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Amazon's new "Join the chat" feature lets you ask questions about products and receive AI-powered audio responses.
It was only a matter of time before they found a way to use AI agents as corporate shills. On Tuesday, Snapchat rolled out AI Sponsored Snaps, a "new way for brands to show up in Chat through AI agents." Or, put another way, it's conversational advertising. (Yay?) AI Sponsored Snaps will appear in the app's Chat tab (with a light gray "Ad" notation next to the brand name). After opening the chat, you can ask the agent questions about the brand it represents. Snap showed an example from its first partner for the initiative, Experian. The bot offers to answer your questions on saving money, improving your credit score and — there it is — exploring loans and credit cards. Whether through credit card offers or other means, the AI agent will presumably try to guide you toward behavior that makes money for the sponsor. So, it isn't clear why this would be better for consumers than asking a general-purpose chatbot like Gemini or Claude the same questions. Maybe the answer is as simple as, "It isn't… but they know people will use it anyway." Snap "Conversation is becoming the most valuable real estate in advertising," Snap's Chief Business Officer, Ajit Mohan, wrote in a press release . "AI is accelerating that shift, turning chat into the place where people discover products, ask questions, and make decisions in real time. The real opportunity isn't just putting ads into those environments, it's designing formats that feel native to how people already talk." Snap says more than half a billion people have messaged its My AI feature since it launched three years ago. That was despite a shaky start, where the bot told researchers and journalists posing as young teenagers how to mask the smell of alcohol or cannabis and set the mood for sex. This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/snapchat-is-rolling-out-sponsored-ai-agents-162720124.html?src=rss
Apple reportedly plans to fix bugs and expand the capabilities of Apple Intelligence with the release of iOS 27, iPadOS 27 and macOS 27 year, and it seems like tweaks to the company's AI could go beyond a more functional version of its Siri assistant. Bloomberg reports that this year's software updates will also include new AI-powered photo editing tools that will let users change things like the background and framing of images, too. You can currently use the Photos app across Apple's operating systems to adjust things like saturation and contrast, apply filters, crop photos or use AI to remove objects with the Clean Up tool . Clean Up will apparently be one of several "Apple Intelligence Tools" after these new updates roll out, Bloomberg writes. Along with Clean Up, users will be able to use "Extend" to expand the background of the photo with generative AI, "Enhance" to automatically improve things like lighting and image quality and "Reframe" to shift the perspective of a photo after it's taken, primarily for Apple's spatial photos. The new features, if released, will bring Apple's photo-editing tools more in line with competitors like Google and Samsung, though both companies still lap Apple in their willingness to create entirely generated images. Google's Magic Editor feature , which debuted in 2023, still takes the cake in terms of giving users leeway to radically add to and change their photos. Other than new photo tools, Apple is reportedly also debuting its new version of Siri powered by Google's Gemini models, a standalone Siri app and AI-powered search inside its apps. Apple will likely introduce many of these new features during its WWDC keynote on June 8 . This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/ios-27-will-reportedly-come-with-new-ai-powered-photo-editing-tools-194119562.html?src=rss
NVIDIA is releasing a new variant of its 5070 GPU for laptops. Nestled in a blog post about the latest version of its Game Ready Drivers, the company notes its partners will soon start selling 5070 laptops with 12GB of VRAM, alongside the 8GB model that NVIDIA has offered since the launch of the 50-series. "Demand for GeForce RTX remains strong, and memory supply is contrastrained. In order to maximize memory availability, we are releasing the GeForce RTX 5070 Laptop GPU 12GB configuration with 24Gb G7 memory. This gives our partners access to an additional pool of memory to complement the 16Gb G7 supply that currently ships with most GeForce GPUs," NVIDIA said. The first 12GB 5070-equipped laptops are slated to start shipping sometime in June, with manufacturers like ASUS, Lenovo and MSI likely to offer the video card as an option in some of their models. NVIDIA has yet to confirm pricing, but outlets like NotebookCheck are reporting that 12GB 5070 laptops could cost as much as their 5070 Ti counterparts. Right now, a 5070 Ti-equipped PC like the Acer Predator Helios Neo 16S AI can set you back as much $2,650 , depending on the amount of RAM on offer. New 12GB 5070 laptops likely won't cost as much, given manufacturers will probably configure them with less RAM. NVIDIA has yet to share the full spec list for the 12GB 5070, but as the company notes, it’s using 24Gb G7 memory, instead of 16GB G7 memory, for the new model. The two memory types are made using different manufacturing processes. The former uses 3GB memory modules, while the latter uses 2GB ones. Either way the company is tapping into a different supply of memory that, in recent months, Samsung and Micron have managed to produce more consistently at scale. That said, unless NVIDIA has redesigned the 5070 to equip it with a wider 192-bit bus interface, which seems unlikely in this case, the new model won't be able to access that additional memory as fast as the 5070 Ti and other models above it in NVIDIA's stack. For most games that shouldn't matter too much, but it does mean the new model isn't quite the upgrade it seems if you just look at the amount of raw VRAM. This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/computing/laptops/nvidia-starts-offering-a-12gb-version-of-the-5070-for-laptops-180057515.html?src=rss
