The Data That Powers AI Is Disappearing Fast

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: For years, the people building powerful artificial intelligence systems have used enormous troves of text, images and videos pulled from the internet to train their models. Now, that data is drying up. Over the past year, many of the most important web sources used for training A.I. models have restricted the use of their data, according to a study published this week by the Data Provenance Initiative, an M.I.T.-led research group. The study, which looked at 14,000 web domains that are included in three commonly used A.I. training data sets, discovered an “emerging crisis in consent,” as publishers and online platforms have taken steps to prevent their data from being harvested.

The researchers estimate that in the three data sets — called C4, RefinedWeb and Dolma — 5 percent of all data, and 25 percent of data from the highest-quality sources, has been restricted. Those restrictions are set up through the Robots Exclusion Protocol, a decades-old method for website owners to prevent automated bots from crawling their pages using a file called robots.txt. The study also found that as much as 45 percent of the data in one set, C4, had been restricted by websites’ terms of service. “We’re seeing a rapid decline in consent to use data across the web that will have ramifications not just for A.I. companies, but for researchers, academics and noncommercial entities,” said Shayne Longpre, the study’s lead author, in an interview.

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Apple Vision Pro’s Content Drought Improves With New 3D Videos

More than a dozen new Immersive Videos are coming to Vision Pro, with the first, titled Boundless, launching last night. “The announcement follows a long, slow period for new Vision Pro-specific video content from Apple,” writes Ars Technica’s Samuel Axon. “The headset launched in early February with a handful of Immersive Video episodes ranging from five to 15 minutes each. Since then, only three new videos have been added.” From the report: Tonight’s Boundless episode will allow viewers to see what it’s like to ride in a hot air balloon over sweeping vistas. Another episode titled “Arctic Surfing” will arrive this fall, Apple says. Sometime next month, Apple will publish the second episode of its real wildlife documentary, simply titled Wild Life. The episode will focus on elephants in Kenya’s Sheldrick Wildlife Trust. Another episode is in the works, too. “Later this year,” Apple writes in its newsroom post, “viewers will brave the deep with a bold group of divers in the Bahamas, who come face-to-face with apex predators and discover creatures much more complex than often portrayed.”

In September, we’ll see the debut of a new Immersive Video series titled Elevated. Apple describes it as an “aerial travel series” in which viewers will fly over places of interest. The first episode will take viewers to Hawaii, while another planned for later this year will go to New England. Apple is additionally partnering with Red Bull for a look at surfing called Red Bull: Big-Wave Surfing. In addition to those documentary episodes, there will be three short films by year’s end. One will be a musical experience featuring The Weeknd, and another will take basketball fans inside the 2024 NBA All-Star Weekend. There will also be Submerged, the first narrative fictional Immersive Video on the platform. It’s an action short film depicting struggles on a submarine during World War II.

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CrowdStrike Stock Tanks 15%, Set For Worst Day Since 2022

Shares of cybersecurity company CrowdStrike Holdings dropped 15% on Friday after the company’s software update resulted in what may turn out to be the largest IT outage ever. CrowdStrike stock “is on pace for its steepest daily loss since November 2022 and its $290 low share price is the lowest intraday mark since April 25,” reports Forbes. “CrowdStrike is on track for the third-worst day in its five-year history as a publicly traded company.” From the report: Microsoft, which was swept up in the outage as the downed systems are those running CrowdStrike’s cybersecurity applications and Microsoft’s Windows software, also slumped, with its shares down about 1% to the $3.2 trillion behemoth’s lowest share price since June 11. CrowdStrike competitor Palo Alto Networks enjoyed a 4% rally Friday, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite stock index gained about 0.2%, held up by the likes of Microsoft rival Apple’s 1% stock gain and a 1% rise for shares of Alphabet, which is reportedly in talks to buy cybersecurity firm Wiz for $23 billion.

The CrowdStrike selloff is “an overreaction to a temporary setback,” Rosenblatt analyst Catharine Trebnick wrote in a note to clients Friday. It’s a “compelling buying opportunity” as it “creates a window for investors to buy into a high-quality, growth-oriented cybersecurity company at a discounted valuation,” Trebnick continued. To her point, CrowdStrike stock’s relative valuation, according to its price-to-earnings ratio (P/E), which compares its market value to its projected profits over the next four quarters, fell Friday to its lowest number since April. Still, CrowdStrike’s P/E of about 70 is very high for a company of its size, meaning investors will need to express significant confidence in the business’ ability to grow earnings, a challenge if Friday’s incident were to impact CrowdStrike’s client base.

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“Extraordinarily Disappointed” Users Reckon With the Google-fication of Fitbit

Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from Ars Technica, written by Scharon Harding: Since the acquisition closed in 2021, the Google-fication of Fitbit has largely meant a reduction in features and a focus from Google on getting people onto the Fitbit app. Long-time users have flocked to Fitbit — sometimes upon Fitbit’s request — to share hundreds of complaints about recent changes. However, Google has been mostly unresponsive to customer feedback. […] It’s worth mentioning that users disgruntled with Fitbit are more likely to complain online. However, it’s notable that Fitbit’s announcement has been met with 1,523 (as of this writing) mostly negative replies, with new responses still coming in. Another thread on Fitbit’s forum that requests to keep the web dashboard currently has 601 upvotes. You can find outraged users on Reddit, too.

The most common complaints are around losing previously available features. “Change is fine. Removing key features is not,” Community member Seymourh86 wrote in June. “Unless you want people to go to competitors…” Comments from this week show that users are not over the change. DebL555, for example, said today that they’re “extremely disappointed and frustrated I cannot access my Dashboard on my PC.” Yesterday, NessWeb dubbed the change “an incredibly bad decision,” adding: “It’s particularly awful for anyone with a visual disability or a finger dexterity issue. It’s still bad for everyone else because you just can’t see as much on a 3″ screen as you can see on a real computer … Bring back the web interface!!”

As has been the case every time there have been problems with Fitbit post-acquisition, theories that Google is making Fitbit worse to push people toward the Pixel Watch run rampant. Others on the Community forum were upset because they felt like Google was ignoring feedback from longtime Fitbit customers. In June, a user going by jessicabilasano wrote: “I just hope Fitbit does not end up like any other Google purchase that turns into a nightmare product/company. Google, instead of removing things that users love about Fitbit features, why not improve them? Listen to your customers/consumers.” However, a lack of response to public negative customer feedback has become commonplace for the Fitbit brand lately. “Users seek alternatives as Google is intent on app-centric focus,” captions schwit1. “Google ruins everything, it’s already ruined Google.”

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