The Age of Apple’s AI Has Arrived – Unlocking the Future of Technology

You know you think you know Tech news but then it goes and changes every single day. Honestly, Tech news needs to figure itself out – this is too much. Being your friend is really hard. Apple, the company that has been following the AI hype train at a safe distance, just quietly dropped an open-source AI model called mg, which stands for multimodal large language model guided image editing – bit of a mouthful.

It’s what you thought it was, as described in a newly published paper from Apple researchers, the image editing model can’t generate images from scratch, but it can, for example, add vegetable toppings to a picture of a pizza when asked to make it healthier or change only the part of the image specified in a prompt, rather than replacing the pizza with a head of broccoli and translating a sign in the background into Simlish. It could be useful in a different scenario. mg is actually freely available to try on Hugging Face, so long as you don’t mind a wait time, currently listed as 3,563 seconds. You can calculate what that is in minutes while you wait. While it did remove my glasses as requested, it also removed half my face and Melania’s helmet wings, so I think Apple’s got their work cut out for them.

It’s been a positive few days overall for AI though. OnePlus is rolling out AI features including the ability to summarize articles and phone calls with the ability to bring stuff up that you talked about so you can remember later – I need this badly. Roblox released a real-time AI chat translator, so you find out near instantaneously what players all around the world are threatening to do to your mom. Thanks to machine learning, we’ve successfully interpreted a scroll that was charbroiled during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. And then there’s the recent study from several US universities which pitted eight LLM agents against each other in a series of war games where they acted as nations and they wound up replicating human-like arms races and only occasionally blew each other to Kingdom come – just like us. Honestly, they showed remarkable restraint with the nukes, they could have used them earlier.

Apple’s newly launched Vision Pro has continued to wobble like a freshly born foal, with the major bad news of the day being Mark German’s revelation that there’s no option for users to independently reset the device if they forget the password. Instead, they’ll need to either mail it to customer support or physically bring it into a store like some kind of peasant – get your assistant to bring it in so that Apple can wipe and reset it. Part of the problem is that the device doesn’t have any port that would allow users to plug it into a Mac for testing and troubleshooting. Apple did create a special strap that would allow the device to be connected to a Mac via USBC, but it costs $300 and was only intended for developers. If civilians get their hands on this, they’ll shoot their eye out, because why would you ever be without access to Bluetooth or Wi-Fi? What are you, an animal, or worse, an Android user?

Apple has released its first developer beta for Vision OS, which will probably address some of the Vision Pro’s early software hiccups, including an issue where virtual objects would disappear when pulled closer and Apple’s gross-looking Persona avatars – no explanation necessary, they’re just wrong. Oddly, YouTube came out this week to announce that they would, in fact, be developing an app for the Vision Pro at some vague point in the future after saying they wouldn’t only a few short weeks ago. Really, the only thing that’s changed in the meantime is that the Apollo for Reddit developer, Christian Selig, made an unofficial Vision Pro YouTube app called Juno, which was immediately popular. Selig even designed it to show YouTube’s own ads to “not make Google grumpy” – too late, they are grumpy, and they’re making an app.

The EU Council and Parliament have reached a provisional agreement on how to implement its right to repair directive for appliances and similar products. Most notably, they will now require vendors to extend a product’s warranty by an additional 12 months once it’s been repaired while under its original warranty. EU law also requires vendors to offer users the choice of a replacement device. This warranty extension is intended to encourage users to repair their goods rather than replace their broken goods, thereby keeping them out of landfills. The provisional agreement also includes rules against barriers to repair, such as hardware that is purposefully difficult to replace or software that blocks the installation of secondhand and third-party parts by independent repair shops. It likewise requires that manufacturers make spare parts available for a reasonable price. Another interesting idea within the EU’s right to repair directive is the creation of an online platform for matchmaking between consumers and repair services – it’s like Tinder but for people with broken washing machines.

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Quick Bits are a series of five smaller stories, which by logical deduction makes the three big stories you just heard slow chunks (and that’s math). Nvidia’s recently released RTX Video HDR feature, which uses an Nvidia GPU’s tensor cores to convert SDR video into HDR in real-time, can apparently be tweaked to do the same thing for games. We know this because a modder going by Emuse figured it out and published it as a mod on Nexus Mods, possibly with a special keyboard built for split hooves, because he’s a moose. You’ll need Windows 11 to run it, but based on early feedback, it seems like the mod generates better looking visuals than Windows 11’s Auto HDR feature, so you’ll want to enable this if you want to be so much happier.

A fusion reactor has now generated almost twice the amount of energy that was put into it. The same scientists who reported a net energy gain in 2022 have had their original findings peer-reviewed and have now released a separate paper on more recent trial runs. They now claim their reactor has been able to generate 1.9 times the amount of energy it received to start the fusion reaction. This is promising news, but experts point out we’re still decades away from commercial power plants. I kind of feel bad for nuclear fusion; everyone’s been neglecting it since fusion was born, but fusion can’t even walk yet.

TSMC, manufacturers of the world’s most advanced semiconductors and the world’s largest semiconductor foundry, is now also the largest semiconductor maker by revenue, having finally surpassed both Intel and Samsung for the 2023 fiscal year. Despite difficulties getting plants up and running in the US of A, TSMC is also expanding and announced that it will build a second Japanese fabrication plant, which is scheduled to begin construction before the end of this year. That being said, none of these external plants are likely to fabricate TSMC’s most advanced 2 nanometer processes, which the firm seems intent on keeping in Taiwan, where it’s safe and nothing bad could ever happen.

The US State Department has announced visa restrictions could be placed on groups and individuals who misuse commercially available spyware to harass activists, journalists, political opponents, and otherwise vulnerable people. Further, they will also be placing these restrictions on investors and vendors whose companies enable this kind of misuse. Commercial spyware is typically marketed to police and government agencies for use against known criminals and foreign spies, but their misuse is rampant worldwide. According to Google, around 80% of the zero-day vulnerabilities uncovered by its threat analysis group in 2023 were attributable to commercial spyware vendors. So remember, every time you report an exploit or install a security update, you are chewing into some massive jerks’ bottom line. Great job.

Amazon is testing some changes to one of its pilot programs in the US to prevent the untimely murder of the company’s Flex drivers – an Uber-like program where independent contractors, aka random people, can sign up to use their own unbranded cars to make deliveries. Amazon’s app will now display a Flex driver’s name and photograph to customers waiting for packages. Likewise, select drivers will receive Amazon-branded magnets and lights to display on their car. Now all this is happening because since 2022, five Flex drivers have been shot while at least five others have had guns pulled on them by homeowners who mistook them for intruders. tragically, there were even at least two fatalities. Amazon launched the Flex program in 2015, meaning it took them almost a decade to realize sending civilians out in the dark of night in unmarked cars full of real-life loot boxes wasn’t the smartest idea.

But it would be smart of you to come back on Friday for more Tech news. We’re going to beam knowledge right into your cranium. Don’t worry; it’s very safe.