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💳 No Ticket, No Escape!
Plus: 💫 Google's Co-Founder Returns, 🔀 X Marks the Logo
📸 AI Cameras Catch Fare Evaders in NYC
The New York City subway system is watching people who don’t pay for their rides. And not just with their eyes, but with their AI.
The Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) has installed AI-powered surveillance software at several subway stations to track riders who avoid paying for a ticket.
The software, created by Spanish AI developer AWAAIT, is capable of detecting and sending photographs of fare evaders to the smartphones of nearby station agents.
The MTA claims the software is being used “essentially as a counting tool” to determine how many riders are dodging fares and the methods they’re using to skip the turnstiles.
The MTA has plenty of motivation to crack down on riders who avoid paying their transportation fares, as the estimated loss to fare evasion last year was $690 million.
💫 Google's Co-Founder Sergey Brin Returns to Tackle ChatGPT-4
Google’s co-founder Sergey Brin is back in action.
Brin, who stepped down from an executive role at Alphabet in 2019, is back at the search giant’s headquarters, working on developing a rival to ChatGPT-4 called Gemini.
Some of the work has involved highly technical matters such as measuring the performance of AI, and Brin has also been steering the hiring of researchers and organizing weekly meetings to discuss fresh AI research.
Brin and fellow co-founder Larry Page were first called on for support in December after Google CEO Sundar Pichai issued a “code red” in response to the launch of ChatGPT.
Google is pouring efforts into Gemini, an AI model designed to rival the GPT-4 model underlying OpenAI’s technology. The development of Gemini is being led by Google DeepMind boss Demis Hassabis.
🔀 Twitter's Bold Logo Change and What It Means for the Future
Twitter has removed its iconic bird logo and adopted an ‘X’ as its official logo.
This move comes after Elon Musk announced the change over the weekend. Musk tweeted that x.com now redirects to twitter.com and called this an “interim” logo, so we might see another logo change in the future.
The company’s CEO Linda Yaccarino tweeted that while Twitter changed the way people conversed with each other, X will go further and have features “centered in audio, video, messaging, payment/banking” and make it a “global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities.”
Musk’s obsession with the letter “X” is well known. He founded X.com back in 1997, which eventually became PayPal. His space startup SpaceX has “X” as the logo. And most recently, he founded an AI company called X.ai.
In April, the Musk-owned social network changed its legal name from Twitter Inc. to X Corp.