Tim Cook, chief executive officer of Apple Inc., during the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference at Apple Park campus in Cupertino, California, US, on Monday, June 10, 2024.
Bloomberg | Getty
Apple on Wednesday released a beta version of a slew of Apple Intelligence features, including its long-awaited ChatGPT integration.
The company announced its answer to the artificial intelligence boom this summer, but is slowly rolling out its features to users. Investors hope AI features will spur a wave of iPhone upgrades because the tools are only available on newer devices.
Apple Intelligence has been available in previews for developers and early adopters, but the official public release will come next week as part of the official iOS 18.1 release, Apple said. This latest batch of features is included in a beta version of iOS 18.2 for software developers that was released Wednesday. Apple developer betas typically go through a cycle of weeks before they are released to the public.
The preview included with iOS 18.2 contains:
New abilities to describe how the user wants Apple Intelligence to rewrite a chunk of text.
Genmoji, Apple’s image generator for new emojis.
Image Playground, Apple’s AI image generator.
Image Wand, a feature that allows users to remove objects or distractions from photos.
Integration with OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
However, the long-awaited ability for Siri to take actions inside of apps isn’t included in this update, but is expected soon.
Answers from ChatGPT
In June, Apple announced its integration with ChatGPT. Although Apple Intelligence and Siri mostly rely on Apple’s chips inside its devices, the company said at the time that for more sophisticated problems or questions, users can get responses from OpenAI’s chatbot instead.
Apple Intelligence unveiled during Apple’s WWDC2024 in Cupertino, Calif. on June 10th. 2024.
Source: Apple Inc.
At the company’s developer conference, Apple showed how the ChatGPT integration will work. When Siri is asked a question that it identifies as being a better question for ChatGPT, it will ask the user for permission to ask ChatGPT. The user doesn’t need an OpenAI account. Users will also be able to use ChatGPT in text fields to generate text.
ChatGPT will also be used in part of a feature that Apple calls Visual Intelligence, where the phone’s camera can identify text or objects and even translate signs in real time.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was spotted on Apple’s campus when the integration was announced. That came after Microsoft began a deep integration with OpenAI models into its products.
However, neither Apple nor OpenAI has commented publicly on the financial details of the partnership, and Apple was not an investor in OpenAI’s fundraising round. Apple execs have also suggested that other AI models, such as those from Google, may also integrate with Apple Intelligence in the future.
Some Apple Intelligence features are already in testing by the public, and will be released next week as part of iOS 18.1. The first wave of tools included the ability to rewrite text, a new look for Siri, and notification summaries that take a stack of push notifications and condenses them into a few sentences.
In this photo illustration, the Spotify music app is seen on a phone on June 04, 2024 in New York City.
Michael M. Santiago | Getty Images
Spotify is minting music millionaires.
Nearly 1,500 artists generated over $1 million in royalties from Spotify in 2024, the company said Wednesday in its annual Loud and Clear Report.
Spotify said more than 80% of the artists in that pool didn’t have a song reach the app’s Global Daily Top 50 chart.
“Spotify has helped level the playing field for artists at every stage of their careers,” read a portion of the report. “Success in the streaming era doesn’t require a decade-spanning catalog nor a chart-topping hit.”
The news comes about a month after the company reported a fourth-quarter earnings beat that saw the Swedish music streamer record its first full year of profitability. The company said it paid an all-time high of $10 billion in royalties to the music industry for the year.
Marc Benioff, Chairman & CEO of Salesforce, speaking on CNBC’s Squawk Box outside the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Jan. 22nd, 2025.
Gerry Miller | CNBC
Salesforce on Wednesday announced plans to invest $1 billion in Singapore over the next five years.
The cloud software giant said the investment is designed to accelerate the country’s digital transformation and the adoption of Salesforce’s flagship AI offering Agentforce.
Salesforce is among the many technology companies hoping to boost revenue with generative AI features.
The company launched the newest version of Agentforce last month. It has previously described the system — which it says can tackle sophisticated questions in Salesforce’s Slack communications app, based on all available data — as the first digital AI platform for enterprises.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff is scheduled to speak at CNBC’s CONVERGE LIVE at around 9:25 a.m. Singapore time (9:25 p.m. ET) on Wednesday.
“We are in an incredible new era of digital labor where every business will be transformed by autonomous agents that augment the work of humans, revolutionizing productivity and enabling every company to scale without limits,” Benioff said in a statement.
“Singapore is at the forefront of this shift, and as the world’s largest provider of digital labor through our Agentforce platform,” he added.
Salesforce said Agentforce can help Singapore to “rapidly expand” its labor force in several key service and public sector roles at a time when the country is grappling with an aging population and declining birth rates.
Jermaine Loy, managing director of the Singapore Economic Development Board, welcomed Salesforce’s investment, saying it will help to boost the country’s efforts “to build a vibrant hub for AI innovation.”
Reddit CEO Steve Huffman stands on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) after ringing a bell on the floor setting the share price at $47 in its initial public offering (IPO) on March 21, 2024 in New York City.
Spencer Platt | Getty Images News | Getty Images
Reddit shares rose more than 10% on Tuesday, reversing a three-day slump that coincided with a broader decline among technology companies.
Despite Tuesday’s gains, Reddit shares are still roughly 30% below the close on Wednesday.
Reddit’s stock market upswing was likely bolstered by a Loop Capital analyst note published Tuesday that reiterated a buy rating and characterized the company’s shares as “extremely attractive.” The analyst note said that Reddit’s 50% drop on Wall Street in the past month “is excessive,” and that the social media company “has the biggest upside potential relative to Street estimates in our coverage universe.”
The company’s shares dropped more than 15% in February after the company reported weaker-than-expected fourth-quarter user numbers as a result of a Googlesearch change that temporarily hurt its search-derived traffic. Although Reddit said at the time that it had recovered from the algorithmic shift, the user number miss spooked investors.
Loop Capital managing director Alan Gould acknowledged in the note that investors are operating in a “risk-off market environment,” but he contended that Reddit “has been one of the top performing stocks over the past year,” aside from its most recent dip.
“RDDT wildly exceeded ours and Street estimates for 2024, which explains why the stock increased almost 7-fold from a $34 IPO price to a peak of $230 in less than a year,” Gould wrote, noting Reddit’s growing revenue and improved advertising tools, among other positive developments.
Reddit’s fourth-quarter sales grew 71% year over year to $428 million, which represents the fastest growth rate for any quarter since 2022.
“In our view, RDDT deserves the revaluation it had experiencing based on the growth it has shown in the recent earnings reports and future projected growth driven by the ability to narrow the ARPU gap, and data licensing possibilities,” Gould wrote.