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Toxický bičíkovec Prymnesium parvum umí při přemnožení vytvořit „vodní květy,“ kterými masově tráví ryby. Padouchem je v tomto případě bizarně složitý hemolytický fykotoxin prymnesin, jehož chemický název byste nikdy nechtěli vyslovovat. Bičíkovcům ho vyrábí dvojice superproteinů PKZILLA-1 a 2, z nichž ten větší budí hrůzu 1 250 nanometry a 4 730 kilodaltony.

Bude stačit balík změn, které šéf Intelu představil? Nezařadí se Intel spolu s Boeingem po bok firem, které kdysi vládly světu a dnes jsou relevantní asi jako Kodak? Sahá si Intel na definitivní dno?

American and Brit firms thought they were employing a Westerner, but not so, it's alleged

The FBI today arrested a Tennessee man suspected of running a "laptop farm" that got North Koreans, posing as Westerners, IT jobs at American and British companies.…

Mise Crew-9 k Mezinárodní vesmírné stanici (ISS) neodstartuje dříve než v úterý 24. září. Na svém blogu o tom informovala NASA, přičemž jako hlavní důvod uvedla přetrvávající problémy s kosmickou lodí Starliner. Tento odklad poskytne odborníkům z NASA a Boeingu více času na analýzu dat získaných ...

Společnost System76 vydala první alfa verzi desktopového prostředí COSMIC Epoch 1 společně s alfa verzí Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS.

Bylo představeno Raspberry Pi Pico 2, tj. nástupce jednočipového počítače Raspberry Pi Pico s výkonnějším procesorem a dvojnásobkem paměti.

Čeští vědci pořídili pomocí elektronového mikroskopu snímek chromozomu. S výsledky mnohaletého výzkumu se pochlubili v odborném časopisu Scientific Reports. Vědci z Brna „vyfotili“ chromozom. Prvně k tomu museli vyvinout unikátní elektronovou mikroskopii Na samotném zobrazení povrchu ...

Like me, analysts expect Apple to eventually charge for access to some Apple Intelligence features, which is why I think the biggest opportunity for the company involves AI-augmented fitness and healthcare.

First, the thesis: Analysts Neil Shah (Counterpoint Research) and Ben Wood (CCS Insight) both told CNBC they believe Apple will eventually attempt to monetize Apple Intelligence, potentially as part of its Apple One bundle of services.

Shah points out that AI has the potential to become more personalized to users over time. This is particularly true for Apple, which has been designing Apple Intelligence from day one to prioritize privacy in all it does. The company has even begun making servers to drive some of its AI services, and as the services those servers provide become more sophisticated, it makes sense to charge for the more advanced tools it offers.

Privacy + AI = ?

The winning combination of Apple Intelligence along with the personal data gathered by the company’s devices and the continued research that makes it possible for AI to work with information without ever actually seeing the inherent data can’t be ignored. It’s that combination (along with the health sensors inside Apple Watch) that make AI-augmented digital health services ripe for monetization.

Think about the services Apple already offers that relate to health. Fitness+ might be the fee-based service, but it is supported by the Health app, years of in-depth research into wearable devices and health, and amazing technological manifestations to protect heart health, women’s health — even fall detection, crash detection, and Emergency SOS via Satellite. Many of these features already rely on various forms of machine intelligence, but generativeAI (genAI) can be far more creative in using the data points Apple’s devices collect — privately and only visible to you.

If Apple does choose to monetize these AI products, it won’t have had to look terribly far for inspiration. Palantir founder Peter Thiel sat on the same tech advice panel as Apple CEO Tim Cook, and the former company is working extensively in AI in healthcare, particularly (and contentiously) with the UK’s National Health Service (NHS).

The NHS is also working closely to develop ways to use AI to support its services. “We’re already seeing great applications of AI technology, and more work is under way to fully harness its benefits and use AI safely and ethically at scale,” the NHS said.

But while Palantir seems to need plenty of NHS data to run its operations, Apple’s approach seems to require less of that because Apple strives to ensure it sees as little as possible. 

Would you pay for AI-augmented digital health?

Now, I don’t want to get into a relative conversation about the differences between Palantir and Apple’s approach to data privacy. I’m not a Palantir expert. But what does seem clear is that Apple’s billions of users might well be willing to pay for smart digital health services, and Apple Intelligence could deliver this.

Based on Apple’s direction of travel in digital health so far, these services would almost certainly focus on preventative health intelligence rather than actual remedies.

The intelligence would exist to provide early warning of symptoms, and to recommend what actions customers could take to handle a health crisis/intervention. Another manifestation (perhaps in conjunction with Apple’s satellite communications services) could be an international medical and emergency system for travellers.

Apple doesn’t need to base its AI monetization on health, of course. It has plenty of other strings for its bow. But one thing is certain — no company will spend tens of billions building cutting-edge services without attempting to recoup that investment down the line. With that in mind, I can’t believe Apple, which famously charges “reassuringly high” amounts even for things like spare iPhone charging leads, isn’t going to find some way to make money from Apple Intelligence.

Reading the room

Wherever it chooses to make that money back, I think it will look to where its core values around privacy, security, and intentionality in AI make the most difference. The company’s seemingly deliberate approach to introducing new features meets the public mood of a population that is becoming increasingly mistrustful of tech firms.

That means the solutions it has introduced so far provide value to most users while also protecting their privacy. Those services are almost certainly the thin end of a multi-billion dollar AI wedge, and Apple, more than most, understands the need to provide solutions that don’t scare customers. (Apple Pay on iPhone was also one of these, back in the day. Now it is the most dominant mobile payment system because Apple introduced it gently.)

This calm, measured intentionality will become increasingly visible over the coming two to three years as Apple puts the pieces in place to deliver fee-based Apple Intelligence services. 

Fees aren’t the only way in which Apple will hope to profit from AI. 

There are other options

Part of its payola should come in accelerating hardware sales as it ships the first end-to-end mobile-to-Mac ecosystem with AI inside and processors to power it up. 

Apple will also be hopeful that its developer communities identify amazing new ways to deploy the large language models (LLMs) it has created within their apps. That’s great for developers, of course, but also gives Apple the competitive edge it needs to maintain hardware sales while also grabbing its slice of App Store revenue action.

But crucial to all of this is that Apple’s AI should be seen as a service, which is what Apple is going to try to build on once the initial Apple Intelligence release is done. That’s going to merit the introduction of additional premium AI tools and services aimed at what people are already doing with their devices.

These could include more advanced email analysis tools to help productivity professionals stay on top of increasingly demanding in-boxes. They might extend to premium automated Keynote presentation design and creation tools.

But the most likely space in which Apple will explore the opportunity for more sophisticated AI inside its devices will be around personal health, at the intersection of science, privacy, and digital arts.

Please follow me on Mastodon, or join me in the AppleHolic’s bar & grill and Apple Discussions groups on MeWe.

The North Korea-linked threat actor known as Kimsuky has been linked to a new set of attacks targeting university staff, researchers, and professors for intelligence gathering purposes. Cybersecurity firm Resilience said it identified the activity in late July 2024 after it observed an operation security (OPSEC) error made by the hackers. Kimsuky, also known by the names APT43, ARCHIPELAGO,

The North Korea-linked threat actor known as Kimsuky has been linked to a new set of attacks targeting university staff, researchers, and professors for intelligence gathering purposes. Cybersecurity firm Resilience said it identified the activity in late July 2024 after it observed an operation security (OPSEC) error made by the hackers. Kimsuky, also known by the names APT43, ARCHIPELAGO, Ravie Lakshmananhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

Režim čtečky zbavuje články na webech rušivých prvků, takže vidíte text, případně obrázky. Firefox 129 ho rozšiřuje o několik parametrů, takže v režimu čtečky si nastavíte nejen šířku sloupce, řádkování a velikost a typ písma. Tyhle možnosti zůstávají, ale přidávají se tloušťka písma, rozestup ...

Hundreds of thousands of users potentially vulnerable

Password manager 1Password is warning that all Mac users running versions before 8.10.36 are vulnerable to a bug that allows attackers to steal vault items.…

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a new "0.0.0.0 Day" impacting all major web browsers that malicious websites could take advantage of to breach local networks. The critical vulnerability "exposes a fundamental flaw in how browsers handle network requests, potentially granting malicious actors access to sensitive services running on local devices," Oligo Security researcher Avi Lumelsky

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a new "0.0.0.0 Day" impacting all major web browsers that malicious websites could take advantage of to breach local networks. The critical vulnerability "exposes a fundamental flaw in how browsers handle network requests, potentially granting malicious actors access to sensitive services running on local devices," Oligo Security researcher Avi Lumelsky Ravie Lakshmananhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

V Rochesteru ve státě New York probíhá čtyřdenní konference Flock to Fedora. Přednášky lze sledovat živě na YouTube.

ChatGPT-maker OpenAI has released a new version of its GPT-4o large language model (LLM), designed to simplify the process of generating “well-defined” and “structured” outputs from AI models.

“This feature is particularly valuable for developers who need to validate and format AI outputs into structures like JSON schemas. Developers often face challenges validating and formatting AI outputs into well-defined structures like JSON schemas,” the company wrote in a blog post, adding that an early release version of the LLM has been made available on Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI Service.

The structured outputs generated by the new version of the LLM, christened GPT-4o-2024-08-06, are a result of the LLM allowing developers to specify the desired output directly from the AI models.  

JSON schema, according to OpenAI and Microsoft, is used by developers to maintain consistency across platforms, drive model-driven UI constraints, and automatically generate user interfaces.

“They are also essential for defining the structure and constraints of JSON documents, ensuring they follow specific formats with mandatory properties and value types. It enhances data understandability through semantic annotation and serves as a domain-specific language for optimized application requirements,” the companies explained.

Additionally, the companies said that these schemas also support automated testing, schema inferencing, and machine-readable web profiles, improving data interoperability.

The new LLM supports two kinds of structured outputs — user-defined JSON schema and strict mode or more accurate tool output.

While the user-defined outputs allow developers to specify the exact JSON Schema they want the AI to follow, the strict mode output, which is a limited version, lets developers define specific function signatures for tool use, the companies said.

The user-defined output is supported by GPT-4o-2024-08-06 and GPT-4o-mini-2024-07-18. Alternatively, the limited strict mode is supported by all models that support function calling, including GPT-3.5 Turbo, GPT-4, GPT-4 Turbo, and GPT-4o models.

GPT-4o was first announced in May 2024, as OpenAI’s new multimodal model, followed by GPT-4o mini in July 2024.

Microsoft has yet to make the pricing of the new model available on its pricing portal.

Critical time for the company and competition

The new model comes at a time when the company is undergoing critical changes in its leadership and is facing stiff competition from rivals such as Anthropic, Meta, Mistral, IBM, Google, and AWS.

This week, OpenAI co-founder John Schulman joined the list of departing OpenAI executives making the move to Anthropic — a rival LLM maker and provider that was founded by a group of executives leaving OpenAI.

Schulman follows Jan Leike, who made the move from OpenAI to Anthropic back in May.

Ilys Sutskever also left a senior role with OpenAI, but he is launching his own AI effort. 

Another troubling indicator at OpenAI was the transfer of safety executive Aleksander Madry, who was mysteriously reassigned. This also follows OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy’s departure back in February. 

At the same time, OpenAI is also facing stiff competition for its LLMs. One such example is Meta’s newly unveiled Llama 3.1 family of large language models (LLMs), which includes a 405 billion parameter model as well as 70 billion parameter and 8 billion parameter variants.

Analysts and experts say that the openness and accuracy of the Llama 3.1 family of models pose an existential threat to providers of closed proprietary LLMs.

Meta in a blog post said that the larger 405B Llama 3.1 model outperformed models such as Nemotron-4 340B Instruct, GPT-4, and Claude 3.5 Sonnet in benchmark tests such as MMLU, MATH, GSM8K, and ARC Challenge.

Its performance was close to GPT-4o in these tests as well. For context, GPT-4o scored 88.7 in the MMLU benchmark and Llama 3.1 405B scored 88.6.

MMLU, MATH, GSM8K, and ARC Challenge are benchmarks that test LLMs in the areas of general intelligence, mathematics, and reasoning.

The smaller Llama 3.1 models of 8B and 70B, which have been updated with larger context windows and support for multiple languages, also performed better or close to proprietary LLMs in the same benchmark tests.

Another example is the release of Claude 3.5 Sonnet in June, which according to the LLM-maker, set new scores across industry benchmarks, such as graduate-level reasoning (GPQA), MMLU, and HumanEval — a test for coding proficiency.

While analysts and industry experts have been waiting for OpenAI to release GPT-5, company CEO Sam Altman’s post on X about summer gardens and strawberries has sparked speculations that the company is working on a next-generation AI model that can crawl the web to perform research.

V předběžném přístupu vychází titul, který má krom zábavy ambici malé i vetší hráče poučit. Však snaha chránit přírodu a její druhovou rozmanitost je v současné době asi aktuálnější než kdy dříve. Naštěstí se Preserve nesnaží nikterak lacině moralizovat, jen hravou formou ukazuje, že starat se o ...

Election tech is fine – it's all those idiots buying into the propaganda that's worrying Jen Easterly

Black Hat  US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) director Jen Easterly and her counterparts from the UK and EU want the world to know that, when it comes to securing elections, they've never been more prepared.…