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 Apple has set the date of May 7 for its next hardware reveal event. This show will focus on the iPad, particularly the new tablet with an OLED screen.
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On Monday, Microsoft introduced "Phi-3-mini," a 3.8-billion parameter language model that the company claims rivals the performance of the slightly older ChatGPT 3.5 and Mixtral 8x7B. The paper is titled "Phi-3 Technical Report: A Highly Capable Language Model Locally on Your Phone," which is clear evidence that Microsoft now has an LLM that can run directly on your PC.
Microsoft hasn't said that Phi-3-mini will be the next Copilot, running locally on your PC. But there's a case to be made that it is, and that we have an idea of how well it will work.
1.) Local AI matters
It's a familiar argument: if you issue a search request to Bing, Google Gemini, Claude, or Copilot, it lives in the cloud. This could be embarrassing ("is this wart bad"?) or sensitive ("can I get in trouble for stealing mail?") or something that you don't want to leak at all like a list of bank statements.
Corporations would like to ask questions of their data via AIs like Copilot, but there are no "on premises" versions of Copilot to date. A local version of Copilot is almost a necessary option at this point.
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Citing increased competition and rising costs as the main reason behind the shutdown, Atlas VPN stated that the "insurmountable challenges" had become too much and it could no longer keep up in a highly competitive market.
The popular freemium VPN service was acquired by Nord Security in 2021 with promises that Atlas VPN would continue to operate independently as a business. That's all changed now though, and the entire user base of around 6 million members will migrate over to the much larger NordVPN after shutdown, continuing an unsettling trend of consolidations in the VPN market as a whole.
The VPN consolidation trend
The global VPN market is valued somewhere in the neighborhood of around $40 billion, so it's no wonder that tech companies are chomping at the bit to control as much of that fortune as they can. What used to be a diverse market made up of small, independent VPN companies has now become a homogenous security consortium.
Security conglomerates with strong financial backing have systematically bought up and folded these smaller VPNs into their own businesses. Atlas VPN is just the latest example.
Market consolidation is not inherently a bad thing, and mergers are common in the fast-moving world of tech. But these umbrella companies often intentionally obscure their own owner
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Amazon customers in California won't be able to get drone deliveries anymore. The e-commerce company has closed its delivery site in Lockeford, which has been operational since 2022, and will now offer its personnel in the area opportunities at other sites. Amazon made the revelation almost as an aside in an announcement that it's launching drone deliveries in the West Valley Phoenix Metro area later this year. Its drones will be deployed from facilities near its Tolleson fulfillment center. Amazon says it's the first time drone deliveries will be fully integrated into its network, and it will allow the company to fulfill and deliver purchases more quickly.
The company doesn't have an exact launch date for its drone deliveries in Phoenix, because it's still working with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and local officials to get the permits it needs. It does have the support of Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego, though, who called drone deliveries "the future" and said it would help her city "reduce local pollution" and further cement it "as a hotbed for the innovative technology of tomorrow."
While Amazon's drone delivery operations are shutting down in California, it'll continue its activities in College Station, Texas. Shortly after it started using drones as couriers in those two areas, The Information reported that the company has made just a handful of deliveries via the method, mostly due to FAA limitations that prohibit the machines from flying over roads or people unless Amazon gets permission for every case. It eventually reached 100 drone de
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