Apple and Meta fined for EU's law breach; TSMC shows off new tech; OpenAI image generator available for developers
Apple and Meta fined for EU's law breach
Apple was fined 500 million euros on Wednesday and Meta 200 million euros, as European Union antitrust regulators handed out the first sanctions under landmark legislation aimed at curbing the power of Big Tech. The sanctions follow a year-long investigation by the European Commission, the EU executive, into whether the companies comply with the Digital Markets Act that seeks to allow smaller rivals into markets dominated by the biggest companies.
Apple said it would challenge the EU fine. 'Today's announcements are yet another example of the European Commission unfairly targeting Apple in a series of decisions that are bad for the privacy and security of our users, bad for products, and force us to give away our technology for free,' Apple said in a statement. Meta criticised it saying, 'The European Commission is attempting to handicap successful American businesses while allowing Chinese and European companies to operate under different standards.'
TSMC shows off new tech
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co unveiled technology for making faster chips and putting them together in dinner-plate-sized packages that will boost performance needed for artificial intelligence applications. It said its A14 manufacturing technology will arrive in 2028 and will be able to produce processors that are 15% faster at the same power consumption as its N2 chips due to enter production this year, or will use 30% less power at the same speed as the N2 chips.
The world's biggest contract manufacturer said its forthcoming 'System on Wafer-X' will be able to weave together at least 16 large computing chips, as well as memory chips and fast optical interconnections and new technology, to deliver thousands of watts of power to the chips. TSMC plans to build two factories to carry out the work near its chip plants in Arizona, with plans for a total of six chip factories, two packaging factories, and an R&D center.
OpenAI image generator available for developers
OpenAI has added the improved image generator in ChatGPT to their API making it easy for developers to integrate the tool directly into their platforms. The new image generator went viral due to its ability to create realistic Ghibli-style photos. OpenAI said that the tool is powered by an AI model called 'gpt-image-1.' Developers will also have the option to control the quality of the images and also consequently the speed.
OpenAI has implemented similar guardrails on the tool like its other image generators, developers can also decide the moderation sensitivity by keeping it at 'auto' or 'low,' which will include NSFW content. OpenAI has set the pricing at $5 per million input tokens for text and $10 per million input tokens for images and $40 per million output tokens for images. The images will also be watermarked with C2PA metadata. Its clients like Canva, GoDaddy, Instacart and HubSpot are already experimenting the feature.
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10 richest countries in the world are..., US is at 9th position, India, Pakistan are at...
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