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Tech News: 5 Things to Know in Australia Today

Asha Barbaschow Avatar
Asha Barbaschow
Tech News: 5 Things to Know in Australia Today

Hello and welcome to Tuesday. Let’s dive into your morning tech news briefing.

 

1. Meet Bard, Google’s answer to ChatGPT

Nothing has made the tech industry cower quite the way ChatGPT has. While some have tried to hop on board asap, others — like Google — are attempting to compete. The tech giant has just announced its answer to the wildly popular chatbot, and it’s called Bard. Bard is Google’s own experimental chatbot that is built with the company’s Language Model for Dialogue Applications, or LaMDA. LaMDA is the same AI engine that an ex-Google engineer warned us was sentient, but the company hopes that LaMDA is powerful enough that it will make Bard Google’s rival to ChatGPT. Bard is currently only available to testers.

2. Alarming stats from eSafety

Research from Australia’s eSafety Commissioner says that more Australians are reporting negative online experiences, with 75 per cent of those responding to its survey saying they had at least one negative experience in the last 12 months. The research presents a handful of confronting stats, such as that 32 per cent of respondents say they were sent unwanted inappropriate content, like porn/violent content, and the overall sentiment of the report put out for Safer Internet Day is that Aussies want technology companies to do more to keep them safe. To that point, per a report from The Guardian, eSafety wants dating apps to cooperate to share information about “bad actors” using their services to abuse and harass other users.

3. Dell to cut 5% of its workforce

Tech companies are always in the news, usually touting the next big thing. However, the tech news cycle recently hasn’t been dominated by the latest gadget or innovation. Instead, layoffs are in the headlines and Dell employees are the latest casualty. The company is cutting 6,600 positions, citing a reduced demand for PCs — as well as the economy — for the decision. According to Bloomberg, the cuts will amount to about 5 per cent of the company’s workforce. Likewise, the company’s workforce will be reduced to roughly 126,000 global employees, which would be its lowest since 2017.

4. Getty Images sues AI company

Getty Images has sued artificial intelligence company Stability AI Inc, accusing it in a lawsuit of misusing more than 12 million Getty photos to train its Stable Diffusion AI image-generation system. Brought to our attention over the weekend by the below embedded tweet, the lawsuit was detailed overnight by Reuters. The report says that Getty accused Stability of copying millions of its photos without a license and using them to train Stable Diffusion to generate more accurate depictions based on user prompts.

5. New Apple/Amazon/Google-competing home speakers for Sonos

The Verge is reporting that sound king Sonos is preparing a new generation of smart speakers, known as the Era 300 and Era 100. The report reckons the new speakers will be pitted against Apple’s $479 HomePod and other smart home speakers from Google and Amazon. Per The Verge, the Era 300 is designed to showcase spatial audio music tracks and Dolby Atmos content and both speakers have a completely new design compared to existing Sonos products.

BONUS ITEM: Why are they still trying to make this hideous thing happen?

See you tomorrow.

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