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Google’s search engine’s latest AI injection will answer voiced questions
SAN FRANCISCO | Google is injecting its search engine with more artificial intelligence that will enable people to voice questions about images and occasionally organize an entire page of results, despite the technology’s past misadventures with misleading information.
The latest changes announced Thursday herald the next step in an AI-driven makeover that Google launched in mid-May when it began responding to some queries with summaries written by the technology at the top of its influential results page. Those summaries, dubbed “AI Overviews,” raised fears among publishers that fewer people would click on search links to their websites and undercut the traffic needed to sell digital ads that help finance their operations.
Google is addressing some of those ongoing worries by inserting even more links to other websites within the AI Overviews, which already have been reducing the visits to general news publishers such as The New York Times and technology review specialists such as TomsGuide.com, according to an analysis released last month by search traffic specialist BrightEdge.
The same study found the citations within AI Overviews are driving more traffic to highly specialized sites such as Bloomberg.com and the National Institute of Health.
Google’s decision to pump even more AI into the search engine that remains the crown jewel of its $2 trillion empire leaves little doubt that the Mountain View, California, company is tethering its future to a technology propelling the biggest industry shift since Apple unveiled the first iPhone 17 years ago.
The next phase of Google’s AI evolution builds upon its 7-year-old Lens feature that processes queries about objects in a picture. The Lens option is now generates more than 20 billion queries per month, and is particularly popular among users from 18 to 24 years old. That’s a younger demographic that Google is trying to cultivate as it faces competition from AI alternatives powered by ChatGPT and Perplexity that are positioning themselves as answer engines.
Now, people will be able to use Lens to ask a question in English about something they are viewing through a camera lens — as if they were talking about it with a friend — and get search results. Users signed up for tests of the new voice-activated search features in Google Labs will also be able to take video of moving objects, such as fish swimming around aquarium, while posing a conversational question and be presented an answer through an AI Overview.
“The whole goal is can we make search simpler to use for people, more effortless to use and make it more available so people can search any way, anywhere they are,” said Rajan Patel, Google’s vice president of search engineering and a co-founder of the Lens feature.
Although advances in AI offer the potential of making search more convenient, the technology also sometimes spits out bad information — a risk that threatens to damage the credibility of Google’s search engine if the inaccuracies become too frequent. Google has already had some embarrassing episodes with its AI Overviews, including advising people to put glue on pizza and to eat rocks. The company blamed those missteps on data voids and online troublemakers deliberately trying to steer its AI technology in a wrong direction.
Google is now so confident that it has fixed some of its AI’s blind spots that it will rely on the technology to decide what types of information to feature on the results page. Despite its previous bad culinary advice about pizza and rocks, AI will initially be used for the presentation of the results for queries in English about recipes and meal ideas entered on mobile devices. The AI-organized results are supposed to be broken down into different groups of clusters consisting of photos, videos and articles about the subject.
Average rate on a 30-year mortgage in ticks up to 6.12%
The average rate on a 30-year mortgage in the U.S. rose to 6.12% this week, the first increase in seven weeks.
The rate ticked up from 6.08% last week, mortgage buyer Freddie Mac said Thursday. A year ago, the rate averaged 7.49%.
Last week, the average rate slipped to its lowest level in two years, boosting home shoppers’ purchasing power as they navigate a housing market with prices near all-time highs.
Borrowing costs on 15-year fixed-rate mortgages, popular with homeowners seeking to refinance their home loan to a lower rate, increased again this week. The average rate rose to 5.25% from 5.16% last week. A year ago, it averaged 6.78%, Freddie Mac said.
Mortgage rates are influenced by several factors, including how the bond market reacts to the Federal Reserve’s interest rate policy decisions. That can move the trajectory of the 10-year Treasury yield, which lenders use as a guide to pricing home loans. The yield on the 10-year Treasury was at 3.82% Thursday, up from 3.78% last week.
The average rate on a 30-year mortgage is down from 7.22% in May, its 2024 peak. Rates have been mostly declining since July in anticipation of last month’s move by the Federal Reserve to cut its main interest rate for the first time in more than four years.
Fed officials also signaled they expect further cuts this year and in 2025 and 2026. The rate cuts should, over time, lead to lower borrowing costs on mortgages.
Setting aside this week’s rise in the average long-term rate, Freddie Mac Chief Economist Sam Khater painted a more optimistic picture for prospective homebuyers.
“Zooming out to the bigger picture, mortgage rates have declined one and a half percentage points over the last 12 months, home price growth is slowing, inventory is increasing, and incomes continue to rise,” Khater said. “As a result, the backdrop for homebuyers this fall is improving and should continue through the rest of the year.”
The average rate on a 30-year mortgage rose from below 3% in September 2021 to a 23-year high of 7.8% last October. That coincided with the Fed increasing its benchmark interest rate to fight inflation.
When mortgage rates rise they can add hundreds of dollars a month in costs for borrowers. The housing market has been in a sales slump since 2022 as elevated mortgage rates discouraged many would-be homebuyers. Sales of previously occupied U.S. homes fell in August even as mortgage rates began easing.
Economists generally expect mortgage rates to remain near their current levels, at least this year. Fannie Mae projects the rate on a 30-year mortgage will average 6.2% in the October-December quarter and decline to an average of 5.7% in the same quarter next year.
Helene’s flooding swept away 11 workers at a Tennessee factory
NASHVILLE, Tenn. | Tennessee state authorities said Wednesday they were investigating the company that owns a plastics factory where 11 workers were swept away by cataclysmic flooding unleashed by Hurricane Helene.
As the nearby Nolichucky River swelled from rainfall, employees in the Impact Plastics factory in Erwin, a small community in rural Tennessee, kept working. Several asserted that they weren’t allowed to leave in time to avoid the storm’s impact. It wasn’t until water flooded into the parking lot and the power went out that the plant shut down and sent workers home.
Several never made it.
The raging waters swept 11 people away, and only five were rescued. Two of them are confirmed dead and are part of a toll across six states that has surpassed 180. Four others from the factory are still missing since they were washed away Friday in Erwin, where dozens of people were also rescued off the roof of a hospital.
Tennessee Bureau of Investigation spokesperson Leslie Earhart said Wednesday that the agency is investigating allegations involving Impact Plastics at the direction of the local prosecutor.
District Attorney Steven R. Finney said in a statement that he asked the bureau to look into any potential criminal violations related to the “occurrences” on Friday.
“Impact Plastics has not been contacted by the TBI yet but will fully cooperate with their investigation,” said the company’s spokesperson, Tony Treadway. He said the company is preparing an internal review, which it will release to the public.
Secondary to the Bureau of Investigation, the state’s workplace safety office opened its own probe Wednesday into the circumstances behind the deaths. While announcing the investigation, the Tennessee Occupational Safety and Health Administration noted that companies have eight hours to report a workplace death, and it hadn’t yet received a fatality report from Impact Plastics as of Wednesday evening.
Some workers managed to drive away from the plant, while others got caught on a clogged road where water rose high enough to sweep vehicles away. Videos show the brown floodwaters covering the nearby highway and lapping at the doors of Impact Plastics.
Jacob Ingram, a mold changer at the factory, filmed himself and four others waiting for rescue as bobbing vehicles floated by. He later posted the videos on Facebook with the caption, “Just wanna say im lucky to be alive.” Videos of their helicopter rescue were posted on social media later Saturday.
In one video, Ingram looks down at the camera, a green Tennessee National Guard helicopter hovering above him, hoisting one of the other survivors. In another, a soldier rigs the next evacuee in a harness.
Impact Plastics said in a statement Monday that it “continued to monitor weather conditions” Friday and that managers dismissed employees “when water began to cover the parking lot and the adjacent service road, and the plant lost power.”
In interviews with local news outlets, two of the workers who made it out of the facility disputed those claims. One told News 5 WCYB that employees were made to wait until it was “too late.” Another, Ingram made a similar statement to the Knoxville News Sentinel.
“They should’ve evacuated when we got the flash flood warnings, and when they saw the parking lot,” Ingram said. “We asked them if we should evacuate, and they told us not yet, it wasn’t bad enough.”
Worker Robert Jarvis told News 5 WCYB that the company should have let them leave earlier.
Jarvis said he tried to drive away in his car, but the water on the main road got too high, and only off-road vehicles were finding ways out of the flood zone.
“The water was coming up,” he said. “A guy in a 4×4 came, picked a bunch of us up and saved our lives, or we’d have been dead, too.”
The 11 workers found temporary respite on the back of a truck driven by a passerby, but it soon tipped over after debris hit it, Ingram said.
Ingram said he survived by grabbing onto plastic pipes that were on the truck. He said he and four others floated for about half a mile (about 800 meters) before they found safety on a sturdy pile of debris.
Ingram’s father, Michael Graham, said Ingram was resting at home Wednesday after getting treated for cuts and lung problems and that his phone wasn’t working anymore. He said Ingram had called him from the truck, afraid for his life.
“We got a call, Jacob saying, ‘I’m stuck at work, we’re on the back of a semitruck. We climbed as high as we can. Just tell everybody I love them if I don’t make it out again,’” Graham said.
He welcomed the criminal investigation into the company, saying accountability could save lives in the future.
“It does seem ridiculous to me that this plant wasn’t evacuated,” Graham said.
“We are devastated by the tragic loss of great employees,” Impact Plastics founder Gerald O’Connor said in the statement Monday. “Those who are missing or deceased, and their families are in our thoughts and prayers.”
The two confirmed dead at the Tennessee plastics factory are Mexican citizens, said Lisa Sherman-Nikolaus, executive director at the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition. She said many of the victims’ families have started online fundraisers to cover funeral costs and other expenses.
Bertha Mendoza was with her sister when the flooding started, but they got separated, according to a eulogy on her GoFundMe page authored by her daughter-in-law, who declined an interview request.
“She was loved dearly by her family, community, her church family, and co-workers,” the eulogy read.
More Americans file for unemployment benefits last week
The number of Americans applying for unemployment benefits rose modestly last week but remains at healthy levels.
The Labor Department reported Thursday that applications for jobless claims rose by 6,000 to 225,000 for the week of Sept. 28. It was slightly more than the 221,000 analysts were expecting.
The four-week average of claims, which evens out some of weekly volatility, fell by 750 to 224,250.
Applications for jobless benefits are widely considered representative of U.S. layoffs in a given week.
Recent labor market data has signaled that high interest rates may finally be taking a toll on the labor market.
In response to weakening employment data and receding consumer prices, the Federal Reserve last month cut its benchmark interest rate by a half of a percentage point as the central bank shifts its focus from taming inflation toward supporting the job market. The Fed’s goal is to achieve a rare “soft landing,” whereby it curbs inflation without causing a recession.
It was the Fed’s first rate cut in four years after a series of rate hikes in 2022 and 2023 pushed the federal funds rate to a two-decade high of 5.3%.
Inflation has retreated steadily, approaching the Fed’s 2% target and leading Chair Jerome Powell to declare recently that it was largely under control.
During the first four months of 2024, applications for jobless benefits averaged just 213,000 a week before rising in May. They hit 250,000 in late July, supporting the notion that high interest rates were finally cooling a red-hot U.S. job market.
U.S. employers added a modest 142,000 jobs in August, up from a paltry 89,000 in July, but well below the January-June monthly average of nearly 218,000. September’s jobs report is due out Friday.
Last month, the Labor Department reported that the U.S. economy added 818,000 fewer jobs from April 2023 through March this year than were originally reported. The revised total was also considered evidence that the job market has been slowing steadily, compelling the Fed to start cutting interest rates.
Thursday’s report said that the total number of Americans collecting jobless benefits was down by 1,000 to about 1.83 million for the week of Sept. 21.
Separately on Thursday, some retailers said they are ramping up hiring for the holiday season, but fewer seasonal employees are expected to be taken on this year.
—From AP reports
