Twitter suffered a major outage with users worldwide reporting they could no longer read links to articles from outside websites. The breakdown, which appeared fixed in less than an hour, comes as the Elon Musk-owned social media giant was trying hard to stabilize after several rounds of layoffs saw more than two-thirds of staff let go. Experts say Twitter is running on a skeleton staff, leaving the platform vulnerable to outages as well as disinformation and harmful content given the fewer numbers to keep the site up and running.
2/10
Microsoft recently announced that its new Bing search engine has crossed 100 million daily active users. It has been a little over a month since Microsoft introduced the AI-powered Bing Chat feature. Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft's VP for Modern Life, Search, and Devices, said that the company is aware that the numbers are still small, particularly in comparison to Google, which currently has over a billion daily active users. However, the new AI chat feature is helping Bing reach new users it has never had access to before.
3/10
Infinix recently announced its new charging tech that will offer 260W charging support on a smartphone as well as a new standard of wireless fast charging at 110W. Infinix claims that it aimed at providing an all-around fast charging solution, which led to the decision to offer both ultra-fast wired and wireless charging speeds.
4/10
Meta Platforms’ WhatsApp has agreed to be more transparent about changes to its privacy policy introduced in 2021, the European Commission said, following complaints from consumer bodies across Europe. The European Consumer Organisation (BEUC) and the European Network of consumer authorities told WhatsApp last year that it had not clarified the changes in plain and intelligible language, violating the bloc’s laws. The company also confirmed that users’ personal data is not shared with third parties or other Meta companies, including Facebook, for advertising purposes.
DuckDuckGo has partnered with OpenAI, creators of the bot sensation ChatGPT, and Anthropic, an AI research and safety company to roll out new AI features for the internet search engine. Called DuckAssist, it is an enhancement of the Instant Answer feature of the search engine that pools a list of pre-determined sources to answer your queries. DuckDuckGo said that during the initial trials, it is limiting the assistant to DuckDuckGo's app or browser extensions. Additionally, the source has also been limited to Wikipedia, for now.
6/10
Microsoft is testing a new Video Super Resolution feature for the Edge Browser. Super-resolution uses your GPU in conjunction with graphics card agnostic algorithms to remove artifacts and upscale web video to a higher resolution for a sharper, cleaner image. This works on all streaming platforms, like YouTube, playing video through the Edge browser. For the feature to work, you are going to require at least an Nvidia RTX 20-series GPU or AMD's RX5700 and above.
7/10
Twitter is reportedly facing yet another issue, according to several users on the platform who have reported seeing tweets of people on their feed of they do not follow. Since the early hours of March 10, Twitter users have been reporting what appears to be a bug in Twitter’s algorithm with tweets from random users they don’t follow showing up in their Twitter feeds. I have also been experiencing the same issues in my ‘For You’ section.
8/10
Apple has announced a new standalone music app called Apple Music Classical. The app is designed specifically for classical music and will be available for download later this month. The app offers users access to over five million tracks, hundreds of curated playlists, thousands of exclusive albums, insightful composer biographies, deep-dive guides for many key works, intuitive browsing features, and more.
Google has announced that it is expanding the One VPN service to all Google One subscriptions. The service was restricted to Google One members with the 2TB plan or above. The VPN service is available in only a few countries and India is not among them. The VPN only works in 22 countries. The VPN works across devices and supports iOS, Android, Windows, and Mac. The users who have a Google One family plan will be able to share the VPN with others on the same plan.
10/10
OpenAI released its ChatGPT API called ‘GPT-3.5-turbo’ -- giving developers access to speech-to-text capabilities in addition to just chat. According to an announcement blog post by OpenAI, the API is one-tenth the cost of their existing models and achieved a 90 percent cost reduction for ChatGPT since December, priced at $0.002 per 1,000 tokens (about 750 words). According to a TechCrunch report, ChatGPT was recently estimated to be the fastest-growing consumer application in history with over 100 million monthly active users as of December.
