At Google’s I/O developer conference, the company made its case to developers — and to some extent, consumers — why its bets on AI are ahead of rivals. At the event, the company unveiled a revamped AI-powered search engine, an AI model with an expanded context window of 2 million tokens, AI helpers across its […]
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While an increasing number of companies are investing in AI, many are struggling to get AI-powered projects into production — much less delivering meaningful ROI. The challenges are many. But a commonly recurring one is data management. The data that companies need to train, run and fine-tune AI models is disorganized, siloed, and otherwise unoptimized. […]
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To give AI-focused women academics and others their well-deserved — and overdue — time in the spotlight, TechCrunch has been publishing a series of interviews focused on remarkable women who’ve contributed to the AI revolution. We’re publishing these pieces throughout the year as the AI boom continues, highlighting key work that often goes unrecognized. Read more profiles here. […]
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Rachel Coldicutt is the founder of Careful Industries, which researches the social impact technology has on society.
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The Series C funding, which brings its total raise to around $95 million, will go toward mass production of the startup’s inaugural products
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The newly announced “Public Content Policy” will now join Reddit’s existing privacy policy and content policy to guide how Reddit’s data is being accessed and used by commercial entities and other partners.
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Ever wonder why conversational AI like ChatGPT says “Sorry, I can’t do that” or some other polite refusal? OpenAI is offering a limited look at the reasoning behind its own models’ rules of engagement, whether it’s sticking to brand guidelines or declining to make NSFW content. Large language models (LLMs) don’t have any naturally occurring […]
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Meta is rolling out an expanded set of generative AI tools for advertisers, after first announcing a set of AI features last October. Now, instead of only being able to create different backgrounds for a product image, advertisers can also request full image variations, which offer AI-inspired ideas for the overall photo, including riffs that update the photo’s subject or product being advertised.
In one example, Meta shows how an existing ad creative showing a cup of coffee sitting outdoors next to coffee beans could be modified to present the cup, from a different angle, in front of lush greenery and coffee beans, evoking imagery reminiscent of a coffee farm.
This may not be a big deal if the image is only mean to encourage someone to visit a local coffee shop. But if it was the coffee cup itself that was for sale, then the AI variations Meta offers could be versions of the product that didn’t exist in real life.
The feature could be abused by advertisers who wanted to dupe consumers into buying products that don’t actually exist.
Meta admits this is a possible use case, saying that an advertiser could tailor the generated output with the coming Text Prompt feature with different colors of their product, from different angles and in different scenarios. Currently, the “different colors” option could be used to dupe customers into thinking a product looked different than it does in real life.
As Meta’s example demonstrates, the coffee cup itself could be transformed into different colors, or could be shown from different angles, where each cup has its own distinct swirl of foaming milk mixed in with the hot beverage.
However, Meta claims that it has strong guardrails in place to prevent its system from generating inappropriate ad content or low-quality images. This includes “pre-guardrails” to filter out images that its gen AI models don’t support and “post-guardrails” that filter out generated text and image content that doesn’t meet its quality bar or that it deems inappropriate. Plus, Meta said it stress-tested the feature using its Llama image and full ads image generation model with both internal and external experts to try to find unexpected ways it could be used, then addressed any vulnerabilities found.
Meta says this feature has already begun to roll out, and in the months ahead, advertisers will be able to provide text prompts to tailor the image’s variations, too.
Image Credits: Meta
Plus, Meta will now allow advertisers to add text overlays on their AI-generated images with a dozen of the most popular font typefaces available to choose from.
Another feature, image expansion, also introduced in October 2023, will now be available to Reels in addition to the Feed, across both Facebook and Instagram. This option leverages AI to help advertisers adjust their image assets to fit across different aspect ratios, like Reels and Feed. The idea is that advertisers could spend less time repurposing their creative assets for different surfaces. Meta says text overlay will work along with image expansion, too.
One advertiser, smartphone case maker Casetify, said that using Meta’s GenAI Background Generation feature led to a 13% increase in return on its ad spend. The company had tested the option with its Advantage+ shopping campaigns, where the AI features first became available in the fall. The updated AI features will also be available through Ads Manager via Advantage+ creative, as before.
Image Credits: Meta
Beyond images, Meta’s AI can be used to generate alternate versions of the ad headline, in addition to the ad’s primary text, which was already supported by leveraging the original copy. Meta says it’s testing the ability for this text to also sound like the brand’s voice and tone, using previous campaigns as its reference material. Text generation capabilities will be moved to Mets’s next-gen LLM (large language model), Meta Llama 3.
All the generative AI features will become available globally to advertisers by the end of the year.
Outside of the AI updates, Meta also announced it would expand its subscription service, Meta Verified for businesses, to new markets including Argentina, Mexico, Chile, Peru, France, and Italy. The service began testing last year in Australia, New Zealand and Canada.
Now, Meta Verified will offer four different tiers to its subscription plan, all with the base features of a verified badge, account support, and impersonation monitoring. Higher tiers will include new tools like profile enhancements, tools for creating connections, and more ways to access customer support.
Meta Verified will be expanded to WhatsApp soon, the company also said.
Opera’s in-browser AI product, called Aria, can now summarize text-based web pages on Android. The AI-powered web page summarizing tool quickly condenses news articles, blog posts or research papers in a short summary that typically fits in one screen.
The new feature, announced Monday, can help users quickly understand a topic and pinpoint the important details. To use it, visit any text-based web page and then tap the three dots in the top right corner of the Opera Android browser and select the “Summarize” option next to the Aria icon. A chat with Aria will then pop up with the requested summary in it.
To access the feature, update to the latest version of Opera for Android and log in to an Opera account, or sign up for a new one.
Aria launched last year and functions like any other AI search companion. The assistant has a chatbot-like interface that answers questions as an alternative to searching the web for answers.
Opera has been building out Aria since its launch and has been expanding its functionality through its AI Feature Drops Program, which enables users to get early access to additional AI features. Most recently, Opera updated Aria with the ability to generate images using Imagen2 by Google. It can also read text answers out loud.
Apple CEO Tim Cook didn’t give much away about the company’s AI plans on Thursday’s Q2 earnings call with investors, but he did confirm a few tidbits about how the tech giant plans to move forward with artificial intelligence.
Notably, his comments suggested that despite spending more than $100 billion on R&D over the last five years, Apple isn’t planning to spin up too many new data centers to run or train AI models. Instead, when it comes to AI, it will continue to pursue a “hybrid” approach, as it does with other cloud services, the company told investors.
We also learned that Apple envisions AI as a key opportunity across the “vast majority” of the company’s device lineup, not just the iPhone. While we’ve known this for some time — after all, Apple has been calling its M3 MacBook Airs the “best consumer laptop for AI” — the company shouted out how AI is being used across its products on its earnings call.
“I think AI — generative AI and AI — both are big opportunities for us across our products, and we’ll talk more about it in the coming weeks. I think there are numerous ways there that are great for us, and we think that we’re well-positioned,” Cook said.
In addition to the MacBook Air, the Apple Watch uses AI and machine learning in features like its irregular heart rhythm notifications and fall detection, Cook noted. And when speaking about the enterprise, the CEO referenced big companies buying and exploring the use cases for Vision Pro, though he added that he wouldn’t want to “cabin that to AI only.”
“I would just say that we see generative AI as a very key opportunity across our products. And we believe that we have advantages that set us apart there,” Cook said.
However, customers itching to have an AI-powered Siri will have to wait a bit longer for that news, which has long been expected to be announced at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in June. When Cook was asked Thursday about how AI will affect consumer demand for new devices like iPhone, he responded that, with regard to generative AI, we wouldn’t see any impact “within the next quarter or so,” but said he was “extremely optimistic” about the technology.
Apple isn’t planning to make its bigger AI announcements before WWDC.
This discovery came about through a correction to a CNBC news story, which had misinterpreted a statement Cook made to seemingly indicate there would be “big plans to announce” from an “AI point of view” at both upcoming events, including next week’s iPad event and WWDC in June. But as subsequent corrections show (likely after a lashing by a frantic Apple comms team), Cook had paused before saying “… from an AI point of view …” which was the start of his next thought and not connected to Apple’s plans for both events.
The story was updated with this correction so people didn’t think AI news would be announced at the iPad event scheduled for May 7. (You can read through the backstory on the corrections here on 9to5Mac.)
While we didn’t expect to hear much if anything about AI until at least WWDC, this correction basically confirms that timing.
The biggest AI news, however, is something Cook said about Apple’s CapEx expenditures, which are funds spent on fixed assets, like servers and data centers, real estate and more.
While that’s not often the most interesting subject, this time the company’s response hinted toward Apple’s AI investment plans. As technology investor M.G. Siegler pointed out on his blog, Apple CFO Luca Maestri had answered a question about generative AI’s impact on Apple’s historical CapEx cadence by explaining that Apple pursues a hybrid model, “where we make some of the investments ourselves, in other cases we share them with our suppliers and partners …”
Plus, he added, Apple does “something similar on the data center side. We have our own data center capacity and then we use capacity from third parties.”
“It’s a model that has worked well for us historically, and we plan to continue along the same lines going forward,” Maestri said.
Siegler interpreted this to mean that Apple won’t need to spend on CapEx because Apple isn’t planning to immediately build and train LLMs (large language models) on its own servers.
And, if you squint a little, it could also be another signal that Apple could be looking at third parties to power its AI services. As Bloomberg reported in April, Apple has been holding discussions with ChatGPT maker OpenAI and Google to power an AI chatbot coming in an iOS 18 update.
With Apple confirming that its CapEx wouldn’t be affected by its near-term AI plans, it’s likely that Apple is planning to forge some sort of deal with partners for AI services in addition to what it can handle on-device and by itself. Whether Apple eventually shifts the balance to utilize more of its own servers and data centers over time still remains to be seen.
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