Google Offers Pixel 8 Pro for $599 With Free Pixel Watch 2
Its upgraded camera setup, featuring a standout 5x telephoto lens, and premium build quality make it a worthy step up. Plus, Google is throwing in a free Pixel Watch 2 with LTE and a phone case at no extra cost.
'The Pixel 8 Pro launched in late 2023, meaning it has just a little over five years of OS updates left before it's no longer supported.' So, there's still plenty of life left. The phone's 120Hz OLED display can drop to 1Hz when idle, thanks to its always-on display tech, helping preserve battery life.
One thing to note — the matte-textured glass back might feel slippery in hand, as Allison Johnson pointed out, so the included case will come in handy.
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India Today
27 minutes ago
- India Today
Why Donald Trump doesn't want Google, Microsoft to hire Indians
US President Donald Trump has told major tech companies like Google, Microsoft and Apple to stop hiring foreign workers, including from India, and focus instead on creating jobs in the United at an AI Summit in Washington on Wednesday, Trump said American companies must now put national interest first, especially in the fast-growing field of artificial said that top US technology firms have made huge profits while setting up operations in countries like China and hiring large numbers of employees in argued that this has come at the cost of American workers. 'Many of our largest tech companies have reaped the blessings of American freedom while building their factories in China, hiring workers in India and stashing profits in Ireland,' Trump said during the event. 'Under President Trump, those days are over.'He said the mindset of these firms had become too global and called for a new 'spirit of patriotism and national loyalty' in Silicon Valley and across the American tech industry. 'We want you to put America first. That's all we ask,' he also used the event to announce three new executive orders aimed at boosting the US's AI industry. One of the orders lays out a national plan to fast-track AI development by easing regulations and encouraging companies to build data centres and other key infrastructure inside the US. The strategy is called 'Winning the Race' and is focused on helping the US lead in AI second order puts new rules on companies that receive federal funds to build AI tools. These companies must now ensure that the tools they develop are politically neutral. Trump said his administration would not support what he called 'woke' AI systems and blamed previous policies that focused on diversity and inclusion for slowing down progress in technology.'We are getting rid of woke,' he said. 'AI must be accurate and not influenced by ideology.' The new rules will also apply to government agencies that use AI tools, and these systems must not be biased or driven by political also questioned the use of the term 'artificial intelligence,' saying he prefers a term that better reflects its power. 'It's not artificial, it's genius,' he third executive order focuses on helping US-built AI products compete globally. It includes steps to support exports and ensure full development of AI technology within the Trump's comments have sparked concern among tech workers in countries like India, no official steps have been announced yet to limit hiring from abroad. However, industry watchers say such remarks from the President could affect the hiring plans of major tech firms, especially those that rely heavily on skilled engineers from India and Indian tech professionals, many of whom are employed in roles related to software development, data science, and AI in the US, Trump's message may create recent years, several US companies have increased their hiring in India to cut costs and tap into the country's large pool of skilled engineers. The latest statement from Trump could put pressure on firms to re-evaluate their hiring strategies, especially if new rules or limitations are the global race for AI dominance continues, the push for more national control and local jobs in the US could have effects on tech ecosystems in countries like India, which play a key role in supporting American firms through outsourcing, engineering services, and back-end operations.- Ends advertisement
Economic Times
an hour ago
- Economic Times
S&P 500 and Nasdaq notch record closes, lifted by Alphabet
Live Events (You can now subscribe to our (You can now subscribe to our ETMarkets WhatsApp channel The S&P 500 and the Nasdaq notched record high closes on Thursday as robust results from Google parent Alphabet fueled optimism about other heavyweight artificial intelligence stocks, while Tesla slumped after the electric vehicle maker's results disappointed rose 1% as the search giant's results boosted confidence that heavy investment in a race to dominate AI technology is paying of Microsoft, Nvidia and Amazon each climbed 1% or U.S.-Japan trade deal and recent signs of progress in talks with the European Union also fueled Wall Street's gains."Investors are feeling optimistic about trade negotiations, about the economy, the trend in inflation, as well as the better-than-expected Q2 earnings reports," said Sam Stovall, chief investment strategist at CFRA tumbled 8.2% after CEO Elon Musk warned of a "few rough quarters" as the U.S. government cuts support for electric vehicle makers. The stock has fallen around 25% so far in fell 4.8% after the insurer revealed it was cooperating with a Department of Justice probe into its Medicare practices, following reports of both criminal and civil dropped almost 8% after its second-quarter results fell flat with investors, hampered by disappointing sales in its core software division. Honeywell fell 6.2% despite topping Wall Street's expectations and raising its annual S&P 500 crept up 0.07% to end the session at 6,363.35 points. The Nasdaq gained 0.18% to 21,057.96 points, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average declined 0.70% to 44,693.91 on U.S. exchanges was relatively heavy, with 19.9 billion shares traded, compared to an average of 17.8 billion shares over the previous 20 of the 11 S&P 500 sector indexes declined, led lower by consumer discretionary, down 1.23%, followed by a 0.75% loss in Airlines tumbled nearly 10% after the carrier forecast a big third-quarter loss, hurt by sluggish domestic travel demand.U.S. President Donald Trump's global trade war has created the biggest uncertainty for the airline industry since the COVID-19 were also monitoring Trump's planned visit to the Federal Reserve's headquarters on Thursday, following months of the president criticizing Fed Chair Jerome Powell for interest rates that Trump views as too the Fed widely expected to hold rates steady at next week's meeting, traders see a 60% chance of a September rate cut, according to CME's FedWatch tool.A U.S. Labor Department report showed jobless claims last week fell to 217,000 - well below estimates - signaling continued resilience in the job market.U.S. business activity gained momentum in July, but companies hiked prices on goods and services, fueling economists' predictions of faster inflation in the months ahead, largely driven by rising import stocks outnumbered rising ones within the S&P 500 by a 1.3-to-one S&P 500 posted 46 new highs and 6 new lows; the Nasdaq recorded 81 new highs and 44 new lows.
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Business Standard
an hour ago
- Business Standard
Trump's order to block 'woke' AI spurs tech giants to censor their chatbots
Tech companies looking to sell their artificial intelligence technology to the federal government must now contend with a new regulatory hurdle: proving their chatbots aren't woke. President Donald Trump's sweeping new plan to counter China in achieving global dominance in AI promises to cut regulations and cement American values into the AI tools increasingly used at work and home. But one of Trump's three AI executive orders signed Wednesday the one preventing woke AI in the federal government marks the first time the US government has explicitly tried to shape the ideological behavior of AI. Several leading providers of the AI language models targeted by the order products like Google's Gemini and Microsoft's Copilot have so far been silent on Trump's anti-woke directive, which still faces a study period before it gets into official procurement rules. While the tech industry has largely welcomed Trump's broader AI plans, the anti-woke order forces the industry to leap into a culture war battle or try their best to quietly avoid it. It will have massive influence in the industry right now, especially as tech companies are already capitulating to other Trump administration directives, said civil rights advocate Alejandra Montoya-Boyer, senior director of The Leadership Conference's Center for Civil Rights and Technology. The move also pushes the tech industry to abandon years of work to combat the pervasive forms of racial and gender bias that studies and real-world examples have shown to be baked into AI systems. First off, there's no such thing as woke AI, Montoya-Boyer said. There's AI technology that discriminates and then there's AI technology that actually works for all people. Molding the behaviors of AI large language models is challenging because of the way they're built and the inherent randomness of what they produce. They've been trained on most of what's on the internet, reflecting the biases of all the people who've posted commentary, edited a Wikipedia entry or shared images online. This will be extremely difficult for tech companies to comply with, said former Biden official Jim Secreto, who was deputy chief of staff to US Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo, an architect of many of Biden's AI industry initiatives. Large language models reflect the data they're trained on, including all the contradictions and biases in human language. Tech workers also have a say in how they're designed, from the global workforce of annotators who check their responses to the Silicon Valley engineers who craft the instructions for how they interact with people. Trump's order targets those top-down efforts at tech companies to incorporate what it calls the destructive ideology of diversity, equity and inclusion into AI models, including concepts like critical race theory, transgenderism, unconscious bias, intersectionality, and systemic racism. The directive has invited comparison to China's heavier-handed efforts to ensure that generative AI tools reflect the core values of the ruling Communist Party. Secreto said the order resembles China's playbook in using the power of the state to stamp out what it sees as disfavored viewpoints." The method is different, with China relying on direct regulation by auditing AI models, approving them before they are deployed and requiring them to filter out banned content such as the bloody Tiananmen Square crackdown on pro-democracy protests in 1989. Trump's order doesn't call for any such filters, relying on tech companies to instead show that their technology is ideologically neutral by disclosing some of the internal policies that guide the chatbots. The Trump administration is taking a softer but still coercive route by using federal contracts as leverage, Secreto said. That creates strong pressure for companies to self-censor in order to stay in the government's good graces and keep the money flowing. The order's call for truth-seeking AI echoes the language of the president's one-time ally and adviser Elon Musk, who has made it the mission of the Grok chatbot made by his company xAI. But whether Grok or its rivals will be favored under the new policy remains to be seen. Despite a rhetorically pointed introduction laying out the Trump administration's problems with DEI, the actual language of the order's directives shouldn't be hard for tech companies to comply with, said Neil Chilson, a Republican former chief technologist for the Federal Trade Commission. It doesn't even prohibit an ideological agenda, just that any intentional methods to guide the model be disclosed, said Chilson, head of AI policy at the nonprofit Abundance Institute. Which is pretty light touch, frankly. Chilson disputes comparisons to China's cruder modes of AI censorship. There is nothing in this order that says that companies have to produce or cannot produce certain types of output, he said. It says developers shall not intentionally encode partisan or ideological judgments. With their AI tools already widely used in the federal government, tech companies have reacted cautiously. OpenAI on Thursday said it is awaiting more detailed guidance but believes its work to make ChatGPT objective already makes the technology consistent with Trump's directive. Microsoft, a major supplier of online services to the government, declined to comment. Musk's xAI, through spokesperson Katie Miller, a former Trump official, pointed to a company comment praising Trump's AI announcements but didn't address the procurement order. xAI recently announced it was awarded a US defense contract for up to $200 million, just days after Grok publicly posted a barrage of antisemitic commentary that praised Adolf Hitler. Anthropic, Google, Meta, and Palantir didn't respond to emailed requests for comment Thursday. The ideas behind the order have bubbled up for more than a year on the podcasts and social media feeds of Trump's top AI adviser David Sacks and other influential Silicon Valley venture capitalists, many of whom endorsed Trump's presidential campaign last year. Their ire centered on Google's February 2024 release of an AI image-generating tool that produced historically inaccurate images before the tech giant took down and fixed the product. Google later explained that the errors including generating portraits of Black, Asian and Native American men when asked to show American Founding Fathers were the result of an overcompensation for technology that, left to its own devices, was prone to favoring lighter-skinned people because of pervasive bias in the systems. Trump allies alleged that Google engineers were hard-coding their own social agenda into the product. It's 100 per cent intentional, said prominent venture capitalist and Trump adviser Marc Andreessen on a podcast in December. That's how you get Black George Washington at Google. There's override in the system that basically says, literally, Everybody has to be Black.' Boom. There's squads, large sets of people, at these companies who determine these policies and write them down and encode them into these systems. Sacks credited a conservative strategist who has fought DEI initiatives at colleges and workplaces for helping to draft the order. When they asked me how to define woke,' I said there's only one person to call: Chris Rufo. And now it's law: the federal government will not be buying WokeAI, Sacks wrote on X. Rufo responded that he helped identify DEI ideologies within the operating constitutions of these systems. (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
