The former PM says she hopes to also contribute to thinking about deep challenges the world is facing. Read...

The Autonomous Bougainville Government (ABG) has launched a Bougainville Parliament YouTube Channel in its efforts `toward greater transparency and public engagement`. Read...

The organisation is determined to ‘doggedly’ protect the female category. Read...

Zack Rook’s family has raised the alarm when they hadn’t heard from him for a while. Read...

We speak to reisdents backing the bins, and those who say the system doesn`t work. Read...

Although Google was the first to develop the transformer architecture that underpins modern large language models, it was OpenAI who raised the bar and ushered in a new era with ChatGPT. Google has since been on their back foot with an internal code red, with an intense two-year period of restructuring, layoffs, and rapid AI development work. When ChatGPT landed in late 2022, everything changed. Google, the giant who invented the tech that paved the way for ChatGPT, is now trailing behind. Wired just published a great article detailing how Google was caught off guard and has been trying to claw back into the lead—or at least recover some lost ground—in the years since then. Led by Sissie Hsiao, Google’s AI team was tasked with building a ChatGPT competitor in 100 days. The result was Bard, brought forward by the work of thousands of employees, scaled-down security checks, and long hours. Meanwhile, Google’s Brain and Deepmind AI units were merged, and that collaboration would result in Gemini, the language modeling project that helped salvage the company’s reputation. But the road back to the top of AI has been bumpy. Bard made embarrassing mistakes, Google’s AI search feature gave inaccurate (and sometimes dangerous) advice, and the company’s image generator caused a media frenzy after generating historically inaccurate images. Despite the setbacks, Google has regained some ground. Gemini launched in late 2023 and beat ChatGPT in several tests. The AI assistant is now being integrated across the Google ecosystem—from Gmail to Google Maps—and efforts at “agentic AI” are now underway. But there’s still much to prove. The AI initiative is expensive, energy-intensive, and taking place at a time when Google is at risk of losing significant search advertising revenue due to ongoing antitrust litigation. Internally, many worry about the pace, the workload, and whether this is really Google’s second chance… or the start of something else. Read...

Machines will take over more jobs at Immigration New Zealand under a multi-million dollar upgrade. Read...

An Auckland food bank that was facing closure last year can now keep its doors open until the end of term two, thanks to a corporate sponsorship. Read...

Amy Pascal and David Heyman have been described as `two of the most accomplished` producers around. Read...

Microsoft is adding ways to make the Windows Photos app much more powerful, combining elements of the elegant Designer app and making Photos more of a centerpiece for visual editing. Microsoft is taking optical-character recognition capabilities that it developed several years ago and adding them to Photos, while pulling in design elements from Microsoft Designer, too. Finally, the company is beefing up File Explorer a bit as well, giving it a more robust visual search capability. Unfortunately, it’s also adding a Copilot button as well, which for now doesn’t really do much. Microsoft’s Windows Photos app languished for years, but it started enjoying a renaissance about two years ago with new AI-powered editing features. Today you can automatically touch up a photo and remove the background — even upscale it, if you own a Copilot+ PC with a supported NPU. Now, Microsoft is testing the ability to “read” documents that you import, something it first added as part of its mobile Office Lens capability five years ago. Microsoft said that it testing these new Photos features in an updated version of the Photos app, version 2025.11030.20006.0, which can be found in the Microsoft Store app. The company had previously released the feature, withdrew it, and then is rolling it out once again. Photos will be able to “read” your photos, too.Microsoft Essentially, the new Photos OCR capabilities places an overlay over the photo or screenshot, allowing it to “read” the text from the highlighted portion. You can then copy it elsewhere. Microsoft’s OCR capabilities were quite good even a half-decade ago, and presumably they’ve now been improved even further. The Designer integration is even more intriguing. Designer debuted in 2022 as a standalone service-as-an-app, similar to the Clipchamp video editing app. Designer played a dual role: as a creator of AI art, as well as a visual design app to integrate that art into layouts with fonts and additional graphics. It appears that Microsoft is trimming some of the design elements of Designer and placing them into Photos, so that you’re not creating art, but integrating your existing photo into a greeting card or graphic. Will Designer be a standalone app or just part of Photos? Or both?Microsoft What’s not clear at this point is whether the Designer aspect will be its own app. Microsoft said this week that you’ll be able to right-click a photo in File Explorer to “Create with Designer.” That and the screenshot above implies Designer will stand alone as an independent app. But last year, Microsoft more explicitly said that Designer would be integrated into Photos, Word and PowerPoint. Microsoft is also making some additional tweaks, allowing you to automatically show photos from subfolders rather than explicitly identifying which folders show up in Gallery mode. It will also display and edit JXL (JPEG XL) files, too. Read...