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Africa News Live Updates: Nigeria begins training camp for 2024 African Nations Championship
Redmi tablet launch in Nigeria signals growing investor confidence in Africa's tech market
The official launch of the Redmi Pad 2 series in Nigeria is being viewed as a significant indicator of the nation's growing consumer electronics market and its attractiveness for foreign direct investment, as per a report in Premium Times. Economic analysts note that the move by Redmi's parent company, Xiaomi, reflects confidence in Nigeria's expanding middle class and increasing digital adoption. The development aligns with the Nigerian government's National Digital Economy Policy, which seeks to leverage technology for growth. However, policy experts also point out that while such launches improve consumer choice and can help bridge the digital divide, they also underscore the need for policies that encourage local manufacturing and address the persistent gap in digital access and literacy across the country.
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Hindustan Times
37 minutes ago
- Hindustan Times
FIR against 10 in Lucknow realtor suicide case
Two days after a 36-year-old Lucknow-based real estate businessman died by suicide after going live on Facebook, Gudamba police registered an FIR on Friday against 10 individuals for alleged abetment, mental harassment, and extortion, naming them based on the realtor's pre-recorded statement in a video. A police official confirmed that the video is part of the evidence and said statements will be recorded soon. (REPRESENTATIVE IMAGE) Following a complaint filed by the deceased's elder brother, Gudamba police registered an FIR late Thursday under Sections 108 (abetment of suicide), 351(2) (criminal intimidation), and 352 (assault) of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS), 2023. The 10 people named in the FIR include local businessmen, acquaintances, and associates. According to the complaint, they had been pressuring the businessman for money, visiting his house repeatedly, hurling abuses, and issuing threats, ultimately pushing him to the edge. A police official confirmed that the video is part of the evidence and said statements will be recorded soon. 'The case has been registered and the matter is under active investigation,' said Gudamba station house officer Prabhatesh Kumar Shrivastav. The realtor, who operated from a small rented office near Tedhipulia crossing, shot himself in the head using a guard's licensed firearm on Wednesday afternoon. Just 15 minutes prior, he went live on social media, detailing the financial and emotional turmoil that led him to take the extreme step. In the over 12-minute long video, which has since gone viral, the businessman claimed he had ₹15 crore debts and had been under intense pressure for the last two-and-a-half years. He made a desperate appeal to politicians and Bollywood A-lister stars to come forward and help his family with ₹20-25 crore to ensure they are not harassed after his death. He even confessed that he sometimes doesn't have money to buy insulin for his diabetic minor daughter. 'My days are so bad that sometimes I don't even have money to buy insulin for my diabetic daughter,' he said in the emotional video, which included multiple references to people he claimed had been threatening him and demanding repayments. The deceased is survived by his wife, three daughters, father and brother.
Mint
3 hours ago
- Mint
Can AI solve the content-moderation problem?
Anyone who spends time on social media knows that it's hard to avoid abusive misinformation, abusive language and offensive content. Platforms like Facebook and YouTube have content moderation systems designed to keep obnoxious material in check, but a 2021 Cato Institute survey found that just one in four users think platforms apply their standards fairly. 'Content moderation is one of the crucial issues of our day and it is essentially broken," says Carolina Are, a researcher at the Center for Digital Citizens at Northumbria University in the U.K. One major difficulty is that different users have different ideas about what should be prohibited online. Are swear words fair game? Nudity? Violent imagery? In the Cato survey, 60% of users said they wanted social-media platforms to provide them with greater choice to pick and choose what they see and what they don't. Soon this kind of personalized content moderation may become a reality, thanks to generative AI tools. In a paper presented this spring at the ACM Web Conference in Sydney, Australia, researchers Syed Mahbubul Huq and Basem Suleiman created a YouTube filter based on commercially available large language models. They used four AI chatbots to analyze subtitles from 4,098 public YouTube videos across 10 popular genres, including cartoons and reality TV. Each video was assessed on 17 metrics used by the British Board of Film Classification to assign film ratings, including violence, nudity and self-harm. Two of the chatbots, GPT-4 and Claude 3.5, were able to identify content that human checkers assessed as harmful at least 80% of the time. The system isn't perfect, and so far it can only assess language in videos, not images. It's also expensive: 'To filter every video [on YouTube] would cost trillions of dollars at today's prices," Huq said. But the demonstration model points to a future in which social media users are able to choose exactly what kinds of content they see. 'If the parent of a child thinks it's suitable for their child to see content that's high in sexual scenes, but low intensity in drugs, they can adjust it," says Huq. With the cost of AI access rapidly dropping, 'we're not far away from when this will be possible." Maarten Sap, assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University, believes effective content moderation will require specialized LLMs, since off-the-shelf models are 'not built for nuanced tasks." For instance, recent research by Sap and his colleagues find AIs have trouble understanding 'relationship backstory," leaving them unable to distinguish between playful banter among friends and personal attacks on strangers. Still, he agrees that LLMs offer an 'opportunity" to develop more finely-grained moderation tools. Customized social-media filters could raise problems as well as solving them. Zeerak Talat, a computer scientist studying content moderation at the University of Edinburgh, notes that users could fine-tune their feeds to see more hate speech instead of less: 'If everyone has personalized moderation, we have no way of controlling illegal content." One option could be to tailor AI content moderation to the laws and preferences of different countries, rather than to individuals: Sexual or political content that would be normal in Silicon Valley could be offensive or illegal in a conservative, religious society. Still, some critics worry that by giving individual users the power to filter what they see, tech giants would be letting themselves off the hook for problems they created. 'I'm reluctant to see the onus of everything being put on the user," says Are. 'I don't want to be told that I deserve to get raped, and I have to be the one putting it in the feed." Talat agrees, noting that customized moderation may protect an individual user, but it doesn't stop hateful or offensive content from spreading to others. 'It defends your stream," he says. 'But it does nothing about what is said about you." Chris Stokel-Walker is a journalist and author based in the U.K. His latest book is 'How AI Ate the World."
Mint
4 hours ago
- Mint
Google Search is under attack. Why ChatGPT won't overthrow it yet.
While ChatGPT's meteoric rise in popularity has positioned it to rival to traditional search engines, analysts say the chatbot hasn't knocked Google out of the top spot just yet. Citi Research analysts led by Ronald Josey reiterated a Buy rating and $203 target price on shares of Alphabet, Google's parent, on Friday. The stock was down slightly at $177.18 in morning trading. Citi polled 2,400 Google Search users in the U.S. and found that the search engine 'remains core to most users' Internet usage." The same conclusion held true across all age groups, Citi said. Still, the bank cited a rise in 'alternative search experiences" among young users, naming ChatGPT and Meta Platforms' Facebook and Instagram as examples. ChatGPT has become the 'go-to" destination for younger users, with Google usage rising with age, Citi said. While 85% of respondents selected Google as their 'core search engine," with 72% saying Google was their first site to search online, differences emerged among age groups. Among users aged 41 to 55, 88% of respondents named Google as their core search engine, but that number dipped to 83% for respondents aged 14 to 24. With that being said, the use of AI agents appears to be 'more research-driven than commercial," as opposed to Google Search, where shopping was ranked as the top use case among respondents, Citi said. And the bank believes there's more to love about Google's growth story, as responses indicated that the use of other features such as Shopping and Travel continued to accelerate. Overall, the results suggest that Google Search is standing its ground for now, which is good news for Alphabet. Revenue attributed to Google Search and other services accounted for more than half of the total in the latest quarter. Google is set to report second-quarter results on July 23. Based on Citi's preliminary analysis, 'we believe the broader online advertising environment, including search and YouTube, is healthy," the analysts wrote. Other firms have sounded the alarm about AI and its effects on Google Search. However, Citi believes the search engine's advertising market improved throughout the quarter. Earnings will put that theory to the test.
