Good Morning! Today we’ll cover Apple's development of a powerful new search engine called Pegasus, IBM's release of generative AI models for businesses, and the NSA's creation of an AI Security Center. Apple aims to make Pegasus a Google search competitor, while IBM's Watsonx Granite models target business applications of generative AI. The NSA will use its new AI Security Center to oversee and guide the integration of artificial intelligence into national security systems.

— Forrest Knight & Meghanadh Vasireddy

Apple's Pegasus: A Powerful Search Engine Upgrade

Apple is working on upgrading its search capabilities with a powerful internal search engine called Pegasus. The company plans to introduce Pegasus to the App Store and other apps soon, potentially making it a viable competitor to Google's search engine.

Enhancing Search with AI: The Pegasus search engine is being developed under the supervision of John Giannandrea, Apple's senior vice president of machine learning and AI, and a former Google executive. The search team aims to integrate Pegasus more deeply into iOS and macOS, possibly using generative AI tools to enhance its performance. This could result in more accurate search results across various applications.

Expanding Pegasus to More Apps: Pegasus is already available in some Apple apps and will soon be introduced to more, including the App Store. One feature that benefits from Pegasus is the in-device search function Spotlight, which is available on iOS and macOS and displays data matching the entered keyword on the device or the internet.

Competing with Google: Apple's search engine upgrades could help the company compete with Google in the search market. With a robust App Store ads business that serves ads to other apps like Apple News and Weather, Apple has the necessary components to launch its own search engine. However, replacing Google as the main search source for many people will not be an easy task, as Google has reached 4.3 billion users globally.

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IBM Releases Watsonx Granite Model Series for Generative AI

IBM has announced the general availability of the first models in the Watsonx Granite series, a collection of generative AI models designed to advance the integration of generative AI into business applications and workflows. The Granite models utilize generative AI for language and code tasks, catering to various business needs.

These models come in different sizes and are based on a decoder-only architecture, aimed at helping businesses scale their AI capabilities. Notable applications include retrieval augmented generation for tailoring responses from enterprise knowledge bases, summarization for condensing lengthy content like contracts or call transcripts, and insight extraction and classification for analyzing customer sentiment.

IBM has also confirmed that the standard contractual intellectual property protections for IBM products will apply to IBM-developed Watsonx AI models. The company is committed to ensuring responsible deployment of AI and addressing issues like governance, risk assessment, privacy, and bias mitigation. To facilitate trusted AI workflows, IBM plans to release Watsonx.governance, an AI governance toolkit, later this year.

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NSA to Open AI Security Center

The National Security Agency (NSA) has announced the creation of an AI Security Center to oversee the development and integration of artificial intelligence capabilities within U.S. national security systems. The center will be incorporated into the NSA's Cybersecurity Collaboration Center, where it works with private industry, international partners, national labs, academia, and the Department of Defense to protect the U.S. defense-industrial base against threats from adversaries led by China and Russia.

The establishment of the AI Security Center follows an NSA study that identified securing AI models from theft and sabotage as a major national security challenge. The center will become the NSA's focal point for leveraging foreign intelligence insights, contributing to the development of best practices, evaluation methodology, and risk frameworks for AI security. It will also help industry understand the threats against their intellectual property and collaborate to prevent and eradicate threats.

Army Gen. Paul Nakasone, director of the NSA, emphasized the increasing importance of AI in the national security landscape and the need to shape the future of AI technology in the security, defense, and intelligence sectors. He warned that while the U.S. currently leads in this critical area, this lead should not be taken for granted.

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Amazon's Generative AI Tool Now Generally Available

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced the general availability of its generative AI tool, Amazon Bedrock, which enables developers to build and scale generative AI applications with security and privacy built in. Generative AI has the potential to reinvent customer experiences, create new applications, and help customers reach new levels of productivity. With Amazon Bedrock, developers can access industry-leading foundation models and generative AI-powered applications, making it easier to build and scale generative AI solutions tailored to their data, use cases, and customers.

In April 2023, AWS launched Amazon CodeWhisperer, an AI coding companion that helps developers build software applications faster by providing code suggestions across 15 languages, based on natural language comments and code in a developer's (IDE). Amazon Bedrock aims to make it possible for developers of all skill levels and organizations of all sizes to innovate using generative AI.

Amazon has also been using generative AI to summarize customer reviews, making it easier for shoppers to understand the community's opinions at a glance. The AI-generated review highlights use only trusted review corpus from verified purchases. The feature is currently available only to some US mobile shoppers.

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Fun Fact

The first electronic computer was created not for math or code, but for music! In 1937, Bell Labs engineer Claude Shannon built a device out of switches, relays and tone generators that could play musical notes and rhythms. He called it the "Ultimate Machine" and it could be programmed to play any musical score by manipulating its switches. While primitive by today's standards, this gadget foreshadowed the flexibility and complexity that modern computers would eventually attain. Shannon was also one of the pioneers of digital circuit design, information theory, and cryptography - his work laid the foundations for many technologies we rely on today. His musical contraption illustrates how computer science grew not just from mathematics but also diverse creative tinkering. Early innovators saw the potential for computers to do far more than crunching numbers, even as the available hardware was still extremely limited.

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