1) Anthropic releases its most powerful language model yet:
Anthropic, the maker of the popular Claude AI chatbot, has released a new AI model called Claude 3.5 Sonnet, which claims to outperform GPT-4o and Gemini 1.5 Pro in a variety of tasks. The new model is available for free on the Claude website and iOS app. However, premium users will get up to 5x higher rate limits.
According to Anthropic, Claude 3.5 Sonnet outperforms GPT-4o and Gemini 1.5 Pro in most overall and vision benchmarks. The new language model comes with a 200K token context window, which translates to around 1500 words.
In terms of real-world use, Anthropic says Claude 3.5 is claimed to be better at understanding nuance, humour and complex instructions while also offering a more natural and relatable tone in its writing. Coding skills are also said to have improved dramatically, with Anthropic stating that Claude 3.5 Sonnet can independently write, edit and execute code with “sophisticated reasoning and troubleshooting capabilities”.
2) X won’t allow free users to start live streams:
Elon Musk-owned social media platform X announced on Friday that it will soon require users to have a premium subscription in order to start a livestream. The new update comes shortly after X made likes on the platform private for all users.
X did not give a timeline for when the livestream feature would go behind the paywall but said it would happen “soon”. Users will also no longer be able to start livestreams via the X integration on the encoder platform.
The news was confirmed in a post from the official ‘@live’ profile on X, which read:, “Starting soon, only Premium subscribers will be able to livestream (create live video streams) on X. This includes going live from an encoder with X integration. Upgrade to Premium to continue going live,”
3) Apple explains why iOS 18 AI features are not coming to older devices:
Apple announced its foray into the world of artificial intelligence with the arrival of Apple Intelligence at the WWDC 2024 event earlier this month. Apple Intelligence brings with it a host of nifty features, including a revamped Siri interface that can hold conversations for longer periods of time, Photos app makeover, integration with ChatGPT, and the ability to generate images and emoji.
While most of the new AI features aren’t likely to arrive this year, when they do, they’ll be limited to the iPhone 15 Pro and later models. This means that even the latest iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Plus will not get the new AI features.
Speaking to John Gruber of the Daring Fireball podcast, John Giannandrea (Apple’s vice president of machine learning and AI strategy) explained the reason behind why Apple’s new AI features are not coming to older devices. He said while the AI models that power Apple Intelligence could theoretically run a very old device, they would be so slow that they would not be useful at all.
Giannandrea said, “The inference of large language models is incredibly computationally expensive… You could in theory run these models on a very old device, but it would be so slow that it would not be useful”
4) WhatsApp could soon rollout a new QR code feature for transferring chats:
Meta-owned personal messaging platform WhatsApp is reportedly gearing up to introduce a slew of new updates aimed at enhancing user experience, with a standout feature that simplifies chat history transfers between devices through QR codes.
According to WABetaInfo, this innovative chat transfer capability is part of the latest beta version, 2.24.9.19, and promises to make moving chat data from one device to another significantly easier, bypassing the need for Google Drive.
Reportedly, the upcoming feature is likely to leverage QR codes to directly transfer chat data between devices. When a user upgrades to a new phone, WhatsApp will generate a QR code on the old device, encapsulating all chat history and data.
5) Adobe leverages AI to allow users to create and edit images within PDFs:
Adobe is adding some new generative AI features to Acrobat Reader to help users be more creative and productive with digital documents. The company will now allow users to create and edit images in PDFs using just text prompts.
Powered by Firefly AI, Adobe says Acrobat is the first application to offer in-app generative AI capabilities. The new update adds two new features: Edit Image in Acrobat and Generate Image in Acrobat.
The Edit Image feature will give users access to tools such as generative fill, remove background, erase and crop. It will allow users to erase unwanted objects from images, remove backgrounds and add new images directly from the Acrobat Reader application.
Meanwhile, the Generate Image feature allows users to add new images to their PDFs using the power of the Firefly Image 3 model. With this feature, users will be able to adjust the size and style of an image and add it to any part of a document.