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Apple will update iOS notification summaries after BBC headline mistake

AI, Apple, apple intelligence, BBC, ios 18, iOS 18.1, journalism, large language models, LLMs, ml, Notification Summaries, Tech / Tim Belzer / January 6, 2025

Nevertheless, it’s a serious problem when the summaries misrepresent news headlines, and edge cases where this occurs are unfortunately inevitable. Apple cannot simply fix these summaries with a software update. The only answers are either to help users understand the drawbacks of the technology so they can make better-informed judgments or to remove or disable the feature completely. Apple is apparently going for the former.

We’re oversimplifying a bit here, but generally, LLMs like those used for Apple’s notification summaries work by predicting portions of words based on what came before and are not capable of truly understanding the content they’re summarizing.

Further, these predictions are known to not be accurate all the time, with incorrect results occurring a few times per 100 or 1,000 outputs. As the models are trained and improvements are made, the error percentage may be reduced, but it never reaches zero when countless summaries are being produced every day.

Deploying this technology at scale without users (or even the BBC, it seems) really understanding how it works is risky at best, whether it’s with the iPhone’s summaries of news headlines in notifications or Google’s AI summaries at the top of search engine results pages. Even if the vast majority of summaries are perfectly accurate, there will always be some users who see inaccurate information.

These summaries are read by so many millions of people that the scale of errors will always be a problem, almost no matter how comparatively accurate the models get.

We wrote at length a few weeks ago about how the Apple Intelligence rollout seemed rushed, counter to Apple’s usual focus on quality and user experience. However, with current technology, there is no amount of refinement to this feature that Apple could have done to reach a zero percent error rate with these notification summaries.

We’ll see how well Apple does making its users understand that the summaries may be wrong, but making all iPhone users truly grok how and why the feature works this way would be a tall order.

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iOS 18.2 developer beta adds ChatGPT and image-generation features

AI, Apple, apple intelligence, chatgpt, iOS, ios 18, iOS 18.1, iOS 18.2, ml, openai, Tech / Tim Belzer / October 23, 2024

Today, Apple released the first developer beta of iOS 18.2 for supported devices. This beta release marks the first time several key AI features that Apple teased at its developer conference this June are available.

Apple is marketing a wide range of generative AI features under the banner “Apple Intelligence.” Initially, Apple Intelligence was planned to release as part of iOS 18, but some features slipped to iOS 18.1, others to iOS 18.2, and a few still to future undisclosed software updates.

iOS 18.1 has been in beta for a while and includes improvements to Siri, generative writing tools that help with rewriting or proofreading, smart replies for Messages, and notification summaries. That update is expected to reach the public next week.

Today’s developer update, iOS 18.2, includes some potentially more interesting components of Apple Intelligence, including Genmoji, Image Playground, Visual Intelligence with Camera Control, and ChatGPT integration.

Genmoji and Image Playground allow users to generate images on-device to send to friends in Messages; there will be Genmoji and Image Playground APIs to allow third-party messaging apps to work with Genmojis, too.

ChatGPT integration allows Siri to pass off user queries that are outside Siri’s normal scope to be answered instead by OpenAI’s ChatGPT. A ChatGPT account is not required, but logging in with an existing account gives you access to premium models available as part of a ChatGPT subscription. If you’re using these features without a ChatGPT account, OpenAI won’t be able to retain your data or use it to train models. If you connect your ChatGPT account, though, then OpenAI’s privacy policies will apply for ChatGPT queries instead of Apple’s.

Genmoji and Image Playground queries will be handled locally on the user’s device, but other Apple Intelligence features may dynamically opt to send queries to the cloud for computation.

There’s no word yet on when iOS 18.2 will be released publicly.

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Saudi Arabia Gains Majority Stake in Magic Leap in $450M Deal

AR Investment, Investment, magic leap, magic leap 2, magic leap investment, ml, ml2, News / Rejus Almole / January 4, 2023

Saudi Arabia has taken majority share of the US-based augmented reality company Magic Leap, The Telegraph reports, widening the stake via its state-owned sovereign wealth fund with a deal amounting to $450 million.

Citing delayed accounts obtained from its European division, the company is said to have raised $150 million in preferred convertible stock and $300 million in debt from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) over the course of 2022. The investment puts the country’s ownership of Magic Leap over 50 percent, giving it overall majority control.

The Telegraph reports that, as of November 2022, Saudi Arabia’s PIF is “entitled to appoint four of the eight directors of the board of directors of Magic Leap.”

The wealth fund, which is controlled by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, invests in projects considered to be strategically significant to diversifying its national economy.

Through PIF, Saudi Arabia owns minority stakes in Uber, Capcom, Nexon, Live Nation, Boeing, Meta, Alphabet, Citigroup, Disney, and Bank of America to name a few. It also owns Premier League football team Newcastle United and LIV Golf, a challenger to the PGA Tour.

Founded in 2010 by Rony Abovitz, the Plantation, Florida-based company kicked off its consumer ambitions with a long and ambitious tease of its first AR headset, Magic Leap 1 (previously styled ‘One’), starting its marketing campaign as it emerged from stealth in 2014.

Released nearly four years later, the developer-focused ‘Creator Edition’ headset was initially priced at an eye-watering $2,300, which not only deflated some of the potent hype behind the unicorn startup, but also cemented a long and bumpy road ahead if Magic Leap wanted to eventually offer its tech at a consumer price point.

Having awkwardly straddled the prosumer segment with limited success, in mid-2020 Abovitz announced he would be stepping down as CEO, signaling a pivot that would refocus the company’s efforts on servicing enterprise instead of consumers. Shortly afterward, Microsoft’s Executive VP of Business Development Peggy Johnson took the reins as CEO of Magic Leap.

The company has since released its follow-up headset, Magic Leap 2, to enterprise partners and through third-party vendors, putting the device in direct competition with Microsoft’s HoloLens 2.

To date, Magic Leap has raised $4 billion, with minority investors including Google, Alibaba, Qualcomm, AT&T, and Axel Springer.

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