An anonymous reader shares a report: Beeper has been offering a unified messaging platform for a few years, allowing users to open a single app to communicate with contacts via SMS, Google Chat, Facebook Messenger, Slack, Discord, WhatsApp, and perhaps most significantly, iMessage. Up until this week though, Android users that wanted to use Beeper to send "blue bubble" messages to iMessage users had their messages routed through a Mac or iOS device. Now Beeper has launched a new app called Beeper Mini that handles everything on-device, no iPhone or Mac bridge required.

Beeper Mini is available now from the Google Play Store, and offers a 7-day free trial. After that, it costs $2 per month to keep using. [...] previously the company had to rely on a Mac-in-the-cloud? The company explains the method it's using in a blog post, but in a nutshell, Beeper says a security researcher has reverse engineered "the iMessage protocol and encryption," so that "all messages are sent and received by Beeper Mini Android app directly to Apple's servers" and "the encryption keys needed to encrypt these messages never leave your phone." That security researcher, by the way, is a high school student that goes by jjtech, who was hired by Beeper after showing the company his code. A proof-of-concept Python script is also available on Github if you'd like to run it to send messages to iMessage from a PC.

It's "the conference about the joy of Emacs and Emacs Lisp." Started in 2013, the volunteer-run EmacsConf accepted 44 talks for this year — and Day Two has just started streaming online now.

Sunday kicks off with a talk counting on how the "hypertextual information manager" GNU Hyperbole can improve your Emacs productivity. (Click here for a list of all of Sunday's talks.) Or hang out in the #emacsconf channel on irc.libera.chat.

The Free Software Foundation provided fiscal sponsorship for this year's event, noting that "The conference has grown rapidly in the last few years" and "welcomes speakers of all backgrounds and all levels of experience from across the world.

"EmacsConf is rooted in the active, passionate community surrounding GNU Emacs, and like Emacs itself, it is committed to user freedom. It is organized and run using an entirely free software stack."

OpenAI's "ChatGPT with voice" feature announced in September is now rolling out to all free users on mobile. Engadget reports: When the company first introduced voice chats, it admitted that the capability to create "realistic synthetic voices from just a few seconds of real speech" presents new risks. It could, for instance, allow bad actors to impersonate public figures or anybody they want. As a result, it decided that ChatGPT's voice feature will focus on conversations. It's powered by a text-to-speech model that can generate "human-like audio from just text and a few seconds of sample speech." OpenAI worked with voice actors to create the capability and offers five different voices to choose from.

In what may be a potentially confusing rebranding move, Microsoft today has rebranded Bing Chat to Copilot, sharing the same brand name as multiple other Microsoft AI products. Search Engine Land reports: Bing is no longer "your AI-powered copilot for the web." However, Microsoft Bing will still provide a combined Search and chat experience. It will just be called CoPilot heading forward. For people who may not want that combined experience, CoPilot will have its own standalone ChatGPT-style experience at https://copilot.microsoft.com/.

Microsoft said the rebrand is to unify the Copilot experience: "Our efforts to simplify the user experience and make Copilot more accessible to everyone starts with Bing, our leading experience for the web. Beginning today, Bing Chat and Bing Chat Enterprise are becoming Copilot, with commercial data protection enforced when any eligible user is signed in with Microsoft Entra ID."

While it's definitely a more unified experience, it also seems a bit confusing because Microsoft's chatbot "companion" is used across multiple apps, including Microsoft 365, Edge, Windows and more -- some free, some not. In addition to Bing Chat, Bing Chat Enterprise is also rebranded as Copilot Pro. It offers the same chat functionality with greater commercial data protection for Microsoft 365 subscribers.

The Brave browser is rolling out a privacy-focused AI assistant named Leo, which the company claims provides "unparalleled privacy" compared to AI chatbot services likes Bing Chat, ChatGPT, Google Bard and others. The Verge reports: Following several months of testing, Leo is now available to use for free by all Brave desktop users running version 1.60 of the web browser. Leo is rolling out "in phases over the next few days" and will be available on Android and iOS "in the coming months."

The core features of Leo aren't too dissimilar from other AI chatbots like Bing Chat and Google Bard: it can translate, answer questions, summarize webpages, and generate new content. Brave says the benefits of Leo over those offerings are that it aligns with the company's focus on privacy -- conversations with the chatbot are not recorded or used to train AI models, and no login information is required to use it. As with other AI chatbots, however, Brave claims Leo's outputs should be "treated with care for potential inaccuracies or errors."

The standard version of Leo utilizes Meta's Llama 2 large language model and is free to use by default. For users who prefer to access a different AI language model, Brave is also introducing Leo Premium, a $15 monthly subscription that features Anthropic's AI assistant, Claude Instant -- a faster and cheaper version of Anthropic's Claude 2 large language model. Brave says that additional models will be available to Leo Premium users alongside access to higher-quality conversations, priority queuing during peak usage, higher rate limits, and early access to new features.

At its fall hardware event Wednesday, Amazon revealed an all-new Alexa voice assistant powered by its new Alexa large language model. The Verge reports: According to Dave Limp, Amazon's current SVP of devices and services, this new Alexa can understand conversational phrases and respond appropriately, interpret context more effectively, and complete multiple requests from one command. In an interview with The Verge ahead of the event, Limp explained that the new Alexa LLM "is a true generalizable large language model that's very optimized for the Alexa use case; it's not what you find with a Bard or ChatGPT or any of these things."

However, this all-new Alexa isn't being unleashed everywhere, on everyone, all at once. The company is rolling it out slowly through a preview program "in the coming months" -- and only in the US. Clearly, there have been lessons learned from the missteps of Microsoft and Google, and Amazon is proceeding with caution. "When you connect an LLM to the real world, you want to minimize hallucinations -- and while we think we have the right systems in place ... there is no substitute for putting it out in the real world," says Limp. If you want to be notified when you can join the preview, tell your Echo device, "Alexa, let's chat," and your interest will be registered.

Unsurprisingly, this superpowered Alexa may not always be free. Limp said that while Alexa, as it is today, will remain free, "the idea of a superhuman assistant that can supercharge your smart home, and more, work complex tasks on your behalf, could provide enough utility that we will end up charging something for it down the road."

WhatsApp is exploring a new feature that would display adverts in the app for the first time, a move that has caused internal controversy, as parent company Meta seeks to monetise the world's most popular messaging service. From a report: Teams at Meta have been discussing whether to show ads in lists of conversations with contacts on the WhatsApp chat screen, but no final decisions have been made, according to three people familiar with the matter. However, the concept has been debated at a high level within the company, due to concerns it would alienate users, said a person with close knowledge of the discussions.

Two of these people said that Meta is also deliberating whether to charge a subscription fee to use the app ad-free, but many insiders are against the move. Before WhatsApp was acquired by Facebook for $19bn in 2014, its co-founder Brian Action had made "No ads! No games! No gimmicks!" a company mantra.

Microsoft will unbundle its chat and video app Teams from its Office suite and make it easier for rival products to work with its software, the U.S. company said on Thursday in a move aimed at staving off a possible EU antitrust fine. From a report: The proposed changes came a month after the European Commission launched an investigation into Microsoft's tying of Office and Teams following a complaint by Salesforce-owned workspace messaging app Slack in 2020. Microsoft's preliminary concessions failed to address concerns. The EU competition enforcer on Thursday said it took note of the company's announcement and declined further comment.

Teams was added to Office 365 in 2017 for free. It eventually replaced Skype for Business and gained in popularity during the pandemic due in part to its video conferencing. "Today we are announcing proactive changes that we hope will start to address these concerns in a meaningful way, even while the European Commission's investigation continues and we cooperate with it," [...] The changes, effective from Oct. 1, will apply in Europe and Switzerland.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Variety: Zoom changed its terms of service to say that it won't use any customer content -- at all -- in training generative artificial intelligence models. The update, which the videoconference company announced Friday, comes after observers raised the alarm about a recent change in Zoom's TOS that appeared to grant the company royalty-free rights in perpetuity for customer video calls and presentations for the purposes of training AI models. In its initial response on Aug. 7, Zoom said it doesn't use any customer audio, video or chat content for training AI "without consent." Now it says it will not use such content in any way related to generative AI development.

In a statement Friday appended its its earlier blog post, Zoom said, "Following feedback received regarding Zoom's recently updated terms of service, particularly related to our new generative artificial intelligence features, Zoom has updated our terms of service and the below blog post to make it clear that Zoom does not use any of your audio, video, chat, screen-sharing, attachments or other communications like customer content (such as poll results, whiteboard, and reactions) to train Zoom's or third-party artificial intelligence models." Zoom said it also updated in-product notices to reflect the change. According to Zoom's revised terms of service, the company still owns all rights to what it calls "service-generated data." That comprises telemetry data, product-usage data, diagnostic data and similar data "that Zoom collects or generates in connection with your or your End Users' use of the Services or Software," the terms of service say.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Zoom updated its Terms of Service in March, spelling out that the company reserves the right to train AI on user data with no mention of a way to opt out. On Monday, the company said in a blog post that there's no need to worry about that. Zoom execs swear the company won't actually train its AI on your video calls even though the Terms of Service still say it can.

The company's legal documents call your video, audio, and chat transcripts "Customer Content." When you click through Zoom's terms, you agree to give Zoom "perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicensable, and transferable license and all other rights" to use that Customer Content for "machine learning, artificial intelligence, training, testing," and a variety of other product development purposes. The company reserves similar rights for "Service Generated Data," which includes telemetry data, product usage data, diagnostic data, and other information it gets from analyzing your content and behavior.

Alibaba said Thursday it is opening up its own artificial intelligence model to third-party developers in a move that would pit it against OpenAI and Meta, which has made similar moves. CNBC reports: In April, Alibaba launched its large language model (LLM) called Tongyi Qianwen. A LLM is an artificial intelligence model trained on huge amounts of data. It is also the basis for generative AI applications, such as ChatGPT -- which generate human-like responses to user prompts. Tongyi Qianwen allows AI content generation in English and Chinese and has different model sizes, including seven billion parameters and above. A model's parameters refer to its power.

Alibaba will be open-sourcing the seven-billion-parameter model called Qwen-7B, along with a version designed for conversational apps, called Qwen-7B-Chat. This means that researchers, academics and companies globally can use the model to create their own generative AI apps without needing to train their own systems, saving time and expense. Companies with more than 100 million monthly active users will require a royalty-free license from Alibaba to do so. While Alibaba might not earn licensing fees from open-sourcing its technology, the distribution will help the company get more users for its AI model.

Virtual pet website Neopets, which was popular in the 2000s but declined in recent years, is planning a comeback with $4 million in funding and a promise to bring back 50 classic games on July 25th. The BBC reports: Launched in 1999 by British developers, the site let users care for cartoon pets, chat and play games. But after Viacom bought it, for $160 million in 2005, the site failed to keep up with the times and many elements stopped working. At its peak, in the mid-2000s, Neopets had 25 million users, rivaling the popularity of Tamagotchis and other virtual pets. But by 2017, that had collapsed to just 100,000 daily users, according to then chief executive David Lord.

But will the promise of new funding and functionality tempt people to return to their neglected pets? [...] Neopets said a management buyout deal meant the website was now an independent business without a large corporate owner. "Free from the corporate baggage that existed in the past, the newly united [Neopets Team] has now been entrusted with the decision-making and overall brand strategy of Neopets, enabling them to work solely on the betterment of the entire Neopets game and community," it said in a blog post. "The Neopets Team is, for the first time in over a decade, equipped to make meaningful changes in pursuit of a Neopian renaissance." It plans to begin the "new era" with a refreshed homepage, on Thursday, 20 July. Five days later, it will bring back 50 of the website's classic games amid plans to fix "many of the most beloved games" in the future.

Slashdot reader quonset shared this report from CNN: Forty years ago this summer, a new movie floated the prospect of the world being destroyed by artificial intelligence run amok — anticipating current anxieties about where the technology could potential lead — a year before the "Terminator" introduced the futuristic threat known as Skynet. At the time, "WarGames" spoke to another issue very much on the minds of movie-goers: The danger of nuclear annihilation during the Cold War, years before the Berlin Wall and Soviet regime fell...

Yet a recent re-viewing of the movie... makes its spin on AI seem even more pointed and timely — the idea that in seeking an emotionally detached, people-free solution to a problem, we might sow the seeds for our own destruction... The AI, in this case, is more sensible than its creators, as opposed to the more malevolent force featured in the new "Mission: Impossible" sequel. Yet the apprehension that has entered the chat — as underscored by recent congressional hearings regarding the perils associated with the technology — is that future iterations of AI won't be so benevolent, and might actually be smarter than the resourceful teenagers that we can deploy to thwart them...

As Ryan Britt wrote recently at Inverse.com, what really makes "WarGames" scary isn't that the computer is evil, but rather its potentially dire inability to recognize nuance the way a human can. "In 'WarGames,' the computer doesn't understand the difference between a game and real life," Britt noted.
CNN says the movie deals with questions that have "simply continued to evolve" as "reality has caught up with science fiction."

In a memo to House staffers this morning, the chamber's Chief Administrative Officer Catherine L. Szpindor said it is placing new guardrails around use of ChatGPT by congressional offices. Axios reports: Szpindor wrote that offices are "only authorized" to use the paid ChatGPT Plus. Unlike the free service, she said, the $20-per-month subscription version "incorporates important privacy features that are necessary to protect House data." She said in addition to other versions of ChatGPT, no other large language models are authorized for use. Szpindor also laid out an array of regulations on how to use the tool.

Offices are allowed to use the tool for "research and evaluation only" and can experiment on how it can improve their operations, but are "not authorized to incorporate it into regular workflow." Offices should only input "non-sensitive" data, she added, instructing staffers not to "paste into the chat bot any blocks of text that have not already been made public." She instructed offices to enable privacy settings, which are disabled by default, to "ensure that your history is not preserved and your interactions are not incorporated back into the large language model."

Discord is introducing new ways to generate revenue, including server subscriptions, tiered subscriptions, and the ability for server owners to sell digital products. This move has raised concerns among some users who feel that Discord is becoming less welcoming and more like the paywalled internet it was once an escape from. PC Gamer reports: "To date, we've paid out millions of dollars to thousands of creators and communities, and we're seeing more creators and communities earning on their Discord servers every day," wrote product manager Derek Yang in a blog post published today. "...Today, we're excited to share new tools that help you get started earning money faster."

The nickel-and-dime-ification of Discord servers begins this week with "media channels," a new type of channel (currently in beta) designed to host subscriber-only content, including, for instance, "exclusive memes and wallpapers." You could see an art creator using this Discord feature to post subscriber-only illustrations, as many comic creators and other illustrators already use Patreon to do.

Not a bad deal for creators, but that's only the start of the new revenue streams Discord, who currently takes a 10% cut of server subscriptions, plans to implement. Here's a full list of what the free (now with three asterisks) chat app has in the works:

- Tier Templates: Formalized subscription tiers with prices set by Discord ($3.99, $4.99, $7.99, and $9.99)
- Downloadables: One-time purchasable digital products or subscriptions sold by server owners, which will be accessed via ...
- Server Shops: "A single home for server owners to sell Server Subscriptions, Downloadables and Premium Roles"

Microsoft is removing its built-in Microsoft Teams client in Windows 11. "The Chat functionality will be replaced with the more flexible free version of Microsoft Teams that's also available as an app for Windows 10," reports The Verge. The changes were announced in a new Windows 11 test build this week. From the report: The original Teams integration in Windows 11, named Chat, was deeply woven into the operating system. Enabled by default, the Chat app was pinned to the taskbar and you'd have to dig into Settings to remove it. Chat offers consumers a way to use Microsoft Teams to contact friends and family. It was weirdly limited to just consumers though, making it useless for the vast majority of Microsoft Teams users that use the work version of the app. Windows 11 users could also end up with two confusing versions of Teams installed to handle work calls and personal ones.

Up until today, Microsoft had been continually adding new features to Chat inside Windows 11, with improved video calling features in October and Discord-like communities and an AI art tool earlier this month. The built-in Chat functionality in Windows 11 was based on the Microsoft Teams 2.0 client, which served as the foundation for the new Microsoft Teams app that's rolling out to businesses at the moment.

Security guru Bruce Schneier and CS professor Jim Waldo think big tech has underestimated the impact of open source principles on AI research: In February, Meta released its large language model: LLaMA. Unlike OpenAI and its ChatGPT, Meta didn't just give the world a chat window to play with. Instead, it released the code into the open-source community, and shortly thereafter the model itself was leaked. Researchers and programmers immediately started modifying it, improving it, and getting it to do things no one else anticipated. And their results have been immediate, innovative, and an indication of how the future of this technology is going to play out. Training speeds have hugely increased, and the size of the models themselves has shrunk to the point that you can create and run them on a laptop. The world of A.I. research has dramatically changed.

This development hasn't made the same splash as other corporate announcements, but its effects will be much greater. It will wrest power from the large tech corporations, resulting in both much more innovation and a much more challenging regulatory landscape. The large corporations that had controlled these models warn that this free-for-all will lead to potentially dangerous developments, and problematic uses of the open technology have already been documented. But those who are working on the open models counter that a more democratic research environment is better than having this powerful technology controlled by a small number of corporations...

[B]uilding on public models like Meta's LLaMa, the open-source community has innovated in ways that allow results nearly as good as the huge models — but run on home machines with common data sets. What was once the reserve of the resource-rich has become a playground for anyone with curiosity, coding skills, and a good laptop.

Bigger may be better, but the open-source community is showing that smaller is often good enough. This opens the door to more efficient, accessible, and resource-friendly LLMs.
Low-cost customization will foster rapid innovation, the article argues, and "takes control away from large companies like Google and OpenAI." Although this may have one unforeseen consequence...

"Now that the open-source community is remixing LLMs, it's no longer possible to regulate the technology by dictating what research and development can be done; there are simply too many researchers doing too many different things in too many different countries."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader mrflash818 for submitting the article

Wired reports on "hundreds of freelancers employed all over the world to animate fake profiles and chat with people who have signed up for dating and hookup sites." They describe one worker at Cyprus-based vDesk as "expected to lure people into paying, message by message, for conversations with fictional characters." WIRED spoke to dozens of people working in the industry, people who had worked for months at a time at two of the companies involved in the creation of virtual profiles... Often recruited into "customer support" or content moderation roles, they found themselves playing roles in sophisticated operations set up to tease subscription money from lonely hearts looking for connections online... Freelancers working in the industry say they make a fraction of the money users are paying. Workers earn around 7 cents per message, or 2 euro an hour.
WIRED shares stories from a "freelance customer support representative" in Ireland and a "freelance remote translator" in Mexico who both ended up doing the same kind of work. (And ironically, both reported they ended up talking to people they knew in real-life...) For the worker in Mexico, "his chat history had all of his personal details: his name, city, job, past marriages. His kids' names and ages. For nearly two years, he had been talking to a virtual. He says he's in love with her."

The portals "usually include lengthy terms and conditions," the article points out, with most saying something like "we may use system profiles at our discretion to communicate with users to enhance our users' entertainment experience..." Once she got over the realization — on her first day working for the company — that translating really meant "flirting through fake profiles," she couldn't help but be impressed by how detailed the virtuals are. "The fakes don't seem like obviously unattainable women, they are eerily convincing and hyper-specific," she says... The sites collect detailed information about users, building profiles that help the freelancers maintain the fiction. These contain their living arrangements, details about their family and marital status ("single after two failed marriages," one read), and other personal details. "It will add their kids' names and ages, when they tell us them," Alice says, "if they have been to therapy recently, what they have been feeling — anything which can be used by the virtual to keep a sense of real connection..."

If the user asks to move off to a free messaging app, the freelancers must write through the virtuals "I prefer to stay in here until I know you better" or "I feel safer on this app until we are better acquainted," and so on...

One morning, Alice opened her chat to a new message:

"Please stop talking to my husband, he is spending money we do not have to talk to you," read the chat line.
The workers don't even know the source of their profile pictures, Wired points out. "A reverse-image search on some of the images seen by WIRED show that at least some are grabbed from pornography sites."

An official ChatGPT app is now available for iOS, with an Android version coming "soon." It can be downloaded from the App Store here. The Verge reports: The app is free to use, syncs chat history with the web, and features voice input, supported by OpenAI's open-source speech recognition model Whisper. The app works on both iPhones and iPads and can be downloaded from the App Store. OpenAI says it's rolling out the app in the US first and will expand to other countries "in the coming weeks."

OpenAI didn't previously hint that a mobile app was coming, but it makes sense given the incredible popularity of ChatGPT. The AI chatbot launched last November but rocketed in use. Some outside estimates suggest the app attracted 100 million users by January this year, though OpenAI has never confirmed these figures.

SimilarWeb: Developers increasingly get advice from AI chatbots and GitHub CoPilot rather than Stack Overflow message boards. While traffic to OpenAI's ChatGPT has been growing exponentially, Stack Overflow has been experiencing a steady decline -- losing some of its standings as the go-to source developers turn to for answers to coding challenges. Actually, traffic to Stack Overflow's community website has been dropping since the beginning of 2022. That may be in part because of a related development, the introduction of the CoPilot coding assistant from Microsoft's GitHub business. CoPilot is built on top of the same OpenAI large language model as ChatGPT, capable of processing both human language and programming language. A plugin to the widely used Microsoft Visual Studio Code allows developers to have CoPilot write entire functions on their behalf, rather than going to Stack Overflow in search of something to copy and paste. CoPilot now incorporates the latest GPT-4 version of OpenAI's platform.

On a year-over-year basis, traffic to Stack Overflow (stackoverflow.com) has been down by an average of 6% every month since January 2022 and was down 13.9% in March. ChatGPT doesn't have a year-over-year track record, having only launched at the end of November, but its website (chat.openai.com) has become one of the world's hottest digital properties in that short time, bigger than Microsoft's Bing search engine for worldwide traffic. It attracted 1.6 billion visits in March and another 920.7 million in the first half of April. The GitHub website has also been seeing strong growth, with traffic to github.com up 26.4% year-over-year in March to 524 million visits. That doesn't reflect all the usage of CoPilot, which normally takes place within an editor like Visual Studio Code, but it would include people coming to the website to get a subscription to the service. Visits to the GitHub CoPilot free trial signup page more than tripled from February to March, topping 800,000.