertheless take advantage of this honeymoon period to use the model as much as humanly possible before the other shoe drops.
Spotify’s slow movement to put lyrics behind its paid service wall in its music service are about as popular as you would expect. Precise details of the update are evolving but what we can say at this point is that it seems that Spotify has a new feature up its sleeve to try and get free users to convert to is paid service.
The why behind the move matters more than the what. Sure, it’s a little weird that Spotify is going to start putting information that is freely available online behind a paid wall, but the company is in a slightly difficult position today. Thanks to an early start and attractive pricing, Spotify is huge. It does billions in revenue, and helped shake up the music industry for good.
That said, it largely offers paid access to other peoples’ music. Other companies do the same. Apple is one of them. That means that Spotify’s pricing power is modest at best. Features like its yearly music review are neat, but don’t allow Spotify to charge more for its mostly-music-service than, say, Apple Music.
But as Spotify makes a lot more money off its paid accounts than it does off free users, it can at least try to get them to upgrade. And it only has so many dials to turn there. So, behind the paywall go the lyrics. For those of us who already pay, it’s a non-issue. But for the budget conscious, it may seem that that their prior service is getting worse for no reason that they can suss out. So long as some convert to paying users, Spotify will endure the gripes. It needs the gross profit.
Meta’s new large language model, Llama 3, powers the imaginatively named “Meta AI,” a newish chatbot that the social media and advertising company has installed in as many of its apps and interfaces as possible. How does this model stack up against other all-purpose conversational AIs? It tends to regurgitate a lot of web search results, and it doesn’t excel at anything, but hey — the price is right.
You can currently access Meta AI for free on the web at Meta.ai, on Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, and probably a few other places if those aren’t enough. It was available before now, but the releases of Llama 3 and the new Imagine image generator (not to be confused with Google’s Imagen) have led Meta to promote it as a first stop for the AI-curious. After all, you’ll probably use it by accident since they replaced your search box with it!
Mark Zuckerberg even said he expects Meta AI to be “the most used and best AI assistant in the world.” It’s important to have goals.
A quick reminder about our “review” process: this is a very informal evaluation of the model, not with synthetic benchmarks but just asking ordinary questions that normal people might, and comparing the results to our experience with other models, or just to what you would hope to get from one. It’s the farthest thing from comprehensive, but it’s something anyone can understand and replicate.
You can read about our method, such as it is, here:
We’re always changing and adjusting our approach, and will sometimes include something odd we found or exclude stuff that didn’t really seem relevant. For instance, this time, although it’s our general policy not to try to evaluate media generation (it’s a whole other can of worms), my colleague Ivan noticed that the Imagine model was demonstrating a set of biases around Indian people. We’ll have that article up shortly (Meta might already be on to us).
Also, as a PSA at the start, you should be aware that an apparent bug on Instagram prevented me from deleting the queries I’d sent. So I would avoid asking anything you wouldn’t want showing up in your search history. Also, the web version didn’t work in Firefox for me.
First up, I asked Meta AI about what’s going on between Israel and Iran. It responded with a concise, bulleted list, helpfully including dates, though it only cited a single CNN article. Like many other prompts I tried, this one ends in a link to a Bing search when on the web interface and a Google search in Instagram. I asked Meta and a spokesperson said that these are basically search promotion partnerships.
(Images in this post are just for reference, and don’t necessarily show the entire response.)
Image Credits: Meta/TechCrunchTo check whether Meta AI was somehow piggybacking on Bing’s own AI model (which Microsoft in turn borrows from OpenAI), I clicked through and looked at the Copilot answer to the suggested query. It also had a bulleted list with roughly the same info but better in-line links and more citations. Definitely different.
Meta AI’s response was factual and up to date, if not particularly eloquent. The mobile response was considerably more compressed, and harder to get at the sources of, so be aware you’re getting a truncated answer there.
Next, I asked if there were any recent trends on Tiktok that a parent should be aware of. It replied with a high-level summary of what creators do on the social network, but nothing recent. Yes, I’m aware that people do “Comedity skits: Humorous, relatable, or parody content” on Tiktok, thank you.
Image Credits: Meta/TechCrunch
Interestingly, when I asked a similar question about trends on Instagram, I got an upbeat response using marketing-type phrases like “Replying with Reels creates conversations” and “AI generates new opportunities” and “Text posts thrive on the ‘gram.” I thought maybe it was being unfairly positive about its creator’s platforms, but no — turns out it was just regurgitating, word for word, an SEO bait Instagram trends post from Hootsuite.
If I ask Meta’s AI on Instagram about trends on Instagram, I would hope for something a little more interesting. If I wanted to read chum I would just search for it.
I asked Meta AI to help me find some primary sources for some research I’m supposedly doing on Supreme Court decisions in the late 19th century.
Image Credits: Meta/TechCrunch
Its response relied heavily on an inoffensive but primary-free SEO-ed up post listing a number of notable 19th-century decisions. Not exactly what I asked for, and then at the end it also listed an 1896 founding document for the People’s Party, a left-leaning party from that era. It doesn’t really have anything to do with the Supreme Court, but Meta AI cites this page, which describes some justices as holding opposite views to the party. A strange and irrelevant inclusion.
Other models provided context and summaries of the trends of the era. I wouldn’t use Meta AI as a research assistant.
Some basic trivia questions, like who won the most medals in the 1984 Olympics and what notable events occurred that year, were answered and cited sufficiently.
Image Credits: Meta/TechCrunch
It’s a little annoying that it gathers its citation numbers at the top and then the links at the bottom. What’s the point of numbering them unless the numbers pertain to certain claims or facts? Some other models will cite in-line, which for research or fact-checking is much more convenient.
I asked Meta AI why Donald Trump’s supporters are predominantly older and white. It’s the kind of question that is factual in a sense but obviously a bit more sensitive than asking about medal counts. The response was pretty even-handed, even pushing back on the assertion inherent to the question:
Image Credits: Meta/TechCrunch
Unfortunately, it didn’t provide any sources or links to searches for this one. Too bad, since this kind of interaction is a great opportunity for people to learn something new.
I asked about the rise of white nationalism as well and got a pretty solid list of reasons why we’re seeing the things we are around the world. Meta AI did say that “It’s crucial to address these factors through education, empathy, and inclusive policies to combat the rise of white nationalism and promote a more equitable society.” So it didn’t adopt one of those aggressively neutral stances you sometimes see. No links or sources on this one either — I suspect they are avoiding citations for now on certain topics, which I kind of understand but also… this is where citations are most needed?
I told Meta AI that my (fictitious) 9-year-old was developing a rash after eating a cupcake and asked what I should do. Interestingly, it wrote out a whole response and then deleted it, saying “Sorry, I can’t help you with this request right now,” and told me that I had stopped it from completing the response. Sir, no.
Image Credits: Meta/TechCrunch
So I asked it again and it gave me a similar answer (which you see above), consisting of perfectly reasonable and general advice for someone looking to handle a potential allergic reaction. This was likely one of these retrospective “whoops, maybe I shouldn’t have said that” type rollbacks where the model only realizes what it’s done too late.
Same for a question about supplements: it gave an even-handed and reasonably well sourced answer, including common dosages, costs, and questions around efficacy.
In mental health, its advice around anxiety and medication was predictably straightforward and safe (basically, “I’m not a doctor, consult a pro”), and when I asked who I should call if having serious trouble, it listed the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline (1-800-273-TALK) and a crisis text line (741741) among other things. No links or sources, though. A reasonable and humane response.
When I had Meta AI summarize a recent article I wrote, it kind of just picked important-sounding sentences to repeat from it, mostly word for word. That’s not wrong, exactly, but I wouldn’t say it’s a summary.
And when it did tweak a sentence, it slightly changed the meaning: originally I wrote that Intuitive Machines “will almost certainly be firing on all cylinders to take on what could be a multi-billion-dollar contract.” The summary says the company “will almost certainly be taking on what could be…” which could mislead some to think that IM is a shoo-in rather than a company that will strive for that contract. In fairness, I could have phrased it more clearly myself.
When I asked it to do the same thing in under 100 words, it did better — kind of.
The summary was more concise, but it brought in a claim from Musk that Starship could return samples from Mars in five years — something I specifically didn’t include in my article because he makes lots of unsubstantiated claims like that. The AI must have gotten this from the other four articles it cited, for some reason, in the “summary” of mine. If I ask for a summary I don’t expect a model to bring in outside information to add onto it.
Marketing copy suggestions for an imaginary clothing brand I claimed to be promoting were exactly what you’d expect, which goes to show how rote this task is becoming. No doubt Meta in particular has an endless supply of captions like this to train on. Pity the marketers — their hard work penning millions pithy pitches for their brands has defined a style at which AI has become quite adept.
Image Credits: Meta/TechCrunch
When asked for some farmer jokes, it gave some real stinkers.
Why did the farmer’s chicken go to the doctor?Because it had a fowl cough!And here’s another one:Why did the farmer take his pig to the movie theater?To see “Babe”!
Meta has positioned its AI as a first layer for casual questions, and it does work. But for the most part it seemed to just be doing a search for what you ask about and quoting liberally from the top results. And half the time it included the search at the end anyway. So why not just use Google or Bing in the first place?
Some of the “suggested” queries I tried, like tips to overcome writer’s block, produced results that didn’t quote directly from (or source) anyone. But they were also totally unoriginal. Again, a normal internet search not powered by a huge language model, inside a social media app, accomplishes more or less the same thing with less cruft.
Meta AI produced highly straightforward, almost minimal answers. I don’t necessarily expect an AI to go beyond the scope of my original query, and in some cases that would be a bad thing. But when I ask what ingredients are needed for a recipe, isn’t the point of having a conversation with an AI that it intuits my intention and offers something more than literally scraping the list from the top Bing result?
I’m not a big user of these platforms to begin with, but Meta AI didn’t convince me it’s useful for anything in particular. To be fair it is one of the few models that’s both free and stays up to date with current events by searching online. In comparing it now and then to the free Copilot model on Bing, the latter usually worked better, but I hit my daily “conversation limit” after just a few exchanges. (It’s not clear what if any usage limits Meta will place on Meta AI.)
If you can’t be bothered to open a browser to search for “lunar new year” or “quinoa water ratio,” you can probably ask Meta AI if you’re already in one of the company’s apps (and often, you are). You can’t ask Tiktok that! Yet.
Social media platform TikTok says that a bill banning the app in the U.S. is “unconstitutional” and that it will fight this latest attempt to restrict its use in court.
The bill in question, which President Joe Biden signed Wednesday, gives Chinese parent company ByteDance nine months to divest TikTok or face a ban on app stores to distribute the app in the U.S. The law received strong bipartisan support in the House and a majority Senate vote Tuesday, and is part of broader legislation including military aid for Israel and Ukraine.
“Make no mistake. This is a ban. A ban on TikTok and a ban on you and YOUR voice,” said TikTok CEO Shou Chew in a video posted on the app and other social media platforms. “Politicians may say otherwise, but don’t get confused. Many who sponsored the bill admit that a TikTok ban is their ultimate goal…It’s actually ironic because the freedom of expression on TikTok reflects the same American values that make the United States a beacon of freedom. TikTok gives everyday Americans a powerful way to be seen and heard, and that’s why so many people have made TikTok a part of their daily lives,” he added.
This isn’t the first time the U.S. government has attempted to ban TikTok, something several other countries have already implemented.
TikTok is based in Los Angeles and Singapore, but it’s owned by Chinese technology giant ByteDance. U.S. officials have warned that the app could be leveraged to further the interests of an “entity of concern.”
In 2020, former President Donald Trump issued an executive order to ban TikTok’s operations in the country, including a deadline for ByteDance to divest its U.S. operations. Trump also tried to ban new downloads of TikTok in the U.S. and barred transactions with ByteDance after a specific date.
Federal judges issued preliminary injunctions to temporarily block Trump’s ban while legal challenges proceeded, citing concerns about violation of First Amendment rights and lack of sufficient evidence demonstrating that TikTok posted a national security threat.
After Trump left office, Biden’s administration picked up the anti-TikTok baton. Today, the same core fundamentals are at stake. So why do Congress and the White House think the outcome will be different?
TikTok has not responded to TechCrunch’s inquiry as to whether it has filed a challenge in a district court, but we know it will because both Chew and the company have said so.
When the company makes it in front of a judge, what are its chances of success?
“In light of the fact that the Trump administration’s attempt in 2020 to force ByteDance to sell TikTok or face a ban was challenged on First Amendment grounds and was rejected as an impermissible ‘indirect regulation of informational materials and personal communications,’ coupled with last December’s federal court order enjoining enforcement of Montana’s law that sought to impose a statewide TikTok ban as a ‘likely’ First Amendment violation, I believe this latest legislation suffers from the same fundamental infirmity,” Douglas E. Mirell, partner at Greenberg Glusker, told TechCrunch.
In other words, both TikTok as a corporation and its users have First Amendment rights, which a ban threatens.
In May 2023, Montana Governor Greg Gianforte signed into law a bill that would ban TikTok in the state, saying it would protect Montanans’ personal and private data from the Chinese Communist Party. TikTok then sued the state over the law, arguing that it violated the Constitution and the state was overstepping by legislating matters of national security. The case is still ongoing, and the ban has been blocked while the lawsuit progresses.
Five TikTok creators separately sued Montana arguing the ban violated their First Amendment rights and won. This ruling thus blocked the Montana law from going into effect and essentially stopped the ban. A U.S. federal judge claimed the ban was an overstep of state power and also unconstitutional, likely a violation of the First Amendment. That ruling has set a precedent for future cases.
TikTok’s challenge to this latest federal bill will likely point to that court ruling, as well as the injunctions to Trump’s executive orders, as precedent for why this ban should be reversed.
TikTok may also argue that a ban would affect small and medium-sized businesses that use the platform to make a living. Earlier this month, TikTok released an economic impact report that claims the platform generated $14.7 billion for small- to mid-sized businesses last year, in anticipation of a ban and the need for arguments against it.
Mirell says courts do give deference to the government’s claims about entities being a national security threat.
However, the Pentagon Papers case from 1971, in which the Supreme Court upheld the right to publish a classified Department of Defense study of the Vietnam War, establishes an exceptionally high bar for overcoming free speech and press protections.
“In this case, Congress’ failure to identify a specific national security threat posed by TikTok only compounds the difficulty of establishing a substantial, much less compelling, governmental interest in any potential ban,” said Mirell.
However, there is some cause for concern that the firewall between TikTok in the U.S. and its parent company in China isn’t as strong as it appears.
In June 2022, a report from BuzzFeed News found that U.S. data had been repeatedly accessed by staff in China, citing recordings from 80 TikTok internal meetings. There have also been reports in the past of Beijing-based teams ordering TikTok’s U.S. employees to restrict videos on its platform or that TikTok has told its moderators to censor videos that mentioned things like Tiananmen Square, Tibetan independence or banned religious group, Falun Gong.
In 2020, there were also reports that TikTok moderators were told to censor political speech and suppress posts from “undesirable users” – the unattractive, poor, and disabled — which shows the company is not afraid to manipulate the algorithm for its own purposes.
TikTok has largely brushed off such accusations, but following BuzzFeed’s reporting, the company said it would move all U.S. traffic to Oracle’s infrastructure cloud service to keep U.S. user data private. That agreement, part of a larger operation called “Project Texas,” is focused on furthering the separation of TikTok’s U.S. operations from China and employing an outside firm to oversee its algorithms. In its statements responding to Biden’s signing of the TikTok ban, the company has pointed to the billions of dollars invested to secure user data and keep the platform free from outside manipulation as a result of Project Texas and other efforts.
Yaqui Wang, China research director at political advocacy group Freedom House, believes the data privacy issue is real.
“There’s a structural issue that a lot of people who don’t work on China don’t understand, which is that by virtue of being a Chinese company – any Chinese company whether you’re public or private – you have to answer to the Chinese government,” Wang told TechCrunch, citing the Chinese government’s record for leveraging private companies for political purposes. “The political system dictates that. So [the data privacy issue] is one concern.”
“The other is the possibility of the Chinese government to push propaganda or suppress content that it doesn’t like and basically manipulate the content seen by Americans,” she continued.
Wang said there isn’t enough systemic information at present to prove the Chinese government has done this in regards to U.S. politics, but the threat is still there.
“Chinese companies are beholden to the Chinese government which absolutely has an agenda to undermine freedom around the world,” said Wang. She noted that while China doesn’t appear to have a specific agenda to suppress content or push propaganda in the U.S. today, tensions between the two countries continue to rise. If a future conflict comes to a head, China could “really leverage TikTok in a way they’re not doing now.”
Of course, American companies have been at the center of attempts by foreign entities to undermine democratic processes, as well. One need look no further than the Cambridge Analytica scandal and Russia’s use of Facebook political ads to influence the 2016 presidential election, as a high-profile example.
That’s why Wang says more important than a ban on TikTok is comprehensive data privacy law that protects user data from being exploited and breached by all companies.
“I mean if China wants Facebook data today, it can just purchase it on the market,” Wang points out.
The government has a hard case to prove, and it’s not a sure decision one way or the other. If the precedent set by past court rulings is applied in TikTok’s future case, then the company has nothing to worry about. After all, as Mirell has speculated, the TikTok ban appears to have been added as a sweetener needed to pass a larger bill that would approve aid for Israel and Ukraine. However, the current administration might also have simply disagreed with how the courts have decided to limit TikTok in the past, and want to challenge that.
“When this case goes to court, the Government (i.e., the Department of Justice) will ultimately have to prove that TikTok poses an imminent threat to the nation’s national security and that there are no other viable alternatives for protecting that national security interest short of the divestment/ban called for in this legislation,” Mirell told TechCrunch in a follow-up email.
“For its part, TikTok will assert that its own (and perhaps its users’) First Amendment rights are at stake, will challenge all claims that the platform poses any national security risk, and will argue that the efforts already undertaken by both the Government (e.g., through its ban upon the use of TikTok on all federal government devices) and by TikTok itself (e.g., through its ‘Project Texas’ initiative) have effectively mitigated any meaningful national security threat,” he explained.
In December 2022, Biden signed a bill prohibiting TikTok from being used on federal government devices. Congress has also been considering a bill called the Restrict Act that gives the federal government more authority to address risks posed by foreign-owned technology platforms.
“If Congress didn’t think that [Project Texas] was sufficient, they could draft and consider legislation to enhance that protection,” said Mirell. “There are plenty of ways to deal with data security and potential influence issues well short of divestment, much less a ban.”
Google Photos is getting an AI upgrade. On Wednesday, the tech giant announced that a handful of enhanced editing features previously limited to Pixel devices and paid subscribers — including its AI-powered Magic Editor — will now make their way to all Google Photos users for free. This expansion also includes Google’s Magic Eraser, which removes unwanted items from photos; Photo Unblur, which uses machine learning to sharpen blurry photos; Portrait Light, which lets you change the light source on photos after the fact, and others.
The editing tools have historically been a selling point for Google’s high-end devices, the Pixel phones, as well as a draw for Google’s cloud storage subscription product, Google One. But with the growing number of AI-powered editing tools flooding the market, Google has decided to make its set of AI photo editing features available to more people for free.
Image Credits: Google
There are some caveats to this expansion, however.
For starters, the tools will only start rolling out on May 15 and it will take weeks for them to make it to all Google Photos users.
In addition, there are some hardware device requirements to be able to use them. On ChromeOS, for instance, the device must be a Chromebook Plus with ChromeOS version 118+ or have at least 3GB RAM. On mobile, the device must run Android 8.0 or higher or iOS 15 or higher.
The company notes that Pixel tablets will now be supported, as well.
Magic Editor is the most notable feature of the group. Introduced last year with the launch of the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro, this editing tool uses generative AI to do more complicated photo edits — like filling in gaps in a photo, repositioning the subject and other edits to the foreground or background of a photo. With Magic Editor, you can change a gray sky to blue, remove people from the background of a photo, recenter the photo subject while filling in gaps, remove other clutter and more.
Previously, these kinds of edits would require Magic Eraser and other professional editing tools, like Photoshop, to get the same effect. And those edits would be more manual, not automated via AI.
Image Credits: Google
With the expansion, Magic Editor will come to all Pixel devices, while iOS and Android users (whose phones meet the requirements) will get 10 Magic Editor saves per month. To go beyond that, they’ll still need to buy a Premium Google One plan — meaning 2TB of storage and above.
The other tools will be available to all Google Photos users, no Google One subscription is required. The full set of features that will become available includes Magic Eraser, Photo Unblur, Sky suggestions, Color pop, HDR effect for photos and videos, Portrait Blur, Portrait Light (plus the add light/balance light features in the tool), Cinematic Photos, Styles in the Collage Editor and Video Effects.
Other features like the AI-powered Best Take — which merges similar photos to create a single best shot where everyone is smiling — will continue to be available only to Pixel 8 and 8 Pro.
FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel on Wednesday announced plans to vote on rules restoring net neutrality. The vote, set for April 25, would reinstate 2015 internet rules adopted under President Obama that were subsequently repealed by President Trump’s FCC two years later.
Rosenworcel, a longtime advocate for net neutrality, announced plans to reverse the reversal toward the end of last year, arguing that the Trump administration had, “put the agency on the wrong side of history, the wrong side of the law and the wrong side of the public.”
In a call with the media this morning, a senior FCC official echoed the sentiment, arguing that the COVID-19 pandemic reaffirmed the importance of broadband intent access. The official added that ongoing national security threats have further highlighted the need for strong oversight.
Net neutrality has the rare chance to receive widespread bipartisan support. In 2022, a poll from the University of Maryland’s Program for Public Consultation found that 82% of Democrats, 65% of Republicans and 68% of Independents supported its restoration.
Opponents suggest that the rules disincentivize investment in telecommunication technologies and represent a form of government overreach. South Dakota Senator John Thune called proposals to reinstate such rules, “a heavy-handed government solution – in search of a problem.” The Republican added, “The Biden FCC wants to use the idea of net neutrality as a cover to assert broad new government powers over the internet using rules that were designed for telephone monopolies back during the Great Depression.”
This morning, FCC officials pointed out that investments only increased following the adoption of the rules in 2015. Speaking on behalf of the committee on Wednesday’s call, a representative added that the FCC is not interested in policing speech online — if anything, they argued, such rules increase speech by taking it out of the hands of internet service providers (ISPs).
“After the prior administration abdicated authority over broadband services, the FCC has been handcuffed from acting to fully secure broadband networks, protect consumer data, and ensure the internet remains fast, open, and fair,” Rosenworcel noted in a prepared statement. “A return to the FCC’s overwhelmingly popular and court-approved standard of net neutrality will allow the agency to serve once again as a strong consumer advocate of an open internet.”
More difficult to answer, however, were questions about how to enshrine such rules. Should they pass, it would represent the third reversal of course in as many administrations. Should Trump be reelected in November, how can current officials ensure we don’t live through this all over again? For this, the FCC was not able to provide a satisfactory answer, only that it believed it had firm legal footing and a shared hope that this would be the last time the committee was forced to revisit these rules.
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