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Japan Today
3 days ago
- Business
- Japan Today
Google makes case for keeping Chrome browser
The US antitrust case poised to weaken Google's dominance in online search comes as OpenAI, Perplexity and other rivals are putting generative artificial intelligence to work fetching information from the internet for users By Thomas URBAIN Google on Friday urged a U.S. judge to reject the notion of making it spin off its Chrome browser to weaken its dominance in online search. Rival attorneys made their final arguments before U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta, who is considering "remedies" to impose after making a landmark decision last year that Google maintained an illegal monopoly in search. U.S. government attorneys have called on Mehta to order Google divest itself of Chrome browser, contending that artificial intelligence is poised to ramp up the tech giant's dominance as the go-to window into the internet. They also want Google barred from agreements with partners such as Apple and Samsung to distribute its search tools, which was the focus of the suit against the Silicon Valley internet giant. Three weeks of testimony ended early in May, with Friday devoted to rival sides parsing points of law and making their arguments before Mehta in a courtroom in Washington. John Schmidtlein, an attorney for Google, told Mehta that there was no evidence presented showing people would have opted for a different search engine if no exclusivity deals had been in place. Schmidtlein noted that Verizon installed Chrome on smartphones even though the U.S. telecom titan owned Yahoo! search engine and was not bound by a contract with Google. Of the 100 or so witnesses heard at trial, not one said "if I had more flexibility, I would have installed Bing" search engine from Microsoft, the Google attorney told the judge. Department of Justice attorney David Dahlquist countered that Apple, which was paid billions of dollars to make Chrome the default browser on iPhones, "repeatedly asked for more flexibility" but was denied by Google. Google contends that the United States has gone way beyond the scope of the suit by recommending a spinoff of Chrome, and holding open the option to force a sale of its Android mobile operating system. "Forcing the sale of Chrome or banning default agreements wouldn't foster competition," said Cato Institute senior fellow in technology policy Jennifer Huddleston. "It would hobble innovation, hurt smaller players, and leave users with worse products." The potential of Chrome being weakened or spun off comes as rivals such as Microsoft, ChatGPT and Perplexity put generative artificial intelligence (AI) to work fetching information from the internet in response to user queries. The online search antitrust suit was filed against Google some five years ago, before ChatGPT made its debut, triggering AI fervor. Google is among the tech companies investing heavily to be a leader in AI, and is weaving the technology into search and other online offerings. Testimony at trial included Apple vice president of services Eddy Cue revealing that Google's search traffic on Apple devices declined in April for the first time in over two decades. Cue testified that Google was losing ground to AI alternatives like ChatGPT and Perplexity. Mehta pressed rival attorneys regarding the potential for Google to share data as proposed by the DoJ in its recommended remedies. "We're not looking to kneecap Google," DoJ attorney Adam Severt told the judge. "But, we are looking to make sure someone can compete with Google." Schmidtlein contended that the data Google is being asked to share contains much more than just information about people's online searches, saying it would be tantamount to handing over the fruit of investments made over the course of decades. "There are countless algorithms that Google engineers have invented that have nothing to do with click and query data," Schmidtlein said. "Their remedy says we want to be on par with all of your ingenuity, and, respectfully your honor, that is not proportional to the conduct of this case." © 2025 AFP
Japan Today
17-05-2025
- Science
- Japan Today
Inner workings of AI an enigma - even to its creators
A photo taken on April 1, 2025 shows the GPT chat logo on a laptop screen (R) next to the logo of Deepseek AI application on a smartphone screen in Frankfurt am Main, western Germany. By Thomas URBAIN Even the greatest human minds building generative artificial intelligence that is poised to change the world admit they do not comprehend how digital minds think. "People outside the field are often surprised and alarmed to learn that we do not understand how our own AI creations work," Anthropic co-founder Dario Amodei wrote in an essay posted online in April. "This lack of understanding is essentially unprecedented in the history of technology." Unlike traditional software programs that follow pre-ordained paths of logic dictated by programmers, generative AI (gen AI) models are trained to find their own way to success once prompted. In a recent podcast Chris Olah, who was part of ChatGPT-maker OpenAI before joining Anthropic, described gen AI as "scaffolding" on which circuits grow. Olah is considered an authority in so-called mechanistic interpretability, a method of reverse engineering AI models to figure out how they work. This science, born about a decade ago, seeks to determine exactly how AI gets from a query to an answer. "Grasping the entirety of a large language model is an incredibly ambitious task," said Neel Nanda, a senior research scientist at the Google DeepMind AI lab. It was "somewhat analogous to trying to fully understand the human brain," Nanda added to AFP, noting neuroscientists have yet to succeed on that front. Delving into digital minds to understand their inner workings has gone from a little-known field just a few years ago to being a hot area of academic study. "Students are very much attracted to it because they perceive the impact that it can have," said Boston University computer science professor Mark Crovella. The area of study is also gaining traction due to its potential to make gen AI even more powerful, and because peering into digital brains can be intellectually exciting, the professor added. Mechanistic interpretability involves studying not just results served up by gen AI but scrutinizing calculations performed while the technology mulls queries, according to Crovella. "You could look into the the computations that are being performed and try to understand those," the professor explained. Startup Goodfire uses AI software capable of representing data in the form of reasoning steps to better understand gen AI processing and correct errors. The tool is also intended to prevent gen AI models from being used maliciously or from deciding on their own to deceive humans about what they are up to. "It does feel like a race against time to get there before we implement extremely intelligent AI models into the world with no understanding of how they work," said Goodfire chief executive Eric Ho. In his essay, Amodei said recent progress has made him optimistic that the key to fully deciphering AI will be found within two years. "I agree that by 2027, we could have interpretability that reliably detects model biases and harmful intentions," said Auburn University associate professor Anh Nguyen. According to Boston University's Crovella, researchers can already access representations of every digital neuron in AI brains. "Unlike the human brain, we actually have the equivalent of every neuron instrumented inside these models", the academic said. "Everything that happens inside the model is fully known to us. It's a question of discovering the right way to interrogate that." Harnessing the inner workings of gen AI minds could clear the way for its adoption in areas where tiny errors can have dramatic consequences, like national security, Amodei said. For Nanda, better understanding what gen AI is doing could also catapult human discoveries, much like DeepMind's chess-playing AI, AlphaZero, revealed entirely new chess moves that none of the grand masters had ever thought about. Properly understood, a gen AI model with a stamp of reliability would grab competitive advantage in the market. Such a breakthrough by a US company would also be a win for the nation in its technology rivalry with China. "Powerful AI will shape humanity's destiny," Amodei wrote. "We deserve to understand our own creations before they radically transform our economy, our lives, and our future." © 2025 AFP
Japan Today
28-04-2025
- Sport
- Japan Today
Women's flag football explodes in U.S. as 2028 Olympics beckon
By Thomas URBAIN Flag football, a non-contact version of American football, is spreading like wildfire among U.S. girls drawn by the prospect of its inclusion in the 2028 Olympics, its popularity even sparking plans for a professional league. "It's the youth version of pickleball, the fastest growing adult sport," says Michael Colt, comparing flag football to the racket sport that's all the rage among the over-30s. "It's crazy." Colt, 44, coaches the Staten Island Giants, last year's under-18 US champions. Since he co-founded the club in 2019, its youth teams have earned a host of national titles and sent several players to the national team. Colt said it had been "a struggle" early on to gain recognition and find backing. "We fought for everything," he said. "We were kind of always pushed to the side, like this wasn't serious. "And I see that about the sport to this day, when you're asking the difference in the sport. In the beginning, nobody really wanted to coach girls." The Giants' trajectory mirrors that of the sport as a whole. Developed as an alternative to collision prone tackle football, girls' and women's flag was relatively unknown six years ago. Yet participation reached close to 270,000 girls aged six to 17 in 2024, according to the USA Football, which oversees U.S. teams in tackle and flag football -- and Colt's Giants club has the financial backing of the NFL's New York Giants. Even as the NFL throws its impressive weight behind the game, the scope of flag football can still come as a surprise to the uninitiated, especially the opportunity it provides for gridiron-loving girls. When 14-year-old Brielle Caetano talks about flag, which she has been playing since kindergarten, people "are very in shock". "And (then) I tell them you can get a (university) scholarship from that," Caetano added. "They're definitely in shock." "Football has always been considered a boy's sport," noted 16-year-old Annie Falcone of the familiar high-contact game whose pinnacle is the NFL. "But flag football has grown so much for women of all ages." In flag football, most often played in a five-on-five format, an offensive player is "tackled" by pulling one of two "flags" worn on a belt around the hips. No blocking is allowed, further reducing the risk of injury in a game that focuses on running and throwing skills. "It's just incredible to me how fast flag overall is growing, but really led by girls and women," said Scott Hallenbeck, USA Football's chief executive officer. "In my probably 30-plus years of being involved in sports, I've never seen a discipline of a sport scale (up) as fast as we're seeing flag." Hallenbeck said a lot of credit for that growth goes to the NFL, which is pushing to develop the game. That includes at the youth level, with the NFL organizing its own national flag tournament for boys and girls in July this year, with sponsors and a TV broadcasting contract. While the NFL is the most-watched pro league in the United States, it has struggled to expand the game outside U.S. borders. The NBA has become a global phenomenon, and elite basketball leagues prosper outside the USA. But tackle football has found a foothold in just a few other countries such as Germany and Mexico. Hallenbeck said flag football could be an international game-changer. "(They are) really pushing flag to help grow fandom and opportunities around the world and then obviously putting a lot of emphasis around it here in this country," he said. Gaining inclusion at the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics is a key part of that campaign, and is already having an effect. "It's a source of motivation for me and for the girls right now," Falcone said. The NFL is already looking beyond the Games, and is "exploring very aggressively now an opportunity to create a professional flag league for both men and women, obviously two different leagues," NFL commissioner Roger Goodell said in February. "They're trying to gather sponsors," said Colt. "I definitely think it's going to be a professional sport by 2032." © 2025 AFP
