AI and Tech News Roundup: OpenAI and Apple Make Waves

This week’s top tech news includes major announcements from OpenAI, Apple, and other companies. OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman unveiled the successors to its o1 reasoning model family, o3 and o3-mini, which are available for safety researchers to preview.

Meanwhile, Apple is reportedly planning to launch two foldable devices in the coming years, with a focus on a giant, foldable iPad. The company has also upgraded its Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses with firmware v11, adding “live AI” that lets wearers converse with Meta AI in real-time.

In other news, UnitedHealth’s Optum left an AI chatbot exposed to the internet, raising concerns about data security and medical decision-making. Databricks has decided to wait until at least 2025 before going public, citing uncertainty and a desire to let early employees cash out.

Other notable tech developments include Oura’s $200 million funding round, Tesla’s return of free Supercharging for life on some Model S cars, Google DeepMind’s new video-generating AI called Veo 2, and Perplexity’s acquisition of Carbon. The week also saw GitHub launch a free version of its Copilot tool and Apple announce plans to take on the Sora video-generating AI from OpenAI.

As we head into the holiday break, we’ll be taking a well-deserved pause. Stay tuned for more tech news in the new year!

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/21/openai-announces-new-o3-model-but-you-cant-use-it-yet