Anthropic has released its Claude AI chatbot on the App Store, bringing the company's ChatGPT competitor to the masses. Compared to OpenAI's chatbot, Claude is built with a focus on reducing harmful outputs and promoting safety, with a goal of making interactions more reliable and ethically aware. You can give it a try here. 9to5Mac reports: Anthropic highlights three launch features for Claude on iPhone:

Seamless syncing with web chats: Pick up where you left off across devices.
Vision capabilities: Use photos from your library, take new photos, or upload files so you can have real-time image analysis, contextual understanding, and mobile-centric use cases on the go.
Open access: Users across all plans, including Pro and Team, can download the app free of charge.

The app is also capable of analyzing things that you show it like objects, images, and your environment.

The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) told employees Wednesday that it is blocking access to ChatGPT on agency-issued laptops to "protect our data from security threats associated with use of ChatGPT," 404 Media reported Wednesday. From the report: "NARA will block access to commercial ChatGPT on NARANet [an internal network] and on NARA issued laptops, tablets, desktop computers, and mobile phones beginning May 6, 2024," an email sent to all employees, and seen by 404 Media, reads. "NARA is taking this action to protect our data from security threats associated with use of ChatGPT."

The move is particularly notable considering that this directive is coming from, well, the National Archives, whose job is to keep an accurate historical record. The email explaining the ban says the agency is particularly concerned with internal government data being incorporated into ChatGPT and leaking through its services. "ChatGPT, in particular, actively incorporates information that is input by its users in other responses, with no limitations. Like other federal agencies, NARA has determined that ChatGPT's unrestricted approach to reusing input data poses an unacceptable risk to NARA data security," the email reads. The email goes on to explain that "If sensitive, non-public NARA data is entered into ChatGPT, our data will become part of the living data set without the ability to have it removed or purged."

The US could lose out on valuable AI and tech talent if some of its immigration policies are not modernized, Google says in a letter sent to the Department of Labor. From a report: Google says policies like Schedule A, a list of occupations the government "pre-certified" as not having enough American workers, have to be more flexible and move faster to meet demand in technologies like AI and cybersecurity. The company says the government must update Schedule A to include AI and cybersecurity and do so more regularly.

"There's wide recognition that there is a global shortage of talent in AI, but the fact remains that the US is one of the harder places to bring talent from abroad, and we risk losing out on some of the most highly sought-after people in the world," Karan Bhatia, head of government affairs and public policy at Google, tells The Verge. He noted that the occupations in Schedule A have not been updated in 20 years.

Companies can apply for permanent residencies, colloquially known as green cards, for employees. The Department of Labor requires companies to get a permanent labor certification (PERM) proving there is a shortage of workers in that role. That process may take time, so the government "pre-certified" some jobs through Schedule A. The US Citizenship and Immigration Services lists Schedule A occupations as physical therapists, professional nurses, or "immigrants of exceptional ability in the sciences or arts." While the wait time for a green card isn't reduced, Google says Schedule A cuts down the processing time by about a year.

Microsoft's motivation for investing heavily and partnering with OpenAI came from a sense of falling badly behind Google, according to an internal email released Tuesday as part of the Justice Department's antitrust case against the search giant. Bloomberg: The Windows software maker's chief technology officer, Kevin Scott, was "very, very worried" when he looked at the AI model-training capability gap between Alphabet's efforts and Microsoft's, he wrote in a 2019 message to Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella and co-founder Bill Gates. The exchange shows how the company's top executives privately acknowledged they lacked the infrastructure and development speed to catch up to the likes of OpenAI and Google's DeepMind.

[...] Scott, who also serves as executive vice president of artificial intelligence at Microsoft, observed that Google's search product had improved on competitive metrics because of the Alphabet company's advancements in AI. The Microsoft executive wrote that he made a mistake by dismissing some of the earlier AI efforts of its competitors. "We are multiple years behind the competition in terms of machine learning scale," Scott said in the email. Significant portions of the message, titled 'Thoughts on OpenAI,' remain redacted. Nadella endorsed Scott's email, forwarding it to Chief Financial Officer Amy Hood and saying it explains "why I want us to do this."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Sunday, word began to spread on social media about a new mystery chatbot named "gpt2-chatbot" that appeared in the LMSYS Chatbot Arena. Some people speculate that it may be a secret test version of OpenAI's upcoming GPT-4.5 or GPT-5 large language model (LLM). The paid version of ChatGPT is currently powered by GPT-4 Turbo. Currently, the new model is only available for use through the Chatbot Arena website, although in a limited way. In the site's "side-by-side" arena mode where users can purposely select the model, gpt2-chatbot has a rate limit of eight queries per day -- dramatically limiting people's ability to test it in detail. [...] On Monday evening, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman seemingly dropped a hint by tweeting, "i do have a soft spot for gpt2." [...]

OpenAI's fingerprints seem to be all over the new bot. "I think it may well be an OpenAI stealth preview of something," AI researcher Simon Willison told Ars Technica. But what "gpt2" is exactly, he doesn't know. After surveying online speculation, it seems that no one apart from its creator knows precisely what the model is, either. Willison has uncovered the system prompt for the AI model, which claims it is based on GPT-4 and made by OpenAI. But as Willison noted in a tweet, that's no guarantee of provenance because "the goal of a system prompt is to influence the model to behave in certain ways, not to give it truthful information about itself."

After convincing the world to buy open source and give up the Morse Code test for ham radio licenses, Bruce Perens has a new gambit: develop a license that ensures software developers receive compensation from large corporations using their work. The new Post-Open Zero Cost License seeks to address the financial disparities in open source software use and includes provisions against using content to train AI models, aligning its enforcement with non-profit performing rights organizations like ASCAP. Here's an excerpt from an interview The Register conducted with Perens: The license is one component among several -- the paid license needs to be hammered out -- that he hopes will support his proposed Post-Open paradigm to help software developers get paid when their work gets used by large corporations. "There are two paradigms that you can use for this," he explains in an interview. "One is Spotify and the other is ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC. The difference is that Spotify is a for-profit corporation. And they have to distribute profits to their stockholders before they pay the musicians. And as a result, the musicians complain that they're not getting very much at all."

"There are two paradigms that you can use for this," he explains in an interview. "One is Spotify and the other is ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC. The difference is that Spotify is a for-profit corporation. And they have to distribute profits to their stockholders before they pay the musicians. And as a result, the musicians complain that they're not getting very much at all." Perens wants his new license -- intended to complement open source licensing rather than replace it -- to be administered by a 501(c)(6) non-profit. This entity would handle payments to developers. He points to the music performing rights organizations as a template, although among ASCAP, BMI, SECAC, and GMR, only ASCAP remains non-profit. [...]

The basic idea is companies making more than $5 million annually by using Post-Open software in a paid-for product would be required to pay 1 percent of their revenue back to this administrative organization, which would distribute the funds to the maintainers of the participating open source project(s). That would cover all Post-Open software used by the organization. "The license that I have written is long -- about as long as the Affero GPL 3, which is now 17 years old, and had to deal with a lot more problems than the early licenses," Perens explains. "So, at least my license isn't excessively long. It handles all of the abuses of developers that I'm conscious of, including things I was involved in directly like Open Source Security v. Perens, and Jacobsen v. Katzer."

"It also makes compliance easier for companies than it is today, and probably cheaper even if they do have to pay. It creates an entity that can sue infringers on behalf of any developer and gets the funding to do it, but I'm planning the infringement process to forgive companies that admit the problem and cure the infringement, so most won't ever go to court. It requires more infrastructure than open source developers are used to. There's a central organization for Post-Open (or it could be three organizations if we divided all of the purposes: apportioning money to developers, running licensing, and enforcing compliance), and an outside CPA firm, and all of that has to be structured so that developers can trust it." You can read the full interview here.

theodp writes: Reports of the death of Bill Gates' influence at Microsoft have been greatly exaggerated: "Publicly, [Bill] Gates has been almost entirely out of the picture at Microsoft since 2021, following allegations that he had behaved inappropriately toward female employees. In fact, Business Insider has learned, Gates has been quietly orchestrating much of Microsoft's AI revolution from behind the scenes. Current and former executives say Gates remains intimately involved in the company's operations -- advising on strategy, reviewing products, recruiting high-level executives, and nurturing Microsoft's crucial relationship with Sam Altman, the cofounder and CEO of OpenAI.

In early 2023, when Microsoft debuted a version of its search engine Bing turbocharged by the same technology as ChatGPT, throwing down the gauntlet against competitors like Google, Gates, executives said, was pivotal in setting the plan in motion. While Nadella might be the public face of the company's AI success [...] Gates has been the man behind the curtain."[...] "Today, Gates remains close with Altman, who visits his home a few times a year, and OpenAI seeks his counsel on developments. There's a 'tight coupling' between Gates and OpenAI, a person familiar with the relationship said. 'Sam and Bill are good friends. OpenAI takes his opinion and consult overall seriously.' OpenAI spokesperson Kayla Wood confirmed OpenAI continues to meet with Gates."

Eight prominent U.S. newspapers owned by investment giant Alden Global Capital are suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement, in a complaint filed Tuesday in the Southern District of New York. From a report: Until now, the Times was the only major newspaper to take legal action against AI firms for copyright infringement. Many other news publishers, including the Financial Times, the Associated Press and Axel Springer, have instead opted to strike paid deals with AI companies for millions of dollars annually, undermining the Times' argument that it should be compensated billions of dollars in damages.

The lawsuit is being filed on behalf of some of the most prominent regional daily newspapers in the Alden portfolio, including the New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune, Orlando Sentinel, South Florida Sun Sentinel, San Jose Mercury News, Denver Post, Orange County Register and St. Paul Pioneer Press.

Apple has poached dozens of AI experts from Google and has created a secretive European laboratory in Zurich, as the tech giant builds a team to battle rivals in developing new AI models and products. From a report: According to a Financial Times analysis of hundreds of LinkedIn profiles as well as public job postings and research papers, the $2.7tn company has undertaken a hiring spree over recent years to expand its global AI and machine learning team. The iPhone maker has particularly targeted workers from Google, attracting at least 36 specialists from its rival since it poached John Giannandrea to be its top AI executive in 2018.

While the majority of Apple's AI team work from offices in California and Seattle, the tech group has also expanded a significant outpost in Zurich. Professor Luc Van Gool from Swiss university ETH Zurich said Apple's acquisitions of two local AI start-ups -- virtual reality group FaceShift and image recognition company Fashwell -- led Apple to build a research laboratory, known as its "Vision Lab," in the city.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Ahead of its annual GitHub Universe conference in San Francisco early this fall, GitHub announced Copilot Workspace, a dev environment that taps what GitHub describes as "Copilot-powered agents" to help developers brainstorm, plan, build, test and run code in natural language. Jonathan Carter, head of GitHub Next, GitHub's software R&D team, pitches Workspace as somewhat of an evolution of GitHub's AI-powered coding assistant Copilot into a more general tool, building on recently introduced capabilities like Copilot Chat, which lets developers ask questions about code in natural language. "Through research, we found that, for many tasks, the biggest point of friction for developers was in getting started, and in particular knowing how to approach a [coding] problem, knowing which files to edit and knowing how to consider multiple solutions and their trade-offs," Carter said. "So we wanted to build an AI assistant that could meet developers at the inception of an idea or task, reduce the activation energy needed to begin and then collaborate with them on making the necessary edits across the entire corebase."

Given a GitHub repo or a specific bug within a repo, Workspace -- underpinned by OpenAI's GPT-4 Turbo model -- can build a plan to (attempt to) squash the bug or implement a new feature, drawing on an understanding of the repo's comments, issue replies and larger codebase. Developers get suggested code for the bug fix or new feature, along with a list of the things they need to validate and test that code, plus controls to edit, save, refactor or undo it. The suggested code can be run directly in Workspace and shared among team members via an external link. Those team members, once in Workspace, can refine and tinker with the code as they see fit.

Perhaps the most obvious way to launch Workspace is from the new "Open in Workspace" button to the left of issues and pull requests in GitHub repos. Clicking on it opens a field to describe the software engineering task to be completed in natural language, like, "Add documentation for the changes in this pull request," which, once submitted, gets added to a list of "sessions" within the new dedicated Workspace view. Workspace executes requests systematically step by step, creating a specification, generating a plan and then implementing that plan. Developers can dive into any of these steps to get a granular view of the suggested code and changes and delete, re-run or re-order the steps as necessary. "Since developers spend a lot of their time working on [coding issues], we believe we can help empower developers every day through a 'thought partnership' with AI," Carter said. "You can think of Copilot Workspace as a companion experience and dev environment that complements existing tools and workflows and enables simplifying a class of developer tasks ... We believe there's a lot of value that can be delivered in an AI-native developer environment that isn't constrained by existing workflows."

Ahead of its annual I/O developer conference in May, Google has decided to lay off staff across key teams like Flutter, Dart, Python and others. "As we've said, we're responsibly investing in our company's biggest priorities and the significant opportunities ahead," said a Google spokesperson. "To best position us for these opportunities, throughout the second half of 2023 and into 2024, a number of our teams made changes to become more efficient and work better, remove layers, and align their resources to their biggest product priorities. Through this, we're simplifying our structures to give employees more opportunity to work on our most innovative and important advances and our biggest company priorities, while reducing bureaucracy and layers." TechCrunch reports: The company clarified that the layoffs were not company-wide but were reorgs that are part of the normal course of business. Affected employees will be able to apply for other open roles at Google, we're told. [...] Though Google didn't detail headcount, some of the layoffs at Google may have been confirmed in a WARN notice filed on April 24. WARN, or the California Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, requires employers with more than 100 employees to provide 60-day notice in advance of layoffs. In the filing, Google said it was laying off a total of 50 employees across three locations in Sunnyvale.

On social media, commenters raised concerns with the Python layoffs in particular, given the role that Python tooling plays in AI. But others pointed out that Google didn't eliminate its Python team; it replaced that team with another group based in Munich -- at least according to Python Steering Council member Thomas Wouters in a post on Mastodon last Thursday.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Streamable: Roku wants to take the term "ad-supported" to another level. The company held its quarterly earnings conference call on Thursday, and revealed that 81.6 million households used a Roku device or smart TV to stream video in the first three months of the year. As part of the report, company CEO Anthony Wood laid out ideas for how the company would increase revenues in 2024. Unsurprisingly, advertising will be an important centerpiece of that strategy, and Wood provided some details on what Roku users can expect from their ad experience going forward.

The idea of bringing more ads to the Roku home screen is nothing new, but that's what Wood focused on in his discussion with analysts about how to boost revenue on the Roku platform. The company has already begun putting more static ads on the screen, but now it appears that Roku is considering how to get video ads embedded into the home page as well. Wood said that he believes that a video-enabled ad unit on the Roku home screen will be "very popular with advertisers," considering that Roku devices have the reach to put ads in front of 120 million pairs of eyes every day. He also said that the company is "testing other types of video ad units, looking at other experiences" that it can bring to the Roku home screen.

As another way to boost ad revenues, Wood suggested that the company's home screen experiences could be leveraged to deliver more ads. He pointed to the NBA Zone, which Roku launched at the beginning of April as an example. Roku can use these themed content hubs to deliver ads more tailored to fans of that particular content, harnessing the power of popular sports to pull more ad revenue. Customers concerned that Roku will just gunk up their home screen with ads are likely wondering if the company has made any moves toward actually making the user experience on the platform better. The good news is that Roku has also introduced a recommended content row, that will compile picks from across various streaming services and use AI to point customers toward new shows and movies they might like. "There's lots of ways we're working on enhancing the home screen to make it more valuable to viewers but also increase the monetization," Wood said.

If 2023 was the tech industry's year of the A.I. chatbot, 2024 is turning out to be the year of A.I. plumbing. From a report: It may not sound as exciting, but tens of billions of dollars are quickly being spent on behind-the-scenes technology for the industry's A.I. boom. Companies from Amazon to Meta are revamping their data centers to support artificial intelligence. They are investing in huge new facilities, while even places like Saudi Arabia are racing to build supercomputers to handle A.I. Nearly everyone with a foot in tech or giant piles of money, it seems, is jumping into a spending frenzy that some believe could last for years.

Microsoft, Meta, and Google's parent company, Alphabet, disclosed this week that they had spent more than $32 billion combined on data centers and other capital expenses in just the first three months of the year. The companies all said in calls with investors that they had no plans to slow down their A.I. spending. In the clearest sign of how A.I. has become a story about building a massive technology infrastructure, Meta said on Wednesday that it needed to spend billions more on the chips and data centers for A.I. than it had previously signaled. "I think it makes sense to go for it, and we're going to," Mark Zuckerberg, Meta's chief executive, said in a call with investors.

The eye-popping spending reflects an old parable in Silicon Valley: The people who made the biggest fortunes in California's gold rush weren't the miners -- they were the people selling the shovels. No doubt Nvidia, whose chip sales have more than tripled over the last year, is the most obvious A.I. winner. The money being thrown at technology to support artificial intelligence is also a reminder of spending patterns of the dot-com boom of the 1990s. For all of the excitement around web browsers and newfangled e-commerce websites, the companies making the real money were software giants like Microsoft and Oracle, the chipmaker Intel, and Cisco Systems, which made the gear that connected those new computer networks together. But cloud computing has added a new wrinkle: Since most start-ups and even big companies from other industries contract with cloud computing providers to host their networks, the tech industry's biggest companies are spending big now in hopes of luring customers.

An anonymous reader shares a report: I paid a lot of money for the privilege of getting an Apple Vision Pro brand-new in February. All-in, with optical inserts and taxes, I financed a little over $3,900 for the 256GB version of the headset. A day or so ago, I made a mistake that I'm sure many early adopters are familiar with: I looked up how much it's been selling for on eBay. On Wednesday, a 1TB Vision Pro, complete with all the included gear, Apple's fluffy $200 travel case, $500 AppleCare Plus, and claimed to have been "worn maybe about an hour" sold for $3,200 after 21 bids. The listed shipping estimate was $20.30. Brand new, that combination is $5,007.03 on Apple's site for me.

Another eBay listing, this one with my headset's configuration (but sans optical inserts) went for just $2,600 -- again with most, if not all, of the included accessories. Several other 256GB and 512GB models sold for around that amount this week. The story is no different over on Swappa, a popular reselling site among Apple users. Bloomberg News, over the weekend: In related news, employees at some Apple retail stores are now being asked to fill out surveys after giving Vision Pro demonstrations to potential buyers. Apple wants to know if they were able to close a sale and get any feedback from the would-be buyer. Apple also wants to ensure employees are following the 20-minute demo script.

As I wrote last week, Vision Pro demand has dropped considerably at many Apple stores. One retail employee says they haven't seen one Vision Pro purchase in weeks and that the number of returns equaled the device's sales in the first month that it was available.

Austria called on Monday for fresh efforts to regulate the use of AI in weapons systems that could create so-called 'killer robots', as it hosted a conference aimed at reviving largely stalled discussions on the issue. From a report: With AI technology advancing rapidly, weapons systems that could kill without human intervention are coming ever closer, posing ethical and legal challenges that most countries say need addressing soon. "We cannot let this moment pass without taking action. Now is the time to agree on international rules and norms to ensure human control," Austrian Foreign Minister Alexander Schallenberg told the meeting of non-governmental and international organisations as well as envoys from 143 countries.

"At least let us make sure that the most profound and far-reaching decision, who lives and who dies, remains in the hands of humans and not of machines," he said in an opening speech to the conference entitled "Humanity at the Crossroads: Autonomous Weapons Systems and the Challenge of Regulation." Years of discussions at the United Nations have produced few tangible results and many participants at the two-day conference in Vienna said the window for action was closing rapidly.

It's another speech-recognizing, AI-powered handheld device "about half the size of a phone," writes CNET. (Though the $199 device comes with a keyboard and a tiny 2.8-inch screen.) "The Rabbit R1 can identify items in its environment. Point it at a plant, and it can tell you what kind it is. Aim it at your lunch, and it can tell you what's in it.

"it also feels a bit like a novelty so far...." It can call an Uber, order dinner from Doordash, translate conversations, record voice memos, play songs from Spotify and more. Your phone can already do all of those things, but [CEO and founder Jesse] Lyu is promoting the Rabbit R1 as a faster and more natural way to do so... So far, the Rabbit R1 feels fun, fresh and interesting, but also frustrating at times. It intrigues me, but it also hasn't convinced me yet that there's room for another gadget in my life.... Many of the things it can do today feel smartphone-esque, like asking for the weather or playing songs on Spotify...

Visual search is the most interesting feature so far... It's pretty accurate for the most part so far. When I pointed it at my salad during lunch, it was able to tell me most of the ingredients. That's not what I asked. After all, who orders a dish without knowing what's in it? I asked the Rabbit R1 to tell me how many calories were in my lunch. While it couldn't provide the answer I wanted, I was impressed with its response... Overall, Rabbit R1's visual analysis worked pretty well for identifying things like plants and characters from pop culture. When describing my colleague's sneakers, the Rabbit R1 got the brand wrong...

So far, I've used the Rabbit R1 to take voice memos, translate speech from Spanish to English, and answer basic questions about things like weather forecasts. These features work as expected for the most part.
The article points out that Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses "also have multimodal AI, meaning the eyewear can 'see' what you see and tell you about it," and "you can already do something like this on your phone through Google's Gemini assistant on Android phones (or the Gemini section of the Google app for the iPhone).

"It's also very reminiscent of Google Lens, which has been around for years..."

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Associated Press: Tech giant Cisco Systems on Wednesday joined Microsoft and IBM in signing onto a Vatican-sponsored pledge to ensure artificial intelligence is developed and used ethically and to benefit the common good... The pledge outlines key pillars of ethical and responsible use of AI. It emphasizes that AI systems must be designed, used and regulated to serve and protect the dignity of all human beings, without discrimination, and their environments. It highlights principles of transparency, inclusion, responsibility, impartiality and security as necessary to guide all AI developments.

The document was unveiled and signed at a Vatican conference on Feb. 28, 2020... Pope Francis has called for an international treaty to ensure AI is developed and used ethically, devoting his annual peace message this year to the topic.

"A former high school athletic director was arrested Thursday morning," reports CBS News, "after allegedly using artificial intelligence to impersonate the school principal in a recording..." One-time Pikesville High School employee Dazhon Darien is facing charges that include theft, stalking, disruption of school operations and retaliation against a witness. Investigators determined he faked principal Eric Eiswert's voice and circulated the audio on social media in January. Darien's nickname, DJ, was among the names mentioned in the audio clips he allegedly faked, according to the Baltimore County State's Attorney's Office.

Baltimore County detectives say Darien created the recording as retaliation against Eiswert, who had launched an investigation into the potential mishandling of school funds, Baltimore County Police Chief Robert McCullough said on Thursday. Eiswert's voice, which police and AI experts believe was simulated, made disparaging comments toward Black students and the surrounding Jewish community. The audio was widely circulated on social media.
The article notes that after the faked recording circulated on social media the principal "was temporarily removed from the school, and waves of hate-filled messages circulated on social media, while the school received numerous phone calls."

The suspect had actually used the school's network multiple times to perform online searches for OpenAI tools, "which police linked to paid OpenAI accounts."

"Intel used to dominate the U.S. chip industry," writes CNBC. But now "it's struggling to stay relevant." Intel's long-awaited turnaround looks farther away than ever after the company reported dismal first-quarter earnings. Investors pushed the shares down 9% on Friday to their lowest level of the year. Although Intel's revenue is no longer shrinking and the company remains the biggest maker of processors that power PCs and laptops, sales in the first quarter trailed estimates. Intel also gave a soft forecast for the second quarter, suggesting weak demand... Intel is the worst-performing tech stock in the S&P 500 this year, down 37%.

Meanwhile, the two best-performing stocks in the index are chipmaker Nvidia and Super Micro Computer, which has been boosted by surging demand for Nvidia-based artificial intelligence servers. Intel, long the most valuable U.S. chipmaker, is now one-sixteenth the size of Nvidia by market cap. It's also smaller than Qualcomm, Broadcom, Texas Instruments, and AMD. For decades, it was the largest semiconductor company in the world by sales, but suffered seven straight quarters of revenue declines recently, and was passed by Nvidia last year.
Intel's problems "are decades in the making," according to CNBC, suggesting that one turning point was Apple's decision not to use Intel's chips in its iPhone. Now nearly every smartphone built uses Arm chips built by Apple and Qualcomm, while Apple's huge orders for TSMC chips "provided the cash to annually upgrade the manufacturing equipment at TSMC, which eventually surpassed Intel." Around 2017, mobile chips from Apple and Qualcomm started adding AI parts to their chips called neural processing units, another advancement over Intel's PC processors. The first Intel-based laptop with an NPU shipped late last year.

Intel has since lost share in its core PC chip business to chips that grew out of the mobile revolution... Apple stopped using Intel in its PCs in 2020. Macs now use Arm-based chips, and some of the first mainstream Windows laptops with Arm-based chips are coming out later this year. Low-cost laptops running Google ChromeOS are increasingly using Arm, too...

AMD made over 20% of server CPUs sold in 2022, and shipments grew 62% that year, according to an estimate from Counterpoint Research last year. AMD surpassed Intel's market cap the same year.

Sarah Perez reports via TechCrunch: EyeEm, the Berlin-based photo-sharing community that exited last year to Spanish company Freepik after going bankrupt, is now licensing its users' photos to train AI models. Earlier this month, the company informed users via email that it was adding a new clause to its Terms & Conditions that would grant it the rights to upload users' content to "train, develop, and improve software, algorithms, and machine-learning models." Users were given 30 days to opt out by removing all their content from EyeEm's platform. Otherwise, they were consenting to this use case for their work.

At the time of its 2023 acquisition, EyeEm's photo library included 160 million images and nearly 150,000 users. The company said it would merge its community with Freepik's over time. Despite its decline, almost 30,000 people are still downloading it each month, according to data from Appfigures. Once thought of as a possible challenger to Instagram -- or at least "Europe's Instagram" -- EyeEm had dwindled to a staff of three before selling to Freepik, TechCrunch's Ingrid Lunden previously reported. Joaquin Cuenca Abela, CEO of Freepik, hinted at the company's possible plans for EyeEm, saying it would explore how to bring more AI into the equation for creators on the platform. As it turns out, that meant selling their work to train AI models. [...]

Of note, the notice says that these deletions from EyeEm market and partner platforms could take up to 180 days. Yes, that's right: Requested deletions take up to 180 days but users only have 30 days to opt out. That means the only option is manually deleting photos one by one. Worse still, the company adds that: "You hereby acknowledge and agree that your authorization for EyeEm to market and license your Content according to sections 8 and 10 will remain valid until the Content is deleted from EyeEm and all partner platforms within the time frame indicated above. All license agreements entered into before complete deletion and the rights of use granted thereby remain unaffected by the request for deletion or the deletion." Section 8 is where licensing rights to train AI are detailed. In Section 10, EyeEm informs users they will forgo their right to any payouts for their work if they delete their account -- something users may think to do to avoid having their data fed to AI models. Gotcha!