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Apple’s Vision Pro launch resembles its Apple Watch debut in more ways than one, but to me the most telling similarity is in the marketing approach. Apple has striven to distance the Vision Pro from the existing crop of virtual reality (and even mixed reality) devices — many of which are objective failures — by exclusively focusing on the term “spatial computing”; however, the marketing seems focused on identifying a few key use cases it thinks will best drive consumer interest.

The company took the same approach with the Apple Watch, which like its face computer cousin, was more or less a solution in search of a problem when it originally debuted. Apple initially focused on a lot of features the Apple Watch has now actually done away with entirely, including its Digital Touch stuff that was meant to be a new paradigm for quickly communicating with friends and loved ones across distances. In general, it was presented as a relatively robust and full-featured platform nearly on par with the iPhone in terms of future potential.

The intervening years and generations of Apple Watch have seen it grow considerably in terms of pure technical capability and specifications, yet the marketing and focus around the product from Apple’s side has been more economical, spending outsized effort at the areas that seemed to resonate best with users — including health and wellness, and more recently, safety.

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Aniai, a startup that has built a burger-grilling robot, Alpha Grill, said today it has raised $12 million, bringing its total raise to $15 million. The money will go toward launching its first manufacturing facility, Factory One, in South Korea. The firm will also be deploying a cloud-based AI software platform for the robot called Alpha Cloud.

Robot adoption in the restaurant business is becoming popular as it can help restaurants address their high pain points like labor shortages, and rising wage issues. Robotics enables restaurants to save 30% to 70% of labor costs, and restaurants could replace more than 80% of restaurant positions with robots, according to a research report.

“Burger chains hire six to eight kitchen staff per shift to grill burgers,” Aniai CEO Gunpil Hwang said. “Alpha Grill enables restaurants to engage only one staff member to grill burgers.”

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Oracle announced the general availability of its OCI Generative AI Service, along with several substantial enhancements to its data science and cloud offerings. Let’s take a look at what Oracle announced.

The OCI Generative AI service is a managed platform designed to incorporate large language models into various enterprise use cases. The new service supports models like Meta’s Llama 2 and Cohere’s Command 52/6B models, offering a multilingual embedding capability for more than 100 languages.

Enhancements such as LangChain integration, endpoint management, and content moderation make it easier to work with LLMs. The service also includes improved GPU cluster management with multi-endpoint support and endpoint analytics features.

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Bluesheets, an AI-powered financial data startup based in Singapore, announced Tuesday it raised $6.5 million in a Series A funding round led by fintech-focused VC Illuminate Financial, bringing the four-year-old startup’s total funding to $12.5 million.

Participating in the round were returning investors Insignia Ventures Partners, Antler Elevate–the emerging growth fund of VC firm Antler–and 1982 Ventures. The Series A values the startup at $30 million.

“A lot of organizations are trying to implement [AI] applications, but are struggling quite a lot,” says Luca Zorzino, general partner and head of Asia at Illuminate Financial, in a video interview. “What we liked about Bluesheets is that not only have they implemented AI themselves, but they can actually form the foundational layer for more AI adoption in financial services.”

Founded in 2020, Bluesheets develops AI-powered data entry and management tools that aim to help companies process their financial data for accounting, reporting and other operations. The startup claims it can update records in real-time while integrating with other enterprise software tools from Google, Microsoft, Quickbooks, Stripe and SAP.

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Sam Altman made news again, with reporting from the Financial Times that the OpenAI CEO is engaged in discussions with key Middle Eastern investors and the Taiwanese chip giant TSMC to launch a new chip venture to design and build semiconductors for accelerating AI workloads.

At the heart of this venture is the ambitious plan to develop and fabricate chips integral for training and building AI models, reflecting the growing importance of custom hardware in the rapidly expanding field of AI.

Sam Altman is discussing establishing a new venture to develop specialized chips for AI applications with prominent Middle Eastern investors and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co, TSMC.

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The researchers have given the breach the title — MOAB, meaning ‘Mother of All Breaches.’

The security of your personal data hangs in the balance as cybersecurity experts uncover what could be the mother of all breaches, posing a threat of unprecedented proportions.

Researchers have warned that a database containing 26 billion leaked data records has been discovered. The supermassive data leak is likely the biggest found to date.

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