Hi, I’m Samantha Edwards, an editor at The Globe and Mail. Welcome back to Lately, The Globe’s new tech newsletter – and if you’re here for the first time, welcome! Every Friday morning, I break down the week’s biggest tech stories and how they intersect with, or even change, our world.
In this week’s issue:
🧠 A godfather of AI and the sentience of machines
🤳 Apple’s big AI strategy
🥷 The 23andMe data breach
🦉 Book lights for night owls
A chat about chatbots
Geoffrey Hinton at his home in Toronto.Laura Proctor/The Globe and Mail
Last week, as the world’s most advanced AI researchers signed a public letter warning of the serious risks that AI could pose to our societies, Geoffrey Hinton, a godfather of AI, asked my colleague Ian Brown to have lunch to chat about “sentience in machines.” Hinton helped invent the neural networks that make chatbots like ChatGPT possible – essentially, language models that are trained to predict the next word in a sequence. He worked for Google for a decade, then publicly quit in 2023, citing concerns about the risks of AI.
Over the course of the afternoon, Hinton discussed how chatbots experience emotions even though they don’t show them in the same way humans do, the need for more government regulation in AI, and why he believes there’s a 50-50 chance AI will get smarter than humans. “When it gets smarter than us, I don’t know what the probability is that it will take over, but it seems to me quite likely.”
Three less flashy, non-AI Apple updates
Apple unveiled new AI integrations for the iPhone, iPad and Mac.Supplied
On Monday, Apple unveiled long-awaited AI features coming to the iPhone, iPad and Mac: an upgraded Siri that will act more like a personal assistant (for example, it can find information within a specific e-mail), a new image generator and integration with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. But in all the AI hoopla, a few other features flew under the radar. Here, a quick roundup of what I’m personally excited about:
- The ability to send scheduled texts in iMessage, which already exists for most e-mail providers
- Lock and hide certain apps that will require your Face ID or passcode to open, ideal for keeping any unhinged Notes secured from wandering fingers
- Similar to Airdrop, send money to another iPhone user by bringing two phones close together, without having to exchange contact information.
Canada teams up with the Brits to investigate 23andMe data breach
Last October a data breach was discovered at 23andMe, the direct-to-consumer genetic testing company, that affected roughly 6.9 million customers. This week Canada’s privacy commissioner said it was teaming up with its British counterpart to determine the scope of the breach and whether proper safeguards were in place to protect this highly sensitive information. The hackers targeted Ashkenazi Jews, Wired reported, and posted a sample of the stolen data on a dark web forum with the offer to sell the names, addresses and genetic heritage of users. The leak also appeared to affect hundreds of thousands of users of Chinese descent.
Bonus! Can you spot the real dad joke?
Can you spot a real dad joke from an AI-generated joke?Illustration by Drew Shannon
In honour of Father’s Day, Globe readers submitted their favourite dad jokes. The best (or worst, depending on how you look at it) jokes received are full of puns, wordplay and punchlines we hate to love. But can you tell which dad jokes are dad-approved, and which were written by AI? Take our quiz and find out.
What we’re reading in the Globe
From hype to reality: why Big Tech is fine with launching unreliable AI apps
Copperleaf agrees to $1-billion takeover by IFS, latest exit of TSX-listed tech company
With so much technology in cars, why can’t the screen show me what the check engine light means?
Soundbite
“As somebody who tries to make experimental, forward thinking, futuristic music, these apps are not really for that. It’s really just for keeping you on the app for as long as possible, and you’re not going to stay on the app if you hear a freaky song that you didn’t want to hear.” – Rapper and music producer Cadence Weapon on the problem with music streaming algorithms, as heard on the latest episode of Lately.
What else we’re reading this week:
The Microsoft superstars throw down in Vegas (The Verge)
Doctors couldn’t help. They turned to a shadow system of DIY medical tests (Washington Post)
Adult Money
With this light, I'll have no excuse to scroll on my phone instead of reading.Supplied
Glocusent Bookmark Reading light, $16
If you’re a night owl like me, and you share a bed with someone who is not, you know the struggle of trying to read without disturbing a partner is very real. Enter: the trusty book light. This compact bookmark style light by Glocusent is the size of a thumb drive, so it won’t weigh down your reading material. It has five brightness settings and a colour mode that the Glocusent says filters 99 per cent of blue light to reduce eye strain. Bonus: It’s so light and lasts so long, I won’t have any excuse to ignore my book in order to scroll Wikipedia on my phone endlessly. (And if you need some reading inspo, check out our picks of must-read summer books).
Culture Radar
There was a time when I was devoted BeReal user, as seen through these newsroom snaps.The Globe and Mail
We all got tired of being real
The photo sharing app BeReal was designed to be the antithesis of Instagram. It prompted users once a day to take a photo within a two-minute window, which was then shared with a feed of friends. If you posted late or retook a selfie five times, that would be noted alongside the photo. The idea was for users to be authentic and well, real, unlike the curated personas on other social media apps.
Monthly active users peaked at 15 million in October, 2022 but dropped to 6 million in March 2023. This week, app developer Voodoo announced that it purchased the company for €500 million and will “innovate around new features and refocus on growth.” The app has already strayed from its original ethos – allowing users to post multiple photos a day and featuring brand posts – so it’s unclear what the future of BeReal will look like.