Technology

What was supposed to herald a new era of AI for Apple has instead left many underwhelmed when the tech giant unveiled the iPhone 16 series, its first AI-powered smartphone line-up, which happens to be still in beta testing and expected to take months, if not years, to fully roll out globally. To make matters worse for the Cupertino, California-based smartphone maker, Chinese tech giant Huawei launched its new Mate XT smartphone just hours after the former’s event, boasting far more impressive AI features powered by Huawei’s in-house Kylin chips.
Huawei’s move showcases its ability to innovate despite facing US sanctions, but it also spells uncertainty for Apple’s market share in Mainland China, one of its most crucial markets. Let’s explore why.
Apple and its AI gambit: Worth the hype?
The delay in rolling out AI features has led many industry analysts to question whether Apple’s AI push is ready for prime time. “With lots of words like ‘later this year’ and ‘early next year’, the core Apple message for iPhone 16 was: Next year will be better,” Reuters quoted Needham analyst Laura Martin.
Apple’s suite of tools, collectively known as Apple Intelligence, has been in development for some time. The company has touted the technology since its developer’s conference in June. However, the software won’t be included in the initial versions of the new iPhones, and many key features won’t arrive until next year. 
For now, the technology primarily focuses on summarising messages and notifications rather than matching the more advanced capabilities of rival systems.
Delayed AI features in iPhone 16 dampen enthusiasm–especially in China
In China, the excitement of the launch of the iPhone 16 series on Monday quickly turned to disappointment for many local Apple users when they learned that the AI features would not be immediately available in their language until next year. 
At the same time, Huawei’s AI assistant, with text summary, translation, and editing functions, and AI-boosted image editing functions, such as trimming unwanted parts of photos, will be readily available once Mate XT goes on sale later this month. This delay has prompted scepticism about the value proposition of the new iPhones in China, especially given the fierce competition from local rivals like Huawei.
“The absence of AI in China is akin to cutting one of Apple’s arms,” one commentator remarked on Weibo, China’s popular microblogging platform. Another user pointedly asked, “With the biggest selling point unavailable, shouldn’t you charge us half the price?” These sentiments reflect a growing frustration among Chinese consumers who feel they are not getting the total value of Apple’s latest innovations, according to South China Morning Post.
In contrast, Huawei’s new Mate XT, which users can fold three ways like an accordion screen door, has already received more than four million pre-orders, for which no deposit is required, according to the company’s website. According to research firm IDC, the global market for foldable phones was around 4 million units in the second quarter.
“Today, we bring you a product everyone can think of but could not make. Our team has been working hard for five years and has never given up,” Huawei executive director Richard Yu said at the launch.
On the other hand, Apple has yet to announce an AI partner in China to power Apple Intelligence. This is because the uncertain regulatory landscape in mainland China adds to the complexity of the situation. The country’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has approved 188 large language models for public use, none of which are from foreign companies. 
This raises questions about whether Apple’s AI features will be available in mainland China even when rolled out in other Chinese-speaking regions. Apple has stated on its website that the launch date of its AI feature in China will depend on the decision of Chinese regulators. 
But Apple has to catch up, and it has to be fast. Apple sales have been dwindling, and the company’s ranking in the world’s second-largest economy has dropped from third to sixth place. This is even though Apple has long experienced robust demand in China, where new iPhone debuts have historically caused a frenzy. 
The industry took a surprising turn when Shenzhen-based Huawei returned to the high-end smartphone sector last year with the debut of a device powered by a domestically manufactured chip. This defied US sanctions that had cut off access to the global chipset supply chain. 
The Mate 60 Pro’s debut startled analysts and US officials. In addition, Huawei started offering two-way foldable phones in its inventory, and strong sales in China helped it beat Samsung Electronics as the world’s largest vendor of such phones earlier this year. 
The delay with Apple Intelligence in China will give competitors like Huawei a window of opportunity to capture market share and establish themselves as leaders in AI-powered smartphones within their home turf. This could make it more challenging for Apple to regain ground once its AI features finally arrive in the country.
Ultimately, Apple’s AI ambitions in China represent a high-stakes gamble for the tech giant. While the company’s brand still holds significant appeal, the delayed rollout of AI features and intense competition from resurgent local players like Huawei pose serious challenges. 
As the smartphone market in China continues to evolve, Apple’s ability to adapt its AI strategy to local conditions may determine its future success in this critical market.
(Photo by James Lee)
See also: Could an Apple-Meta partnership redefine the AI landscape?
Want to learn more about AI and big data from industry leaders? Check out AI & Big Data Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. The comprehensive event is co-located with other leading events including Intelligent Automation Conference, BlockX, Digital Transformation Week, and Cyber Security & Cloud Expo.
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Sony Research and AI Singapore (AISG) will collaborate on research for the SEA-LION family of large language models (LLMs).
SEA-LION, which stands for Southeast Asian Languages In One Network, aims to improve the accuracy and capability of AI models when processing languages from the region. This is particularly important given the linguistic diversity of Southeast Asia, which is home to over a thousand different languages. 
“As a global company, diversity and localisation are vital forces,” said Hiroaki Kitano, President of Sony Research. “In Southeast Asia specifically, there are more than a thousand different languages spoken by the citizens of the region. This linguistic diversity underscores the importance of ensuring AI models and tools are designed to support the needs of all populations around the world.”
The collaboration will focus on testing and improving the SEA-LION model, with a particular emphasis on Tamil, a language spoken by an estimated 60-85 million people worldwide. Sony Research will leverage its expertise in Indian languages – including Tamil – and its research in speech generation, content analysis, and recognition.
“Access to LLMs that address the global landscape of language and culture has been a barrier to driving research and developing new technologies that are representative and equitable for the global populations we serve,” Kitano added.
The collaboration is further strengthened by Kitano’s existing ties to the Singaporean technology landscape. He holds positions on numerous advisory councils and boards in the country, including the Advisory Council on the Ethical Use of AI and Data, the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA), the Singapore Economic Development Board (EDB), and the National Research Foundation, Singapore (NRF).
“The integration of the SEA-LION model, with its Tamil language capabilities, holds great potential to boost the performance of new solutions,” Teo continued. “We are particularly eager to contribute to the testing and refinement of the SEA-LION models for Tamil and other Southeast Asian languages, while also sharing our expertise and best practices in LLM development.
“We look forward to seeing how this collaboration will drive innovation in multilingual AI technologies.”
(Photo by James Lee)
See also: Whitepaper dispels fears of AI-induced job losses
Want to learn more about AI and big data from industry leaders? Check out AI & Big Data Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. The comprehensive event is co-located with other leading events including Intelligent Automation Conference, BlockX, Digital Transformation Week, and Cyber Security & Cloud Expo.
Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars powered by TechForge here.
The post Sony and AI Singapore collaborate on SEA-LION LLMs appeared first on AI News.
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At Microsoft, we’re ushering in a new era of computing on the path to unlocking scientific advantage and tackling some of the world’s most pressing challenges. This is why we’re building Azure Quantum — to create the first platform for reliable quantum computing and achieve the vision of quantum at scale.
In April, we announced we’re entering the next phase for solving meaningful problems with reliable quantum computers by demonstrating the most reliable logical qubits with an error rate 800x better than physical qubits. The main issue with today’s noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) machines is that their physical qubits are too noisy and error-prone, making the machines impractical for real-world applications. That’s why we must transition to using reliable logical qubits that combine multiple physical qubits together to protect against noise and to maintain coherence for long-running computations.
But quantum computing doesn’t exist in isolation. It requires deep integration with the power of the cloud. We must leverage the best of computing to unlock a new generation of hybrid quantum applications that could solve some of our most pressing challenges — from pioneering more sustainable energy solutions to transforming how we treat disease with the next generation of life-saving therapeutics.
We designed the Azure Quantum compute platform to provide quantum computing across a variety of hardware architectures, enabling the most advanced hybrid quantum applications in the industry — all in a secure, unified and scalable cloud environment — to tackle classically intractable problems. This is our vision for Azure Quantum. Today, we continue to make advances that bring us closer to achieving it with our industry-leading partners, Quantinuum and Atom Computing. With both companies, we want to bring best-in-class solutions to the Azure Quantum platform, and collectively advance and scale resilient quantum capabilities.
In collaboration with Quantinuum, we applied our improved qubit-virtualization system to create and entangle 12 highly reliable logical qubits. This represents the largest number of entangled logical qubits, with the highest fidelity, on record. These results scale logical qubit computation — on ion-trap hardware — within our Azure Quantum compute platform. In addition, advancing toward scalable quantum computing necessitates not only reaching significant hardware milestones, but also proving these improvements can address practical and real-world challenges.
This is why we demonstrated the first end-to-end chemistry simulation that combines reliable logical quantum computation with cloud high-performance computing (HPC) and AI. Today’s announcements would not have been possible without Quantinuum’s leading quantum machines. This paves the way toward practical solutions at the intersection of these technologies, especially in the domains of chemistry, physics and life sciences.
Lastly, as we expand our Azure Quantum compute platform, we are excited to announce that Microsoft and Atom Computing are coming together to ultimately build the world’s most powerful quantum machine. Through this collaboration, we’re bringing a new generation of reliable quantum hardware to customers by integrating and advancing Atom Computing’s neutral-atom hardware into our Azure Quantum compute platform. With it, we are bringing the best-in-class from Microsoft and our partner ecosystem to provide the commercial offering of a reliable quantum machine.
Combining the capabilities of this reliable quantum hardware with our platform for Science, Azure Elements, we are providing a comprehensive discovery suite to achieve scientific quantum advantage.
Creating a new generation of hybrid quantum applications
At Microsoft, we’re pioneering a new computing paradigm by bringing the power of the cloud and AI together with quantum. Our Azure Quantum compute platform enables the seamless execution of quantum applications that leverage hardware across a variety of qubit architectures and chips, while offering integration with cloud HPC and AI. Over this past year, we’ve continued to announce new breakthroughs and collaborations in pursuit of this platform mission, including offering Generative Chemistry and Accelerated DFT and advancing the industry to reliable quantum computing by demonstrating highly reliable logical qubits.
We are bringing these technologies together in a purpose-built cloud platform that leverages the complementary strengths of both AI for large-scale data processing and quantum for complex calculations and unprecedented accuracy. This strong compute foundation offers a secure, unified and scalable hybrid computing environment that enables innovators to develop best-in-class solutions for tackling problems that are difficult or even intractable on classical computers. We are integrating quantum hardware architectures from our ecosystem partners with our quantum control, processing and error correction software — in addition to capabilities for copilot-assisted workflows, developer tools, classical supercomputing and multi-modal AI models. This differentiated computing stack will pave the way for this new generation of hybrid applications. AI co-reasoning will help articulate problems and translate them into workflows, using both classical and scaled quantum tools at the right stages to drive impactful insights in an iterative loop to compress R&D and time-to-solution into days, not years.
Continuing to implement reliable quantum computing with Quantinuum 
Today, in collaboration with Quantinuum, we’re proud to announce the demonstration of the best performing logical qubits on record, achieving the largest number of entangled logical qubits. We created 12 logical qubits by improving and optimizing our qubit-virtualization system for Quantinuum’s 56-physical-qubits H2 machine.
This progress speaks to the world-class error correction expertise at Microsoft. In less than six months, our improved qubit-virtualization system tripled reliable logical qubit counts. Furthermore, when we entangled all 12 logical qubits in a complex state required for ‘deeper’ quantum computation, they exhibited a 22X circuit error rate improvement over the corresponding physical qubits. 
With our improved error correction code and qubit-virtualization system, we’ve demonstrated a 22X improvement between physical and logical circuit error rates when entangled. As we continue to strive toward scientific and industrial breakthroughs with quantum computers, noise remains our biggest barrier. In a previous post, I highlighted how increasing the number of physical qubits alone is not enough to make robust quantum error correction possible. As part of the quantum ecosystem, we must remain focused on improving both logical qubit counts and fidelity to have a solid foundation for producing meaningful results. This will be possible through hardware and software advancements that together enable running longer and more reliable quantum applications. Today’s announcement demonstrates that it is possible to realize these fundamental capabilities on the path to large-scale quantum computing.
A true computing paradigm shift also requires a focus on practical and commercially relevant applications. Earlier, we successfully completed a chemistry simulation in the first end-to-end workflow that combined HPC, AI and logical qubit computation to predict the ground state energy for a specific catalyst problem. This demonstration marked a critical step toward ushering in a new generation of hybrid applications that will become increasingly impactful as quantum technologies scale. Quantum and AI will have the earliest significant impact on scientific discovery, and researchers at Microsoft have demonstrated the breakthrough potential of this integration. This work was only possible thanks to our long-standing and close collaboration with Quantinuum, a company that remains at the forefront of quantum computing.
You can learn more about today’s improved logical qubits and the technical details about this chemistry simulation in our blog Microsoft and Quantinuum create 12 logical qubits and demonstrate a hybrid, end-to-end chemistry simulation.
Announcing a new commercial offering with Atom Computing
Lastly, in collaboration with Atom Computing, we are excited to bring a new generation of reliable quantum hardware to customers. Bringing together Microsoft’s enhanced qubit-virtualization system with Atom Computing’s neutral-atom hardware, we’ve jointly generated logical qubits and are optimizing the system to enable reliable quantum computation. Together, we believe this new commercial offering will be the world’s most powerful quantum machine on record and will scale to scientific advantage and beyond.
Atom Computing’s hardware uniquely combines capabilities essential for expanding quantum error correction, including large numbers of high-fidelity qubits, all-to-all qubit connectivity, long coherence times and mid-circuit measurements with qubit reset and reuse. The company is building 2nd generation systems with over 1,200 physical qubits and plans to increase the physical qubit count tenfold with each new hardware generation. By applying Microsoft’s state-of-the-art fault-tolerance protocols on a different qubit architecture, our Azure Quantum compute platform can offer a spectrum of best-in-class logical qubits across multiple hardware platforms, providing flexibility and future proofing our customers’ investments.
Microsoft and Atom Computing team up to enhance the Azure Quantum compute platform with neutral-atom hardware and tailored qubit virtualization, enabling a commercial discovery suite with continuous upgrade capabilities for additional logical qubits. Our collaboration with Atom Computing aims to integrate these capabilities with Azure Elements, our purpose-built cloud platform offering differentiated computing scale, state-of-the-art AI models for chemistry and materials science simulations and Copilot. Our goal is to empower governments and organizations to tackle scientifically and commercially relevant problems with today’s most advanced computational solutions, including designing and predicting properties of chemicals and materials, exploring molecular interactions and simulating complex chemical reactions. Additionally, we want to help galvanize a quantum-ready ecosystem, providing the critical tools necessary for commercial adoption of these technologies that can help build quantum expertise and create new demand for jobs.
Empowering customers with the best of quantum and AI
At Microsoft, we want to enable practitioners to unlock a new generation of applications that harness the complementary strengths of quantum, classical supercomputing and AI, all connected in the Azure cloud.
We remain committed to achieving quantum at scale so we can solve commercially significant problems that are far too complex for classical computers. As a platform company, it’s critical that we continue investing in the quantum ecosystem and collaborating with industry leaders such as Quantinuum, Atom Computing, Photonic and others to advance and scale quantum capabilities. Alongside our industry collaborations, we’re also focused on our own innovation with a topological qubit-based approach.
This approach continues to offer a unique path to scaling up, with fast clock speeds, digital control and more. Furthermore, a topological quantum computer could control over one million physical qubits on a single chip, with the ability to process information faster than other types of qubits. Our Azure Quantum team previously demonstrated the feasibility of this approach, and we look forward to scaling this to the level of quantum supercomputing. 
Azure is the place where all this innovation comes together. For more information about today’s announcements:
Read the technical blog Microsoft and Quantinuum create 12 logical qubits and demonstrate a hybrid end-to-end chemistry simulation. Register for the upcoming Microsoft Quantum Innovator Series on how quantum and AI can unlock a new generation of hybrid applications for science. Get the latest news and announcements from Azure Quantum. The post Microsoft announces the best performing logical qubits on record and will provide priority access to reliable quantum hardware in Azure Quantum appeared first on The Official Microsoft Blog.
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