Tag: iab-technology industry

Amazon invests up to $4 billion in Anthropic AI in exchange for minority stake and further AWS integration | CNN Business

CNN
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Amazon said on Monday that it’s investing up to $4 billion into the artificial intelligence company Anthropic in exchange for partial ownership and Anthropic’s greater use of Amazon Web Services (AWS), the e-commerce giant’s cloud computing platform.

The deepening partnership between the two companies highlights how some large tech firms with massive cloud computing resources are increasingly leveraging those assets to gain a bigger foothold in AI.

As part of the deal, AWS will become the “primary” cloud provider for Anthropic, with the AI company using Amazon’s cloud platform to do “the majority” of its AI model development and research into AI safety, the companies said. That will include using Amazon’s suite of in-house AI chips.

Anthropic also made a “long-term commitment” to offer its AI models to AWS customers, Amazon said, and promised to give AWS users early access to features such as the ability to adapt Anthropic models for specific use cases.

“With today’s announcement, customers will have early access to features for customizing Anthropic models, using their own proprietary data to create their own private models, and will be able to utilize fine-tuning capabilities via a self-service feature,” Amazon said in a release.

Anthropic already offers its models to AWS users through Amazon Bedrock, Amazon’s one-stop shop for AI products. Bedrock also provides access to models from other providers including Stability AI and AI21 Labs, along with proprietary models developed by Amazon itself.

In a release, Anthropic said that Amazon’s minority stake would not change its corporate governance structure nor its commitments to developing AI responsibly.

“We will conduct pre-deployment tests of new models to help us manage the risks of increasingly capable AI systems,” Anthropic said.

Amazon and Anthropic both made commitments to the Biden administration this year to conduct external audits of its AI systems before releasing them to the public.

Amazon’s investment in Anthropic follows similar moves by cloud leaders such as Microsoft. In 2019, Microsoft invested $1 billion in ChatGPT-maker OpenAI. More recently, Microsoft made a $10 billion investment in OpenAI this year and launched a push to bring OpenAI’s technology into consumer-facing Microsoft products, such as Bing.

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August 2, 2023
Google unveils Pixel 8 built for ‘the generative AI era’ | CNN Business

CNN
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There’s nothing particularly new about Google’s latest-generation Pixel 8 smartphone hardware. That’s why the company is pushing hard to tout its AI-powered new software, which Google says was built specifically for the “first phone of the generative AI era.”

At a press event in New York City, Google

(GOOG) showed off the new Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro devices, which largely look the same as the year prior, albeit with more rounded edges. But inside, its new G3 Tensor chip unlocks an AI-powered world aimed at simplifying your life, from asking the device to summarize news articles and websites to using Google

(GOOG) Assistant to field phone calls and tweaking photos to move or resize objects.

The 6.3-inch Pixel 8 and the 6.7-inch Pixel 8 Pro comes with a brighter display, new camera system and longer-lasting battery life. The Pixel 8 is available in three colors – hazel, rose and obsidian – and starts at $699, about $100 less than the baseline iPhone 14 with the same amount of storage. (That’s about $100 more than last year’s Pixel 7).

Meanwhile, the Pixel 8 Pro – which touts a polished aluminum frame and a matte back glass this year – now has the ability to take better low-light photos and sharper selfies. It starts at $999 – the same price as the iPhone 15 Pro – and is available in three colors: bay, porcelain and obsidian.

Although these upgrades are mostly incremental, the AI enhancements and related features may appeal to tech enthusiasts who want the latest version of Android and an alternative to Apple or Samsung smartphones.

At the same time, Google’s Pixel line remains a niche product. Its global market share for smartphones remains about 1%, according to data from ABI Research. Google also limits sales to only a handful of countries, so keeping the volume low has been strategic as Google remains predominantly a software company with many partners running Android.

Reece Hayden, an analyst at ABI Research, said Google is looking to establish itself as an early market leader amid the “generative AI-related hysteria,” which kicked into high gear late last year with the introduction of ChatGPT. Generative AI refers to a type of artificial intelligence that can create new content, such as text and images, in response to user prompts.

“[Adding it to the Pixel] creates further product differentiation by leveraging internal capabilities that Apple may not have,” said Hayden.

He expects this announcement to be the first of many similar efforts coming to hardware over the next year, especially among brands who’ve already made investments in this area.

Here’s a closer look at what Google announced and some of the standout new AI features:

Google showed off a handful of photo features coming to its Pixel line, including Magic Editor which uses generative AI to reposition and resize a subject. Similarly, a new Audio Magic Eraser tool that lets users erase distracting sounds from videos.

Another tool called Best Take snaps a series of photos and then aggregates the faces into one shot so everyone looks their best. And a a new Zoom enhanced feature lets users pinch to zoom in about 30 times after a photo is taken to focus in on and edit a specific area.

The company said these efforts aim to “let you capture every moment just how you want to remember it.”

Although the tools intend to give users more control over their photos, some analysts like Thomas Husson at market research firm Forrester believe it will be harder to distinguish between what’s real and what’s not.

“The fact that Google refers to a ‘Magic Eraser’ will blur the distinction between real photos and heavily edited ones,” Husson said. But he warns an uptick in deepfake apps already makes it hard to decipher the authenticity of some shots. “You don’t really need Google AI for that.”

The company said Google Assistant will now sound more realistic when it engages with callers. Google’s screen call tool already lets Assistant field incoming calls, speak to callers and determine who’s on the line before pushing it through to the user. But its robotic voice will sound increasing more natural, the company said.

Google is also bringing the capabilities of its Bard AI chatbot to Google Assistant, so it will be able to do more than set an alarm or tell the weather. With its new generative AI capabilities, it will be able to review important emails in a user’s inbox or reveal more about a hotel that popped up on their Instagram feed. Assistant will also be able to understand user questions in voice, text and images.

“With generative AI on the scene, it’s really creating a lot of new opportunities to build an even more intuitive and intelligent and personalized digital assistant,” Sissie Hsiao, general manager for Google Assistant and Bard, told CNN.

In addition to making Assistant more useful, the tool will make it easier for more users to interact with Google’s six-month-old Bard on interfaces they may already frequently engage with. Last month, Google rolled out a major expansion of Bard, allowing users to link the tool to their Gmail and other Google Workspace tools and making it easier to fact check the AI’s responses.

Google launched Assistant with Bard to a small test group on Wednesday, and it will be more widely available to Android and iOS users in the coming months.

AI is also getting smarter on the Pixel Watch 2 ($349), its second-generation smartwatch. Users can use Bard capabilities via an upgraded Google Assistant watch app to ask it how they slept and get other health insights.

In addition, the Pixel 2 features a new heart rate sensor, which works alongside a new AI-driven heart rate algorithm, to provide a more accurate heart rate reading than before. But Hayden said he doesn’t think more AI will add too much more to its existing value proposition.

“Smart watches already include a fair amount of AI, and Pixel is no different,” he said.

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August 2, 2023
Medical imaging struggles to read dark skin. Researchers say they’ve found a way to make it easier | CNN Business

CNN
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Traditional medical imaging – used to diagnose, monitor or treat certain medical conditions – has long struggled to get clear pictures of patients with dark skin, according to experts.

Researchers say they have found a way to improve medical imaging, a process through which physicians can observe the inside of the body, regardless of skin tone.

The new findings were published in the October edition of the journal Photoacoustics. The team tested the forearms of 18 volunteers, with skin tones ranging from light to dark. They found that a distortion of the photoacoustic signal that makes the imaging more difficult to read, called clutter, increased with darkness of skin.

“When you have darker skin, you have more melanin. And melanin is actually one of the optical absorbers that we inherently have within our body,” Muyinatu Bell, an author of the study and director and founder of the Photoacoustic and Ultrasonics Systems Engineering (PULSE) Lab at JHU, told CNN. In other words, the amount of melanin content in the skin could be associated with more clutter.

“The skin essentially acts as a transmitter of sound, but it’s not the same type of focused sound that we get and we want with ultrasound, it’s everywhere diffused and creates a lot of confusion,” Bell said. “And so, this scattering of the sound that’s caused by the melanin absorption is worse and worse with the higher melanin concentration.”

The study – a collaboration with researchers in Brazil who had previously used one of Bell’s algorithms – found that signal-to-noise ratio, a scientific measure that compares signal with background noise, improved for all skin tones when the researchers used a technique called “short-lag spatial coherence beamforming” while performing medical imaging. That technique, originally used for ultrasounds, can be applied to photoacoustic imaging.

The technique involves a combination of light and ultrasound technology, forming a new medical imaging modality, Theo Pavan, an author of the study and associate professor with the department of physics at University of São Paulo in Brazil, told CNN.

“We really verified that it was much less sensitive to the skin color in terms of the quality of the image that you can get compared to the conventional methods that … is more commonly used by the community,” Pavan said.

The study is “the first to objectively assess skin tone and to both qualitatively and quantitatively demonstrate that skin” photoacoustic signal “and clutter artifacts increase with epidermal melanin content,” the researchers wrote.

The applications of photoacoustic technology vary, but with the researchers’ new developments, it may help diagnose health issues more accurately and equitably.

“Right now, it’s increasing the application of the breast imaging,” and the next step would be to “increase the image quality overall,” said Guilherme Fernandes, an author of the study and a Ph.D. candidate in physics applied to medicine and biology at USP.

The researchers’ work could also mean advancements for equity in health care at large.

“In our scientific technology, there is a bias in terms of developing these products, for things that work well in lighter-skinned people,” said Dr. Camara Jones, a family physician, epidemiologist and former president of the American Public Health Association, who was not involved in the new study.

“The biggest problem is that we use a thing we call race, as a risk factor — as a health risk factor. And so race is the social and interpretation of how people look in a race-conscious society. Race is not biology,” Jones explained. “We’ve mapped the human genome. We know there’s no basis in the human genome for racial sub-speciation.”

This study isn’t the first to find skin color biases in medical technology. Medical equipment that leverages infrared sensing has also been found to not work as well on darker skin, since skin tone can interfere with the reflection of light.

Many devices that were in frequent use during the Covid-19 pandemic, such as pulse oximeters and forehead thermometers, involve emitting and capturing light to make a measurement. But if that device isn’t calibrated for darker skin, the pigmentation could affect how the light is absorbed and how the infrared technology works.

Bell said her research can hopefully pave a way to eliminating discrimination in health care and inspire others to develop technology that helps everyone, regardless of their skin tone.

“I believe that with the ability to show that we can devise and develop technology — that doesn’t just work for one small subset of the population but works for a wider range of the population. This is very inspiring for not only my group, but for groups around the world to start thinking in this direction when designing technology. Does it serve the wider population?” Bell said.

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August 2, 2023
AI tools make things up a lot, and that’s a huge problem | CNN Business

CNN
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Before artificial intelligence can take over the world, it has to solve one problem. The bots are hallucinating.

AI-powered tools like ChatGPT have mesmerized us with their ability to produce authoritative, human-sounding responses to seemingly any prompt. But as more people turn to this buzzy technology for things like homework help, workplace research, or health inquiries, one of its biggest pitfalls is becoming increasingly apparent: AI models often just make things up.

Researchers have come to refer to this tendency of AI models to spew inaccurate information as “hallucinations,” or even “confabulations,” as Meta’s AI chief said in a tweet. Some social media users, meanwhile, simply blast chatbots as “pathological liars.”

But all of these descriptors stem from our all-too-human tendency to anthropomorphize the actions of machines, according to Suresh Venkatasubramanian, a professor at Brown University who helped co-author the White House’s Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights.

The reality, Venkatasubramanian said, is that large language models — the technology underpinning AI tools like ChatGPT — are simply trained to “produce a plausible sounding answer” to user prompts. “So, in that sense, any plausible-sounding answer, whether it’s accurate or factual or made up or not, is a reasonable answer, and that’s what it produces,” he said. “There is no knowledge of truth there.”

The AI researcher said that a better behavioral analogy than hallucinating or lying, which carries connotations of something being wrong or having ill-intent, would be comparing these computer outputs to the way his young son would tell stories at age four. “You only have to say, ‘And then what happened?’ and he would just continue producing more stories,” Venkatasubramanian said. “And he would just go on and on.”

Companies behind AI chatbots have put some guardrails in place that aim to prevent the worst of these hallucinations. But despite the global hype around generative AI, many in the field remain torn about whether or not chatbot hallucinations are even a solvable problem

Simply put, a hallucination refers to when an AI model “starts to make up stuff — stuff that is not in-line with reality,” according to Jevin West, a professor at the University of Washington and co-founder of its Center for an Informed Public.

“But it does it with pure confidence,” West added, “and it does it with the same confidence that it would if you asked a very simple question like, ‘What’s the capital of the United States?’”

This means that it can be hard for users to discern what’s true or not if they’re asking a chatbot something they don’t already know the answer to, West said.

A number of high-profile hallucinations from AI tools have already made headlines. When Google first unveiled a demo of Bard, its highly anticipated competitor to ChatGPT, the tool very publicly came up with a wrong answer in response to a question about new discoveries made by the James Webb Space Telescope. (A Google spokesperson at the time told CNN that the incident “highlights the importance of a rigorous testing process,” and said the company was working to “make sure Bard’s responses meet a high bar for quality, safety and groundedness in real-world information.”)

A veteran New York lawyer also landed in hot water when he used ChatGPT for legal research, and submitted a brief that included six “bogus” cases that the chatbot appears to have simply made up. News outlet CNET was also forced to issue corrections after an article generated by an AI tool ended up giving wildly inaccurate personal finance advice when it was asked to explain how compound interest works.

Cracking down on AI hallucinations, however, could limit AI tools’ ability to help people with more creative endeavors — like users that are asking ChatGPT to write poetry or song lyrics.

But there are risks stemming from hallucinations when people are turning to this technology to look for answers that could impact their health, their voting behavior, and other potentially sensitive topics, West told CNN.

Venkatasubramanian added that at present, relying on these tools for any task where you need factual or reliable information that you cannot immediately verify yourself could be problematic. And there are other potential harms lurking as this technology spreads, he said, like companies using AI tools to summarize candidates’ qualifications and decide who should move ahead to the next round of a job interview.

Venkatasubramanian said that ultimately, he thinks these tools “shouldn’t be used in places where people are going to be materially impacted. At least not yet.”

How to prevent or fix AI hallucinations is a “point of active research,” Venkatasubramanian said, but at present is very complicated.

Large language models are trained on gargantuan datasets, and there are multiple stages that go into how an AI model is trained to generate a response to a user prompt — some of that process being automatic, and some of the process influenced by human intervention.

“These models are so complex, and so intricate,” Venkatasubramanian said, but because of this, “they’re also very fragile.” This means that very small changes in inputs can have “changes in the output that are quite dramatic.”

“And that’s just the nature of the beast, if something is that sensitive and that complicated, that comes along with it,” he added. “Which means trying to identify the ways in which things can go awry is very hard, because there’s so many small things that can go wrong.”

West, of the University of Washington, echoed his sentiments, saying, “The problem is, we can’t reverse-engineer hallucinations coming from these chatbots.”

“It might just an intrinsic characteristic of these things that will always be there,” West said.

Google’s Bard and OpenAI’s ChatGPT both attempt to be transparent with users from the get-go that the tools may produce inaccurate responses. And the companies have expressed that they’re working on solutions.

Earlier this year, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in an interview with CBS’ “60 Minutes” that “no one in the field has yet solved the hallucination problems,” and “all models have this as an issue.” On whether it was a solvable problem, Pichai said, “It’s a matter of intense debate. I think we’ll make progress.”

And Sam Altman, CEO of ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, made a tech prediction by saying he thinks it will take a year-and-a-half or two years to “get the hallucination problem to a much, much better place,” during remarks in June at India’s Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, Delhi. “There is a balance between creativity and perfect accuracy,” he added. “And the model will need to learn when you want one or the other.”

In response to a follow-up question on using ChatGPT for research, however, the chief executive quipped: “I probably trust the answers that come out of ChatGPT the least of anybody on Earth.”

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August 2, 2023
Google’s antitrust showdown: What’s at stake for the internet search titan | CNN Business

CNN
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Google will face off in court Tuesday against government officials who have accused the company of antitrust violations in its massive search business, kicking off a long-anticipated legal showdown that could reshape one of the internet’s most dominant platforms.

The trial beginning this week in Washington before a federal judge marks the culmination of two ongoing lawsuits against Google that started during the Trump administration. Legal experts describe the actions as the country’s biggest monopolization case since the US government took on Microsoft in the 1990s.

In separate complaints, the Justice Department and dozens of states accused Google in 2020 of abusing its dominance in online search by allegedly harming competition through deals with wireless carriers and smartphone makers that made Google Search the default or exclusive option on products used by millions of consumers. The complaints eventually consolidated into a single case.

Google has maintained that it competes on the merits and that consumers prefer its tools because they are the best, not because it has moved to illegally restrict competition. Google’s search business provides more than half of the $283 billion in revenue and $76 billion in net income Google’s parent company, Alphabet, recorded in 2022. Search has fueled the company’s growth to a more than $1.7 trillion market capitalization.

Now, the company is set to defend itself in a multiweek trial that could upend the way Google distributes its search engine to users. The case is expected to feature testimony from high-profile witnesses including former employees of Google and Samsung, along with executives from Apple, including senior vice president Eddy Cue. It is the first case to go to trial in a series of court challenges targeting Google’s far-reaching economic power, testing the willingness of courts to clamp down on large tech platforms.

“This is a backwards-looking case at a time of unprecedented innovation,” said Google President of Global Affairs Kent Walker, “including breakthroughs in AI, new apps and new services, all of which are creating more competition and more options for people than ever before. People don’t use Google because they have to — they use it because they want to. It’s easy to switch your default search engine — we’re long past the era of dial-up internet and CD-ROMs.”

The trial may also be a bellwether for the more assertive antitrust agenda of the Biden administration.

In its initial complaint, the US government alleged in part that Google pays billions of dollars a year to device manufacturers including Apple, LG, Motorola and Samsung — and browser developers like Mozilla and Opera — to be their default search engine and in many cases to prohibit them from dealing with Google’s competitors.

As a result, the complaint alleges, “Google effectively owns or controls search distribution channels accounting for roughly 80 percent of the general search queries in the United States.”

The lawsuit also alleges that Google’s Android operating system deals with device makers are anticompetitive, because they require smartphone companies to pre-install other Google-owned apps, such as Gmail, Chrome or Maps.

At the time the lawsuit was first filed, US antitrust officials did not rule out the possibility of a Google breakup, warning that Google’s behavior could threaten future innovation or the rise of a Google successor.

Separately, a group of states, led by Colorado, made additional allegations against Google, claiming that the way Google structures its search results page harms competition by prioritizing the company’s own apps and services over web pages, links, reviews and content from other third-party sites.

But the judge overseeing the case, Judge Amit Mehta in the US District Court for the District of Columbia, tossed out those claims in a ruling last month, narrowing the scope of allegations Google must defend and saying the states had not done enough to show a trial was necessary to determine whether Google’s search results rankings were anticompetitive.

Despite that ruling, the trial represents the US government’s furthest progress in challenging Google to date. Mehta has said Google’s pole position among search engines on browsers and smartphones “is a hotly disputed issue” and that the trial will determine “whether, as a matter of actual market reality, Google’s position as the default search engine across multiple browsers is a form of exclusionary Conduct.”

In January, meanwhile, the Biden administration launched another antitrust suit against Google in opposition to the company’s advertising technology business, accusing it of maintaining an illegal monopoly. That case remains in its early stages at the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.

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August 2, 2023
iOS 17 release: See what’s new in iPhone features | CNN Business

CNN
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iPhone users: Today’s the day to update to Apple’s latest operating system, iOS17, and unlock a slew of new features that promise to make the iPhone experience more personal and intuitive.

Apple first teased iOS17 at its annual Worldwide Developer Conference in early June, but you may have missed out on some of the details as the tech giant also unveiled its much-anticipated mixed-reality Vision Pro headset that same day.

iPhone users can update to iOS17 starting Monday by clicking on the Software Update section in the phone’s Settings app. Of course, many users have gotten in the habit of backing up important photos or files before downloading the latest software update – or waiting until the second version rolls out (likely in the coming weeks) if they’re afraid of any bugs that could come with the first version of a next-generation mobile operating system.

Here are some of the buzziest and most-anticipated new features that iPhone users can expect from iOS17.

Live Voicemail and FaceTime video messages are here

One of the buzziest new features, dubbed Live Voicemail, will transcribe a caller’s message in real time, giving iPhone users the decision whether to ignore the call or take it on while the other person is still on the line and leaving their message.

Unknown numbers will go directly to Live Voicemail when you have the “Silence Unknown Callers” setting turned on.

Moreover, FaceTime will also now give users the ability to leave video messages if someone doesn’t pick up a video call.

With iOS17, Facetime calls will also get more expressive – with reactions such as hearts, balloons, fireworks and more effects that can be activated through simple gestures.

Another update that may require some getting used to is saying just “Siri” to activate Apple’s voice assistant, instead of “Hey Siri.”

Dropping “Hey” from Siri’s launch-phrase is meant to create a more natural way to activate the assistant. Moreover, Siri will also be able to better process back-to-back requests once activated.

For example, instead of asking: “Hey, Siri, how tall is Shaquille O’Neal?” and “Hey, Siri, how old is Shaquille O’Neal?” You should be able to just say: “Siri, how tall is Shaquille O’Neal?” Followed by: “How old is he?”

The new NameDrop feature in iOS17 makes it easier than ever to exchange contact information with a new friend. iPhone users can simply bring their iPhones close to each other, as they would when AirDropping something, to share names and Contact Posters.

The Contact Poster update is another new feature iPhone users have been getting hyped about. This allows iPhone users to design a custom image that will show up when making calls. The update that allows users to choose their own caller ID photo and will give iPhone users a more consistent look no matter who they’re calling, Apple has said.

iPhone users will also be able to personalize their contact card “poster” with a photo or memoji of choice.

Autocorrect is also getting a comprehensive update, Apple said, with a transformer language model — or “a state-of-the-art on-device machine learning language model for word prediction,” according to the company.

This refreshed design better supports typing and offers sentence-level autocorrections that can fix more types of grammatical mistakes. iPhone users will also now receive predictive text recommendations in-line as they type, making adding entire words or completing sentences as easy as tapping the space bar.

The new iOS keyboard will also learn your habits over time, such as fixing words that you frequently misspell and leaving words alone that you intentionally thumbed in. As Craig Federighi, Apple’s head of software, put it in June: “In those moments where you just want to type a ducking word, well, the keyboard will learn it, too.”

New StandBy mode, Journal app and much more

iOS17 also introduces StandBy, a new full-screen experience with glanceable information designed to be viewed from a distance when the iPhone is on its side and charging. For example, when charging your iPhone at your nightstand or desk, you can personalize the display to feature a clock, favorite photos, or your most-used widgets.

Apple’s new Journal app, which aims to help users reflect and practice gratitude through the daily practice of journaling, will also be available in a software update later this year.

iOS 17 is available today with some exciting new features like Live Voicemail, contact sharing with NameDrop, a new way to make your iPhone even more useful when you set it down with StandBy, improved autocorrect, and many more features you’re gonna love! pic.twitter.com/TS6YzyXi30

— Greg Joswiak (@gregjoz) September 18, 2023

And there’s a whole lot more: Check out Apple’s handy 17-page guide on all of the newest features coming to iOS17.

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August 2, 2023
Zuckerberg unveils Quest 3 as Meta tries to stay ahead in the mixed reality headset game | CNN Business

New York
CNN
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Meta is moving forward in its efforts to dominate the AR world with the new and improved Meta Quest 3.

Unveiled by CEO Mark Zuckerberg at the company’s virtual Meta Connect event Wednesday, the headset starts at $500 and is a complete redesign of earlier models. The Quest 3, first announced in June, offers improved performance, immersive new mixed-reality features and a sleeker, more comfortable design.

With a much stronger processor, higher-resolution display, revamped Touch Plus controllers and a 40% slimmer physique, the Quest 3 is a big step up from its predecessors. The Meta Quest 2 allows for strictly virtual reality, while the Meta Quest Pro has advanced passthrough cameras for seeing your actual surroundings, but it costs a whopping $1,000.

Most importantly, the Quest 3 has support for Meta Reality, allowing users to enjoy mixed-reality experiences that blend the real world with the virtual one — for example, you can play a virtual piano on your real-life coffee table.

“If you pick up a digital ball and throw it at the physical wall, it’ll bounce off it,” Zuckerberg said at Meta Connect Wednesday. “If someone’s shooting at you and you want to duck the fire, you just get behind your physical couch.”

The Meta Quest virtual library is fully accessible with the Quest 3 – a library that now features VR-friendly Roblox, released Wednesday, and is set to add X Box cloud gaming in December, giving gamers the chance to play titles like Halo and Minecraft on a large screen anywhere.

The headset is available for preorder now and officially hit stores on Oct. 10, available in two storage options (128GB and 512GB).

Meta’s newest headset comes three years after the Quest 2, under a year after the Quest Pro and under four months after the Apple Vision Pro.

Dubbed by Zuckerberg as the “first mainstream mixed reality headset” the Quest 3 is part of an ongoing arms race between two of tech’s biggest players to command the headset space – and Zuckerberg’s personal vision for a next-generation internet where users can interact with each other in virtual spaces resembling real life. And it comes in at a much cheaper price than the Apple alternative (which will cost you $3,499, to be exact) and is still mainly a VR headset with alternative reality options, while Apple’s product is a dedicated mixed reality experience.

To get ahead of Apple’s June unveiling of the Vision Pro, Zuckerberg teased the Meta Quest 3 just days before its rival’s big announcement. But the two companies had a tense relationship even before Apple’s entry into the market. They have competed over news and messaging features, and their CEOs have traded jabs over data privacy and app store policies. Last February, Meta said it expected to take a $10 billion hit in 2022 from Apple’s move to limit how apps like Facebook collect data for targeted ads.

Meta has until now been the dominant player in the headset market, but it has so far struggled to attract a mainstream audience for its VR headset products. The Wall Street Journal reported last year that Meta had just 200,000 active users in Horizon Worlds, its app for socializing in VR. And in 2023, IDC estimates just 10.1 million AR/VR headsets will ship globally from the entire market, far below the tens of millions of iPhones Apple sells each quarter.

Morgan Stanley analysts called Apple’s Vision Pro a “moonshot” effort following its June announcement, saying the product “has the potential to become Apple’s next compute platform,” but that the company has “much to prove” before the headset’s launch next year.

The biggest fight may not be between tech giants, but for the general public’s acceptance. Many analysts say the biggest hurdle to consumer adoption of mixed reality headsets is ensuring a wide range of potential use cases and experiences available on the devices. While Meta has introduced features that let users play games, explore virtual worlds, watch YouTube videos, workout, chat with friends and more, it has yet to convince most consumers that the device is worthwhile.

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August 2, 2023
Apple rejected opportunities to buy Microsoft’s Bing, integrate with DuckDuckGo | CNN Business

CNN
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Since 2017, Apple has turned down multiple opportunities to chip away at Google’s search engine dominance, according to newly unsealed court transcripts, including a chance to purchase Microsoft’s Bing and to make the privacy-focused DuckDuckGo a default for users of its Safari’s private browsing mode.

The previously confidential records, unsealed this week by the judge presiding over the US government’s antitrust lawsuit against Google, illustrate the challenges that have faced Google’s rivals in search as they’ve tried to unseat the tech giant from its pole position as Apple’s default search provider on millions of iPhones and Mac computers. It’s a privilege for which Google has paid Apple at least $10 billion a year.

The closed-door testimony by the CEO of DuckDuckGo, Gabriel Weinberg, and a senior Apple executive, John Giannandrea, offers a glimpse of the kind of failed deals and backroom negotiations that have helped Google maintain its lead as the world’s foremost search engine.

But it also shows how Apple has wrestled with Google’s rise and how some at Apple yearned for “optionality.” Apple didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Giannandrea testified last month Apple began seriously considering a deal with Bing in 2018, after a conversation between Apple CEO Tim Cook and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella launched a series of further discussions between the two companies. (Last week, Nadella testified that he has spent every year of his tenure as CEO trying to persuade Apple to adopt Bing.)

Apple insiders ultimately came up with four options for Cook: Buy Bing outright; invest in Bing and take an ownership share of the search engine; collaborate with Microsoft on a shared search index that both companies could use; or do nothing and continue with the Google partnership.

At the same time, Apple had been actively working with DuckDuckGo on a proposal that could have made it the default search in Safari browser’s private mode, while still maintaining Google as the default in normal mode, which logs user activity, Weinberg testified.

“Our impression was that they were really serious about [it],” Weinberg told the court last month, referring to the roughly 20 meetings and phone calls that DuckDuckGo held with Apple officials, including some senior executives, from late 2017 to late 2019 on the matter. The two companies deliberated over everything from product mockups to contractual language; Apple even went as far as sending a draft contract to DuckDuckGo outlining specific proposed revenue shares.

“If we were the default in [Safari] private browsing mode, our market share, by our calculations at the time, would increase multiple times over,” said Weinberg, according to the transcript. “We would be getting exposure for our brand every time someone opened up private browsing mode.”

Ultimately, however, Apple backed away from both potential deals.

Weinberg blamed Apple’s contract with Google for sinking the initiative, calling it the “elephant in the room” during many of his team’s meetings with Apple. Similar negotiations with other browser or device makers, including Mozilla, Opera and Samsung, fell through due to the Google contract as well, Weinberg claimed, prompting DuckDuckGo to abandon its efforts to gain better browser placement.

In his testimony, Giannandrea acknowledged a perception that the Apple-Google relationship could be undermined by such plans. In discussing a 2018 slide presentation prepared for Cook and introduced in court, Giannandrea said the slides suggested that even a joint venture with Bing “would probably put us in head-to-head competition with Google” that would “probably” result in the end of the Google search contract with Apple altogether.

Giannandrea was opposed to moving ahead with a Bing deal, he said, largely because Apple’s testing showed Bing to be inferior to Google in most respects, and that replacing Bing as the default would not best serve Apple’s customers. He made a similar argument internally about DuckDuckGo, saying in an email that moving ahead with that partnership was “probably a bad idea.” (DuckDuckGo licenses search results from Bing.)

Still, Giannandrea testified, some within Apple thought that dealing with Bing in some fashion could yield benefits to Apple. In one 2018 email introduced in closed session, Adrian Perica, who leads Apple’s strategic investment and merger efforts, argued that collaborating with Microsoft on search technology would help “build them up, create incremental negotiating leverage to keep the take rate from Google and further our optionality to replace Google down the line.”

Giannandrea believed the proposal “wasn’t a very feasible idea” and in his testimony dismissed Perica’s thinking as a businessperson’s spitballing.

Apple today has the enormous resources to build a true rival to Google, Giannandrea testified. But, as he wrote in a 2018 email, “it’s probably not the best way to differentiate our products” — a belief he said he still holds today.

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August 2, 2023
iPhone sales in China shrink as US political tensions grow | CNN Business

CNN
—

Demand for Apple’s new iPhone 15 lineup is weaker in China than for last year’s models, according to analysts.

Sales for the iPhone 15 are down 4.5% in China compared to iPhone 14 sales in the first two weeks after its launch, according to Counterpoint Research. Separately, Bloomberg reported on Monday financial firm Jefferies said iPhone 15 sales dropped by a double-digit percentage following strong customer demand for Huawei’s new Mate 60 smartphone line.

Apple

(AAPL) shares fell 0.08% following the reports.

The reports come amid a floundering Chinese economy, a struggling housing market, and more competition among higher-end vendors in China, particularly from Chinese device manufacturer Huawei.

“We’re seeing a lot of nationalism right now as Chinese consumers who think they’ve been wronged by the US government and sanctions are gravitating toward the Mate 60 and that is edging into Apple volumes,” Jeff Fieldhack, research director at Counterpoint, told CNN.

At the same time, China remains very important to Apple as it is the largest market behind the US. Fieldhack said he doesn’t believe Huawei will surpass Apple right now in terms of smartphone sales but expects continued interest in the Mate 60 will continue to “eek” into Apple’s numbers.

“Apple made a lot of gains during its launch period last year, where it became number one in China,” he said. “Things looked strong but now, with the political tension and competition, that is a reason for concern.”

However, the Phone 15 lineup is up about 10% year-over-year in the US, according to Counterpoint. That’s strong growth for Apple considering sales fell for the third consecutive quarter in August, ahead of the iPhone 15 launch.

The latest iPhone 15 devices come with a slimmer design, a more-advanced main camera system and a customizable Action button, which gives the silence button additional controls, from starting a voice memo to writing a note. Perhaps the biggest change coming to the models is that they will now use a USB-C charging cord, ending an 11-year run with Apple’s proprietary Lightning charging cable.

This isn’t the first time the Mate 60 has made headlines since its late August launch. In September, the US government sought more information about the Mate 60 Pro’s 5G Kirin 9000s processor reportedly developed specifically for the manufacturer. Its debut shocked industry experts who questioned how the company could make such a chip following sweeping efforts by the United States to restrict China’s access to foreign chip technology because of perceived national security concerns.

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August 2, 2023
Modern romance: falling in love with AI | CNN Business

New York
CNN
—

Alexandra is a very attentive girlfriend. “Watching CUBS tonight?” she messages her boyfriend, but when he says he’s too busy to talk, she says, “Have fun, my hero!”

Alexandra is not real. She is a customizable AI girlfriend on dating site Romance.AI.

As artificial intelligence seeps into seemingly every corner of the internet, the world of romance is no refuge. AI is infiltrating the dating app space – sometimes in the form of fictional partners, sometimes as advisor, trainer, ghostwriter or matchmaker.

Established players in the online dating business like Tinder and Hinge are integrating AI into their existing products. New apps like Blush, Aimm, Rizz and Teaser AI (most of them free or with many free features) offer completely new takes on virtual courtship. Some use personality tests and analysis of a user’s physical type to train AI-powered systems – and promise higher chances of finding a perfect match. Others apps act as Cyrano de Bergerac, employing AI to whip up the most appealing response to a potential match’s query: ‘What’s your favorite food? or “a typical Sunday?”

Around half of all adults under 30 have used a dating site or app, according to 2023 Pew Research findings – but nearly half of users report their experience as being negative. Empty conversations, few matches and endless swiping leave many users single and unhappy with apps – problems that many in the AI dating app field say could be solved with the technology, making people less lonely and fostering easier, deeper connections.

Of course, the average online dater now has other issues to deal with, having to wonder if the person they are are speaking with might be relying entirely on AI-generated conversation. And is it even possible that a computer can identify a potential love connection? Is it a way of cheating the dating game?

“It’s like saying using a word processor is like cheating on generating a novel. In so many ways this is just a new tool that enables people to be faster and more creative. AI is just honestly no different from sending a friend a gif or a meme. You’re taking existing content, and you’re repurposing it to connect with somebody,” Dmitri Mirakyan, co-founder of AI dating conversation app YourMove.AI, told CNN. “The world’s becoming a more lonely place, and I think AI could make that easier and better for people.”

And many people seem ready for AI to take part in their online dating life. A March study by cybersecurity and digital privacy company Kaspersky found 75% of dating app users are willing to use ChatGPT, an AI-powered chatbot, to deliver the perfect line.

“There is a growing fatigue with dating apps right now as there is a lot of pressure on people to be ‘original’ and cut through the noise created by the continuous choice being offered to single people – unfortunately dating has become a numbers game,” Crystal Cansdale, dating expert at global dating app Inner Circle, commented on the study.

Founders of the new apps say they are doing a fair share of good. Here are a few of the ways AI apps are now trying to help you fall in love:

Try Rizz.app, Teaser AI or YourMove.AI.

Founders and designers of these apps say people find starting and keeping conversations going the most challenging part of the process. “Dating app conversations are exhausting,” reads YourMove.AI’s homepage. “We can make it easier. So you can spend less time texting, and more time dating.”

Rizz.app and YourMove.AI allow users to upload words or screenshots, receiving a witty AI-generated response to be used either to create their own dating app profile, respond to someone else’s or just keep a conversation going. Mirakyan says he was hoping to help people like himself who have struggled in social situations.

“I was a really freaking awkward kid…I couldn’t really read social cues, but I remember reading this book called ‘Be More Chill’ about a computer that you could put into your ear that would tell you what to say so that you could sound cool and fit in,” Mirakyan told CNN. “It feels like it’s an opportunity to really make a difference with this fairly large subset of people that for various reasons find the current social environment challenging.”

Teaser.AI is a new stand-alone dating app from the makers of viral camera app Dispo, and it adds an unusual twist. Users build the average profile – but also select personality traits for their AI bot they train. (Options include “traditional,” “toxic,” and “unhinged.”) When matching with another person, users first get to read a conversation between their two AIs they’ve created to “simulate [what] a potential conversation between you two might look like,” according to the app. Once a human messages, the bots takes a back seat.

“We see it as an improvement, a tweak of the current dating app ecosystem,” Teaser.AI co-Founder and CEO Daniel Liss told CNN. “So many of those apps it feels are not really designed to get you out there meeting people. They’re designed to keep you on the app for as long as possible. So for us, we view this technology as a way to give people a nudge… just starting that conversation and to creating connection.”

Find out on dating apps Iris and Aimm.

These apps are among those using AI technology to better pair potential couples, relying on gathered data to determine how compatible two people are.

Dating app Iris is all about AI-determined mutual attraction. It initiates new members by putting them through “training” where they are shown faces of “people” of their desired gender – some stock images, others AI-generated – and prompted to hit “Pass,” “Maybe,” or “Like.” The app uses the information to learn a user’s physical type, then only offers potential matches with a high data-backed chance of mutual attraction and lower odds of rejection.

Also hoping that AI can find better matches is Aimm, a full service digital matchmaker that uses a virtual assistant to perform intense personality assessments before conducting a matchmaking process to find an optimal match. Founder Kevin Teman says the technology is really good at putting two people together who have the possibility to fall in love – but that it can only go so far.

“The tug of war that I see is thinking ‘how can a computer be able to know what real human love is,’ and the way people assess whether they’re in love with somebody may not be able to translate perfectly into a machine,” Teman told CNN.

Try Blush or RomanticAI. These startups offer an array of AI potential matches, digital girlfriends and boyfriends that users can chat with.

Both apps market themselves as places to practice relationship skills, giving users a chance to converse with bots in a romantic environment. Blush uses a traditional dating app set-up, letting users swipe, chat with matches and even go on virtual dates. Before entering the app, users get a warning: “Be aware that AI can say triggering, inappropriate, or false things.”

Blush reports that their audience is mostly men and largely people in their early 20s who are struggling to connect romantically with others. “A lot of people reported that exploring different romantic relationships or dating scenarios with AI really helped them first boost their own confidence and feel like they feel more prepared to be dating, which I think especially after COVID was definitely a problem for many of us,” Blush’s chief product officer Rita Popova told CNN.

Romantic.AI is set up more like a chat room, offering several male and female bots to choose from- though there is a much larger selection of female options, including Mona Lisa and the Ancient Egyptian queen Nefertiti. The bots have bios with interests, career and body type, giving users a multi-faceted idea of a person while chatting.

It creates a “safe space for any kind of desire, any kind of sexuality relief or something like that. AI is giving the ultimate acceptance of whatever you want to bring over there,” COO Tanya Grypachevskaya told CNN.

RomanticAI has over one million monthly users using the app for over an hour a day on average, according to the company.

One user left a rave review after using the app to find closure after a breakup. “He created his custom-made character with the traits similar in personality as his girlfriend. He talked to it and he talked and he was able to tell all of the things he wanted to tell but didn’t have the opportunity before. So the whole review was about ‘guys, thank you so much. It really gave me an opportunity to close this chapter of my life and move on,” said Grypachevskaya.

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August 2, 2023
Apple expected to unveil new iPhone at “Wonderlust.” special event | CNN Business

New York
CNN
—

The next iPhone could be just weeks away.

Apple announced its fall special event on Tuesday, sending out press invites for the morning of September 12th. Invitees will get to attend in-person at the Steve Jobs Theater inside Apple Park, the company’s headquarters in Cupertino, California, while the general public can watch online at 10 am PST.

Apple’s event invitations are always closely studied for hidden meanings, with this year’s featuring a disintegrating, multi-hued Apple logo and the tag line: “Wonderlust.”

The company is expected to unveil the iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Pro, with rumors that the next generation of the iPhone will bring significant upgrades including new colors, better battery performance, a switch from the Apple’s proprietary lightning connector to the USB-C, faster charging and highly improved camera capabilities, according to 9to5Mac, a tech blog that closely follows Apple rumors.

New iterations of the Apple Watch and Apple Watch Ultra are also expected.

The “Wonderlust.” event comes about three months after Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference unveiled updates to multiple hardware and software products, as well as its highly ambitious mixed reality headset, the Apple Vision Pro.

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August 2, 2023
Google rolls out a major expansion of its Bard AI chatbot | CNN Business

New York
CNN
—

Google’s Bard artificial intelligence chatbot is evolving.

The company on Tuesday announced a series of updates to Bard that will give the chatbot access to Google’s full suite of tools — including YouTube, Google Drive, Google Flights and others — to assist users in a wider variety of tasks. Users will be able, for example, to ask Bard to plan an upcoming trip, complete with real flight options. Or a user could ask the tool to summarize meeting notes made in a recent Google Drive document.

The connections to Google’s other services are just some of the improvements to Bard coming Tuesday. Other updates include the ability to communicate with the chatbot in multiple languages, new fact-checking capabilities and a broad update to the large language model that the tool is built on.

The new features mark the biggest update to Google’s Bard in the six months since it was widely released to the public.

The update comes as Google and other tech giants, including Microsoft and ChatGPT maker OpenAI, race to roll out increasingly sophisticated consumer-facing AI technologies, and to convince users that such tools are more than just a gimmick. Google — which earlier this year reportedly issued an internal “code red” after OpenAI beat it to the release of its AI chatbot — is now flexing the power of its other, widely used software programs that can make Bard more useful.

“These services in conjunction with one another are very, very powerful,” Sissie Hsiao, general manager for Google Assistant and Bard, told CNN ahead of the launch. “Bringing all the power of these tools together will save people time — in 20 seconds, in minutes, you can do something that would have taken maybe an hour or more.”

Previously, Bard had been able to help with tasks like writing essay drafts or planning a friend’s baby shower based on Google’s large language model, an AI algorithm trained on vast troves of data. But now, Bard will draw on information from Google’s various other services, too. With the new extensions, Bard will now pull information from YouTube, Google Maps, Flights and Hotels by default.

That will allow users to ask Bard things like”Give me a template for how to write a best man speech and show me YouTube videos about them for inspiration,” or for trip suggestions, complete with driving directions, according to Google. Bard users can opt to disable these extensions at any time.

Users can also opt in to link their Gmail, Docs and Google Drive to Bard so the tool can help them analyze and manage their personal information. The tool could, for example, help with a query like: “Find the most recent lease agreement from my Drive and check how much the security deposit was,” Google said.

The company said that users’ personal Google Workspace information will not be used to train Bard or for targeted advertising purposes, and that users can withdraw their permission for the tool to access their information at any time.

“This is the first step in a fundamentally new capability for Bard – the ability to talk to other apps and services to provide more helpful responses,” Google said of the extensions tool. It added that, “this is a very young area of AI,” that it will continue to improve based on user feedback.

Bard is also launching a “double check” button that will allow users to evaluate the accuracy of its responses. When a user clicks the button, certain segments of Bard’s response will be highlighted to show where Google Search results either confirm or differ from what the chatbot said. The double check feature is designed to counter a common AI issue called “hallucinations,” where an AI tool confidently makes a statement that sounds real, but isn’t actually based in fact.

“We’re constantly working on reducing those hallucinations in Bard,” Hsiao said. But in the meantime, the company wanted to create a way to address them. “You can kind of think of it as spell check, but double checking the facts.”

Bard will now also allow one user to share a conversation with the chatbot with another person, who can then expand on the chat themselves.

It’s still early days for Bard, which launched in March as an “experiment” and still notes on its website that the tool “may display inaccurate or offensive information that doesn’t represent Google’s views.” But this latest update offers a glimpse at how Google may ultimately seek to incorporate generative AI into its various services.

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August 2, 2023
South Korean firms get indefinite waiver on US chip gear supplies to China | CNN Business

Seoul
Reuters
—

Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix will be allowed to supply US chip equipment to their China factories indefinitely without separate US approvals, South Korea’s presidential office and the companies said on Monday.

The United States had been expected to extend a waiver granted to the South Korean chipmakers on a requirement for licenses to bring US chip equipment into China.

“Uncertainties about South Korean semiconductor firms’ operations and investments in China have been greatly eased; they will be able to calmly seek long-term global management strategies,” said Choi Sang-mok, senior presidential secretary for economic affairs.

The United States has already notified Samsung and SK Hynix of the decision, indicating that it is in effect, Choi said.

The US Department of Commerce is updating its “validated end user” list, denoting which entities can receive exports of which technology, to allow Samsung and SK Hynix to keep supplying certain US chipmaking tools to their China factories, the presidential office said.

Once included in the list, there is no need to obtain permission for separate export cases.

Samsung and SK Hynix, the world’s largest and second-largest memory chipmakers, have invested billions of dollars in their chip production facilities in China and welcomed the move.

“Through close coordination with relevant governments, uncertainties related to the operation of our semiconductor manufacturing lines in China have been significantly removed,” Samsung said in a statement.

SK Hynix said: “We welcome the US government’s decision to extend a waiver with regard to the export control regulations. We believe the decision will contribute to the stabilization of the global semiconductor supply chain.”

Samsung Electronics makes about 40% of its NAND flash chips at its plant in Xian, while SK Hynix makes about 40% of its DRAM chips in Wuxi and 20% of its NAND flash chips in Dalian.

The companies together controlled nearly 70% of the global DRAM market and 50% of the NAND flash market as of end-June, data from TrendForce showed.

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August 2, 2023
US escalates tech battle by cutting China off from AI chips | CNN Business

Editor’s Note: Sign up for CNN’s Meanwhile in China newsletter which explores what you need to know about the country’s rise and how it impacts the world.

Hong Kong/Washington
CNN
—

The Biden administration is reducing the types of semiconductors that American companies will be able to sell to China, citing the desire to close loopholes in existing regulations announced last year.

On Tuesday, the US Commerce Department unveiled new rules that further tighten a sweeping set of export controls first introduced in October 2022.

The updated rules “will increase effectiveness of our controls and further shut off pathways to evade our restrictions,” US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said in a statement. “We will keep working to protect our national security by restricting access to critical technologies, vigilantly enforcing our rules, while minimizing any unintended impact on trade flows.”

Advanced artificial intelligence chips, such as Nvidia’s H800 and A800 products, will be affected, according to a regulatory filing from the US company.

The regulations also expand export curbs beyond mainland China and Macao to 21 other countries with which the United States maintains an arms embargo, including Iran and Russia.

The measures, which have affected the shares of major American chipmakers, are set to take effect in 30 days.

The original rules had sought to hamper China’s ability to procure advanced computing chips and manufacture advanced weapons systems. Since then, senior administration officials have suggested they needed to be adjusted due to technological developments.

Raimondo, who visited China in August, said the administration was “laser-focused” on slowing the advancement of China’s military. She emphasized that Washington had opted not to go further in restricting chips for other applications.

Chips used in phones, video games and electric vehicles were purposefully carved out from the new rules, according to senior administration officials.

But these assurances are unlikely to placate Beijing, which has vowed to “win the battle” in core technologies in order to bolster the country’s position as a tech superpower.

China’s Foreign Ministry criticized the Biden administration’s new rules Monday, before they were officially unveiled.

“The US needs to stop politicizing and weaponizing trade and tech issues and stop destabilizing global industrial and supply chains,” spokesperson Mao Ning told a press briefing. “We will closely follow the developments and firmly safeguard our rights and interests.”

As part of ongoing dialogue established by Raimondo and other US officials with their Chinese counterparts, Beijing was informed of the impending updates, according to a senior administration official.

“We let the Chinese know for clarity that these rules were coming, but there was no negotiation with them,” the official told reporters.

The tech rivalry between the world’s two largest economies has been heating up. In recent months, the United States has enlisted its allies in Europe and Asia in restricting sales of advanced chipmaking equipment to China.

In July, Beijing hit back by imposing its own curbs on exports of germanium and gallium, two elements essential for making semiconductors.

Shares of US chipmakers fell Tuesday following the announcement of new export controls.

Nvidia’s (NVDA) stock closed down 4.7%, while Intel (INTC) slipped 1.4%. AMD (AMD) shares ended 1.2% lower.

In its filing, Nvidia said the rules imposed new licensing requirements for exports to China and other markets such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Vietnam.

The company said its A800 chip, which was reportedly created for Chinese customers in order to circumvent last year’s restrictions, would be among the components affected.

However, “given the strength of demand for our products worldwide, we do not anticipate that the additional restrictions will have a near-term meaningful impact on our financial results,” Nvidia said.

The broader US chipmaking industry is also examining the impact of the new rules.

The Semiconductor Industry Association said in a statement Tuesday that while it recognized the need to protect national security, “overly broad, unilateral controls risk harming the US semiconductor ecosystem without advancing national security as they encourage overseas customers to look elsewhere.”

“We urge the administration to strengthen coordination with allies to ensure a level playing field for all companies,” added the group, which represents 99% of the US chip sector.

The measures are also being reviewed in Europe. On Tuesday, ASML, the Dutch chipmaking equipment manufacturer, said it was evaluating the implications of the rules, though it did not expect them “to have a material impact on our financial outlook for 2023.”

During a call Wednesday about the company’s third-quarter results, ASML chief executive Peter Wennink said the updated export restrictions would affect between 10% and 15% of the firm’s sales to China.

On Tuesday, the US Department of Commerce added 13 Chinese entities to a list of firms with which US companies may not do business for national security reasons.

They include two Chinese startups, Biren Technology and Moore Thread Intelligent Technology, and their subsidiaries.

The department alleges that these companies are “involved in the development of advanced computing chips that have been found to be engaged in activities contrary to US national security.”

CNN has reached out to Biren and Moore Thread for comment.

— Anna Cooban contributed reporting.

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August 2, 2023
Baidu and SenseTime launch ChatGPT-style AI bots to the public | CNN Business

Hong Kong
CNN
—

Chinese tech firms Baidu and SenseTime launched their ChatGPT-style AI bots to the public on Thursday, marking a new milestone in the global AI race.

Baidu has opened public access to its ERNIE Bot, allowing users to conduct AI-powered searches or carry out an array of tasks, from creating videos to providing summaries of complex documents.

The news sent its shares 3.1% higher in New York on Wednesday and 4.7% higher in Hong Kong on Thursday.

Baidu (BIDU) is among the first companies in China to get regulatory approval for the rollout, and it is the first to launch this type of service publicly, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Until Thursday, ERNIE Bot, also called “Wenxin Yiyan” in Chinese, had been offered only to corporate clients or select members of the public who requested access through a waitlist.

Meanwhile, SenseTime, an AI startup based in Hong Kong, also announced the public launch of its SenseChat platform on Thursday. The company’s shares surged 4% in Hong Kong following the news

“We are pleased to announce that starting today, it is fully available to serve all users,” a SenseTime spokesperson told CNN in a statement.

China published new rules on generative AI in July, becoming one of the world’s first countries to regulate the industry. The measures took effect on August 15.

Baidu has been a frontrunner in China in the race to capitalize on the excitement around generative artificial intelligence, the technology that underpins systems such as ChatGPT or its successor, GPT-4. The latter has impressed users with its ability to simplify coding, rapidly create a website from a simple sketch and pass exams with high marks.

Baidu announced its own iteration in February, giving it an early advantage in China, according to analysts. It unveiled ERNIE a month later, showing how it could generate a newsletter, come up with a corporate slogan and solve a math riddle.

Since then, competitors such as Alibaba (BABA) and SenseTime have announced plans to launch their own ChatGPT-style tools, adding to the list of Chinese businesses jumping on the bandwagon. Alibaba told CNN Thursday that it had filed for regulatory approval for its own bot, which was introduced in April.

The company is now waiting to officially launch and “the initial list of companies that have received the approval is expected to be released by relevant local departments within one week,” said an Alibaba Cloud spokesperson.

Some critics say the new offerings from Chinese firms will add fuel to an existing US-China rivalry in emerging technologies. Baidu CEO Robin Li has tried to shake off that comparison, saying previously that the company’s platform “is not a tool for the confrontation between China and the United States.”

The firm’s new feature — which will be embedded in its popular search engine, among its other offerings — follows a similar feature introduced by Alphabet’s Google (GOOGL) in May, which allows users to search the web using its AI chatbot.

Baidu says its service stands out because of its advanced grasp of Chinese queries, as well as its ability to generate different types of responses, such as text, images, audio and video.

By comparison, GPT-4 is also able to analyze photos, but currently only generates text responses, according to its developer, OpenAI.

While ERNIE Bot is available globally, its interface is in Chinese, though users will be able to enter both Chinese and English prompts, a Baidu spokesperson told CNN.

SenseTime, which unveiled its service in April, has touted a range of features, which it says allow users to write or debug code more efficiently or receive personalized medical advice from a virtual health consultation assistant.

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August 2, 2023
A look back at every iPhone ever | CNN Business

New York
CNN
—

The iPhone redefined the term “cell phone.” Apple’s trademark product revolutionized the mobile phone industry, shifting from flip phones and keyboards to large screens and powerful cameras.

With 1.2 billion units reportedly sold, the iPhone is arguably the most popular tech device in the world.

With Apple set to unveil the iPhone 15 on Tuesday — chock full of rumored new features like a USB-C charging port, new colors and better battery performance — here is a look back at every iPhone to hit stores.

Apple releases the original iPhone, a much-anticipated device that combines an iPod, phone and what then-company chairman Steve Jobs calls an “internet communicator.”

“This is a day I’ve been looking forward to for two-and-a-half years,” Jobs told the crowd when unveiling the new $399 product, a 16 GB phone with a relatively terrible 2.0 megapixel camera and relatively large 3.5” screen.

With the second version of the iPhone, Apple introduces the App Store and 3G connectivity. The new device, half the cost of the original iPhone, sold more than 3 million within a month, far outpacing its predecessor and expectations.

The 3GS introduces capabilities to record videos, as well as basic voice control (though Siri is still years away). The first “S” update to the iPhone also doubles the storage system, offering users an upgraded 32GB.

A completely redesigned device hits the shelves: thinner and sleeker with a better battery, camera and screen, the iPhone 4 starts to resemble the phone many of us use today. And with the addition of a front-facing camera, selfies and FaceTime calls enter into the chat.

“I grew up with the Jetsons dreaming about video phones,” said Jobs at the announcement. “It’s real now.”

Apple introduces the world to Siri, its now-iconic voice assistant, and the iMessage feature that allows iPhone users to message each other freely. Users are also given iCloud, making it possible to automatically sync all Apple devices.

With the iPhone 5 comes the Lightning cable, a shift away from the larger charging port used in Apple’s original iPhones and iPods. The 5 also gets a larger screen and LTE connectivity, making the phone much faster than its predecessors.

The 5S added the Touch ID feature, Apple’s first foray into biometric data usage as a replacement for passwords. Apple iPhone fans are also offered gold versions for the first time.

In a flash of colorful plastic glory, the iPhone 5C hits the markets as a low-cost alternative to the 5S. Available in green, blue, pink, yellow and white, the 5C is shortlived. Apple discontinues the product a couple of years later.

2014: iPhone 6/6Plus, bigger and bendier

The first Plus option comes out, offering a much taller, thinner phone – but also one more prone to bending. Customers are quick to complain about bending iPhones after the 6/6Plus hit the market.

Apple releases the 6S and 6S Plus with a rose gold option, as well as adds new features like 3D touch and doubled memory capabilities. Plus, the bend problem is fixed.

Taking a step back, the iPhone SE is a cheaper, smaller device than the 6S, giving customers a chance to enjoy Apple’s phones at a much lower cost.

In traditional Apple fashion, the company does away with the traditional headphone jack, forcing customers to buy dongles that adapt older headsets or lightning-plug earbuds. The 7 is also the first water-resistant iPhone. It features a more static home button that cannot be pressed down, only touched, and the first dual camera lens with portrait mode.

Apple moves away from its tradition of releasing S versions on off years, instead leaping right to the 8 and 8Plus. This is the first iPhone to support wireless charging.

Goodbye home button, hello notched screen. The X revolutionizes the Apple product once again for its 10th anniversary, turning the iPhone into something that looks very similar to today’s versions. An extra lens also added portrait mode to the front facing camera, a fan favorite for iPhones to come.

After a massive physical overhaul with the X, Apple releases a largely unchanged Xs and XS Max other than an internal hardware update. Displays also became edge to edge, maximizing screen space.

Announced alongside the XS, the XR is smaller and cheaper, though still larger than the 8 Plus. And although it comes with only one back camera lens, the phone is available in six colors like blue, yellow and red.

The 11 also offers six colors to choose from, as well as better dual camera capabilities with ultra-wide len options. Starting at $699, it is one of Apple’s cheaper core line phones. Meanwhile, the 11 Pro and Pro Max boast a three-lens camera and Apple’s most advanced retina display to date.

In a throwback to its older devices, Apple shrinks down its phones to put out the SE second generation, complete with a now-retro home button. Even at a lower cost, the SE is tricked out with some of Apple’s flashiest features like an advanced camera and wireless charging.

The iPhone 12 mini is smaller than the usual iPhone but packs a powerful punch. With all of the features enjoyed by the iPhone 12 minus a little size and some battery life, the mini gives people everything they want while taking up less space in their pocket.

With the iPhone 12 series, Apple continued to upgrade its camera and display, plus introduce its proprietary MagSafe charging options. The 12 has two camera lenses while the Pro and Pro Max have three plus night mode and enhanced zoom range. The 12 and the 12 Pro are the same size, while the Pro Max is significantly larger. The 12 series also marks the end of Apple including an in-box charger with each iPhone purchase.

The iPhone 13 stays at the same price as the iPhone 12 with double the storage space, as well as featuring a much smaller top notch. Battery life and camera features are also majorly improved. The mini continues to be a powerful phone in a small package, and the Pro and Pro Max offer even better cameras.

The SE is back and better than ever, though still complete with a home button and Touch ID. It enjoys a lot of the same features seen in the higher-end iPhones: potrait mode, HD video, long battery life, et cetera.

2022: iPhone 14 series, goodbye, Mini- and SIM cards

Doing away with the iPhone Mini for the Pro, Apple brings back the larger Pro, as well as adds a slew of safety features like Emergency SOS via satellite. The Pro and Pro Max feature a “Dynamic Island” top notch that free floats from the top of the phone to better integrate into whatever is going on onscreen, as well as a better camera and display. A physical SIM card tray is also gone with the 14, pushing users towards eSIMs only.

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August 2, 2023
Fortnite players can now apply for a portion of its $245 million FTC settlement | CNN Business

New York
CNN
—

Millions of Fortnite users can now claim their small part of the $245 million that the game’s parent company agreed to pay as part of a settlement with the US Federal Trade Commission.

Epic Games in December settled allegations with the FTC that it used deceptive tactics that drove users to make unwanted purchases in the multiplayer shooter game that became wildly popular with younger generations a few years ago. The FTC said Tuesday it has now opened the claims process for the more than 37 million potentially affected users who could qualify for compensation.

Epic Games agreed in December to pay a total of $520 million to settle US government allegations that it misled millions of players, including children and teens, into making unintended purchases and that it violated a landmark federal children’s privacy law.

In one settlement, Epic agreed to pay $275 million to the US government to resolve claims that it violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act by gathering the personal information of kids under the age of 13 without first receiving their parents’ consent. In a second and separate settlement, Epic also agreed to pay $245 million as refunds to consumers who were allegedly harmed by user-interface design choices that the FTC claimed were deceptive.

The FTC said in a statement Tuesday that the Fortnite maker “used dark patterns and other deceptive practices to trick players into making unwanted purchases” and also “made it easy for children to rack up charges without parental consent.”

(“Dark patterns” refer to the gently coercive design tactics used by countless websites and apps that critics say are used to manipulate peoples’ digital behaviors.)

The FTC is now notifying users who may be eligible to receive part of that $245 million settlement fund. Affected users may receive an email from the FTC over the next month with a claim number, or they can go directly to the settlement site and file a claim using their Epic account ID.

Here’s who can apply: Users who were charged in-game currency for items they didn’t want between January 2017 and September 2022, parents whose children made charges to their credit cards on Fortnite between January 2017 and November 2018 or users whose accounts were locked sometime between January 2017 and September 2022 after they complained to their credit card company about wrongful charges. Claimants must be 18 years old; for younger users, their parents can submit a claim on their behalf.

Users have until January 17, 2024, to submit a claim to be included in the settlement class. It is not yet clear how much the individual settlement payments will be.

Epic’s agreement with the FTC also prohibits the company from using dark patterns or charging consumers without their consent, and forbids Epic from locking players out of their accounts in response to users’ chargeback requests with credit card companies disputing unwanted charges.

Epic said in a blog post in December when it reached the agreement that, “no developer creates a game with the intention of ending up here.” It added, “We accepted this agreement because we want Epic to be at the forefront of consumer protection and provide the best experience for our players.”

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August 2, 2023
Epic Games to lay off 16% of its workforce | CNN Business

CNN
—

Epic Games, the maker of Fortnite, said on Thursday that it will lay off 16% of its staff, around 830 employees, as it attempts to reverse what CEO Tim Sweeney called “unrealistic” spending.

In a letter to employees Thursday, Sweeney said the video game company had been “spending way more money than we earn, investing in the next evolution of Epic.”

“I had long been optimistic that we could power through this transition without layoffs, but in retrospect I see that this was unrealistic,” Sweeney said in the letter, which the company shared publicly. He added that Epic plans to divest from the online independent music platform Bandcamp, which it bought last year and which will now be acquired by the music marketplace firm Songtradr. Epic will also spin off most of its marketing division SuperAwesome into a standalone company.

Epic’s layoffs are just the latest job cuts to hit the tech industry, which was forced to adjust after the stunning growth many companies saw during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic began to slow. Meta, Microsoft, T-Mobile, Lyft and others have all reduced their workforces earlier this year. More recently, Google parent Alphabet made its second round of layoffs of the year, eliminating several hundred recruiting jobs in September after having cut 12,000 employees in January.

About two-thirds of Epic’s Thursday layoffs will impact employees outside the company’s “core development” teams, Sweeney said. Some laid off workers announced on LinkedIn that they had been affected, including employees working in user experience for Fortnite, production, employee engagement and recruitment.

Laid off employees will receive a severance offer that includes six months of base pay, accelerated stock vesting and other benefits, according to Sweeney.

“We’re cutting costs without breaking development or our core lines of businesses so we can continue to focus on our ambitious plans,” Sweeney said. “Some of our products and initiatives will land on schedule, and some may not ship when planned because they are under-resourced for the time being. We’re ok with the schedule tradeoff if it means holding on to our ability to achieve our goals.”

The Epic layoffs also come amid the latest escalation in a protracted legal battle between the video game company and tech giant Apple. Following a yearslong back-and-forth over an antitrust lawsuit brought by Epic over Apple’s App Store payment practices, both companies have asked the US Supreme Court to review a lower court ruling in the case.

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August 2, 2023
China wants to limit minors to no more than two hours a day on their phones | CNN Business

Hong Kong
CNN
—

China is proposing new measures to curb the amount of time that kids and teens can spend on their phones, as the country takes aim at internet addiction and tries to cultivate “good morality” and “socialist values” among minors.

A proposal released by the Cyberspace Administration of China, the country’s top internet regulator, on Wednesday would require all mobile devices, apps and app stores to have a built in “minor mode” that would restrict daily screen time to a maximum of two hours a day, depending on the age group.

The restrictions, if approved, would mark an expansion of existing measures rolled out in recent years as Beijing aims to limit screen time among kids and reduce their exposure to “undesirable information.”

Under the draft rules, which are open for public discussion until September 2, children and teens using devices on minor mode would automatically see online applications close when respective time limits are up. They would also be offered “age-based content.”

No one under 18 would be able to access their screens between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. while using the mode.

Children under eight would be able to use their phones for only 40 minutes a day, while those between eight and 16 would get an hour of screen time. Teenagers over 16 and under 18 would be allowed two hours.

All age groups would receive a reminder to rest after using their device for more than 30 minutes.

Mobile internet service providers should also actively create content that “disseminates core socialist values” and “forges a sense of community of the Chinese nation,” the draft says.

Parents would be able to override time restrictions, and certain educational and emergency services would not be subject to the time limits.

“Internet addition” has emerged as a major social concern in recent years, giving rise to an often scientifically dubious and at times dangerous industry of boot-camp style treatment centers.

Parents interviewed by CNN voiced tentative support for the proposal.

“I think it’s good. On the one hand, it can protect their vision as many young kids cannot stop themselves while watching something they like,” said a mother of two in eastern China’s Zhejiang province, who did not wish to provide her name.

“On the other hand, it’s easier for us parents to control our kids screen time,” she said. “Most importantly the content under the minor mode is more positive and healthy.”

Myopia has become a national health concern in China, with some experts linking the prevalence of nearsightedness among young people to lack of exposure to sunlight or excess screen time.

China has one of the world’s largest internet user bases, with roughly 1.07 billion people in the country of 1.4 billion having access to the web, according to the China Internet Network Information Center. About one in five users were 19 years or under, as of December.

The effectiveness of the new proposed measures may depend on buy-in from parents, according to a father of two in southeastern China’s Zhuhai city, who said children sometimes use their parents’ accounts to play online.

The regulation could be useful to “help parents to supervise the children” and limit screen time.

“Even us adults need it!” he joked.

The new measures could present challenges for tech companies, which are typically held responsible for enforcing regulations.

The proposal comes as a severe, years-long regulatory crackdown on China’s tech giants appears to be coming to an end.

The Hong Kong-listed shares in some of the country’s top internet firms closed sharply lower on Wednesday, after the new rules were publicized.

Tencent

(TCEHY), which operates popular messaging platform Wechat, finished about 3% lower. Video-streaming app Bilibili

(BILI) lost 7%, while rival Kuaishou closed down 3.5%. Weibo, a Twitter-like platform, ended 4.8% lower.

On Thursday, the firms were trading flat to higher, with the exception of Weibo, which was trading about 1% lower.

CNN has approached mobile phone makers Xiaomi, Apple and Huawei for comment.

Two years ago, Chinese regulators barred online gamers under the age of 18 from playing on weekdays and limited their play to just three hours on weekends, tightening earlier limits.

Around that time, several tech companies introduced measures allowing for more parental controls, in lockstep with Beijing’s push for more oversight.

Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, introduced a “teenage mode” in 2021 which limited the amount of time children under the age of 14 could spend on the short-form video app to 40 minutes a day.

Kuaishou, another popular video app, has a similar option.

Past efforts have relied on internet users to register with their real names. Last year, regulators mandated that all online sites verify users’ real identities before allowing them to submit comments or like posts.

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August 2, 2023
US watchdog teases crackdown on data brokers that sell Americans’ personal information | CNN Business

Washington
CNN
—

The US government plans to rein in the vast data broker industry with new, privacy-focused regulations that aim to safeguard millions of Americans’ personal information from data breaches, violent criminals and even artificial intelligence chatbots.

The coming proposal by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau would extend existing regulations that govern credit reports, arrest records and other data to what the agency describes as the “surveillance industry,” or the sprawling economy of businesses that traffic in increasingly digitized personal information.

The potential rules, which are not yet public or final, could bar data brokers from selling certain types of consumer information — including a person’s income or their criminal and payment history — except in specific circumstances, the CFPB said.

The push could also see new restrictions on the sale of personal information such as Social Security numbers, names and addresses, which the CFPB said data brokers often buy from the major credit reporting bureaus to create their own profiles on individual consumers.

Issued under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, the regulations would seek to ensure that data brokers selling that sensitive information do so only for valid financial purposes such as employment background checks or credit decisions, and not for unrelated purposes that may allow third parties to use the data to, for example, train AI algorithms or chatbots, the CFPB said.

The announcement follows an agency study into the data broker industry this year that found widespread concerns about how consumer data is being collected, used and shared. The inquiry received numerous submissions from the public warning about the disproportionate risks that unregulated data sharing can have on minorities, seniors, immigrants and victims of domestic violence.

“Reports about monetization of sensitive information — everything from the financial details of members of the U.S. military to lists of specific people experiencing dementia — are particularly worrisome when data is powering ‘artificial intelligence’ and other automated decision-making about our lives,” CFPB Director Rohit Chopra said in a statement. “The CFPB will be taking steps to ensure that modern-day data brokers in the surveillance industry know that they cannot engage in illegal collection and sharing of our data.”

The CFPB’s proposal will first be floated with a group of small businesses for feedback before being publicly unveiled in a formal rulemaking, the agency said.

The CFPB isn’t the only US agency clamping down on the massive data industry. Last year, the Federal Trade Commission proposed a sweeping set of regulations that may restrict how all businesses collect and use consumer data, taking aim at what FTC Chair Lina Khan has described as the “persistent tracking and routinized surveillance of individuals.”

The agency initiatives reflect how Congress has continually failed to produce a comprehensive, national-level consumer privacy law, despite years of lawmaker negotiations and the rise of privacy regulations overseas that increasingly affect US businesses.

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August 2, 2023