Updates, Copies and Algorithms

App Updates And Algorithms

Instagram Has Started Placing Ads In Search Results

Instagram has started letting companies slip ads into the feed that appears when you tap into a post in Instagram's search results. While Instagram's post vaguely states the ads will reach people actively searching for businesses, products and content, company spokesperson Shenny Barboza has since confirmed that ads will appear for search terms within the community and recommendation guidelines. Additionally, Instagram is rolling out "reminder ads," which send push notifications to remind you of an upcoming event or important date, but only if you opt in to receive them.

WhatsApp's Latest Updates Make Groups Easier To Manage

WhatsApp has announced two new features to improve the privacy of community group chats and make it easier to find groups users have in common. One feature will let WhatsApp group admins decide who is permitted to join their group from an invite link or community, granting them more proactive control over group privacy. The other feature allows users to search a contact's name to see a list of the groups they're both a member of, which can help members check if they have joined all of the correct groups.

Apple Music Bug Adds Other People's Playlists To Users' Libraries

Apple Music users have started noticing a strange issue that is causing other people's playlists and songs to show up in their libraries, leaving them unable to access the music they once had. This issue is only affecting the Apple Music app on iOS and could be related to some iCloud syncing issue. Toggling off iCloud syncing and turning it back on has helped, but Apple still hasn't acknowledged the issue. This problem is similar to a bug that affected iCloud for Windows last year.

Companies Are Creating More ChatGPT Lookalikes

Mozilla Is Creating A Startup To Build More Open And Trustworthy AI

Mozilla is creating a new startup called Mozilla.ai to build a trustworthy and independent open-source AI ecosystem. Moez Draief, a longtime AI researcher and scientist, is leading the startup, and Mozilla is investing $30 million to get it started. This is a familiar playbook for Mozilla, as it has a long history of being a small but influential player in the market, especially with Firefox. The Mozilla.ai announcement is light on detail about what the company plans to work on, but it sounds as though it will focus on building safety and transparency tools for developers rather than trying to compete with GPT-4. CEO Mitchell Baker believes we are headed into a moment of real change in the browser space, which could help Firefox (or some other browser) win back some market share.

It's interesting timing for this announcement, as Bard and Bing are owned and operated by two of the largest companies in tech, both of which have a vested interest in keeping their experience closed. Mozilla seems to figure that someone will have to champion a better model for building AI and that it might be the only company that can do it.

GitHub Copilot Provides A ChatGPT-like Assistant To Help Developers Write And Fix Code

GitHub is overhauling its Copilot system to integrate OpenAI's GPT-4 model and bring chat and voice support to its AI pair programmer. This includes a ChatGPT-like experience inside code editors, allowing the chatbot to recognize and explain code, recommend changes, and fix bugs. GitHub Copilot can sit at the side of your integrated development environment (IDE), ready to accept commands. It appears as a sidebar similar to Bing chat in Microsoft Edge, but GitHub is also working on features that will make Copilot appear elsewhere. GitHub is integrating its "Hey, GitHub!" functionality into Copilot, an AI-powered chat system.

Copilot uses a mix of OpenAI models to power its new chat and auto-complete features. It can also help with AI-generated answers about code documentation, offering answers for React, Azure docs, and MDN. It is also coming to pull requests to help developers create AI-generated descriptions. Finally, Copilot is coming to the command line interface (CLI) to help developers write and execute a command. This new Copilot X system will only initially be available inside Microsoft's Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code apps. Still, GitHub plans to expand it to other IDEs in the future.

GitHub's new Copilot X features remind me of Microsoft's Microsoft 365 Copilot, which has revolutionized how we create spreadsheets and Word documents. GitHub's Copilot has already played a major role in developer productivity, helping developers code up to 55% faster. AI assistants like Copilot are going to be fundamental to how people learn how to code in the future, as they can remember what they learned as a six-year-old.

Microsoft Loop Now Offers Futuristic Office Documents

Microsoft is now letting anyone preview Microsoft Loop, a collaborative hub offering a new way of working across Office apps and managing tasks and projects. It includes workspaces and pages where you can import and organize tasks, projects, and documents, and shareable components that let you turn any page into a real-time block of content that can be pasted into Microsoft Teams, Outlook, Word on the web, and Whiteboard. Loop components are constantly updated and editable for whoever they're shared with and can support up to 50 people editing a workspace at once. The main interface looks a lot like Notion, a workspace app that Adobe, Figma, Amazon use, and many other businesses. The project and task management features are largely what you'd expect. Microsoft developed Loop during the pandemic and hybrid work to help fill the gaps in virtual teams.

It includes nudges, a way to drop an emoji on a canvas that animates to show appreciation for co-workers, and the mobile Loop app, designed for capturing photos, ideas, and more. Loop is the result of years of work from Microsoft to create a new kind of Office document. Microsoft is opening Loop to public preview, allowing businesses and even consumers to access an early version of the software. Microsoft is also privately testing its new Microsoft 365 Copilot system, which allows users to use AI-powered suggestions to create brainstorming or blueprints. Notion has a similar AI-powered system that goes much further, allowing users to analyze meeting notes, create summaries, surface important information, and rewrite or generate text.