Apple unveiled a long-awaited AI strategy on Monday, integrating its new “Apple Intelligence” technology across its suite of apps including Siri and bringing OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT to its devices.
In the nearly two-hour long presentation at Apple’s annual developer conference, executives including CEO Tim Cook touted how voice assistant Siri would be able to interact with messages, emails, calendar, as well as third party apps. Siri will be able to write emails and change the tone of voice to suit the occasion.
Long known for a focus on user safety, the iPhone maker also signaled it plans to differentiate itself from rivals Microsoft and Google by placing privacy “at the core” of its features.
But Wall Street — looking for more dazzling AI features and reassurance that would put Apple in good standing to compete on AI with market-leader Microsoft — was lukewarm on the event. Apple shares closed down nearly 2%.
Apple’s stock, which trails those of other Big Tech firms this year, had rallied 13% last month in the run-up to the event.
“There isn’t anything here that propels the brand ahead of its as-expected trajectory of incrementalism,” said Dipanjan Chatterjee, analyst at Forrester.
“Apple Intelligence will indeed delight its users in small but meaningful ways, it brings Apple level with, but not head and shoulders above, where its peers are at.”
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Retired astronaut William Anders, who was one of the first three humans to orbit the moon, capturing the famed “Earthrise” photo during NASA’s Apollo 8 mission in 1968, died on Friday in the crash of a small airplane in Washington state. He was 90.
NASA chief Bill Nelson paid tribute to Anders on social media with a post of the iconic image of Earth rising over the lunar horizon, saying the former Air Force pilot “offered to humanity among the deepest of gifts an astronaut can give.”
The Heritage Flight Museum near Burlington, Washington, which he co-founded, confirmed that Anders was killed in an aircraft accident.
Anders was piloting the plane alone when it went down off the coast of Jones Island, part of the San Juan Islands archipelago north of Seattle, between Washington and Vancouver Island, British Columbia, The Seattle Times reported, citing his son, Greg.
According to television station KCPQ-TV, a Fox affiliate in Tacoma, Anders, a resident of San Juan County, was at the controls of a vintage Air Force single-engine T-34 Mentor that he owned.
Video footage showed on KCPQ showed a plane plunging from the skies in a steep dive before slamming into the water just offshore.
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Boeing’s new Starliner capsule flew its first crew of astronauts to space on Wednesday from Florida in a much-delayed test mission to the International Space Station, a milestone in the aerospace giant’s ambitions to step up its competition with Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
The CST-100 Starliner, with astronauts Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Sunita “Suni” Williams aboard, lifted off from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, strapped to an Atlas V rocket furnished and flown by the Boeing-Lockheed Martin joint venture United Launch Alliance (ULA).
The gumdrop-shaped capsule and its crew was headed for a rendezvous with the International Space Station (ISS) following years of technical problems, delays and a successful 2022 test mission to the orbital laboratory without astronauts aboard.
On Wednesday, the Atlas V’s engines thundered to life in flaming clouds of exhaust and coolant-water vapor as the spacecraft roared off its launch pad into sunny skies from Florida’s Atlantic Coast.
The rocket’s upper stage separated from its lower section about four minutes into flight, followed by Starliner’s separation from the second stage. Now on its own, the spacecraft fired onboard thrusters to start pushing itself into orbit, mission managers said, a process that starts its 24-hour catch-up journey with the ISS, which orbits some 250 miles (400 km) above Earth.
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As the Paris Olympics fast approaches, summertime temperatures will only continue to get hotter, giving athletes additional challenges as they seek to bring home medals.
Temperatures are expected to soar again in the European summer, after setting records in 2023, and although it is too early for an exact forecast for July, national weather agency Meteo-France said warmer than normal conditions were most likely.
There will be no air conditioning in the athletes’ rooms at Paris 2024, which has pledged to host the greenest ever Games, meaning they will have to pay more attention to their body temperatures as they train, recover and compete.
“It can be very hot and miserable (in Paris), as it was in Tokyo during the last Olympics,” Craig Heller, a biology professor at Stanford University who specialises in body temperature regulation, told Reuters.
“And that increase in environmental temperature has lots of effects on performance.”
Stanford University, in California’s Bay Area, is well known for Olympic athletes with at least one medallist at every Games since 1912 being linked with the school. Stanford-affiliated athletes won 26 medals in Tokyo and 27 in Rio in 2016.
The school’s researchers like Heller have had the opportunity to study body temperature regulation, and the proximity to Silicon Valley has allowed tech to enter the playing field.
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https://arizonadigitalfreepress.com/olympics-to-beat-the-heat-athletes-bring-cool-tech-to-paris-2024/
As the Paris Olympics fast approaches, summertime temperatures will only continue to get hotter, giving athletes additional challenges as they seek to bring home medals.
Temperatures are expected to soar again in the European summer, after setting records in 2023, and although it is too early for an exact forecast for July, national weather agency Meteo-France said warmer than normal conditions were most likely.
There will be no air conditioning in the athletes’ rooms at Paris 2024, which has pledged to host the greenest ever Games, meaning they will have to pay more attention to their body temperatures as they train, recover and compete.
“It can be very hot and miserable (in Paris), as it was in Tokyo during the last Olympics,” Craig Heller, a biology professor at Stanford University who specialises in body temperature regulation, told Reuters.
“And that increase in environmental temperature has lots of effects on performance.”
Stanford University, in California’s Bay Area, is well known for Olympic athletes with at least one medallist at every Games since 1912 being linked with the school. Stanford-affiliated athletes won 26 medals in Tokyo and 27 in Rio in 2016.
The school’s researchers like Heller have had the opportunity to study body temperature regulation, and the proximity to Silicon Valley has allowed tech to enter the playing field.
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Science & Technology | Thomson Reuters
China landed an uncrewed spacecraft on the far side of the moon on Sunday, overcoming a key hurdle in its landmark mission to retrieve the world’s first rock and soil samples from the dark lunar hemisphere.
The landing elevates China’s space power status in a global rush to the moon, where countries including the United States are hoping to exploit lunar minerals to sustain long-term astronaut missions and moon bases within the next decade.
The Chang’e-6 craft, equipped with an array of tools and its own launcher, touched down in a gigantic impact crater called the South Pole-Aitken Basin on the moon’s space-facing side at 6:23 a.m. Beijing time (2223 GMT), the China National Space Administration said.
The mission “involves many engineering innovations, high risks and great difficulty”, the agency said in a statement on its website. “The payloads carried by the Chang’e-6 lander will work as planned and carry out scientific exploration missions.”
The successful mission is China’s second on the far side of the moon, a region no other country has reached. The side of the moon perpetually facing away from the Earth is dotted with deep and dark craters, making communications and robotic landing operations more challenging.
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Science & Technology | Thomson REUTERS
OpenAI’s apparent homage to the movie “Her” featuring the voice likeness of Scarlett Johansson is fueling a backlash against artificial intelligence across Hollywood, executives told Reuters.
Johansson’s accusation that the ChatGPT-maker copied her performance in the Spike Jonze-directed feature film, after failing to strike an agreement, rekindled the creative class’s anxiety about the existential threat posed by AI, even as Hollywood studios test new tools and mull alliances with OpenAI.
“This seemed to strike a real chord,” said one industry executive. “It kind of puts a human face on it … There’s a well-known tech company that did something to a person we know.”
OpenAI stunned the world in February with feature film-like quality videos generated by its text-to-video tool, Sora. Since then, Hollywood executives and agents have met the company multiple times to discuss potential creative partnerships and applications of the technology, according to agents and industry executives.
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Scarlett Johansson on Monday accused OpenAI of creating a voice for the ChatGPT system that sounded “eerily similar” to the actress after she declined to voice the chatbot herself.
Johansson made the comments in a statement released hours after the artificial intelligence company said it was taking down the voice, called ‘Sky.’
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a statement emailed to Reuters on Monday that Sky’s voice was not an imitation of Johansson, but belonged to a different professional actress.
“The voice of Sky is not Scarlett Johansson’s, and it was never intended to resemble hers. We cast the voice actor behind Sky’s voice before any outreach to Ms. Johansson,” Altman said.
“Out of respect for Ms. Johansson, we have paused using Sky’s voice in our products. We are sorry to Ms. Johansson that we didn’t communicate better.”
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Scarlett Johansson says OpenAI chatbot voice ‘eerily similar’ to hers
Scarlett Johansson on Monday accused OpenAI of creating a voice for the ChatGPT system that sounded “eerily similar” to the actress after she declined to voice the chatbot herself.
Johansson made the comments in a statement released hours after the artificial intelligence company said it was taking down the voice, called ‘Sky.’
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a statement emailed to Reuters on Monday that Sky’s voice was not an imitation of Johansson, but belonged to a different professional actress.
“The voice of Sky is not Scarlett Johansson’s, and it was never intended to resemble hers. We cast the voice actor behind Sky’s voice before any outreach to Ms. Johansson,” Altman said.
“Out of respect for Ms. Johansson, we have paused using Sky’s voice in our products. We are sorry to Ms. Johansson that we didn’t communicate better.”
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Science & Technology | Thomson REUTERS
Bezos’ Blue Origin launches first crew to edge of space since 2022 grounding
Jeff Bezos’ space company Blue Origin launched a six-person crew – including the first U.S. Black astronaut candidate from the 1960s — from West Texas to the edge of space on Sunday, resuming its centerpiece space tourism business for the first time since its suborbital New Shepard rocket was grounded in 2022.
“I am ecstatic,” Ed Dwight, who at age 90 years and eight months became the oldest person in space, said upon landing.
Dwight and the other passengers, seated in a gumdrop-shaped capsule atop the rocket, were launched from Blue Origin facilities near the remote desert town of Van Horn.
The rocket separated from the capsule, which then ascended further beyond the boundary of Earth’s atmosphere to 65.7 miles (105.7 km), while the booster returned to land as planned.
The capsule then returned to Earth under parachutes, capping a mission lasting roughly 10 minutes. One of the capsule’s three parachutes did not fully inflate, a hitch that may draw scrutiny before the rocket’s next flight.
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Science & Technology | Thomson REUTERS
Kirin’s electric spoon leaps from Ig Nobel infamy to the dinner table
Japanese drinks giant Kirin Holdings will start selling an electrified spoon that researchers claim can promote healthier eating by enhancing salty tastes without extra sodium.
Monday’s product launch marks the first commercialisation of technology that last year won an Ig Nobel Prize, which honours unusual and whimsical research.
Kirin will sell just 200 of its Electric Salt Spoons online for 19,800 yen ($127) this month and a limited run at a Japanese retailer in June, but is hoping for 1 million users globally within five years. Sales overseas will start next year.
The spoon, made of plastic and metal, was co-developed with Meiji University professor Homei Miyash*ta, who previously demonstrated the taste-enhancing effect in prototype electric chopsticks.
The effect works by passing a weak electric field from the spoon to concentrate sodium ion molecules on the tongue to enhance the perceived saltiness of the food.
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Science & Technology | Thomson REUTERS
Netflix said on Wednesday its ad-supported tier has reached 40 million global monthly active users, from 5 million a year earlier, a sign that its push to attract new users with the cheaper plan is paying off.
The jump comes at a time when streaming companies are facing stiff competition and introducing bundles with their rivals to retain subscribers.
Netflix, which launched the ad-supported plan in November 2022, said that 40% of all sign-ups come from those plans in the countries where they are available.
In the fourth quarter, the majority of gross subscriber additions for the streaming industry came from ad-supported plans for the first time, data from research firm Antenna showed earlier this week.
Netflix also said it will launch an in-house advertising technology platform by the end of 2025, in a bid to offer clients new ways to buy ads and better engage with users.
Science & Technology | Thomson Reuters
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TikTok plans to start labeling images and video uploaded to its video-sharing service that have been generated using artificial intelligence, it said on Thursday, using a digital watermark known as Content Credentials.
Researchers have expressed concern that AI-generated content could be used to interfere with U.S. elections this fall, and TikTok was already among a group of 20 tech companies that earlier this year signed an accord pledging to fight it.
The company already labels AI-generated content made with tools inside the app, but the latest move would apply a label to videos and images generated outside of the service.
“We also have policies that prohibit realistic AI that is not labeled, so if realistic AI (generated contents) appears on the platform, then we will remove it as violating our community guidelines,” Adam Presser, head of operations and trust and safety at TikTok, said in an interview.
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Biden touts new $3.3 billion Microsoft data center at failed Foxconn site Trump backed
U.S. President Joe Biden on Wednesday unveiled plans by Microsoft Corp to build a $3.3 billion data center in southeastern Wisconsin, drawing a sharp contrast to his Republican predecessor who had backed a previous $10 billion project at the same site that was significantly scaled back.
Biden, on his fourth visit to Wisconsin this year, said Microsoft‘s investment would create thousands of jobs in the presidential election battleground state that his campaign sees as critical to his bid for a second term.
The facility will be built where Biden’s rival for the presidency, Donald Trump, announced a $10 billion investment by Taiwan electronics manufacturer Foxconn in 2017 that the company later drastically scaled back. Trump had called it “the eighth wonder of the world.”
“I’m here to talk about a great comeback story in America,” Biden told about 200 people at Gateway Technical College’s Sturtevant campus in a Midwestern state hit by manufacturing declines.
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Sony Pictures Entertainment and private equity firm Apollo Global Management on Wednesday submitted a $26 billion offer for Paramount Global but have yet to receive a response as of Friday, according to a person familiar with the matter.
A special committee of the Paramount board, created to evaluate offers for the company, has been holding exclusive deal talks with Skydance Media. That period of exclusivity ends Friday, and a separate source familiar with the matter said the exclusivity period is unlikely to be extended, opening the doors to other bidders.
The companies submitted a non-binding offer letter on Wednesday, signed by Sony Pictures Chief Executive Tony Vinciquerra and Apollo partner Aaron Sobel, a source confirmed to Reuters. The $26 billion offer is a combination of cash and assumption of debt.
Apollo declined comment to Reuters, which reported in April that Sony’s SPE and Apollo were in talks on a joint bid. Paramount and Sony also declined comment on the Apollo-Sony offer, which was first reported by the Wall Street Journal.
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China on Friday launched an uncrewed spacecraft on a nearly two-month mission to retrieve rocks and soil from the far side of the moon, the first country to make such an ambitious attempt.
The Long March-5, China’s largest rocket, blasted off at 5:27 p.m. Beijing time (0927 GMT) from Wenchang Space Launch Center on the southern island of Hainan with the more than 8 metric ton Chang’e-6 probe.
Chang’e-6 is tasked with landing in the South Pole-Aitken Basin on the far side of the moon, which perpetually faces away from the Earth, after which it will retrieve and return samples.
The launch marks another milestone in China’s lunar and space exploration programme.
“It is a bit of a mystery to us how China has been able to develop such an ambitious and successful programme in such a short time,” said Pierre-Yves Meslin, a French researcher working on one of the scientific objectives of the Chang’e-6 mission.
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Elon Musk pushed for China’s approval for Tesla to roll out advanced driver-assistance systems in a whirlwind trip to Beijing that ended on Monday, a step that could boost revenues at a time when Tesla is under pressure from Chinese rivals.
Tesla CEO Musk arrived in the Chinese capital on Sunday where he was expected to discuss the rollout of Full Self-Driving (FSD) software and permission to transfer driving data overseas, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.
His meetings included one with Chinese Premier Li Qiang, who praised Tesla’s development in China as a successful example of U.S.-China economic and trade cooperation though state media did not say if the two had discussed FSD.
Still, the U.S. automaker won a key endorsement that coincided with his trip – from a top Chinese auto association which said Tesla’s Model 3 and Y cars were among models found to be compliant with China’s data security requirements.
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EXPLAINER: What is so special about TikTok’s technology
The content recommendation algorithm that powers the online short video platform TikTok has once again come under the spotlight after the U.S. ordered its Chinese owner, ByteDance, to sell the app’s U.S. assets or face a nationwide ban.
Here is how it works and why it has attracted more discussion than technology used by its rivals such as Meta’s Instagram, Google’s YouTube and Snapchat:
ALGORITHMS of TikTok
The algorithms are deemed core to ByteDance’s overall operations, and ByteDance would rather shut down the app than sell it, Reuters reported citing sources.
China made changes to its export laws in 2020 that give it approval rights over any export of algorithms and source codes, adding a layer of complexity to any effort to sell the app.
Academics and former company staff said that it is not just the algorithms, but also how it works with the short video format, that has made TikTok so successful globally.
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Paleontologists from Argentina announced the discovery of a new medium-sized herbivorous dinosaur, which was a fast runner and lived about 90 million years ago in the Late Cretaceous period in present day Patagonia.
The animal, named Chakisaurus nekul, was found in the Pueblo Blanco Natural Reserve, in the southern province of Río Negro, an area rich in fossils where many mammals, turtles, and fish have been found along with other species of dinosaur.
It is estimated that the largest Chakisaurus reached 2.5 or 3 meters long and was 70 centimeters high (8 to 10 feet long and 27 inches high).
Studies of Chakisaurus yielded new findings indicating that it was a fast runner and had its tail curved unusually downward.
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The U.S. Senate voted by a wide margin late Tuesday in favor of legislation that would ban TikTok in the United States if its owner, the Chinese tech firm ByteDance, fails to divest the popular short video app over the next nine months to a year.
Driven by widespread worries among U.S. lawmakers that China could access Americans’ data or surveil them with the app, the bill was passed by the U.S. House of Representatives on Saturday and U.S. President Joe Biden has said he will sign it into law on Wednesday.
“For years we’ve allowed the Chinese Communist party to control one of the most popular apps in America that was dangerously shortsighted,” said Senator Marco Rubio, the top Republican on the Intelligence Committee. “A new law is going to require its Chinese owner to sell the app. This is a good move for America.”
Asked about the Senate’s vote, the Chinese foreign ministry referred on Wednesday to comments the ministry made in March when the House of Representatives passed a similar bill.
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