Microsoft is sitting on top of the world right now, thanks to its lead in AI. It’s the most valuable company on the planet, with a valuation of more than $3.2 trillion. Its rise was rocket-fueled by its investor relationship with OpenAI, the company that makes the wildly popular generative AI (genAI) chatbot ChatGPT. OpenAI’s GPT large language model is also the basis for Microsoft Copilot, the genAI tool that Microsoft is building into just about every one of its products, from GitHub to Windows to Microsoft 365 and beyond. Microsoft’s AI dominance appears insurmountable. But things can chang ..read more

Hey. You. Yes, you — the one there with the moist eyeballs, staring at this suspiciously smudgy screen. I want to let you in on a little secret. It's technically a two-part secret, as the first part is something incredibly useful that hardly anyone realizes is possible — and the second part is a completely new twist on that same concept that virtually no one knows about yet. The concepts in question are both connected to Chrome and the timeless act of traipsing around this tumbleweed-laden web of ours. They give you an enchantingly easy way to peek in at a page without interrupting what you're ..read more

At this point, the best thing Mozilla Corp. has going for it is that it is not a publicly traded company, because if it was, its stock would be getting slaughtered. The company’s CEO, Mitchell Baker, recently departed, and recent reports put its share of the browser market in the low single digits. But Mozilla is no stranger to challenges. It was born into adversity, launched after the collapse of Netscape Communications in 2003. As one of its last acts, Netscape open-sourced the code for its eponymous browser. The Mozilla Foundation was formed to take up the project abandoned by Netscape and ..read more

We've been exploring unconventional ways to control your favorite Android device with physical gestures — y'know, real-world movements like shaking and flipping the thing in a variety of specific ways. But get this: Android also has the ability to let you interact with your phone by simply moving your face. I kid you not: A cursory glance to the left with your pretty little peepers could take the place of the typical Android Back gesture. An upward glance could open your notifications. And a coy-looking eyebrow raise could take you back to your home screen (as well as make anyone around you th ..read more

I really need to upgrade my brain's internal storage. I'm only partially kidding: Just like a hard drive, I'm pretty sure my mind reached maximum capacity at some point in the past decade. The only way I can remember anything these days is by making and maintaining a million notes, both physical and digital. (My wife can confirm this: "I told you that a week ago" is an all-too-common phrase 'round these parts.) I'm still waiting for Western Digital to start selling SSD implants for the noggin, but in the meantime, Google Keep has become my repository for notes of the non-sticky variety. I like ..read more

Google Cloud has joined AWS and Europe-based Cloud Infrastructure Services Providers in Europe (CISPE) in protesting Microsoft’s anticompetitive cloud software licensing practices in the EU. “Microsoft’s cloud licensing restrictions restrict choice and create harmful downstream impacts for companies, ranging from higher costs to more security breaches to a chilling effect on smaller cloud and software providers including European AI startups,” Amit Zavery, vice president of platforms at Google Cloud, wrote on X. Microsoft should end the arbitrary “Listed Provider” designation and allow custome ..read more

Google Workspace is an expansive suite of business and productivity apps. Its core apps — Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, Drive, Gmail, and Meet — are worth mastering individually. They also have features that integrate with other Workspace apps. Knowing how these apps can work together can save time and broaden how you and your co-workers use Workspace. To read this article in full, please click here ..read more

Holy leapin' lizards, Larry! It may seem like Google's Android 14 update is still sizzling and fresh out of the fryer, but we're officially on our way toward 2024's Android 15 release — with the first developer preview now out in the wild and in front of us. To be clear, we're far from the finish line still, and what we're seeing right now is almost certainly not the complete picture. But, oh yes, Le Googlé let loose on its first public Android 15 release the other day, and that means we're getting our closest look yet at some of what the company's got cookin'. To read this article in full, pl ..read more

Only a week after releasing its latest generative artificial intelligence (genAI) model, Google on Thursday unveiled that model’s successor, Gemini 1.5. The company boasts that the new version bests the earlier version on almost every front. Gemini 1.5 is a multimodal AI model now ready for early testing. Unlike OpenAI's popular ChatGPT, Google said, users can feed into its query engine a much larger amount of information to get more accurate responses. To read this article in full, please click here ..read more

Among the experimental tools that Google offers is NotebookLM, a bare-bones notes app that you use in your web browser. What makes it interesting is that it uses Google’s generative AI chatbot (variously known as Bard or Duet AI and now rebranded as Gemini) to analyze sources of text that you “feed” it, and then generate notes based on the information in them. Here are some scenarios where you might want to use NotebookLM: To turn the contents of a long document into a brief summary. To extract insights from several documents that cover a certain topic. For example, you can have NotebookLM an ..read more