Google has agreed to a $68 million settlement regarding claims that its voice assistant inappropriately spied on smartphone users. Plaintiffs claimed that the company’s Google Assistant platform began listening to them after it misheard conversations that sounded like its wake words. The suit argued that private information that Google Assistant shouldn't have heard was then used to deliver [...]
In a new paper that studies tool-use in large language model (LLM) agents, researchers at Google and UC Santa Barbara have developed a framework that enables agents to make more efficient use of tool and compute budgets. The researchers introduce two new techniques: a simple "Budget Tracker" and a more comprehensive framework called "Budget Aware Test-time Scaling." These techn [...]
The App Store is a home for many kinds of apps (including, inexplicably, one that lets users undress strangers without their consent). But hey, it also has games! And soon the store's Apple Arcade service will include one more: the not-so-highly rated Civilization VII.Apple announced on Wednesday that Sid Meier's Civilization VII will arrive almost exactly a year after launch. The game i [...]