Author: Computerworld
Microsoft this week pushed out 61 Patch Tuesday updates with no reports of public disclosures or other zero-days affecting the larger ecosystem (Windows, Office, .NET). Though there are three updated packages from February, they’re just informational changes with no further action is required.The team at Readiness has crafted this helpful infographic outlining the risks associated with each of the March updates.Known issues Each month, Microsoft publishes a list of known issues that relate to the operating system and platforms included in the latest update cycle; for March, there are two minor issues reported: Windows devices using more than one monitor might experience…
Apple has quietly acquired yet another AI startup, Canada’s Darwin AI, a company focused on machine vision intelligence, smart manufacturing, improved machine learning efficiency and edge-based intelligence.All of these seem critical to Apple’s future plans.Who is Darwin AI?As reported by Bloomberg, several members of the Darwin AI team have now joined Apple. Ostensibly a visual quality inspection company, Darwin AI was developed to provide electronics manufacturers with a tool to improve product quality and production efficiency.A note on Arm.com suggests DarwinAI’s patented Explainable AI (XAI) platform was in use across a number of Fortune 500 companies, including Audi, BMW, Honeywell, and Arm.…
Over the next two years, generative artificial intelligence (genAI) will force organizations to address a myriad of fast-evolving issues, from data security to tech review boards, new services, and — most importantly — upskilling employees.By 2027, AI will represent 29% of organizational spend, according to IDC President Crawford Del Prete, who spoke Thursday at the IDC Directions conference in Boston.This year alone, the average enterprise will spend $28 million dollars on genAI initiatives, based on data from a February IDC survey. In all, organizations will spend $150 billion on genAI tech initiatives by 2027, with a total economic impact of…
There appear to be a couple of snags in the latest iteration of macOS Sonoma that are upsetting to Apple admins: Some USB hubs are no longer recognized by the Mac and a popular command tool used to restart services on remote Apple devices is no longer supported.Why isn’t my USB hub working?The USB hub issue is emerging across the Apple web at the moment, including on Apple’s own support forums and Reddit. The problem isn’t consistent — most users aren’t affected — and it seems to relate to Macs running the latest version of Sonoma and third-party monitors equipped with…
Anthropic has launched its most affordable and fastest AI model — Claude 3 Haiku, which the company claims is up to half the cost of GPT 3.5 and works up to three times faster than existing models. This newest addition to the Claude model family joins the ranks of Claude 3 Opus and Claude 3 Sonnet.Claude 3 Haiku is a cost-effective AI solution offered by Anthropic with a fee of $0.25 per token for input and $1.25 for output. This makes it accessible to enterprises of all sizes, Anthropic wrote in a blog post.Anthropic argued that Haiku is not only affordable…
As generative AI (genAI) continues to move into broad use by the public and various enterprises, its adoption is sometimes plagued by errors, copyright infringement issues and outright hallucinations, undermining trust in its accuracy.One study from Stanford University found genAI makes mistakes when answering legal questions 75% of the time. “For instance,” the study found, “in a task measuring the precedential relationship between two different [court] cases, most LLMs do no better than random guessing.”The problem is that the large language models (LLMs) behind genAI technology, like OpenAI’s GPT-4, Meta’s Llama 2 and Google’s PaLM 2, are not only amorphous…
Now that Apple has opened up choice to third-party browsers as part of its efforts to comply with the EU’s Digital Markets Act, we can expect a new focus on browser market share in the near future.Third-party browsers have been supported in iOS since version 14. What’s changed is that Apple must now offer EU users a choice of which browser becomes the default when they use their device. Apple clearly didn’t want to do this as WebKit (which drives Safari) is fundamental to many of the technologies and solutions the company packs inside its iPhones. (I think it’s likely…
Look, we need to talk: The PC industry has a big problem. And it’s not hardware makers’ fault — it’s Microsoft’s responsibility. The hardware is here: Intel, AMD, Nvidia, and PC makers have delivered on their end.Now, everyone is waiting for Microsoft to catch up and make Windows truly shine on these “AI PCs.” Can the company deliver something compelling in time?Want to stay up to date on Windows — and PCs? My free Windows Intelligence newsletter delivers all the best Windows tips and PC news straight to your inbox. Plus, you’ll get free copies of Paul Thurrott’s Windows 11…
How did we get to the point where the tech industry is in the user-data business instead of the tech business?Every day, Google collects data on billions of people worldwide, according to The Regulatory Review. The dodge that users gain some benefit from ad targeting is fallacy. For example, if Google’s search were decoupled from its advertising, there would be less chance for users to be misled by ignored search terms and seemingly hard-wired results.There’s nothing beneficial to the user about Google’s sponsored search results. That’s also true of the adjacent Google ads that follow you around from site to…
The US government is lobbying Council of Europe members to weaken an international treaty on human rights and AI software by exempting private vendors from compliance.Diplomats are meeting in Strasbourg, France, this week to create a final version of the treaty, which would require organizations using AI to respect human rights and adhere to democratic principles. But the US, a non-voting observer of the Council of Europe, appears to be close in its efforts to water down the treaty, Politico reported.The US, with backing from the UK, a member state, and fellow observer states Canada and Japan, is seeking to…