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A view of Apple’s new iPhone 16 at an Apple Store on the Regent Street in London, United Kingdom on September 20, 2024.

Rasid Necati Aslim | Anadolu | Getty Images

As Apple prepares Apple Intelligence to jump into Silicon Valley’s AI race, it’s relying on one of its strongest advantages: Its army of 34 million app developers.

IPhone users will get their first taste of Apple Intelligence, the company’s artificial intelligence system, later this month. The company is relying on Apple Intelligence to be the strongest selling point for the iPhone 16, its latest generation of smartphones.

Apple’s AI isn’t as advanced as the state of the art coming out of the most advanced labs, such as rivals like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and Meta’s Llama. Apple isn’t using the biggest models, nor can it pull off some of the more show-stopping tricks of the bleeding-edge voice models — OpenAI’s latest can sing, for example.

Where Apple is hoping to distinguish its AI is that Siri may actually be able to do things on your phone — send emails, decipher calendars and take and edit photos. That’s something other company’s AI chatbots cannot currently do, and to accomplish this, Apple is beckoning its army of third-party developers to fine tune their apps to collaborate with Apple Intelligence. Eventually, Siri may be able to trigger any action in an app that a user can take, part of the company’s long term vision for Siri, Apple said in June.

“Siri will have the ability to take hundreds of new actions in and across apps,” said Apple’s Kelsey Peterson, director of machine learning, in the Apple Intelligence launch video.

Apple can easily make this happen for its own apps, but for Apple Intelligence to interact with the millions of non-Apple apps, it needs developers to embrace a new way of programming their apps. This means developers will need to create as many as hundreds of snippets of additional code called App Intents.

Apple has a strong history of getting its developers to support new platform initiatives, and it’s running a well-worn playbook to get them on board — personal attention from developer relations, a party-like atmosphere at the company’s annual developer’s conference and most importantly, it dangles App Store promotion that can lead to millions of downloads for developers who get on board.

If third-party developers jump on board and the Siri system works as advertised, it could represent one of Apple’s biggest and most durable advantages in the AI race.

“You should be able to string things together and kind of get that future we’ve all been envisioning where you can use Siri conversationally, to do a bunch of things at once,” said Jordan Morgan, an iOS developer who’s written a tutorial about App Intents.

Whether Apple is successful at cajoling its millions of developers is a critical question, and the stakes are high for the company. 

The company is relying on Apple Intelligence, which only works on last year’s iPhone 15 Pro or iPhone 16 models that came out this year, to spur a wave of upgrades and boost flat iPhone sales. If Apple’s improved Siri is poorly supported by developers or it fails to impress, it could cool iPhone sales, and customers could wind up choosing to use a rival’s voice assistant through an app instead of the built-in Siri.

Apple Intelligence photos

Apple Inc. 

What are App Intents?

Inside the Music app, for example, Apple has built about 10 intents, including actions like “Add to Playlist,” “Play Music,” or “Select Music.” A single app intent should define a single action, programmers say. 

If you take a caffeine tracking app, for example, one intent would be the ability to show an overview of exactly how much caffeine the user has logged today, Morgan said.

When that App Intent is finished, Apple’s various “system experiences,” such as widgets, live activities, control center and Shortcuts, will be able to quickly display a current running tracker of how much caffeine has been logged without the user ever opening up the tracking app.

System search is another big draw for some developers. App Intents will allow apps to surface specific emails or other more granular data inside Spotlight, Apple’s system search.

App Intents don’t take that long to write, developers say, often requiring only a few lines of code. 

In previous years, Apple recommended that developers adopt App Intents for their most important features, said Michael Tigas, the developer of Focused Work, a productivity app.

“Now, if there’s a way to adjust your app to perform any general action then you should create an App Intent for it,” Tigas said.

Fortunately for developers, they still have time to write all the code necessary for App Intents. While Apple Intelligence is starting to roll out next month, the biggest improvements to Siri aren’t scheduled to be released until next year.

Apple has to incentivize developers

Apple’s new Siri system will better understand questions even if a user makes a speaking error, a direct result of Apple’s work with language models, a relative of the large language models that power systems like OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

That means that Siri will be much more flexible in understanding the hundreds of different ways a user could phrase, for example, “apply a photo filter to an image I took yesterday.”

Apple has to train and test its model to understand the range of the most likely commands and questions for any given category of apps.

A downside to Apple’s approach is that only a few categories of apps will be supported by the new Siri at first, starting with photo and email apps. Eventually, Siri will support apps that focus on books, journaling, whiteboards, managing files, word processing, browsers, camera and photos, the company said.

Developers are already imagining how they might plan for users to interact with their apps with their voices.

A representative for Superhuman, a premium email app, told CNBC that it plans to use Apple’s AI system to enable questions about the contents of emails, such as “Hey Siri, when does my flight depart?” or “Hey Siri, when am I meeting with James to review his proposal?”

There’s a downside to Apple’s plan in the eyes of some developers who worry that users will spend less time inside their apps or confuse Apple Intelligence with the AI features they’ve built themselves.

“If this story were only about App Intents, developers would worry that their products might be reduced to the role of the plumbing that powers Siri, and leave them unclear on how to build sustainable businesses around it,” Igor Zhadanov, CEO under of Readdle, which makes email app Spark, wrote in an email.

Another drawback is that Apple Intelligence features will only be available on the latest iPhones, a small subset of the total iPhone user base. That limited market of iPhone users may discourage developers from investing time and effort into supporting the technology in the near term.

“Apple are limiting these kinds of Apple Intelligence features to the new 2024 iPhones and the expensive models from last year, so you won’t be able to build something for the masses anyway,” Tigas said.

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Meta extends ban on new political ads past Election Day

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Meta extends ban on new political ads past Election Day

Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg plans to visit South Korea, scheduling key meetings during the trip, according to a statement by Meta on Wednesday, which did not provide further details. Reportedly, Zuckerberg is anticipated to meet with Samsung Electronics chairman Jay Y. Lee later this month to discuss AI chip supply and other generative AI issues, as per the South Korean newspaper Seoul Economic Daily, citing unnamed sources familiar with the matter.

Alex Wong | Getty Images News | Getty Images

Meta extended its ban on new political ads on Facebook and Instagram past Election Day in the U.S.

The social media giant announced the political ads policy update on Monday, extending its ban on new political ads past Tuesday, the original end date for the restriction period.

Meta did not specify the day it will lift the restriction, saying only that the ad blocking will continue “until later this week.” The company did not say why it extended the political advertising restriction period.

The company announced in August that any political ads that ran at least once before Oct. 29 would still be allowed to run on Meta’s services in the final week before Election Day. Other political ads will not be allowed to run.

Organization with eligible ads will have “limited editing capabilities” while the restriction is still in place, Meta said. Those advertisers will be allowed to make scheduling, budgeting and bidding-related changes to their political ads, Meta said.

Meta enacted the same policy in 2020. The company said the policy is in place because “we recognize there may not be enough time to contest new claims made in ads.”

Google-parent Alphabet announced a similar ad policy update last month, saying it would pause ads relating to U.S. elections from running in the U.S. after the last polls close on Tuesday. Alphabet said it would notify advertisers when it lifts the pause.

Nearly $1 billion has been spent on political ads over the last week, with the bulk of the money spent on down-ballot races throughout the U.S., according to data from advertising analytics firm AdImpact.

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Jeff Bezos and OpenAI invest in robot startup Physical Intelligence at $2.4 billion valuation

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Jeff Bezos and OpenAI invest in robot startup Physical Intelligence at .4 billion valuation

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, attends the 54th annual meeting of the World Economic Forum, in Davos, Switzerland, January 18, 2024 (L), and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos speaks during the UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) in Glasgow, Scotland, Britain, November 2, 2021.

Reuters

Physical Intelligence, a robot startup based in San Francisco, has raised $400 million at a $2.4 billion post-money valuation, the company confirmed Monday to CNBC.

Investors included Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, OpenAI, Thrive Capital and Lux Capital, a Physical Intelligence spokesperson said. Khosla Ventures and Sequoia Capital are also listed as investors on the company’s website.

Physical Intelligence’s new valuation is about six times that of its March seed round, which reportedly came in at $70 million with a $400 million valuation. Its current roster of employees includes alumni of Tesla, Google DeepMind and X.

The startup focuses on “bringing general-purpose AI into the physical world,” per its website, and it aims to do this by developing large-scale artificial intelligence models and algorithms to power robots. The startup spent the past eight months developing a “general-purpose” AI model for robots, the company wrote in a blog post. Physical Intelligence hopes that model will be the first step toward its ultimate goal of developing artificial general intelligence. AGI is a term used to describe AI technology that equals or surpasses human intellect on a wide range of tasks.

The news comes days after OpenAI launched a search feature within ChatGPT, its viral chatbot, that positions the AI startup to better compete with search engines like GoogleMicrosoft‘s Bing and Perplexity. Last month, OpenAI also closed its latest funding round at a valuation of $157 billion.

Physical Intelligence’s vision is that one day users can “simply ask robots to perform any task they want, just like they can ask large language models (LLMs) and chatbot assistants,” the startup wrote in the blog post. In case studies, Physical Intelligence details how its tech could allow a robot to do laundry, bus tables or assemble a box.

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Barry Diller calls timing of The Washington Post’s non-endorsement a ‘blunder’

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Barry Diller calls timing of The Washington Post's non-endorsement a 'blunder'

Watch CNBC's full interview with IAC and Expedia chairman Barry Diller

To Barry Diller, a friend of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, the decision for The Washington Post not to endorse a candidate in tomorrow’s presidential election was “absolutely principled” — and poorly timed, he said Monday on CNBC’s Squawk Box.

“They made a blunder — it should’ve happened months before, and it didn’t, and that’s the issue with it,” Diller said.

Diller is chairperson of both online travel company Expedia and IAC, which owns media platforms and websites like Dotdash Meredith and Care.com. He and Bezos appear to have been close friends for years, with Diller and his wife, fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg, hosting Bezos’s engagement party to fiancee Lauren Sanchez.

The decision not to endorse a presidential candidate in the 2024 race or for future presidential races came directly from Bezos, the paper’s owner, according to an article published by two of the Post’s own reporters.

The move prompted public condemnation from several staff writers, a flood of at least 250,000 digital subscription cancellations and the resignations of at least three editorial board members.

Bezos defended his position in his own op-ed late last month, calling the move a “meaningful step in the right direction” to restore low public trust in media and journalism.

“Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election,” Bezos wrote, emphasizing that the decision to not endorse a candidate was made “entirely internally” and without consulting either campaign. “I wish we had made the change earlier than we did, in a moment further from the election and the emotions around it.”

Diller said he spoke to Bezos following the decision.

“I think it was absolutely principled,” Diller said. “The mistake they made — and it was a mistake admitted by him — was timing.”

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