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With the iPhone 16 reveal just around the corner at Apple’s “Glowtime” event on September 9, the major talking point of the next best iPhone is likely its Apple Intelligence integration rather than a hardware bump.

Apple’s suite of AI features is expected to headline the marketing of the next-generation iPhone lineup, but customers will have to wait until iOS 18.1 launches later in the year to get a taste of what Apple Intelligence can do. 

While we won’t have long to wait after the launch of the iPhone 16 and 16 Pro to try out Apple Intelligence, some of the major features we’ve all been clamoring for won’t arrive until 2025, the biggest of which is Siri 2.0.

With that in mind, we’ll examine what the next generation of Siri will look like and why you should be excited to use the AI-powered voice assistant when it arrives next year.

Siri 2.0

(Image credit: Apple)

First of all, here’s a brief breakdown of the expected Apple Intelligence launch according to top insiders like Mark Gurman at Bloomberg. Apple Intelligence’s initial features, like proofreading, summarizing, phone call recording, Clean Up, and other useful tools, will arrive as part of iOS 18.1, which is set to launch later this year, potentially in October. 

That means that, on day one, iPhone 16 owners won’t have any Apple Intelligence features on their iOS 18-powered smartphone. It’s a bummer but considering iOS 18.1 is in beta right now, it hopefully won’t be too long before your whole contact list is sending AI-generated responses to AI-generated questions with Genmoji over iMessage.

In iOS 18.1, Siri will get an overhaul with a new stylish design that appears on the edges of your iPhone, pulsating as you speak. It looks gorgeous, and you’ll also be able to double-tap the bottom of your device to use ‘Type to Siri’ when speaking out loud, which is convenient. From my testing, Siri is definitely improved in iOS 18.1, but it’s nowhere near as clever as the Siri Apple showed off at WWDC in June. 

For that version of the voice assistant, which we’ll call 2.0, Gurman suggests they’ll “go into beta testing for developers in January and then debut publicly around the springtime — part of an iOS 18.4 upgrade that’s already in the works."

The wait for a smarter Siri will be worth it

(Image credit: Apple)

At WWDC, Craig Federighi, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Software Engineering, showed an example of Siri’s AI capabilities, pulling information from an event's poster to determine whether he could move his meeting and still make his daughter’s theater performance. Apple Intelligence was able to know who his daughter was and the event in question, and on top of all that, contacted those involved and created new calendar events. 

It was seriously impressive stuff and all possible thanks to the major improvements coming to Siri, which let the voice assistant become your on-device personal assistant. Apple made a huge deal about Siri using Apple Intelligence’s ability to read personal context, interact with what’s on your device’s display, and act wiser than we’ve ever seen before. Siri will ultimately, just like Gemini on the latest Google Pixel 9 phones, become the cornerstone of Apple Intelligence on Apple devices moving forward.

That said, until Siri 2.0 launches next year, Apple will have to make a conscious effort to explain to the mass market that Siri included in iOS 18.1 with its snazzy design overhaul isn’t the voice assistant we’ve been promised. 

Otherwise, Apple Intelligence’s launch could be met with disappointment as users use AI on iPhones for the first time only to quickly realize that, outside of some nifty new features, it isn’t quite the AI-fuelled future just yet. 

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Netflix's new Jeff Goldblum show, Kaos, features the actor playing god: quite literally, because he's the Greek god Zeus. The show is a very modern spin on one of mythology's oldest characters, and while the reviews have been decidedly mixed Kaos looks like it's another big hit for the streamer. And if myths are your thing, there's plenty more best Netflix shows to keep you entertained. Here are three of our favorites with god-like Rotten Tomatoes scores.

Blood of Zeus

Originally known as Gods & Heroes, this adult animated series is set in Ancient Greece and follows Heron, the demigod son of Zeus, as he tries to save both Olympus and Earth. Heron is an invention of the series, although there were plenty of demigods hinted at in the original myths. Season 1 has the full 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and so does the second season. Espinof says it's "one of the most entertaining animated series available". 

According to ScreenAnarchy, "Resplendent in darkly beautiful animation, Blood of Zeus feels like a graphic novel brought to life" while Paste Magazine would clearly give season 2 of the show more than 100% if they could: "We finally have a follow-up season that largely matches and, in many cases, surpasses its predecessor thanks to compelling bad guys, improved visuals, and similarly clever allusions to age-old narratives."

Ragnarok

Now in its third season, Ragnarok takes place in a small town poisoned by pollution and rattled by melting glaciers where the End Times feel imminent. It's a coming-of-age story with a dark mythological twist and some pitch-dark humor, centring on two young men who just happen to be the latest incarnations of Thor, god of thunder, and Loki, god of mischief. 

According to Book and Film Globe: "Ragnarok is awkward and bizarre at its best" and that's a compliment: the original myths are awkward and bizarre too, and "the young characters in this show actually feel genuinely angry in a way that's appropriate for youth, particularly in terms of the kinds of problems youths these days face".

The Sandman

We're in two minds about recommending this given the allegations against creator Neil Gaiman, but it'd be a shame if the great work and performances on display here were overshadowed by its writer. We rated The Sandman very highly, describing it as "oh-so-nearly brilliant" and paying particular regard to a "supremely talented cast who breathe life into The Sandman's eclectic cast of characters":

Tom Sturridge, Gwendoline Christie, Boyd Holbrook, Vivienne Acheampong, Jenna Coleman and Mason Alexander Park. It's the story of Morpheus, one of seven mythical beings, who becomes trapped on Earth and who discovers that the Dream Dimension he called home has fallen into ruin. 

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Swiss startup Apheros has unveiled a new way to address the global demand for data processing driven by the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and large language lodels (LLMs)

The company has developed a novel metal foam it says can revolutionize the cooling systems used in data centers.

As pressure on data centers continues to rise, cooling systems become more crucial for maintaining their optimal operation, often accounting for nearly 40% of their total energy consumption.

Efficient cooling solution for data centers

Data centers are increasingly tasked with handling complex AI workloads, which require specialized hardware such as GPUs and TPUs.

These components generate significant amounts of heat, necessitating advanced cooling systems to prevent overheating and ensure consistent performance. Traditionally, data centers have relied on heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems for cooling. However, as server densities increase, these air-based systems have become insufficient.

To address these limitations, more efficient cooling methods have emerged, including immersion cooling and direct-to-chip cooling. Immersion cooling involves submerging servers in a dielectric liquid, while direct-to-chip cooling circulates coolant through cold plates attached to the chips. Both methods rely on effective heat exchange to transfer heat away from the chips and into a cooling medium, which is where Apheros' metal foams come into play.

(Image credit: Apheros)

The metal foams are available in various compositions including copper, nickel, iron, and stainless steel. Their structure features completely open porosity with interconnected pores, resulting in a surface area that is 1000x higher compared to traditional solutions. The foams have densities ranging from 0.9 to 2.2 g/cm3.

Apheros uses a patent-pending, easily scalable powder-based method that operates at room temperature, which it says results in consistent properties and high open-cell porosity, based on established food production techniques like chocolate mousse and meringue, which allows for the creation of mechanically stable foams.

Apheros' metal foams have high thermal conductivity and can provide up to 90% improved heat exchange compared to traditional solutions. This allows for the use of higher coolant temperatures, leading to 10-20% energy savings in cooling systems, not only reducing operational costs but also supports the growing need for sustainable data center working.

(Image credit: Apheros)

The foams are optimal for passive cooling applications like heat sinks and are suitable for single-phase cold plates and immersion cooling in data centers. There is also potential for two-phase direct-to-chip cooling. Furthermore, the large surface area makes the foams suitable for use as electrodes and catalysts.

Julia Carpenter, co-founder and CEO of Apheros, told VentureBeat, “This ultra-high surface area metal foam goes directly on the chip and allows the liquid to flow through it. So, in the case of on-chip cooling, it acts like a kitchen sponge with really fine porosity, where the water or the coolant flows through and takes the heat away. This also occurs in immersion cooling.”

“The increase in heat transfer efficiency of Apheros foams directly translates into energy-saving benefits as it allows data centers to use higher coolant temperatures. This is crucial as it allows for heat exchange with outside air without using water-intensive evaporation towers or power-hungry processes like compression."

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Midjourney is famous for being among the better AI image generators, but now the company is looking to get into hardware, too. The company announced the shift in strategy on X (formerly Twitter) by soliciting people to apply to join the new team. 

There aren't a lot of details about what kind of hardware Midjourney is looking to build. In follow-up posts, Midjourney said it won't be a pendant and that it has "different form factors" under consideration. The company hinted it would create something more immersive, though it may have been a joke when one post described the hardware as something to "go inside of." 

Though Midjourney is looking to staff up for the hardware team, there is at least one major name on board. Midjourney hired former Apple Vision Pro headset Hardware Engineering Manager Ahmad Abbas as the head of its hardware division last year. Abbas has a history with Midjourney CEO David Holz dating back to their time together at Leap Motion and has the virtual reality and hardware credentials to support some ambitious ideas at Midjourney.

We're officially getting into hardware. If you're interested in joining the new team in San Francisco please email us at hardware@midjourney.comAugust 28, 2024

Midjourney Races On

Midjourney’s foray into hardware comes at a time when the company is facing stiff competition from other AI image creators, including Flux, which is embedded on X through the Grok AI chatbot, as well as the recently upgraded Ideogram. Diversifying into hardware makes sense on the face of it, but AI devices have had a rough path. That might be why Midjourney explicitly rejected the idea of a pendant, which is what the Humane AI Pin and new NotePin from Plaud.ai look like, and not too different from the Rabbit R1 device either.

Excitement among Midjourney’s fans aside, the company will have to do something to stand out as innovative if it wants its hardware to be interesting, useful, and well-received. Not even tech giants like Meta or Snapchat can reach their sales goals for AI-powered devices like their smart glasses. Still, it’s fun to imagine what the Midjourney's hardware might be Perhaps it would involve more direct interaction with the AI-generated visuals it produces or even crossing over into the much-vaunted and now quietly ignored realm of the metaverse.  

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Social Media and its Section 230 protection may have met its Waterloo. For most of the two-plus decades we've been using social media like X (nee Twitter), Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and others, they've operated under protections designed 25 years ago primarily to shield platforms like Compuserve and AOL.

Those protections, which are part of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, said that online computer services couldn't be held liable for content posted on their platforms by third parties. These services were like dumb, vast warehouses with shelves of information placed there by others. A warehouse doesn't create what's inside, it just accepts the content and gives consumers access. 

This was back in the days of AOL, which controlled the pages you saw using keywords, a rough organizing principle for such a vast amount of information. In some ways, early platforms like Prodigy, CompuServe, and AOL were just one pretty interface removed from the Bulletin Board Systems that preceded them.

Modern digital services, mainly social media, have one major difference: they no longer passively wait for you to discover content and make connections on your own. Everything is tailored based on custom algorithms. TikTok's vaunted For Your Page, X's For You page, Threads' For You Feed, Facebook's feed, Instagram's recommendations – all of them are driven by algorithms that learn your habits and then deliver other people's content based on those assumed interests. 

AOL wanted people to sign up and stay on, but it mostly kept its numbers up by managing churn. Almost as many people stopped paying for and using the service as signed up each month. That's why we all got so many disks and CDs in the mail, begging us to join.

Algorithms in control

These days, the platforms are mostly free. Ads and partner deals pay the bills, so it's crucial that eyeballs remain glued to each service. Hence, the algorithms that do the dirty work of keeping us all engaged.

While AOL, CompuServe, and even ISPs could fairly claim that they had no control over the content we saw online, and that the responsibility still fell on the shoulders of the content originators, the algorithms make the picture far murkier for modern social media, and perhaps even search engines like Google.

Section 230 has been under attack for years. I used to believe that it fairly protected all online services. When you look for someone to blame for seeing unwanted violent, hateful, perverse, or even pornographic content in your feed, the ultimate responsibility lies with the creator of that content and not the host.

I don't believe that anymore and, as far as I can tell, it looks like US courts could soon make a precedent on this point in a closely watched case.

Precedent could be set

In 2021, a 10-year-old girl, Nylah Andreson, found a viral meme in her TikTok feed. The video promoted something called "The Blackout Challenge." Social media is full of these viral challenges and the vast majority of them are harmless. 

This one was not. It promoted choking yourself until you black out.

Tragically, Nylah, according to the filing, died while attempting the challenge and her family has been suing TikTok ever since. While the lower courts dismissed the case, a US Court of Appeals ruled that Nylah's family could sue TikTok and specifically pointed to the TikTok algorithm as not being protected by the Federal-level Section 230.

From the ruling:

"TikTok makes choices about the content recommended and promoted to specific users, and by doing so, is engaged in its own first-party speech."

While no one person at TikTok curates content for anyone's feed, it is fair to call the algorithm the arbiter, and the algorithm is programmed by TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance (the company is currently being told to sell itself to US entities or face a ban in the States).

The Andreson case will continue and if Nylah's family wins its suit against TikTok, it could mean a rapid end of protections for all social media currently using algorithms to shape our feeds. If TikTok loses, the social media companies could be held liable the next time you see hate speech, violent imagery, pornography, or suggestions of dangerous actions. 

In a separate interview, Nylah's family said they wanted these Big Tech firms to be held accountable for the algorithms and to do more to protect their users.

The winds of change

Whatever the final result, any platform that programs an algorithm to analyze your interests, then caters content based on that analysis, has a responsibility to ensure that its algorithm can't deliver dangerous content.

In my own social media use, especially on TikTok, I've marveled at the algorithm's power and flexibility. It will endlessly fill my For Your Page, keeping me hooked for hours at a time. It does allow for personal curation, which mostly happens by searching for things of interest. 

When I stumble on something I like, I pay extra attention to it. I watch it more than once, pause the video, like it, share it, and then watch a few more videos in the same vein. If I do this a few times, I can shape my FYP feed so that I see more videos about people refurbishing old gadgets or making pasta.

However, these feeds have a needy side. They always throw in a "you might also like"  topic that's been popular with others. They're trying to prevent you from losing interest in your feed and the platform.

That's how, I believe, most people end up seeing things like violence and dangerous memes. You need to show the feed how much you dislike that content, then you can weed it out – assuming the algorithm allows it.

TikTok will fight this case, as other social media platforms have, but I think the tide has turned and a loss is possible. If that happens, TikTok, X, Threads, Facebook, Instagram, and other social media platforms may be forced to trash and recast all of their algorithms to ensure they don't repeat the mistakes of the past. Otherwise they could end up buried under costly lawsuits – which they might lose again – until the platforms succumb and disappear forever.

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Starting today all Claude.ai users – whether you pay for the service or enjoy it for free – can create and view Artifacts across the website, as well as Android and iOS apps, and it’s an upgrade ChatGPT is sorely lacking.

To catch you up to speed on this AI bot, Claude is a ChatGPT rival from Anthropic with similar features – such as being able to be prompted by text, files, and images, or a combination of the three. However, beyond privacy it doesn’t have much that truly sets it apart from the big-name AI – which is perhaps why Claude on iOS saw 157,000 total global downloads in its first week compared with ChatGPT’s 480,000 downloads in its first five days (via TechCrunch).

This is where Artifacts could lend a hand in helping Claude finally stand out. As explained by Anthropic in a blog post Artifacts turn conversations with its AI into a more ‘collaborative experience.’ With Artifacts turned on Claude will open a separate window that shows you the project it’s helping to create next to your prompts allowing you to see in real-time what your tweaks and edits look like without needing a third-party tool. 

To turn on Artifacts, simply navigate to your Claude.AI Profile Settings by clicking on your initials in the lower left corner of the screen, then tap Settings, and then toggle on (or off) the 'Enable Artifacts' option. When you're next using Claude it can start to generate Artifacts though there are some restrictions – such as the content needing to be "significant and self-contained" which Anthropic says is typically "over 15 lines of content." You can check out a more in-depth look at Anthropic's other Artifacts rules on the official FAQ.

Examples shown off in the Artifacts announcement video (shown above) include seeing a draft version of a website, or digital games like a virtual Rubik’s Cube. If you see any features you’d like to tweak you can alter your prompts and see how they affect what you’re working on in real time. That’s not offered by ChatGPT, and makes the process of iterating an idea with an AI (especially on mobile) a much more straightforward task.

With the rollout of Artifacts users on the Free and Pro plans can also choose to publish their Artifacts, which other users can subsequently remix – altering what others have made to suit their own ideas. Team plan users can share Artifacts too, but only with their teammates. This kind of collaborative AI design process is also something we’ve not really seen before, and we’re excited to see if Artifacts live up to Anthropic’s hype.

Nevertheless, coupled with its emphasis on privacy, Claude is shaping up to be a proper ChatGPT rival rather than a mere clone. We’ll have to watch this space but if you’ve been having issues with OpenAI’s bot and want to try something new, Claude could be the bot you need.

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More details of OpenAI’s secretive Project Strawberry have dropped, including its expected release date and the areas it will specialize in.

A recent report in The Information quotes “two people who have been involved in the effort”, and goes on to say that Project Strawberry could drop this Fall, and be better at math and programming than any chatbot we’ve seen so far. 

Previously it was thought that OpenAI’s Project Strawberry would be aimed at “deep research”, the ability to perform follow-up research on its own, without human intervention. While this still seems to be true, the additional information that Project Strawberry will do math better than we’ve seen before comes as welcome news to many, given that ChatGPT’s relationship with math so far has been, shall we say, fraught? For a while now, there have been plenty of memes of screenshots showing ChatGPT getting simple math problems wrong, leading many to ask why ChatGPT can’t do basic math. The reason for ChatGPT's mistakes in math is down to its training data not containing enough mathematical information, which, as we shall see, could be one of the improvements that Project Strawberry aims to make. Whatever the reason, something was definitely not adding up.

Improved ability to solve programming challenges is also welcome, but Project Strawberry’s scope is way beyond just being better at math. In demonstrations to other employees, people working on Project Strawbery have shown how the new AI is capable of more advanced levels of thinking enabling it to solve puzzles like the New York Times Connections, which is a complex word puzzle.

Sam Altman's mysterious strawberry tweet. (Image credit: X.com/Sam Altman)

Open AI CEO, Sam Altman kickstarted the rumors about Project Strawberry when he tweeted an image of some strawberries growing in a pot on August 7 with no further explanation than the text, “I love summer in the garden”. Since then there have been widely reported rumors that OpenAI was working on a powerful new LLLM, and had demonstrated a version of Project Strawberry to national security officials.

It’s still not clear when Project Strawberry will be released, but insiders think it could be as early as Fall (September or October) perhaps with a smaller version of it becoming a part of the ChatGPT chatbot in ChatGPT 5. If Project Strawberry doesn't end up as part of ChatGPT 5 then its ability to produce higher-quality data could be utilized in producing the vast amount of training data that Open AI’s next LLM will require if it’s going to reduce the amount of hallucinations (otherwise known as factual errors) that it's prone to.

ChatGPT recently, and quietly, released an improved version of its cutting-edge ChatGPT-4o model, which is much faster than the previous version, leading many to speculate that this may have been what Project Strawberry was all about. Now it seems that the project is set to bear even more exciting fruit.

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