Apple’s recent Siri delays have stirred up a mess of bad press, and reportedly led to an all-hands meeting where an exec called the affair “ugly and embarrassing.” But per another key quote from that meeting, there’s no doubt Apple saved itself a world of trouble with the move.
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Since Amazon announced plans for a generative AI version of Alexa, we were concerned about user privacy. With Alexa+ rolling out to Amazon Echo devices in the coming weeks, we’re getting a clearer view at the privacy concessions people will have to make to maximize usage of the AI voice assistant and avoid bricking functionality of already-purchased devices.
In an email sent to customers today, Amazon said that Echo users will no longer be able to set their devices to process Alexa requests locally and, therefore, avoid sending voice recordings to Amazon’s cloud. Amazon apparently sent the email to users with “Do Not Send Voice Recordings” enabled on their Echo. Starting on March 28, recordings of everything spoken to the Alexa living in Echo speakers and smart displays will automatically be sent to Amazon and processed in the cloud.
Attempting to rationalize the change, Amazon’s email said:
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It is hard to describe how utterly joyless and devoid of imaginative ideas The Electric State is. Netflixâs latest feature codirected by Joe and Anthony Russo takes many visual cues from Simon StÃ¥lenhagâs much-lauded 2018 illustrated novel, but the filmâs leaden performances and meandering story make it feel like a project borne out by a streamer that sees its subscribers as easily impressed dolts who hunger for slop.Â
While you can kind of see where some of the money went, itâs exceedingly hard to understand why Netflix reportedly spent upward of $300 million to produce what often reads like an idealized, feature-length version of the AI-generated âmoviesâ littering social media. With a budget that large and a cast so stacked, you would think that The Electric State might, at the very least, be able to deliver a handful of inspired set pieces and characters capable of leaving an impression. But all this clunker of a movie really has to offer is nostalgic vibes and groan-inducing product placement.
Set in an alternate history where Walt Disneyâs invention of simple automatons eventually leads to a devastating war, The Electric State centers Michelle (Millie Bobby …
In a new paper published Thursday titled "Auditing language models for hidden objectives," Anthropic researchers described how models trained to deliberately conceal certain motives from evaluators could still inadvertently reveal secrets, thanks to their ability to adopt different contextual roles or "personas." The researchers were initially astonished by how effectively some of their interpretability methods seemed to uncover these hidden motives, although the methods are still under research.
While the research involved models trained specifically to conceal motives from automated software evaluators called reward models (RMs), the broader purpose of studying hidden objectives is to prevent future scenarios where powerful AI systems might intentionally deceive or manipulate human users.
While training a language model using reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), reward models are typically tuned to score AI responses according to how well they align with human preferences. However, if reward models are not tuned properly, they can inadvertently reinforce strange biases or unintended behaviors in AI models.
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OpenAI and Google are pushing the US government to allow their AI models to train on copyrighted material. Both companies outlined their stances in proposals published this week, with OpenAI arguing that applying fair use protections to AI “is a matter of national security.”
The proposals come in response to a request from the White House, which asked governments, industry groups, private sector organizations, and others for input on President Donald Trump’s “AI Action Plan.” The initiative is supposed to “enhance America’s position as an AI powerhouse,” while preventing “burdensome requirements” from impacting innovation.
In its comment, Open claims that allowing AI companies to access copyrighted content would help the US “avoid forfeiting” its lead in AI to China, while calling out the rise of DeepSeek.
“There’s little doubt that the PRC’s [People’s Republic of China] AI developers will enjoy unfettered access to data — including copyrighted data — that will improve their models,” OpenAI writes. “If the PRC’s developers have unfettered access to data and American companies are left without fair use access, the race for AI is effectively over.”
Google, unsurprisingly, agrees. The company’s response similarly states that copyright, privacy, and patents policies “can impede appropriate access to data necessary for training leading models.” It adds that fair use policies, along with text and data mining exceptions, have been “critical” to training AI on publicly available data.
“These exceptions allow for the use of copyrighted, publicly available material for AI training without significantly impacting rightsholders and avoid often highly unpredictable, imbalanced, and lengthy negotiations with data holders during model development or scientific experimentation,” Google says.
Anthropic, the AI company behind the AI chatbot Claude, also submitted a proposal – but it doesn’t mention anything about copyrights. Instead, it asks the US government to develop a system to assess an AI model’s national security risks and to strengthen export controls on AI chips. Like Google and OpenAI, Anthropic also suggests that the US bolster its energy infrastructure to support the growth of AI.
Many AI companies have been accused of ripping copyrighted content to train their AI models. OpenAI currently faces several lawsuits from news outlets, including The New York Times, and has even been sued by well-known names like Sarah Silverman and George R.R. Martin. Apple, Anthropic, and Nvidia have also been accused of scraping YouTube subtitles to train AI, which YouTube has said violates its terms.
Anthropic is one of the worldâs leading AI model providers, especially in areas like coding. But its AI assistant, Claude, is nowhere near as popular as OpenAIâs ChatGPT.
According to chief product officer Mike Krieger, Anthropic doesnât plan to win the AI race by building a mainstream AI assistant. âI hope Claude reaches as many people as possible,â Krieger told me onstage at the HumanX AI conference earlier this week. âBut I think, [for] our ambitions, the critical path isn’t through mass-market consumer adoption right now.â
Instead, Krieger says Anthropic is focused on two things: building the best models; and what he calls âvertical experiences that unlock agents.â The first of these is Claude Code, Anthropicâs AI coding tool that Krieger says amassed 100,000 users within its first week of availability. He says there are more of these so-called agents for specific use cases coming this year and that Anthropic is working on âsmaller, cheaper modelsâ for developers. (And, yes, there are future versions of its biggest and most capable model, Opus, coming at some point, too.)
Krieger made his name as the cofounder of Instagram and then the news aggregati …
Google will replace Google Assistant on Android phones with Gemini later this year, the company announced on Friday. Google said in a blog post that it’ll upgrade more users from Google Assistant to Gemini “over the coming months.” Later this year, Assistant will no longer be accessible on most mobile devices or available from app […]
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This week, Google released a family of open AI models, Gemma 3, that quickly garnered praise for their impressive efficiency. But as a number of developers lamented on X, Gemma 3’s license makes commercial use of the models a risky proposition. It’s not a problem unique to Gemma 3. Companies like Meta also apply custom, […]
© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Amazon is discontinuing a feature that allowed users of some of its Echo smart speakers to choose not to send their voice recordings to the cloud. According to an email the company sent to users that was posted on Reddit, it will disable the feature that allowed select Echos to process Alexa requests locally on the device on March 28th, 2025.
The move appears to be connected to the launch of its generative AI-powered Alexa Plus, slated for later this month (March 28th, perhaps?). The email states, “As we continue to expand Alexa’s capabilities with generative AI features that rely on the processing power of Amazon’s secure cloud, we have decided to no longer support this feature.”
Amazon confirmed the change in an email to The Verge. Spokesperson Lauren Raemhild provided the following statement: “The Alexa experience is designed to protect our customers’ privacy and keep their data secure, and that’s not changing. We’re focusing on the privacy tools and controls that our customers use most and work well with generative AI experiences that rely on the processing power of Amazon’s secure cloud. Customers can continue to choose from a robust set of tools and controls, including the option to not save their voice recordings at all. We’ll continue learning from customer feedback and building privacy features on their behalf.”
As she states, you’ll still be able to have Amazon delete voice recordings after they’ve been sent to the cloud. If you have “Do Not Send Voice Recordings” option turned on, it will default to the “Don’t save recordings” setting on March 28th. This means your recordings will be sent to and processed in the cloud and then deleted after Alexa deals with the request.
If you haven’t heard of this option, it’s not a surprise. Local processing of voice recordings was only available on three Echo devices – Echo Dot (4th Gen), Echo Show 10, and Echo Show 15 – and only for customers in the U.S. with devices set to English.
Still, it’s a shame the option is going away, as it was a feature many would have liked to see expanded to more devices, not taken away, especially for smart home users who may only use the voice assistant to turn their lights on or adjust their thermostat. But it seems Alexa’s future, and to be fair, most of its past, is all about the cloud.
For those looking for a non-cloud-dependent voice assistant, Home Assistant’s new Voice PE is worth considering.
