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This Chinese Startup Is Winning the Open Source AI Race - WIRED (Full Access)   

Meta shook up the race to build more powerful artificial intelligence last July by releasing Llama 2, an AI model similar to the one behind ChatGPT, for anyone to download and use. In November, a little-known startup from Beijing, 01.AI, released its own open source model that outperforms Llama 2 and scores near the top of many leaderboards used to compare the power of AI models.

Within a few days of its release 01.AI’s model, Yi-34B, rocketed to the top spot on a ranking maintained by startup Hugging Face, which compares the abilities of AI language models across various standard benchmarks for automated intelligence. A few months on, modified versions of 01.AI’s model consistently score among the top models available to developers and companies on the Hugging Face list and other leaderboards. On Monday, the startup launched a “multimodal” AI model called Yi-VL-34B that can process images and discuss their contents.

OpenAI, Google, and most other AI companies tightly control their technology, but 01.AI is giving away its AI models in hopes of inspiring a loyal developer base that helps it hatch some killer AI apps. 01.AI, founded in June of last year, has raised $200 million in investment from Chinese ecommerce giant Alibaba and others and is valued at over $1 billion, according to Pitchbook.

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iPhone users should turn on Apple’s stolen device protection feature | TechCrunch - TechCrunch (Full Access)   

Apple released a new version of iOS yesterday with a handful of new features, such as collaborative playlists in Apple Music and a new Unity wallpaper for Black History Month. Another interesting new feature in iOS 17.3 is something called “stolen device protection.” It is disabled by default and I encourage iPhone users to turn it on when they have updated to iOS 17.3.

This feature is the result of an investigation from Joanna Stern and Nicole Nguyen for the Wall Street Journal. They found out that thieves have been stealing money and accessing sensitive data that is supposedly stored securely on an iPhone and the related iCloud account.

The reason why the passcode is such a critical piece of information is that you can use it to unlock a phone and change some settings. Even when Face ID (or Touch ID) is turned on, you can still use the passcode as a fallback method to unlock a phone and change settings.

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Cops Used DNA to Predict a Suspect’s Face—and Tried to Run Facial Recognition on It - WIRED (Full Access)   

In 2017, detectives working a cold case at the East Bay Regional Park District Police Department got an idea, one that might help them finally get a lead on the murder of Maria Jane Weidhofer. Officers had found Weidhofer, dead and sexually assaulted, at Berkeley, California's Tilden Regional Park in 1990. Nearly 30 years later, the department sent genetic information collected at the crime scene to Parabon NanoLabs—a company that says it can turn DNA into a face.

Parabon NanoLabs ran the suspect's DNA through its proprietary machine learning model. Soon, it provided the police department with something the detectives had never seen before: the face of a potential suspect, generated using only crime scene evidence.

The image Parabon NanoLabs produced, called a Snapshot Phenotype Report, wasn't a photograph. It was a 3D rendering that bridges the uncanny valley between reality and science fiction; a representation of how the company's algorithm predicted a person could look given genetic attributes found in the DNA sample.

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VR needs to build for its best use cases — not for all-around computing | TechCrunch - TechCrunch (Full Access)   

Apple’s Vision Pro launch resembles its Apple Watch debut in more ways than one, but to me the most telling similarity is in the marketing approach. Apple has striven to distance the Vision Pro from the existing crop of virtual reality (and even mixed reality) devices — many of which are objective failures — by exclusively focusing on the term “spatial computing”; however, the marketing seems focused on identifying a few key use cases it thinks will best drive consumer interest.

The company took the same approach with the Apple Watch, which like its face computer cousin, was more or less a solution in search of a problem when it originally debuted. Apple initially focused on a lot of features the Apple Watch has now actually done away with entirely, including its Digital Touch stuff that was meant to be a new paradigm for quickly communicating with friends and loved ones across distances. In general, it was presented as a relatively robust and full-featured platform nearly on par with the iPhone in terms of future potential.

The intervening years and generations of Apple Watch have seen it grow considerably in terms of pure technical capability and specifications, yet the marketing and focus around the product from Apple’s side has been more economical, spending outsized effort at the areas that seemed to resonate best with users — including health and wellness, and more recently, safety.

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