Wednesday’s top tech news: Google showcases its own AI search experiences

A trade group that represents Apple, Google, Samsung, and HP asked Governor Kathy Hochul to make sweeping changes that would water down New York’s landmark bill.

You can see how they essentially rewrote chunks of the legislation thanks to documents obtained by Grist.

Once again, Fitbit isn’t working as it should. Things fell apart Monday morning, with thousands of users asking each other on social media if the Fitbit app was completely borked. A fix was pushed out, only for the same issues to crop up on Tuesday.

It’s now Wednesday and things still aren’t working right for a handful of users. DownDetector shows it’s not nearly as bad today, but it’s the principle of the matter.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai is an extremely smart and thoughtful guy, but think about how hard his set of choices is right now: he has to roll out chatbot AI search in order to make investors happy, but rolling that out will instantly cause legal, ethical, and regulatory chaos, all while simultaneously increasing the costs of search and reducing the profits of web advertising. Yikes!

(Also, to be clear, I meant the end of this era of Google. Forgive me, it was 8am and I was in a hotel room in Bellevue.)

Google held an AI event this morning, but investors apparently aren’t impressed (just check out this stock graph). It probably hasn’t helped that Bard, its chatbot search tool, made a pretty embarrassing error in a demo. Microsoft’s stock is doing well since it announced a ChatGPT-powered version of Bing yesterday, by the way.

The Mid-Season Invitational, or MSI, pits top League teams from all across the world, and it’s one of my favorite gaming events of the year. MSI takes place over the course of many days in May, and you can buy tickets starting later this month.

Today’s Nintendo Direct got one student at California State University Fullerton so worked up that they accidentally triggered a police threat response.

Campus police said they emailed a professor anonymously asking to cancel class because of a “once-in-a-lifetime event that would occur.”

The person must have been referring to the possibility of the Advance Wars remakes finally launching since Nintendo Directs happen pretty frequently.

You’ve seen the presentations, so you know what Microsoft and Google have shown when it comes to AI chatbot search.

Now take 20 minutes and see what Satya Nadella said on Decoder about Microsoft’s big plans for OpenAI and ChatGPT.

Microsoft and Google just announced AI-powered search tools, and Chinese companies are already catching on.

While ecommerce giant Alibaba tells CNBC that it’s working on a ChatGPT rival, gaming company NetEase similarly says it has goals to develop a generative AI product. It’s going to be a long year.

PC Gamers rejoice: you can finally get your hands on laptops that contain Nvidia’s immensely powerful GeForce RTX 4080 and 4090 mobile GPUs. Some of the new launches have been specifically designed for creative professionals, identifiable by an Nvidia Studio badge.

Don’t need all that power? No sweat, as RTX 4070, 4060, and 4050 powered Laptops will arrive later on February 22nd.

Microsoft’s first shot across the bow in the new AI search wars rang out yesterday afternoon, and now it’s Google’s turn. We know it already uses AI and machine learning, but what’s new for that technology in Google’s tools?

(Update — we did find out. Google has set its stream to private, but you can see the chatbot demo here and Google’s other AI search news here.)

Will Tesla’s plan include sharks? Lasers? Sharks using lasers to ignite a controlled fusion reaction that brings on the singularity? Anything’s possible with the boy billionaire. We’ll find out March 1st.