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Apple says it took a ‘responsible’ approach to training its Apple Intelligence models

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Apple published technical paper detailing the models developed for Apple Intelligence, a range of generative AI features coming to iOS, macOS, and iPadOS over the subsequent few months.

In the article, Apple opposes accusations that it took an ethically questionable approach to training a few of its models, reiterating that it didn’t use private user data but as a substitute relied on a combination of knowledge publicly available and licensed to Apple Intelligence.

“(The) pre-training dataset consists of… data we have licensed from publishers, curated publicly available or open datasets, and publicly available information crawled by our web crawler, Applebot,” Apple writes within the article. “Given our focus on protecting user privacy, we note that no private Apple user data is included in the data mix.”

Proof News in July reported that Apple used a dataset called The Pile, which comprises captions from a whole lot of 1000’s of YouTube videos, to train a family of models designed for on-device processing. Many YouTube creators whose captions were wolfed up by The Pile were unaware of this and didn’t consent to it; Apple later issued a statement saying it had no intention of using the models to power any AI features in its products.

A technical paper that offers a sneak peek on the models that Apple first unveiled at WWDC 2024 in June, titled Apple Foundation Models (AFM), emphasizes that the training data for the AFM models was acquired in a “responsible” manner — or at the least responsibly by Apple’s definition.

The training data for the AFM models includes publicly available Internet data, in addition to licensed data from undisclosed publishers. According to The New York Times, Apple I contacted several publishers in late 2023, including NBC, Condé Nast, and IAC, with multi-year deals price at the least $50 million to train models on publishers’ news archives. Apple’s AFM models were also trained on open-source code hosted on GitHub, specifically Swift, Python, C, Objective-C, C++, JavaScript, Java, and Go code.

Training models on code without permission, even open source, is a point of contention amongst developers. Some developers have argued that some open-source code bases are unlicensed or don’t allow AI training of their terms of use. However, Apple says it has “licensed” the code to try to include only repositories with minimal usage restrictions, reminiscent of those licensed under the MIT, ISC, or Apache licenses.

To boost the mathematical skills of the AFM models, Apple specifically included math questions and answers from web sites, math forums, blogs, tutorials, and seminars within the training set, according to the article. The company also used “high-quality, publicly available” data sets (which the article doesn’t specify) with “licenses that allow use to train… models,” filtered to remove sensitive information.

In total, the training dataset for the AFM models weighs in at about 6.3 trillion tokens. (Tokens are small pieces of knowledge which are typically easier for generative AI models to digest.) By comparison, that’s lower than half the variety of tokens — 15 trillion — that Meta used to train its flagship text-generating model, Llama 3.1 405B.

Apple acquired additional data, including human and artificial data, to refine the AFM models and attempt to mitigate any undesirable behaviors reminiscent of toxicity release.

“Our models are designed to help users perform on a regular basis tasks on Apple products in a way that’s well-established
in Apple’s core values ​​and rooted in our principles of responsible AI at every stage,” the corporate said.

There is not any hard evidence or shocking insights within the article, and that is due to its careful design. Rarely are such articles very revealing, due to pressures of competition, but in addition because revealing much of the data could get corporations into legal trouble.

Some corporations that train models by scraping public web data claim that their practice is protected by fair use doctrine. But that is a difficulty that is extremely controversial and the topic of a growing variety of lawsuits.

Apple notes within the article that it allows webmasters to block the crawler from scraping their data. But that puts individual creators in a difficult position. What’s an artist to do if, for instance, their portfolio is hosted on a site that refuses to block Apple from scraping their data?

Court battles will resolve the fate of generative AI models and the way they’re trained. For now, though, Apple is trying to position itself as an ethical player while avoiding unwanted legal scrutiny.

This article was originally published on : techcrunch.com
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Outboard motor startup Pure Watercraft is selling for parts

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Electric outboard startup Pure Watercraft is selling itself for parts

One promising player within the growing electric jet ski market is now not available and is being sold for parts.

Pure Watercraft was founded in 2011 with the goal of replacing gas-powered outboards with all-electric engines. We profiled the corporate in 2016 when it began taking pre-orders for its first industrial outboards, and in 2020, Pure raised $23 million to ramp up production. GM even acquired a 25% stake in Pure as a part of its big investment in electric infrastructure.

The company offered an electrical outboard and battery that may very well be mounted to a ship like several other outboard, or as a package cope with a rigid dinghy or pontoon. With prices starting from $21,600 for just the drive to just about $100,000 for the complete boat, Pure’s products were probably not cheaper than gas options, but they were definitely much cleaner and quieter—something boaters were increasingly opting for. (Not to say the dearth of gas costs.)

But the tough market has seemingly put a damper on Pure’s ambitions. The company entered bankruptcy (a style of alternative type of bankruptcy) in July, filing paperwork in King County, Washington, where it is headquartered. In August, it also announced a planned multimillion-dollar factory in West Virginia we cannot move forward.

The documents list a big selection of creditors, from individual investors to lending banks to the most important, GM, which put in about $35 million. But it wasn’t just money: Pure’s assets included about $25 million in “production support,” “know-how,” name licensing, and other types of noncash assets. (Such tangible investments are fairly common.)

On the assets side, we discover $3.6 million in “finished products,” presumably assembled engines and batteries manufactured by Pure, even though it’s unclear why that wasn’t distributed to the 900-plus individuals who put down the cash (or whether it’s going to be refunded). It also lists $25.5 million in “raw materials,” however it’s unclear what that may be—other documents detailing the sale of assets like boats and batteries don’t come near that quantity.

TechCrunch reached out to each Pure and GM for comment on the matter. GM has not provided any substantive response, and Pure has yet to reply.

The electric jet ski industry is growing but still in its infancy, with startups like Candela, Navier, FleetZero and Zin Boats all working toward cleaner, more efficient waterways and infrastructure.

This article was originally published on : techcrunch.com
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Is Your City a Sunset City? This Interactive Map Will Tell You –

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sundown. town m ap

Tougaloo College’s interactive map permits you to explore cities and communities across the United States, and discover in the event that they are considered sunset cities.


Some interactive map from Tougaloo College means that you can study cities and communities within the United States and discover in the event that they are considered sunset cities.

According to Britannicasunset in US history is a city that excluded people of color, most frequently African Americans, when the sun went down. The way people enforced these “rules” ranged from collective violence similar to public lynchings, discriminatory laws, and discrimination in open housing.

The map is inspired by a database introduced by the late historian and sociologist James W. Loewen. He is the writer of the classic bestseller. Tougaloo’s History and Social Justice section has included what describes as “the only cities in the world with a twilight register.”

“Sunset Town isn’t just a place where something racist happened,” researchers write on the database’s website. “It’s an entire community (and even a county) that was intentionally ‘all white’ for decades.”

The researchers add that “All white” is in quotation marks because some towns historically “allowed one black family to remain while expelling the rest.” They also indicate that some sunset towns also barred Chinese, Jews, Mexicans, Native Americans, and in some cases, Mormons.

How to read a map

For the interactive map, users should hover over a state to see an alphabetical list. The map key consists of six colours used as dots to discover cities which are definitely, probably, possibly, or unlikely to be sunset cities.

Black dots indicate black cities or municipalities. Places on the interactive map with a red flag indicate places of special importance.

On at first glance, the Midwest and The Plains region seems to have more dots indicating definite, probable, and possible sunset cities. The map shows that there just isn’t a single state in America that doesn’t have a suspected sunset city.

As for black cities and towns, the ten listed are Pembroke and Brooklyn, Illinois. Expose, Mound Bayou, New Africa, Renova, and Winstonville, all in Mississippi. Maryville, South Carolina; Martinsville, Indiana; and North Amityville, New York.


This article was originally published on : www.blackenterprise.com
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Adam Neumann’s Flow Startup Launches Co-Living Community in Saudi Arabia

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Flow, Adam Neumann’s co-living startup, has opened a 238-apartment complex in the Saudi capital of Riyadh, Forbes has some details. The opening included an Aztec-style hot chocolate ceremony and bags reading “holy s— I live.” Rent for furnished units starts at $3,500 a month and includes hotel services like laundry and housekeeping, in addition to amenities like swimming pools, coed gyms (unusual in Saudi Arabia) and bowling alleys. Flow is constructing three other properties with almost 1,000 apartments in Riyadh.

The company’s first, less luxurious properties opened in April in Fort Lauderdale and Miami.

Flow raised $350 million from Andreessen Horowitz in 2022. The funding raised questions given the troubled history of Neumann’s previous startup, WeWork. Once valued at $47 billion, WeWork filed for bankruptcy protection last yr and was eventually acquired by Yardi, an actual estate group, for $450 million.

This article was originally published on : techcrunch.com
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