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Humans get a real buzz from the virtual world of gaming and augmented reality but now scientists have trialled the use of these new-age technologies on small animals, to test the reactions of tiny hoverflies and even crabs. In a bid to comprehend the aerodynamic powers of flying insects and other little-understood animal behaviors, the study is gaining new perspectives on how invertebrates respond to, interact with and navigate virtual 'worlds' created by advanced entertainment technology.

A new article examines the convergence of physics, chemistry, and AI, highlighted by recent Nobel Prizes. It traces the historical development of neural networks, emphasizing the role of interdisciplinary research in advancing AI. The authors advocate for nurturing AI-enabled polymaths to bridge the gap between theoretical advancements and practical applications, driving progress toward artificial general intelligence.

To assist humans with household chores and other everyday manual tasks, robots should be able to effectively manipulate objects that vary in composition, shape and size. The manipulation skills of robots have improved significantly over the past few years, in part due to the development of increasingly sophisticated cameras and tactile sensors.

Institutions using predictive AI in education are already seeing adaptive learning platforms that make robotics training more accessible and relevant to evolving industry needs.

Amazon has introduced a handful of robots in its warehouses that the e-commerce giant says will improve efficiency and reduce employee injuries.

Physical reservoir computing (PRC) utilizing synaptic devices shows significant promise for edge AI. Researchers from the Tokyo University of Science have introduced a novel self-powered dye-sensitized solar cell-based device that mimics human synaptic behavior for efficient edge AI processing, inspired by the eye's afterimage phenomenon. The device has light intensity-controllable time constants, helping it achieve high performance during time-series data processing and motion recognition tasks. This work is a major step toward multiple time-scale PRC.

The genome has space for only a small fraction of the information needed to control complex behaviors. So then how, for example, does a newborn sea turtle instinctually know to follow the moonlight? Neuroscientists have devised a potential explanation for this age-old paradox. Their ideas should lead to faster, more evolved forms of artificial intelligence.

A pair of engineers at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) has designed, built and tested a feathered, hawk-inspired drone capable of carrying out banking maneuvers without using its wings.

A team of roboticists and engineers affiliated with several institutions in South Korea, working with the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, has developed a tiny soft robot that is capable of manipulating multiple types of hard and soft objects. Their results are published in the journal Science Advances.

High-resolution samples from Stability AI’s 8B rectified flow model

In this article, we delve into ten groundbreaking research papers that expand the frontiers of AI across diverse domains, including large language models, multimodal processing, video generation and editing, and the creation of interactive environments. Produced by leading research labs such as Meta, Google DeepMind, Stability AI, Anthropic, and Microsoft, these studies showcase innovative approaches, including scaling down powerful models for efficient on-device use, extending multimodal reasoning across millions of tokens, and achieving unmatched fidelity in video and audio synthesis.

If you’d like to skip around, here are the research papers we featured:

1. Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces by Albert Gu at Carnegie Mellon University and Tri Dao at Princeton University
2. Genie: Generative Interactive Environments by Google DeepMind
3. Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis by Stability AI
4. Accurate Structure Prediction of Biomolecular Interactions with AlphaFold 3 by Google DeepMind
5. Phi-3 Technical Report: A Highly Capable Language Model Locally on Your Phone by Microsoft
6. Gemini 1.5: Unlocking Multimodal Understanding Across Millions of Tokens of Context by Gemini team at Google
7. The Claude 3 Model Family: Opus, Sonnet, Haiku by Anthropic
8. The Llama 3 Herd of Models by Meta
9. SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videos by Meta
10. Movie Gen: A Cast of Media Foundation Models by Meta

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Top AI Research Papers 2024

1. Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces

This paper presents Mamba, a groundbreaking neural architecture for sequence modeling designed to address the computational inefficiencies of Transformers while matching or exceeding their modeling capabilities. 

Key Contributions

• Selective Mechanism: Mamba introduces a novel selection mechanism within state space models, tackling a significant limitation of earlier approaches – their inability to efficiently select relevant data in an input-dependent manner. By parameterizing model components based on the input, this mechanism enables the filtering of irrelevant information and the indefinite retention of critical context, excelling in tasks that require content-aware reasoning.
• Hardware-Aware Algorithm: To support the computational demands of the selective mechanism, Mamba leverages a hardware-optimized algorithm that computes recurrently using a scan method instead of convolutions. This approach avoids inefficiencies associated with materializing expanded states, significantly improving performance on modern GPUs. The result is true linear scaling in sequence length and up to 3× faster computation on A100 GPUs compared to prior state space models.
• Simplified Architecture: Mamba simplifies deep sequence modeling by integrating previous state space model designs with Transformer-inspired MLP blocks into a unified, homogeneous architecture. This streamlined design eliminates the need for attention mechanisms and traditional MLP blocks while leveraging selective state spaces, delivering both efficiency and robust performance across diverse data modalities.

Results

• Synthetics: Mamba excels in synthetic tasks like selective copying and induction heads, showcasing capabilities critical to large language models. It achieves indefinite extrapolation, successfully solving sequences longer than 1 million tokens.
• Audio and Genomics: Mamba outperforms state-of-the-art models such as SaShiMi, Hyena, and Transformers in audio waveform modeling and DNA sequence analysis. It delivers notable improvements in pretraining quality and downstream metrics, including a more than 50% reduction in FID for challenging speech generation tasks. Its performance scales effectively with longer contexts, supporting sequences of up to 1 million tokens.
• Language Modeling: Mamba is the first linear-time sequence model to achieve Transformer-quality performance in both pretraining perplexity and downstream evaluations. It scales effectively to 1 billion parameters, surpassing leading baselines, including advanced Transformer-based architectures like LLaMa. Notably, Mamba-3B matches the performance of Transformers twice its size, offers 5× faster generation throughput, and achieves higher scores on tasks such as common sense reasoning.

2. Genie: Generative Interactive Environments

Genie, developed by Google DeepMind, is a pioneering generative AI model designed to create interactive, action-controllable environments from unannotated video data. Trained on over 200,000 hours of publicly available internet gameplay videos, Genie enables users to generate immersive, playable worlds using text, sketches, or images as prompts. Its architecture integrates a spatiotemporal video tokenizer, an autoregressive dynamics model, and a latent action model to predict frame-by-frame dynamics without requiring explicit action labels. Genie represents a foundation world model with 11B parameters, marking a significant advance in generative AI for open-ended, controllable virtual environments.

Key Contributions

• Latent Action Space: Genie introduces a fully unsupervised latent action mechanism, enabling the generation of frame-controllable environments without ground-truth action labels, expanding possibilities for agent training and imitation.
• Scalable Spatiotemporal Architecture: Leveraging an efficient spatiotemporal transformer, Genie achieves linear scalability in video generation while maintaining high fidelity across extended interactions, outperforming prior video generation methods.
• Generalization Across Modalities: The model supports diverse inputs, such as real-world photos, sketches, or synthetic images, to create interactive environments, showcasing robustness to out-of-distribution prompts.

Results

• Interactive World Creation: Genie generates diverse, high-quality environments from unseen prompts, including creating game-like behaviors and understanding physical dynamics.
• Robust Performance: It demonstrates superior performance in video fidelity and controllability metrics compared to state-of-the-art models, achieving consistent latent actions across varied domains, including robotics.
• Agent Training Potential: Genie’s latent action space enables imitation from unseen videos, achieving high performance in reinforcement learning tasks without requiring annotated action data, paving the way for training generalist agents.

3. Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis

This paper by Stability AI introduces advancements in rectified flow models and transformer-based architectures to improve high-resolution text-to-image synthesis. The proposed approach combines novel rectified flow training techniques with a multimodal transformer architecture, achieving superior text-to-image generation quality compared to existing state-of-the-art models. The study emphasizes scalability and efficiency, training models with up to 8B parameters that demonstrate state-of-the-art performance in terms of visual fidelity and prompt adherence.

Key Contributions

• Enhanced Rectified Flow Training: Introduces tailored timestep sampling strategies, improving the performance and stability of rectified flow models over traditional diffusion-based methods. This enables faster sampling and better image quality.
• Novel Multimodal Transformer Architecture: Designs a scalable architecture that separates text and image token processing with independent weights, enabling bidirectional information flow for improved text-to-image alignment and prompt understanding.
• Scalability and Resolution Handling: Implements efficient techniques like QK-normalization and resolution-adaptive timestep shifting, allowing the model to scale effectively to higher resolutions and larger datasets without compromising stability or quality.

Results

• State-of-the-Art Performance: The largest model with 8B parameters outperforms open-source and proprietary text-to-image models, including DALLE-3, on benchmarks like GenEval and T2I-CompBench in categories such as visual quality, prompt adherence, and typography generation.
• Improved Sampling Efficiency: Demonstrates that larger models require fewer sampling steps to achieve high-quality outputs, resulting in significant computational savings.
• High-Resolution Image Synthesis: Achieves robust performance at resolutions up to 1024×1024 pixels, excelling in human evaluations across aesthetic and compositional metrics.

4. Accurate Structure Prediction of Biomolecular Interactions with AlphaFold 3

AlphaFold 3 (AF3), developed by Google DeepMind, significantly extends the capabilities of its predecessors by introducing a unified deep-learning framework for high-accuracy structure prediction across diverse biomolecular complexes, including proteins, nucleic acids, small molecules, ions, and modified residues. Leveraging a novel diffusion-based architecture, AF3 advances beyond specialized tools, achieving state-of-the-art accuracy in protein-ligand, protein-nucleic acid, and antibody-antigen interaction predictions. This positions AF3 as a versatile and powerful tool for advancing molecular biology and therapeutic design.

Key Contributions

• Unified Model for Diverse Interactions: AF3 predicts structures of complexes involving proteins, nucleic acids, ligands, ions, and modified residues. 
• Diffusion-Based Architecture: In AF3, AlphaFold 2’s evoformer module is replaced with the simpler pairformer module, significantly reducing the reliance on multiple sequence alignments (MSAs). AF3 directly predicts raw atom coordinates using a diffusion-based approach, improving scalability and handling of complex molecular graphs.
• Generative Training Framework: The new approach employs a multiscale diffusion process for learning structures at different levels, from local stereochemistry to global configurations. It mitigates hallucination in disordered regions through cross-distillation with AlphaFold-Multimer predictions.
• Improved Computational Efficiency: The authors suggested an approach to reduce stereochemical complexity and eliminate special handling of bonding patterns, enabling efficient prediction of arbitrary chemical components.

Results

• AF3 demonstrates superior accuracy on protein-ligand complexes (PoseBusters set), outperforming traditional docking tools.
• It achieves higher precision in protein-nucleic acid and RNA structure prediction compared to RoseTTAFold2NA and other state-of-the-art models.
• The model demonstrates a substantial improvement in predicting antibody-protein interfaces, showing a marked enhancement over AlphaFold-Multimer v2.3.

5. Phi-3 Technical Report: A Highly Capable Language Model Locally on Your Phone

With Phi-3, the Microsoft research team introduces a groundbreaking advancement: a powerful language model compact enough to run natively on modern smartphones while maintaining capabilities on par with much larger models like GPT-3.5. This breakthrough is achieved by optimizing the training dataset rather than scaling the model size, resulting in a highly efficient model that balances performance and practicality for deployment.

Key Contributions

• Compact and Efficient Architecture: Phi-3-mini is 3.8B-parameter model trained on 3.3 trillion tokens, capable of running on devices like iPhone 14 entirely offline with over 12 tokens generated per second.
• Innovative Training Methodology: With focus on “data optimal regime,” the team meticulously curated high-quality web and synthetic data to enhance reasoning and language understanding. The model delivers significant improvements in logical reasoning and niche skills due to filtering data for quality over quantity, deviating from traditional scaling laws.
• Long Context: The suggested approach Incorporates the LongRope method to expand context lengths up to 128K tokens, with strong results in long-context benchmarks like RULER and RepoQA.

Results

• Benchmark Performance: Phi-3-mini achieves 69% on MMLU and 8.38 on MT-Bench, rivaling GPT-3.5 while being an order of magnitude smaller. Phi-3-small (7B) and Phi-3-medium (14B) outperform other open-source models, scoring 75% and 78% on MMLU, respectively.
• Real-World Applicability: Phi-3-mini successfully runs high-quality language processing tasks directly on mobile devices, paving the way for accessible, on-device AI.
• Scalability Across Models: Larger variants (Phi-3.5-MoE and Phi-3.5-Vision) extend the capabilities into multimodal and expert-based applications, excelling in language reasoning, multimodal input, and visual comprehension tasks. The models achieve notable multilingual capabilities, particularly in languages like Arabic, Chinese, and Russian.

6. Gemini 1.5: Unlocking Multimodal Understanding Across Millions of Tokens of Context

In this paper, the Google Gemini team introduces Gemini 1.5, a family of multimodal language models that significantly expand the boundaries of long-context understanding and multimodal reasoning. These models, Gemini 1.5 Pro and Gemini 1.5 Flash, achieve unprecedented performance in handling multimodal data, recalling and reasoning over up to 10 million tokens, including text, video, and audio. Building on the Gemini 1.0 series, Gemini 1.5 incorporates innovations in sparse and dense scaling, training efficiency, and serving infrastructure, offering a generational leap in capability.

Key Contributions

• Long-Context Understanding: Gemini 1.5 models support context windows up to 10 million tokens, enabling the processing of entire long documents, hours of video, and days of audio with near-perfect recall (>99% retrieval).
• Multimodal Capability: The models natively integrate text, vision, and audio inputs, allowing seamless reasoning over mixed-modality inputs for tasks such as video QA, audio transcription, and document analysis.
• Efficient Architectures: Gemini 1.5 Pro features a sparse mixture-of-experts (MoE) Transformer architecture, achieving superior performance with reduced training compute and serving latency. Gemini 1.5 Flash is optimized for efficiency and latency, offering high performance in compact and faster-to-serve configurations.
• Innovative Applications: The models excel in novel tasks such as learning new languages and performing translations with minimal in-context data, including endangered languages like Kalamang.

Results

• Benchmark Performance: Gemini 1.5 models surpass Gemini 1.0 and other competitors on reasoning, multilinguality, and multimodal benchmarks. They consistently achieve better scores than GPT-4 Turbo and Claude 3 in real-world and synthetic evaluations, including near-perfect retrieval in “needle-in-a-haystack” tasks up to 10 million tokens.
• Real-World Impact: The evaluations demonstrated that Gemini 1.5 models can reduce task completion time by 26–75% across professional use cases, highlighting its utility in productivity tools.
• Scalability and Generalization: The models maintain performance across scales, with Gemini 1.5 Pro excelling in high-resource environments and Gemini 1.5 Flash delivering strong results in low-latency, resource-constrained settings.

7. The Claude 3 Model Family: Opus, Sonnet, Haiku

Anthropic introduces Claude 3, a groundbreaking family of multimodal models that advance the boundaries of language and vision capabilities, offering state-of-the-art performance across a broad spectrum of tasks. Comprising three models – Claude 3 Opus (most capable), Claude 3 Sonnet (balanced between capability and speed), and Claude 3 Haiku (optimized for efficiency and cost) – the Claude 3 family integrates advanced reasoning, coding, multilingual understanding, and vision analysis into a cohesive framework.

Key Contributions

• Unified Multimodal Processing: The research introduces a seamless integration of text and visual inputs (e.g., images, charts, and videos), expanding the model’s ability to perform complex multimodal reasoning and analysis without requiring task-specific finetuning.
• Long-Context Model Design: Claude 3 Haiku model potentially provides support for context lengths up to 1 million tokens (with the initial production release supporting up to 200K tokens) through optimized memory management and retrieval techniques, enabling detailed cross-document analysis and retrieval at unprecedented scales. The suggested approach combines dense scaling with memory-efficient architectures to ensure high recall and reasoning performance even over extended inputs.
• Constitutional AI Advancements: The research further builds on Anthropic’s Constitutional AI framework by incorporating a broader set of ethical principles, including inclusivity for individuals with disabilities. The alignment strategies are balanced better for helpfulness and safety, reducing refusal rates for benign prompts while maintaining robust safeguards against harmful or misleading content.
• Enhanced Multilingual: The research paper suggests new training paradigms for multilingual tasks, focusing on cross-linguistic consistency and reasoning.
• Enhanced Coding Capabilities: The advanced techniques for programming-related tasks were developed to improve understanding and generation of structured data formats.

Results

• Benchmark Performance: Claude 3 Opus achieves state-of-the-art results in MMLU (88.2% on 5-shot CoT) and GPQA, showcasing exceptional reasoning capabilities. Claude models also set new records in coding benchmarks, including HumanEval and MBPP, significantly surpassing the predecessors and competing models.
• Multimodal Excellence: Claude models also excel in visual reasoning tasks like AI2D science diagram interpretation (88.3%) and document understanding, demonstrating robustness across diverse multimodal inputs.
• Long-Context Recall: Claude 3 Opus achieves near-perfect recall (99.4%) in “Needle in a Haystack” evaluations, demonstrating its ability to handle extensive datasets with precision.

8. The Llama 3 Herd of Models

Meta’s Llama 3 introduces a new family of foundation models designed to support multilingual, multimodal, and long-context processing with significant enhancements in performance and scalability. The flagship model, a 405B-parameter dense Transformer, demonstrates competitive capabilities comparable to state-of-the-art models like GPT-4, while offering improvements in efficiency, safety, and extensibility.

Key Contributions

• Scalable Multilingual and Multimodal Design: Trained on 15 trillion tokens with a multilingual and multimodal focus, Llama 3 supports up to 128K token contexts and integrates image, video, and speech inputs via a compositional approach. The models provide robust multilingual capabilities, with enhanced support for low-resource languages using an expanded token vocabulary.
• Advanced Long-Context Processing: The research team implemented grouped query attention (GQA) and optimized positional embeddings, enabling efficient handling of up to 128K token contexts. Gradual context scaling ensures stability and high recall for long-document analysis and retrieval.
• Simplified Yet Effective Architecture: The models adopt a standard dense Transformer design with targeted optimizations such as grouped query attention and enhanced RoPE embeddings, avoiding the complexity of mixture-of-experts (MoE) models for training stability.
• Enhanced Data Curation and Training Methodology: The researchers employed advanced preprocessing pipelines and quality filtering, leveraging model-based classifiers to ensure high-quality, diverse data inputs.
• Post-Training Optimization for Real-World Use: Post-training strategy Integrates supervised finetuning, direct preference optimization, rejection sampling, and reinforcement from human feedback to improve alignment, instruction-following, and factuality.

Results

• Benchmark Performance: Llama 3 achieves near state-of-the-art results across benchmarks such as MMLU, HumanEval, and GPQA, with competitive accuracy in both general and specialized tasks. It also excels in multilingual reasoning tasks, surpassing prior models on benchmarks like MGSM and GSM8K.
• Multimodal and Long-Context Achievements: The models demonstrate exceptional multimodal reasoning, including image and speech integration, with preliminary experiments showing competitive results in vision and speech tasks. Also, Llama 3 405B model handles “needle-in-a-haystack” retrieval tasks across 128K token contexts with near-perfect accuracy.
• Real-World Applicability: Llama 3’s multilingual and long-context capabilities make it well-suited for applications in research, legal analysis, and multilingual communication, while its multimodal extensions expand its utility in vision and audio tasks.

9. SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videos

Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM 2) by Meta extends the capabilities of its predecessor, SAM, to the video domain, offering a unified framework for promptable segmentation in both images and videos. With a novel data engine, a streaming memory architecture, and the largest video segmentation dataset to date, SAM 2 redefines the landscape of interactive and automated segmentation for diverse applications.

Key Contributions

• Unified Image and Video Segmentation: SAM 2 introduces Promptable Visual Segmentation (PVS), generalizing SAM’s image segmentation to video by leveraging point, box, or mask prompts across frames. The model predicts “masklets,” spatial-temporal masks that track objects throughout a video.
• Streaming Memory Architecture: Equipped with a memory attention module, SAM 2 stores and references previous frame predictions to maintain object context across frames, improving segmentation accuracy and efficiency. The streaming design processes videos frame-by-frame in real-time, generalizing the SAM architecture to support temporal segmentation tasks.
• Largest Video Segmentation Dataset (SA-V): SAM 2’s data engine enables the creation of the SA-V dataset, with over 35M masks across 50,900 videos, 53× larger than previous datasets. This dataset includes diverse annotations of whole objects and parts, significantly enhancing the model’s robustness and generalization.

Results

• Performance Improvements: SAM 2 achieves state-of-the-art results in video segmentation, with superior performance on 17 video datasets and 37 image segmentation datasets compared to SAM. It also outperforms baseline models like XMem++ and Cutie in zero-shot video segmentation, requiring fewer interactions and achieving higher accuracy.
• Speed and Scalability: The new model demonstrates 6× faster processing than SAM on image segmentation tasks while maintaining high accuracy.
• Fairness and Robustness: The SA-V dataset includes geographically diverse videos and exhibits minimal performance discrepancies across age and perceived gender groups, improving fairness in predictions.

10. Movie Gen: A Cast of Media Foundation Models

Meta’s Movie Gen introduces a comprehensive suite of foundation models capable of generating high-quality videos with synchronized audio, supporting various tasks such as video editing, personalization, and audio synthesis. The models leverage large-scale training data and innovative architectures, achieving state-of-the-art performance across multiple media generation benchmarks.

Key Contributions

• Unified Media Generation: A 30B parameter Movie Gen Video model trained jointly for text-to-image and text-to-video generation, capable of producing HD videos up to 16 seconds long in various aspect ratios and resolutions. A 13B parameter Movie Gen Audio model that generates synchronized 48kHz cinematic sound effects and music from video or text prompts, blending diegetic and non-diegetic sounds seamlessly.
• Video Personalization: An introduced Personalized Movie Gen Video enables video generation conditioned on a text prompt and an image of a person, maintaining identity consistency while aligning with the prompt.
• Instruction-Guided Video Editing: The authors also introduced Movie Gen Edit model for precise video editing using textual instructions.
• Technical Innovations: The research team developed a temporal autoencoder for spatio-temporal compression, enabling the efficient generation of long and high-resolution videos by reducing computational demands. They implemented Flow Matching as a training objective, providing improved stability and quality in video generation while outperforming traditional diffusion-based methods. Additionally, the researchers introduced a spatial upsampling model designed to efficiently produce 1080p HD videos, further advancing the model’s scalability and performance.
• Large Curated Dataset: The Meta team also presented a curated dataset of over 100 million video-text pairs and 1 billion image-text pairs, along with specialized benchmarks (Movie Gen Video Bench and Movie Gen Audio Bench) for evaluation.

Results

• State-of-the-Art Performance: Movie Gen outperforms leading models like Runway Gen3 and OpenAI Sora in text-to-video and video editing tasks, setting new standards for quality and fidelity. It also achieves superior audio generation performance compared to PikaLabs and ElevenLabs in sound effects and music synthesis.
• Diverse Capabilities: The introduced model generates visually consistent, high-quality videos that capture complex motion, realistic physics, and synchronized audio. It excels in video personalization, creating videos aligned with the user’s reference image and prompt.

Shaping the Future of AI: Concluding Thoughts

The research papers explored in this article highlight the remarkable strides being made in artificial intelligence across diverse fields. From compact on-device language models to cutting-edge multimodal systems and hyper-realistic video generation, these works showcase the innovative solutions that are redefining what AI can achieve. As the boundaries of AI continue to expand, these advancements pave the way for a future of smarter, more versatile, and accessible AI systems, promising transformative possibilities across industries and disciplines.

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What’s New in iOS 18: The Must-Know Top Features

Finally, iOS 18 has arrived, and you now know how to make your iPhone more powerful, more secure, and easier to use in ways you never thought possible. Whether you are a tech enthusiast or just an iPhone user looking to upgrade or curious about what is new in this latest update. We have something to share on this. From improved privacy controls to smarter widgets, one feels that Apple solved all the things other than giving users a lot more ways to customize their devices and improve their lives. Following are a few top features of the newest iOS 18 and learn how these new features will help enjoy a seamless iPhone experience.

Top 10 Features of iOS 18 Update: Must Know

1. Apple Intelligence Integration

The integration of Apple Intelligence is one of the most notable improvements in the latest iOS update. This is essentially Apple’s idea of using artificial intelligence to improve gadget responsiveness and context awareness. Imagine being able to schedule reminders simply by mentioning them in your texts or having your iPhone recognize what you need before you even look for it. Apple Intelligence can learn from your actions and recommend apps, tasks, or settings to make using your iPhone easier and more convenient.

For instance, if you open the Maps app when leaving your office too often, Apple Intelligence will recognize and immediately advise opening Maps at the appropriate time. It can also provide customized prompts depending on previous interactions, like recommending workout songs or keeping you up to date on the newest news in your favored themes. Thus, your iPhone will be a true assistant to you without requiring specific commands.

2. Home Screen Customization

Home Screen personalization has significantly improved with iOS 18, offering more personalization options than ever before. You can now select different “Modes” on your home screen depending on your lifestyle, such as work, entertainment, or relaxation. Each mode lets you choose certain widgets, apps, and even wallpapers, giving you a personalized experience based on what you’re doing. For example, you can have a basic home screen with only the most important apps at work and a colorful layout with media apps and game widgets at home.

Additionally, widgets became interactive in iOS 18. You can now control media, execute tasks, and update information directly from widgets without opening the corresponding app. This improves the home screen’s functionality, allowing quick access to important features with a few clicks.

3. Redesigned Photo App

The Photos app has also received a new appearance and a lot of new features. One of the most significant modifications is the addition of “Memory Mixes,” which automatically build albums based on shared events, such as a trip with friends or family reunions. These Memory Mixes are more adjustable, so you can simply add and remove photos, apply certain filters, and change the music playing in the background. Apple has also updated its search capabilities, allowing you to find photographs by context, such as “birthday party in 2023” or “mountain trip.”

Editing capabilities in the Photos app have also been updated. Users may now make more exact adjustments, such as changing the backdrop of a shot to increase depth or remove undesired components. AI-powered editing capabilities enable users to instantly clean up images, transforming ordinary photos into stunning memories without the need for additional photo-processing software.

4. Enhanced Message Features

Messages have been upgraded with new features that make keeping connected more pleasurable. One of the most significant enhancements is “Voice Clips Enhancements,” which converts your voice communications in real time. This is especially beneficial when you are unable to listen to a voice note; simply read the transcript instead.

Another useful feature is the option to set vanishing messages, which is comparable to other messaging apps. This feature gives users more control over their privacy by allowing them to send messages that disappear after a specified time. Furthermore, there are new “Expressive Stickers,” which contain animated emojis and stickers made from your own images, allowing for even more personalized interactions.

Group conversations have also been upgraded, with new options to handle notifications, assign tasks, and generate polls directly within the conversation, making it easier to collaborate with friends or coworkers.

5. Control Center Enhancements

The Control Center has undergone a significant change, making it far more customizable and intuitive. You may now add new controls, organize them as needed, and access more settings without having to navigate through menus. You can include quick buttons for managing smart home devices, as well as sliders for finely adjusting screen brightness or volume.

Furthermore, iOS 18 has a function called “Quick Actions” that suggests actions based on the task you are performing at the moment. For instance, if you like to fall asleep while listening to your music, the control center can recommend setting up a sleep timer.

6. The Password App

The Passwords App is the next noteworthy feature of the new iOS 18. It saves all the passwords in a separate section. Thus, you can manage, add, and remove saved passwords on all of your devices with its integration with your iCloud Keychain. It also provides recommendations for weak or commonly used passwords, making it easy to maintain online security.

Additionally, you can safely share a password with friends or family using the “Password Sharing” feature of the Passwords App. Wi-Fi networks and shared streaming services benefit greatly from this feature. All the shared passwords are encrypted to guarantee that only authorized users can access them.

7. App Locking and Hiding

Privacy is a major concern, and Apple has responded by introducing additional ways to protect apps and data. With iOS 18, you can now lock specific apps with Face ID or a passcode. This means you may add an extra layer of security to apps that handle sensitive data, like banking or messaging apps.

In addition, there is a new “App Hiding” function, which allows you to conceal select apps from the home screen and library. Hidden apps can still be found using search, but they are invisible to anyone leisurely perusing your phone. This is especially useful if you wish to clear your home screen or keep specific apps secret.

8. iPhone Mirroring

It is one of the best features seen on iOS 18, as it can mirror the screen of your iPhone wirelessly to another iOS device. Which is a pretty good tool for lecturers or presentation-makers. Or you use it just to share your iPhone screen for some kind of amusement. It does work easily and wirelessly, switching between your iPhone and any other connected Apple device without needing cords or complicated settings.

This function also enables multi-device control, allowing you to operate your iPhone from an iPad while mirroring, making navigation much easier when the device is linked to a larger screen.

9. Continuity Camera for Apple TV 4K

The Continuity Camera feature now works with Apple TV 4K. It allows your iPhone to serve as a powerful webcam for FaceTime chats and video conferences on a bigger screen. This also allows you to watch high-quality video discussions on the television, good for family calls, virtual events or business meetings. The camera quality of the iPhone is far much better than most built-in webcams that result in clearer, sharper video output.

The Continuity Camera for Apple TV now includes Center Stage capabilities as well. This keeps you engaged during video chats, even if you move around, making for a more immersive experience for participants.

10. Continuity Camera for Apple TV 4K

The Continuity Camera feature now works with Apple TV 4K. It enables your iPhone to operate as a powerful webcam for FaceTime chats and video conferences on a bigger screen. It also allows you to view high-quality video discussions on your television, making it ideal for family calls, virtual events, and business meetings.

Additionally, users can build a digital voice that sounds like their own with the new “Personal Voice” feature. The assistive access feature streamlines the iPhone interface for users with cognitive impairments by providing a larger font for simpler navigation and a streamlined home screen with key mobile apps.

Additionally, Apple has included “Motion Sensitivity Adjustments,” which reduces animations and effects that some users may find uncomfortable. This guarantees that everyone can use their device with ease, regardless of their unique needs.

Conclusion

iOS 18 offers several innovative new features that will increase the accessibility, safety, and personalization of your iPhone. From the smart integration of Apple Intelligence that makes your smartphone more intuitive to the Home Screen personalization possibilities, the revamped Photos App, and increased privacy features like App Locking and Hiding, this update has something for everyone.

Other innovations, such as iPhone Mirroring and Continuity Camera with Apple TV 4K, extend the usability of your iPhone beyond a single screen, while accessibility improvements guarantee that Apple’s technology is accessible to all users. With all of these additions, iOS 18 has proven to be a significant step forward, enriching the iPhone experience and tailoring it to individual needs.

 

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Great news for writers: ChatGPT just released an update that has once again put the tech in the lead as the top AI writer for creative writing.

Ironically, news of the ChatGPT update was released just days after Google set a new record of its own in creative writing with the release of its new Gemini Exp-1114 version.

Bottom line: The relentlessly fierce competition between ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude Anthropic — often considered the top three AI chatbots/AI writers on the market — promises the Big Three will be releasing ever-more powerful AI writers at a blistering pace for the foreseeable future.

In other news and analysis on AI writing:

*ChatGPT: Now Clocking 3.7 Billion Visits-Per-Month: With an ever-increasing popularity that seems to know no bounds, ChatGPT is now clocking-in at 3.7 billion visits-per-month, according to Similarweb.

Incredibly, that means more people are using ChatGPT every month than the Google Chrome browser — which as we all know, has been ‘everywhere’ for years.

In comparison, ChatGPT’s closest competitor — Google Gemini — is only seeing 292 million visits-per-month.

And its second-closest competitor — Claude Anthropic — is only seeing 84 million visits-per-month.

*Word God: Writing Jobs Take Big Hit From AI: Freelance jobs are taking the biggest hit with the advent of AI, according to a new piece in Harvard Business Review.

A study of help wanted posts on a popular freelancer job board found that ads seeking writing help decreased by 30% over a two-year period.

Observes Ozge Demirci, lead writer on the study: “Interestingly, job posts that include ‘ChatGPT’ in their skill requirement also saw an increase.

“These results suggest that the ability to integrate AI tools into work is becoming increasingly valued.”

*Nachos for Everyone!: Taco Bell Scores Big Win With AI Writing: Marketing campaigns personalized with AI are delivering excellent gains for Taco Bell and other Yum brands, according to Joe Park, Yum’s chief digital and technology officer.

Observes Park: “With AI-driven marketing, instead of sending the same offer to everyone as a one-size-fits-all, we can engage each of them with the relevant offers at the right time.

“Our goal is to give our consumers better-timed offers, personalized content and tailored interactions so they feel understood and don’t receive generic clutter.”

*Bargain Bin AI: Copilot Now So Cheap, Even Robots Are Shocked: Software titan Microsoft has dropped pricing for its white label version of ChatGPT in Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan and Thailand, according to writer Ryan Christoffel.

Essentially, Copilot Pro features are being ‘baked into’ Microsoft’s productivity suite — rather than being billed as a separate, premium service.

As such, they’ll be easily accessible for use with popular apps like Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook.

Microsoft undoubtedly plans to roll-out the price-drop globally before too long, Christoffel adds.

*Smarty Pants: Jasper’s AI Now Better Than Your Marketing Team?: AI writing pioneer Jasper is out with an update that promises to further optimize the use of the AI tool for marketing.

Powered by Jasper’s new Brand IQ and Marketing IQ modules, the update is designed to enable marketers to scale content and campaigns that are on-brand and optimized for marketing best practices.

Observes Timothy Young, CEO, Jasper: “Brand IQ and Marketing IQ ensure that marketing expertise is built-in, so teams can focus on strategy and creativity while AI handles the heavy lifting of scaling content and brand compliance.”

*2025: Year of the AI Agent?: Add consulting firm McKinsey to the growing number of tech soothsayers predicting 2025 will witness the rise of AI agents.

Such agents can be programmed to repeatedly implement a series of tasks, as warranted — without human oversight.

Observes writer Taryn Plumb: “According to McKinsey, generative AI and other technologies have the potential to automate 60% -70% of employees’ work.

“And already, an estimated one-third of American workers are using AI in the workplace — oftentimes unbeknownst to their employers.”

*Thanks for the Diagnosis, Doc — But What Does ChatGPT Think?: In a shoot-out between human doctors and ChatGPT, the AI tool came in first, offering an accurate diagnosis 90% of the time of the ills that ail us.

Human doctors, in comparison, were only right 74% of the time.

Observes Dr. Johnathan H. Chen, an author on the study: “The chat interface is the killer app.”

*Pursuing the ‘Perfect Prompt:’ Anthropic Says It Has the Answer: “Anthropic has launched a new suite of tools designed to automate and improve prompt engineering in its developer console — a move expected to enhance the efficiency of enterprise AI development,” according to writer Michael Nuñez.

Nuñez adds: “At the core of these updates is the Prompt Improver, a tool that applies best practices in prompt engineering to automatically refine existing prompts.

“This feature is especially valuable for developers working across different AI platforms, as prompt engineering techniques can vary between models.”

*AI Big Picture: Adoption of AI Hits a Plateau: A new study finds the use of AI at work may be leveling-off at 33% of the workforce.

Observes writer Ina Fried: “Slack (a work communications tool company) said its most recent survey found 33% of U.S. workers say they are using AI at work — an increase of just a single percentage point.

“That represents a significant flattening of the rapid growth noted in prior surveys.”

The survey queried 17,372 workers in the following countries: Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the U.K. and the U.S.

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–Joe Dysart is editor of RobotWritersAI.com and a tech journalist with 20+ years experience. His work has appeared in 150+ publications, including The New York Times and the Financial Times of London.

The post ChatGPT Noses Ahead in Creative Writing appeared first on Robot Writers AI.

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