AI NewsGoogle gives in to users’ complaints over AI-powered ‘Ask Photos’ search feature

Google gives in to users’ complaints over AI-powered ‘Ask Photos’ search feature

2:26 AM IST · March 11, 2026

In a slight capitulation to those who don’t want AI infused into their everyday apps, Google said it’s now offering a toggle that will allow users of its Google Photos app to return to the previous and often faster “classic” search experience instead of the newer AI-powered option known as “Ask Photos.” The Ask Photos feature,launchedin the U.S. in 2024, lets users search their photos using natural language queries, including complex requests. The product’s rollout was brieflypausedlast summer as the company worked to address issues around latency, following user feedback. Some Google Photos users never warmed up to the AI-powered experience,complainingthat Ask Photos still failed to find some of their photos and that searches were less accurate than before. While Google offered anoption to disablethe use of Gemini in Google Photos, it was buried in the settings and was often overlooked. The company said it will offer users an easier and more visible way to switch between the two search experiences. Via a new toggle button on the search screen, users can turn the Ask Photos AI search off and view the classic results instead. Google said it will still lead with whichever results best fit the user’s query, however. In the announcement,sharedby Google Photos lead Shimrit Ben-Yair, the company suggested that the move was driven by users’ complaints about the Ask Photos feature. In a post on X, Ben-Yair wrote, “We’ve heard your feedback that you want more control over the type of results you see when searching in Google Photos.” The exec also noted that Google had improved the quality of some of the most popular searches, also based on user feedback. “We know search in Photos is one of the most loved and used features and we’re committed to getting this experience right, so please keep the feedback coming! It helps us build a more magical experience for everyone,” she said.

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OpenAI’s feud with mathematicians is only escalating

Twenty-five leading mathematicianssigned an open letterarguing that AI labs are threatening their intellectual work as they seek to one-up each other with solutions to famous math problems. Each signatory has been awarded the Fields Medal, considered the most prestigious prize in mathematics. This week, NYU professor Tristan BuckmasteraccusedOpenAI of pressuring him not to credit a collaborator who works for Anthropic for solving an important math problem, and wondered if the company had used their work with Codex to produce its owngroundbreaking proofover a marathon weekend of inference. On Thursday, OpenAIwithdrewits sponsorship of a math event at CalTech after the company was criticized by researchers at the university. While the ability of AI models to solve the world’s outstanding mathematical challenges could be a boon to humanity, the signatories of the new letter argue that will only be the case if those solutions can be understood and communicated by the math community and, ultimately, the rest of the world. “Often these solutions are announced in a rush, leaving no time for a proper writeup, the isolation of new methods and ideas, and citing relevant previous work of others,” they wrote — and OpenAI’s proof remains unverified. “As in all creative professions, this raises severe attribution and plagiarism questions. Moreover, without the willing mathematicians who must take care of their development and integration into the mathematical canon, AI-conceived ideas would never become fully alive and the crucial human transmission chain between mathematicians would be lost.” With other mathematicians growing paranoid and wondering if their Codex use was in turn fed into OpenAI’s new models, there is real fear that the culture of open research will be threatened. Today, if frontier labs see a useful path to a discovery, they can spend tens of millions of dollars using LLMs to beat the original researchers to a proof — a dynamic that will incentivize secrecy. This letter follows theLeiden Declaration, released by a working group of mathematicians in June. That document also grapples with the ways that LLM proofs will change their work and offers a set of recommendations for mathematicians, institutions, and policymakers. As with software engineering and other areas where AI tools are changing workflows, mathematicians find a justification in the work around the work: The value in math isn’t just the proofs and who gets credit, but the intellectual super-structure that nourishes students, finds new questions and ideas, and integrates them into broader human civilization. And if you don’t particularly care about the cutthroat world of high-stakes mathematical proofs, don’t forget: Your field of interest is next. “The issues the mathematical community faces now are similar to issues that other scientific and creative professions are facing, and indicate issues that all of humanity might face: how to make sure that, as AI changes the way work is done, we do not lose sight of what that work was meant to achieve in the first place,” they wrote.

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Y Combinator’s Garry Tan wants US open-weight AI labs to ‘distill’ frontier models, too

When it comes to Chinese AI labs using distillation techniques to extract knowledge from frontier model makers, Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan is hoping regulators stay out of it. In fact, he thinks U.S. AI labs should perhaps play the same game. “I would do nothing,” he toldCNBC in an interview earlier this week. “We could argue that there should be an American distillation regime.” He elaborated to TechCrunch that this means he wants smaller, American open-weight AI labs to use the same kind of training techniques on American frontier AI labs, giving the U.S. a more robust set of open-weight options that aren’t Chinese. Distillation is when a model maker extensively prompts another model in order to learn how it works and reasons. It is commonly, and legitimately, used by AI labs to help train new models. Anthropic this weekreleased its second reportalleging that Chinese labs are engaged in “illicit distillation attacks,” hiding their identities to distill without permission and relying on fraud and stolen credentials to do so. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei had previouslypublicly called on U.S. regulatorsto crack down on distillation. It’s notable that the commander of Silicon Valley’s prestigious and prolific startup accelerator doesn’t agree. To be clear, Tan isn’t advocating for American AI labs to use stolen credentials to distill. He wants them to be free to come in the front door. In fact, his argument is twofold. He feels it’s an overreach for AI labs to dictate what their customers can do with the information their models share with them. He also notes that the proprietary AI labs didn’t ask permission when they vacuumed up as much human knowledge as they could to train their models. They famously ingested plenty of copyrighted materialwithout the permission of those intellectual property holders. “Controlling what users and customers do with API calls to closed weight models feels constraining, and there’s a role government can play here to normalize the fact that access to intelligence that was trained on broad public access data should itself also be more a form of a public good than something locked away behind restrictive terms of service,” he told TechCrunch when asked why American labs should be free to distill, too. Tan, who is himself such an avid AI user that he oncedescribed himself as having cyber psychosis, wants to see a balance between open-weight AI labs and frontier labs. “They are at the frontier and driving it forward. We want that to be fundable, and be a great business model ongoing,” he told CNBC. “You want open weight models to give people freedom and access.” To him, the true AI doomer scenario is for all the immense power of frontier AI to wind up in the hands of a single powerful, proprietary provider. “The nightmare scenario, the doomer scenario for AI is that there’s just one company,” he said. “It has the best access to capital. It has the best AI researchers. It runs away with it and suddenly there’s one company that’s monolithic. And that would be bad.”

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Mecka AI nears $500M valuation in Sequoia-led deal amid rush for robot training data

Mecka AI, a startup that collects and analyzes human motion data to train humanoid robots and other robotics, is nearing a new round led by Sequoia Capital at a valuation of about $500 million, according to two people with knowledge of the deal. The new financing comes just three months after Mecka announced that it raised $60 million in a round led by Framework Ventures that included participation from Menlo Ventures, SV Angel, and Kindred Ventures. TechCrunch has not learned the precise size of the new round. The terms of the deal are not final and could still change. Mecka AI didn’t respond to a request for comment. Sequoia declined to comment. Mecka AI was co-founded in 2024 by four entrepreneurs, including Canadians Josh Gao and Mogen Cheng, who previously built a restaurant fintech startup, and Jason Chong, who joined Coinbase after it acquired his crypto exchange. Duy Nguyen, the only non-Canadian on the team, focuses on operations at Mecka. The four co-founders don’t have backgrounds in robotics. But they did recognize that there was a dearth of physical-world data and realized that capturing real-world interactions was the primary bottleneck holding back general-purpose robots, including humanoids. Mecka, which derives its name from “mecha,” a fictional giant robot controlled by humans, set out to do for robotics what Scale AI, Mercor, Surge, and other human data companies have done for LLMs. The startup pays people to record themselves performing everyday tasks — like making coffee or fixing cars — using body sensors and smartphones. As of early June, Mecka was projecting that it would end 2026 at an annual run rate of $100 million, Gao told Fortune when the startup announced its previous fundraise. While Mecka AI hasn’t publicly disclosed its customer list, many robotics companies and AI labs rely on real-world data captured through this “egocentric” approach, alongside other physical data collection methods like teleoperation, to build their models. Other startups collecting real-world data for robot training include XDOF, which TechCrunch reported last week was nearing a new round at a$1.2 billion valuation, as well as human-data platforms expanding beyond LLMs, such asScale AIandMicro1.

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Nscale adds former OpenAI exec Fidji Simo to its board ahead of potential IPO

Nscale, the buzzy U.K.-based AI data center startup, has appointed former OpenAI, Meta, and Instacart executive Fidji Simo to its board. Simo joins high-profile tech executives Sheryl Sandberg, Susan Decker, and Nick Clegg on Nscale’s board ahead of the startup’s anticipated IPO this fall. Formerly CEO of AGI deployment at OpenAI, essentially the No. 2 executive at the AI lab, Simoleft the company in Julyciting health reasons. She still advises the company on a part-time basis. Before OpenAI, Simo was chair and CEO of Instacart, where she led the company through its 2023 IPO. She also spent more than a decade at Meta, including as head of the Facebook app. Simo also sits on Shopify’s board. Nscale’s founder and CEO, Josh Payne, said Simo is one of the few leaders who understand what it means to scale products used by billions of people and the demands those products place on the underlying systems. “That’s what we’re building for at Nscale,” he said in a statement. “Fidji joins a board we’ve built deliberately, with the experience of scaling platforms to the largest in the world, and the independence, financial rigor and operating depth to which companies at this scale are held.” Nscale’s valuation has skyrocketed since it was founded just two years ago on the back of booming demand for AI infrastructure. The startup, which designs, builds, and operates AI data centers, is reportedly trying to raise up to $3.5 billion ahead of a planned IPO,Bloomberg reportedlast week, citing unnamed sources.

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Google gives in to users’ complaints over AI-powered ‘Ask Photos’ search feature

最新 AI 资讯

OpenAI’s feud with mathematicians is only escalating

Y Combinator’s Garry Tan wants US open-weight AI labs to ‘distill’ frontier models, too

Mecka AI nears $500M valuation in Sequoia-led deal amid rush for robot training data

Nscale adds former OpenAI exec Fidji Simo to its board ahead of potential IPO

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