Google glasses

In brief: For all of the advancements generative AI has made this year, many people rarely or never use the likes of ChatGPT. But maker OpenAI is reportedly looking to create its first consumer device that offers a more natural and intuitive way of interacting with the technology, and it is working with former Apple designer Sir Jony Ive, along with SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son, to launch this “iPhone of artificial intelligence.”

According to The Financial Times , which cites three people familiar with the talks, OpenAI boss Sam Altman has been in discussions with Ive about the device. The pair are looking to take inspiration from the way the original iPhone, which Ive helped create, and its touchscreen technology was a catalyst that led to today’s mobile internet.

The pair are said to be brainstorming what the design or device might be. An actual phone seems unlikely, despite the “iPhone of AI” quote. One X user suggests it could be a modern reimagining of Google Glass.

Also involved in the project is Masayoshi Son, the CEO of Japanese investment company SoftBank. He’s already invested $140 billion into AI startups and is reportedly ready to hand $1 billion of funding to OpenAI and LoveFrom, the company Ive founded when he departed Apple in 2019.

Sam Altman

SoftBank famously holds a 90% stake in British chip designer Arm, so it shouldn’t be a surprise to learn that Son is pitching a major role for Arm in the device’s creation.

Ive has previously spoken out against the compulsive nature of smartphones. In 2108, he said that Apple had a “moral responsibility” to mitigate the addictiveness of technologies such as apps.

Ive reportedly believes the OpenAI project presents an opportunity to create a way of interacting with computers that is less reliant on screens. The Verge notes that Altman is no stranger to this concept thanks to his investment in hardware and software startup Humane, which is developing a screenless wearable AI device designed to replace smartphones.

The details of what the trio have planned are obviously minimal, and there might not even be an end product after all of these discussions, but the talks are said to be “serious.” With the smartphone market having just experienced its worst quarterly performance in over a decade, could now be the perfect time to introduce a new device?

Center image: TechCrunch

Meta has ramped up the race for our faces as it revealed the next generation of its wearable immersive tech products.

The headline announcement: a successor in the Meta Quest series, the Meta Quest 3, and a follow-up to its Ray-Ban Stories smart glasses.

Facebook’s parent company claims the Quest 3 is 40% slimmer than its predecessor and boasts better graphics hardware.

But the main focus this year is on “mixed reality” – an experience that marries up the virtual and real-life surroundings.

I was invited by Meta to try out the new model ahead of release to see whether it manages to keep pace with its numerous rivals in an increasingly competitive market.

A new headstrap made the device feel slightly lighter than the previous model, and I didn’t experience the Quest 2’s interminable issue of fogging – when the lenses would steam up from my breathing – causing me to either repeatedly wipe the display, or hold my breath for uncomfortable periods of time.

The Quest 3 immediately began scanning the room’s walls, floors and objects automatically, a task you previously had to arduously perform manually.

New features and alien games

Once the machine had a good idea of where everything was in the room, Meta demonstrated various apps and games to showcase the mixed reality element.

One game saw aliens crash through your ceiling, blurring the line between reality and game.

Another immersed you in a virtual, abandoned space station, entirely leaving behind the artificial living room Meta had constructed for us.

As someone who doesn’t spend much time in the metaverse, it took some getting used to, and after taking it off and returning to reality, I did feel a bit like a drunk sailor on the high seas.

The developers have cannibalised much of the tech found in their premium Pro model which retails for £1,499.99.

The Quest 3 starts at £499.99 and sports some of the Pro’s biggest hits – such as an enhanced display and the ability to select menu options with just your fingers.

Prohibitive manufacturing costs mean that the Pro’s eye-tracking is not included, and the controllers don’t include rechargeable lithium-ion batteries like you’d find on a PlayStation or Xbox controller.

Accessibility appears to have been a priority for Meta this year, both in cost-efficiency, and user-friendliness.

The new hand-tracking feature makes navigating menus more convenient for when those controllers are out of reach – or when you’ve run out of double A batteries.

The finger-tracking isn’t as precise as using a controller, and sometimes my finger would select the wrong button or resize the window – but it worked most of the time.

What’s the Metaverse for?

The price is arguably competitive when set against its competitors such as the HTC Vive Pro 2 (£1,399) or the PSVR2 (£529.99), for example.

One unavoidable question mark, however, still hangs over Meta’s VR project like the sword of Damocles – the purpose of the ‘Metaverse’ itself.

Meta has invested over $36bn (£29.5bn) in research and development in the Metaverse so far, to seemingly little benefit.

For comparison, Apple spent just over $150m (£123m) in R&D to invent the iPhone.

When asked whether that $36bn could have been better spent on researching AI, a Meta spokesperson told Sky News: “We do spend an awful lot of money on AI, we have been working on AI for over a decade, so I think it’s hard to quantify in that way.”

Following Meta’s announcement of a new chatbot coming to its Messenger app, the spokesperson said they were confident they were keeping pace in the AI arms race against Microsoft and Google: “I think we’re just doing different things… we’re pretty comfortable with how we’re progressing.”

Alongside the Quest 3, Meta has also updated its Ray-Ban Stories smart glasses.

These do not project images, but capture them.

Two tiny cameras buried in the chassis of a pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses record the world around you without you even having to take your phone out.

The last generation of smart glasses was not a roaring success, with one report published only last month suggesting 90% of customers stopped using theirs shortly after purchase.

Sunglasses for Instagram

So will the improved cameras, microphones and built-in speakers be enough to make these an attractive proposition for content creators?

With the Instagram generation firmly in mind, the specs now only shoot in portrait mode, without the option of landscape.

As someone who works in traditional TV news, I found it a shame to lose the landscape feature, but the logic behind the change makes sense.

Serial Instagrammers will appreciate the change, but whether the general public will or not remains to be seen.

The built-in speakers situated in the glasses’ temples offered good-quality Bluetooth music playback, though more bass-heavy tracks suffered once the volume was turned up to maximum.

Read more: Your iPhone is getting a major update Sex offenders using virtual reality to abuse children

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The protective charging case looks indistinguishable from the norm, with a light on the front to tell you when they’re at maximum charge.

But if you’re in the 10% of men worldwide who suffer from red/green colour blindness like me, you’ll likely struggle to differentiate the orange and green indicators.

The ultimate aim for Meta is to marry up the display technology behind the Quest and the camera capability of the Stories.

Mark Zuckerberg has already proclaimed his aim to one day ship a pair of smart glasses that does both – but that still feels several generations away.

For now, Meta has injected a healthy and vital dose of competition into the market, and however vague the concept of the Metaverse may remain, that will drive progress.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg kicked off the tech giant’s Connect developer conference on Wednesday with a focus on virtual and augmented reality and artificial intelligence

The company, which renamed itself Meta two years ago, unveiled the next version of its virtual reality headset, the Quest 3. It will cost $499 and begin shipping Oct. 10.

Standing in a courtyard at his company’s Menlo Park , California headquarters, Zuckerberg told the audience of developers, employees and journalists that Meta is “focused on building the future of human connection” — and painted a near-future where people interact with hologram versions of their friends or coworkers and with AI bots built to assist them.

“Soon the physical and digital will come together in what we call the metaverse,” he said.

Zuckerberg introduced an AI personal assistant people can interact with using any of Meta’s messaging apps — along with a smattering of AI characters he called “a bit more fun,” such as “Max the sous chef,” who can help come up with ideas for dinner, or Lily, a “personal editor and writing partner.”

“These are just a few we have trained, there are a lot more coming,” he said.

He also introduced the next version of Meta’s Ray Ban Stories smart glasses, which let people record video or photos, livestream, listen to music and interact with the Meta AI assistant.

“Smart glasses are the ideal form factor for you to let an AI assistant see what you are seeing and hear what you are hearing,” Zuckerberg said. The glasses will launch Oct. 17 and cost $299.

Meta is in the midst of a corporate transformation that it says will take years to complete. It wants to evolve from a provider of social platforms to a dominant power in a nascent virtual-reality world called the metaverse — sort of like the internet brought to life, or at least rendered in 3D.

But this transformation has been slower than expected — and has already cost billions of dollars — and Meta’s main business remains advertising on its social media platforms, Facebook and Instagram. Competition with TikTok remains Meta’s biggest challenge, said Insider Intelligence analyst Yoram Wurmser.

“A lot of this effort around chatbots and stories and other ways just to keep engagement going (like) AI-driven personalization and stuff like that, that’s the overarching challenge for the company,” he said.

Squeezed by a slump in online advertising and uncertainty around the global economy, Meta has cut more than 20,000 jobs since last November. Zuckerberg dubbed 2023 the company’s “year of efficiency” as it reduces its workforce while focusing on more technical hires such as experts in AI to focus on Meta’s long-term vision.

Artificial intelligence is central to that vision. Over the summer, Meta released the next generation of its AI large language model and made the technology, known as Llama 2, free for research and commercial use. On Wednesday, it unveiled an AI image generator named Emu, which creates images based on prompts from users.

Much like tech peers Google and Microsoft, Meta has long had a big research team of computer scientists devoted to advancing AI technology. But it’s been overshadowed as the release of ChatGPT sparked a rush to profit off of “generative AI” tools that can create new prose, images and other media.

Zuckerberg said at the time that people can download its new AI models directly or through a partnership that makes them available on Microsoft’s cloud platform Azure “along with Microsoft’s safety and content tools.”

Looters who gleefully stole iPhones and other products in a second night of lawlessness were left enraged as Apple disabled the devices.

The devices all began blaring, rendered useless to the thieves.

‘Oh my god, this is crazy,’ one of the looters can be heard saying in a video showing someone pouring what looks like orange juice over an iPad on the sidewalk.

Several other Apple devices are seen on the ground and one person appears holding iPhones in dismay.

‘Oh my god, these iPhones, oh my god,’ the same person is heard saying.

The video is captioned, ‘stolen ipads goin off’.

Earlier video showed dozens of looters inside an Apple store with ‘iPhone 15 Pro’ marked on the glass façade, grabbing devices as sirens sounded and cops cars could be seen arriving.

‘Free iPhones!’ someone could be heard saying repeatedly.

Police thus far have made 52 arrests from Wednesday night’s looting of stores in the Center City, Northeast and West Philadelphia, according to WPVI . All of them but three were adults, Jane Roh, a spokeswoman for the district attorney’s office.

Cops received a call around 8.18pm for looting at the Apple Store on the 1600 block of Walnut Street. No arrests were immediately made around the incident. The store recovered numerous of the stolen items, WPVI reported.

Lululemon and Fine Wine & Good Spirits were also ransacked.

A looter known as Meatball, Dayjia Blackwell, was arrested after sharing videos of the mayhem at the Apple Store, Lululemon and Foot Locker, then entering and stealing from a liquor store.

Violence broke out in the City of Brotherly Love after a judge dismissed charges against former police Officer Mark Dial who fatally shot black man Eddie Irizarry, 27, in August.

Businesses across the city closed earlier as police increased patrols on Wednesday.

‘The bottom line is sending a message that Philadelphia is not going to be the place where you can do this type of behavior,’ said Interim Philadelphia Police Commissioner John Stanford.

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A young holidaymaker has bagged herself a week-long holiday with her whole family for just £2.42 – that’s cheaper than six McDonalds’s McNuggets!

Emily Orchard, a student nurse from St Helens, won the holiday by taking part in Jet2Holidays ” Bid for a Break ” scheme, where you bid a low amount for a holiday, with the lowest unique bid winning.

Not only will Emily get to go to her five-star resort hotel in Gran Canaria, but she can also take a second adult and two children with her. Emily will be going to the Lopes Baobab Resort for the holiday of a lifetime – and all she had to do was bid the lowest original amount on the Jet2 app.

READ MORE: Travel experts reveal the cheapest week to book flights including New York and Rome

The Gran Canaria Resort is a stunning hotel which will have most of us drooling. The seven heated outdoor pools wind its way among tropical palm trees, shaded bars and plenty of sun loungers in the grounds – plus, there’s even a faux waterfall, statues of elephants, glass lined balconies and walkways and swim-up rooms.

The resort’s design is inspired by African countries “from the jungle-like gardens to the earthy warmth of the décor, lagoon-style pools running past caves, flowing waterfalls and sandy shallows”. There are also some slides in a small aqua playground for children.

The resort has a championship golf course, an air conditioned gym and offers sports like aerobics, basketball, table tennis, yoga, pilates, football and darts. Or you can hire a bike on site to explore the island. There’s also a spa that offers beauty treatments and a hairdressers that lets you get your tresses trimmed.

Guests can also enjoy facilities including a disco, pool bar, lobby bar and coffee bar serving a range of local and international drinks. The four restaurants include two buffets and two a la carte options. Come evening time, there’s entertainment from bingo to in-house entertainment shows, as well as karaoke, live DJ, live music, mini-disco, professional shows and quizzes. Kids can get stuck into the children’s club where they enjoy arts and crafts, team games, movie nights, drama and music and even games consoles.

Some rooms even have their own private pools or are swim-up, while fancy suites come with reserved pool areas and sun loungers, access to a CIP lounge, priority check in, bottles of wine on arrival and access to the a la carte restaurant for breakfast. Ooh la la!

Thrilled to be getting her break, Emily said: “I entered Bid for a Break as my friend told me about it, but I never thought I would actually win. Wow – I’m still waiting for someone to tell me I’ve got it wrong! I chose my winning bid by just looking at the time, which was 2:42pm. Thank you so much to the Jet2holidays team – this is a fantastic competition and I guess it really can be won by anyone!”

Steve Heapy, CEO of Jet2.com and Jet2holidays, added: “Since its launch, our Bid for a Break campaign has been extremely popular with holidaymakers, so we were delighted to welcome its return every weekday and weekend throughout September. The campaign is highly sought-after, and its bumper return has proven to be a huge hit with customers once again.

“We know how much holidaymakers want to get away from the UK and enjoy a well-deserved break, and with some fantastic holidays available to bid on daily, we are offering them the chance to do just that for as little as a few pence. We would like to send a huge congratulations to Emily for successfully bidding on a break and securing a holiday to Gran Canaria for just £2.42. We still have some fantastic holidays up for grabs, so make sure you get involved and have a bid in mind for tomorrow’s auction.”

There are still breaks to bid for this month too including a seven night stay for two adults and two kids at the Paradise Park Fun Lifestyle Hotel in Tenerife, another one for the Kirman Calyptus Resort & Spa in Turkey and finally, a stay for two adults at Ammon Garden in Greece.

It’s not the first time someone has managed to get a holiday so cheaply. Mum Joanna Liburd snagged a seven-night holiday to Cyprus for just £1.40.

To Bid for a Break, all holidaymakers need to do is download the Jet2 mobile app and add in their bid to the nearest pence. If their bid is the lowest, and nobody else has bid that same amount, they will purchase the holiday for the same price as their bid. The Jet2 mobile app can be downloaded for free from the App Store or on Google Play. For further information on the campaign, please visit jet2holidays.com/bid-for-a-break .