DeepSeek just quietly updated its flagship DeepSeek-V3 model, switching to a permissive MIT license that lets developers freely build commercial projects. Community benchmarks show a small boost in coding performance, and an Apple researcher managed to run a quantized version on a Mac Studio at 20 tokens per second. It's a huge win for open-source AI commercialization.
Alibaba just released Qwen2.5-VL-32B-Instruct, a visual language model fine-tuned with reinforcement learning. It delivers major boosts in math reasoning and human preference alignment, designed as the sweet spot for users who find 72B too heavy and 7B not capable enough for local rigs.
Apple just rolled out the iOS 18.4 Release Candidate to developers ahead of an early April public release. The update adds Priority Notifications to highlight key alerts on your lock screen, brings a new Sketch style to Image Playground, and expands Apple Intelligence to simplified Chinese, French, Japanese, and more. Barring critical bugs, this is what hits your iPhone next month.
Apple is reportedly working on adding cameras to the Apple Watch to power features like Visual Intelligence within the next two years, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman. Standard models could tuck lenses under the display, while the Ultra might mount one beside the digital crown. Apple basically wants wearables to see the physical world, aiming to drive the system with in-house models by 2027.
Lyft just announced that riders in Atlanta will be able to hail robotaxis starting this summer, using a fleet of Toyota Sienna minivans powered by May Mobility. The ride-hailing company also plans to expand to Dallas in 2026 with Mobileye-equipped vehicles, gearing up to scale thousands of autonomous cars across multiple cities.
Alie Jules just launched VrefDeck, a dedicated visual organization app built for AI creators, designers, and photographers. The tool lets users drag, sort, and tag reference images with custom cards for parameters and prompts, running 100% locally to protect private workflows. It's available on Mac and Windows for a one-time purchase of $29.
Topaz Labs just rolled out Gigapixel 8.3, introducing a brand-new Recover v2 model that restores high-resolution image details over 5x faster with significantly fewer artifacts. It runs locally with 8GB VRAM or in the cloud, alongside a refreshed interface and Gigaprint cropping tools.
Tesla just secured a commercial ride-hailing permit in California, clearing the path to compete head-on with Uber and Lyft. The catch is that human drivers are still mandatory—the permit doesn't cover autonomous vehicles. Tesla plans to have employees drive other staff first before rolling the app-based service out to the public.
Google just released Gemma 3, its newest lineup of open-weight models ranging from 1B to 27B parameters. The 4B, 12B, and 27B versions handle both images and text with an expanded 128k token context window, supporting over 140 languages. Why it matters: The 27B model beats Gemini 1.5 Pro across key benchmarks, offering top-tier multimodal power you can run openly.
Rivian just rolled out an update for its second-generation vehicles, bringing hands-free highway driving to 135,000 miles of roads across the US and Canada. The system monitors driver gaze via an infrared rearview mirror camera, with plans to expand road coverage and add eyes-off capabilities in 2026.
Apple just confirmed that its most anticipated Siri upgrades—the ones with personal context and cross-app actions—are delayed until "the coming year." Getting an AI assistant to dig through private emails and reliably execute real-world tasks proved harder than planned. Basically, that truly smart Siri likely won't arrive until iOS 19.
McDonald's is rolling out a sweeping AI overhaul across its 43,000 restaurants worldwide. Powered by edge computing from Google Cloud, the system uses connected sensors for predictive kitchen maintenance—including its notoriously broken McFlurry machines—and smart drive-thrus to ease crew stress.
Apple just rolled out AI-powered review summaries in the latest iOS 18.4 beta 2, condensing common user feedback directly on App Store listings. The summaries appear above user reviews, update at least weekly, and are currently live for eligible English apps in the US before expanding later this year.
Apple just unveiled the new MacBook Air powered by the M4 chip, now starting at $999 with 16GB of unified memory by default. The upgraded Neural Engine accelerates on-device AI tasks up to 3x faster than the M1 model, built specifically to power Apple Intelligence. Pre-orders are live today, with shipments arriving March 12.
Apple just introduced the updated Mac Studio powered by M4 Max and the new M3 Ultra chips. The compact desktop supports up to 512GB of unified memory and Thunderbolt 5, allowing developers to run LLMs with over 600 billion parameters entirely in memory. It basically turns a desktop Mac into a serious local AI powerhouse.
Uber and Waymo just launched autonomous rides in Austin, Texas, giving Uber riders a chance to get picked up by an all-electric Jaguar I-PACE with no human driver behind the wheel. The ride comes at no extra cost, and passengers can easily opt in or out. It plants robotaxis right in Tesla's home territory ahead of its own planned rollout.
Google just added an on-device AI scam detector to Google Messages to catch conversational text scams that start out friendly before turning nasty. The AI analyzes SMS and RCS chats from unsaved contacts in real time without sending your private messages to the cloud. It is enabled by default and rolling out first to English users in the US, UK, and Canada.
Apple just refreshed the iPad Air with its M3 chip, making the midrange tablet fully ready for Apple Intelligence. It packs a 60% faster Neural Engine over the M1 model to speed up on-device AI tasks, landing in 11-inch and 13-inch sizes at the same $599 starting price alongside a cheaper Magic Keyboard.
Stability AI just teamed up with Arm to run its text-to-audio model, Stable Audio Open, directly on smartphone CPUs without an internet connection. Powered by Arm's KleidiAI libraries, generating an 11-second audio clip dropped from 240 seconds to under 8 seconds—a 30x speedup for on-device creators.
Opera just previewed Browser Operator, an agentic AI built directly into the browser to handle routine web tasks like shopping and bookings. Instead of cloud VMs or taking screenshots of your screen, it runs locally and reads the page DOM directly, keeping your login data safe on-device while letting you take the wheel anytime. It is slated to launch soon via Opera's AI Feature Drops.
