The latest on Apple's AI

Welcome back to The Daily Update — Today’s AI tool of the day is a good one and we’ve got more big news from the Air Force and Apple. Here’s the full menu:

🗞️ The Latest: The Air Force wants $6 billion to build a fleet of AI drones

🤖 AI Tool of the Day: Unicorn Platform — AI-powered landing page builder

📸 Business Spotlight: Apple is spending millions everyday training AI

🚨 AI Roundup: Four quick hits

Read time: 2 minutes

🗞️ The Latest: The Air Force wants $6 billion to build a fleet of AI drones

The United States Air Force (USAF) has requested nearly $6 billion in federal funding over the next five years to build a fleet of AI-controlled XQ-58A Valkyrie aircraft.

Key points:

• Each XQ-58A Valkyrie is expected to cost $3 million. For comparison, cutting-edge F-22s and F-35s cost $143 million and $75 million respectively.

• The USAF hopes to build up to 2,000 pilotless AI drones.

• The XQ-58 is built as a stealthy escort aircraft to fly in support of the F-22 and F-35 during combat missions.

• Each aircraft could be tailored to a variety of roles, including surveillance, resupply actions and swarming enemy aircraft in active combat.

Why it matters: This request is part of an effort to build out America’s drone production base as China accelerates its conventional weapon production. The AI arms race is still moving at full speed.

🤖 AI Tool of the Day: Unicorn Platform — AI-powered landing page builder

Unicorn Platform is designed to build landing pages for SaaS founders, and it’s easily one of the best AI website builders I’ve tested. You don’t need any coding experience to use Unicorn Platform, and it offers a diverse selection of templates to choose from.

Use Unicorn Platform to build a landing page for your:

• SaaS startup

• No-code agency

• VC fund

• Web hosting company

• NFT

• Mobile app

• AI startup

• Personal brand

• Newsletter

I’ve included screenshots of the website I built with Unicorn Platform. Click here to try it for free.

📸 Business Spotlight: Apple is spending millions everyday training AI

Apple is investing millions of dollars per day into artificial intelligence according to The Information. The company believes that its Ajax language model is more powerful than ChatGPT.

What you need to know:

• Apple is working on multiple AI models across several teams.

• The company’s “Foundational Models” unit is working on conversational AI.

• A Visual Intelligence unit is developing an image generation model.

• Another group is researching multimodal AI that can recognize and produce videos, images and text.

• Apple is developing a chatbot that can interact with customers who use AppleCare, and another that would make it easier to automate multistep tasks with Siri.

• Ajax GPT has reportedly been trained on more than 200 billion parameters and is more powerful than OpenAI’s GPT-3.5.

The bottom line: Apple has been noticeably quiet about its AI investments, but the company will certainly be a major player in a growing market.

🚨 AI Roundup: Four quick hits

• Election Season: Google to make disclosure of AI-generated content mandatory for election advertisers.

• AI in Academia: Harvard launches ‘AI in Medicine’ PhD track.

• Regulation Update: California Gov. Gavin Newsom signs executive order to study the development and risks of generative AI.

• AI Assistant: Zoom launches AI Companion that can compose chat responses, generate automatic meeting summaries, email messages, smart recordings and more.

Have questions or thoughts on today’s newsletter? Reply to this email and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can. Thanks for reading The Daily Update!

Jack

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