Apple, Amazon quarterly reports ... Anthropic's Claude 3 mobile app ... R.I.P. Rabbit's r1... TL;DR summary 5May24

Last update: Sunday 5/5/24 

Welcome to our 5May24 TL;DR summary of the past week's top AI stories on our "Useful AI News" page  ➡ 1) More Big Tech quarterly reports (Apple, Amazon), (2) Anthropic's Claude 3 mobile app for iPhones, and(3) Second (final?) thoughts about Rabbit's r1

No podcast this week 

TL;DR link ➡ HERE

A. TL;DR summary of Top 3 stories 

1. Quarterly | 2. Anthropic | 3. Rabbit  

1) More Big Tech quarterly reports (Apple, Amazon)

-- Amazon

Apple and Amazon published their quarterly reports this week. It was the first 2024 quarterly for Amazon but the second for Apple because Apple started its fiscal 2024 in October 2023, like th U.S. federal government. 

Amazon delighted its shareholders by reporting increased profits together with a substantial increase in demand for its AI related cloud services. Although Amazon also tempered expectations of future profitability because of planned future capital investments related to AI, this guidance did put downward pressure on its stock, unlike the collapse in the value of Meta's stock that occured last week when Meta announced its commitment to planned increases in its AI related capital expenditures.

-- Apple

Whereas Amazon's profits increased, Apple's profits declined. However Apple boosted the value of its stock by announcing a 110 billion dollar buyback of its shares, its biggest ever. 

As for AI, Apple made no announcements. However its CEO Tim Cook made a firm commitment to making important generative AI announcements in the "coming weeks" ...  which many observers interpreted as meaning at its upcoming developers conference in June. 

At this point Apple is the last of the biggest Big Techs to enter the GenAI race ... and time may be running out. Apple's entry will be constrained by two of its defining corporate values -- its commitment to producing the highest quality products and its commitment to privacy.

• Its recent admission that it has held discussions with OpenAI and with Google about using their language models suggests that Apple has not been able to develop its own high quality language models fast enough.
  
  
• And its commitment to privacy suggests that Apple would prefer to use small models, small enough to run on its iPhones, rather than cloud based models. 

According to published benchmark tests, Google’s Gemini Nano runs a distant second to Anthropic's Claude 3 Haiku. And OpenAI has never announced a small language model. Has Apple held any unannounced discussions with Anthropic?

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2) Anthropic's Claude 3 mobile app for iPhones

Anthropic announced a new app that would enable its users to query its language models from their smartphones. All Claude 3 models, even the smallest, Haiku, will still be running in the cloud. The initial version of this app only runs on iPhones, but Anthropic promised that an app for Android will be coming soon.

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3) Second (final?) thoughts about Rabbit's r1

The editor of this blog ordered an r1 after reading the initial reviews that wre posted shortly after the r1 was released last week; but he cancelled his order after reading the damning articles cited by the Useful AI News page for this story that were written by tech reporters who had used the r1 for a few days. Consider the titles;

• "Rabbit R1 review: A $199 AI toy that fails at almost everything", Engadget
  
• "Rabbit R1 review: I can't believe this bunny took my money", Mashable

The authors complain that the r1 does not perform many of the functions that it was advertised to perform and/or it does not perform them competently. However the next title raises a fundamental deficiency:

•  "Turns out the Rabbit R1 was just an Android app all along", The Verge

Although Rabbit's CEO  loudly rejected this criticism, he cannot reject the question: Why do we need the r1? In other words, what can the r1 do that an app for a smartphone could not be designed to do? 

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B. Top 3 stories in past week ...  

1. Misc
   More Big Tech quarterly reports ... Jan Feb, Mar 2024
   -- "Amazon Reports $143.3 Billion in Revenue for First Quarter of 2024", Karen Weise, NY Times, 4/30/24
   ---- Amazon Q1 also covered by Reuters, Bloomberg, The Information, Business Insider, ... and Amazon Q1
   
   -- "Apple Sales Fall as iPhone, China Businesses Remain Sluggish", Aaron Tilley, Wall Street Journal, 5/2/24 .
   -- Apple Q2 also covered by Business Insider, Reuters, Reuters AI .. and Apple Q2 (pdf)
   
   
2. Other Models
   "Anthropic finally releases a Claude mobile app", Emilia David, The Verge, 5/1/24 ***
   -- This story also covered by Gizmodo, Bloomberg, Mashable, Engadget, Ars Technica, ... and Anthropic
   
   
3. Misc
   Second (final?) thoughts about Rabbit's r1. Here are some reviews from techs who took a few more days to assess these products after others had posted initial favorable impressions *** 
   
   -- "Rabbit R1 review: A $199 AI toy that fails at almost everything", Devindra Hardawar, Engadget, 5/3/24
   
   -- "Rabbit R1 review: I can't believe this bunny took my money", Kimberly Gedeon, Mashable, 5/3/24
   
   -- "Turns out the Rabbit R1 was just an Android app all along", Allison Johnson, The Verge, 5/2/24... Not true!!! Not true!!! cries Rabbit CEO

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