Category: News

I believe that means Apple sees AI as a very important component to its future, PCC as an essential hub to drive forward to tomorrow, and that it will also now find some way to transform platform security using similar tools. Apple’s fearsome reputation for security means even its opponents have nothing but respect for the robust platforms it has made. That reputation is also why more and more enterprises are, or should be, moving to Apple’s platforms.

The mantle of protecting security is now under the passionate leadership of Ivan Krstić, who also led the design and implementation of key security tools such as Lockdown Mode, Advanced Data Protection for iCloud, and two-factor authentication for Apple ID. Krstić has previously promised that, “Apple runs one of the most sophisticated security engineering operations in the world, and we will continue to work tirelessly to protect our users from abusive state-sponsored actors like NSO Group.”

When it comes to bounties for uncovering flaws in PCC, researchers can now earn up to $1 million dollars if they find a weakness that allows arbitrary code execution with arbitrary entitlements, or a cool $250,000 if they uncover some way to access a user’s request data or sensitive information about their requests.  

“Upset that your hair never looks right with a blurred background? On-device AI will fix that, rendering a much finer distinction between the subject and the blurred background,” Forrester said. “More importantly, the AI PC will also enable new use cases, such as eye contact correction, portrait blur, auto framing, lighting adjustment, and digital avatars.”

From the cloud to the edge

Experts see AI features and tools moving more to the edge — being embedded on smartphones, laptops and IoT devices — because AI computation is done near the user at the edge of the network, close to where the data is located, rather than centrally in a cloud computing facility or private data center. That means less lag time and better security.

Lenovo, for example, just released AI Now, an AI agent that leverages a local Large Language Model (LLM) built on Meta’s Llama 3, enabling a chatbot that’s able to run on PCs locally without an internet connection. And just last month, HP announced two AI PCs: theOmniBook Ultra Flip 2-in-1 laptop and the HP EliteBook X 14-inch Next-Gen AI laptop. The two PCs come with three engines (CPU, GPU, and NPU) to accelerate AI applications and include either an Intel Core Ultra processor with a dedicated AI engine or an AMD Ryzen PRO NPU processor enabling up to 55 TOPS (tera operations per second) performance.

To make generative AI tools (genAI) work as well as possible, tech companies have chosen to train their large language models (LLMs) on large amounts of text, even though doing so could run afoul of copyright laws.

Most recently, book publisher Penguin Random House has chosen to include a warning in its books stating the content may not be used or reproduced for the purpose of training AI models. And, according to The Bookseller, the AI warning will not only be added to new books but also to reprints of older titles.

The move is likely to spur more publishers to follow suit with similar warnings to their books.

“Anytime you have a very solid position with a dominant player, it really quells innovation and quells enrichments, and you end up with a zero-sum game,” he said. That’s because once a company has a dominant position that can’t be challenged, there is little accountability for product and/or service quality, so “companies simply test the bounds of tolerance” with their customers, Shimmin said.

Power corrupts; regulation corrects

While Trump might favor ensuring Google plays fair instead of breaking up the company, according to his comments reported by the Times, this may not be enough to encourage fair competition, noted another industry expert.

“The fundamental problem with big tech is the economic perversities of monopoly power,” said John Bambenek, president at Bambenek Consulting. “Sure, regulation can help, but if the problem is too extreme, splitting companies up is the only solution to maintain viable capitalism.”

One is the text and image to video generation that Adobe previewed last month, accessible in the Firefly web app at firefly.adobe.com. This enables users to create five-second, 720p-resolution videos from natural-language text prompts. These can contain realistic video footage and 2D or 3D animations. It’s also possible to generate video using still images as a prompt, meaning a photograph or illustration could be used to create b-roll footage.

To provide greater control over the output, there are options for different camera angles, shot size, motion and zoom, for example, while Adobe says it’s working on more ways to direct the AI-generated video.

Waiting list

Adobe said it only trains the video model on stock footage and public domain data that it has rights to use for training its AI models. It won’t use customer data or data scraped from the internet, it said.

Just below that in the line-up is the Ryzen AI 9 HX PRO 370, an identical chip with slightly less NPU performance — up to 50 TOPS. And the entry-level chip is the Ryzen AI 7 PRO 360 with 8 cores/16 threads, a 5GHz clock speed, Radeon 880M graphics, and the same 50 TOPS NPU performance.

NPUs are on the new frontline of desktop competition because they make possible features such as accelerating Microsoft’s Copilot + and AI-intensive tasks such as real-time language translation.

They also pit AMD against traditional rival Intel, which has had NPUs of its own in its Core Ultra CPUs since 2023. Today, NPU AI acceleration is premium priced, but there are signs the technology is likely to jump quickly to more mainstream chips.

Finally, there are genAI agents that function as virtual “teammates.” 

The agents can be designed to generate and review marketing content, for instance, collate feedback from various sources, or streamline processes such as clearing up Jira backlogs and organizing Confluence pages. Users can also create their own Rovo Agents using a no-code text interface or Atlassian’s Forge app development platform. More than 20 pre-built agents are already available. 

Atlassian also unveiled new developer-focused AI Agents that help perform a variety of tasks beyond writing code. These can generate code plans and recommendations, and pull requests in Jira based on task descriptions, requirements, and context across the organization.  

Judith Chevalier, a professor of finance and economics at Yale University, told the court that using Google tools takes a lower share of publishers’ revenue, and that on average it is “less expensive to use Google-to-Google than using third-party-to-third-party” tools for connecting publishers and advertisers, Mulholland wrote.

Only connect

CheckMyAds noted that a chart presented by Chevalier showed that Google Ads was the only buying tool that connected with Google Ad Exchange, a fact DOJ noted in its cross-examination. The integration of Google’s different ad technologies and the lack of openness to competitors is one elements of the DOJ’s case.

Mulholland didn’t namecheck any of the witnesses Google called in its last two days of evidence, but CheckMyAds had plenty to say about Mark Israel, an economics expert who, it came out in questioning, has done paid work for Google in the past. He sought to show that the market for online advertising is a single two-sided market and not the three separate markets (ad servers, ad networks, and ad exchanges) the DOJ says it is.