A judge has limited FBI powers to trawl through data obtained from tech giants like Apple, Google, and ISPs under FISA (the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act).
Separately, a Cloudflare privacy flaw has been identified in one of Apple’s IT service providers, which could have exposed the rough location of millions of web and app users before it was fixed …
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Chinese AI assistant DeepSeek has become the top rated free app on Apple's App Store in the US and elsewhere, beating out ChatGPT and other rivals. It's powered by the open-source DeepSeek V3 model, which reportedly requires far less computing power than competitors and was developed for under $6 million, according to (disputed) claims by the company. At the same time, it offers performance that's on par with Claude-3.5, GPT-4o and other rivals, DeepSeek said last week.
Available on web, app and API, DeepSeek is similar to AI Assistant like ChatGPT with features like coding content creation and research. Its first DeepSeek-R1 release is available under an MIT license, so it can be used commercially and without restrictions.
The company is headquartered in Hangzhou, China and was founded in 2023 by Liang Wenfeng, who also launched the hedge fund backing DeepSeek. To develop the tech, he reportedly stockpiled NVIDIA A100 chips prior to the US export ban and paired those with less powerful chips that can still be imported, according to MIT Technology Review.
However, DeepSeek was still at a significant hardware disadvantage next to rival models from OpenAI, Google and others. That forced the company to be more efficient with its AI models, and it has supposedly been able to build and train them at a far lower cost than previously thought possible.
Analysts from Citi and elsewhere have questioned those claims, though, and pointed out that China is a "more restrictive environment" for AI development than the US. Still, the rise of DeepSeek has raised concerns about the potential profits of rivals like OpenAI that have already invested billions in AI infrastructure. In fact, the news that DeepSeek topped the App Store charts caused a sharp drop in tech stocks like NVIDIA and ASML this morning.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/deepseeks-ai-assistant-from-china-has-become-the-top-free-iphone-app-134445339.html?src=rss©
© GREG BAKER via Getty Images
China’s DeepSeek – an AI chatbot intended to rival ChatGPT – is currently the number one download in the App Store, after its performance took US companies by surprise.
The Chinese startup appears to be rivalling the performance of OpenAI’s ChatGPT despite having cost far less to develop, and that’s hitting the market valuations of major US AI players …
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Calling all iPhone lovers: we might just have a full look at Apple's iPhone SE 4 on our hands. X (formerly Twitter) user Majin Bu shared what Bu claims is the new iPhone SE 4. The leaker posted a video of the device from all angles and then four photos of both a black and white model from the back.
There's no guarantee that these posts aren't just highlighting a well-done dummy unit — a version typically made for accessory manufacturers. But, if real, then there's a few things we can glean. One of the most significant bits is that this iPhone SE 4 still has a notch. In 2022, Apple released its Dynamic Island design on the iPhone 14 Pro and Pro Max, foregoing the front camera's notch for a more integrated appearance. The iPhone 15 and 16 also got the Dynamic Island but, despite rumors it would come to the next SE, this leak indicates the notch will remain.
Here's what the iPhone SE 4 looks like pic.twitter.com/pEyIAJ34VR
— Majin Bu (@MajinBuOfficial) January 25, 2025
One big change, however, on the iPhone SE 4 is a switch from the lightning port to a USB-C. New regulations mean this move is necessary for the device to be on sale in the European Union. The posts also show a single rear camera, the same as previous iPhone SE phones. Again, most of this is just a possibility at the moment. The leaker has been wrong in the past, such as a 2022 prediction for an iPhone 15 Ultra with two front cameras.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/mobile/smartphones/a-convincing-dummy-iphone-se-4-suggests-the-return-of-the-notch-130049779.html?src=rss©
© Majin Bu
A chatbot made by Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek has rocketed to the top of Apple’s App Store charts in the US this week, dethroning OpenAI’s ChatGPT as the most downloaded free app. The eponymous AI assistant is powered by DeepSeek’s open-source models, which the company says can be trained at a fraction of the cost using far fewer chips than the world’s leading models. Shares for Nvidia, the biggest global supplier of advanced AI chips, are currently down over 12 percent in pre-market training,
Downloads for the app exploded shortly after DeepSeek released its new R1 reasoning model on January 20th, which is designed for solving complex problems and reportedly performs as well as OpenAI’s o1 on certain benchmarks. R1 was built on the V3 LLM DeepSeek released in December, which the company claims is on par with GPT-4o and Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and cost less than $6 million to develop. By contrast, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said GPT-4 cost over $100 million to train.
DeepSeek also claims to have needed only about 2,000 specialized chips from Nvidia to train V3, compared to the 16,000 or more required to train leading models, according to the New York Times. These unverified claims are leading developers and investors to question the compute-intensive approach favored by the world’s leading AI companies. And if true, it means that DeepSeek engineers had to get creative in the face of trade restrictions meant to ensure US domination of AI.
Nvidia, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Meta are investing billions into AI data centers — $500 billion alone for the Stargate Project, of which $100 billion is thought to be earmarked for Nvidia. Investors and analysts are now wondering if that’s money well spent, with Nvidia, Microsoft, and other companies with substantial stakes in maintaining the AI status quo all trending downward in pre-market trading.
One of the big questions about the upcoming iPhone SE 4 is whether the display will have a notch or Dynamic Island. Two leakers have presented clashing views on this, with the latest dummy models appearing to support the notch.
The dummy models also give us our clearest view yet of what the new entry-level iPhone may look like, with high-quality photos, and a video …
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If you’ve been following the AI industry, Mistral should be a familiar name by now. The French AI startup with a $6 billion valuation is arguably the biggest AI company working on foundation models in Europe. Alan, on the other hand, isn’t as well known. The health insurance unicorn has been quietly growing to become […]
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