This Week in AI: Apple Opens its AI Doors to Developers

Apple had a tough job when kicking off its annual Worldwide Developers Conference this week. The company is broadly considered to have fallen behind in the tech industry's AI race after delaying the release of its upgraded Siri voice assistant as part of its Apple Intelligence service.

While Apple's Siri upgrades are still delayed, the company did offer a consolation: Developer access to its AI models, which the company says are trained on "diverse and high-quality data," including content "licensed from publishers, curated from publicly available or open-sourced datasets, and publicly available information crawled by our web-crawler, Applebot."

"For example, if you’re getting ready for an exam, an app like Kahoot can create a personalized quiz from your notes to make studying more engaging," Craig Federighi, Apple's head of software, said during the company's announcements. He added that because apps can use on-device models, these features can be implemented "without cloud API costs."

Whether developers use those models is still an open question, but the company has a long track record of offering development features that end up powering popular apps. The company's Metal graphics API for example has helped power some of its most popular mobile games, while its Core ML helped improve image editing apps.

While Apple rolled out new AI tech...

Tesla robotaxis hitting roads in Texas

Tesla CEO and former White House advisor Elon Musk took time away from politics to announce that his company's self-driving robotaxis will begin on June 22 in Austin, Texas, CNBC reported.

Musk's announcement has been a long time coming, and at this point will be competing against the other major robotaxi provider, Waymo. That company, which is a corporate cousin to Google, began offering driverless robotaxi rides in Austin earlier this year. Waymo robotaxis also run in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Phoenix.

Waymo's driverless cars have received positive marks from reviewers, who note that the cars are fully driverless.

Not everyone has been happy about them, though. Protesters in San Francisco have frequently vandalized and attempted to disable the cars to criticize the tech industry that helped invent them, and broader cultural concerns about automation. Immigration protesters in Los Angeles this week have even set them on fire.

OpenAI's latest upgrades

While techies spent much of this week discussing the Nintendo Switch 2 launch, Xbox ROG Ally and everything Apple, OpenAI announced a newly upgraded iteration of its o3 model, called o3-pro. The upgrade, which OpenAI said replaces o1-pro, has access to web search, file uploads and other features while using the company's underlying o3 model.

OpenAI also announced an upgrade to ChatGPT that makes its voice mode feature sound more human. The upgrade, which is part of ChatGPT's "Advanced Voice Mode," helps the chatbot speak "more naturally, with subtler intonation, realistic cadence (including pauses and emphases), and more on-point expressiveness for certain emotions including empathy, sarcasm, and more."

Like Apple and Google, OpenAI also announced live translation, allowing users to speak one language and have the app play back in another.

News sites are getting hammered

While AI is remaking the way we interact with technology, it's also reportedly destroying the news industry. A new report from the Wall Street Journal adds more detail about how bad things truly are, noting layoffs at one online publication, Business Insider, were blamed on "endure extreme traffic drops outside of our control." Overall, the WSJ reported, Similarweb estimates search-related traffic has dropped more than 55% in the past three years.

It's easy to blame tech companies, but they are increasingly pointing to you and me as the reason.

Our habits are changing so fast that Google has accelerated its launch of AI mode, an optional chatbot that can replace the famous blue links while surfing the web. Even Apple has said that search traffic from its iPhones, iPads and Mac computers dropped for the first time -- ever -- as people switch to AI chatbots instead. So, now Apple has said it's "actively looking at" changing its default Safari browser to focus on AI.

Wikipedia's AI revolt

AI adoption may be happening at spectacular speeds, but it still has pushback. Wikipedia said that it will pause experimental AI summaries, after an editor backlash, according to 404 Media. Editors said the feature could undermine people's trust in Wikipedia as a source of information.

Google learned that lesson the hard way when its AI overviews for search provided embarrassing recommendations, including that people add glue to their pizza to keep the cheese from falling off.

“Just because Google has rolled out its AI summaries doesn't mean we need to one-up them, I sincerely beg you not to test this, on mobile or anywhere else,” one Wikipedia editor reportedly said, according to 404 Media. "Let's not insult our readers' intelligence and join the stampede to roll out flashy AI summaries."

Barbie-maker Mattel partnering with OpenAI

Hello Barbie may have a second life thanks to a new partnership between ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and Mattel. The toy maker said it intends to "bring the magic of AI to age-appropriate play experiences with an emphasis on innovation, privacy, and safety," by the end of the year, according to Reuters.

That mention of privacy and safety is particularly important for Mattel, whose Hello Barbie internet-connected doll was hacked a decade ago. Security researchers found the doll was, ahem, insecure, and could potentially give up private information to hackers. Mattel quietly discontinued the doll shortly after.

Mattel hasn't said exactly how it'll use OpenAI's technology, so Barbie may remain silent for now. Or perhaps the company will finally construct an AI-powered T-800 from the Terminator franchise movies. Dun dun, duh-dun-dun.

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Ian Sherr is a widely published journalist who's covered nearly every major tech company from Apple to Netflix, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and more for CBS News, The Wall Street Journal, Reuters, and CNET. Aside from writing, he tinkers with tech at home, is a longtime fencer -- the kind with swords -- and began woodworking during the pandemic.