Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. hasn’t been able to completely fulfill demand for AI training from clients because of

A study commissioned by Apple has highlighted the work of its small developers, amid ongoing questions about the future and fairness of the App Store. The research showed that small developers have seen strong growth in their revenues, and that they have outpaced larger developers in finding new customers. Smaller developers – those that earn up to $1 million per year and get fewer than a million annual downloads – saw their revenue increase 71 per cent between 2020 and 2022, according to the research, conducted by Analysis Group. In Europe, revenues among those developers were up 64 per cent. Announcing the results of the study, Apple pointed to the work it has done to support those smaller developers. It highlighted initiatives such as its “Small Business Programme”. That gives those smaller developers a larger proportion of their revenues, with Apple taking less of a cut, in an attempt to encourage independent businesses on the store. Many of Apple’s initiatives come amid an increased focused by regulators on its behaviour in relation to the App Store. Larger companies have accused it of using its control over the iPhone to benefit itself, while smaller ones have complained about the difficulties of finding new customers given the vast number of apps that are available on the store. The new report looked to address that latter belief by pointing to the small developers who were able to flourish on the App Store. As well as seeing an increase in revenues, those smaller developers were going on to become large ones quickly, the study noted – 40 per cent of those earning more than $1 million in 2022 earned less than $10,000 five years ago or were not on the App Store at all. It also looked to show how the global reach of the App Store meant that developers were able to show their app to users in a variety of countries. In 2022, almost 80 per cent of small developers were active on multiple storefronts, and about 40 per cent of total app downloads for those small developers came from users outside of their home country, the research showed. Apple has commissioned a range of studies from the Analysis Group that have examined the nature of the App Store amid that increasing regulatory scrutiny. The latest comes amid particular pressure over the position of the App Store on the iPhone and iPad as the only way to download apps, with some arguing that Apple should allow “sideloading” so that new software can be installed from other sources. Rumours have suggested that Apple could be preparing to allow at least some version of that sideloading in future versions of its iOS operating system, at least partly in response to regulatory pressure in the US and Europe. The company will host its Worldwide Developer Conference early in June, and is expected to make a range of new announcements about the App Store and its software more generally. Ahead of that conference, Apple’s head of developer relations Susan Prescott hailed the importance of having apps “built by everyone” in an interview with The Independent last month. Read More Apple finally launches two professional apps on the iPad Apple announces shock results Tim Cook reveals his thoughts on AI – and Apple’s plans to use it

A hacking group suspected of ties to an Asian government has broadened its targets to government agencies in

For years people have been looking to the skies for signs of alien life - but maybe, they should have been looking at the bottom of the ocean this whole time. A Harvard physicist has claimed that parts of an alien 'spacecraft' could have been uncovered under the sea. Professor Avi Loeb set off on a search along the bottom of the Pacific Ocean and found 50 iron pieces which originated from the IM1 meteor. IM1 crashed off the coast of Papua New Guinea and Leob believes it could contain key information in the search for life out there in the universe, saying he hasn’t discounted the idea of the pieces being evidence of a “spacecraft” from an “extraterrestrial technological civilization” which crashlanded on Earth. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Loeb is currently the head of Harvard’s Galileo Project, focusing on the search for aliens, and he said the fragments they found must have come from “a natural environment different from the solar system, or an extraterrestrial technological civilization.” Speaking to Fox News Digital, Loeb detailed his thoughts on the origins of the meteor fragments by saying: “Given IM1's high speed and anomalous material strength, its source must have been a natural environment different from the solar system, or an extraterrestrial technological civilization.” He added that IM1 “is actually tougher and has material strength that is higher than all the space rocks that were catalogued by NASA. That makes it quite unusual.” Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard has been approved by the UK regulator.

SAVE $50: As of July 11, Apple's most powerful iteration of the iPad, the iPad

Quality of new vehicles sold in the United States is declining as factors such as growing use of

Your online search for certain mental health terms may unexpectedly lead to malware. New research

Madden 24 Early Access begins at 8 p.m. ET on Aug. 14. All players with Early Access will be able to explore the game come Aug. 15.

Kazutaka Yonekura dreams of a world where everyone will have their very own digital “clone,” an online avatar that's updated in real time with information about a person's tastes and habits

Microsoft Corp-owned LinkedIn said on Thursday it was working on a video advertising product that would allow marketers

ChatGPT’s creators have attempted to get the system to explain itself. They found that while they had some success, they ran into some issues – including the fact that artificial intelligence may be using concepts that humans do not have named for, or understanding of. Researchers at OpenAI, which developed ChatGPT, used the most recent version of its model known as GPT-4 to try and explain the behaviour of GPT-2, an earlier version. It is an attempt to overcome the so-called black box problem with large language models such as GPT. While we have a relatively good understanding of what goes into and comes out of such systems, the actual work that goes on inside remains largely mysterious. That is not only a problem because it makes things difficult for researchers. It also means that there is little way of knowing what biases might be involved in the system, or if it is providing false information to people using it, since there is no way of knowing how it came to the conclusions it did. Engineers and scientists have aimed to resolve this problem with “interpretability research”, which seeks find ways to look inside the model itself and better understand what is going on. That has often required looking at the “neutrons” that make up such a model: just like in the human brain, an AI system is made up of a host of so-called neutrons that represent parts of the data it uses. Finding those is difficult, however, since humans have had to pick through the neurons and manually inspect them to find out what they represent. But some systems have hundreds of billions of parameters and so actually getting through them all with people is impossible. Now, researchers at OpenAI have looked to use GPT-4 to automate that process, in an attempt to more quickly pick through the behaviour. They did so by attempting to create an automated process that would allow the system to provide natural language explanations of the neuron’s behaviour – and apply that to another, earlier language model. That worked in three steps: looking at the neuron in GPT-2 and having GPT-4 try and explain it, then simulating what that neuron would, and finally scoring that explanation by comparing how the simulated activation worked with the real one. Most of those explanations went badly, and GPT-4 scored itself poorly. But researchers said that they hoped the experiment showed that it would be possible to use the AI technology to explain itself, with further work. The creators came up against a range of “limitations”, however, that mean the system as it exists now is not as good as humans at explaining the behaviour. Part of the problem may be that explaining how the system is working in normal language is impossible – because the system may be using individual concepts that humans cannot name. “We focused on short natural language explanations, but neurons may have very complex behavior that is impossible to describe succinctly,” the authors write. “For example, neurons could be highly polysemantic (representing many distinct concepts) or could represent single concepts that humans don’t understand or have words for.” It also runs into problems because it is focused on specifically what each neuron does individually, and not how that might affect things later on in the text. Similarly, it can explain specific behaviour but not what mechanism is producing that behaviour, and so might spot The system also uses a lot of computing power, the researchers note. Read More Google to unveil major new AI AI robots figure out how to play football in shambolic footage White House asks hackers to break ChatGPT White House reveals plan to ‘protect’ citizens from danger of AI DeepMind boss says human-level AI is just a few years away Regulator to probe use of artificial intelligence such as ChatGPT