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Amazon today launched the Amazon One app, which is designed to allow customers to scan their palms to make device-free purchases at Whole Foods, Panera Bread, and 150 third-party locations in stadiums, airports, fitness centers, and convenience stores.
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Snapchat has a new AI-powered perk for subscribers: Bitmoji versions of your pet. The feature, which is unfortunately not called "petmoji," allows users to snap a photo of their four-legged friend to create a cartoon-like avatar to accompany their Bitmoji in the Snap Map.
Based on screenshots shared by the company, it seems users will be able to choose from a few different variations of the AI-generated images after sharing a photo of their pet. That's considerably less customization than what you can do with your own human-inspired Bitmoji,though it should allow users to create something that looks similar to their IRL pet. (No word on if Snap could one day introduce branded pet accessories for animal avatars like they do for human Bitmoji.)
The addition is also the latest example of how Snap has embraced AI features in its subscription offering. Since debuting Snapchat in 2022, the company has used the premium service to experiment with generative AI features, including its MyAI assistant as well as camera-powered features like Dreams and AI-generated snaps. Snapchat has more than
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Microsoft's Copilot AI service is set to run locally on PCs, Intel told Tom's Hardware. The company also said that next-gen AI PCs would require built-in neural processing units (NPUs) with over 40 TOPS (trillion operations per second) of power — beyond the capabilities of any consumer processor on the market.
Intel said that the AI PCs would be able to run "more elements of Copilot" locally. Currently, Copilot runs nearly everything in the cloud, even small requests. That creates a fair amount of lag that's fine for larger jobs, but not ideal for smaller jobs. Adding local compute capability would decrease that lag, while potentially improving performance and privacy as well.
Microsoft was previously rumored to require 40 TOPS on next-gen AI PCs (along with a modest 16GB of RAM). Right now, Windows doesn't make much use of NPUs, apart from running video effects like background blurring for Surface Studio webcams. ChromeOS and macOS both use NPU power for more video and audio processing features, though, along with OCR, translation, live transcription and more, Ars Technica noted.
So far, the processor with the fastest NPU speed is Apple M3, which offers 18 TOPS across the lineup (M3, M3 Pro and M3 Ultra). AMD's Ryzen 8040 and 7040 laptop
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Amazon has announced it is investing $2.75 billion in OpenAI-rival Anthropic, bringing its total investment in the AI startup to $4 billion, as initially announced. In September last year, Amazon had invested an initial tranche of $1.25 billion.
As part of this partnership, Anthropic will use Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its main cloud provider for key operations, including safety research and the development of foundational models. Anthropic will also use AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips for building, training, and deploying future models.
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Oregon this week signed a Right to Repair bill into law, and it is notable because it is the first such law that puts a stop to the practice of parts pairing. Manufacturers like Apple are not able to require customers to use Apple-sourced parts that then have to be authenticated, with the bill giving Apple device owners the right to use new parts, used parts, or third-party parts.
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Thankfully, though, VPNs currently have the upper hand. With the right VPN service and a little elbow grease, you can access most, if not all, of the content you want to watch no matter your physical location.
How to watch streaming services with a VPN
1. Find the right VPN service and subscribe.
The first crucial step is to choose the correct VPN for your needs. While traveling, it's important to pick a VPN that has a larger server network, with many servers in your home country. You can usually find a list of the available servers on a VPN's website.
You'll then want to make sure that the VPN's servers will be able to unblock major streaming services. You can check out our best VPNs for Netflix roundup, or read our individual reviews to learn about any particular service's unblocking capabilities.
PCWorld's favorite VPN for streaming netflix
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