Facebook Messenger: Meta app is intended to drain the battery heavily on purpose

An ex-Meta employee claims Facebook Messenger sucks smartphone battery life for testing purposes. That is dangerous.

Facebook Messenger is said to be a massive drain on the battery of some users – intentionally and for testing purposes. That's what an ex-employee of Meta Platforms, the parent company, claims. He originally even demanded compensation in a lawsuit and talks about how dangerous these so-called negative tests are. They are, so to speak, stress tests and are intended to show how people react and act with apps when something is not running smoothly.

The lawsuit was first reported by the New York Post, a tabloid. Accordingly, George Hayward claims that the messenger should specifically charge and empty the smartphone battery. He considers this to be negligent, because if the battery is empty, you can no longer call for rescue in an emergency. When he spoke to his boss about it, she replied: "By harming some, we can help many." The case is now before an arbitral tribunal. Because he refused to work on such tests, he was fired. Hence his alleged claim for damages.

Smartphone settings against battery guzzlers

In fact, it has to be said that smartphones display such battery guzzlers. On the iPhone, for example, the "Battery" selection can be found under the settings and below that is a list of which apps account for what percentage of consumption. If an app stands out, that could be noticed. Android also has such an overview - there it is called "Battery" and can even explicitly warn if something is eating up a lot of battery life.

If an app appears to be particularly battery-hungry, this does not have to be due to such stress tests. It can also simply be that one app actually consumes more than another. Instagram with all the pictures, videos and advertisements can hardly be compared to the calendar. In addition, bugs can always be the reason for problems without any intention. Basically, the power-saving mode helps if you are concerned that the battery could drain too quickly. Other options include dark mode for OLED devices or generally dimming the screen, turning off location sharing and forbidding background updates.

Chat GPT, the AI at the service of cheating and scamming

Chat GPT, the chatbot developed by the Californian start-up Open AI, is proving, as its skills are revealed, to be a formidable tool of efficiency for better and for worse.

Within weeks, Chat GPT became a social media star. This "conversational agent" developed by OpenAI is put to all sauces by users: it responds to the most absurd requests with imperturbable phlegm and is able to write an article, a poem, a speech or a song on all themes. and in all styles.

The result is usually indistinguishable from serious work done by a human being. But, past the excitement of discovering a gadget with unlimited skills, some now see very concrete applications in it: this is what a handicapology teacher at the faculty of Lyon saw, reports Le Progrès. Stéphane Bonvallet had given his students three weeks to work on the following subject: "Defining the main features of the medical approach to disability in Europe."

However, on half of the 14 copies returned, the professor noticed troubling commonalities: “We found the same grammatical constructions. The reasoning was conducted in the same order, with the same qualities and the same faults. Finally, they were all illustrated by a personal example, relating to a grandmother or a grandfather…” he explains to Progrès. It was not a banal copy/paste from Wikipedia but a new kind of cheat.

After a brief investigation, the professor was stunned to discover that seven of the 14 assignments had been authored by Chat GPT. A total surprise for Stéphane Bonvallet who had heard of this chatbot without imagining for a moment that he was capable of writing an entire assignment.

In the absence of a rule prohibiting this tool, specifies the Progrès, the professor had to resolve to mark the copies normally for what they were worth, that is to say between 10 and 12. Not without having alerted the direction of the university and having realized, while broaching the subject with colleagues, that cheating with Chat GPT is already a massive phenomenon.

In New York, the realization was quick: the use of Chat GPT is now prohibited in all public schools. But how to spot the Cat GPT paw in an assignment, a much more difficult task than to detect simple plagiarism using software? Here too, countermeasures are being developed. Open AI, for example, plans to associate all the texts provided by Chat GPT with a cryptographic key comparable to an invisible watermark hidden in a photo, proving that it was produced by the bot. Unfortunately, underlines the Journal du Geek, it will be enough to slightly change the turns of the text to make the protection useless.

And the flow of problems and questions raised by the rise of Chat GPT is only growing: it can turn out to be a massive propaganda tool, capable of generating thousands of well-argued pages in a matter of seconds and, notes Numerama , online scammers would already use it to generate convincing scam and phishing emails in many languages. And this, without any syntax or spelling mistakes…

Remember "Chat GPT-3"?

The OpenAI chatbot, which fascinated many Internet users at the end of the year, turned out to be perfectly annoying. In this column, Xavier de La Porte slips into the shoes of an anthropologist exploring our digital life from a very distant future.

At the end of the year 2022, our ancestors were fascinated (or perhaps they were very worried, but the humans of that time manifested these two states in a rather similar way) by the appearance of a being called " GPT-3 chat”. According to the records, he answered all kinds of questions in a coherent and informed manner. He could discuss trivially, but also explain mathematical theorems, illuminate points of meta

The unsuspected medical virtues of ChatGPT revealed by a study

A new study reveals an unexpected effect of ChatGPT-like language models.
Discovering that you know nothing or very little. This is the feeling of many observers with ChatGPT. For example, we would not have imagined that artificial intelligence would have a role to play in helping to detect Alzheimer's disease, which today affects 55 million people worldwide.

A very effective tool

However, researchers at Drexel University in Pennsylvania have just published an important study which shows that GPT-3, the program which is used by ChatGPT, is able to identify certain clues in a person's writings which make it possible to locate the early stages of the disease. The efficiency would reach 80%, a very honorable level.

Quoted by our colleagues from Unite.ai, Hualou Liang, co-author of this research explains: "The most commonly used tests for the early detection of Alzheimer's disease examine acoustic characteristics, such as pauses, articulation and voice quality, in addition to status tests. But we believe that improving natural language processing programs offers another avenue to support the early identification of Alzheimer's disease. ".

Discovering that you know nothing or very little. This is the feeling of many observers with ChatGPT. For example, we would not have imagined that artificial intelligence would have a role to play in helping to detect Alzheimer's disease, which today affects 55 million people worldwide.
A very effective tool

However, researchers at Drexel University in Pennsylvania have just published an important study which shows that GPT-3, the program which is used by ChatGPT, is able to identify certain clues in a person's writings which make it possible to locate the early stages of the disease. The efficiency would reach 80%, a very honorable level.

Quoted by our colleagues from Unite.ai, Hualou Liang, co-author of this research explains: "The most commonly used tests for the early detection of Alzheimer's disease examine acoustic characteristics, such as pauses, articulation and voice quality, in addition to status tests. But we believe that improving natural language processing programs offers another avenue to support the early identification of Alzheimer's disease. ".

So how does it work ? GPT-3 is well suited to spot certain language features that predict dementia, the authors explain. By training this language model on this specific point, it could identify these markers even better.

Suiting words to deeds, the scientists “fed” GPT-3 with patient voice recordings to test the relevance of AI in diagnosis. Some had Alzheimer's disease while others did not. As we have seen above, the results were very conclusive.

And the researchers conclude: "Our results demonstrate that text integration, generated by GPT-3, can be used reliably not only to detect people with Alzheimer's disease compared to healthy controls, but also to infer the subject's cognitive test score, in both cases based solely on the voice data."

Discovering that you know nothing or very little. This is the feeling of many observers with ChatGPT. For example, we would not have imagined that artificial intelligence would have a role to play in helping to detect Alzheimer's disease, which today affects 55 million people worldwide.
A very effective tool

However, researchers at Drexel University in Pennsylvania have just published an important study which shows that GPT-3, the program which is used by ChatGPT, is able to identify certain clues in a person's writings which make it possible to locate the early stages of the disease. The efficiency would reach 80%, a very honorable level.

Quoted by our colleagues from Unite.ai, Hualou Liang, co-author of this research explains: "The most commonly used tests for the early detection of Alzheimer's disease examine acoustic characteristics, such as pauses, articulation and voice quality, in addition to status tests. But we believe that improving natural language processing programs offers another avenue to support the early identification of Alzheimer's disease. ".

Artificial intelligence: we explain the Chat GPT revolution

A new conversational robot was born at the end of 2022. Chat GPT reinforces the capacity of artificial intelligence to produce credible but not infallible texts. Competition for Google.

“Please Chat GPT… Write me an article!” "Here is an article on the benefits of hiking in the mountains..." Admittedly, the robot does not have the poetry of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. It is nonetheless the prodigious chatbot of the moment. Guided by a "natural" language and deep scanning of the web until 2021, this conversational robot deceives the Internet user in a few seconds with a confusing repartee...

Reactions to WhatsApp messages are about to be launched

In a context where Facebook is rebranding itself as Meta, WhatsApp has added a new way for users not to get caught up in the conversation. As part of the company’s vision to unify the experience across all of its apps, Meta-owned WhatsApp could now allow users to reply to messages with emojis, like on Instagram and Facebook Messenger.

We know that WhatsApp has been working to provide post-like reactions to Instagram DMs for quite some time now. The feature was first spotted in September, and since then we've seen WhatsApp add features, labels, and text related to this feature here and there.

Now, according to a new report from WABetaInfo, WhatsApp is close to launching reactions to the messages. Like all other features, reactions to WhatsApp messages will first be available for testing for beta users, and then they will appear in the stable version. The post noted that "reaction notifications" are now available in the beta version of the Android app.

Google makes commitments on the future of online advertising

The American giant has made further concessions to the British antitrust. It wants to ensure that its competitors will not be harmed by the scheduled end of third-party cookies in its Chrome browser in 2023.

Reassure, reassure again, reassure always. This has been the watchword since Google announced in early 2020 that it intended to delete third-party cookies from its Chrome browser - small files that record the behavior of Internet users and are used to send them targeted ads based on their interests. , but also to measure the effectiveness of advertising campaigns.

Advertising professionals fear that Google will take advantage of this upheaval to further strengthen its control over the sector. A proactive investigation was opened in early 2021 by the CMA (the British competition authority) on the subject (also scrutinized by the French CNIL and European antitrust).

Capitalism increased. Facebook throws us into the matrix

Caught in the turmoil, Mark Zuckerberg picks up the pace: he renamed Facebook Meta, and laid the foundations for the metaverse, "the future of the Net" according to him. A closed, 3D, immersive ecosystem that promises to isolate the user in virtual happiness and the firm from very real exponential profits.

M like Meta. Or like Mark - we thought you had to be President of the French Republic to dare to name your company or party with your initials - as a metastasis or even as a megalomaniac. Facebook's name and logo change (a blue M pulling on both the glasses and the infinity sign) can be a bit of a smile. But if Mark Zuckerberg is to be believed, the group no longer wants to be reduced to the social network where it was born. “Right now our brand is so tied to a single product that it is impossible for it to represent everything we do today, let alone what we will do in the future,” explained the CEO.

Metaverse: Niantic wants it in augmented reality

Technology: The publisher of Pokémon Go is raising 300 million to develop one of these virtual universes that have proliferated lately, in word at least.

What if the real metaverse was on the Pokémon side? The publisher of Pokémon Go, Niantic, is raising 300 million to develop one of these virtual universes that have proliferated lately, in word at least.

The company wants to create an organizational alliance, in the first place to affirm the vision of a “real world metaverse”. Understand here that the augmented reality star, with his Pokémon Go game which uses a smartphone camera to place virtual objects in the physical environment, does not hear that the metaverse looks like a Second Life accessible via a reality headset Virtual.

Facebook uses first-person videos to train future AIs

One of the obvious goals of almost every computer vision project is to enable a machine to see and perceive the world as a human does. Today Facebook started talking about Ego4D, its own effort in the field, for which it created a huge new dataset to train future models. In a statement, the company said it had recruited 13 universities in nine countries that had collected 2,200 hours of footage from 700 participants. This footage was captured from the user's perspective that can be used to train these future AI models. Kristen Grauman, lead researcher at Facebook, says this is the largest collection of data created specifically for this focus.
sunglasses, sunglasses: Ray-Ban Stories. © Karissa Bell Ray-Ban stories.

The footage focused on a range of common experiences in human life, including social interaction, hand and object manipulation, and predicting what will happen. For the social network, this is a big step towards better computing experiences, which until now have always been about getting data from the perspective of the viewer. Facebook has announced that the datasets will be released in November "for researchers who sign Ego4D's data usage agreement". And for the next year, researchers outside of this community will be challenged to better train machines to understand what exactly people are doing in their lives.

Of course there is the aspect that Facebook, which now has a camera glasses partnership with Ray Ban, would like to improve its own skills in the future. You probably already know the dangers of this potential surveillance and why someone might be a little suspicious of the announcement.