Inteligência Artificial

Google wants to be the interface for the web

The opening of Google I/O this year (35-minute video recap) showed a Google less shy about transforming the web into raw material for its AIs.

Search will become (even more) a souped-up ChatGPT, and also the checkout counter for every online store, and YouTube will use video clips to create answer pages.

Notice that in all these announcements, Google/YouTube transforms itself into a curator and interface for web content, without attribution or with minimal credit given. You won’t visit websites anymore; you’ll visit Google — and you’ll stay there. On the flip side, whoever calls themselves a “content creator” is actually a content supplier for platforms. It’s always been that way for Meta (Instagram), TikTok, and YouTube; now it’s also the case for Google, even if unintentionally (myself included!).

All of this amounts to a complete betrayal of everything Google once stood for (and was) back then. Maybe people like this new incarnation because the web, poor thing, has long suffered from the pernicious incentives and destructive influence of Google itself, but nothing is so bad that it can’t get worse.

By the way: Manual do Usuário project offers an instance of SearxNG, a metasearch engine that displays ten (or more) blue links to actual websites. It’s free. Use it and spread the word.

Nvidia announces an AI filter for games, and gamers go wild

Something funny happened in the world of video games.

Nvidia realized that its graphics chips are also good for gaming, not just AI, and announced a technology called DLSS 5 that uses their power to, in the company’s words, “infuse pixels with photoreal lighting and materials to bridge the gap between rendering and reality.” With generative AI, obviously.

The public reaction was quite negative, even on Nvidia’s official YouTube video. DLSS 5 kind of turns the look of games into AI-generated videos. More photorealistic than the original, yes, but the criticism is that the technology interferes with the art of games.

The DLSS 5-on graphics do indeed look like AI-generated videos, or those artificial filters on Instagram and TikTok, but it’s not as if the originals, without the effect, were much better. That intrigued me a bit more than DLSS 5 itself. I haven’t played video games in ages, and these PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X graphics don’t seem all that different from what I remember of video games from two or three generations ago. Given that, I think I prefer Nvidia’s AI-filtered version…?

This article from Gizmodo has some comparisons and videos.

Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, was unfazed by the widespread criticism. During a Q&A session at Nvidia GTC, the company’s AI-focused event, when asked by a reporter, Jensen began his response saying that “Well, first of all, they [critics] are completely wrong” (video).

Firefox 148, released on Tuesday (24th), features a kill switch for the browser's AI features. Below it are selective controls for specific features. All of them are located in a new area in the settings (about:preferences), called “Artificial Intelligence Controls.”

The AI industry doesn’t take “no” for an answer

For days now, I've had a quote from David Bushell stuck in my head:

Has anyone else noticed that the AI industry can’t take “no” for an answer? AI is being force-fed into every corner of tech. It’s unfathomable to them that some of us aren’t interested.

David complained about receiving communications from Proton offering Lumo, its generative AI, even though he had expressly indicated that he did not want to receive such messages. The worst part is that Proton, instead of owning up to its mistake and apologizing, insisted on absurd justifications to say that there was no mistake. It only gave in when an executive got involved, and only after the post went viral.

(more…)

For this [AI] not to be a bubble, by definition it requires that the benefits of this are much more evenly spread. I think a telltale sign of if it’s a bubble would be if all we’re talking about are the tech firms. If all we talk about is what’s happening to the technology side that then that’s just purely supply side.

Bald man wearing glasses, smiling.Satya Nadella,
CEO of Microsoft

I have some bad news for you, Satya…

In another excerpt from the interview, picked up by Pivot to AI, Nadella says that companies need to reorganize around AI to learn, in practice, how to use it in business. Destroy what is working to learn an innovation that might help them… do what they were doing before?

Dell and Microsoft, marketing geniuses

Remember when Warner Bros. changed the name of its streaming service from HBO Max to Max, and then less than a year later back to HBO Max? Or when the richest person in the world proved that money has no relation to intelligence and threw the “Twitter” brand in the trash? Marketing geniuses!

Maybe it's late capitalism, maybe it's a side effect of new drugs circulating among the bigwigs of the world's most powerful companies. Or maybe it's just plain stupidity. The fact is that the practice is spreading, and fast.

In early 2025, Dell revamped its line of notebooks and retired traditional names, including XPS, perhaps the most recognizable after Apple's MacBook. The goal was to simplify. No one understood anything.

Cut to 2026, and Dell announced at CES, to no one's surprise, that it will return to using the XPS brand. They look nice.

Running behind is Microsoft. When accessing the office.com website, we come across this gem (my highlight):

Welcome to the Microsoft 365 Copilot app

The Microsoft 365 Copilot app (formerly Office) lets you create, share, and collaborate all in one place with your favorite apps now including Copilot.*

Just imagine, replacing the brand that has been synonymous with productivity apps for three decades with… Copilot, a slop generator that people generally dislike and only use because their employer requires them to.

Good for us. The less we associate critical software with big tech brands, the better. Long live Microsoft 365 Copilot — or whatever other weird name Word, Excel, and company end up with in the future.

2025 has been a disaster for Windows 11 
windowscentral.com

Zac Bowden wrote a long article stating that Windows fans (the author's definition) have been sold a “disastrous 2025 for Windows 11.” I haven't used Windows in many years and have barely touched version 11, so I read it with extra attention.

Anyway, I'm sure you can guess the most obvious problem with Windows 11 in 2025:

(more…)

The fact that people are unimpressed that we can have a fluent conversation with a super smart AI that can generate any image/video is mindblowing to me.

A picture of Mustafa Suleyman.Mustafa Suleyman
CEO da Microsoft AI

Mustafa Suleyman’s outburst is a reaction to Windows 11 users’ criticism of another Microsoft exec, Pavan Davuluri, who said Windows is evolving into an “agentic” operating system.

“Agentic” is a euphemism tech execs use for “AI‑stuffed software that doesn’t work properly.” In the case of Windows 11, for example, Microsoft warns that AI “agents” can, among other things, install malware and expose private data. Yay…?

I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

2

Mozilla is developing a built‑in AI assistant for Firefox that will be offered as a third browsing mode alongside Normal and Private tabs. They’re calling it “Window AI.”

Details are still scarce. Based on Mozilla’s official announcement on Thursday (13th), it looks like a deeper implementation than the existing sidebar that gives access to third‑party chatbots (ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, etc.). The post stresses the feature will be opt-in and that the user “is in control.”

There’s a waitlist to try the feature and a Mozilla forum thread inviting people to “help shape” the initiative.

(more…)

A few months ago, youtubers reported unsolicited interventions by Google to “improve” their videos with generative AI. It appeared to be a test; now it’s official.

Channel owners can disable this feature in Studio: go to Settings, Channel, Advanced settings and uncheck the two options under Video quality enhancements. For viewers, Google’s suggested workaround is to change the resolution in the player’s settings.

1

In the lawsuit where the US Justice is deciding which “remedy” to give to Alphabet, following its conviction for monopolizing the search engine market, Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice-president of services, said that in April, the volume of searches made via Safari shrank for the first time in history — that is, in almost two decades.

Eddy attributes the decline to the rise of generative AI assistants that deliver pre-digested search results, such as Perplexity (with whom Apple is reportedly in talks), ChatGPT, and Claude.

Alphabet (Google) shares took a 7.5% dive following the Apple executive’s statement, as reported by Bloomberg. The company released a statement disputing the information, saying that “we continue to see overall query growth in Search. That includes an increase in total queries coming from Apple’s devices and platform”

Who to believe? I don’t know, but if there were doubts that a seismic shift is underway, data like this helps dispel them.

Eddy Cue also said that Apple is considering changing Safari so that the browser can incorporate AI assistants, and that he has lost sleep over the possibility of losing the annual USD 20 billion that Google pays as a “sweetener” to be Safari’s default search engine. I almost feel sorry for him.