Cupertino frequently shows up late to events and acts as though it never happened. That’s about where Apple is now, two years after making a big announcement about AI features in 2024 that, for the most part, didn’t materialize on schedule. Though it’s still reasonable to question whether different equates to better, this year feels different. Demonstrated at WWDC in June, the latest iteration of Siri is more than just an Apple-branded chatbot. It’s being designed to do things like draft emails, retrieve old hotel confirmations from a Gmail thread, and recommend items to bring to a friend’s potluck after…
Author: Taylor Lowery
Taylor Lowery
Taylor Lowery is a senior editor at glofiish.com, a technology writer, and a true circuit enthusiast. She works in the tech sector, so she does more than just cover it. Taylor works for a smartphone company during the day, which gives her a firsthand look at how gadgets are designed, manufactured, promoted, and ultimately placed in people's hands.Her writing is unique because of this insider viewpoint. Taylor makes the technical connections that other writers overlook, whether she's dissecting the silicon architecture of a new flagship chipset, analyzing the implications of a significant Android update for actual users, or tracking the effects of a new AI model announcement across the mobile industry.Her editorial focus covers every aspect of the current tech stack, including smartphone software and hardware, artificial intelligence (from large language models and generative tools to on-device inference), and the broader innovation trends influencing the direction of the consumer technology sector. She is especially passionate about the nexus of AI and mobile computing, which she feels is still in its most exciting early stages.
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It’s noteworthy that China’s tech discourse is currently experiencing a certain kind of silence. A few years ago, Chinese researchers, philosophers, and the occasional tech executive were still willing to voice unsettling concerns about AI, such as the loss of human relevance, job losses, and runaway systems. Most of those voices are now silent. Not because the anxieties vanished. Because it no longer felt safe, helpful, or even welcome to say them aloud. It is easy to understand why. Beijing has made a significant political investment in AI as the catalyst for its upcoming economic phase. By 2027, the “AI…
From the outside, it appears to be a minor skirmish taking place in American statehouses. No demonstrations outside biotech labs, no tractors obstructing roads. Meat produced from animal cells in steel bioreactors rather than raised on pasture is prohibited by these bills, which were quietly signed. First place went to Florida. In an attempt to “save our steaks,” Governor Ron DeSantis signed a law prohibiting the sale of lab-grown meat in his state in May 2024. In a matter of weeks, Alabama followed. More than a dozen states currently limit the labeling of cultivated meat products, with Arizona and Tennessee…
There’s a particular kind of unease that settles in when software starts making decisions you never approved. Not a crash, not an error message — just a quiet action taken somewhere in the background, discovered later, almost by accident. That’s the feeling increasingly surrounding AI agents, the next generation of artificial intelligence tools that don’t wait to be asked. For the past few years, AI felt like a very capable assistant. You typed a prompt, got an answer, and the system went dormant until you needed it again. Agents are different. They’re built to monitor, plan, and act continuously, often…
Knowing that a digital version of your city is already existing in a server room that most of us will never see gives you a strange sense of comfort. Not in a symbolic sense. Block by block, pipe by pipe, traffic light by traffic light, literally. These digital twins are subtly changing how cities choose what to construct, what to repair, and what to be afraid of. The concept had nothing to do with urban planning. When engineers needed a way to model spacecraft systems without endangering the real hardware, NASA developed it in the late 1960s. They would be…
A recent academic review of speech recognition failures contains a small but telling detail: when a man with dysarthria says “drink fresh water,” the software hears “available now.” This is not a typo. Not a typical mishearing. Simply put, the machine created something completely different that fit the patterns it had learned and sounded plausible. Millions of people experience this peculiar form of failure on a daily basis. It’s easy to forget how new and limited voice-activated technology is because it has become so integrated into daily life. Whisper-based transcription tools, Google Assistant, Alexa, and Siri were all trained to…
A professor at a mid-sized university informed a colleague a few months ago that she had completely stopped giving out take-home essays. She claimed that it wasn’t because the students were indolent, but rather because she could no longer identify the author. In higher education, that modest, almost embarrassing admission has become commonplace. The process of rethinking education for the AI era at universities appears to be much more complicated than any official press release would imply. It wasn’t a sudden change. The majority of institutions responded to the rapid spread of ChatGPT and similar tools on campuses in the…
In Silicon Valley, a certain kind of confidence appears just before an expensive project fails. It debuted with the Humane AI Pin, a $700 brooch-like gadget that was meant to take the place of your screen but quickly became a joke. It reappeared with the Rabbit R1, which was orange, sincere, and ultimately constrained. OpenAI, Apple, Meta, and a few chipmakers are all discreetly working toward what is loosely referred to as the truly intelligent smartphone. These days, it appears in a different form and is associated with bigger names and much more money. The phrase is working hard on…
The sound of cooling fans is a constant outside a server farm in northern Virginia. It sounds unglamorous for a technology that has become a hot topic in labor markets, foreign policy, and now, it seems, Middle Eastern geopolitics in just a few years. Researchers and policy analysts are still debating the implications of reports that claim Iran has managed to obtain or modify open-source AI models developed in the United States. The fundamental issue is structural. The idea behind open-source models—those whose weights are made publicly downloadable—is that transparency encourages creativity and responsibility. A graduate student in Lagos or…
When you realize that the voice on the other end of the phone—your daughter, your boss, or the fraud department at your bank—might not actually be a human, a certain kind of uneasiness sets in. Now that it has a name, that unease is spreading equally quickly through family group conversations and corporate security briefings. Deepfake AI voice clones are now the preferred tool on the dark web, not because they are rare or difficult to locate, but rather because they are inexpensive, quick, and eerily realistic. This is almost embarrassingly easy math. Three seconds of a person’s voice can…