🧙🏼 Launched: iPhone 16 and its AI features

Howdy, wizards.

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Here’s what’s brewing in AI today:

Dario’s Picks

The most important news stories in AI this week

1. iPhone 16’s AI features. Apple just announced several new products and upgrades for Apple Watch, Airpods, and iPhone. The latest iPhone model has a new chip named A18 which enables it take advantage of all the upcoming features of Apple Intelligence.

    

   

   Visual intelligence gives you a dedicated button to show AI the world around you. Via Apple on YouTube.

    

    

   AI is deeply integrated into the new iPhone and across apps:

   • Visual intelligence. The new iPhone has a new, physical camera control button on the side. Point your phone at anything you’re watching, press and hold the button, and voila – it gives you more info about what you’re seeing via AI. It uses the on-device AI model by default, but it can also call on ChatGPT for assistance if the problem requires more complex reasoning, e.g. a math homework assignment.

   • AI writing tools: You’ll have quick access to AI that can help you rewrite, summarise and proofread text and email. You can also generate custom emojis (Genmojis) with AI that you can use while chatting.

   • AI search for photos and videos. You’ll be able to search using natural language, for videos and photos you’ve taken based on their content. For example, “show me the photos from the barbecue last week”.

   • The new Siri. Siri will now have a lot of personal context from you, including information, photos and videos that’s stored on your iPhone. Remember, Apple Intelligence works on-device, and doesn’t send data to third parties (like ChatGPT) unless given explicit permission by the user to do so; in cases where it shares data with third-parties, it uses Apple’s private cloud compute to do this more securely.

   • While they didn’t say it in the keynote, the new iPhone 16 and 16 Pro reportedly have 8GB of RAM dedicated for Apple Intelligence.

   • Apple Intelligence will be available in beta starting next month, with features gradually rolling out in the months to come. At first, it’ll only be available in US English; localized English will be available in December and French, Spanish, Chinese and Japanese is coming next year.

    

   • ‎ Why it matters‎ ‎ Powerful, user-friendly AI is about to reach a mass audience. There’s honestly so much new functionality and ways to use it that it’s hard to summarise it all. What stood out for me as new from this presentation, that wasn’t covered during the WWDC 2024 in June, is the “visual intelligence” feature and how it’s integrated. I’d say it’s a big step forward in terms of UX for multimodal AI; you can think of it as sort of an on-the-go Google Lens – a button that’s always available for letting AI see what you see in the world around you.

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2. Man charged for $10 million scam using AI-generated songs. In a first of its kind case, a North Carolina man is found to have used AI to generate thousands of songs; he then continuously streamed them using bot accounts, and collected more than $10 million in royalty payments from Spotify, Amazon Music, Apple Music and YouTube Music.

    

   The offender allegedly had help on this scheme from the CEO of an unnamed AI music company.

    

   

    

   ‎ Why it matters‎ ‎ Yikes. I see this remaining a big challenge for content platforms and creators, as AI bots can take on more human-like behaviour as they become more advanced – hence more difficult to identify. It’s no wonder platforms like YouTube are working hard on upgrading their AI detection tools.

    

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