Revenue reached an all-time high for Apple’s most recent quarter as iPhone sales experienced an uptick due in part to consumer excitement for the arrival of Apple Intelligence, the company’s heavily advertised set of AI tools. Total sales reached $94.9 billion for the quarter, up 6 percent year-over-year and exceeding the $94.5 billion that financial analysts had predicted. The company’s iPhone business reported sales of $46.2 billion, following disappointing consecutive quarters in the first half of the year. The AI boom resulted in strong quarters for other Big Tech leaders including Alphabet, Amazon, Meta Platforms and Microsoft. Continue reading Jump in iPhone Business Results in Record Quarter for Apple

OpenAI has announced Swarm, an experimental framework that coordinates networks of AI agents, and true to its name the news has kicked over a hornet’s nest of contentious debate about the ethics of artificial intelligence and the future of enterprise automation. OpenAI emphasizes that Swarm is not an official product and says though it has shared the code publicly it has no intention of maintaining it. “Think of it more like a cookbook,” OpenAI engineer Shyamal Anadkat said in a social media post, calling it “code for building simple agents.” Continue reading OpenAI Tests Open-Source Framework for Autonomous Agents

OpenAI has added publishing powerhouse Hearst to its formidable list of media partners. The force behind outlets including Cosmopolitan, Elle, Esquire, Car & Driver, Popular Mechanics, San Francisco Chronicle and Houston Chronicle will allow more than 20 magazine brands and over 40 newspapers to provide “a vast array of lifestyle content” as well as local news and niche insights to ChatGPT’s professed 200 million weekly users as well as, presumably, on the prototype SearchGPT that launched in July (with a planned ChatGPT integration). Continue reading Hearst Agrees to Content Deal with OpenAI to Fuel ChatGPT

Samsung heralded the world of personalized AI at its 10th annual developer conference, where Samsung Electronics Vice Chairman, CEO and Head of Device eXperience Jong-Hee Han said those who own the company’s top of the line TVs will soon have generative AI, ChatGPT and a more responsive relationship with Bixby, Samsung’s smart assistant. The company introduced AI Cast, making it simpler to get intelligence from Galaxy phones to Samsung TVs. The Galaxy S24 series, released early this year, has native AI that will soon generate content that can be beamed to a sprawling TV screen. Continue reading Samsung Developer Conference Emphasizes AI, One UI 7 UX

On the heels of announcing a $6.6 billion funding round, OpenAI is getting busy with new products including the launch of the latest iteration of ChatGPT. The chatbot will now extend beyond simple questions and answers with Canvas, a new interface that opens in a separate window, allowing collaborative engagement with ChatGPT on writing and coding projects. Launching in beta, Canvas was built with GPT-4o and can be manually selected in the model picker. Canvas is being made available first to global ChatGPT Plus and Team users with Enterprise and Edu users next. The company says it will be available to all free ChatGPT users when it’s out of beta. Continue reading ChatGPT Enhances Collaborative Ability with Canvas Interface

Having demonstrated how advertisements in its AI Overviews would work back in May at its Google Marketing Live event, the search giant is now adding the feature for U.S. mobile users and plans to include Google Lens shopping ads “above and alongside visual search results by the end of the year.” “The ways people ask questions today have expanded beyond the search box,” notes Google, explaining the move as a response to that evolution, as artificial intelligence technology has helped consumers use their voice and cameras “to explore the world around them.” Continue reading Google Serving Ads in AI Overviews and Lens Search Results

OpenAI unveiled major updates at its DevDay conference with the focus largely on making AI more accessible, efficient and affordable. Included were four innovations: Vision Fine-Tuning in the API, Model Distillation, Prompt Caching and the public beta of Realtime API. The approach underscores OpenAI’s effort to empower its developer ecosystem even as it continues to compete for end-users in the enterprise space. The Realtime API gives developers the option of building “nearly real-time” speech-to-speech app experiences, selecting from among six OpenAI voices. Vision Fine-Tuning for GPT-4o enables customization of the model’s visual understanding of images and text. Continue reading OpenAI Showcases Latest Updates for Voice, Picture and More

Snap Inc. is leveraging its relationship with Google Cloud to use Gemini for powering generative AI experiences within Snapchat’s My AI chatbot. The multimodal capabilities of Gemini on Vertex AI will greatly increase the My AI chatbot’s ability to understand and operate across different types of information such as text, audio, image, video and code. Snapchatters can use My AI to take advantage of Google Lens-like features, including asking the chatbot “to translate a photo of a street sign while traveling abroad, or take a video of different snack offerings to ask which one is the healthiest option.” Continue reading Snapchat: My AI Goes Multimodal with Google Cloud, Gemini

As OpenAI gears up to become a for-profit company next year, it is releasing ChatGPT Advanced Voice Mode, which brings a humanlike conversation mode to ChatGPT 4o. All U.S. subscribers to ChatGPT Plus and Team plans will gain access to the new feature, which will also be made available to those paying for ChatGPT Edu and Enterprise plans in the coming weeks. The firm is also adding five new voices and allowing customers to save personalized instructions for the voice assistant, including memory behaviors. Concurrently, executives including CTO Mira Murati have resigned as the company pivots to commerciality. Continue reading OpenAI Rolls Out Advanced Voice Mode Feature for ChatGPT

BlackRock has joined forces with Microsoft to launch what will initially be a $30 billion investment fund to finance AI infrastructure — concentrating primarily on building data centers and developing energy projects. The amount could quickly scale to about $100 billion. Abu Dhabi-based tech investment firm MGX is also participating, as is Global Infrastructure Partners (GIP), which owns, operates and invests across energy, transport, digital and waste management. BlackRock announced it is in the process of acquiring GIP, and says a deal expected to close next month. The new fund is called Global AI Infrastructure Investment Partnership (GAIIP). Continue reading BlackRock Teams with Microsoft to Advance AI Infrastructure

A newly redesigned Snapchat experience is built around a three-tab user interface called Simple Snapchat. As part of that effort, the social platform is launching more generative video features, including text-to-video as part of the app’s Lens Studio AR authoring tool. Easy Lens allows the quick generation of Lenses by typing text prompts, making it possible to do things like experiment with Halloween costumes or explore looks for back to school. Launching in beta for select creators, Snap says the new features are designed for all ability levels. The company is also updating its GenAI Suite and adding an Animation Library of “hundreds of high-quality movements.” Continue reading Snapchat Is Getting a Redesign and Generative Text-to-Video

Google announced the company is making its new AI assistant Gemini Live available free to all Android users. The move follows the feature’s release last month to Gemini Advanced subscribers. This general release will occur gradually, and only in English for the time being. Gemini Live lets users have a more natural, free-flowing conversation with their phones than was available through Google Assistant via the “Hey, Google” prompt. Gemini inquiries are meant to be conversational, eliciting a back and forth that queriers can interrupt, adding more detail or veering to another topic entirely. Continue reading Google Begins Rolling Out Gemini Live Free to Android Users

OpenAI is previewing a new series of AI models that can reason and correct complex coding mistakes, providing a more efficient solution for developers. Powered by OpenAI o1, the new models are “designed to spend more time thinking before they respond, much like a person would,” and as a result can “solve harder problems than previous models in science, coding, and math,” OpenAI claims, noting that “through training, they learn to refine their thinking process, try different strategies, and recognize their mistakes.” The first model in the series is being released in preview in OpenAI’s popular ChatGPT and in the company’s API. Continue reading OpenAI Previews New LLMs Capable of Complex Reasoning

An AI-powered coding app called Cursor is building a fanbase, with everyone from hobbyists to engineers subscribing to the service. The platform reportedly has 30,000 paying customers, among them employees at OpenAI, Midjourney and Perplexity. Referred to as “the ChatGPT of coding,” Cursor uses popular models including GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet to automate building apps and other coding tasks. Cursor was launched by two-year-old startup Anysphere, which has raised more than $60 million in Series A funding led by Andreessen Horowitz and Thrive Capital. Continue reading New AI Coding App Cursor Gains Following and $60M in Funds

Google is giving Gemini Advanced, Enterprise and Business subscribers the ability to create personalized AI assistants, which the company calls “Gems.” “Create your own personal AI experts on any topic you want,” the Alphabet company says. The search giant is also reintroducing Gemini’s image generation capabilities with its latest Imagen 3 model, which will be available to everyone. Gemini, which is Google’s ChatGPT competitor, will again have the ability to generate images of people, something Google disabled in February after controversy over some of the images. The company announced it has implemented new guardrails. Continue reading Gemini Gets Custom Gems AI Assistants and Adds Imagen 3