Google bids for multimodal AI leadership

Google Cloud Unveils Generative AI Search and Agentic Tools for Retailers Technology News

AI agents are specialised software systems that use AI to execute actions and complete tasks autonomously, using skills such as reasoning, planning, and memory. Even if some uses of generative AI were deemed legal under fair use, ethical concerns remain. Should creators have the right to opt out of having their works used in AI training datasets? Should AI companies share profits with the creators whose works were used for training? These questions highlight the broader moral implications of AI’s reliance on copyrighted material. Generative AI models are trained on massive datasets, often containing millions of works.

To ensure generative AI serves society without undermining creators, we need new legal and ethical frameworks that address these challenges head-on. Only by evolving beyond traditional fair use can we strike a balance between innovation and protecting the rights of those who fuel creativity. The fair use doctrine was designed for specific, limited scenarios—not for the large-scale, automated consumption of copyrighted material by generative AI. While the technology holds immense potential, its current reliance on copyrighted works without permission makes fair use a weak defense. Most datasets used to train generative AI models include copyrighted materials without the creators’ consent.

• The Search tool offers Google-like search capabilities that can be integrated into any website.
• Generative AI models are trained on vast datasets, often containing copyrighted materials scraped from the internet, including books, articles, music and art.
• United Parcel Service Inc. built a dashboard that uses truck-mounted sensor data to optimize real-time delivery routes by issuing specific instructions to drivers in real-time.
• And now, with the Google Pixel’s Magic Editor, you can remove an object or person right there on your screen, with a single tap.
• Upgrade your lifestyleDigital Trends helps readers keep tabs on the fast-paced world of tech with all the latest news, fun product reviews, insightful editorials, and one-of-a-kind sneak peeks.

In manufacturing, AI agents are already helping to enable predictive maintenance and equipment monitoring, ushering in an era of “smart” factory management. In healthcare, AI agents help patients streamline appointment scheduling and automate prescription refilling. Google’s automotive AI agent will even provide near-real-time information about local landmarks and restaurants for Mercedes’ MBUX entertainment and navigation system starting with the next model year’s CLA. Anthropic, best known for its Claude family of AI models, is one of the leading start-ups in the new wave of generative AI companies building tools to generate text, images, and code in response to user prompts. Nividia unveiled its Nemotron model families, designed specifically for agentic AI tasks, at CES 2025 earlier this month. It should come as no surprise then that the industry’s top companies like Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic and Nvidia are all racing to develop and deploy AI agents for the business and consumer markets as well.

What is an agentic AI?

“This combination of multimodal data and AI enables a level of personalization and scalability that was previously unattainable,” Ahmad said. Currently, the platform allows the creation of agents for inventory management, customer service, and connecting with various third-party applications such as Slack, GitHub, Drive, Outlook, and more. With new features and tools being released on a consistent basis, it can be difficult for professionals to know where to start or how to keep up in a constantly changing field. Below, 20 Forbes Business Council members share tips to help professionals effectively break into the AI or generative AI field of work. “We rolled it out for paid users about two months ago,” Kevin Weil, OpenAI’s chief product officer, said during Monday’s livestream. “I can’t imagine ChatGPT without Search now. I use it so often. I’m so excited to bring it to all of you for free starting today.”

Alongside that useful patch was a full-page experience that lets users dive into more relevant and important articles, forums, and more. The company states that users looking up information on recipes will find “top recipes” first, before diving into things regarding its ingredients or other variations. Google says Circle to Search will now “automatically identify” phone numbers, email addresses, and URLs.

Creators have the right to control how their work is used, and the absence of their consent undermines ethical and legal defenses. While fair use—a legal framework allowing limited use of copyrighted material without permission—has long been a pillar of creativity and innovation, applying it to generative AI is fraught with legal and ethical challenges. According to the company, the full o1 model will begin rolling out to folks in OpenAI’s “Tier 5” developer category.

The start-up is in a fierce competition with rivals OpenAI and Elon Musk’s xAI, both of which raised more than $10 billion last year, as well as Facebook parent Meta and Microsoft. Businesses can contact Google Cloud to share their enterprise requirements and get a quote. These cases underscore the difficulty of applying traditional fair use principles to generative AI’s large-scale, automated processes. • AI-generated art could compete directly with human artists, reducing demand for commissions.

Why most companies are not ready for AI agents

The tool can be used to create an internal search experience for websites and domains to help customers navigate through different pages and find the product easily. If you are going to learn AI, there are a number of free classes online that would be a great place to start. AI is here to stay, but it won’t be replacing humans anytime soon, as the human touch still needs to be added to any AI content. People who know how to use AI will replace those who are not trained or certified in AI. The technology is also being applied to enterprise business and Salesforce is far from the only SaaS company to embrace AI agents. Claude’s “Computer Use” API, for example, enables the chatbot to effectively mimic the keyboard strokes and mouse movements of a human user, enabling Claude to interact with the local computing system.

The launch positions Perplexity as a stronger, more direct competitor to larger players such as OpenAI and Google, offering its real-time, web-connected search capabilities to users. In a blog post, Perplexity described Sonar API as “lightweight, affordable, fast, and simple to use,” noting that it includes features such as citations and the ability to customize sources. The company said the API is ideal for businesses requiring streamlined question-and-answer functionalities optimized for speed.

The Search tool offers Google-like search capabilities that can be integrated into any website. The search giant says that the rapid advancement of AI can enable businesses to address bottlenecks such as supply chain complexities and rising costs in managing a diverse range of enterprise applications. To offer a solution, the company announced its Agentspace platform and improvements to the Vertex AI Search for commerce tool. You can find agentic AI in the banking system where it assists with fraud detection and automated stock trading tasks. In the logistics industry, AI agents are used to optimize inventory levels and delivery routes as market and traffic conditions change.

Google announced new artificial intelligence (AI) search and agentic tools for retail-focused enterprises on Sunday. These announcements were made at the ongoing National Retail Federation’s (NRF) 2025 event. The Mountain View-based tech giant introduced its Agentspace platform that enables enterprises to build personalised AI agents for a wide range of automation tasks. Additionally, Google Cloud also shared improvements made to its Vertex AI platform’s Search for commerce tool.

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I do this mainly to be nice, but as an added benefit, I get to try out a lot of new smartphones in a real-world setting. This is helpful to me, because it offers a very different perspective to the sometimes detached feeling you get when reviewing and testing kit for a magazine. But for the tool to succeed, significant customization may be necessary, tailored to specific industries and individual companies. To stay competitive, Perplexity will need to explore other differentiators, such as compliance, Gogia said. Although real-time information capabilities offer clear advantages, they also introduce additional complexities to an already intricate landscape. For enterprises with more complex requirements, Perplexity will offer the Sonar Pro API, which supports multi-step queries, a larger context window for handling longer and more detailed searches, and higher extensibility.

AI systems that are better than almost all humans at almost all tasks,” Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei said in an interview with CNBC on Tuesday. Nonetheless, investors are not anticipating that Anthropic or its rivals will be profitable in the near future, given the steep costs of developing leading AI models. With new breakthroughs, they believe the technology could ultimately create trillions of dollars in value. Google is making a fresh investment of more than $1 billion into OpenAI rival Anthropic, boosting its position in the start-up as Silicon Valley titans rush to develop cutting-edge artificial intelligence systems.

By combining technologies such as image and voice recognition with structured data for retrieval-augmented generation training, organizations can unlock insights from previously unusable data, she said. With some forecasts calling for the multimodal artificial intelligence market to grow more than 35% annually over the next few years, Google LLC is betting it can grab a pole position. The tech giant says that AI agents built via Agentspace can offer product recommendations, answer queries, and guide buyers through their shopping process.

The tool now supports advanced AI models that can be used to improve product discovery of a platform. Additionally, its Connected Stores tool can connect the end users’ devices and in-store systems to improve the omnichannel experience. The tool can be used to browse through a physical store’s catalogue, make payments during checkout, and learn more about the in-stock inventory. From OpenAI’s ChatGPT to Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude, artificial intelligence is increasingly changing the ways in which businesses operate.

Billed as “the next big thing in AI research,” AI agents are capable of operating independently and without continuous, direct oversight, while collaborating with users to automate monotonous tasks. In this guide, you’ll find everything you need to know about how AI agents are designed, what they can do, what they’re capable of, and whether they can be trusted to act on your behalf. Perplexity has introduced an API service named Sonar that would allow developers and enterprises to embed the company’s generative AI search technology into their applications. Google Agentspace is an enterprise platform that allows businesses to build AI agents.

Of course, when a chatbot boofs its answer, the stakes are relatively low (unless that user is a lawyer or Google, mind you), compared to what would happen if an AI agent hallucinates data about its automated stock trading strategy. As with all generative AI, users need to be vigilant about what information (be it financial, medical, or personal) they share with chatbots and LLMs. Yet the more I’ve picked up the latest AI-powered phones, from the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra to the Google Pixel 9, the more I’m starting to worry about the future of photography.

• The fair use doctrine was designed for specific, limited scenarios—not for the large-scale, automated consumption of copyrighted material by generative AI.
• Currently, the platform allows the creation of agents for inventory management, customer service, and connecting with various third-party applications such as Slack, GitHub, Drive, Outlook, and more.
• The launch positions Perplexity as a stronger, more direct competitor to larger players such as OpenAI and Google, offering its real-time, web-connected search capabilities to users.
• “Right now I’m more confident than I have been at any previous time that we are very close to powerful capabilities…

Anthropic, founded in 2021 by a group of former OpenAI employees, has sought to differentiate itself from its rivals by focusing on AI safety. It has poached multiple staff from OpenAI in recent months, including a co-founder of the company. The close relationships between AI start-ups and their Big Tech backers were probed by the Federal Trade Commission during Joe Biden’s administration.

United Parcel Service Inc. built a dashboard that uses truck-mounted sensor data to optimize real-time delivery routes by issuing specific instructions to drivers in real-time. Bell Canada is using AI-generated transcripts of calls to its contact center to train a coaching assistant that delivers feedback to agents. Google estimates that 90% of enterprise data is unstructured, Ahmad said in an interview with SiliconANGLE.

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Anthropic’s revenue hit an annualized $1 billion in December, up roughly 10 times on a year earlier, according to a person with knowledge of the company’s finances. When AI-generated content competes with human creators, courts are unlikely to view its use of copyrighted material as fair. We’ve already crossed Google’s Circle to Search anniversary, which took place during 2024’s launch of the Galaxy S24 series. The feature hit Samsung’s past-gen devices first, alongside Google’s Pixel series before other Android phones. The star of the feature was the user’s ability to highlight anything they see on their phone for a search on Google’s engine.

Google reportedly ‘rushed’ artificial intelligence to Israel after Hamas attack – JNS.org

Google reportedly ‘rushed’ artificial intelligence to Israel after Hamas attack.

Posted: Wed, 22 Jan 2025 15:23:54 GMT [source]

As consumers stare down the launch of the Galaxy S25 series, Google is announcing a new update its search software on Android.

It seems the software will try to identify what it’s seeing in your circled/highlighted box. Once down, Circle to Search will now display an AI Overview first with quick bullet points and links for fact-checking. Moreover, users retain the ability to write a bit text in case they’d like to refine what the AI is searching for. The Alphabet-owned search behemoth had already committed about $2 billion to Anthropic and was now increasing its stake in the group, according to four people with knowledge of the situation.

When this occurs, the company states users will see a new chip that they can tap to call that number, send an email, or head to a website. More importantly, Google warns that this feature “works on compatible apps” and that results “may vary” depending on the visual search. Upgrade your lifestyleDigital Trends helps readers keep tabs on the fast-paced world of tech with all the latest news, fun product reviews, insightful editorials, and one-of-a-kind sneak peeks. On the ninth day of OpenAI’s holiday press blitz, the company announced that it is releasing the full version of its o1 reasoning model to select developers through the company’s API.

While individual pieces may contribute minimally, the sheer scale of usage complicates the argument for fair use. Fair use traditionally applies to specific, limited uses—not wholesale ingestion of copyrighted content on a global scale. Generative AI models are trained on vast datasets, often containing copyrighted materials scraped from the internet, including books, articles, music and art. These models don’t explicitly store this content but learn patterns and structures, enabling them to generate outputs that may closely mimic or resemble the training data.

In November, Microsoft announced Copilot Actions, which would see Copilot-based agents integrated throughout the company’s 365 app ecosystem, and began rolling the feature out to business and enterprise users in January 2025. Being designed to take action for their users, AI agents are able to perform a staggeringly wide variety of tasks. Agentic AI is a type of generative AI model that can act autonomously, make decisions, and take actions towards complex goals without direct human intervention. These systems are able to interpret changing conditions in real-time and react accordingly, rather than rotely following predefined rules or instructions. Based on the same large language models that drive popular chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini, agentic AIs differ in that they use LLMs to take action on a user’s behalf rather than generate content.

And now, with the Google Pixel’s Magic Editor, you can remove an object or person right there on your screen, with a single tap. As a child of the 70s, I remember a time when photography was a craft, defined by its constraints. You loaded a roll of film, measured the light, composed your shot, and pressed the shutter. It will also provide approximately twice the number of citations per search compared to the standard Sonar API, the company said.

The tool is called Whisk, and it’s based on Google’s latest Imagen 3 image generation model. Rather than relying solely on text prompts, Whisk helps you create your desired images using other images as the base prompt. However, significant challenges remain in areas such as data privacy, depth, scale, and audit trails before any company can establish itself as a leader in the field. “Right now I’m more confident than I have been at any previous time that we are very close to powerful capabilities…

One of the most significant fair use factors is the effect on the market for the original work. Generative AI threatens to disrupt creative markets by producing high-quality content at scale. Fair use relies heavily on whether the use is transformative, meaning it adds new meaning, value or purpose to the original work. While human creativity often achieves this through intentionality—commentary, critique or parody—AI outputs rarely meet this standard. And in practice, this means that what I’m seeing on my fellow tourists’ screens is often very different from the scene I’m actually witnessing.

Those are users that have had an account for more than a month and who spend at least $1,000 with the company. The new service is especially pricey for users (on account of the added compute resources o1 requires), costing $15 for every (roughly) 750,000 words analyzed and $60 for every (roughly) 750,000 words generated by the model. Marc Benioff hailed AI agents’ emergence as “the third wave of the AI revolution” last September. The “third wave” is characterized as generative AI systems outgrowing being just tools for human use, instead, evolving into semi-autonomous actors capable of learning from their environments. The company’s cloud computing unit recently asserted that multimodal AI, which combines text, images, video, audio and other unstructured data with generative AI processing, will be one of the top five AI trends of 2025. Google Cloud also shared enhancements made to its Search for commerce tool that can be accessed via the Vertex AI platform.

• An AI-generated artwork blending styles from multiple creators may appear novel but lacks the purposeful transformation of human creativity. Generative AI has emerged as a transformative force in technology, creating text, art, music and code that can rival human efforts. However, its rise has sparked significant debates around copyright law, particularly regarding the concept of fair use. Google also updated its AI Overviews with more organization in its condensed format.

AI lacks the intent to create something transformative, making it challenging to meet this critical fair use requirement. • AI-generated text might reorganize or paraphrase existing content without offering unique insights or value. While these factors have worked well in traditional scenarios like criticism, parody or education, generative AI presents unique challenges that stretch these boundaries.