Apple's AI play

Plus: False Facial Recognition leads to a wrongful arrest

Hey folks,

In today’s update:

📰 News: Apple’s Generative AI play

🛠️ Tools: Fitness app with body movement tracking

🎲 Misc: False Facial Recognition leads to a wrongful arrest

Reading time is 4 minutes. Let’s dive in 🤿

 Big Tech

Apple’s Generative AI play

Apple has been relatively quiet on the AI front, preferring the terms “Machine Learning” and “Neural Engine” instead of AI, but it’s actively investing in development of new generative AI models that can run on mobile devices.

New features like the Photo app’s new ability to recognize your friends in pictures, auto-correct, new noise-awareness features in AirPod etc, are all powered by AI.

Why it Matters: Apple considers AI as the “core and fundamental technology that is integral to virtually every product”. This means everything from iMessages to optimizing your iPhone’s battery-life are powered by AI.

Every big tech company has an AI strategy: Meta’s playing the open-source card, Microsoft’s cornering the enterprise AI market. Apple’s strength is in distribution and privacy -

  1. Distribution: With more than 2 billion active devices, even small feature updates have a significant impact and usage.

  2. Privacy: Apple’s AI models are run on-device. This means your private data never leaves your device, a stark contrast with OpenAI and Google.

Even though not much is known about Apple’s AI strategy, investors are nevertheless betting on it - the stock price up more than 43% in 2023 alone.

Leverage AI Tools

Fitness app with body-movement tracking

Reflect: An AI-powered fitness app to coach you through your daily workout by tracking your movements, correcting your form, counting your reps, and timing your workouts.(link)

Convert text documents to Audio

AnyToSpeech: With this you convert text, pdf or url to audio content. Also create podcasts from text content, create content on YouTube without a microphone using text and convert books from text or pdf to audio.(link)

 Today in Tech

  • Battle for your data: Zoom planned to use your personal data, including voice, audio and text without an option to opt-out, but walks back after backlash - Gizmodo

  • Bing on Chrome: Microsoft’s Bing Chat, which is only available in products like Edge browser and Bing app, is coming “soon” to third-party browsers, including on mobile - Techcrunch

  • End of Surge Pricing?: Lyft wants to kill surge pricing in order to compete with Uber - Techcrunch

  • Who pays for AI mistakes?: How a false facial recognition match led to Detroit police wrongfully arresting a Black woman for carjacking and robbery, the first such known case for a woman - New York Times 

  • New Dev Tools: Google debuts Project IDX, an AI-enabled browser-based dev environment using the open-source Visual Studio Code and that integrates Google's PaLM 2-based Codey - Google

  • Nvidia’s AI push: Nvidia announces AI Workbench, which lets users create, test, and customize LLMs from Hugging Face and others on local workstations before using cloud resources - NVIDIA 

  • HR replacement?: Austin-based One Model, which uses AI to help employers make recruiting, hiring, promotion, layoff, and other HR decisions, raised $41M led by Riverwood Capital - Techcrunch 

  • Return to Office: Zoom, known for helping millions of people work from home, asks its employees living within 50 miles of an office to work in person at least two days per week - New York Times 

  • Emerging AI issue: Researchers show that ChatGPT 3.5 outperforms ChatGPT 4 in many tasks, including solving math problems, highlighting the issue of “drift” in improving AI models - Wall Street Journal