The IT Nerd

Yesterday I got the latest Chrome emergency update hitting my test PCs and my test Macs. By my count that’s the eighth one of the year which is insane. This one which is tracked as CVE-2023-7024 was the eighth Chrome zero-day patched by Google this year. The flaw was described as a heap buffer overflow in WebRTC. An advisory from Google has more details.

To make sure you’re protected against this flaw, here’s what you should be running when it comes to Chrome:

Google said the Stable channel has been updated for desktops to

• 120.0.6099.129 for Macs and Linux machines
• 120.0.6099.129/130 for Windows machines.

On top of that, you should update any other Chromium based browser like Opera or Microsoft Edge as well to make sure you’re safe.

Now, on one hand it’s good that Google is patching these flaws. But at the same time it’s bad that they have so many. Thus you might want to pick another option for your browsing needs. Just a thought.

Today, YouTube published its annual end of year ads leaderboard today, featuring the top 10 most popular video ads in Canada in 2023. See below for the full list as well as insights and trends that bubbled up from this year’s list to help guide advertisers on what it takes to stand out in the industry today. 

Canadian Top Ads

1. Oppenheimer | New Trailer (Universal Pictures Canada)
2. To summer in Quebec is to summer all out (Bonjour Québec)
3. lululemon | Mens 2023 (lululemon)
4. What I Wouldn’t Do (North Star Calling) – Artists for Feel Out Loud supporting Kids Help Phone (Kids Help Phone)
5. Hyundai | We make WAH | Hyundai Canada (Hyundai Canada)
6. RONA Black Friday (RONA Inc)
7. Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes | Teaser Trailer (20th Century Studios Canada)
8. Celebrating 30 years of wonder in Las Vegas | Cirque du Soleil (Cirque du Soleil)
9. Élémentaire | Bande-annonce officielle (Walt Disney Studios Canada)
10. Soba Noodle Masterclass at Blue Goose Farm | Packed Up (MATTY MATHESON, in partnership with YETI)

Notable Themes:

1. Start with the story. Best practices matter, but it’s the creative—the insights, the story and how it’s told—that counts. It doesn’t hurt to make people laugh and lean into emotions. The best ads we’ve seen reflect the human experience and inspire. For example, set against a cover from local duo Mayfly, Bonjour Québec’s creative style is more an invite than an ad, bringing the magic of the province to life, and welcoming viewers to join in the experience.  
2. Connect with your audience like a creator. People connect with brands that behave like creators, crafting work that’s unique to the platform it runs on, and reflects trends and styles, embraces fandom, and invites conversation and commentary. YETI’s work with Matty Matheson shows that partnering with creators can be the best way to tell your brand’s story in an authentic way to new audiences. 
3. Create for YouTube, not TV. Storytelling formats and production styles have changed and brands are taking great advantage of YouTube’s unique canvas, blending non-traditional lengths and production styles with orientations like vertical Shorts for the greatest creative variety and results. This year, Kids Help Phone shows us a great example of taking time to tell the story by delivering an almost five minute, emotionally charged ad. And finally, we have RONA’s hilarious Black Friday ad, that resonated with Canadian consumers on a level no other Black Friday ad did.
4. Canadians still love to be entertained. Every year we publish this list, movie trailers bubble to the top. Canadians go to YouTube to be entertained and to learn, and movies satisfy both of these desires. And movies also present an opportunity for adjacent storytelling and creativity. Canadians love movie trailers but we also love the dissection of a topic. We crave information about upcoming films to know more about the plot, behind the scenes, interviews, or easter eggs, and YouTube satisfies all our curiosities around a topic.

Last week Google introduced Gemini, their latest and most capable AI model, and explained their vision, revealed technical details and shared a roadmap of what’s to come. They also previewed what developers will be able to build with its state-of-the-art multimodal capabilities.  

Google is now making Gemini Pro available to developers and organizations, as well as a range of other AI tools, models and infrastructure. 

Here’s what They’re announcing:  

• The Gemini Pro API is available to developers in Google AI Studio.
• It’s also available to enterprises through Google Cloud’s Vertex AI platform.
• They’re also introducing other models in Vertex AI to help developers and enterprises flexibly build and ship applications:
• An upgraded Imagen 2 text-to-image diffusion tool.
• A family of foundation models fine-tuned for the healthcare industry, MedLM available (via allowlist) to Google Cloud customers in the U.S.
• And they announced general availability of Duet AI for Developers and Duet AI in Security Operations.

Summary:

• Gemini Pro API and more new AI tools for developers and enterprises
• Bringing Gemini to Organizations Everywhere

Go deeper

• Gemini Pro API in AI Studio and Vertex AI
• Vertex AI with Imagen 2 
• Introducing MedLM
• General Availability of Duet AI for Developers and Duet AI in Security Operations
• Duet AI for Developers through our partner ecosystem

Today, Google made a series of announcements about a major AI breakthrough which is their largest and most capable AI model, called Gemini. 

The news spanned the world of enterprise, developers and consumers, so I thought it would be helpful to summarize the main announcements and provide links to the most useful blog posts. 

Today’s news 

Today, Google announced Gemini — the most capable general AI model they have ever built. It is the result of large-scale collaborative efforts by teams across Google, including Google DeepMind and Google Research, and is their largest science and engineering project ever. 

Google has optimized Gemini 1.0, our first version of the model, for three different sizes:

• Gemini Ultra — their most capable and largest model for highly-complex tasks
• Gemini Pro — their best model for scaling across a wide range of tasks
• Gemini Nano — their most efficient model for on-device tasks

What is Gemini? 

Gemini is a multimodal AI model. This means that it can generalize and seamlessly understand, operate across and combine different types of information, including:

• Text
• Images 
• Audio 
• Video 
• Coding languages

It’s also their most flexible model yet, able to efficiently run on everything from mobile devices to data centres. Gemini will significantly enhance the way developers and enterprise customers build and scale with AI. 

Built on next-generation capabilities

Until now, the standard approach to creating multimodal models involved training separate components for different modalities and then stitching them together to roughly mimic some of this functionality. These models can sometimes be good at performing certain tasks like describing images, but struggle with more conceptual and complex reasoning. 

So Google designed Gemini to be natively multimodal — pre-trained from the start on different modalities. Then they fine-tuned it with additional multimodal data to further refine its effectiveness. This helps Gemini seamlessly understand and reason about all kinds of inputs from the ground up, far better than existing multimodal models — and its capabilities are state-of-the-art in nearly every domain. 

Learn more about Gemini’s capabilities and see how it works.

Benchmarking tests

Google has been rigorously testing our Gemini models and evaluating their performance on a wide variety of tasks. From natural image, audio and video understanding to mathematical reasoning, Gemini Ultra’s performance exceeds current state-of-the-art results on 30 of the 32 academic benchmarks widely used in large language model research and development. 

You can see more details in this technical whitepaper. 

Making Gemini available to the world

Gemini 1.0 is now rolling out across a range of products and platforms:

For consumers

• Starting today, Bard — using  a fine-tuned version of Gemini Pro — will be available in English in more than 170 countries and territories. It will be far more capable at things like understanding and summarizing, reasoning, brainstorming, writing and planning. Google is enthusiastic about bringing Bard’s generative AI potential to Canadians soon; 
• Google is also bringing Gemini to Pixel. Pixel 8 Pro is the first smartphone engineered to run Gemini Nano, which is powering new features like Summarize in the Recorder app, and rolling out in Smart Reply in Gboard, starting with WhatsApp, with more messaging apps coming next year; 
• And in the coming months, Gemini will be available in more of their core products and services like Search, Ads, Chrome, and Duet AI.

For developers

• Starting on December 13, developers and enterprise customers can access Gemini Pro via the Gemini API in Google AI Studio and Vertex AI:
• Google AI Studio is a free, web-based developer tool that helps developers and enterprise customers prototype and launch apps quickly with an API key; 
• When it’s time for a fully-managed AI platform, Vertex AI allows customization of Gemini with full data control and benefits from additional Google Cloud features for enterprise security, safety, privacy, and data governance and compliance.  
• Android developers will also be able to build with Gemini Nano, their most efficient model for on-device tasks, via AICore. AICore is a new system capability available in Android 14, starting on Pixel 8 Pro devices. Sign up for an early preview. 
• And as part of their extensive trust and safety checks for Gemini Ultra, they will make it available to select customers, developers and partners for early experimentation and feedback before making it broadly available to developers and enterprise customers early next year 

Looking ahead 

This is a significant milestone in the development of AI, and the start of a new era for Google as they continue to rapidly innovate and responsibly advance the capabilities of our models. They’ve made great progress on Gemini so far and they’re working hard to further extend its capabilities for future versions. 

On the one year anniversary of ChatGPT going public comes these recent findings by Google researchers on ChatGPT’s training data.

The researchers successfully prompted ChatGPT to disclose parts of its training data using a novel attack technique, which involved asking the chatbot’s production model to repeatedly echo specific words indefinitely.

Anurag Gurtu, CPO, StrikeReady had this to say:

The exposure of training data in ChatGPT and other generative AI platforms raises significant privacy and security concerns. This situation underscores the need for more stringent data handling and processing protocols in AI development, especially regarding the use of sensitive and personal information. It also highlights the importance of transparency in AI development and the potential risks associated with the use of large-scale data. Addressing these challenges is critical for maintaining user trust and ensuring the responsible use of AI technologies.

This is not a good look for AI in general and ChatGPT specifically. Clearly people behind AI products need to get a handle on this sort of thing quickly or these sorts of issues will simply multiply.

UPDATE: Kevin Surace, Chair, Token adds this:

The attack was incredibly simple and some of them still work as of now. It is an absolute disaster for any model to reveal its training data – IP-wise, legal, integrity and so on. Certainly, OpenAI and others must put in more stringent safeguards to keep this from happening again.

If you are a user of the Chrome browser, you should update it ASAP to stop a flaw in said browser from being used by threat actors as an attack vector to pwn you.

The details of the flaw can be found here. The flaw allows an attacker to execute code and pwn you. Which is of course bad. What’s worse is that this exploit according to 9to5Mac is actively being exploited. Making this a today problem for you.

Time to update all the things Chrome related.

Shopping habits have significantly shifted over the years as Canadians become increasingly digitally savvy shoppers. With Black Friday and Cyber Monday around the corner, Google Canada is revealing new insights around how Canadians plan to shop this holiday season, and the top searched products under a number of categories. 

Whether Canadians are looking to revive cargo pants, up their hair and nails game or contemplate whether the iconic Mattel hunk is truly “Kenough” for gifting this holiday season, Google Canada’s has the top searched items for holiday shoppers along with additional insights on how Canadians are shopping this season here.

Here’s what Canadians are searching for leading into Black Friday/Cyber Monday*:

Top trending toy searches Dune Lego Blox Fruits Plush Pomni Plush OVO BearbrickToddler Balance Bike Wood Play Kitchen Marvel Action Figures BarbieTrain Set Ken	Top trending apparel searches Crocs Carhartt beanie Vessi shoes Birkenstock Clogs Cargo pants Ugg slippers Nike Air Force 1 Patagonia Fleece Lululemon Bag Loafers
Top trending consumer electronic searches Dyson headphones Bose soundbar Remote car starter Xbox 360 iPhone 15 Pro Max Nintendo Switch Games Garmin Forerunner 45 Watch Sonos speakers Sony Alpha Camera Kindle	Top trending beauty searches ELF lip oil Dior lipstick Clinique black honey Nail stickers Bubble moisturizer Press on nails Aquaphor lip balm EOS body lotion La Roche-Posay Cicaplast Baume B5 Maybelline vinyl ink

Source: Google Search Trends.*

Today, Google Canada is announcing the winning Canadian advertisers and agencies selected for the inaugural Google Search Honours Awards, celebrating those who are using AI-powered advertising to propel their business forward. 

There are plenty of awards that recognize flashy brand campaigns, but Search marketing doesn’t get the same recognition despite its impact on driving business results. The Google Search Honours Awards were created to celebrate brands and marketers using Google’s AI-powered ads to reach new audiences, maximize their spends and push the boundaries of what their campaigns can achieve.

On September 14, Google announced the shortlist, and six winners were announced at the awards celebration on Thursday November 2.

Category	Award	Candidates
Reach Expansion The Reach Expansion category recognizes work that leverages AI-powered Search tools to efficiently connect with a wider audience.	Rising Star	Winner: Simplii Financial Shortlist: BMO | KINESSO; Desjardins | Glassroom; Hyundai | INNOCEAN
	Best in Class	Winner: Canadian Tire Shortlist: Hudson’s Bay; lululemon athletica; RBC Insurance | WebAgency
Value Impact The Value Impact category celebrates AI-powered work that uses smart bidding strategies to get the most out of Search advertising investments.	Rising Star	Winner: Shopify Shortlist: Destination BC | Noise Digital; Scotiabank; WestJet Airlines Ltd. | Touché!
	Best in Class	Winner: Toyota | Saatchi & Saatchi Shortlist: Air Canada; Jewlr; QuickBooks Online
AI Innovation The final category is AI Innovation, which shines a light on those who are pushing the boundaries and breaking new ground with AI-powered Search campaigns.	Agency of the Year	Winner: Mindshare Shortlist: PHD; Saatchi & Saatchi/Synergize; Starcom
	Marketer of the Year	Winner: QuickBooks Online Shortlist: Canadian Tire; lululemon athletica; TD Bank

The news is out from Google this morning Demand Gen will enter global general availability for all advertisers.

YouTube & Google announced the beta for Demand Gen back at Cannes – unveiling it as a new ads campaign type for social marketers. Since then, global brands and agencies like Samsung Germany and pHd Media have used this solution to uplevel their approach to social.

Their findings: Neither Google nor YouTube are markedly social platforms but the interconnected networks provide performance and results that are better for social buyers. It’s because of the unparalleled reach (read: billions of users a month) across multiple surfaces and screens, plus thecontent that viewers seek out, and the singular nature of how this ecosystem is where consumers turn to first to engage during critical moments of consideration – from brand letters in Gmail to creator recommendations on YouTube and Shorts.

More details can be found in this blog post.