Category: Business

The Transportation Safety Board of Canada has opened an investigation into the implosion of the Titan, the underwater sea vessel that imploded with five people onboard as it was traveling to the wreckage of the Titanic, the British ocean liner that sank in the North Atlantic in 1912 after striking an iceberg. The submersible vessel was the property of OceanGate Expeditions, a U.S.-based company. Its support ship, Polar Prince, however, is a Canadian-flagged ship. “The Transportation Safety Board of Canada (TSB) is launching an investigation into the fatal occurrence involving the Canadian-flagged vessel Polar Prince and the privately operated submersible Titan,” the board said in a statement Friday, raising questions about the safety of the ill-fated excursion. The board said a team of investigators has been sent to St. John’s, Newfoundland, to gather information and conduct interviews. U.S. officials said they too, were opening an investigation. “The U.S. Coast Guard has declared the loss of the Titan submersible to be a major marine casualty and will lead the investigation. The NTSB has joined the investigation and will contribute to their efforts. The USCG is handling all media inquiries related to this investigation,” the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board said Friday in a tweet. The Polar Prince lost contact with the Titan an hour and 45 minutes after the submersible began its descent Sunday. Responders rushed equipment to where remains of the Titan were found. Five major fragments of the 6.7-meter Titan were located in the debris field left from its …

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi met with U.S. and Indian technology executives in Washington on Friday, the final day of a state visit where he agreed to new defense and technology cooperation and addressed challenges posed by China.  U.S. President Joe Biden rolled out the red carpet for Modi on Thursday, declaring after about 2-1/2 hours of talks that their countries’ economic relationship was “booming.” Trade has more than doubled over the past decade.  Biden and Modi gathered with CEOs including Apple’s Tim Cook, Google’s Sundar Pichai and Microsoft’s Satya Nadella.  Also present were Sam Altman of OpenAI, NASA astronaut Sunita Williams, and Indian tech leaders including Anand Mahindra, chairman of Mahindra Group, and Mukesh Ambani, chairman of Reliance Industries, the White House said.  “Our partnership between India and the United States will go a long way, in my view, to define what the 21st century looks like,” Biden told the group, adding that technological cooperation would be a big part of that partnership.  Observing that there were a variety of tech companies represented at the meeting from startups to well established firms, Modi said: “Both of them are working together to create a new world.”  Modi, who has appealed to global companies to “Make in India,” will also address business leaders at the Kennedy Center for Performing Arts. The CEOs of top American companies, including FedEx, MasterCard and Adobe, are expected to be among the 1,200 participants.   Not ‘about China’  The backdrop to Modi’s visit is the Biden administration’s …

Titans of business, fashion, entertainment and more made the guest list for Thursday’s big White House dinner in honor India’s Narendra Modi, with the likes of designer Ralph Lauren, filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan and tennis legend Billie Jean King rubbing shoulders with tech leaders from Apple, Google and Microsoft.  Shyamalan powered past reporters as he arrived, declaring it was “lovely” to be at the White House. Lauren revealed he’d designed first lady Jill Biden’s off-shoulder green gown for the occasion, calling her style “chic and elegant.” And violinist Joshua Bell, part of the after-dinner entertainment, said the evening was a “little different than anything I’ve done before.”  “I’ll skip out and practice for half an hour” during dinner, he reported.  Saris and sequins were prominent among those attending the splashy event, with a guest list of about 400 names heavy with prominent Indian Americans. Politicians of both parties also made the cut, notably including Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise.  Other notables on the guest list included social media influencer Jay Shetty, big Democratic donors including Florida lawyer John Morgan and civil rights activist Martin Luther King III. The CEO contingent included Apple’s Tim Cook, Google’s Sundar Pichai and Microsoft’s Satya Nadella.  Guests were to dine on a plant-based menu of millet, mushrooms and strawberry shortcake, catering to the vegetarian tastes of the prime minister. For guests wanting something more, there was roast sea bass available on request.  Despite deep differences over human rights and …

Kenyan video gamers are joining forces to advocate for bringing to Africa more world-class gaming servers that provide greater stability and control. Apart from South Africa, many African countries lack servers, placing players at a disadvantage and discouraging many from joining esports. Mohammed Yusuf has more from Nairobi. …

Artificial intelligence is changing how wildlife reserves prevent poaching, with smart cameras, drones, and other technology helping rangers protect endangered species. Kate Bartlett and Zaheer Cassim report from Limpopo, South Africa. Video editor: Jason Godman. …

A submarine on a tourism expedition to explore the wreckage of the Titanic has gone missing off the coast of southeastern Canada, according to the private company that operates the vessel. OceanGate Expeditions said in a brief statement on Monday that it was “mobilizing all options” to rescue those on board the vessel. It was not immediately clear how many people were missing. The U.S. Coast Guard did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Media reports said the Coast Guard has launched search-and-rescue operations. “We are deeply thankful for the extensive assistance we have received from several government agencies and deep sea companies in our efforts to reestablish contact with the submersible,” OceanGate said in a statement. The company is currently operating its fifth Titanic “mission” of 2023, according to its website, which was scheduled to start last week and finish on Thursday. The expedition, which costs $250,000 per person, starts in St. John’s, Newfoundland, before heading out approximately 400 miles into the Atlantic to the wreckage site, according to OceanGate’s website. In order to visit the wreck, passengers climb inside Titan, a five-person submersible, which takes about two hours to descend to the Titanic. The British passenger ship famously sunk in 1912 on its maiden voyage after striking an iceberg, killing more than 1,500 people. The story has been immortalized in non-fiction and fiction books as well as the 1997 blockbuster movie “Titanic.”   …

The Dutch government is soon to join the United States and Japan in rolling out new semiconductor export control measures aimed at keeping sensitive technology away from China due to concern for potential misuse, the country’s economic affairs minister told reporters on a visit to Washington. The measures are likely to further restrict sales to China by Netherlands-based ASML, maker of the world’s most advanced chip-printing machines, which last year disclosed the “unauthorized misappropriation of data” by a now former employee in China. The United States in October 2022 announced its own export control measures affecting advanced computing integrated circuits and certain semiconductor manufacturing items. The U.S. said the measures were aimed at items that “could provide direct contributions to advancing military decision making” such as “designing and testing weapons of mass destruction (WMD), producing semiconductors for use in advanced military systems, and developing advanced surveillance systems that can be used for military applications and human rights abuses.” The U.S. subsequently asked allies including Japan and the Netherlands, which play key roles in the semiconductor supply chain, to introduce similar measures. “The main concern is [the chip-making technology] will be used in military products,” Micky Adriaansens, Netherlands’ minister of economic affairs and climate, told a group of journalists on June 8 at the Dutch Embassy in Washington. Adriaansens acknowledged that the negotiations with Washington have not been easy. “To be honest, the conversation has been intense, and is still intense,” she said. “But we agreed already upon the main issues, …

The first large-scale battery to be built at an Australian coal site has been switched on in Victoria’s Latrobe Valley, east of Melbourne. The 150-megawatt battery is at the site of the former Hazelwood power station in the southern Australian state of Victoria. The station was built in the 1960s and closed in 2017. The new battery was officially opened Wednesday and has the ability to power about 75,000 homes for an hour during the evening peak. The decommissioned coal plant produced 10 times more electricity, but the battery’s operators aim to increase its generating capacity over time. The Latrobe Valley has been the center of Victoria’s coal-fired power industry for decades, but the region is changing. The new battery will store power generated by offshore wind farms and is run by the French energy giant Engie, and its partners Eku Energy and Fluence. Engie chief executive Rik De Buyserie told reporters it is an important part of Australia’s green energy future. “The commissioning of this battery represents a key milestone in this journey and marks an important step in the transition of the La Trobe Valley from a thermal energy power to a clean energy power provider,” he said. The state of Victoria aims to have at least 2.6 gigawatts of battery storage connected to the electricity grid by 2030 and 6.3 gigawatts by 2035. Lily D’Ambrosio, Victoria’s minister for climate action, energy and resources, told reporters that the state government is committed to boosting its renewable energy sector. …

U.S. security officials say the U.S. Energy Department and several other federal agencies have been hacked by a Russian cyber-extortion gang. Homeland Security officials said Thursday the agencies were caught up in the hacking of MOVEit  Transfer, a file-transfer program that is popular with governments and corporations. The Energy Department said two of its entities were “compromised” in the hack. The Russia-linked extortion group CI0p, which claimed responsibility for the hacking, said last week on the dark web site that its victims had until Wednesday to negotiate a ransom or risk having sensitive information dumped online.  It added that it would delete any data stolen from governments, cities and police departments. Jen Easterly, director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, said while the intrusion was “largely an opportunistic one” that was superficial and caught quickly, her agency was “very concerned about this campaign and working on it with urgency.” Reuters reports that the Britain’s Shell Oil Company, the University of Georgia, Johns Hopkins University and the Johns Hopkins Health System were also among those targeted in the hacking campaign. The Associated Press quoted a senior CISA official as saying U.S. military and intelligence agencies were not affected. MOVEit said it is working with the federal agencies and its other customers to help fix their systems. Information for this report was provided by The Associated Press and Reuters.   …

An announcement by YouTube that it will no longer remove content containing misinformation on the U.S. 2020 presidential election has some experts divided. In a June blog post, YouTube said it was ending its policy — enforced since December 2020 — that removed tens of thousands of videos that falsely claimed the 2020 election was impaired by “widespread fraud, errors or glitches.” “We find that while removing this content does curb some misinformation, it could also have the unintended effect of curtailing political speech without meaningfully reducing the risk of violence or other real-world harm,” the post said. The Google-owned platform says the move is to support free speech, but some experts in tech and disinformation say it could allow harmful content to again be easily shared. “The message that YouTube is sending is that the election denial crowd is now welcome again on YouTube and can resume its campaign of undermining trust in American elections and democratic institutions,” said Paul Barrett, deputy director at New York University’s Stern Center for Business and Human Rights. But others say the policy caused “legitimate” content to be removed and that the core issue is a wider societal problem, not something confined to YouTube. YouTube’s other election misinformation policies remain unchanged, the platform said. These include prohibiting content aimed at misleading people about the time and place for voting and claims that could significantly discourage voting. Google spokesperson Ivy Choi told VOA in an email that the company has “nothing to add beyond …

Suspected state-backed Chinese hackers used a security hole in a popular email security appliance to break into the networks of hundreds of public and private sector organizations globally, nearly a third of them government agencies including foreign ministries, the U.S. cybersecurity firm Mandiant said Thursday. “This is the broadest cyber espionage campaign known to be conducted by a China-nexus threat actor since the mass exploitation of Microsoft Exchange in early 2021,” Charles Carmakal, Mandiant’s chief technical officer, said in an emailed statement. That hack compromised tens of thousands of computers globally. In a blog post Thursday, Google-owned Mandiant expressed “high confidence” that the group exploiting a software vulnerability in Barracuda Networks’ Email Security Gateway was engaged in “espionage activity in support of the People’s Republic of China.” It said the activity began as early as October. The hackers sent emails containing malicious file attachments to gain access to targeted organizations’ devices and data, Mandiant said. Of those organizations, 55% were from the Americas, 22% from the Asia Pacific region and 24% from Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and they included foreign ministries in Southeast Asia and foreign trade offices and academic organizations in Taiwan and Hong Kong. the company said. Mandiant said the majority impact in the Americas may partially reflect the geography of Barracuda’s customer base. Barracuda announced on June 6 that some of its email security appliances had been hacked as early as October, giving the intruders a back door into compromised networks. The hack was so …

Chinese manufacturers of electric vehicles are stepping up their push to dominate the European market. As Amy Guttman reports from London, they are making progress in Britain, where car shoppers are eager to buy the lower-cost electric cars that Chinese automakers are offering. …

Microsoft Founder Bill Gates was in China on Thursday for what he said were meetings with global health and development partners who have worked with his charitable foundation. “Solving problems like climate change, health inequity and food insecurity requires innovation,” Gates tweeted. “From developing malaria drugs to investing in climate adaptation, China has a lot of experience in that. We need to unlock that kind of progress for more people around the world.” Gates said global crises stifled progress in reducing death and poverty in children and that he will next travel to West Africa because African countries are particularly vulnerable “with high food prices, crushing debt, and increasing rates of TB and malaria.” Reuters, citing two people familiar with the matter, said Gates would meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping. Gates is the latest business figure to visit China year, following Apple’s Tim Cook and Tesla’s Elon Musk. Some information for this report came from The Associated Press, Agence France-Presse and Reuters. …

Experts are raising concerns that a recent Cambodian government order allocating around $1 million to a local company for a facial recognition technology project could pave the way for the technology to be used against citizens and human rights defenders. The order, signed by Prime Minister Hun Sen and released in March in a recent tranche of government documents, would award the funds to HSC Co. Ltd., a Cambodian company led by tycoon Sok Hong that has previously printed Cambodian passports and installed CCTV cameras in Phnom Penh, Cambodia’s capital. The Oct. 17 order appears to be the first direct indication of Cambodia’s interest in pursuing facial recognition, alarming experts who say such initiatives could eventually be used to target dissenters and build a stronger surveillance state similar to China’s. In recent months, the government has blocked the country’s main opposition party from participating in the July national elections, shut down independent media and jailed critics such as labor organizers and opposition politicians. Neither the Interior Ministry nor the company would answer questions about what the project entails. “This is national security and not everyone knows about how it works,” Khieu Sopheak, secretary of state and spokesperson for the Interior Ministry, told VOA by phone. “Even in the U.S., if you ask about the air defense system, they will tell you the same. This is the national security system, which we can’t tell everyone [about].” The order names HSC, a company Sok Hong founded in 2007, as the funds’ recipient. …

Chinese authorities are cracking down on political and fraud cases driven by deepfakes, created with face- and voice-changing software that tricks targets into believing they are video chatting with a loved one or another trusted person. How good are the deepfakes? Good enough to trick an executive at a Fuzhou tech company in Fujian province who almost lost $600,000 to a person he thought was a friend claiming to need a quick cash infusion. The entire transaction took less than 10 minutes from the first contact via the phone app WeChat to police stopping the online bank transfer when the target called the authorities after learning his real friend had never requested the loan, according to Sina Technology. Despite the public’s outcry about such AI-driven fraud, some experts say Beijing appears more concerned about the political challenges that deepfakes may pose, as shown by newly implemented regulations on “deep synthesis” management that outlaw activities that “endanger national security and interests and damage the national image.” The rapid development of artificial intelligence technology has propelled cutting-edge technology to mass entertainment applications in just a few years. In a 2017 demonstration of the risks, a video created by University of Washington researchers showed then-U.S. President Barack Obama saying things he hadn’t. Two years later, Chinese smartphone apps like Zao let users swap their faces with celebrities so they could appear as if they were in a movie. Zao was removed from app stores in 2019 and Avatarify, another popular Chinese face-swapping app, …

Bill Gates, Microsoft Corp’s co-founder, is set to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping on Friday during his visit to China, two people with knowledge of the matter said. The meeting will mark Xi’s first meeting with a foreign private entrepreneur in recent years. The people said the encounter may be a one-on-one meeting. A third source confirmed they would meet, without providing details. The sources did not say what the two might discuss. Gates tweeted on Wednesday that he had landed in Beijing for the first time since 2019 and that he would meet with partners who had been working on global health and development challenges with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The foundation and China’s State Council Information Office, which handles media queries on behalf of the Chinese government, did not immediately respond to Reuters requests for comment.  Gates stepped down from Microsoft’s board in 2020 to focus on philanthropic works related to global health, education and climate change. He quit his full-time executive role at Microsoft in 2008.  The last reported meeting between Xi and Gates was in 2015, when they met on the sidelines of the Boao forum in Hainan province. In early 2020, Xi wrote a letter to Gates thanking him, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, for pledging assistance to China including $5 million for its fight against COVID.  The meeting would mark the end of a long hiatus by Xi in recent years from meeting foreign private entrepreneurs and business leaders, after …

EU lawmakers on Wednesday voted for tougher landmark draft artificial intelligence rules that include a ban on the use of the technology in biometric surveillance and for generative AI systems like ChatGPT to disclose AI-generated content. The lawmakers agreed to the amendments to the draft legislation proposed by the European Commission which is seeking to set a global standard for the technology used in everything from automated factories to bots and self-driving cars. Rapid adoption of Microsoft-backed OpenAI’s ChatGPT and other bots has led top AI scientists and company executives including Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to raise the potential risks posed to society. “While Big Tech companies are sounding the alarm over their own creations, Europe has gone ahead and proposed a concrete response to the risks AI is starting to pose,” said Brando Benifei, co-rapporteur of the draft act. Among other changes, European Union lawmakers want any company using generative tools to disclose copyrighted material used to train its systems and for companies working on “high-risk application” to do a fundamental rights impact assessment and evaluate environmental impact. Microsoft, which has called for AI rules, welcomed the lawmakers’ agreement. “We believe that AI requires legislative guardrails, alignment efforts at an international level, and meaningful voluntary actions by companies that develop and deploy AI,” a Microsoft spokesperson said. However, the Computer and Communications Industry Association said the amendments on high-risk AIs were likely to overburden European AI developers with “excessively prescriptive rules” and slow down innovation. “AI …

European Union antitrust regulators took aim at Google’s lucrative digital advertising business in an unprecedented decision ordering the tech giant to sell off some of its ad business to address competition concerns. The European Commission, the bloc’s executive branch and top antitrust enforcer, said that its preliminary view after an investigation is that “only the mandatory divestment by Google of part of its services” would satisfy the concerns. The 27-nation EU has led the global movement to crack down on Big Tech companies, but it has previously relied on issuing blockbuster fines, including three antitrust penalties for Google worth billions of dollars. It’s the first time the bloc has ordered a tech giant to split up keys of business. Google can now defend itself by making its case before the commission issues its final decision. The company didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. The commission’s decision stems from a formal investigation that it opened in June 2021, looking into whether Google violated the bloc’s competition rules by favoring its own online display advertising technology services at the expense of rival publishers, advertisers and advertising technology services. YouTube was one focus of the commission’s investigation, which looked into whether Google was using the video sharing site’s dominant position to favor its own ad-buying services by imposing restrictions on rivals. Google’s ad tech business is also under investigation by Britain’s antitrust watchdog and faces litigation in the U.S. Brussels has previously hit Google with more than $8.6 billion worth of …

Amazon.com said cloud services offered by its unit Amazon Web Services were recovering after a big disruption on Tuesday affected websites of the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority and The Boston Globe, among others. Several hours after Downdetector.com started showing reports of outages, Amazon said many AWS services were fully recovered and marked resolved. “We are continuing to work to fully recover all services,” AWS’ status page showed. Tuesday’s impact stretching from transportation to financial services businesses underscores adoption of Amazon’s younger Lambda service and the degree to which many of its cloud offerings are crucial to companies in the internet age. According to research in the past year from the cloud company Datadog, more than half of organizations operating in the cloud use Lambda or rival services, known as serverless technology. Nearly 12,000 users had reported issues with accessing the service, according to Downdetector, which tracks outages by collating status reports from a number of sources, including user-submitted errors on its platform. The disruption appeared smaller in time and breadth than one the company suffered in 2017 of its data-hosting service known as Amazon S3, representing the bread and butter of its cloud business. The outage appeared to extend to AWS’s own webpage describing disruptions in its operations, which at one point failed to load on Tuesday, Reuters witnesses saw. “We quickly narrowed down the root cause to be an issue with a subsystem responsible for capacity management for AWS Lambda, which caused errors directly for customers and indirectly …

A “final Beatles record”, created with the help of artificial intelligence, will be released later this year, Paul McCartney told the BBC in an interview broadcast on Tuesday. “It was a demo that John (Lennon) had, and that we worked on, and we just finished it up,” said McCartney, who turns 81 next week. The Beatles — Lennon, McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr — split in 1970, with each going on to have solo careers, but they never reunited. Lennon was shot dead in New York in 1980 aged 40 while Harrison died of lung cancer in 2001, aged 58. McCartney did not name the song that has been recorded but according to the BBC it is likely to be a 1978 Lennon composition called “Now And Then”. The track — one of several on a cassette that Lennon had recorded for McCartney a year before his death — was given to him by Lennon’s widow Yoko Ono in 1994. Two of the songs, “Free As A Bird” and “Real Love”, were cleaned up by the producer Jeff Lynne, and released in 1995 and 1996. An attempt was made to do the same with “Now And Then” but the project was abandoned because of background noise on the demo. McCartney, who has previously talked about wanting to finish the song, said AI had given him a new chance to do so. ‘Now and Then’ Working with Peter Jackson, the film director behind the 2021 documentary series “The Beatles: Get …

India threatened to shut Twitter down unless it complied with orders to restrict accounts critical of the government’s handling of farmer protests, co-founder Jack Dorsey said, an accusation Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government called an “outright lie.” Dorsey, who quit as Twitter CEO in 2021, said on Monday that India also threatened the company with raids on employees if it did not comply with government requests to take down certain posts. “It manifested in ways such as: ‘We will shut Twitter down in India’, which is a very large market for us; ‘we will raid the homes of your employees’, which they did; And this is India, a democratic country,” Dorsey said in an interview with YouTube news show Breaking Points. Deputy Minister for Information Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar, a top ranking official in Modi’s government, lashed out against Dorsey in response, calling his assertions an “outright lie.” “No one went to jail nor was Twitter ‘shut down’. Dorsey’s Twitter regime had a problem accepting the sovereignty of Indian law,” he said in a post on Twitter. Dorsey’s comments again put the spotlight on the struggles faced by foreign technology giants operating under Modi’s rule. His government has often criticized Google, Facebook and Twitter for not doing enough to tackle fake or “anti-India” content on their platforms, or for not complying with rules. The former Twitter CEO’s comments drew widespread attention as it is unusual for global companies operating in India to publicly criticize the government. Last year, Xiaomi in a …

A three-year-old startup company is leading Kenya into the world of high-tech manufacturing, building a workforce capable of making semiconductors and nanotechnology products that operate modern devices from mobile phones to refrigerators.  Anthony Githinji is the founder of Semiconductors Technologies Limited, or STL, located in Nyeri, about a three hours’ drive from Nairobi.  He brought his know-how to Kenya from the United States, where he started work in 1997 on semiconductors — materials that conduct electricity and are used in thousands of products.  He said the biggest barrier to entry in any high-tech business is finding a workforce with the right skills. In deciding to start a business in Kenya, his country of origin, Githinji said a meeting with the vice-chancellor of Dedan Kimathi University of Science and Technology, also known as DEKUT, was a game changer.  “DEKUT and STL formed a partnership that allowed for us to engage STEM-related education and develop it, tool it and orient it toward our specific industry, which is the semiconductor and microchip space and so we started attaching students and having internships through STL, and it became very clear and very quickly that the level and caliber of the education system and the product of DEKUT, I believe most institutions of higher learning in Kenya are very high level,” Githinji said. Female engineers STL employs about 100 engineers, 70 percent of them women. Irene Ngetich, a process engineer with a background in telecommunications and electrical engineering, graduated from DEKUT in 2019. She said …

Staying in touch with a loved one after their death is the promise of several start-ups using the powers of artificial intelligence, though not without raising ethical questions. Ryu Sun-yun sits in front of a microphone and a giant screen, where her husband, who died a few months earlier, appears. “Sweetheart, it’s me,” the man on the screen tells her in a video demo. In tears, she answers him, and a semblance of conversation begins. When Lee Byeong-hwal learned he had terminal cancer, the 76-year-old South Korean asked startup DeepBrain AI to create a digital replica using several hours of video. “We don’t create new content” such as sentences that the deceased would have never uttered or at least written and validated during their lifetime, said Joseph Murphy, head of development at DeepBrain AI, about the “Rememory” program. “I’ll call it a niche part of our business. It’s not a growth area for us,” he cautioned. The idea is the same for StoryFile, a company that uses 92-year-old “Star Trek” actor William Shatner to market its site. “Our approach is to capture the wonder of an individual, then use the AI tools,” said Stephen Smith, boss of StoryFile, which claims several thousand users of its Life service. Entrepreneur Pratik Desai caused a stir a few months ago when he suggested people save audio or video of “your parents, elders and loved ones,” estimating that by “the end of this year” it would be possible to create an autonomous avatar of …

Resisting the hype, Apple defied most predictions this week and made no mention of artificial intelligence when it unveiled its latest slate of new products, including its Vision Pro mixed reality headset. Generative AI has become the tech world’s biggest buzzword since Microsoft-backed OpenAI released ChatGPT late last year, revealing the capabilities of the emerging technology.  ChatGPT opened the world’s eyes to the idea that computers can churn out complex, human-level content using simple prompts, giving amateurs the talents of tech geeks, artists or speechwriters.  Apple has laid low as Microsoft and Google raced out announcements on how generative AI will revolutionize its products, from online search to word processing and retouching images. During the recent earnings season, tech CEOs peppered mentions of AI into their every phrase, eager to reassure investors that they wouldn’t miss Silicon Valley’s next big chapter. Apple has chosen to be much more discreet and, in its closely watched keynote address to the World Developers conference in California, never once mentioned AI specifically. “Apple ghosts the generative AI revolution,” said a headline in Wired Magazine after the event.  ‘Not necessarily AI?’ Arguments vary on why Apple has chosen a more subtle approach.  For one, Apple follows other critics who have long been wary of the catchall “AI” term believing that it is too vague and unhelpfully evokes dystopian nightmares of killer robots and human subjugation to machines.  For this reason, some companies – including TikTok or Facebook’s Meta – roll out AI innovations, but without …