Latest news with #AIWeekly
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
AI Weekly: Apple plays it safe, OpenAI rakes it in
STORY: From why Apple isn't making big promises, to signs that OpenAI is making real money, this is AI Weekly. :: Apple Apple unveiled upgrades to its AI services, focused on practical tools including live translation of phone calls. 'Hi, are you available to cater a wedding on December 6th?' [GERMAN TRANSLATION] The announcement comes a year after it failed to deliver on promised AI-based upgrades to key products such as Siri. Analysts say this year's relatively modest updates suggest the tech giant wants to avoid making the same mistake. Business is booming at OpenAI. The ChatGPT maker says revenue was rolling in at an annual rate of $10 billion by June. It's a sign of how AI is fast becoming big business, with rival firms also pulling in cash. Competitor Anthropic recently passed $3 billion in annualized revenue. Bots could be bad news for the environment though. A United Nations report says indirect carbon emissions from four leading AI-focused firms rose on average by 150% from 2020-2023. The report says Amazon saw the biggest increase, ahead of Microsoft, Meta and Alphabet. Soaring use of giant data centers drove the increases. Meta is hiring a team to build so-called 'artificial general intelligence' - AI that matches or surpasses human abilities. :: Meta That's according to Bloomberg, which says boss Mark Zuckerberg will personally hire some 50 people. It says he's been spurred partly by frustration over the performance and public reception of Llama 4, Meta's latest AI model. :: Timbuktu Content/SC Johnson And AI has joined the fight against mosquito-borne illness. Researchers at the University of South Florida have developed a trap that uses the tech to rapidly identify the disease-carrying insects. Ryan Carney is a professor on the team: 'We have algorithms that process that image and direct an artificial intelligence algorithm to identify the anatomical components as well as the species of the mosquito.' The team hopes the cheap traps can be used as an early warning system for diseases like dengue fever. Sign in to access your portfolio
Yahoo
04-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
AI Weekly: Sam Altman makes a prediction
STORY: From when Sam Altman thinks AI will make a leap, to how Meta plans to automate advertising, this is AI Weekly. :: AI Weekly Sam Altman is expecting big things in 2026. Speaking in San Francisco, he said that's when AI agents could start functioning at a higher level. 'I would bet next year that in some limited cases, at least in some small ways, we start to see agents that can help us discover new knowledge or can figure out solutions to business problems that are kind of very nontrivial. Right now, it's very much in the category of, okay, if you got something like repetitive cognitive work, we can automate it at a kind of a low level on a short time horizon. And as that expands to longer time horizons and higher and higher levels, you know, at some point you're going to add a scientist, an AI agent that can go discover new science, and that will be kind of a significant moment in the world.' DeepSeek has updated its bot for the first time since January, when the debut of the low-cost, high-power model rocked the tech sector. The Chinese startup said the new version of its R1 reasoning system offered significant improvements. Benchmark tests showed it was closing the gap with products from OpenAI and Google. Meta aims to fully automate advertising with AI by the end of next year. The Wall Street Journal says firms will be able to provide a product image and a budget - and leave bots to make and target ads. Companies will reportedly be able to personalize marketing, so that viewers see different versions of ads in real time based on factors including their location. :: ETH Zurich And a Swiss team has developed a bot that can play badminton against humans. The system uses so-called reinforcement learning - a type of AI that improves by repeating tasks. Researchers say it paves the way for bots that can do other roles like search and rescue. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Yahoo
07-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
AI Weekly: OpenAI has a change of heart
STORY: From OpenAI having a big change of heart, to what Nvidia has planned for China, this is AI Weekly. OpenAI won't turn into a for-profit company after all. Instead, the ChatGPT maker will leave its nonprofit parent in charge, potentially limiting the power of boss Sam Altman. The move follows a storm of criticism and legal challenges, including a lawsuit by co-founder Elon Musk. He's accused OpenAI of straying from its mission to develop AI for the good of humanity. :: Boston Dynamics Boston Dynamics says its humanoid robot Atlas is going to work. It will start trials at a Hyundai car factory later this year. Company director of robotics research Scott Kuindersma says the android can match a human athlete: '...a lot of the jobs that you might want a humanoid to actually do are the kind of jobs where it's basically backbreaking labor for a person to do. And these are these are really challenging, ergonomically unfit tasks that we ask people to do or need people to do right now. And we think that robots will be much better suited for those.' The bots seem to be paying off for big banks. JPMorgan says AI helped it boost sales to wealthy clients and manage requests during the recent market turmoil. America's biggest bank says the tech helped supercharge the speed at which it could provide research and investment advice. Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs is rolling out an AI assistant to its bankers, and Morgan Stanley has developed a chatbot for its financial advisers. U.S. power consumption will hit record highs this year and next, according to official estimates. The increased demand comes in part from data centers dedicated to artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency, and as homes and businesses use more electricity for heat and transportation. The forecast comes as power companies race to strike deals with tech firms, including Constellation Energy's move to reopen a reactor at Three Mile Island to feed Microsoft. And Nvidia is tweaking the design of some of its chips so they can be sold to Chinese customers without clashing with U.S. export rules. The company declined to comment on the report from tech publication The Information. It says the chip giant has told big customers like Alibaba and ByteDance that the new silicon will be ready as soon as June.
Yahoo
30-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
AI Weekly: Tech giants get busy, bots pay off
STORY: From new bots making their debut, to what Alphabet said to cheer investors, this is AI Weekly. Alibaba launched a new flagship AI model as competition mounts in China's AI market. Qwen 3 features hybrid reasoning, which the firm says creates a more efficient platform for app and software developers. Baidu also launched its latest model - Ernie 4.5 Turbo. The search engine giant additionally claimed to have made big progress in developing its own chips to power AI models. :: Meta Facebook-parent Meta was also busy. The company debuted a new personal assistant and a tool to help developers build on the firm's Llama model. Boss Mark Zuckerberg spoke to Microsoft chief Satya Nadella at an event in California about how bots were taking over programming: "The big one that we're focused on is building an AI and machine learning engineer to advance the Llama development itself. Right. Because I mean, our bet is sort of that in the next year probably, you know, I don't know, maybe half the development is going to be done by AI as opposed to people. And then that will just kind of increase from there." DeepSeek is available again in South Korea, after being suspended since February over data privacy concerns. :: April 24, 2025 The country's data protection agency said the bot transferred user data and other information without permission back when the service first launched. DeepSeek didn't immediately respond to the comments, but has revised a privacy policy note attached to its app. Chinese President Xi Jinping has called on the country to become self-sufficient in AI. State media reports say he said China should deploy its 'whole national system' to push forward on the tech. Washington has imposed sanctions in a bid to slow AI development in the country, but some experts say China has narrowed the gap over the last year even so. And Alphabet cheered investors, saying its big bet on AI was starting to deliver tangible returns. The Google parent firm said the tech was fueling growth in its core advertising business. Alphabet said its AI Overviews - that's the summaries that appear above its traditional search results - now had 1.5 billion users per month.
Yahoo
23-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
AI Weekly: Huawei's chips, humanoid robots get competitive
STORY: From Huawei's plans for China to humanoid robots racing in a half-marathon, this is AI Weekly. Huawei plans to begin mass shipments of its advanced AI chips to Chinese customers as early as next month. That's according to two people familiar with the matter, who added some shipments have already been made. Chinese companies have been scrambling to find a domestic replacement for Nvidia's H20 chip. The Silicon Valley giant had until recently been able to sell the chip freely in the Chinese market. :: Meta Handout Meta Platforms says it is expanding access to its AI assistant on Ray-Ban smart glasses to seven additional European countries. That will allow people in Germany, Austria, Belgium and others to interact with Meta AI using voice prompts to get answers to general questions, the company said. The Facebook and Instagram parent launched its AI technology in Europe in March after a delay over data protection and privacy concerns. A report from the International Monetary Fund says the economic gains from artificial intelligence will likely outweigh the costs of rising carbon emissions by the data centers needed to run AI models. The IMF says AI will boost global output by around 0.5% a year between 2025 and 2030 - but noted that those gains would not be shared equally across the world. Takeup of AI is expected to drive a surge in demand for energy-intensive data processing power in the coming years, even as the world struggles to keep promises on reducing emissions. Humanoid robots raced against humans for the first time in a half-marathon in China's Beijing. The race drew crowds of spectators, including He Sishu, who works in the artificial intelligence field. 'There is a kind of sportsmanship, whether it's humans or robots, they're all exercising. It feels like I'm watching the development of machines… the development of AI.' The winning robot, Tiangong Ultra, finished in 2 hours and 40 minutes — a long way off from the men's winner who finished in just over an hour. Sign in to access your portfolio
