Here is the daily technology #threadcast for 9/11/24. We aim to educate people about this crucial area along with providing information of what is taking place.
Drop all question, comments, and articles relating to #technology and the future. The goal is make it a technology center.
Consciousness a 'realistic possibility' in birds, fish, squid and bees, scholars say
ST. JOHN'S, N.L. — Scientists and philosophers across the globe agree it is reasonable to assume the vast majority of creatures on Earth are sentient in some way — including lobster, squid and the tiny flies that swarm over drinks left outside in the summer.
The New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness, released Friday, was signed by 39 cognition scholars at universities from Canada to Australia. It says there is "at least a realistic possibility" that all vertebrates and many invertebrates have conscious experience.
According to the technology of baking bread, the dough should rest before the last kneading... we all sometimes need a rest lol :) !PIZZA
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — First came space tourism. Now comes an even bigger thrill for the monied masses: spacewalking.
The stage is set for the first private spacewalk Thursday. Tech billionaire Jared Isaacman will pop out of the hatch of his orbiting SpaceX capsule, two days after blasting off from Florida on a chartered flight that lifted him and his crew higher than anyone since NASA's moonwalkers. He partnered with SpaceX CEO Elon Musk to buy a series of rocket rides and help develop brand new spacesuits.
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/09/10/amazon-makes-8-billion-uk-investment-to-build-cloud-and-ai-infrastructure.html
Amazon makes £8 billion UK investment to build cloud and AI infrastructure
#amazon #news #newsonleo
According to reuters
https://www.reuters.com/technology/samsung-elec-plans-global-job-cuts-up-30-some-divisions-sources-say-2024-09-11/
#news #tech #cent
Reuters: NXP Semiconductors to invest more than $1 bln in India as it boosts R&D efforts
https://www.reuters.com/technology/nxp-semiconductors-invest-more-than-1-bln-india-it-boosts-rd-efforts-2024-09-11/
Reuters: Tech firm executives to testify before US Senate about election threats
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/tech-firm-executives-testify-before-us-senate-about-election-threats-axios-2024-09-10/
Reuters: Exclusive: Samsung Electronics plans global job cuts of up to 30% in some divisions
https://www.reuters.com/technology/samsung-elec-plans-global-job-cuts-up-30-some-divisions-sources-say-2024-09-11/
Reuters: Amazon to invest $10 billion in UK data centres
https://www.reuters.com/technology/amazon-invest-10-billion-uk-data-centres-2024-09-10/
BBC: Grand Theft Audio? The tricky business of music and gaming
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cjrdwzgq30go
BBC Video: SpaceX's Polaris Dawn mission blasts off
https://www.bbc.com/news/videos/c9d17y3vve2o
Adobe to launch generative AI video creation tool later this year
https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/adobe-launch-generative-ai-video-creation-tool-later-this-year-2024-09-11/
#news #tech #cent
InMobi secures $100 million for AI acquisitions ahead of IPO
Adtech startup InMobi has raised $100 million in debt financing as the profitable Indian firm looks to "significantly deepen" its artificial intelligence Adtech startup InMobi has raised $100 million in debt financing to "significantly deepen" its AI initiatives.
Adtech startup InMobi has raised $100 million in debt financing as the profitable Indian firm looks to “significantly deepen” its artificial intelligence initiatives and fund potential AI acquisitions ahead of a planned IPO next year.
Mars Growth Capital, a joint venture between MUFG and Liquidity Group, has financed the funding, InMobi said Wednesday. The investment is the latest in a growing Indian portfolio of Mars, which has also backed quick commerce startup Zepto and marketplace Infra.Market in recent months.
#startup #inmobi #ai #ipo #technology
SoftBank-backed InMobi, which counts Mastercard, Samsung, Vodafone, and Coca-Cola among its customers, has been actively exploring AI advancements over the past two years to enhance ad interactivity. The company, which works with tens of thousands of app developers across over 50 nations, recently developed techniques for seamlessly integrating native advertisements into content, TechCrunch previously reported.
InMobi also owns Glance, a unicorn startup that operates an Android lockscreen platform. The Android platform is separately in talks to raise more than $200 million, TechCrunch has reported.
Adobe says video generation is coming to Firefly this year
Users will get their first chance to try out Adobe's AI model for video generation in just a couple months.
Users will get their first chance to try out Adobe’s AI model for video generation in just a couple months. The company says features powered by Adobe’s Firefly Video model will become available before the end of 2024 on the Premiere Pro beta app and on a free website.
#ai #technology #adobe #video #firefly #newsonleo
Adobe says three features – Generative Extend, Text to Video, and Image to Video – are currently in a private beta, but will be public soon.
Generative Extend, which lets you extend any input video by two seconds, will be embedded into the Premiere Pro beta app later this year. Firefly’s Text to Video and Image to Video models, which create five second videos from prompts or input images, will be available on Firefly’s dedicated website later this year as well. (The time limit may increase, Adobe noted.)
Adobe’s software has been a favorite among creatives for decades, but generative AI tools like these may upend the very industry the company serves, for better or worse. Firefly is Adobe’s answer to the recent wave of generative AI models, including OpenAI’s Sora and Runway’s Gen-3 Alpha. The tools have captivated audiences, making clips in minutes that would have taken hours for a human to create. However, these early attempts at tools are generally considered too unpredictable to use in professional settings.
But controllability is where Adobe thinks it can set itself apart. Adobe’s CTO of digital media, Ely Greenfield, tells TechCrunch there is a “huge appetite” for Firefly’s AI tools where they can complement or accelerate existing workflows.
For instance, Greenfield says Firefly’s generative fill feature, added to Adobe Photoshop last year, is “one of the most frequently used features we’ve introduced in the past decade.”
Article
Mistral releases Pixtral 12B, its first multimodal model
French AI startup Mistral has released its first model that can process images as well as text.
French AI startup Mistral has released its first model that can process images as well as text.
Called Pixtral 12B, the 12-billion-parameter model is roughly 24GB in size. Parameters roughly correspond to a model’s problem-solving skills, and models with more parameters generally perform better than those with fewer parameters.
#newsonleo #ai #technology #mistral #imagegenerator
Wow, this is incredible
I thought it was a big breakthrough.
Built on one of Mistral’s text models, Nemo 12B, the new model can answer questions about an arbitrary number of images of an arbitrary size given either URLs or images encoded using base64, the binary-to-text encoding scheme. Similar to other multimodal models such as Anthropic’s Claude family and OpenAI’s GPT-4o, Pixtral 12B should — at least in theory — be able to perform tasks like captioning images and counting the number of objects in a photo.
Available via a torrent link on GitHub and AI and machine learning development platform Hugging Face, Pixtral 12B can be downloaded, fine-tuned and used presumably under Mistral’s standard dev license, which requires a paid license for any commercial applications, but not for research and academic uses.
Mistral hasn’t clarified exactly which license applies to Pixtral 12B, however. The startup offers some models under an Apache 2.0 license without restrictions. We’ve reached out to Mistral for more information and will update this post if we hear back.
This writer wasn’t able to take Pixtral 12B for a spin, unfortunately — there weren’t any working web demos at the time of publication. In a post on X, Sophia Yang, head of Mistral developer relations, said Pixtral 12B will be available for testing on Mistral’s chatbot and API-serving platforms, Le Chat and Le Platforme, soon.
Apple punts on AI
One would have expected that "Apple's first phone made from the ground up for Apple Intelligence" would justify being so.
It was reasonable to expect that Apple would do with AI what it has done before with so many features and apps: wait, take notes, and then redefine. But though it has filed off some of the sharper edges of the controversial technology, the company seems to have hit the same wall as everyone else: Apple Intelligence, like other AIs, doesn’t really do anything.
#apple #ai #technology
Well, it does do something. A few things, in fact. But like many AI tools, it seems to be an incredibly computationally demanding shortcut for ordinary tasks. This isn’t necessarily bad, especially as inference — that is, performing the actual text analysis, generation, etc. — becomes efficient enough to move to the device itself.
It was billed as much more, however. Tim Cook told us at the outset of Monday’s “Glowtime” event that Apple Intelligence’s “breakthrough capabilities” will have “an incredible impact.” Craig Federighi said it will “transform so much of what you do with your iPhone.”
The capabilities:
Rephrase snippets of text
Summarize emails and messages
Generate fake emoji and clip art
Find pictures of people, locations, and events
Look up things
Any of those feel like a breakthrough to you? There are countless writing helpers. Summary capability is inherent to nearly every LLM. Generative art has become synonymous with a lack of effort. You can trivially search your photos this way across any number of services. And our “dumb” voice assistants were looking up Wikipedia entries for us a decade ago.
rue, there is some improvement. Doing these things locally and privately is definitely preferable; there are some new opportunities for people who can’t easily use a regular touchscreen UI; there is certainly a net increase in convenience.
But literally none of it is new or interesting. There don’t appear to be any meaningful changes to these features since they were released in beta after WWDC, beyond the expected bug fixes. (We’ll know more when we’ve had time to test them.)
One would have hoped that “Apple’s first phone made from the ground up for Apple Intelligence” would offer much more. As it turns out, the 16 won’t even ship with all the features mentioned; they’ll arrive in a separate update.
Is it a failure of imagination or of technology? AI companies are already beginning to reposition their products as yet another enterprise SaaS tool, rather than the “transformative” use cases we heard so much about (it turns out those were mostly just repeating stuff they found on the web). AI models can be extremely valuable in the right place, but that place doesn’t seem to be in your hand.
Article
Senate leaders ask FTC to investigate AI content summaries as anti-competitive
A group of Democratic senators is urging the FTC and Justice Department to investigate whether AI tools that summarize and regurgitate online content
A group of Democratic senators is urging the FTC and Justice Department to investigate whether AI tools that summarize and regurgitate online content like news and recipes may amount to anticompetitive practices.
In a letter to the agencies, the senators, led by Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), explained their position that the latest AI features are hitting creators and publishers while they’re down.
#newsonleo #senate #ai #ftc #summary
As journalistic outlets experience unprecedented consolidation and layoffs, “dominant online platforms, such as Google and Meta, generate billions of dollars per year in advertising revenue from news and other original content created by others. New generative AI features threaten to exacerbate these problems.”
The Senate letter:
While a traditional search result or news feed links may lead users to the publisher’s website, an AI-generated summary keeps the users on the original search platform, where that platform alone can profit from the user’s attention through advertising and data collection. […] Moreover, some generative AI features misappropriate third-party content and pass it off as novel content generated by the platform’s AI.
Publishers who wish to avoid having their content summarized in the form of AI-generated search results can only do so if they opt out of being indexed for search completely, which would result in a materially significant drop in referral traffic. In short, these tools may pit content creators against themselves without any recourse to profit from AI-generated content that was composed using their original content. This raises significant competitive concerns in the online marketplace for content and advertising revenues.
Essentially, the senators are saying that a handful of major companies control the market for monetizing original content via advertising, and that those companies are rigging that market in their favor. Either you consent to having your articles, recipes, stories, and podcast transcripts indexed and used as raw material for an AI, or you’re cut out of the loop.
The letter goes on to ask the FTC and DOJ to investigate whether these new methods are “a form of exclusionary conduct or an unfair method of competition in violation of the antitrust laws.”
Though it’s clearly a serious issue — and one that affects this outlet — the FTC may have its work cut out for it here. While AI summaries of web content may provide highly lopsided benefits, there are many power relationships in play in business and media, and the bar for anticompetitive behavior is quite high.
For instance, in this case, it would have to be shown that the AI makers have overwhelming market power and that they are using that power in ways specifically forbidden by law. Something can be unfair, unethical, and perfectly legal.
Article
The real power of Apple Intelligence will show up in third-party apps
Apple Intelligence, the iPhone maker's new set of AI capabilities arriving in iOS 18, is laying the groundwork for a new way to use apps.
Apple Intelligence, the iPhone maker’s new set of AI capabilities arriving in iOS 18, is laying the groundwork for a new way to use apps.
Today, the dated App Store model is under constant regulatory attack. Meanwhile, users can accomplish a lot of tasks with fairly simple questions to an AI assistant like ChatGPT. Proponents believe AI could become the preferred way we’ll search for answers, be productive at work, and experiment with creativity.
#apple #iphone #ai #technology
Where does that leave the world of apps, and the growing services revenue (more than $6 billion last quarter) they generate for Apple?
The answer cuts to the core of Apple’s AI strategy.
Apple Intelligence itself only offers a small set of capabilities out-of-the-box, like writing helpers, summarization tools, generative art, and other baseline offerings.
But earlier this year at its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in June, Apple presented new features that will allow developers’ apps to connect more deeply with both Siri and Apple Intelligence.
Improvements to the smart assistant will allow Siri to invoke any item from an app’s menu without additional work on a developer’s part. That means users could ask Siri to “show me my presenter notes” in a slide deck, for instance, and Siri would know what to do. Siri will also be able to access any text displayed on the page, allowing users to reference and act on what’s on their screen.
So, if you were looking at your reminder to wish a family member a “happy birthday,” you could say something like “FaceTime him” and Siri would know what action to take.
That’s already an upgrade from the basic functionality today’s Siri offers, but it doesn’t end there. Apple is also providing developers with tools to use Apple Intelligence in their own apps. At WWDC, the company indicated that Apple Intelligence would first be made available to certain categories of apps, including Books, Browsers, Cameras, Document readers, File management, Journals, Mail, Photos, Presentations, Spreadsheets, Whiteboards, and Word processors. Over time, Apple is likely to open up these capabilities to all developers across the App Store.
Article
Connectly, now backed by Alibaba, taps AI to personalize text messages to customers
Connectly.ai, a startup using AI to personalize text messages from brands, has closed a new fund round led by Chinese tech giant Alibaba.
Stefanos Loukakos, formerly a director at Meta’s business-focused Messenger division and, briefly, the tech giant’s blockchain org, noticed several years ago that online retailers were struggling to connect with potential shoppers. The problem, in his opinion, was that their marketing campaigns weren’t tailored enough. Merchants were sending generic social media, text, and email blasts that failed to resonate with buyers and convert.
#newsonleo #alibaba #ai #technology #text
“Businesses need a solution to create winning messaging campaigns and automate conversations with both leads and customers,” Loukakos said. “Ideally, it can also tailor suggestions to ensure customers discover products they’ll love, and help companies gain a deeper understanding of their customers.”
Things clicked when Loukakos met Yandong Liu, formerly the CTO of Strava and a former Yahoo researcher, through a mutual friend in the founder community. The pair quickly bonded over their shared interest in messaging-based marketing, and in 2020, they founded Connectly.ai, which leverages AI to help businesses, like retailers and enterprise e-commerce leaders, sell their products and services across any messaging platform. According to Loukakos, customers can “send and receive messages without having to host, manage or take care of software updates.”
Connectly’s platform integrates with a range of messaging apps and services — including WhatsApp, Instagram, SMS and web-based chatbots — to let brands create ad campaigns and automate certain basic conversations with customers. AI, fine-tuned on a retailer’s product catalog and preferences and plugged into the brand’s online store, sends texts informing customers of things like price changes, stock availability and offers.
Article
The Guardian: Meta’s AI is scraping users’ photos and posts. Europeans can opt out, but Australians cannot
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/sep/11/meta-ai-post-scraping-security-opt-out-privacy-laws
The Guardian: ‘My uniform’s more valuable than I am’: a security guard’s take on bodyworn cameras
https://www.theguardian.com/business/article/2024/sep/11/my-uniforms-more-valuable-than-i-am-a-security-guards-take-on-bodyworn-cameras
The Guardian: The 10 best electric cars to buy if you want to avoid Tesla
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/sep/10/the-10-best-electric-cars-to-buy-if-you-want-to-avoid-tesla
The Verge: Here’s what your iPhone 16 will do with Apple Intelligence — eventually
https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/10/24237714/apple-intelligence-generative-ai-features-update-schedule
CNN: Australia plans a minimum age limit for social media use
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/09/10/tech/australia-minimum-age-limit-social-media/index.html
Wired: The World’s Biggest Bitcoin Mine Is Rattling This Texas Oil Town
https://www.wired.com/story/the-worlds-biggest-bitcoin-mine-is-rattling-this-texas-oil-town/
BBC: What Western medicine can learn from the ancient history of psychedelics
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240910-the-ancient-history-behind-healing-trauma-with-psychedelics
BBC: Sony reveals much more expensive and powerful PlayStation 5 Pro
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx29r65ygdqo
BBC: The great gene editing debate: can it be safe and ethical?
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c74j2lz88pwo
Meet Verse, an AI-powered creative app that helps Gen Z design and publish expressive content
Verse, a new AI-powered creative app, is aiming to help Gen Z create hyper-visual and expressive content.
Verse, a new AI-powered creative app, is aiming to help Gen Z users create hyper-visual and expressive content. The iOS app allows users to design and publish multimedia content on an interactive canvas with the help of an AI assistant.
#verse #technology #newsonleo #genz
You can create a mini website, called a Verse, for things like moodboards, greeting cards, invitations, storefronts, fan pages, blogs, and more. Verse also gives content creators and influencers a creative way to connect with their audience and share information via a link-in-bio format.
Verse was founded by Bobby Pinckney, a former management consultant at PwC, and Michelle Yin, a former engineer at Meta. The duo met in college and previously founded a YC-backed music discovery app called Discz, which currently has over 1.5 million users.
Pinckney and Yin came up with the idea for Verse while they were working on Discz. They added a Profile feature for the app that users could drag and drop songs or images onto. Although the duo added the feature to allow users to express what kind of music they like, they saw that people were using it as a creative tool.
“What we thought was going to be a way for people to express like, this is who I am and what music I like, turned out to be a tool of choice for users,” Pinckney told TechCrunch. “And this just blew our minds, because we didn’t expect it at all. We’re like, this is a music app, and we gave these users a Profile, but they’re literally using our platform to create media that they then share elsewhere.”
Article
Atomico backs Tem to help businesses buy renewable energy directly from sources
Tem wants to do for utilities what neobanks have done for the financial sector: disrupt an industry using tech, streamline it, and cut out the middlemen.
A U.K. startup wants to do for utilities what neobanks have been doing for the financial sector for more than a decade: disrupt an age-old industry using technology, streamline it and cut out the middlemen.
London-based Tem has built a marketplace and platform to connect businesses directly to renewable energy sources, and it is working with an existing Ofgem-regulated utility partner instead of applying for a supply license itself. Ultimately, Tem is all about enabling businesses to bypass so-called “big energy” and their big prices while making it easier to meet climate targets.
#energy #newsonleo #tem #technology
“We like to think of ourselves as the U.K.’s very first ‘neo-utility’,” Tem’s co-founder and CEO, Joe McDonald, told TechCrunch over email.
Founded in 2021, Tem on Wednesday said it has raised £10.5 million ($13.7 million) in a Series A round led by European venture capital firm Atomico, which closed two funds totaling $1.24 billion earlier this week. The investment comes as nations in Europe and beyond strive to reduce their carbon output and become “climate-neutral” by 2050. The U.K., specifically, is committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions by “at least 100% of 1990 levels” within the next 25 years.
At the same time, rising oil and gas prices have underscored the need to find an alternative solution to fossil fuels.
Aside from McDonald, Tem’s founding team includes chief technology officer Bartlomiej Szostek, chief commercial officer Jason Stocks, and Ross McKay. All three met at a startup called Limejump that used big data to disrupt the U.K. energy market, and that was where the seed for Tem was sown.
Have you seen what this robot is doing?
ESPN is Using AI to Replace Human Announcers As AI Becomes The Future of TV
#ai #technology #sports
Streaming and TV Industry News Roundup
AI's Growing Role in Sports Coverage
ESPN is expanding its use of AI-generated content for sports coverage, particularly for lesser-known sporting events. This follows similar moves by other networks:
Industry experts predict that AI will play an increasingly significant role in sports broadcasting, potentially replacing human announcers for play-by-play and commentary in the future. This shift is driven by the potential for substantial cost savings in staffing expenses.
The trend extends beyond sports, with AI-generated content becoming more prevalent in news articles and other forms of media coverage.
Disney and DirecTV Dispute
Disney and DirecTV are engaged in a contentious negotiation over channel rights:
This ongoing dispute leaves DirecTV customers without access to Disney-owned channels. Affected viewers are advised to explore alternative options, such as using an antenna for local ABC coverage or considering services like Sling TV for access to ESPN.
Sling TV's AirTV Improvements
Sling TV is enhancing its AirTV streaming player:
This development makes Sling TV an attractive option for cord-cutters looking to combine local antenna channels with popular cable networks at a lower cost.
Other Streaming News
The Future of Hulu
Questions persist about Hulu's future following Disney's acquisition:
This summary highlights the dynamic nature of the streaming industry, with ongoing shifts in content delivery, business models, and technological integration shaping the future of television and digital entertainment.
Sergey Brin says he's working on AI at Google 'pretty much every day'
In a fireside at the All-In Summit 2024, Google co-founder Sergey Brin said that he's working on AI at Google 'pretty much every day.'
Google co-founder and ex-Alphabet president Sergey Brin said he’s back working at Google “pretty much every day” because he hasn’t seen anything as exciting as the recent progress in AI — and doesn’t want to miss out.
Brin revealed the tidbit in an interview during the All-In Summit in L.A. this week. Last year, several publications reported that Brin was back at Google HQ working on various AI projects, but the sit-down is the first time Brin has publicly commented on his return.
#google #sergeybrin #alphabet #ai #technology
“It’s a big, fast-moving field,” Brin said of AI, adding that there is “tremendous value to humanity,” before explaining why he doesn’t think training more capable AI will require massively scaling up compute.
“I’ve read some articles that extrapolate [compute] … and I don’t know if I’m quite a believer,” he said, “partly because the algorithmic improvements that have come over the last few years maybe are actually even outpacing the increased compute that’s being put into these models.”
https://inleo.io/threads/view/taskmaster4450le/re-ahmadmanga-2sh79v3s4?referral=taskmaster4450le
ESPN’s AI-generated sports recaps are already missing the point
The network is turning to AI to ‘augment existing coverage’ of less-followed sports.
This weekend, ESPN began publishing AI-generated recaps of women’s soccer games, with more sports to come. It’s using Microsoft AI to write each story, with humans only involved in reviewing each recap for “quality and accuracy.” ESPN says these stories will “augment,” rather than detract from, its other content — but needless to say, people have feelings about it.
#espn #ai #sports
It’s not that ESPN is masquerading AI work as that of humans. In fact, each story advertises that it’s written by “ESPN Generative AI Services,” and ESPN includes a note at the bottom of each article about how the recap is based on a transcript from the sporting event.
ESPN isn’t the only news organization that does this; The Associated Press started using AI to write sports recaps back in 2016, and both organizations pitch this as a way to cover more underserved sports. In addition to soccer, ESPN will also use it for lacrosse.
Meta
Meta AI arrives in Latin America — but leaves Brazil out; understand why
Meta announced, this Tuesday (23), the arrival of Meta AI, the brand's generative artificial intelligence (AI), in Latin America. The technology was launched in September 2023 in the United States and other English-speaking countries, and is now available on WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram in 22 Latin American countries.
The feature works in a similar way to other chatbots, such as ChatGPT, and promises full integration with big tech's messengers and social networks. Users can receive responses from AI, create personalized stickers, edit photos and even co-create images with friends.
#newsonleo #technology #ai #meta
Available in Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico and Peru, Meta AI does not yet have a date to officially arrive in Brazil. The disagreement during the launch occurred due to disagreements between Meta and the Brazilian government.
The country's courts understood that the company's new privacy policy could mean “serious and irreparable damage or difficult repair to the fundamental rights” of Brazilians.
Big tech understands the case as “local regulatory uncertainties”. In the next few lines, understand more details about the arrival of Meta AI in Latin America and why it is not yet available in Brazil.
I knew that the Brazilian government had some responsibility for Meta not being available here in the country.
This left-wing government is increasingly holding Brazil back.