Google is making it harder for ChatGPT, Bard to access content
Ever since ChatGPT arrived on the scene in November 2022, generative AI has been the talk of the town. Publishers have been concerned over their data being scraped by AI tools. Google has said in a post that “We have also heard from web publishers that they want greater choice and control over how their content is used for emerging generative AU user cases”. Google is offering publishers the option to control the data used by generative AI tools like ChatGPT and Bard. The new control, called Google-Extended, allows web publishers to manage whether their sites contribute to improving AI models. By using Google-Extended, publishers can choose whether to help these models become more accurate and capable over time. Google believes that providing transparency and control over AI models is crucial, and as AI tools expand, publishers will face the challenge of managing different uses at scale. Google-Extended is a standalone product token that web publishers can use to manage whether their sites help improve Bard and vertex AI generative APIs. Google and other companies use crawlers to get data to improve their tools.
98% of Gen Z and Millennials watch mobile videos daily
Snap Inc. unveiled its latest study, Mobile Video Trends 2023 for India, which provides captivating insights into the critical mobile video trends among Gen Z and Millennial consumers in India. This comprehensive research sheds light on the dynamic evolution of the mobile video landscape, its growing popularity over other mediums, and its significant impact among the younger generation, helping marketers engage with their audiences more effectively. Gen Z and Millennials make Smartphones Reign Supreme in Video Viewing. Findings reveal that 98% of Gen Z and Millennials watch mobile videos daily. Notably, a majority of the individuals in this demographic frequently watch videos on their smartphones. Mobile video presents a significant opportunity for brands to build relationships with consumers. Consumers love the mobile video format for its relevance, access to diverse perspectives, connection capabilities, and quality. 97% agree it’s essential to see videos from various people and perspectives worldwide, while 96% say it’s crucial to experience all kinds of videos in one place. Additionally, 93% of Gen Z and Millennials also acknowledge that their generation primarily communicates through mobile video. Trust and safety have emerged as critical factors in mobile video consumption, with a resounding 96% of consumers emphasizing their importance. Furthermore, when asked about Snapchat’s attributes, 9 in 10 consumers highlighted Trust, Control, and Safety as the platform’s most vital qualities. The research also reveals how engaging with content from chosen creators, publishers, or people users are familiar with creates a trusted environment for watching mobile videos. Gen Z and Millennials exhibit 2.6 times more trust in videos from publishers and 1.3 times more trust in people they know personally than in celebrities/influencers or unfamiliar individuals. Mobile viewers are 1.2 times more likely to feel curious when watching videos on their mobile devices compared to TV.
Tata Play launches Binge PaaS for OTT aggregators across the globe
Tata Play, India’s leading content distribution platform providing Pay-TV and OTT aggregation services announced the launch of the Tata Play Binge PaaS for OTT aggregators across the globe. The first project-collaboration to that effect is with Philippines’ leading Pay-Tv provider, Cignal TV. Tata Play’s aggregator solution will empower users to watch content from multiple OTT apps by downloading one app, with one subscription and on one screen. While the promoter company focuses on tying up with various OTT partners and acquiring subscribers in the region, Tata Play will manage its end-to-end technology platform, over the cloud. Tata Play Binge software architecture is now available as PaaS, providing end to end development and deployment opportunities. Apart from providing the software architecture, partner companies will also benefit from Tata Play’s learnings over the years in areas of forging commercial partnerships, recommendation engine, subscription management, analytics, and much more. With the launch of this enterprise solution, a unique OTT content aggregation and distribution ecosystem has been created.
Meta’s new AI chatbot trained on public Facebook and Instagram posts
Meta Platforms used public Facebook and Instagram posts to train its new Meta AI virtual assistant, but excluded private posts shared only with family and friends in an effort to respect consumers’ privacy. Meta also did not use private chats on its messaging services as training data for the model and tool steps to filter private details from public datasets used for training. LinkedIn’s content was deliberately not used because of privacy concerns. These comments were made by Nick Clegg, Meta’s president for global affairs. Big tech companies have come in for criticism for scraping information from the internet without permission to train their AI models, which summarize massive data and generate imagery.
With ChatGPT Vision, Internet Opens Its AIs to a New World
It feels like November 2022 all over again when ChatGPT was first launched. The internet is buzzing, and the X-verse (formerly Twitterverse) is full of thrilled startup founders, product designers and tech geeks sharing all that the new ChatGPT Vision can do. Be it reading a cluttered signboard with ease, writing code from a screenshot of a SaaS dashboard, breaking down a diagram of a human cell for a 9th grader, or interpreting a cartoon or comic like a seasoned intellectual, the latest feature from Sam Altman’s OpenAI has geeks from Silicon Valley to Bengaluru and beyond bowled over. “We’re basically starting a new gold rush and the possibilities are limitless,” Pietro Schirano, senior designer at American fintech company Brex. “This is completely uncharted territory, but this is so crazy and so exciting!” The Vision feature, launched to enhance the multimodal capabilities of ChatGPT with image understanding, allows users to upload one or more images to ask ChatGPT questions. “Multi-modal models were just a matter of time,” Kailash Nadh, chief technology officer of Zerodha, said, adding that he is “as excited by the possibilities” as he is “paranoid of the ramifications”. The Vision feature is still in beta and currently only available to OpenAI’s Plus and Enterprise users. Founders across various Indian startups have said that the Vision feature could have a “transformational impact” on a range of industries from fashion and ecommerce to health and agriculture. Some of them are looking forward to building products on it, some are already experimenting with it, and some believe a whole new set of companies will come up offering various products and services as a result of this new feature. “The biggest sector where we see ChatGPT Vision having prominence is fashion retail,” said Rashid Khan, co-founder and chief product officer of Yellow.ai, a conversational AI platform for enterprises. The feature will allow brands to offer personalized shopping, enabling them “to advise a user on what clothes would best suit their body type, or even help them with recreating a look that their favourite actor sported by pointing them to products that they could purchase to complete the look”, he said.
CTV, Short-form Content Driving Major Growth for YouTube India
YouTube, which dominates digital video consumption in India with its 573 million users, is witnessing a boom in content consumption on both mobile and TV screens across long and short content formats in the country, a top company official said. “There are two different kinds of trends that are happening at the same time. On the one hand, we are seeing the explosion of short-form video through YouTube Shorts, and on the other hand, we are also seeing an explosion of consumption of YouTube on living room screens (CTV),” said YouTube India director Ishan John Chatterjee. While mobile devices remain the primary screen for the consumption of digital video in the country, the growth of internet-enabled TV sets or connected TV (CTV) has also led to an increase in the consumption of digital content on large screens. According to Chatterjee, CTV has been the fastest-growing service for YouTube over the last five years in India, and YouTube users are watching over two-and-a-half hours of content on average on these screens daily, with over 50% of the watch time being on content that is 21 minutes or longer. YouTube is experimenting with 30-second non-skippable commercials that are only available on CTVs, encouraged by the platform’s growth on the large screen.
X has been losing daily active users since Musk takeover
X CEO Linda Yaccarino shared the platform’s latest daily active users stats, which show a drop of millions of users from before Elon Musk took over Twitter. Linda Yaccarino said in an interview with CNBC. During the 45-minute-long interview, she shared previously unknown stats of the company. Throughout the interview, she repeated that she’s only been on the job at X for 12 weeks. She revealed that X is losing daily active users after Elon Musk took over. At the tech conference, Yaccarino shared that the company currently has 225 million daily active users – a decline in tens of millions or 11.6 percent of users from just before Musk acquired the company. CEO also claimed, “90 percent of the top 100 advertisers have returned to the platform in the last 12 weeks alone.” Last year, Elon Musk posted a series of tweets which showed that Twitter had 254.5 million daily active users.
Indian small businesses adopting cloud, AI can unlock Rs 1.6 tn in productivity by 2030
Small businesses that embrace artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud-enabled technologies in India are expected to unlock up to Rs 1.6 trillion in annual productivity gains and support 45.9 million jobs by 2030, a new report said. The jobs are likely to be created across the healthcare, education, and agriculture sectors by 2030, representing 9 percent of total jobs in the country, according to the report by Amazon Web Services (AWS), conducted by global professional services firm Accenture. India’s current rate of at least basic cloud adoption for all businesses, such as the use of web-based email services or cloud-based storage solutions, is at 28%, the report said. Notably, moving to the cloud can facilitate remote healthcare consultations, improve access to education, and enhance precision agriculture, among others, which contribute to achieving the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs). The report further estimated that small businesses in India can help unlock Rs 1.1 trillion in annual productivity benefits in agriculture. In the healthcare sector alone, cloud-enabled small entities can help unlock Rs 199.5 billion in annual productivity benefits and support 47 million telehealth consultations in India by 2030. In the education sector, cloud-enabled small businesses can help unlock Rs 291.6 billion in annual productivity benefits in education and provide 99 million students in India with e-learning solutions by 2030. The research has also found that nine in ten (90%) SMBs are investing in areas such as marketing automation, AI and online communities as part of their budget, with over nine in ten (93 per cent) agreeing that ChatGPT could help their business with marketing,” it said.
Apple, Google Agreed to ‘Defend’ Search Deal From Regulators
Apple Inc.’s lucrative agreement to use Alphabet Inc.’s Google as the default search engine for the iPhone includes a provision that the two tech giants will “support and defend” the deal against government scrutiny, a top Apple executive said at an antitrust trial. Their longtime contract was renegotiated in 2016 to include the provision, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Services Eddy Cue disclosed in a Washington federal court, where the US government is pressing its claim that Google operates a monopoly in the search business. Cue, the architect of the most recent version of the agreement, said the provision for a joint defense was added at Google’s request. He said it was handled by company lawyers so he couldn’t speak directly to why it was included. Around that time, the European Union was investigating Google’s dominance in online search. During his testimony, the executive defended Apple’s arrangement with its tech rival, saying it was the best choice for customers to have Google as the default search engine. “There certainly wasn’t a valid alternative we would have gone to at the time,” Cue said. “I don’t know what we would have done” if the deal had collapsed, he said. Google first became the default option in the Safari browser in 2002. That deal has been revised several times. Cue said the contract was extended in 2021, after the Justice Department filed its initial case against Google’s search dominance the year before. Google pays Apple billions of dollars for this prominent position on products like the iPhone, making the agreement of particular interest to the government. The question before the judge in the antitrust trial is whether the search giant pushed its way onto Apple devices at the expense of competitors. In his testimony, Cue stressed that Apple sees no need to develop its own search tool because Google clearly is the best option. That differs from the company’s approach in other areas: It competes with Google in mapping software and voice assistants, as well as operating systems for phones and computers. The Justice Department displayed an email from 2016 in which Cue told Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook that Google CEO Sundar Pichai was not agreeing to Apple’s proposed revenue share. When the Justice Department’s attorney asked Cue whether Apple would have walked away from the negotiation, Cue said he didn’t seriously consider it, but Apple might have created its own search engine.
Infosys, MS Team up to Push GenAI
Infosys announced its collaboration with Microsoft to jointly develop solutions that leverage Infosys Topaz, Azure OpenAI Service and Azure Cognitive Services. “Both organizations are bringing together their respective artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to enhance enterprise functions with AI-enabled solutions,” Infosys said. This will accelerate rapid democratization of data and intelligence to help businesses increase productivity and drive new revenue growth, it said. Through the partnership, Infosys Topaz will use Azure OpenAI Service and Azure Cognitive Services to augment its capabilities to help enterprise customers transition from digital to AI solutions.
ChatGPT Can Now See, Hear and Speak
OpenAI announced it is rolling out new voice and image capabilities in ChatGPT that can now help the AI chatbot see, hear and speak. These capabilities offer a new, more intuitive type of interface by allowing you to have a voice conversation or show ChatGPT what you’re talking about, the company said.
81% intent on festival season e-shopping
About 81 percent of consumers have indicated strong sentiment and intent to shop online during this festival season, according to a study by Nielsen Media India on behalf of Amazon India. About 78 percent trust online shopping and one in two intend to increase online spending, compared to the last season. Consumers expect a wide selection, unmatched value with competitive pricing, plus convenience of easy returns and exchange, which is driving the online shopping experience. The study also revealed that for 68 percent of consumers, Amazon.in is the go-to online shopping destination. About 75 percent find the widest range and selection of products and brands on the e-commerce platform. The study said that 87 percent of consumers in metros and 86 percent in Tier-II cities (population of 10-40 lakh) prefer to shop online during this festival period. Over 77 per cent of the respondents affirmed that festive day sales enhanced the convenience of their online shopping experience with options like faster delivery. More than 70 percent wait for such events to purchase electronic items, with attractive offers (76 percent) and new brand launches (75 per cent) among the core drivers. Over 75 percent consumers are looking forward to attractive bank offers and no-cost equated monthly installments for shopping.
