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A woman tests Vueling’s new biometric recognition system at El Prat airport, January 19, 2023, in El Prat de Llobregat, Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain. 

David Zorrakino | Europa Press | Getty Images

As end-of-summer travel lines back up at TSA airport checkpoints in the U.S., one overseas airport is going all-in on a biometric passenger experience. The Smart Travel Project at Zayed International Airport in Abu Dhabi will involve biometric sensors at every airport identification checkpoint by 2025.

Airport security and travel experts have generally cheered the move.

“They are boldly moving forward in adopting facial recognition as the means to let travelers into their system, and I commend them for doing it,” said Sheldon Jacobson, an engineering and computer science professor at the University of Illinois. Jacobson has been studying airport security since the 1990s and helped the TSA develop its pre-screening program, which allows some travelers in the U.S. to skip the checkpoints. “Facial recognition is the future, and we will start to get intelligent with airport security and focus on the traveler rather than the items they bring. By doing that, you create a different paradigm,” Jacobson said. “What they are doing in Abu Dhabi is just the beginning, but it has to start somewhere.”

Going completely paperless from the parking garage to your seat-back tray table is unnerving to some who wonder if a Crowdstrike-type outage could bring down fully electronic boarding systems and grind travel to a halt. But Jacobson says those are very rare events, and even if the system completely shut down because of an outage, the net benefits of a biometric travel experience over time will outweigh the costs.

Zayed International Airport’s program relies on a partnership with the government. The UAE’s Federal Authority for Identity, Citizenship, Customs & Port Security collects biometrics from any traveler arriving in the UAE for the first time. The airport then uses this database to verify passengers passing checkpoints. The airport did not respond to a request for comment on its plans. Saeed Saif Al Khaili, General Director at the United Arab Emirate’s Federal Authority for Identity, Citizenship, Customs, and Port Security, said in a recent press release that the Biometric Smart Travel project “aims to enhance the travel experience at Zayed International Airport from curb to gate, ensuring high levels of security and safety.”

Jacobson says the TSA tends to move more slowly and incrementally on changes, and that the UAE’s political system allows for faster implementation of programs, so this all-encompassing collection of biometric data likely wouldn’t fly in the U.S., at least not now. Whenever new biometric programs are introduced, he said, there is “tremendous pushback.”

Still, the U.S. public appears to be getting more comfortable with usage of biometrics at airports.

According to data analytics firm J.D. Power and Associates, a majority (53%) of those surveyed at major U.S. airports say biometrics in airports are a good idea or they are willing to use a biometric security check. An additional 12% say they are a good idea but have privacy concerns.

Among the concerns expressed are what type of data someone would need to give during the biometric enrollment process, and whether biometric security processes will be used to track movements throughout the airport, or if biometric data will be used outside the airport.

“To make the technology more widespread and allow airports and travelers to take advantage of it, airports should establish clear guidelines and processes and make travelers aware of potential uses. Buy-in from travelers is essential,” says Mike Taylor, J.D. Power’s senior managing director of travel, hospitality, and retail.

Shawn DuBravac, futurist and author of “Digital Destiny: How the New Age of Data Will Transform the Way We Work, Live, and Communicate,” said he believes biometrics will transform travel. “While we’ve seen growing use of biometric sensors to streamline travel, the vision of a fully paperless experience by next year is incredibly ambitious,” he said.

Singapore launches passport-free immigration processing at Changi Airport

Travel veterans generally agree that some aspects of biometrics will be involved in future airport visits if they aren’t already. DuBravac sees biometrics at airports in the U.S. used as a tool to make the human element more responsive.

“Instead of managing mundane tasks like document verification, personnel can provide higher levels of customer service, assist travelers with special needs, and ensure that the overall passenger experience is efficient and welcoming. Automating routine processes will empower a more human experience,” he said.

Billionaire Elon Musk lauded Zayed’s innovation, commenting on X in response to a video that showed a traveler breezing through check-in at the Abu Dhabi airport that the U.S. needs to “catch up.”

“Musk’s comments are close to wishful thinking,” said Irina Tsukerman, a national security lawyer and fellow at the Arabian Peninsula Institute. She noted that privacy concerns and costs would likely prevent the implementation of a whole biometric airport experience in the U.S.

“This worked in Abu Dhabi because UAE is a small, wealthy monarchy with a high degree of population trust in the government and sufficient resources to devote to technical innovation,”  Tsukerman said. The same ingredients aren’t in place in the U.S. “Transition to full automation for all eligible travelers will be time-consuming, onerous, expensive, and meet resistance from airport worker unions,” she said.

Despite Musk dinging U.S. airports, it isn’t like there isn’t a biometric presence in the United States.

In 2018, LAX became one of the first airports in the United States to pilot biometric boarding, and today, it is used as an option for qualifying passengers.

“At LAX, we use biometrics to support our airline partners and federal authorities to speed up the process of boarding international departing flights,” said Ian Law, chief digital transformation officer, Los Angeles World Airports, which includes LAX. There are up to four biometric lanes at each international departure gate and facial recognition technology can be used to do touchless, paperless traveler verification.

“Airlines are able to significantly reduce the time needed to board a flight, cutting the time travelers stand in line,” Law said.

While no U.S. airports are close to Abu Dhabi’s goal of a completely biometric airport, plenty of airports in the United States at least use some biometrics. According to the TSA, its PreCheck option is currently available at more than 200 airports with over 90 participating airlines nationwide and has a voluntary facial recognition component. To be approved for PreCheck, participants fill out an online form, pay a fee, undergo a background check, an in-person interview, and can opt-in for a facial recognition scan.

Clear, a publicly trading company, has also made inroads into more than 55 U.S. airports, allowing those who pay a fee and undergo prescreening to skip the lines and board biometrically. The service has made some lawmakers balk at creating a tiered system of travelers, and in California a group of lawmakers tried – but failed — earlier this year to restrict Clear.

Travel technology provider Amadeus is not involved in the Abu Dhabi airport’s biometric program but has them at other airports, such as Dubai, Vancouver, Perth, and London’s Heathrow airport. Chris Keller, vice president of airport and airline operations at Amadeus, says that for the foreseeable future, airports will be able to implement paper backups if there is a technological issue. “We expect increasing numbers of passengers to use biometrics, but there will always be a group, perhaps those that need special assistance or premium passengers, who will choose an agent-assisted experience and prefer a paper document,” Keller said.

Jacobson says that would-be criminals will be thwarted by the fact that their faces will be known in a biometric airport system. “Once the person is known this has a deterrence effect and drives down the risk,” he said. But he also indicated that Musk’s comments lack proper context. “It is not that we are behind, this is an incremental process of growth and development,” he said. “We won’t get there this week. It takes a certain amount of will and proof of concept.”

For example, when PreCheck in was rolled out in 2011 it had taken eight years from proposal to implementation.

“People are uncomfortable with change, anytime you make changes we have to do it more efficiently, more securely and less intrusively,” Jacobson said.

In the U.S., it’ll probably be awhile until getting from terminal check-in to airplane seat involves just showing your face.

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Nvidia calls China’s DeepSeek R1 model ‘an excellent AI advancement’

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Nvidia calls China’s DeepSeek R1 model ‘an excellent AI advancement’

Jensen Huang, co-founder and chief executive officer of Nvidia Corp., during a news conference in Taipei, Taiwan, on Tuesday, June 4, 2024. Nvidia is still working on the certification process for Samsung Electronics Co.’s high-bandwidth memory chips, a final required step before the Korean company can begin supplying a component essential to training AI platforms. 

Annabelle Chih | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Nvidia called DeepSeek’s R1 model “an excellent AI advancement,” despite the Chinese startup’s emergence causing the chip maker’s stock price to plunge 17% on Monday.

“DeepSeek is an excellent AI advancement and a perfect example of Test Time Scaling,”  an Nvidia spokesperson told CNBC on Monday. “DeepSeek’s work illustrates how new models can be created using that technique, leveraging widely-available models and compute that is fully export control compliant.”

The comments come after DeepSeek last week released R1, which is an open-source reasoning model that reportedly outperformed the best models from U.S. companies such as OpenAI. R1’s self-reported training cost was less than $6 million, which is a fraction of the billions that Silicon Valley companies are spending to build their artificial-intelligence models. 

Nvidia’s statement indicates that it sees DeepSeek’s breakthrough as creating more work for the American chip maker’s graphics processing units, or GPUs. 

Read more DeepSeek coverage

“Inference requires significant numbers of NVIDIA GPUs and high-performance networking,” the spokesperson added. “We now have three scaling laws: pre-training and post-training, which continue, and new test-time scaling.”

Nvidia also said that the GPUs that DeepSeek used were fully export compliant. That counters Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang’s comments on CNBC last week that he believed DeepSeek used Nvidia GPUs models which are banned in mainland China. DeepSeek says it used special versions of Nvidia’s GPUs intended for the Chinese market.

Analysts are now asking if multi-billion dollar capital investments from companies like Microsoft, Google and Meta for Nvidia-based AI infrastructure are being wasted when the same results can be achieved more cheaply. 

Earlier this month, Microsoft said it is spending $80 billion on AI infrastructure in 2025 alone while Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg last week said the social media company planned to invest between $60 to $65 billion in capital expenditures in 2025 as part of its AI strategy. 

“If model training costs prove to be significantly lower, we would expect a near-term cost benefit for advertising, travel, and other consumer app companies that use cloud AI services, while long-term hyperscaler AI-related revenues and costs would likely be lower,” wrote BofA Securities analyst Justin Post in a note on Monday.

Nvidia’s comment also reflects a new theme that Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella have discussed in recent months.

Much of the AI boom and the demand for Nvidia GPUs was driven by the “scaling law,” a concept in AI development proposed by OpenAI researchers in 2020. That concept suggested that better AI systems could be developed by greatly expanding the amount of computation and data that went into building a new model, requiring more and more chips.

Since November, Huang and Altman have been focusing on a new wrinkle to the scaling law, which Huang calls “test-time scaling.” 

This concept says that if a fully trained AI model spends more time using extra computer power when making predictions or generating text or images to allow it to “reason,” it will provided better answers than it would have if it ran for less time. 

Forms of the test-time scaling law are used in some of OpenAI’s models such as o1 as well as DeepSeek’s breakthrough R1 model.

WATCH: DeepSeek challenging sense of U.S. exceptionalism priced into markets, fund manager says

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Apple turns its AI on by default in latest software update

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Apple turns its AI on by default in latest software update

Tim Cook, chief executive officer of Apple Inc., greets customers during the first day of in-store sales of Apple’s latest products at Apple’s Fifth Avenue store in New York, US, on Friday, Sept. 20, 2024. 

Victor J. Blue | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Apple on Monday released a software update for iPhones, iPads and Macs that turns Apple Intelligence on by default for users with supported devices.

The updates, iOS 18.3, iPadOS 18.3 and macOS Sequoia 15.3, also disable AI summaries for news apps, which have gained a reputation for twisting news push notifications to display inaccurate facts.

The release is a milestone in the rollout of Apple Intelligence, the company’s suite of artificial intelligence features. Apple Intelligence is a critical service for Apple as it seeks to distinguish its products from competitors with an AI system integrated into iPhones and its other devices.

While Apple Intelligence is already featured in the company’s marketing for the latest iPhones, the rollout has been deliberate and limited. Apple says that is to allow it to test new features and make sure it has enough server capacity. The entire Apple Intelligence suite is still officially in beta, and it’s only available in a handful of English-speaking countries.

Apple’s move to turn Apple Intelligence on by default is a step toward a more complete rollout of the feature. Previously, users with supported iPhones — models that were released in 2024 as well as 2023 “Pro” level models — were prompted to turn on Apple Intelligence when setting up their phone, a process that included downloading AI models from the internet and some installation.

With the latest updates, Apple Intelligence will be turned on by default when the latest software update is installed, expanding the number of users who are exposed to the software. Apple Intelligence is marketed as being able to rewrite text, generate images, and summarize long emails and message threads.

“For users new or upgrading to iOS 18.3, Apple Intelligence will be enabled automatically during iPhone onboarding,” Apple said in the developer release notes for the update.

Users will have to navigate to the Apple Intelligence page in the Settings app to turn it off, according to Apple.

The latest software update also includes one of the most notable examples so far of Apple rolling back an AI feature after it generated controversy and subpar results. Apple joins Google and Microsoft as companies that were forced to recall new AI features after they generated harmful content or “hallucinations” that weren’t based in reality.

Apple Intelligence can take stacks of notifications and simplify them into a three-sentence notification. However, the BBC and other news outlets discovered in December that the feature can twist news headlines into inaccurate information.

Earlier this month, Apple’s system conflated notifications from BBC’s sports app to say that “Brazilian tennis player, Rafael Nadal, comes out as gay.” Nadal is Spanish and is married to Maria Francisca Perello.

The latest update disables Apple Intelligence for news and entertainment apps. Apple Intelligence also has been updated to show any notifications generated by its AI in italics, signifying which notifications are created by generative AI and which were pushed by the app itself.

“We’re pleased that Apple has listened to our concerns and is pausing the summarization feature for news,” a BBC spokesperson told CNBC.

Apple told CNBC earlier this month that its notification summaries for news apps would return in a future update.

WATCH: Apple’s superficial problem is there’s not enough demand, says Jim Cramer

Apple's superficial problem is there's not enough demand, says Jim Cramer

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DeepSeek hit with large-scale cyberattack, says it’s limiting registrations

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DeepSeek hit with large-scale cyberattack, says it's limiting registrations

Dado Ruvic | Reuters

DeepSeek on Monday said it would temporarily limit user registrations “due to large-scale malicious attacks” on its services, though existing users will be able to log in as usual.

The Chinese artificial intelligence startup has generated a lot of buzz in recent weeks as a fast-growing rival to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and other leading AI tools.

Earlier on Monday, DeepSeek took over rival OpenAI’s coveted spot as the most-downloaded free app in the U.S. on Apple‘s App Store, dethroning ChatGPT for DeepSeek’s own AI Assistant. It helped inspire a significant sell-off in global tech stocks.

Buzz about the company, which was founded in 2023 and released its R1 model last week, has spread to tech analysts, investors and developers, who say that the hype — and ensuing fear of falling behind in the ever-changing AI hype cycle — may be warranted. Especially in the era of the generative AI arms race, where tech giants and startups alike are racing to ensure they don’t fall behind in a market predicted to top $1 trillion in revenue within a decade.

Read more CNBC reporting on AI

DeepSeek reportedly grew out of a Chinese hedge fund’s AI research unit in April 2023 to focus on large language models and reaching artificial general intelligence, or AGI — a branch of AI that equals or surpasses human intellect on a wide range of tasks, which OpenAI and its rivals say they’re fast pursuing.

The buzz around DeepSeek especially began to spread last week, when the startup released R1, its reasoning model that rivals OpenAI’s o1. It’s open-source, meaning that any AI developer can use it, and has rocketed to the top of app stores and industry leaderboards, with users praising its performance and reasoning capabilities.

The startup’s models were notably built despite the U.S. curbing chip exports to China three times in three years. Estimates differ on exactly how much DeepSeek’s R1 costs, or how many graphics processing units went into it. Jefferies analysts estimated that a recent version had a “training cost of only US$5.6m (assuming US$2/H800 hour rental cost). That is less than 10% of the cost of Meta‘s Llama.”

But regardless of the specific numbers, reports agree that the model was developed at a fraction of the cost of rival models by OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and others.

As a result, the AI sector is awash with questions, including whether the industry’s increasing number of astronomical funding rounds and billion-dollar valuations is necessary — and whether a bubble is about to burst.

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