OpenAI launching a search engine to compete with Google and Perplexity
Patch Notes newsletter July 20 - 26
Welcome back to Patch Notes, a weekly news roundup for the most noteworthy stories in emerging tech and video games. This week, we’re looking at the competition in A.I. and search heating up, some workplace shake-ups in the games industry, and following up on the CrowdStrike I.T. outage from last week.
OpenA.I. announced their new search engine, SearchGPT, which puts ChatGPT in direct competition with Google Gemini, Bing Search, and Perplexity AI. The goal is to eventually integrate search features directly into ChatGPT rather than having two separate services. SearchGPT is only rolling out to 10,000 test users and is considered a “prototype.”
Third-party content providers are being sourced for SearchGPT’s results, which show summaries rather than just a list of links. These providers can also opt-out of training the A.I. model while still being surfaced in results.
Web
Reddit is now blocking search engines from displaying results from its site. Google is still able to index the site and show search results, as well as search engines that use Google’s index. Reddit claims this move is in no way related to their $60 million deal to provide training data for Google Gemini, but also claims this move was made to block other search engines from training on Reddit data.
Google’s Jigsaw is open-sourcing a tool to help smaller websites weed out terrorist or extremist content.
Apple Maps is now available on web as a public beta. This is Apple’s first meaningful attempt to compete with Google’s service since launching, effectively making Apple Maps available on non-Apple platforms for the first time. Apple Maps for Web is currently available on Safari and Chrome on macOS and Chrome and Edge on Windows.
Twitch has clarified its sexual harassment policy for the streaming platform, following a controversy involving a major streamer sending sexually explicit messages to a minor. It is also introducing a new sexual harassment filter to its AutoMod service, which flags potentially harmful messages in the live text chat, though this filter is disabled by default and must be enabled by the content creator with a strictness rating from 0 to 4.
Privacy and Security
CrowdStrike’s I.T. outage that impacted major airlines and other key industries last week likely cost over $5 billion, according to cybersecurity firm Parametix. Among the hardest hit were airlines and the healthcare industry, each topping $1 billion in losses.
The U.S. Senate unanimously passed a bill that would allow victims of deepfake pornography to sue for damages with a statue of limitations of up to ten years. The bill now goes to the House and if passed would go to the President to be signed into law.
Google is reversing course for user privacy on Chrome. Previously, it had announced third-party cookies and trackers would be disabled, joining Apple’s Safari and Mozilla’s Firefox. Now, Google is going to make users disable the trackers themselves instead of doing it by default.
Video Games
SAG-AFTRA, the largest union for actors and performers in the U.S., called for a strike against several video game publishers who failed to negotiate protections for members from A.I. use of likenesses. The strike affects major publishers including Activision Blizzard, Electronic Arts, Insomniac Games, and Take 2, among others. Negotiations have been ongoing since 2022 and a similar deal was already reached for animated TV shows earlier this year.
Bethesda Game Studios workers have joined the Communications Workers of America, becoming the first Microsoft game studio to form a union. The 241 workers include artists, engineers, programmers and designers. Bethesda is the studio behind prestigious game series such as The Elder Scrolls and Fallout, as well as newer titles such as Starfield.
Fortnite is returning to iOS, in Europe. Thanks to a EU decision about third-party app stores on Apple’s platforms, Epic Games will soon be able to launch their own Epic Games Store on iOS in the EU and with it the relaunch of Fortnite on the platform. Other app stores, including AltStore from the developer of the Delta emulator app, will also be getting Fortnite.
Tech and Devices
Rivian’s CEO says “don’t hold your breath” for Apple CarPlay in Rivian EVs.
Proton announces Proton Wallet, a digital wallet for cryptocurrencies.