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Apple is transforming your iPhone into a fintech service taking on PayPal, Affirm, and more

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Apple is transforming into a fintech organization. The organization declared a few new features for the iPhone’s Wallet app at its developers conference Monday directly rival products from other fintech organizations, for example, Affirm and PayPal. The large one: a buy now, pay later service called Apple Pay Later. That declaration sent Affirm shares down over 5% Monday, and they were down an extra 4% starting around Tuesday morning.

Apple will likewise launch a new payments system not long from now that allows you to pay somebody by tapping your iPhone against theirs. It’s a direct competitor to Block’s Square. Also, Wallet in iOS 16 will allow you to follow online orders you purchase through Apple Pay.

Every one of this focuses to one of the most interesting corners of the Apple ecosystem — a growing suite of financial products within the Wallet app. A significant number of these features aren’t intended to bring in cash for Apple straightforwardly, however they truly do make Apple Pay more attractive for individuals who haven’t attempted it yet. (Apple takes a minuscule percentage of each and every Apple Pay transaction, so the more individuals using it, the better it is for Apple.) Like most major new iOS features, it’s likewise one more system to keep clients got into Apple’s ecosystem and upgrading to a new iPhone when they’re prepared.

Be that as it may, Apple’s new Wallet features are likewise coming during a time of incredible economic uncertainty. Expansion is as yet going wild. Gas costs keep on hitting record highs. What’s more, there are a lot of genuine feelings of dread about an impending downturn. It very well may be a difficult stretch for Apple to launch a new product intended to get individuals to purchase more stuff on the off chance that those trends persist throughout the year.

Apple’s new opponents in the buy now, pay later space have battled in recent months as consumer spending shifts from goods to services. Other fintech and crypto organizations, for example, Robinhood, PayPal and Coinbase have battled for the current year too.

Apple has a longer-term vision for Wallet. As the organization uncovered the most recent features Monday, executives said the ultimate goal is for the digital Wallet app to supplant everything in your physical wallet.

However, things are moving gradually in certain areas, for example, last year’s feature that allows you to add your driver’s license, which is accessible in only two or three states in the U.S., and with a few more expected soon. And still, at the end of the day, you can utilize the ID just at TSA checkpoints at one airport in Phoenix. Carmakers have likewise been delayed to embrace the iOS feature that allows you to store a digital version of your car key on your phone.

In any case, Apple let me know yesterday there’s little worry over that slow adoption. The expectation is consumer demand pushes third parties to adopt the technology.

On the fintech side, notwithstanding, Apple is building a foundation to give a lift to its payments business by layering more functions into Apply Pay and Wallet beyond just using your iPhone, rather than your credit card, to pay for things. Furthermore, due to Apple’s scale with in excess of a billion gadgets being used, much more individuals are going to be presented to these products.

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Adobe Unveils AI-Enhanced Mobile App for Content Creation

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Adobe has released a new mobile app called Adobe Express, which leverages generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) from Adobe Firefly to make content creation easier.

The company said in a press release on Thursday, April 18, that users would be able to create and distribute social media posts, videos, flyers, logos, and other types of content with the new mobile app.

According to the release, Govind Balakrishnan, senior vice president of Adobe Express and Digital Media Services, “brings the magic of Firefly generative AI directly into web and mobile content creation services.”

Per the release, the new mobile app is an all-in-one content editor that incorporates the photo, design, video, and GenAI tools from Adobe.

Users of any skill level can easily complete complex tasks with straightforward text prompts thanks to the app’s integration of the company’s Firefly GenAI, according to the release.

According to the release, you can use Text to Image to create images, Text Effects to generate text stylings, Generative Fill to add or remove objects from photos, and Text to Template to create editable templates.

According to the release, this is the first time these Firefly-powered features have been made available on mobile devices.

Balakrishnan stated in the release, “We’re excited to see a record number of customers turning to Adobe Express to promote their ideas, passions, and businesses through digital content and on TikTok, Instagram, X, Facebook, and other social platforms.”

A quarterly earnings call in March saw executives from Adobe announce that the company has been implementing GenAI features across its product lines for digital media, digital experience, publishing, and advertising.

All client segments have demonstrated a high level of demand for these features, according to the business. Since its launch in 2023, Firefly, for instance, has assisted users in creating over 6.5 billion images, vectors, designs, and text effects..

The content supply chain for businesses is set to be revolutionized by Adobe’s latest product launch, GenStudio and Firefly, which it announced in March along with additional GenAI capabilities.

New features in asset management, creation and production, delivery and activation, workflow and planning, insights and reporting, and asset management are among these additions. Their purpose is to furnish organizations with a cohesive and smooth content supply chain.

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Llama 3, a Dedicated AI Web Portal, is Announced by Meta

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On April 18, Meta made the announcement that Llama 3, its most recent large language model (LLM), had launched. It was hailed as a “major leap over Llama 2.”

According to the company, it has already released the first two models of the current version, which have 8B and 70B parameters. 400B parameters will be featured in future models.

A “large, high-quality training dataset” with over 15 trillion tokens—7 times larger and 4 times more code than Llama 2—was used to train Llama 3, as highlighted by Meta. To maintain the quality of the data, Llama 3 also includes filtering methods, such as NSFW filters.

Over half of the 12 use cases show that LLama 3 performs better than Llama 2 and rival models like Claude Sonnet from Anthropic, Mistral Medium, and Chat GPT-3.5 from OpenAI.

Text-based models comprised the initial releases of Llama 3. But multilingual and multimodal releases are on the way. “Core LLM capabilities” as defined by Meta will be exhibited by them, along with a longer context and improved reasoning and coding performance.

All significant cloud providers, model API providers, and other services will host Llama 3, according to the company’s plans. The product will be released “everywhere,” as planned.

Greater user Accessibility

Developers are the target audience for Llama 3, but Meta has also introduced new channels for end users in the US and over 12 other countries to access AI services.

A recent inclusion is a specialized website called Meta AI, where users can get homework help, trivia games, simulated job interviews, and writing help powered by AI.

Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and other products from Meta are all integrated with Meta AI. Additionally, the service is available in the US through Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, and the company has plans to expand it to include its Meta Quest VR headset.

The announcement of Meta’s expanded AI product line follows the release of updates to rival services. The competition between consumer-focused AI services progressed when ChatGPT upgraded to GPT-4 Turbo on April 11 and Microsoft Copilot upgraded to GPT-4 Turbo beginning in March.

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Reka AI Unveils Multimodal Language Model Competing Head-to-Head with Google’s Gemini

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Reka Core, the company’s first multimodal language model, was released by AI startup Reka AI. According to the company’s statement, Core is “competitive” with top models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google when it comes to industry-accepted metrics and can work with images, audio, and video.

Reka AI is a San Francisco-based startup with two Southeast Asian founders, and it was started by researchers from DeepMind, Google, and Meta. The chief scientist of the company is Yi Tay, a Singaporean, and the CEO, Dani Yogatama, is an Indonesian.

Reka Core is a large language model with “powerful” contextualized image, video, and audio understanding. According to the company, there are only two developers whose commercially available models support comprehensive multimodal input, the other being Google.

Reasoning skills, such as language and math, can be used for tasks requiring complex reasoning thanks to Core’s 128,000-token context window. Moreover, it is a code generator that enhances agent-based workflows.

Reka AI asserted that Core performs better on video tasks than Google’s Gemini Ultra, another multimodal model, when compared to comparable models available in the market. According to some, Core is also similar to GPT-4V on MMMU, an AI benchmark that assesses a model’s ability to complete tasks requiring reasoning and knowledge appropriate for a university.

Reka AI released its Edge and Flash models a few months prior to the release of Core. Together with Radical Ventures and DST Global Partners, the company has raised US$58 million in funding as of June 2023. The last known valuation of Reka AI is $300 million, according to market research platform CB Insights.

Reka AI’s partners include Snowflake, Oracle, and AI Singapore. On the basis of valuation per employee, it was recently ranked fifth among all AI firms worldwide.

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