23/10/2025

BIZ & FINANCE THURSDAY | OCT 23, 2025

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Research finds AI assistants make errors reporting news

OpenAI’s Atlas browser takes on

Google’s Chrome SAN FRANCISCO: OpenAI on Tuesday unveiled ChatGPT Atlas, a long-anticipated artificial intelligence-powered web browser built around its popular chatbot, in a direct challenge to Google Chrome’s dominance. The launch marks OpenAI’s latest move to capitalise on 800 million weekly active ChatGPT users, as it expands into more aspects of users’ online lives by collecting data about consumers’ browser behaviour. It could accelerate a broader shift toward AI-driven search, as users increasingly turn to conversational tools that synthesise information instead of relying on traditional keyword-based results from Google – intensifying competition between OpenAI and Google. Shares of Alphabet, which owns the Chrome browser, were down 1.8% in afternoon trading. Reuters earlier reported on OpenAI’s planned browser launch. It is the latest entrant in a crowded field of AI browsers, which includes Perplexity’s Comet, Brave Browser and Opera’s Neon, as companies race to weave in tools that can summarize pages, fill out forms and draft code to attract users. Atlas lets users open a ChatGPT sidebar in any window to summarise content, compare products or analyze data from any site. In “agent mode”, now available to paid users, ChatGPT can interact with websites on their behalf – completing tasks from start to finish, such as researching and shopping for a trip. In a demo on Tuesday, OpenAI developers showcased how ChatGPT could find an online recipe and then automatically purchase all the ingredients. The agent navigated to the Instacart website and added the necessary groceries to the cart – a task that took several minutes to complete. The browser is now available globally on Apple’s macOS. Versions for Windows, iOS and Android will be released later. Led by Sam Altman, OpenAI upended the tech industry with the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022. Following its initial success, the company has faced stiff competition from Google and startup Anthropic and has been seeking new areas of growth. Google, meanwhile, has been developing ways to adapt to shifting search behaviors since ChatGPT’s debut. Depending on the query, each Google search result can now display an AI overview, or AI Mode, alongside traditional links, offering a chatbot-like experience. Last month, Google integrated its Gemini AI model into Chrome for US users, with plans to bring Gemini to the iOS Chrome app as well. In a win for Google, a federal judge in September ruled that Google will not have to sell the Chrome browser. Judge Amit Mehta said Google can continue paying partners to promote its search engine, noting that heavy investment in generative AI by Big Tech and startups alike now threatens traditional search, making such payments more acceptable. Despite increasing competition, Google Chrome has held its dominance, with 71.9% market share in the global browser market in September, according to StatCounter. Still, analysts say a new browser from OpenAI could introduce fresh competition for ad dollars. “Integrating chat into a browser is a precursor for OpenAI starting to sell ads, which it has yet to do so far. Once OpenAI starts selling ads that could take away a significant part of search advertising share from Google, which has around 90% of that spend category,” said Gil Luria, analyst at D.A. Davidson. – Reuters

o They misrepresent content in nearly half their responses

responses from all AI assistants studied, including outdated information, it said. Examples cited by the study included Gemini incorrectly stating changes to a law on disposable vapes and ChatGPT reporting Pope Francis as the current Pope several months after his death. Twenty-two public-service media organisations from 18 countries including France, Germany, Spain, Ukraine, Britain and the United States took part in the study. With AI assistants increasingly replacing traditional search engines for news, public trust could be undermined, the EBU said. “When people don’t know what to trust, they end up trusting nothing at all, and that can deter democratic participation,” EBU media director Jean Philip De Tender said in a statement. Some 7% of all online news consumers and 15% of those aged under 25 use AI assistants to get their news, according to the Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report 2025. The new report urged AI companies to be held accountable and to improve how their AI assistants respond to news-related queries. – Reuters

Reuters has made contact with the companies to seek their comment on the findings. Gemini, Google’s AI assistant, has stated previously on its website that it welcomes feedback so that it can continue to improve the platform and make it more helpful to users. OpenAI and Microsoft have previously said hallucinations – when an AI model generates incorrect or misleading information, often due to factors such as insufficient data – are an issue that they are seeking to resolve. Perplexity says on its website that one of its “Deep Research” modes has 93.9% accuracy in terms of factuality. A third of AI assistants’ responses showed serious sourcing errors such as missing, misleading or incorrect attribution, according to the study. Some 72% of responses by Gemini, Google’s AI assistant, had significant sourcing issues, compared to below 25% for all other assistants, it said. Issues of accuracy were found in 20% of

GENEVA: Leading AI assistants misrepresent news content in nearly half their responses, according to new research published yesterday by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) and the BBC. The international research studied 3,000 responses to questions about the news from leading artificial intelligence assistants – software applications that use AI to understand natural language commands to complete tasks for a user. It assessed AI assistants in 14 languages for accuracy, sourcing and ability to distinguish opinion versus fact, including ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini and Perplexity. Overall, 45% of the AI responses studied contained at least one significant issue, with 81% having some form of problem, research showed. The company which makes the iconic Birkin bag, said sales growth in the United States accelerated slightly in the third quarter by 7.2% to €714 million (RM3.5 billion). “In the Americas we had a very good third quarter, in particular in the United States with growth driven by all product lines,” said chief financial officer Eric du Halgouet. Hermes said earlier this year that it hoped to avoid raising prices in the United States further despite the new 15% tariff on goods from the EU, but warned the weak dollar was also weighing on performance. The gain in sales would have been 14.1% had the dollar not fallen. Halgouet said Hermes had kept prices steady since the EU-US tariff deal in July. “We’ll continue to invest in this strategic market,” he said, noting the opening of a new store in Nashville, Tennessee, earlier this month. Overall, the company’s third quarter sales rose by 5% to €3.9 billion. That puts it ahead of the world’s biggest luxury group LVMH, which reported last week that its third-quarter revenue dropped four percent due to adverse currency movements. In China, the key market for luxury firms where sales have recently faced headwinds, Hermes posted flat third quarter revenues. – AFP

Hermes defies American tariffs as sales grow PARIS: Sales by French luxury group Hermes, known for its silk scarves and leather handbags, defied US tariffs and a weak dollar to rise in the third quarter.

A woman walks in front of a Hermes store in Paris. – REUTERSPIC

Netflix shares sink as quarterly profit misses mark SAN FRANCISCO: Netflix shares sank on Tuesday after the streaming television powerhouse reported quarterly profit that fell short of market expectations. an earnings call that absent the hefty cost in Brazil, it would have exceeded its operating margin forecast in the quarter.

likelihood of Netflix being hit with the expense, so it recorded it in the recently-ended quarter, according to Neumann. Netflix shares were down more than 6% to slightly less than US$1,163 in after-market trades that followed release of the earnings figures. Netflix viewership in UK and US reached their highest levels in about three years, powered by a lineup that included its most popular film ever KPop Demon Hunters . – AFP

“It’s not an income tax; it’s a cost of doing business in Brazil,” said Netflix chief financial officer Spencer Neumann. “It’s not even specific to streaming, so we assume other companies will be impacted by this.” A recent court ruling involving a different company doing business in Brazil boosted the

Netflix recorded a profit of US$2.5 billion on revenue of US$11.5 billion in the recently ended quarter, saying it was hit with a US$619 million expense due to an ongoing dispute with Brazilian tax authorities. Netflix executives told financial analysts on