Artificial Intelligence

We first heard last year that former Apple design chief Jony Ive and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman were working on some kind of AI hardware project. It was later reported that Tang Tan, Apple’s chief iPhone and Apple Watch designer, was also joining the project.

A report now suggests that the pair are now seeking a billion dollars in funding, and are in talks with Steve Jobs’ widow, founder and president of the Emerson Collective, Laurene Powell Jobs …

Spotify’s AI DJ feature launched more than a year ago now, but users had little control over it. A new AI Playlist feature changes that for beta uses, as you can now create playlists from ChatGPT-style text prompts.

Spotify recommends specifying a combination of genres, moods, artists, and decades – but you can also try off-the-wall things like “beats to battle a zombie apocalypse” …

Chinese media is reporting that Apple is buying AI services from local tech giant Baidu. The WSJ had earlier reported that the iPhone maker had been in discussions with the company, to use its AI smarts in iOS 18.

Baudi operates a ChatGPT-style LLM known as ERNIE Bot, which claims to “comprehend human intentions and deliver accurate, logical, and fluent responses approaching human level” …

The OpenAI mess was all but over as of last November, but there was one outstanding item: an official review into the actions of CEO Sam Altman. Update: The internal review is now complete, Altman has now been officially appointed to the board, with three new directors.

The board expressed full confidence in the leadership of Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, but the mystery of what led to his removal in the first place remains unsolved – more at the end …

Disability campaigner Colin Hughes has described eight ways that AI accessibility features could turbo-boost the experience of using Apple products this year.

Hughes – who is quadriplegic, and previously shared with us the ways in which Apple tech helps him in his daily life – is excited by the company’s focus on artificial intelligence …

Tomorrow is the date of Apple’s annual shareholder meeting, and the company this year faces five shareholder proposals – and recommends voting against all of them.

The company went as far as trying to exclude one of them, but the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) ruled that it must be put to a vote …

A limited number of Apple support staff are reportedly using an internal AI tool to help answer customer questions. The tool is reportedly known as Apple Ask.

The ChatGPT-style tool lets advisors paste in or paraphrase a support question, and the AI then searches Apple’s internal knowledge base to generate answers …

Apple has announced an innovative new artificial intelligence tool which could enable anyone to create animations. Apple Keyframer is an AI animation generator that needs nothing other than a still image and a text instruction.

It comes just a few days after the company revealed MGIE, a way of editing photos using text commands …

A new report says that Apple bought “up to” 32 AI startups in 2023, more artificial intelligence acquisitions than any other tech giant.

Apple is also said to have bought companies at an earlier stage in their development …

Apple is one of more than 200 companies and other organisations to join the US AI Safety Institute Consortium (AISIC), at the request of the White House.

Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Nvidis are among the other companies to join the consortium in response to an executive order by President Biden to ensure that artificial intelligence is “safe, secure, and trustworthy” …

Apple’s AI work may be something of a slow-burn when it comes to Siri, but the company isn’t sitting back doing nothing. The company has just released an open-source AI model for editing photos using simple text commands – something which has been described as a breakthrough achievement.

Named MGIE – for Multimodal large language model Guided Image Editing – the model allows the user to use natural language to tell the editor what it is you want to achieve …

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s AI announcement has raised major concerns, after he said that the company had more user data than was used to train ChatGPT – and would soon be using it to train its own AI systems.

The company’s plan to use Facebook and Instagram posts and comments to train a competing chatbot raises concerns about both privacy and toxicity …

Adobe has announced that its popular generative AI app Firefly is coming to Vision Pro. The company says the experience is “purpose-built for visionOS” and will help users “bring their creative visions to life.” While the app usually costs generative credits, Adobe is making it free to use the text to image AI on Vision Pro until March.