By MATT O’BRIEN, Associated Press

Tech companies looking to sell their artificial intelligence technology to the federal government must now contend with a new regulatory hurdle: prove their chatbots aren’t “woke.”

President Donald Trump’s sweeping new plan to counter China in achieving “global dominance” in AI promises to cut regulations and cement American values into the AI tools increasingly used at work and home.

But one of Trump’s three AI executive orders signed Wednesday — the one “preventing woke AI in the federal government” — also mimics China’s state-driven approach to mold the behavior of AI systems to fit its ruling party’s core values.

Several leading providers of the AI language models targeted by the order — products like Google’s Gemini and Microsoft’s Copilot — have so far been silent on Trump’s anti-woke directive, which still faces a study period before it gets into official procurement rules.

While the tech industry has largely welcomed Trump’s broader AI plans, the anti-woke order forces the industry to leap into a culture war battle — or try their best to quietly avoid it.

“It will have massive influence in the industry right now,” especially as tech companies “are already capitulating” to other Trump administration directives, said civil rights advocate Alejandra Montoya-Boyer, senior director of The Leadership Conference’s Center for Civil Rights and Technology.

The move also pushes the tech industry to abandon years of work to combat the pervasive forms of racial and gender bias that studies and real-world examples have shown to be baked into AI systems.

“First off, there’s no such thing as woke AI,” she said. “There’s AI technology that discriminates and then there’s AI technology that actually works for all people.”

The Made by Google 2025 event is less than a month away, and it’s the event showcasing Google’s latest and greatest hardware innovations, such as its best Pixel phones and best Android watches. However, while the Google Pixel Watch 4’s appearance is inevitable (despite being as-yet-unannounced), I’m also hoping for a smaller, cheaper device to appear alongside it.

Yes, I believe it’s time for a new Fitbit band-style tracker to make its appearance. Fitbits are still synonymous with the fitness band format thanks to years at the top of the category, and there are happy Fitbit fans out there still using ancient models like the Fitbit Flex and Inspire 2.

AUSTIN (KXAN) — Texas summers can be deadly. In 2023, deaths caused by dehydration soared to record numbers. According to the Texas Department of State Health Services, 334 people died that year from heat-related causes, like dehydration. The previous year, that number reached 306.

Engineers at the University of Texas are looking to help address this and other medical issues through high tech wearables.

“It’s really cool to be able to work on, basically, like at the cutting edge of wearable devices,” said Hyonyoung Shin, a Ph.D. student with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UT Austin.

Think Apple Watches but instead of counting steps, they are monitoring the water in your body or taking pictures of your heart.

Shin is part of a team working on an e-tattoo. This paper-thin electronic device is a sticky pad that attaches to a small heart monitor. The monitor takes various readings of the heart. Shin is working on using AI to interpret data from the device, which can then feed information to patients and doctors via a smart phone.

“You can even get like blood pressure from just this sensor,” Shin said about the sensor.

The latest from the lab is a wearable sensor that detects dehydration. Previously, doctors typically tested hydration levels using blood or urine samples. The new device can provide data instantly and non-invasively.

“Our body overall is composed of 70% of water,” said Professor Nanshu Lu with the Cockrell School of Engineering. Lu leads the wearable team, but also is the Carol Cockrell Curran Chair in Engineering.

The hydration sensor is a thin ribbon strip that wraps around the bicep. The team chose this muscle because it is large and muscles have a lot of water in them.

The sensor passes an electrical charge through the muscle. If the charge passes easily through the muscle, that means it is full of water. Water is an excellent conductor of electricity. If there is little water in the muscle, due to dehydration, then electricity passes poorly through the muscle.

Similar technology has been used in the past to test hydration levels, but that technology passed the current through the whole body and not just one muscle.

“What we found is [passing the current through the bicep has] a 99% correlation with the full body,” Lu said.

Placing the device around the wrist isn’t viable due to the smaller muscles in that area. Skin and bone don’t contain as much water as a muscle does.

Lu said the technology is still in the early phases. They plan to test how diets might affect the conductivity. This includes testing something like creatine, a bodybuilding supplement, that assists in hydrating muscles.

A small Bluetooth device on the sensor beams the results back to a phone.

Companies have already shown interest in the tech, but Lu says they’re still in the development phase. Next, they would like to test the technology out with local partners like UT Athletics.

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Open image in gallery

Dr. Louise Bernard, Founding Director, Obama Presidential Center Museum, and Christiane Paul, Curator of Digital Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, discuss the evolving museum experience and embracing new technologies

Open image in gallery

Cathie Wood, Founder and CEO, ARK Investment Management, and Meredith Whittaker, President, Signal Messenger, in conversation about privacy, open-source software and authentication in the AI age

• New Google Pixel Watch 4 renders have emerged
• The watch apparently comes with a revamped charging system
• We should see it launched on August 20

There’s a very good chance we’ll see the Pixel Watch 4 at the launch event that Google has scheduled for Wednesday, August 20. And ahead of time we’ve got some unofficial renders of the device, which show several color options and a weird new charging system.

All of this comes from the team at Android Headlines, and if these renders turn out to be accurate, then the look of the wearable is going to be very similar to the Pixel Watch 3. The familiar circular design is on show, with a selection of bands.

2. Comcast’s New Streaming Store Features A Cast Of Hundreds

Comcast launched something called SteamStore this week, which is essentially its version of Amazon’s Channels store, or, more directly, Verizon’s +play: a way for customers to add streaming services from a convenient hub and to also purchase bundles of their most watched services.

It is, depending on your POV, either an admission that streaming is the future or a way to meet your customers where they are. Either way you look at it though, it’s a smart move, one that is likely to be appreciated by the mass of Xfinity subscribers who are not in the Early Adopter cohort.

But that’s not what is interesting to me about the announcement.

What’s interesting is that there are 450 apps in the offering, including some 100 niche subscription services who clearly have enough runway for Comcast to include them in its offering.

That is a lot of niche subscription services.

Why It Matters

I suspect many of them are low-priced enough that their subscribers don’t bother to cancel, either because they want to support that type of content, forget they have that particular $3.99/month subscription or keep thinking they’ll find the time to watch something on there.

That said, they all also likely have passionate and sizeable fan bases who turn to Reddit and Discord to discuss the content and the overall direction of the service. They are part of what we’ve been calling “Feudal Media”–small unconnected islands of content, each with its own culture, in-jokes and celebrities.

Now what’s notable here is that there are over 100 of these services. Not 10 or 15, but 100. That’s a lot of little bubbles.

Comcast’s plan makes a lot of sense in that people generally like bundles, or the smaller and simpler bundles offered around streaming, anyway..

It’s one less thing to worry about.

Plus they get a single interface, with all the services they subscribe to included, which is much better experience than the industry seems to realize—if there’s one complaint I hear most often, it’s that it is far too difficult to find anything in streaming, even if you go in knowing what you want to watch. 

And that if you don’t, going back and forth from app to app to see what they recommend is way too much effort.

Hence the bundle and the popularity of companies like Bango and MyBundle.

One more note on Comcast’s SteamStore: many of the bundles on offer—take the $15/month StreamSaver, for instance— feature the ad-supported versions of the apps that are being bundled, in this case, Peacock and Netflix. 

This is notable in that it is a thinly veiled secret that the big SVOD apps are all struggling to build up their ad-supported subscriber base in the US.

The “why” on that is not much of a mystery: the price gap between ad-free and ad-supported remains relatively small—maybe $10/month. And many of their new subs go in thinking they’ll only subscribe for three months or so—just long enough to watch whatever series got them to subscribe in the first place—and so $30 to watch it without ads is not that big a deal.

Especially given that “watch all your favorite shows without ads” has been Netflix’s main selling proposition for the past decade and it’s a hard behavior to change.

So there’s that and the fact that there are people who’d happily pay large sums of money to avoid ads, and I wonder whether the greater savings provided by this type of bundling will lead to a noticeable bump in the size of their ad-supported audiences.

Let’s just say I am skeptical.

What You Need To Do About It

If you are Comcast, well done. This is a smart move and given that you do own a goodly share of the broadband market in the US, giving your customers what they want is a wise decision.

If you are one of the streaming services looking to grow your ad-supported subscriber base, remember that word-of-mouth is still a powerful driver, and so making the experience a good one is key. That means resisting the urge to jam more ads into every break and making sure the same three ads don’t run all the time either.

Something to keep in mind.

If you are an Xfinity subscriber, this is definitely something worth checking out especially if you’ve been looking for a more unified interface.

You’re welcome.