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It emerged recently that Humane was trying to sell itself for as much as $1 billion after its confuddling, expensive and ultimately pretty useless AI Pin flopped. A New York Times report that dropped on Thursday shed a little more light on the company's sales figures and, like the wearable AI assistant itself, the details are not good.

By early April, around the time that many devastating reviews of the AI Pin were published, Humane is said to have received around 10,000 orders for the device. That's a far cry from the 100,000 it was hoping to ship this year, and about 9,000 more than I thought it might get. It's hard to think it picked up many more orders beyond those initial 10,000 after critics slaughtered the AI Pin.

At a price of $700 (plus a mandatory $24 per month for 4G service), that puts Humane's initial revenue at a maximum of about $7.24 million, not accounting for canceled orders. And yet Humane wants a buyer for north of $1 billion after taking a swing and missing so hard it practically knocked out the umpire.

HP is reportedly one of the companies that Humane was in talks with over a potential sale, with discussions starting only a week or so after the reviews came out. Any buyer that does take the opportunity to snap up Humane's business and tech might be picking up somewhat of a poisoned chalice. Not least because the company this week urged its marks customers to stop using the AI Pin's charging case over a possible “fire safety risk.”

Google first launched NotebookLM, its AI-powered research tool, in summer 2023 and now the company is expanding its capabilities and access. In a new blog post, Google announced that NotebookLM is officially running on Gemini 1.5 Pro, an upgrade from the original Gemini Pro model that brings a host of new features. The research and writing assistant has also expanded to over 200 countries and territories. 

NoteBookLM works differently than many other AI-powered tools in that it only takes from the resources you provide, rather than a plethora of general knowledge. The research assistant has always accepted files such as transcripts, research notes and corporate documents from Google Docs or in PDF format, but now you can also upload Google Slides and web URLs. 

Other new features include letting you ask questions about images, charts and diagrams, along with including images in citations as further supporting evidence. Then there's a boost to inline citations, which now bring you directly to the supporting passages so you can confirm the AI knows what it's talking about. Plus there's Notebook Guide, which will convert your sources into clear formats like FAQs and briefing docs. 

I'm the first to admit that the amount of joy Google Sheets brings me is a bit odd, but I use it for everything from tracking my earnings to planning trip budgets with friends. So, I'm excited to see that Google is making it easier to get notified about specific changes to my spreadsheet without me learning to code (something I've just never gotten into). The company has announced that Google Sheets is getting conditional notifications, meaning you can set rules in spreadsheets that send emails when certain things happen.

For example, you could set it to send you an email notification when a number drops below or above a certain amount or when a column's value changes at all. You can also set rules that align more with a project manager tool, like getting a notification when a task's status or owner changes. This tool only requires edit access, with anyone able to set notifications for themselves or others by entering their email addresses. Don't worry, you can unsubscribe if someone starts sending you unwanted notifications.

To use conditional notifications, go to tools and then conditional notifications or just right-click in a cell. From there, click add rule (you can name the rule or let Google auto-label it) and then select a custom range or column. You can add additional criteria for the rule, such as exactly what a box should say for you to receive a notification. Then, you can manually input email addresses or select a column containing them. However, Google warns that if you do the latter, the number of cells must match the number included in the rule. So, if you have three cells in the rule, you can only highlight three cells with email addresses. If you get confused, Google gets into all the nitty-gritty of it here.

Google Sheet's conditional formatting is available to anyone with the following workplaces: Businesses Standard and Plus, Education Plus and Enterprise Starter, Standard, Plus or Essential. It started rolling out for Rapid Release domains on June 4 and will begin showing up for Standard Release domains on June 18. In both cases, conditional formatting might take up to 15 days to appear.

NewsBreak, a popular free news app in the US, has been publishing fictitious stories written by AI since 2021, according to Reuters. The app publishes licensed content from legitimate news sources, such as CNN, AP and Reuters itself, but it also uses artificial intelligence tools to rewrite press releases and local news. One of the most egregious examples of a false news story by NewsBreak was published on Christmas Eve last year. The app's writeup claimed that there was a shooting in Bridgeton, New Jersey when no such incident took place. 

New Jersey's police department dismissed the claims made in the article before the app, which said it got the information from another website, took it down four days later. In January, February and March, a Colorado-based food bank told Reuters that it had to turn people away because NewsBreak published the wrong time for food distribution. It also received no response from the company when it complained about its inaccurate reporting. 

Another charity in Pennsylvania said NewsBreak published a report, twice, that claimed it was holding a 24-hour foot-care clinic for homeless people when it wasn't. The app removed all the false stories involving the charities after Reuters notified it. In March, it added a warning on its homepage that says its content "may not always be error-free," as well. Aside from publishing erroneous stories, NewsBreak allegedly copied articles from websites without permission and had previously settled copyright infringement cases with at least two publications. Reuters describes NewsBreak as the "most downloaded US news app." If you haven't heard of it before, that's probably because its users are predominantly women above the age of 45, who don't have college degrees and who live in suburban and rural US. It's known for posting links on social networks like Facebook, and clicking on one will prompt you to download the app. 

NewsBreak, which is only available in the US, launched in the country as a subsidiary of China-based company Yidian, which is partly owned by a Chinese state-linked media firm. Yidian is no longer connected with the app, but one of its primary investors is IDG Capital, a Beijing-based company that the Pentagon says is affiliated (PDF) with the Chinese military. 

Former employees told Reuters that NewsBreak's China-based engineers do most of the work on its algorithms, even though the app presents itself as a US-based company with US investors. NewsBreak CEO Jeff Zheng told Reuters that it complies with US data and privacy laws and that it's maintained on Amazon servers based in the United States. Its Chinese staff, Zheng said, can only access anonymous data stored on those servers. It's worth noting that despite its connection to China, Reuters didn't find evidence that NewsBreak has published stories that showed the Chinese government in a positive light. 

Microsoft is under investigation by the Federal Trade Commission over its deal with Inflection AI, according to The Wall Street Journal. Back in March, the company hired almost all of Inflection AI's employees, including founders Karén Simonyan and Mustafa Suleyman, who was also a DeepMind cofounder. In addition, Microsoft paid Inflection AI $650 million to license its artificial intelligence technology. Now, the FTC wants to know whether the companies deliberately structured the deal to avoid being the subject of regulatory antitrust review. 

As The Journal notes, companies are required to report any acquisition that's valued at $119 million or more to federal antitrust agencies. The FTC or the Justice Department could then investigate whether the deal stifles competition in the industry and then sue to block the merger or the investment that it deems to be anti-competitive. When companies want to hire all the talent in another firm, they typically buy the other out in an "acquihire." But Microsoft didn't buy Inflection, which denied that the bigger company has any power over it. Ted Shelton, its new COO, told the publication that it still operates as an independent company under new leadership. 

The FTC has already sent out subpoenas to both Microsoft and Inflection, asking for relevant documents over the past two years. If it does determine that the companies entered into an agreement in a way that would give Microsoft control over the other while dodging regulatory review, then Microsoft could be fined, and the transaction could be suspended pending a more in-depth investigation. 

US federal agencies have been cracking down on monopolistic practices by the world's largest tech companies over the past few years. To be even more efficient in conducting antitrust investigations involving the current biggest players in artificial intelligence, the agencies have also just struck a deal on how they're dividing their responsibilities. The Justice Department will take the lead in investigations involving NVIDIA, while the FTC will take charge of antitrust probes involving Microsoft and OpenAI.

When we reviewed the Dell XPS 16 and XPS 14 laptops earlier this year, one of our biggest complaints with both models was the relatively exorbitant prices. Now, Dell has addressed this to a minor extent by dropping the price of both models by $200 across all configurations, the company told Engadget in an email. 

Dell cited a couple of examples of high-end configurations. The XPS 14 build with an Intel Core Ultra 7 processor, 32GB of RAM, 1TB of storage, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4050 and a 3.2K OLED display is now $2,500 instead of $2,700. Meanwhile, the higher-end XPS 16 with the same specs but the addition of a GeForce RTX 4070 and 4K OLED display drops from $3,400 to $3,200. 

Lower-end configurations are also $200 cheaper and represent a better saving, percentage-wise. The XPS 16 starts at $1,900 so it's now $1,700, while the base 14-inch model drops from $1,700 to $1,500. 

That's still MacBook Pro M3 money for similar higher-end models (the 16-inch 36GB M3 Pro model is $2,900). However, it shows some acknowledgement from Dell that the original price was too steep and may have impacted sales. 

In fairness, these are among the best Windows laptops available (Dell obviously felt they were worth a premium), with glorious screens and a blend of beauty and power. They also offer solid connectivity, though we disliked the invisible trackpad and capacitive top row buttons that disappear in bright sunlight. 

Because there simply aren’t enough AI-powered chatbots out there, we’re getting one more. This one, called AI Chat, comes courtesy of DuckDuckGo, the privacy-focused search engine that obviously doesn’t want to feel left behind in the AI arms race. The company has been testing AI Chat over the last few months, but as of today, it’s available to everyone.

Unlike other standalone bots like Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT that are powered by their own large language models, DuckDuckGo’s AI Chat is not. Instead, think of it as a way to access multiple chatbots in a single place. Right now, AI chat will let you choose between OpenAI’s GPT 3.5, Anthropic’s Claude 3 Haiku, Meta’s Llama 3 and Mistral’s Mistral 8x7B, and the company says that more models are coming soon. The main differences between them largely boil down to how many parameters — technical speak for the settings that a large language model can tweak to give you an answer — each one has. If you don’t like a model’s answer, you can try another one. 

AI Chat is free to use but is capped with the daily limit. The company said that it’s exploring a paid plan that will give access to higher limits as well as more advanced AI models. DuckDuckGo said that you can use AI Chat to ask questions, draft emails, write code, and create travel itineraries among other things, but it doesn't generate images yet.

Not surprisingly, DuckDuckGo is stressing how private using AI Chat is compared to just using ChatGPT or Claude on their own. The company claims that your questions and the generated answers won’t be used for training AI models. "[We] call the underlying chat models on your behalf, removing your IP address completely and using our IP address instead,” wrote Nirzar Pangarkar, DuckDuckGo’s lead designer in a blog post. “This way it looks like the requests are coming from us and not you.” And if you’d rather not deal with a chatbot when you’re just trying to search anonymously, DuckDuckGo lets you easily turn the feature off.

AI Chats is separate from DuckAssist, another AI-powered feature that DuckDuckGo added last year that provides AI-generated summaries at the top of search results. It’s just like Google’s AI Overviews, the controversial new feature that recently told people to eat rocks and put glue on their pizza, except that DuckAssist sticks to reliable sources like Wikipedia to generate its responses. DuckDuckGo thinks that AI Chat and DuckAssist are complementary. “If you start with Search, you may want to switch to AI Chat for follow-up queries to help make sense of what you’ve read, or for quick, direct answers to new questions that weren’t covered in the web pages you saw,” wrote Pangarkar. “It’s all down to your personal preference.”

Remember Humane’s AI pin that was hyped as the next big thing right up until people used it? Turns out being an unusable piece of tat wasn’t the only thing wrong with it: Humane has now advised users its charging case may pose a fire risk. There are other less flammable ways to re-juice your unit, with the fault limited to a single component. But, even so, it’s not a good look for a company that already has plenty of eggs on its virtual face.

— Dan Cooper

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Boeing’s first crewed Starliner mission is finally heading to the ISS

It’s carrying two astronauts and 760 pounds of cargo.

Boeing

Starliner has successfully completed its first crewed launch on the back of an Atlas V rocket, nearly a month after originally planned. The vessel is now on course to dock with the ISS with two crew members and 760 pounds of cargo, where it will stay for the next eight days. After so many false starts, let’s hope Starliner can finally start delivering on the promises made all those years ago.

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YouTube is putting new age restrictions on gun videos

No, it wasn’t doing this already.

YouTube has altered its policies on weapon-related videos to ban content for users under 18. Similarly, it’s banning clips detailing how to remove safety devices for all ages from June 18. The move comes a full year after a watchdog group found YouTube was recommending gun content to “child” accounts.

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A $110,000 MicroLED TV? In this economy?

Who needs a home when you can have Samsung’s latest panel?

Samsung

Robin Williams once said [a certain substance best inhaled through the nose] is God’s way of telling you you’re making too much money. To that list, we can add Samsung’s brand new MicroLED TVs, which start at $110,000 and run all the way to $150,000. Just imagine what your local homeless shelter could do with that sort of money.

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If the wave of overwhelmingly negative reviews weren’t enough, it seems that Humane has discovered yet another major issue with its once-hyped AI Pin. The company is warning customers not to use the device’s charging case due to a potential “fire safety risk.”

In an email sent to AI Pin owners, the company said it had received a report of a “charging issue” that led to “a quality issue with the battery cell supplied by a third-party vendor used in your Charge Case Accessory.” Humane didn’t explicitly indicate whether the unspecified “charging issue” caused an actual fire, but it said an investigation found that “certain battery cells supplied by this vendor may pose a fire safety risk.”

While Humane is so far not using the word “recall,” the company is advising people to stop using the charging case immediately. Other charging accessories, including the battery booster and charge pad, are apparently safe as their batteries come from different suppliers. We’ve reached out to Humane for more information and whether they have plans to refund or replace the $149 accessory for people who have already bought one. In the meantime, the company is offering customers two months of its subscription service for free.

The full text of the email is below.

Out of an abundance of caution, we are reaching out today to ask that you immediately stop using and charging your Charge Case Accessory due to an issue with certain battery cells for the Charge Case Accessory.

Upon receiving a single report of a charging issue while using a third-party USB-C cable and third-party power source, we identified a quality issue with the battery cell supplied by a third-party vendor used in your Charge Case Accessory.

Our investigation determined that the battery supplier was no longer meeting our quality standards and that there is a potential that certain battery cells supplied by this vendor may pose a fire safety risk. As a result, we immediately disqualified this battery vendor while we work to identify a new vendor to avoid such issues and maintain our high quality standards.

The issue identified is isolated only to certain battery cells used in the Charge Case Accessory and is not related to the Charge Case Accessory hardware design.

Importantly, Humane’s Ai Pin, its Battery Booster(s) and Charge Pad are not affected as the disqualified vendor does not supply batteries or any other components of those Humane products, and are safe for continued use.