(This article is part of Today’s Cache, The Hindu’s newsletter on emerging themes at the intersection of technology, innovation and policy. To get it in your inbox, subscribe here.)
Apple to update EU browser options
Apple will change how users choose browser options in the European Union, add a dedicated section for changing default apps, and make more apps deletable, the company said on Thursday. The iPhone maker came under pressure from regulators to make changes after the EU’s sweeping Digital Markets Act took effect on March 7, forcing big tech companies to offer mobile users the ability to select from a list of available web browsers on a “choice screen”.
The new rules require mobile software makers to show the choice screen where users can select a browser, search engine and virtual assistant as they set up their phones, which earlier came with preferred options from Apple and Google. In an update later this year, Apple users will be able to select a default browser directly from the choice screen after going through a mandatory list of options.
Microsoft’s new Phi-3.5 models
Microsoft has released the latest batch of open-source small AI models in the Phi series called Phi-3.5. The company has claimed that the three small language models beat competitors including Google’s Gemini 1.5 Flash, Meta’s Llama 3.1, and even OpenAI’s GPT-4o in some benchmarks. The set of three new Phi-3.5 models include the 3.82 billion parameter Phi-3.5-mini-instruct, the 41.9 billion parameter Phi-3.5-MoE-instruct, and the 4.15 billion parameter Phi-3.5-vision-instruct, which were all designed for tasks like basic and fast reasoning, more powerful reasoning and vision tasks like image and video analysis, respectively.
All of these three models are available for download for free and can be run using a local tool like Ollama. Despite its tiny size, the Phi-3.5 Mini Instruct model can process images as well as text and is multilingual too. The model performed quite well at the reasoning tasks and was only beaten by GPT-4o-mini out of its rivals.
YouTube AI chatbot to recover hacked accounts
YouTube has announced a new AI chatbot to help users recover accounts that have been compromised by hackers. Labelled as a “troubleshooting tool,” the feature is available on Google’s support page and accessible through the YouTube Help Center. The chatbot then asks the account owner a series of questions and helps them secure their hacked Google login while also reversing any changes made to their accounts.
The support assistant is currently available in English and is limited to a select number of creators but Google has said that they will be expanding the feature gradually to all YouTube creators. There have been instances in the past when YouTube accounts of even big creators were hacked, while hacked small partnered accounts have taken a long time to resolve.
