Day: May 25, 2024

Apple CEO Tim Cook at the Worldwide Developers Conference in 2023.

Josh Edelson/AFP Getty Images

• Apple has largely held off from making any big reveals about its AI plans.
• A tech analyst says that that’s par for course for the company.
• “Apple is rarely first to market,” an analyst told BI.

For the better part of last year, Apple has felt increasing pressure from investors to debut in the generative AI space.

Google and Microsoft have rolled out AI-integrated products — to varying degrees of success — and OpenAI last week introduced its latest iteration of its wildly popular ChatGPT language model, GPT-4o.

Announcements about Apple’s AI moves have been mainly limited to media reports and assurances from CEO Tim Cook, who promised in February that AI “will affect every product and service we have.”

Still, company investors are getting impatient. As Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference comes in June, analysts say Apple will have to show off its AI goods to appease shareholders.

“They have to do it,” Gene Munster, managing partner at Deepwater Asset Management, told Business Insider. “The future of computing is to have multimodal AI everywhere,”

But does it matter that the tech company is late, as many analysts have declared?

Carolina Milanesi, principal analyst at Creative Strategies, a tech consulting firm, told BI that Apple’s success has rarely been defined by its ability to be first. Just look at the iPhone, iPad, or the Apple Watch.

“Apple is very rarely first to market,” Milanesi said. “They prefer to come in and disrupt the market — take anything from wearables to smartphones to tablets. They’ve never been first.”

Before Apple debuted the iPhone in 2007, Blackberry dominated the smartphone market. Tablets existed decades before the iPad launched in 2010. And the Apple Watch came only after other companies like Sony and Samsung began to enter the wearable space.

Milanesi thinks AI will be no different.

However, the analyst also argues that AI’s impact on Apple is unique since the Cupertino-based company relies less on revenue streams directly from AI. Apple’s driving source of revenue remains the iPhone despite declining sales.

Milanesi said what will be critical for Apple is to show how it will continue to add value to its existing ecosystem of products and services by integrating artificial intelligence.

“The way they’re going to leverage AI and how they’re going to bring value back to their business is going to be very different from the way that Google and Microsoft and Amazon Web Services do it,” she said. “For those companies, it’s all about the cloud, running the LLMs in the cloud, and monetizing from that.”

Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. targeted former President Trump over his administration’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, as he spoke to Libertarians during their party convention Friday.  

Kennedy argued that the former president and his administration had violated people’s First Amendment rights when they instituted health guidelines to combat the coronavirus pandemic.

“I think he had the right instinct when he came into office. He was initially very reluctant to impose lockdowns, but then he got rolled by his bureaucrats. He caved in, and many of our most fundamental rights disappeared practically overnight,” Kennedy said at the Libertarian National Convention in Washington.

“President Trump allowed his health regulators to mandate science-free social distancing, which undermined our First Amendment rights to freedom of assembly. We could no longer peacefully gather,” he said later.

Kennedy’s comments marked one of the most pointed set of remarks against Trump yet. Though Kennedy is widely seen as a long-shot contender between Trump and President Biden, recent polling has suggested he could be a spoiler for Trump in November.

Kennedy used much of his speech accusing Trump and Biden of infringing on Americans’ rights and constitutional freedoms, saying he would do more to protect people’s rights to free speech and right to assemble.

Both Kennedy and Trump are slated to speak at the convention, with the former president delivering remarks Saturday.

The Trump administration rolled out strict protocols aimed at curbing social gatherings, nonessential travel and in-person work during the beginning of the pandemic as COVID-19 cases and deaths escalated. The president and health officials were frequently at odds over how to best manage the pandemic, including over which institutions could be allowed to be open or accessible.

Though the president supported churches reopening, states instituted their own guidelines, creating a patchwork of different rules on how to tackle COVID-19. That led to different procedures over when to open other institutions, like businesses and schools.

Anthony Fauci, the former White House chief medical adviser during the pandemic, became a frequent target of Republicans, including Trump, who believed health officials were going too far in their health guidelines.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) criticized the former president during his own presidential campaign over his handling of the pandemic and for not removing Fauci from his post.

“President Trump said that he was going to run America like a business. And he came in and he gave the keys to all of our businesses to a 50-year bureaucrat who had never been elected to anything and had no accountability,” Kennedy said, claiming Trump closed millions of businesses with “no due process, no just compensation in violation of the Fifth Amendment.” 

“With lockdowns, mass mandates the travel restrictions, President Trump presided over the greatest restriction on individual liberties this country has ever known,” he added.

(NewsNation) — The New Jersey dad charged with murdering his 6-year-old son after forcing him to do abusive treadmill workouts was caught on bodycam footage blaming the child’s mother just two days after his son’s death.

Christopher Gregor, 31, was pulled over by Alcoa, Tennessee, police April 4, 2021 for speeding in a construction zone. When questioned why he took the route he did, Gregor’s response was captured on bodycam footage.

“If he (Corey Micciolo) didn’t have a drug addict mother, then he’d still be alive. That’s been going through my head this whole drive. She’s a special kind of dirtbag,” Gregor said, referring to Corey’s mother, Breanna Micciolo.

Corey Micciolo died from blunt force trauma and lacerations to his heart and liver, according to autopsy reports. His father, Christopher Gregor, forced his son to run on a treadmill in March 2021. The workout was captured on surveillance video, which shows Gregor continually increasing the treadmill’s speed, causing his son to fall off it face-first about six times.

Breanna Micciolo said she reported suspected abuse more than 100 times in 18 months, but no action was taken before the child’s death.

Did CPS overlook abuse before death?

A former Child Protective Services caseworker says implicit bias and a workforce crisis may have contributed to the death of Corey Micciolo.

Jessica Pryce, author of “Broken: Transforming Child Protective Services,” told NewsNation’s “CUOMO” last week that CPS has “to take accountability for what happened in this case.”

“When I was in the field, there was this line between the family court and CPS … But I want CPS to realize that we can’t do child safety alone … We’ve got to be the leader because we’re the experts in (keeping) kids safe.”

Host Chris Cuomo pressed Pryce on how more than 100 reports from the mother were ignored with no home visit. Pryce cited high caseworker turnover, potentially causing reports to fall “through the cracks.”

However, because Corey’s mother was an addict, Pryce said implicit bias against marginalized parents being perceived as not credible could also be a factor.

“Unfortunately, implicit bias plays a big role in this,” Pryce said. “Sometimes, we have this level of bias toward parents to say, ‘Oh, she’s not credible,’ and we’re going to …keep the child with the dad.”

New Jersey’s child welfare agency has declined requests for an interview about the case. Pryce said the agency should be transparent about any lapses that led to this tragedy.

Damita Menezes contributed to this report.

This week Donald Trump made the unhinged false suggested that President Biden sent federal law enforcement to kill him while carrying out the search and seizure warrant at Mar-a-Lago. This is obviously false for numerous reasons. The language in the warrant was standard procedure stuff. The Feds knew Trump wasn’t even home at the time the warrant was served. And Biden would have had nothing to do with the warrant.

But Trump’s unhinged words have a way of motivating his unhinged supporters to do unhinged things (see January 6th and numerous lower profile incidents). So there’s a concern that Trump could be putting law enforcement officers in harm’s way by spreading these false conspiracy theories about federal law enforcement trying to murder him.

To that end, Special Counsel Jack Smith has filed for a gag order against Donald Trump, preventing him from saying these kinds of things about law enforcement while awaiting his federal criminal trial for stealing classified documents.

Of course the judge in that trial is Aileen Cannon, and given that she’s as incompetent as she is compromised, it’s anyone’s guess what she might do. But if she does refuse to grant such an obvious gag order, it could finally give Jack Smith enough of a case to convince the 11th Circuit to take the trial away from her.

The post Jack Smith takes the fight directly at Donald Trump appeared first on Palmer Report.