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California Lawmakers Amend New AI Bill, Verdict Expected by End of August
- Written by Andrea Miliani Former Tech News Expert
- Fact-Checked by
California’s State Assembly’s Appropriations Committee accepted amendments to the new bill S.B. 1047 this Thursday, and it could potentially become a law by the end of the month.
The “Safe and Secure Innovation for Frontier Artificial Intelligence Models Act” requires companies working with AI products and services in California to test safety before releasing the technologies. It aims to prevent major AI consequences and guarantee safety.
According to The New York Times , if approved, California’s attorney general could sue companies if these technologies cause harm—like human casualties or mass property damage—including local tech giants like Google, OpenAI, and Meta.
Senator Scott Wiener wrote the bill in February and since then it has gone through multiple amendments, especially after the increasing concerns and requests from multiple tech companies who oppose it. This would be one of the final stages of the process to approve it.
According to TechCrunch , the most recent amendments have been suggested by the AI company Anthropic.
“We accepted a number of very reasonable amendments proposed, and I believe we’ve addressed the core concerns expressed by Anthropic and many others in the industry,” said Senator Wiener to TechCrunch. “These amendments build on significant changes to SB 1047 I made previously to accommodate the unique needs of the open source community, which is an important source of innovation.”
One of the significant changes is that the bill will not punish companies for not failing to apply good safety practices before any major consequence has happened, only after, as recommended by Anthropic.
A spokesperson from Google said to The New York Times that their concerns “still stand,” Anthropic said it will carefully review the updates, and Meta and OpenAI—even after its recent report on GPT4-o ’s safety which aligns with the bill’s requirements— declined to comment on the new changes.
Most AI companies are concerned that this bill will discourage the development of the technology or make companies move headquarters to other states. If approved by the Democratic-majority Legislature’s final vote, then the California Senate, and finally the Governor, it could become the first AI safety law in the United States.
Photo by Bastian Riccardi on Unsplash
Google Expands AI Overviews to More Countries and Languages
- Written by Andrea Miliani Former Tech News Expert
- Fact-Checked by
Google announced this Thursday that the AI-powered search feature AI Overviews will be extended to more countries and in more languages in the next few weeks. The company also issued new updates for the search tool.
According to the document shared by the tech giant on its site, the expansion of AI Overviews will begin in six countries and it will consider local languages. The company also announced new features that users registered in the Search Labs program for testing experiments will be able to try.
“After extensive testing and positive feedback, including in the U.S. and Search Labs globally, we’re bringing the helpfulness of AI Overviews to six new countries: United Kingdom, India, Japan, Indonesia, Mexico, and Brazil – along with local language support in each country,” states the announcement.
AI Overviews was launched in May in the United States only and has raised multiple concerns, from how it will affect traffic on websites to the relevance of the results. The AI-powered feature gained an embarrassing reputation among users just a few weeks after it was deployed because it kept giving users inaccurate and absurd information to users.
However, Google highlighted in the update that it has improved its feature and that the new expansion is focused “on maintaining Search’s high bar for information quality.”
Along with the expansion, selected users who have joined the Search Labs programs—across 120 countries—will be able to test a new icon and the inclusion of links to relevant pages so that users can keep reading more information about the topics they want to learn. These new updates come with a different look on the AI Overviews results and as a part of the solution to address concerns regarding the decrease in traffic to websites.
Those in the U.S. will be able to try a new feature to save AI Overview results during searches and explore a new “interests” page.
Google also recently announced other AI features for its Gemini models and the new Pixel 9 devices .
