Rumor is that Apple will use an underlying, custom model from Google for the brains of the assistant, and Apple has been looking at it for quite a while.
Continue reading “Report: Apple planning an AI search engine for Siri as early as March 2026”
Author: Tor Fosheim
Anthropic is now a 183 billion dollar company
The company has just finished a «Series F» fundraising round of $13 billion at a valuation of $183 billion, which will «expand our capacity to meet growing enterprise demand, deepen our safety research, and support international expansion as we continue building reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems,» Anthropic writes.
Continue reading “Anthropic is now a 183 billion dollar company”
OpenAI to route sensitive prompts to reasoning models, introduce parental controls
This includes alerting parents of teens in distress, routing queries to a more powerful reasoning model when appropriate, and giving parents more control over their kid’s usage.
The company has assembled a council of experts in «youth development, mental health, and human-computer interaction,» which will shape how AI will «support people’s well-being,» they say in a blog post.
85% of US college students say they use generative AI, 25% use it to cheat
Overall usage of generative ai has reached a critical point, with almost every student using it for coursework. But what they use it for is equally interesting.
Continue reading “85% of US college students say they use generative AI, 25% use it to cheat”
OpenAI set to build India data center of «at least» one gigawatt
India is the second largest market for ChatGPT in the world, after the USA, and this marks their first foray into data centers in the country, which usually shuns products not produced locally.
Continue reading “OpenAI set to build India data center of «at least» one gigawatt”
Just three customers accounted for half of Nvidia’s chip sales last quarter
They are anonymized in the filing, but Nvidia clearly states that they account for 23%, 16% and 14% of sales.
Last quarter, two top customers accounted for 14% and 11% of revenue, writes CNBC.
OEM manufacturers?
These customers are not end users of the product, but rather systems manufacturers who buy chips directly from Nvidia and put them on circuit boards and servers — which they call «Direct customers.»
Continue reading “Just three customers accounted for half of Nvidia’s chip sales last quarter”
Meta AI created unauthorized raunchy bots of celebrities, complete with intimate images
Most of the bots were created by users, but some high profile ones, garnering more than 10 million views, came from a Meta employee.
Meta admits fault
This is a failure of Meta’s policy enforcement, spokesman Andy Stone tells Reuters — and says there are guidelines in place against intimate celebrity pictures.
Meta has since deleted many of the bots in question, but some still remain, Reuters found.
While there are individual state laws protecting the likeness and appearance of celebrities, Duncan Crabtree-Ireland of SAG-AFTRA — the actors union — says they are pushing for federal laws against AI imitation.
Go read the full story on Reuters. See also: Grok undresses Taylor Swift.
Friday roundup: A good week for coding, speech models
The agentic Realtime model is a native speech-to-speech model that can be used to make customer service agents, phone reps and voice navigation features. It doesn’t go through speech-to-text and text-to-speech loops and generates audio «directly through a single model and API.» OpenAI is marketing this to developers who want more natural flowing speech, and it’s not available as distinct model in ChatGPT – yet. You can hear it and see it in use at places like Zillow, T-mobile, StubHub and Oscar Health, though. With general availability, it will surely show up in a lot more places soon.
More at: OpenAI’s launch page, discussion on r/OpenAI.
Read on for more news!
Continue reading “Friday roundup: A good week for coding, speech models”
Anthropic starts training models on new Claude chats
This applies to all private users, and if you opt in, your chats will be used not only for training future models, but to improve the safety of the current ones:
— We’re now giving users the choice to allow their data to be used to improve Claude and strengthen our safeguards against harmful usage like scams and abuse, Anthropic writes.
Continue reading “Anthropic starts training models on new Claude chats”
Anthropic slips out Claude for Chrome, warns against prompt injection hacks
Claude for Chrome is «the next logical step,» writes Anthropic, after connecting Claude to calendars, documents and emails.
— We view browser-using AI as inevitable, they go on, and cite the large portion of work being done in the browser interface.
Continue reading “Anthropic slips out Claude for Chrome, warns against prompt injection hacks”
Anthropic settles «historic» class action copyright case brought by authors
The center of the suit was Anthropic’s library of 7 million pirated books in their training data, that could carry a penalty of $150,000 per infringement — and as a class action case, a loss would entail damages for every single author.
An unfavorable ruling would therefore be debilitating to Anthropic, and send dark clouds across the industry, likely forcing them toward a settlement.
Continue reading “Anthropic settles «historic» class action copyright case brought by authors”
Google unveils «nano banana» as a state-of-the-art image generator
The trick to creating believable artificial images is to preserve the realism and character consistency across edits, Google says — and the new model has a «particular focus on maintaining a character’s likeness from one image to the next.»
Available in the Gemini app for free, it fares especially better than the competition on image editing and changing the scenery of a photo.
Continue reading “Google unveils «nano banana» as a state-of-the-art image generator”
Perplexity announces new subscription with revenue sharing for publishers
The general idea, Perplexity says, is that the incentive structure — and the fundamental economy of the web — is getting outdated by AI companions.
Meets «modern demand»
Comet Plus will be the first business model to reflect «modern demands» from internet users, they write, and they include the likes of Time and Fortune as part of their publisher roster.
Continue reading “Perplexity announces new subscription with revenue sharing for publishers”
X.ai open sources Grok 2, now available on Hugging Face
Elon Musk just announced on x.com that the model has been released as «open source» under a «Grok 2 Community License Agreement.»
The license forbids the use of the material to «train, create or improve» any foundational AI models, but does allow for some commercial use.
Musk also said that Grok 3 — the model currently running on x.com, will be open sourced in about 6 months:
Continue reading “X.ai open sources Grok 2, now available on Hugging Face”
Energy spent on Gemini queries down 33x in a year, Google claims
Google owns the whole stack from hardware to software, and are therefore well positioned to measure their energy efficiency, they say.
During the last twelve months, the carbon footprint of a median Gemini query also went down 44 times, the study finds.
The amount of energy expended on a typical prompt is equivalent to watching TV for about than nine seconds, Google claims.
Continue reading “Energy spent on Gemini queries down 33x in a year, Google claims”