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Apple quietly acquired Canadian artificial intelligence startup DarwinAI earlier this year, adding dozens of the company’s staffers to its AI division.
Bloomberg News reported the under-the-radar purchase on Thursday (Mar. 14) with Apple yet to publicly announce the news. They did tell the US news outlet that it “buys smaller technology companies from time to time.”
One of the big players in the Ontario-based company, Alexander Wong, has joined Apple as a director in its AI group as part of the deal. He helped to build the startup and works as an AI researcher at the University of Waterloo.
DarwinAI is the latest in a long list of similar acquisitions as Apple reportedly purchased 32 AI startups last year.
What is DarwinAI?
DarwinAI is best known for developing AI technology that can visually inspect components during the manufacturing process. They’re said to have served customers in a range of industries.
Founded in 2017, the company said its initial focus was on disrupting ‘the electronics manufacturing industry by improving the efficiency of Printed Circuit Board Assembly production through their ground-breaking technology.’
In 2022, they raised more than $15 million across six funding rounds. They received investment from 12 investors, including the likes of Honeywell Ventures and Inovia Capital, amongst other venture capital firms.
In a press release following the announcement of a funding round in December 2022, one of the co-founders said the “transformation is just beginning,” as they planned to raise money to help continue building advanced features.
Why did Apple buy DarwinAI?
It’s no secret that Apple is currently trailing behind other industry titans who have already made the steps into the world of AI.
The iPhone maker is now playing catch-up, with Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook promising that Apple will “break new ground” in AI this year. And the iPhone could soon have Google’s Gemini artificial intelligence (AI) to power new features, following chats between Apple and the search giant.
Its acquisition is likely in line with their focus and attention being on artificial intelligence, to keep up with others in the industry. 
In September of 2023, it was reported by The Information that the multinational corporation is investing millions of dollars per day into artificial intelligence, with work ongoing across multiple AI models over several teams.
Extensive work seems to have been carried out in the background at Apple in terms of bringing AI to the forefront, with an announcement expected around June time ahead of iOS 18 in September. 
Featured Image: Via Ideogram
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Sony Group Corporation has allegedly put a stop to production of its PSVR2 headset, due to a backlog of unsold units.
The news came from an article by Bloomberg journalist Takashi Mochizuki who claims that sales of the product have slowed ‘progressively since its launch and stocks of the device are building up.’
Citing unnamed sources who are ‘familiar with its [the firm’s] plans,’ Sony has apparently produced ‘well over two million units of the product launched in February of last year.’
This comes just over a year after the PlayStation VR2 was officially launched, catapulting Sony as one of the front runners in the virtual reality gear market. The device, priced at $549.99, allows users to explore reality gaming with PlayStation VR2 Sense technology.
In the Bloomberg article, Macquarie analyst Yijia Zhai offers a reason for the potential lack of take-up: “The high price of VR hardware acts as the main hurdle for its expansion,”
“Currently, there are limited games that support VR devices, and that will also lead to lack of motivation for players to purchase VR hardware. This limited content also has a reason – the development cost for VR games is substantially higher than normal titles.”
Sony has not yet confirmed or denied the halting of production and it is expected that they’re continuing to work on expanding the PSVR2 headset range.
Reality of the video game industry
The Tokyo-based technology giant has faced some challenges recently, as it announced plans to cut around 900 jobs within its PlayStation unit and shut down a London-based studio in late February 2024.
These layoffs affected in-house studios like Guerrilla Games which worked on creating an exclusive game for the headset from its popular Horizon series.
Sony is not alone, as both Microsoft and Tencent-owned Riot Games also underwent significant layoffs in recent months due to a slow recovery in the gaming industry.
PlayStation 5 Pro expected launch in September
Although the PSVR2 headset may not be performing as well as the company hoped, that isn’t stopping them from gearing up ahead of the PlayStation 5 Pro release.
An exact date isn’t yet known, but console fans are trading rumors about a possible date in September of this year. Several gaming tech insiders seem to agree about this rough window which would line up logically with the planned release of Grand Theft Auto 6 in 2025.
It’s reported by industry sources via the YouTube channel RedGamingTech that the PlayStation 5 Pro will feature eight-core Zen 2 CPUs (clocking in at 4GHz), an RDNA 3 GPU at 2.8 GHZ, and 16GB of 18,000 MT/s GDDR6 memory with a bandwidth of 587 GB/s.
Much like everything else, the price isn’t yet known either. In 2016, when Sony released a Pro console after a Slim version, the Pro version cost $100 more. By that logic, the PlayStation 5 Pro could potentially be in the region of $599.99.
Featured Image: Photo by Triyansh Gill on Unsplash
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xAI has confirmed the open release of its Grok artificial intelligence (AI) model, detailing the weights and architecture of the system. 
Elon Musk’s company detailed the Grok-1 version as a “314 billion parameter Mixture-of-Experts model trained from scratch by xAI.” In addition, the San Francisco-based startup outlined how the model had been instructed on a large volume of text data rather than tailored toward any specific task.
No training code is required, as users can head directly to Git Hub to get started with the large language model (LLM). 
In an effort to solicit input from the research community on potential enhancements, companies like xAI can make their LLMs either fully open-source or available through limited open-source releases.
Grok has also been available to premium subscribers on X, the prominent social media platform formerly known as Twitter before Musk’s takeover.
What is the legal dispute between Elon Musk and OpenAI?
Last week, the billionaire announced xAI would open-source Grok at a time when he is embroiled in a bitter legal battle with rival firm OpenAI, which he was previously associated with as a co-founder.
Musk, 52, walked away to take a different direction in AI development and now he has sued the maker of ChatGPT and its incumbent CEO, Sam Altman, for allegedly reneging on its original purpose to build AI for the benefit of humanity and not for the pursuit of profit.
In response, OpenAI has rebuked the legal action, stating it is based on “convoluted – often incoherent – factual premises”, in a court filing as part of the counterclaim.
An official blog post that accompanied an email to company employees appeared to dismiss the early influence and impact of Musk on Open AI. 
The firm implored it has stayed true to its mission “to ensure AGI benefits all of humanity, which means both building safe and beneficial AGI”, “every step of the way”.
It was penned collectively by Altman, Greg Brockman, John Schulman, Ilya Sutskever, and Wojciech Zaremba, and detailed how the firm had raised less than $45 million from Musk, despite his pledge to bring in up to $1 billion in funding.
Image source: x.ai
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The iPhone could soon have Google’s Gemini artificial intelligence (AI) to power new features, following chats between Apple and the search giant.
According to a Bloomberg report, the two companies are reportedly in ‘active negotiations to let Apple license Gemini, coming to the iPhone software this year.’
Gemini is Google’s suite of generative AI tools, including chatbots and coding assistants. Over the years, Google is said to have paid Apple billions of dollars annually to make its search engine the default option in the Safari web browser on the iPhone and other devices.
A partnership between these two tech titans could give them a huge edge over the industry, but it seems more has to be done as the report says: “the two parties haven’t decided on the terms or branding of an AI agreement or finalized how it would be implemented.”
Apple has recently held discussions with OpenAI too, which is one of Gemini’s biggest competitors in the industry.
Neither Apple nor Google have confirmed or denied the potential for a collaboration.
Apple to focus on AI in the future
Coming in September 2024, Apple’s update – in the form of iOS 18 – is expected to be heavily focused on the use of AI.
Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman believes this could be a ‘relatively groundbreaking’ software update with ‘major new features and designs.’ Although the rumors have been circulating for the last few months, the Silicon Valley-based company hasn’t yet offered much in the way of sneak peeks.
This comes after news around Apple’s own testing of its large language model named Ajax. In 2023 we reported how the chatbot, built using Apple’s own framework named “Ajax,” is a large language model that utilizes AI to generate human-like responses. 
It’s believed that Ajax GPT was created for internal use and not much else has been heard about the tool over the last few months.
Featured Image: Via Ideogram
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Cities Skylines II has had a rocky start, part of which is down to just how good playing the original Cities Skylines, even today, with all its mods, patches, and tweaks, can be.
A ropy start, poor optimization, and a feeling that the devs Colossal Order were fire–fighting from the off have meant some poor publicity for the game, but things have been getting better slowly but surely.
The lack of official mod support has been a huge bugbear of the community for a while now but a post today on the official blog should now help put that to bed with the news that we are just a week away from getting mod support – albeit in a beta format initially.

The post reads: “With Mods (short for modifications), you can tailor your gaming experience to your unique preferences. Uploaded by creators all over the world, you can pick between anything to create the city of your dreams. Along with Beach Properties, the first wave of Cities: Skylines II Modding will be available. The Beta release of Modding will initially support Map and Code mods.
With the Map Editor, you can make maps with the Terraforming Tools you’re used to, import hightmaps to create highly accurate depictions of your hometown, and upload your creations to Paradox Mods.
With the Code Tools, you can show off your coding skills and create Code Mods to meet your heart’s desire!”
This will be news to warm the hearts of Skylines II players. The prospect of mods to improve quality of life quicker than the devs can push them out should now help propel the games towards where it should have been at launch.

The Mods beta will launch on March 25th alongside a beach Properties Asset Pack that will bring a new Waterfront Zone to the game.
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