At its WWDC 2024 developer convention on Monday, Apple confirmed off Safari Highlights, a browser characteristic that resembles Google’s AI Overviews.
In the event you witnessed the tough begin for AI Overviews, you could be questioning why. Or no less than you might be questioning how comparable Safari Highlights could be.
Briefly, Safari Highlights makes use of machine studying to show related data on the prime of sure net pages as you browse.
It is a part of Apple’s large new push into generative AI. At WWDC, the tech firm introduced a long-awaited AI framework referred to as Apple Intelligence, which is able to energy new options like textual content summaries and picture personalization, together with a revamped model of Siri, which is able to use AI to change into extra conversational and private.
There was a whole lot of anticipation main as much as WWDC about what precisely Apple had up its sleeve with generative AI. Although its Large Tech friends way back planted their flags, Apple has characteristically taken its time. Now we’ve got a greater sense of how the corporate plans to catch up, which additionally consists of a cope with OpenAI to carry the favored ChatGPT chatbot to the iPhone with iOS 18 later this yr.
Here is how Safari Highlights works. The characteristic shows instructions, summaries and hyperlinks that will help you study extra concerning the individuals, music, films and TV exhibits you are researching through the browser. Primarily based on the examples proven throughout Monday’s occasion, Highlights faucets data from sources like Apple Music, Apple TV Plus and Wikipedia.
For example, when you’re studying an article about Dua Lipa, Safari Highlights would possibly pull an album for you from Apple Music, or when you’re studying a evaluation of Palm Royale, it might characteristic the present’s Apple TV Plus web page.
It wasn’t instantly clear if Apple is utilizing different sources for Highlights or if different subjects will spur callouts. Apple did not reply to a request for remark.
Apple introduced an identical characteristic, Safari Summaries, for its Reader app. Right here, Apple will take away “distractions” like advertisements from articles and it’ll add a desk of contents and a abstract for what you are about to learn. Movies will mechanically broaden to fill the window in an identical capability.
By comparability, Google’s AI Overviews had been imagined to usher in a brand new period of search with a customized Gemini mannequin that higher understands our intent and shortly addresses what we’re in search of, including summaries on the prime of search engine outcomes pages — together with tackling questions we did not even ask but.
These summaries cowl a a lot wider vary of knowledge and supply responses from throughout the online. There’s additionally extra of a customized facet right here as Google’s AI techniques study from consumer habits.
However Google shortly scaled again AI Overviews after the characteristic generally returned weird responses, akin to suggesting that individuals eat rocks or put glue on pizza. The corporate refined the queries that yield AI Overviews, saying the characteristic would not deal with health-related queries or when it senses customers are attempting to journey it up.
Google’s Gemini and different chatbots are recognized to have hassle with AI hallucinations, when a generative AI mannequin presents false or deceptive data as reality. Hallucinations come up from flawed coaching knowledge, algorithmic errors or misinterpretations of context.
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