Enlarge (credit: ALAIN JOCARD / Contributor | AFP)

Google has agreed to pay 250 million euros (about $273 million) to settle a dispute in France after breaching years-old commitments to inform and pay French news publishers when referencing and displaying content in both search results and when training Google's AI-powered chatbot, Gemini.

According to France's competition watchdog, the Autorité de la Concurrence (ADLC), Google dodged many commitments to deal with publishers fairly. Most recently, it never notified publishers or the ADLC before training Gemini (initially launched as Bard) on publishers' content or displaying content in Gemini outputs. Google also waited until September 28, 2023, to introduce easy options for publishers to opt out, which made it impossible for publishers to negotiate fair deals for that content, the ADLC found.

"Until this date, press agencies and publishers wanting to opt out of this use had to insert an instruction opposing any crawling of their content by Google, including on the Search, Discover and Google News services," the ADLC noted, warning that "in the future, the Autorité will be particularly attentive as regards the effectiveness of opt-out systems implemented by Google."

Enlarge / Velib bicycles are parked in front of a French office of US computer company Microsoft on January 25, 2023 in Issy-les-Moulineaux, France. (credit: Getty Images)

On Monday, Microsoft announced plans to offer AI models from Mistral through its Azure cloud computing platform, which came in conjunction with a 15 million euro non-equity investment in the French firm, which is often seen as a European rival to OpenAI. Since then, the investment deal has faced scrutiny from European Union regulators.

Microsoft's deal with Mistral, known for its large language models akin to OpenAI's GPT-4 (which powers the subscription versions of ChatGPT), marks a notable expansion of its AI portfolio at a time when its well-known investment in California-based OpenAI has raised regulatory eyebrows. The new deal with Mistral drew particular attention from regulators because Microsoft's investment could convert into equity (partial ownership of Mistral as a company) during Mistral's next funding round.

The development has intensified ongoing investigations into Microsoft's practices, particularly related to the tech giant's dominance in the cloud computing sector. According to Reuters, EU lawmakers have voiced concerns that Mistral's recent lobbying for looser AI regulations might have been influenced by its relationship with Microsoft. These apprehensions are compounded by the French government's denial of prior knowledge of the deal, despite earlier lobbying for more lenient AI laws in Europe. The situation underscores the complex interplay between national interests, corporate influence, and regulatory oversight in the rapidly evolving AI landscape.

Enlarge / An illustration of a robot holding a French flag, figuratively reflecting the rise of AI in France due to Mistral. It's hard to draw a picture of an LLM, so a robot will have to do. (credit: Getty Images)

On Monday, Mistral AI announced a new AI language model called Mixtral 8x7B, a "mixture of experts" (MoE) model with open weights that reportedly truly matches OpenAI's GPT-3.5 in performance—an achievement that has been claimed by others in the past but is being taken seriously by AI heavyweights such as OpenAI's Andrej Karpathy and Jim Fan. That means we're closer to having a ChatGPT-3.5-level AI assistant that can run freely and locally on our devices, given the right implementation.

Mistral, based in Paris and founded by Arthur Mensch, Guillaume Lample, and Timothée Lacroix, has seen a rapid rise in the AI space recently. It has been quickly raising venture capital to become a sort of French anti-OpenAI, championing smaller models with eye-catching performance. Most notably, Mistral's models run locally with open weights that can be downloaded and used with fewer restrictions than closed AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google. (In this context "weights" are the computer files that represent a trained neural network.)

Mixtral 8x7B can process a 32K token context window and works in French, German, Spanish, Italian, and English. It works much like ChatGPT in that it can assist with compositional tasks, analyze data, troubleshoot software, and write programs. Mistral claims that it outperforms Meta's much larger LLaMA 2 70B (70 billion parameter) large language model and that it matches or exceeds OpenAI's GPT-3.5 on certain benchmarks, as seen in the chart below.

Enlarge / Apple's iOS 17.1 release includes updates to the Settings for StandBy on the iPhone. (credit: Apple/Ars Technica)

A plethora of point-one updates have arrived for Apple devices, adding a few features and some useful bug fixes to iPhones, iPads, MacBooks, Apple Watches, and Apple TVs and HomePods. It also addresses French regulators' concerns that the iPhone 12 produced too much electromagnetic radiation in certain conditions.

The biggest new features among the software refreshes are on the Apple Watch and HomePods. If you're a frequent user of AirDrop, however, and find yourself throwing huge files to people, iOS 17.1 adds a new "Use Cellular Data" option. If both the sender and recipient have iCloud accounts, an AirDrop transfer can continue over a cellular connection if your phone leaves Wi-Fi or Bluetooth range or drops the connection. MacRumors shows the changes and settings involved.

Elsewhere in iOS 17.1, StandBy gets new display options, including display-off timers. No Journal app has arrived yet. One new thing that has arrived is a patch to the iPhone 12's radio operation to accommodate, as Apple put it, "the protocol used by French regulators." France's National Frequency Agency (ANFR) found that the iPhone 12 exceeded a "limbs" limit of radiation, for when the phone is in a pocket or purse or otherwise against the body, and called for Apple to stop selling the device and potentially recall it. Apple, noting that the device was "certified by multiple international bodies," still agreed to address the issue in iOS 17.1.

Enlarge (credit: CMB | Moment)

State attorneys general in 41 states and the District of Columbia sued Meta today. The move comes after the conclusion of a multistate probe launched in 2021, where a bipartisan coalition of state enforcers began examining how Facebook and Instagram features are designed to allegedly addict and harm kids.

Back in 2021, the Massachusetts attorney general's office led the multistate probe investigating "Instagram's impacts on young people" after Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen revealed that Facebook knew Instagram was "toxic" to teen girls but downplayed risks to the public. In a press release today, Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell accused Meta of "deliberately" exploiting "young users' vulnerabilities for profit."

Eight states and Washington, DC, filed lawsuits against Meta in state and local courts, while 33 states filed a joint lawsuit in a federal court in California, The Washington Post reported.