For the third time in roughly a week, a major tech company is showing off its near-term plans for the future of generative artificial intelligence. This time, it’s Microsoft’s turn. The company will kick off its Build developer conference Tuesday in Seattle—and is expected to unveil how the Windows operating system will make AI computers the new standard. The three-day event comes a few months after CEO Satya Nadella said 2024 would be the year that AI becomes the “first-class part of every PC.” Build is where the company hopes to show what it has in mind. On Monday, it began to show its han ..read more

Generative AI (general artificial intelligence) has been the trendiest term in software for two years. Now it’s about to make its way to the consumer hardware market, too. By the latter half of this year, it’s likely that we’ll begin to encounter phones being marketed as GenAI smartphones or simply GenAI phones. But just what is a GenAI phone, and where does the phrase come from? Here’s what you need to know. WHAT IS A GENAI PHONE? As far as I can tell, the term GenAI smartphone first came to prominence only in the last six months, when it began appearing in reports by a few major marketing ..read more

OpenAI held a webcast Monday to roll out a new version of its ChatGPT app, which sounds and acts a lot like the AI in the 2013 Spike Jonze film, Her. The experience is powered by a new version of its GPT-4 large language model—available on desktop and mobile—called GPT-4o (“GPT-four-oh”). The new model, OpenAI says, returns answers much faster than GPT-4, and improves on its text, vision, and audio capabilities. The model is a showcase for OpenAI’s development of multimodal AI. GPT-4o can receive and reason about text, audio, and visual inputs, then deliver outputs in natural language and na ..read more

The search engine market could be on the verge of a tidal shift. Reuters, last week, reported that OpenAI was planning to launch an artificial intelligence-powered search product as early as this week, putting it in direct competition with Google, but also with its close partner Microsoft. OpenAI has denied the details of that report, but didn’t completely reject the premise. Google, meanwhile, is expected to talk a bit about its own AI search plans at its annual I/O conference, along with lots of other AI announcements tied to its Gemini AI, on Tuesday, making it very clear that the market ..read more

Nowadays the word “Innovative” is thrown around very easily without paying attention to its meaning. In this issue through the chosen “Most Innovative Companies” we attempt to pay attention to the true nature of an innovative company. Globally there’s no company that comes close to Nvidia. Our Global technology editor Harry McCracken spoke with co-founder and CEO Jensen Huang for a story about how Huang realised his long-gestating vision and what’s next for the company. Locally, in South Africa we pay attention to 10companies whose work serves as a reminder of what it means to be innovative ..read more

Today Apple announced an update to the Apple Pencil—the first in nearly six years. The Apple Pencil Pro (available for $129 today) is cool, and artists will love its updated features. But it fails to fulfill the eternally elusive iPad promise of become a truly satisfying drawing and painting simulator. The new Pencil comes with a handful of great new tricks. You can now double tap near the tip to trigger actions without even touching the screen. You can also squeeze the front part of the pen to access contextual menus that give instant access tools and shortcuts (something that Wacom tablet ..read more

After a long delay, Apple is gearing up, finally, to embrace artificial intelligence in a big way on the iPhone. The company is expected to show off new AI-powered features for the iPhone’s upcoming operating system, iOS 18, next month at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference. The most prominent AI feature iOS 18 is likely to introduce is an Apple-built large language model (LLM)—the software that powers AI chatbots like ChatGPT. Many are speculating that Apple’s LLM will be integrated with the iPhone’s current digital assistant, Siri. An LLM-powered Siri would make Apple’s assistant mo ..read more

The fake AI video of Elon Musk which was used to solicit investment is a classic example of bad use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) video technology by bad actors. Sadly, this has also raised concerns about what can be done to harm people’s reputation. Lately, I’ve been impressed by the same technology if put into good use. One great example in this regard has been shared by the founder of the LinkedIN platform, Reid Hoffman, who has also been an investor in OpenAI (creator of ChatGPT). He has been experimenting with positive uses of AI. At some point he co-wrote a book with the assistance o ..read more

Gen Z is sick of smartphones—and big brands are starting to catch on. For the past several years, “dumbphones”—’90s-inspired phones with pared-back features—have gradually gained traction. Plenty of smaller manufacturers offer their own versions of dumbphones, and the trend has even recently inspired a subgenre on YouTube dedicated to helping viewers convert their smartphones into DIY dumbphones. While cautious parents and technophiles have already caught on to dumbphones, it looks like the trend is now hitting the mainstream. In an unexpected collaboration revealed last week, beer brand Hei ..read more

Tesla’s humanoid robot is still in the lab, but it may be ready to sell as soon as the end of next year, chief executive Elon Musk said on Tuesday. Several companies have been betting on humanoid robots to meet potential labor shortages and perform repetitive tasks that could be dangerous or tedious in industries such as logistics, warehousing, retail and manufacturing. Musk told investors on a conference call that he guessed the Tesla robot, called Optimus, would be able to perform tasks in the factory by the end of this year. Humanoid robots have been in development for several years by Ja ..read more