Linked List: May 30, 2024

Thursday, 30 May 2024

New from Lux, makers of Halide:

Today we’re excited to launch Kino, a powerful filmmaking app for beginners and experts alike. As say they say in screenwriting, “Show, Don’t tell,” so let’s walk through a few of the tent-pole features in our huge 1.0 release. [...]

Last fall, everything changed when Apple introduced “Log” video support on the iPhone 15 Pro. When recording in this format, your iPhone saves a version of your video with most of the original information, and before any creative decisions have been applied. Using that cake analogy, it’s like the iPhone now saves all the ingredients that make up a cake, but leaves you to do the baking.

That’s great if you’re a skilled baker… er… colorist… but it’s challenging for most of us. Out of the box, Apple Log footage looks really flat. It’s not meant to look good. It’s meant to be edited later.

But what if you didn’t have to edit? What if you could use all that powerful extra color data and get a cinematic look with one tap?

What a delightful prosumer balance Kino strikes. Preset color grades include some from Evan Schneider, Tyler Stalman, Stu Maschwitz, Sandwich Video, and Kevin Ong.

And I just adore some of the UI touches in the app, like drawing a big red border around the entire display when recording footage. It’s like those big red lights in TV studios.

Kino is going to cost $20 as a one-time purchase, but is available at launch for just $10. What a great deal.

See also: Lux cofounders Sebastiaan de With and Ben Sandofsky were my guests on The Talk Show back in October, and dropped some hints about what is now Kino.

Lorne Michaels on SNL ‘Best Cast’ Nostalgia ★

Lorne Michaels, a decade ago, as SNL hit its 40th anniversary, and the widespread belief that the show was better “back in the day”:

“Generally when people talk about the best cast I think, ‘Well, that’s when they were in high school,’” said Michaels. “Because in high school you have the least amount of power you’re ever gonna have. ... Staying up with friends later on a Saturday is great, and people attach to a cast.”

Jibes with yesterday’s post on “America’s best decade”.

Gurman: ‘iOS 18 Siri AI Update Will Let Users Control Features in Apps With Voice’ ★

Mark Gurman, with yet another scoop:

The new system will allow Siri to take command of all the features within apps for the first time, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the initiative isn’t public. That change required a revamp of Siri’s underlying software using large language models — a core technology behind generative AI — and will be one of the highlights of Apple’s renewed push into AI, they said. [...]

Siri will be a key focus of the WWDC unveiling. The new system will allow the assistant to control and navigate an iPhone or iPad with more precision. That includes being able to open individual documents, moving a note to another folder, sending or deleting an email, opening a particular publication in Apple News, emailing a web link, or even asking the device for a summary of an article.

This sounds a lot like a large action model, not just a large language model. It makes sense if Apple can pull it off.

In 2018, Apple launched Siri Shortcuts as well, letting users manually create commands for app features. The new system will go further, using AI to analyze what people are doing on their devices and automatically enable Siri-controlled features. It will be limited to Apple’s own apps at the beginning, with the company planning to support hundreds of different commands.

This makes me think that developers will need to support new APIs to describe and define the sort of actions Siri can perform — like Siri Shortcuts but richer, and hopefully easier for developers to support. According to Gurman, this feature isn’t slated to roll out to iOS 18 users until sometime next year. That makes sense, given that the ink seemingly isn’t yet dry on the Apple-OpenAI partnership.

Writing at 9to5Mac, Ryan Christoffel puts it thus:

Presumably, this change will lead to a lot fewer occasions of having you ask Siri to complete a task and finding it has no idea what you’re talking about. A more intelligent Siri that can understand natural language for a much wider array of commands sounds like the Siri we have always expected but never quite got.

That sounds like exactly where Apple’s goalposts should be.

The Information: ‘OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Cements Control as He Secures Apple Deal’ ★

Amir Efrati and Wayne Ma, reporting for The Information (paywalled; Ars Technica has a good summary):

Now, he has fulfilled a longtime goal by striking a deal with Apple to use OpenAI’s conversational artificial intelligence in its products, which could be worth billions of dollars to the startup if it goes well, this person said.

Aside from the financial windfall such a deal might bring, a partnership with Apple has the potential to boost OpenAI’s position within the tech industry over the long term. Altman and his colleagues hope the Apple partnership might one day supplant a longstanding alliance Apple has with Google, OpenAI’s main rival, which today handles searches on Apple’s Safari browser and is critical to preserving Google’s search monopoly.

While a partnership between Apple and OpenAI has been rumored for months, this report by The Information is the first I’m aware to assert that the deal is official. It’s light on details, to say the least, starting with just who is paying whom and how either company plans to make money from the partnership. Presumably it’ll be Apple paying OpenAI for the privilege of integrating with their expensive-to-run cloud-based servers.

The financial arrangement between Google and Apple for default search, on the other hand, is both simple and lucrative. Google makes money showing ads in search results. Safari drives zillions of users to Google search. Google pays Apple roughly $20 billion per year for that traffic acquisition, while selling ads worth many tens of billions of dollars for those searches. Google makes money and maintains access to the Apple demographic. Apple makes money from Google’s payments. And Safari users get Google Search results by default.

There’s nothing like that with OpenAI, right now. There’s also this:

To top it off, Altman is working on two new projects outside OpenAI: the first is a daring effort to make AI server-chip factories and the other is developing an AI-powered personal device, such as earbuds with forward-facing cameras that could emulate the AI companion in the film “Her,” with the aid of former Apple designer Jony Ive. Both efforts could complement his work at OpenAI — which would own stakes in the ventures — and give him even more clout.

Apple and Google’s friendly relationship — Google’s then-CEO Eric Schmidt was an Apple board member from 2006 to 2009 — ended when Google changed Android from being an open alternative to Blackberry to being an open alternative to iPhones. OpenAI is — according to multiple reports — not only looking to create its own personal computing devices, they’re considering partnering with Jony Ive and LoveFrom to do it. They’re setting themselves up to be frenemies with Apple before the first partnership is even announced.