Once upon a time, wed say software is eating the planet. It still is, but these days our world is being consumed by generative AI (genAI), which is seeminglybeing added to everything. Now, Apples Siri is on the cusp of bringing in its own form of genAI in a more conversational version Apple insiders are already calling LLM Siri.What is LLM Siri?Apple has alreadytold us to expecta more contextually-aware version of Siri in 2025, part of the companys soon-to-be-growing Apple Intelligence suite. This Siri will be able to, for example, respond to questions and requests concerning a website, contact, or anything else you happen to be looking at on your Mac, iPhone, or iPad. Think of it like an incredibly focused AI that works to understand what you are seeing and tries to give you relevant answers and actions that relate to it.Thats what we knew already. What we learn now (fromBloomberg)is that Apples AI teams are working to give Siri even more capabilities. The idea is to ensure Apples not-so-smart smart assistant can better compete against chatbots like ChatGPT, thanks to the addition of large language models (LLMs) likeOpenAIorGeminialready use.What will Smart Siri do?This smarter Siri will be able to hold conversations, and drill into enquiries, just like those competing engines particularly Advanced Voice Mode on ChatGPT. Siris responses will also become more human, enabling it to say, I have a stimulating relationship with Dr. Poole, and for you to believe that.These conversations wont only need to be the equivalent of a visit to the therapist on a rainy Wednesday; youll also be able to get into fact-based and research-focused conversations, with Siri dragging up answers and theories on command.In theory, youll be able to access all the knowledge of the internet and a great deal of computationally-driven problem solving from your now-much-smarter smartphone. Apples ambition is to replace, at least partially, some of the features Apple Intelligence currently hands off to ChatGPT, though I suspect the iPhone maker will be highly selective in the tasks it does take on.The company has already put some of the tools in place to handle this kind of on-the-fly task assignment; Apple Intelligence can already check a request to see whether it can be handled on the device, on Apples ownhighly secure servers, or needs to be handed over for processing by OpenAI or any other partners that might be in the mix.When will LLM Siri leap into action?Bloombergspeculates that this smarter assistant tech could be one of the highlight glimpses Apple offers at WWDC 2025. If thats correct, it seems reasonable to anticipate the tech will eventually be introduced across the Apple ecosystem, just like Apple Intelligence.You could be waiting a while for that introduction; the report suggests a spring 2026 launch for the service, which the company is already testing as a separate app across its devices.In the run-up to these announcements, Siricontinues to develop more features. As of iOS 18.3 it will begin to build a personal profile of users in order to provide better responses to queries. It will also be able to use App Intents, which let third-party developers make the features of their apps available across the system via Siri. ChatGPT integration will make its own debut next month.Will it be enough?Siri as a chatbot is one area in which Apple does appear to have fallen behind competitors. While it seems a positive at least in competitive terms that Apple is working to remedy that weakness, its current competitors will not be standing still (though unfurling AI regulation might put a glass ceiling to limit some of their global domination dreams).Apples teams will also be aware of work in the background taking place between former Apple designer Jony Ive and Sam Altmans OpenAI, and will want to ensure it has a moat in place to protect itself againstwhatever the fruits of that laborturn out to be.With that in mind, Apples current approach to identifykey areas in which it can make a difference and to work towards edge-based, private, secure AI makes sense and is likely to remain theprimary thrust of Apples future efforts.Though if theres one net positive every Apple user already enjoys out of the intense race to AI singularity it is that the pre-installed memory inside all Apple devices has now increased. Which means that even those who never, ever, ever want to have a conversation with a machine can get more stuff done quicker than before. Learn more about Apple Intelligencehere.You can follow me on social media! Join me onBlueSky, LinkedIn,Mastodon, andMeWe.

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Reviews weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.Well, what about China?This is a comment I get all the time on the topic of climate change, both in conversations and on whatever social media site is currently en vogue. Usually, it comes in response to some statement about how the US and Europe are addressing the issue (or how they need to be).Sometimes I think people ask this in bad faith. Its a rhetorical way to throw up your hands, imply that the US and Europe arent the real problem, and essentially say: if they arent taking responsibility, why should we? However, amid the playground-esque finger-pointing there are some undeniable facts: China emits more greenhouse gases than any other country, by far. Its one of the worlds most populous countries and a climate-tech powerhouse, and its economy is still developing.With many complicated factors at play, how should we think about the countrys role in addressing climate change?Chinas emissions are the highest in the world, topping 12 billion tons of carbon dioxide in 2023, according to the International Energy Agency.Theres context missing if we just look at that one number, as I wrote in my latest story that digs into recent global climate data. Since carbon dioxide hangs around in the atmosphere for centuries, we should arguably consider not just a countrys current emissions, but everything its produced over time. If we do that, the US still takes the crown for the worlds biggest climate polluter.However, China is now in second place, according to a new analysis from Carbon Brief released this week. In 2023, the country exceeded the EUs 27 member states in historical emissions for the first time.This reflects a wider trend that were seeing around the world: Developing nations are starting to account for a larger fraction of emissions than they used to. In 1992, when countries agreed to the UN climate convention, industrialized countries (a category called Annex I) made up about one-fifth of the worlds population but were responsible for a whopping 61% of historical emissions. By the end of 2024, though, those countries share of global historical emissions will fall to 52%, and it is expected to keep ticking down.China, like all nations, will need to slash its emissions for the world to meet global climate goals. One crucial point here is that while its emissions are still huge, there are signs that the nation is making some progress.Chinas carbon dioxides emissions are set to fall in 2024 because of record growth in low-carbon energy sources. That decline is projected to continue under the countrys current policy settings, according to an October report from the IEA. Chinas oil demand could soon peak and start to fall, largely because its seeing such a huge uptake of electric vehicles.One growing question: With all this progress and a quickly growing economy, should we be expecting China to do more than just make progress on its own emissions?As I wrote in the newsletter last week, the current talks at COP29 (the UN climate conference) are focused on setting a new, more aggressive global climate finance goal to help developing nations address climate change. China isnt part of the group of countries that are required to pay into this pot of money, but some are calling for that to change given that it is the worlds biggest polluter.One interesting point hereChina already contributes billions of dollars in climate financing each year to developing countries, according to research published earlier this month by the World Resources Institute. The countrys leadership has said it will only make voluntary contributions, and that developed nations should still be the ones responsible for mandatory payments under the new finance goals.Talks at COP29 arent going very well. The COP29 president called for faster action, but progress toward a finance deal has stalled amid infighting over how much money should be on the table and who should pay up.Chinas complex role in emissions and climate action is far from the only holdup at the talks. Leaders from major nations including Germany and France canceled plans to attend, and the looming threat that the US could pull out of the Paris climate agreement is coloring the negotiations.But disagreement over how to think about Chinas role in all this is a good example of how difficult it is to assign responsibility when it comes to climate change, and how much is at play in global climate negotiations. One thing I do know for sure is that pointing fingers doesnt cut emissions.Now read the rest of The SparkRelated readingDig into the data with me in my latest story, which includes three visualizations to help capture the complexity of global emissions.Read more about why global climate finance is at the center of this years UN climate talks in last weeks edition of the newsletter.Keeping up with climateFusion energy has been a dream for decades, and a handful of startups say were closer than ever to making it a reality. This deep dive looks at a few of the companies looking to be the first to deploy fusion power. (New York Times) I recently visited one of the startups, Commonwealth Fusion Systems. (MIT Technology Review)President-elect Donald Trump has tapped Chris Wright to lead the Department of Energy. Wright is head of the fracking company Liberty Energy. (Washington Post)In the wake of Trumps election, it might be time for climate tech to get a rebrand. Companies and investors might increasingly avoid using the term, opting instead for phrases like energy independence or frontier tech, to name a few. (Heatmap)Rooftop solar has saved customers in California about $2.3 billion on utility bills this year, according to a new analysis. This result is counter to a report from a state agency, which found that rooftop panels impose over $8 billion in extra costs on consumers of the states three major utilities. (Canary Media)Low-carbon energy needs much less material than it used to. Rising efficiency in making technology like solar panels bodes well for hopes of cutting mining needs. (Sustainability by Numbers)New York governor Kathy Hochul has revived a plan to implement congestion pricing, which would charge drivers to enter the busiest parts of Manhattan. It would be the first such program in the US. (The City)Enhanced geothermal technology could be close to breaking through into commercial success. Companies that aim to harness Earths heat for power are making progress toward deploying facilities. (Nature) Fervo Energy found that its wells can be used like a giant underground battery. (MIT Technology Review)

MIT Technology Reviews How To series helps you get things done.Since the start of the generative AI boom, artists have been worried about losing their livelihoods to AI tools. There have been plenty of examples of companies replacing human labor with computer programs. Most recently, Coca-Cola sparked controversy by creating a new Christmas ad with generative AI.Artists and writers have launched several lawsuits against AI companies, arguing that their work has been scraped into databases for training AI models without consent or compensation. Tech companies have responded that anything on the public internet falls under fair use. But it will be years until we have a legal resolution to the problem.Unfortunately, there is little you can do if your work has been scraped into a data set and used in a model that is already out there. You can, however, take steps to prevent your work from being used in the future.Here are four ways to do that.Mask your styleOne of the most popular ways artists are fighting back against AI scraping is by applying masks on their images, which protect their personal style from being copied.Tools such as Mist, Anti-DreamBooth, and Glaze add tiny changes to an images pixels that are invisible to the human eye, so that if and when images are scraped, machine-learning models cannot decipher them properly. Youll need some coding skills to run Mist and Anti-DreamBooth, but Glaze, developed by researchers at the University of Chicago, is more straightforward to apply. The tool is free and available to download as an app, or the protection can be applied online. Unsurprisingly, it is the most popular tool and has been downloaded millions of times.But defenses like these are never foolproof, and what works today might not work tomorrow. In computer security, breaking defenses is standard practice among researchers, as this helps people find weaknesses and make systems safer. Using these tools is a calculated risk: Once something is uploaded online, you lose control of it and cant retroactively add protections to images.Rethink where and how you sharePopular art profile sites such as DeviantArt and Flickr have become gold mines for AI companies searching for training data. And when you share images on platforms such as Instagram, its parent company, Meta, can use your data to build its models in perpetuity if youve shared it publicly. (See opt-outs below.)One way to prevent scraping is by not sharing images online publicly, or by making your social media profiles private. But for many creatives that is simply not an option; sharing work online is a crucial way to attract clients.Its worth considering sharing your work on Cara, a new platform created in response to the backlash against AI. Cara, which collaborates with the researchers behind Glaze, is planning to add integrations to the labs art defense tools. It automatically implements NoAI tags that tell online scrapers not to scrape images from the site. It currently relies on the goodwill of AI companies to respect artists stated wishes, but its better than nothing.Opt out of scrapingData protection laws might help you get tech companies to exclude your data from AI training. If you live somewhere that has these sorts of laws, such as the UK or the EU, you can ask tech companies to opt you out of having your data scraped for AI training. For example, you can follow these instructions for Meta. Unfortunately, opt-out requests from users in places without data protection laws are honored only at the discretion of tech companies.The site Have I Been Trained, created by the artist-run company Spawning AI, lets you search to find out if your images have ended up in popular open-source AI training data sets. The organization has partnered with two companies: Stability AI, which created Stable Diffusion, and Hugging Face, which promotes open access to AI. If you add your images to Spawning AIs Do Not Train Registry, these companies have agreed to remove your images from their training data sets before training new models. Again, unfortunately, this relies on the goodwill of AI companies and is not an industry-wide standard.If all else fails, add some poisonThe University of Chicago researchers who created Glaze have also created Nightshade, a tool that lets you add an invisible layer of poison to your images. Like Glaze, it adds invisible changes to pixels, but rather than just making it hard for AI models to interpret images, it can break future iterations of these models and make them behave unpredictably. For example, images of dogs might become cats, and handbags might become toasters. The researchers say relatively few samples of poison are needed to make an impact.You can add Nightshade to your image by downloading an app here. In the future, the team hopes to combine Glaze and Nightshade, but at the moment the two protections have to be added separately.

Apple will dramatically reduce the cost of speaker repair in the Apple Silicon 14-inch MacBook Pro and 16-inch MacBook Pro, ending the longstanding need to buy a whole replacement top case.Apple is making it more affordable to repair the MacBook Pro.The replacement of damaged speakers in these MacBook Pro models remains complex, but self-service repair will as much as 90% cheaper than at present. It's entirely because standalone speaker repair parts will be released soon.Consequently, users will not have to pay for a replacement battery, the MacBook Pro's top casing, or other unrelated components. As first spotted by MacRumors, this will be the first time that MacBook Pro speakers have been directly repairable since 2015. Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

With Black Friday just around the corner, many software deals are emerging, offering substantial savings on some of the top software products. Here's a roundup of the best deals AppleInsider has found.Black Friday software deals - Image credit: Adobe, Microsoft, Parallels, ExpressVPNThis Black Friday roundup highlights some fantastic deals on must-have software. These deals cater to a wide range of users, including professional creatives, business users, and students by providing creative suites and essential office tools at discounted prices. Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

Istanbul Modern by Renzo Piano Building Workshop on the Karaky waterfront WAF 2024 winner newshttps://www.e-architect.com/istanbul/istanbul-modern-building-by-renzo-piano#istanbul #modernart #turkey #contemporaryart #renzopiano #architectureIstanbul Modern, Trkiyes first museum of modern and contemporary art opens in a new building designed by Renzo Piano Building Workshop

Metropolitan Station in Lublin, Poland, wins First Prize at the World Architecture Festival in Singapore! This contemporary-style Polish rail hub was built in the centre of the cityhttps://www.e-architect.com/poland/new-metropolitan-station-lublin-poland#stationery #poland #worldarchitecture #singapore #architectureThe new Metropolitan Station in Lublin, received the first passengers. The new Metropolitan Station was built in the centre of the city

Cool innovation! Ultra-thin vacuum insulation is transforming refrigeration and sustainable design. Discover its potential! #Sustainability #Innovation #GreenBuilding #EnergyEfficiency #DesignTech https://bit.ly/4fAilhBFrom transforming home appliances to reshaping building design, Vacuum Insulation Panels (VIPs) promise unprecedented energy efficiency, space savings, and climate-conscious innovation

Survived Category 5! The Sand Palace shows the power of resilient design. Concrete & ICFs kept it standing. #ResilientDesign #HurricaneReady #SandPalace #ICFConstruction #ExtremeWeather #Sponsored #ZondaMediaIntel8 lessons on why this home emerged nearly undamaged from a direct Category 5 hurricane hit.

In case you haven't checked outArchinect's Pinterestboards in a while, we have compiled ten recently pinned images from outstanding projects on various ArchinectFirmandPeopleprofiles.Today's top images (in no particular order) are from the boardBiophilia.Tip:use the handyFOLLOW featureto easily keep up-to-date with all your favorite Archinect profiles! Rheingold Bushwick inBrooklyn, NY byDurukan Design 1 Great Jones Alley inNew York, NY byBKSK Architects; LandscapeDesign:HMWhite; Photo:Christopher Payne | ESTO Hotel Indigo Hangzhou Uptown inHangzhou, China by Studio Carter; Photo:Seth Powers Photography MRIIA HOUSE in Ukraine byMAKHNO Studio Blue Lake-Lakeside Teahouse Renovation inBeijing, China byYI+MU Design Office; Photo:YI+MU Design OfficeBlodgett-Calvin Residential Compoundin San Marino, CA by Fung + Blatt Architects; Original Architect: Calvin Straub; Photo: Mark Mahaney Siji Minfu Roast Duck Restaurant inBeijing, China byIN.X Design...