The Morning After: Google dismisses Elon Musk’s claim that autocomplete interfered in the election
Google has responded to allegations it “censored” searches about Donald Trump after Elon Musk baselessly claimed the company had imposed a “search ban” on the former president. Google explained the bugs in its autocomplete feature caused the issues. But Musk’s tweet, viewed more than 118 million times, has forced the search giant to publicly explain one of its most basic features.
Google added that the strange suggestions for “president donald” were due to a “bug that spanned the political spectrum.” It also affected searches related to former President Barack Obama and other political figures.
— Mat Smith
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Perplexity will put ads in its AI search engine
Perplexity will start sharing revenue with some publishers as part of an advertising platform it plans to launch around the end of September. The Perplexity Publishers’ Program comes less than two months after the startup, valued at $3 billion, came under fire from Forbes, Wired and Condé Nast for allegedly scraping content without permission.
Samsung tests its Galaxy Z Flip phones as police bodycams
A pilot scheme is expanding to 25 metro police departments across five states.
A new blog post from Samsung highlights how law enforcement is adopting its Galaxy Z Flip series devices. The line of foldable mobile devices was part of a pilot program, two years ago, in Kimberling City Police and Indian Point Police in Missouri, to test how the phones might improve daily operations. According to Samsung, the program was the first time police used a foldable device as a bodycam. The foldables were customized in collaboration with Visual Labs, a company that repurposes mobile devices as body and dash cameras.
This robot dog has a vacuum to clean up trash
It uses AI to pick cigarette butts up from Italy’s beaches.
Italian scientists have built a quadruped robot that can identify litter and pick up the smaller bits with its leg-mounted vacuums. The group published a paper in April’s Journal of Field Robotics on VERO’s development. Discarded butts release toxic chemicals and microplastics into the ocean as they break down. It’s also the “second most common undisposed waste worldwide” in areas that are hard to reach for most robots. VERO picked up 90 percent of the cigarette butts identified in testing.
