Artificial Intelligence

Jony Ive and Sam Altman yesterday released a strong candidate for most frustrating video of the year: promising a completely new concept in AI hardware, but giving very little clue as to what it might be.

I transcribed the video to see whether I could spot any clues, in conjunction with other things the two have said. I think we can draw some pretty safe conclusions about what it’s not – and there are one or two clues about what it is …

At CES 2025, MacPaw unveiled Eney, an all new AI-powered companion that’ll complete tasks for you. It taps into the plethora of apps available on Setapp, and serves as an assistant of sorts. Eney is available in public beta starting today. I’ve had the opportunity to test it out early, and it’s certainly a strong offering.

Yesterday, Microsoft kicked off its annual developers conference with, unsurprisingly, a slew of AI features, models, and capabilities it is bringing to its own systems, many of which developers will also be able to leverage.

While some are very specific to Microsoft’s ecosystem, there were quite a few that would undoubtedly be a great addition to Apple’s own native AI offerings, whenever those finally materialize.

I won’t reprise the sad story of how Apple went from being at the forefront of AI technology with the launch of Siri in 2011 to being hopelessly left behind in 2025.

The company’s current approach appears to be to retain the Siri branding for simpler tasks, while using Apple Intelligence for the shiny new things – but there’s now an obvious problem with this …

Reddit has announced plans to fight back after a large-scale AI fraud was carried out against users of the highly popular Change My View subreddit.

However, the company’s plans to take to fight AI bots may not be popular with users, as it could compromise the platform’s long-standing approach to privacy …

Trigger warning for brief references to sexual assault.

It’s been discovered that millions of Reddit users were deceived and “psychologically manipulated” by an unauthorized AI experiment performed by researchers from the University of Zurich …

Ray-Ban Meta glasses now offer a live translation feature to all owners, after an earlier small-scale test. You can download language packs in advance, enabling translation even when you don’t have a mobile data connection.

The Meta AI features, which lets you ask the glasses questions about what you’re seeing, has also now launched in EU countries, and there are new frame and lens combos too …

WhatsApp users have expressed frustration at the fact that there is no way to remove the new Meta AI chatbot feature from the messaging app, raising concerns that the company is seeking to use their private chats to train the bot.

Meta says the AI chatbot can’t read messages unless one of the chat participants chooses to share it, but adds that the company is “listening to feedback” from users …

Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported a couple of days ago on what he described as “Apple’s biggest push into health yet with a new AI doctor.”

While I completely understand why Apple would want to do this, I think the company will need to tread extremely carefully to avoid the risk of doing more harm than good …

China’s DeepSeek AI chatbot doesn’t exactly have the best of reputations. It has exposed chat history and other sensitive data; the iOS app has been shown to have multiple security flaws; is under investigation in both the US and Europe; and ARM’s CEO believes it will end up being banned in the US.

But none of this has stopped Apple CEO Tim Cook describing it as “excellent” during a visit to Beijing for the China Development Forum …

Anthropic announced this week a major update for Claude, its AI chatbot. The platform can now search for results on the web in real time to provide up-to-date information, making it even more useful for research.

The embarrassment over the state of Siri continues, with the discovery that the ‘intelligent’ assistant doesn’t even know what month it is.

My colleague Zac Hall suggested that things are now so bad the Siri brand is irredeemably tarnished, and any new version should be given a completely new name – but some think Apple should go further than this, and let us replace Siri with our own choice of AI chatbot …

The Meta AI chatbot is finally rolling out to European countries from this week, and will be accessible in Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook, and Messenger. However, the headline feature of Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses will not be available.

The generative AI feature first launched in the US back in 2023, but privacy concerns were raised when it came to light that the company had been training it on Facebook and Instagram posts since way back in 2007 ….

If there’s one piece of advice that bears repeating about AI chatbots it’s “Don’t use them to seek factual information – they absolutely cannot be trusted to be right.”

A new study demonstrated the extent of the problem – but did show that Apple made a good choice in partnering with OpenAI’s ChatGPT for queries Siri can’t answer …

One of the odder aspects of Apple’s history is that the company has gone in 14 years from one of the leaders in intelligent assistants to one of the biggest laggards.

We’ve gone from the futuristic-feeling Siri way back in 2011 to a painfully inadequate-feeling Apple Intelligence in 2025 ….

A new market intelligence report indicates that Mac market share grew at a faster rate that the top three PC brands during the final quarter of last year.

Apple also dominates the AI-capable computer market, with a 45% share against 15% for the nearest Windows PC competitor …

Bad news for DeepSeek users in South Korea. The country’s regulator announced on Monday that the Chinese AI app is now banned in South Korea under allegations that it fails to comply with local data protection laws. As a result, both Apple and Google will have to remove the app from their respective app stores.