After Apple updated the iPhone’s iOS 18.1 recently, the company has started to slowly release its much-anticipated Apple Intelligence system. The initial upgrade was not that impressive and can be considered underwhelming, but it also hints of more changes to come.

Despite the highly promoted investment in AI, its first batch of iPhone features could be called moderately helpful, at best. With Apple Intelligence, users can now catch up on notifications faster with notification summaries, ask Siri questions with text instead of just their voice, and remove unwanted elements from photos with a new editor, among a handful of other new capabilities.

However, the initial list of new features doesn’t include the flashiest and most-promoted Apple Intelligence features — like the Image Playground, where users will be able to generate AI images via a prompt, or Visual Intelligence, which will allows them to search the web for what’s in their camera’s real-life viewfinder.

In fact, most of the currently available Apple Intelligence features are quite similar to AI features already available on certain Galaxy and Pixel phones. Still, the new iPhone features are useful enough while everyone await for the meatier main course later this year and next, when more Apple Intelligence features will be released.

To activate Apple Intelligence, first, users will need to install the latest iOS 18.1 update. To do so, they should go to Settings > General > Software Update and select "Update Now" under iOS 18.1. (Obligatory reminder to back up the phone beforehand!)

Once that’s good to go, the user will also have to actively request access to Apple Intelligence. They can go to Settings > Apple Intelligence & Siri > Apple Intelligence and select "Join the Waitlist." It shouldn’t take long. Some users gained access in just a couple of minutes, though some people report it taking a couple of hours.

As mentioned in earlier press releases, only the iPhone 15 Pro models and iPhone 16 models can access Apple Intelligence.

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The online video production company MrBeast reported last 1 November that it has fired somewhere between 5 to 10 employees following an investigation into the YouTube empire's workplace culture. This came after a series of lawsuits were filed earlier this year.

A company spokesman did not confirm the exact number of the firings, but said that employees were let go or for what reasons. The company overhaul comes as Jimmy Donaldson, who draws millions of views under the MrBeast alias with highly produced stunts and giveaways, deals with accusations of impropriety against himself, his collaborators and others within his multimillion-dollar production company that have threatened his family-friendly image.

Investigating authorities only identified "several isolated instances of workplace harassment and misconduct," according to a two-page letter sent by Alex Spiro, a trial lawyer who led the investigation by white-shoe law firm Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan and whose clients have included Jay-Z and Elon Musk.

During the almost three-month investigation, results concluded that there were no basis behind allegations that MrBeast team members committed sexual misconduct or "knowingly" employed people with "proclivities or histories towards illegal or questionable legal conduct."

Spiro said the team interviewed 39 current and former employees. Millions of documents from phones, emails, and messaging platforms including Discord and Slack were also reviewed, according to the letter.

The controversies surrounding the so-called King of YouTube began snowballing this summer. Ava Tyson, a Donaldson friend and fellow creator accused of sharing inappropriate sexual messages with minors over multiple years, left the channel in July. Also circulated online by YouTuber Rosanna Pansino was a 2017 recording of Donaldson making racist comments and using homophobic slurs.

A preliminary July shoot for his ambitious "Beast Games" Amazon Prime Video show was quickly hit with safety complaints from some contestants who said they faced "limited sustenance" and "insufficient medical staffing" while competing for a US$ 5 million grand prize.

Donaldson has largely remained silent on the matters. He recently launched a prepacked lunch brand alongside internet personalities Logan Paul and KSI — marking his latest entrance into the food market after his chocolate bar and burger chain were met with mixed reviews.

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Apple Intelligence may have been launched officially last 28 October, but it was not a complete rollout. What happened is just a glimpse of how Apple hopes to transform its products with artificial intelligence.

The tech giant unveiled initial features of Apple Intelligence — its suite of AI tools — on select devices with its latest software update for iPhones, iPads and Macs.

Apple’s AI features for iPhones will only be available for free to users with any iPhone 16, iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max, who update to iOS 18.1. Apple Intelligence is also available for iPad and Mac models that support iPadOS 18.1 and macOS Sequoia 15.

With the new featurres, Apple is implementing its first set of generative AI tools that aim to change how people use their iPhones and cement Apple’s stake in the AI race against competitors like Microsoft and Google. Generative AI is the technology that produces unique text and images in response to user-prompts — from obscure images to relentlessly catchy music.

The release of Apple Intelligence comes immediately after the company released the iPhone 16 in September, which is equipped with chip hardware designed to support Apple’s AI-powered features.

A pivot to AI has been a focus for Apple since it first unveiled the suite of Apple Intelligence features at the annual Worldwide Developers Conference in June. Implementing new generative AI is at the forefront of Big Tech ambitions to maintain exponential growth, and after years of sluggish sales, Apple is betting on AI to boost its performance and reinvigorate its consumer base.

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It has been more than a year now since the U.S. government has put restrictions in the access of Chinese entities to high-performance AI hardware. However, there appears toe be enough AI processors in China to build the world's most powerful training cluster.

According to the reports of SemiAnalysis, Huawei, which is probably the most sanctioned company in the IT sector, has not only circumvented U.S. sanctions by using proxies, but it produces plenty of its own Ascend 910-series processors domestically.

It has become obvious that Nvidia's highest-end AI and HPC GPUs like the H100 and H200 are being smuggled into China from other countries, including India, Malaysia, and Singapore. As a result, entities that need to build a server or even a rack powered by Nvidia's Hopper GPUs can do so, albeit at a premium price.

Another method of acquiring the GPUs is acquire Nvidia's cut-down DGX H20 processors aimed at China and shipped to the country without restrictions.

SemiAnalysis estimates that Nvidia will officially sell 900,000 HGX H20 processors to China this year alone, and will then supply over a million B20 processors to the country in 2025. How many 're-exported' H100/H200 processors will end up in China is unknown, but the analysts believe that 'many' will make it into the country. Chinese companies would of course like to have more of Nvidia's high-end AI processors, but they can also access them in the cloud.

Huawei may not be exactly interested in getting Nvidia's hardware, as it has its own Ascend 900-series hardware platform for AI. The company's Ascend 910 processor was originally made by TSMC (and it looks like eventually Huawei managed to continue making the compute chiplet of this design at TSMC via a proxy), and it also has the Ascend 910B made by SMIC using its N+2 manufacturing technology (7nm-class), along with the Ascend 910C made on SMIC's N+3 fabrication technology (6nm-class).

How can SMIC keep producing chips on advanced process technologies two years after the U.S. imposed tight restrictions on sales of advanced wafer fab tools to China's most advanced fabs?

The reports suggest that the restrictions curbs are easily circumvented by formally supplying sophisticated wafer fab equipment to fabs that are not restricted. SMIC, for example, has an unrestricted legacy fab and a restricted advanced logic fab interconnected by a wafer bridge that enables wafers to travel back and forth, essentially making the two fabs into a single facility. This setup enables one fab to continue producing advanced chips for AI applications, like the Kirin 9000S and Ascend 910B, while the other fab, classified as a legacy fab, can legally import advanced tools.

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It is estimated that about two-thirds of teachers report regularly using tools for detecting AI-generated content. At that scale, even tiny error rates can add up quickly and this was seen in one case.

Moira Olmsted was taking some time off from college early in the pandemic to start a family. When the threat subsided, she was eager to return to online school.

For months, she juggled a full-time job and a toddler to save up for a self-paced program that allowed her to learn remotely. Seven months pregnant with her second child, Olmsted enrolled in online courses at Central Methodist University in 2023, studying to become a teacher.

Just weeks into the fall semester, Olmsted submitted a written assignment in a required class—one of three reading summaries she had to do each week. Soon after, she received her grade: zero. When she approached her professor, Olmsted said she was told that an AI detection tool had determined her work was likely generated by artificial intelligence. In fact, the teacher said, her writing had been flagged at least once before.

For the 24-year old Olmsted, the accusation was a "punch in the gut." It was also a threat to her standing at the university. "It’s just kind of like, oh my gosh, this is what works for us right now—and it could be taken away for something I didn’t do," she says.

Olmsted disputed the accusation to her teacher and a student coordinator, stressing that she has autism spectrum disorder and writes in a formulaic manner that might be mistakenly seen as AI-generated, according to emails viewed by Bloomberg Businessweek. The grade was ultimately changed, but not before she received a strict warning: If her work was flagged again, the teacher would treat it the same way they would with plagiarism.

The best AI writing detectors are highly accurate, but they’re not really foolproof.

Businessweek made a test on two of the leading services — GPTZero and Copyleaks —o n a random sample of 500 college application essays submitted to Texas A&M University in the summer of 2022. These documents were obtained before the release of ChatGPT, effectively guaranteeing they weren’t AI-generated.

The essays were also collected through a public records request, meaning they weren’t part of the datasets on which AI tools are trained. Businessweek found the services falsely flagged 1 percent to 2 percent of the essays as likely written by AI, in some cases claiming to have near 100 percent certainty.

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On 29 October, Apple officially released another announcement schedued for the week with the launch of the new Mac mini M4 and M4 Pro. Earlier rumors were confirmed: the small desktop computer is even tinier – about the size of the Apple TV box.

The Mac mini is now one of the most affordable option for users who want a Mac computer. Since the debut of Apple's silicon chipset, and the subsequent release of the M1 Mac mini in late 2020, the Mac mini has been an incredibly affordable option for those looking for a powerful computer.

First up, the Mac mini's most attractive feature: the price. The even more powerful M4 and M4 Pro Mac mini models are still going to provide the most bang for each buck. Apple is keeping the US$ 599 starting price for the base M4 model with 10-core CPU and 10-core GPU configuration.

And even better, Apple has finally dropped the base 8GB of memory from the Mac mini M4 lineup and that starting price now gets consumers 16GB of RAM, which is upgradable to 32GB.

As for storage, the Mac mini M4 will continue to ship with 256GB for the base model and can be upgraded with up to 2TB of disk space.

The Mac mini M4 Pro model, however, can be upgraded even further. The US$ 1,399 M4 Pro Mac mini base model starts with a 12-core CPU and 16-core GPU as well as 24GB of memory and 512GB of storage. In addition to the upgraded base model memory, the new Mac mini M4 Pros can be maxed out to 64GB of RAM, which is double the amount of the previous Mac mini model and the new Mac mini M4 base models.

Apple has fit this all into its smallest computer yet as the redesigned Mac mini measures at 5 x 5 inches (as opposed to its predecessor's 7.75 x 7.75 dimensions).

Apple says the new M4 chip has 2.5 times faster performance than the M1 Mac mini and is 20 times faster than the last Intel Mac mini, which came out in 2018.

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