Google is putting more restrictions on AI Overviews after it told people to put glue on pizza

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1. Google is putting more restrictions on AI Overviews after it told people to put glue on pizza

Google's Head of Search, Liz Reid, has admitted that the company's AI Overviews have returned some "odd, inaccurate or unhelpful" results. She explained that some of the more egregious responses, such as claims that it's safe to leave dogs in cars, are fake. Google's AI was linked to a website that published satirical content tackling the topic.

The feature was tested extensively before launch, and Google has implemented safeguards to help return more accurate and less meme-worthy results. The company has also tweaked its AI to better detect humor and satire content, limited user-generated replies in Overviews, added triggering restrictions for queries where AI Overviews were not as helpful, and stopped showing AI-generated replies for certain health topics.

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2. China is opening a robotaxi route to a major train station, startup Pony.ai says

Beijing has begun allowing robotaxis to operate closer to the city center, with tests of robotaxis with human staff inside running a 40-minute route between a major high-speed train station and a suburban area to its south. The route between Beijing South Railway Station and the suburb of Yizhuang is set to open a public-facing robotaxi service in the next week or two.

Zhang, vice president at Pony.ai, said that by the end of this year or early next year, the train station route will be fully driverless, with no human staff inside. In the next two years, Beijing will allow robotaxis to run between the sixth and fourth ring roads regardless of city district. With scale, Zhang expects business growth to be exponentially fast in the later years.

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3. Perplexity will research and write reports

Perplexity has launched a new feature called Pages, which generates customizable webpages based on user prompts. The feature aims to help educators, researchers, and hobbyists share their knowledge. Users type in their report topic, and Perplexity searches for information and creates a research presentation.

Users can customize the page's details, cite sources, and add visuals. However, Pages cannot edit the text, and users must write another prompt to fix any mistakes. While it does the surface-level googling and writing, it is not geared towards research.

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4. OpenAI has a has a new version of ChatGPT just for universities

OpenAI has introduced ChatGPT Edu, a version of its AI language model designed for college campuses. It includes access to GPT-4o, OpenAI's latest large language model, which is better at interpreting text, coding, mathematics, analyzing data sets, and accessing the web. 

ChatGPT Edu also has higher message limits and allows universities to build custom versions of ChatGPT trained on their own data, called GPTs. OpenAI claims that conversations and data from ChatGPT Edu won't be used to train OpenAI's models.

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5. Discord has become an unlikely center for the generative AI boom

Viggle, an AI-generated platform, has created a video-to-video platform that mimics the movements of celebrities and athletes. The platform uses a combination of a video and a photo of a person performing a specific action, creating a video replicating the person's movements.

Viggle's founder, Hang Chu, explains that the platform has gained popularity after the Lil Yachty meme went viral. Viggle's main users are creating memes and using it in game design and VFX. With over 3 million members, Viggle's server is larger than the servers for games like Valorant and Genshin Impact combined.

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