Hartley Charlton: Apple today announced Apple Business, a new all-in-one platform that unifies device management, productivity tools, and customer outreach features. The service is designed to be a consolidated replacement for several of Apple's existing business-focused offerings, including Apple Business Essentials, Apple Business Manager, and Apple Business Connect. It provides organizations with a single interface […]

Juli Clover (Hacker News): OpenAI today said that it is ending support for its Sora AI video app just six months after it initially launched. Kyle Orland: The announcement comes days after leaked news of an OpenAI all-hands meeting in which company executives reportedly said they were refocusing on business and productivity applications rather than […]

Well, at least we know who taught her to talk like that.

Jessica E. Lessin, Amir Efrati, and Erin Woo, reporting for the paywalled-without-gift-links The Information:

While we have reported that Apple can tweak, or fine-tune, a version of Google’s Gemini AI so that it responds to queries the way Apple wants, the agreement gives Apple a lot more freedom with Google’s tech.

In fact, Apple has complete access to the Gemini model in its own data center facilities. Apple can use that access to produce smaller models that power specific tasks or are small enough to run directly on Apple devices so they can run the tasks faster, said a person who has direct knowledge of the arrangement.

The process of producing such models is called distillation, which essentially transfers knowledge from one large language model, which acts like a teacher, to another model that acts as a student.

That Apple negotiated this level of access is interesting, but not surprising. The biggest tell that this deal runs much deeper than simple white-labelling is that Apple will — or at least has the right to — run these Gemini-based models in Apple’s own Private Cloud Compute datacenters.

Katie Notopoulos, my favorite Sora user, at Business Insider (paywalled, alas, but available via News+):

Eventually, my friends all seemed to get bored with the app. As I do at most parties, I stuck around longer than everyone else, but eventually I, too, found that the novelty had worn off. I rarely opened the app after the second week.

This was, I imagine, a problem: making videos of yourself is fun, but watching videos that strangers make of themselves is not fun. The idea of a social feed of AI-generated videos is simply not something that people are interested in. Around the same time, Meta also tried this with an app of AI videos, and it was even more boring.

It’s hard to see how anyone thought Sora would have staying power, or could ever justify the apparently exorbitant cost of running it. OpenAI burned a ton of money on what was effectively a stunt.

OpenAI doesn’t appear to be a well-oiled machine at the moment.