Many have accepted the fact that progress is rarely linear, and AI is no exception.

As academics, independent developers, and the biggest tech companies in the world drive us closer to artificial general intelligence — a still hypothetical form of intelligence that matches human capabilities — they've hit some roadblocks. Many emerging models are prone to hallucinating, misinformation, and simple errors.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai referred to this phase of AI as AJI, or "artificial jagged intelligence," on a recent episode of Lex Fridman's podcast.

"I don't know who used it first, maybe Karpathy did," Pichai said, referring to deep learning and computer vision specialist Andrej Karpathy, who cofounded OpenAI before leaving last year.

AJI is a bit of a metaphor for the trajectory of AI development — jagged, marked at once by sparks of genius and basic mistakes.

In a 2024 X post titled "Jagged Intelligence," Karpathy described the term as a "word I came up with to describe the (strange, unintuitive) fact that state of the art LLMs can both perform extremely impressive tasks (e.g. solve complex math problems) while simultaneously struggle with some very dumb problems." He then posted examples of state of the art large language models failing to understand that 9.9 is bigger than 9.11, making "non-sensical decisions" in a game of tic-tac-toe, and struggling to count.

The issue is that unlike humans, "where a lot of knowledge and problem-solving capabilities are all highly correlated and improve linearly all together, from birth to adulthood," the jagged edges of AI are not always clear or predictable, Karpathy said.

"You see what they can do and then you can trivially find they make numerical errors or counting R's in strawberry or something, which seems to trip up most models," Pichai said. "I feel like we are in the AJI phase where dramatic progress, some things don't work well, but overall, you're seeing lots of progress."

In 2010, when Google DeepMind launched, its team would talk about a 20-year timeline for AGI, Pichai said. Google subsequently acquired DeepMind in 2014. Pichai thinks it'll take a little longer than that, but by 2030, "I would stress it doesn't matter what that definition is because you will have mind-blowing progress on many dimensions."

By then the world will also need a clear system for labeling AI-generated content to "distinguish reality," he said.

"Progress" is a vague term, but Pichai has spoken at length about the benefits we'll see from AI development. At the UN's Summit of the Future in September 2024, he outlined four specific ways that AI would advance humanity — improving access to knowledge in native languages, accelerating scientific discovery, mitigating climate disaster, and contributing to economic progress.

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Investors will now have an idea what the stakes are when Apple reveals what’s next for its most important products at its annual Worldwide Developer’s Conference on 9 June.

Apple announced its long-awaited push into artificial intelligence at last year’s event by introducing Apple Intelligence, a suite of AI-powered features for the iPhone and other products. But delays and underwhelming capabilities have put Apple on its back foot.

The company has struggled to convince consumers and Wall Street that it’s a leader in the crucial technology, which is expected to overhaul the way people work, communicate and find information online.

Now, one year after introducing Apple Intelligence, the company is on the hook to prove at this week's Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC), a key annual event for the company, that it can make a name for itself in the AI space as its chief rivals like Google continue to charge ahead.

At this year’s WWDC, which kicks off with a keynote address from Apple CEO Tim Cook and other executives at 10 A.M. PT, don’t expect Apple to show off a flashy new iPhone or Apple Watch. Instead, the company will outline new capabilities for its current devices that lay the foundation for where it could be going next.

"WWDC, from a developer conference perspective, is maybe more interesting than others," said Carolina Milanesi, president and principal analyst at technology analysis firm Creative Strategies. "It does give consumers a peek as to what they can expect coming to whatever device that they already own."

Apple’s AI struggles are larger than just a product delay. The bigger issue is that Apple’s current AI tools don’t offer experiences that are notably different from what you can get elsewhere. Apple Intelligence can summarize text messages, identify real-world surroundings with the iPhone’s camera, erase unwanted objects from photos, rewrite emails and prioritize notifications. But those features are similar to capabilities offered by other companies such as Google, OpenAI and Samsung.

In fact, rivals like Google and OpenAI are already moving one step further with technology they claim can execute tasks for consumers rather than just answering questions or generating summaries.

There are benefits to waiting; Apple has largely been able to avoid the embarrassing AI gaffes of its rivals, with one exception. Apple is also known for popularizing new technologies rather than being first, as was the case with smartwatches and tablets, two categories it now dominates.

But Apple has yet to prove it can do the same with AI. And it doesn’t sound like that's going to change at WWDC, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, who wrote the event "may be a letdown from an AI standpoint," citing "people within the company."

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Many user are encountering crashes or freezing and blank screens when trying to open the Mail app on their iPhone.

Apple users across the internet have complained of poor functionality with Mail and other apps, and the culprit appears to be the latest iOS 18.5 update, at least according to disgruntled customers.

While Apple's support System Status page showed all services were online on the afternoon of 6 June, users on Apple Support Communities threads, Reddit, and other social media platforms and forums continued to report issues with functionality.

The crux of the complaints began around 4 June, nearly a month after 18.5 was released on 13 May. It is unclear why the issue would arise so long after the release, but it appears to impact iPhones of all ages and varieties, making the update the only common denominator. Some posts have indicated that the owners only recently downloaded 18.5, despite it being available for weeks.

Some users complained about other hiccups since downloading iOS 18.5, including slow app loading, crashes, and misaligned visual assets. The posts appear to indicate that models older than the iPhone 16 are encountering the most issues.

The tech giant has not acknowledged the reported issue publicly on its website, in support community posts or on its official social media accounts as of late Friday afternoon.

While Apple has not yet released an official fix to the issue, some users have discovered a few workarounds.

One user said a local Apple support representative advised resetting network settings to temporarily relieve the issues. You can do so by following this path on your iPhone: Settings > General > Transfer or Reset [Device] > Reset > Reset Network Settings.

Other users reported success using the suggested network reset method.

Some others reported that changing autocorrect and keyboard settings temporarily improved Mail functionality, though this could be coincidental more than anything. If you'd like to try it anyway, follow these steps: Settings > General > Keyboard > then disable features including "Auto-Correction" and "Smart Punctuation."

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A recent investigation has uncovered that three tech giants are set to build more water-hungry data centers in some of the world's driest areas. Experts warn that communities could suffer.

The nonprofit SourceMaterial used local news reports and industry sources, Baxtel and Data Center Map, to document 632 active or under-development data centers from Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, according to The Guardian, which was also involved in the investigation.

It found the companies intended to increase the number of data centers they own worldwide by 78 percent, with projects planned in North America, South America, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australia. Many of those centers will be in the arid regions.

The demand for data centers — essentially used to power a myriad of digital services — has been skyrocketing with the emergence of cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence.

Data centers can gobble up more energy than entire countries, leading at times to higher utility rates and strained electrical grids that can lead to blackouts, as well as spewing planet-warming pollution into the atmosphere if their power source relies on dirty fuels.

What's more, just a midsize data center can require up to 300,000 gallons of water each day. With a warming climate, driven by human activities, contributing to increased water scarcity and making its availability more volatile, adding more data centers to the mix could have a troublesome ripple effect across multiple systems, including our food supply.

Lorena Jaume-Palasí, founder of the Ethical Tech Society, told The Guardian that "resilience from a resource perspective is going to be very difficult" for populations grappling with water scarcity, including in Spain, which is on "the verge of ecological collapse," even as Amazon plans to add a fourth data center to the Aragon region.

Cryptocurrency and AI both have the potential to contribute to a greener and safer future, with companies using digital currency to fund projects like reforestation and ocean cleanups, and AI leading to more accurate weather forecasting, among other things.

For their part, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google have said they plan to be "water positive" by the end of the decade, per the Guardian. All have also invested in clean-energy projects, including to support AI operations. However, critics remain skeptical they'll live up to some of their promises.

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Without a doubt, AI has surged to the top of the diplomatic agenda in the past couple of years.

And one of the leading topics of discussion among researchers, tech executives, and policymakers is how open-source models — which are free for anyone to use and modify — should be governed.

At the AI Action Summit in Paris earlier this year, Meta's chief AI scientist, Yann LeCun, said he'd like to see a world in which "we'll train our open-source platforms in a distributed fashion with data centers spread across the world." Each will have access to its own data sources, which they may keep confidential, but "they will contribute to a common model that will essentially constitute a repository of all human knowledge," he said.

This repository will be larger than what any one entity, whether a country or company, can handle. India, for example, may not give away a body of knowledge comprising all the languages and dialects spoken there to a tech company. However, "they would be happy to contribute to training a big model, if they can, that is open source," he said.

To achieve that vision, though, "countries have to be really careful with regulations and legislation." He said countries shouldn't impede open-source, but favor it.

Even for closed-loop systems, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said international regulation is critical.

"I think there will come a time in the not-so-distant future, like we're not talking decades and decades from now, where frontier AI systems are capable of causing significant global harm," Altman said on the All-In podcast last year.

Altman believes those systems will have a "negative impact way beyond the realm of one country" and said he wanted to see them regulated by "an international agency looking at the most powerful systems and ensuring reasonable safety testing."

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According to the recent report from NPR, Meta plans to shift the task of assessing its products' potential harms away from human reviewers, instead leaning more heavily on AI to speed up the process.

Internal documents seen by the publication note that Meta is aiming to have up to 90 percent of risk assessments fall on AI, NPR reports, and is considering using AI reviews even in areas such as youth risk and "integrity," which covers violent content, misinformation and more.

Unnamed current and former Meta employees who spoke with NPR warned AI may overlook serious risks that a human team would have been able to identify.

Updates and new features for Meta's platforms, including Instagram and WhatsApp, have long been subjected to human reviews before they hit the public, but Meta has reportedly doubled down on the use of AI over the last two months.

Now, according to NPR, product teams have to fill out a questionnaire about their product and submit this for review by the AI system, which generally provides an "instant decision" that includes the risk areas it's identified. They'll then have to address whatever requirements it laid out to resolve the issues before the product can be released.

A former Meta executive told NPR that reducing scrutiny "means you're creating higher risks. Negative externalities of product changes are less likely to be prevented before they start causing problems in the world."

In a statement to NPR, Meta said it would still tap "human expertise" to evaluate "novel and complex issues," and leave the "low-risk decisions" to AI. Read the full report over at NPR.

It comes a few days after Meta released its latest quarterly integrity reports — the first since changing its policies on content moderation and fact-checking earlier this year. The amount of content taken down has unsurprisingly decreased in the wake of the changes, per the report. But there was a small rise in bullying and harassment, as well as violent and graphic content.

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