TheChek News Flow

A new creative organization will be revealed soon.

Virginie Viard, artistic director of fashion collections at Chanel, has departed the company after five years, according to a statement from Chanel on Wednesday evening.

A new creative organization will be “announced in due course,” said a Chanel spokeswoman.

The 62-year-old Viard, who succeeded Karl Lagerfeld, has been able to “renew the codes of the house while respecting the creative heritage of Chanel,” said the company.

Viard has been with Chanel for 30 years and was a close collaborator of Karl Lagerfeld, who was creative director of Chanel for more than three decades until his death in 2019.

“Chanel would like to thank Virginie Viard for her remarkable contribution to Chanel’s fashion, creativity and vitality,” said a Chanel spokeswoman.

The fall 2024 haute couture collection will be presented as planned on June 25 at the Opéra Garnier in Paris, according to Chanel.

Just a few weeks ago, Chanel gave Viard its vote of confidence after the French luxury house again delivered record revenues in 2023. At that time, Chanel’s global chief executive officer Leena Nair and chief financial officer Philippe Blondiaux said the luxury behemoth plans to maintain both its brand strategy and creative direction unchanged, despite a slowdown in global luxury spending and mixed online reactions to its latest price increases and ready-to-wear collections.

The luxury house reported revenues totaled $19.7 billion last year, up 16 percent at comparable rates, with double-digit growth across all categories. Sales increased in all markets as tourists returned to many locations, while demand from local customers remained sustained.

After succeeding Lagerfeld, Viard had been instrumental to the brand’s success in recent years. Under her watch, Chanel’s rtw business has been multiplied by 2.5 and it grew 23 percent last year alone, Blondiaux reported last month. ”From a consumer perspective and a brand perspective, Virginie has been a massive contributor,” he said.

That praise followed a slew of negative social media comments following Chanel’s resort show in Marseille, which targeted a younger demographic. The show was held on the rooftop of the Cité Radieuse, one of the flagship midcentury housing projects of architect Le Corbusier, on a damp and blustery day.

The display had come amid renewed speculation that Hedi Slimane would take over as creative director of the house — a rumor that first surfaced in 2017 and one that Chanel has consistently denied.

Other names that have been bandied about as possible successors are Pierpaolo Piccioli, former Valentino creative director, and Sarah Burton, former creative director of Alexander McQueen.

Viard’s appointment had marked the first time a female designer had taken the helm of the brand since Gabrielle Chanel herself.

Despite having been at the company for more than 30 years, when she took on the lead creative post, Viard had until that time kept out of the spotlight. Lagerfeld and Viard had such a close working relationship that he once stated, “She is my right arm and my left arm.”

Her own signature punk look includes kohl-rimmed eyes, blunt bangs and all-black outfits. Viard began what would become lengthy design experience as an intern at Chanel in 1987, after being recommended to the brand by the chamberlain to Prince Rainier of Monaco. She was quickly put in charge of the house’s embroidery. Developing a close professional relationship with Lagerfeld, Viard left Chanel for Chloé when the designer — who previously designed for Chloé from 1963 to 1983 — returned to the label for the second time in 1992. Viard then left Chloé with Lagerfeld in 1997, returning to Chanel as the coordinator of haute couture. In 2000, Viard became director of Chanel’s creation studio, where she oversaw the haute couture, rtw and accessories collections. She worked closely with Lagerfeld on all 10 collections that Chanel produces each year.

Born in 1962, the designer hails from Lyon, France, where her grandparents worked as silk manufacturers. Viard studied theater design at the Cours Georges and then became the assistant to costume designer Dominique Borg.

Private equity firm invests €1bn in start-up set to challenge SNCF on intercity routes

Infrastructure fund Antin is backing a new independent high-speed train operator in France, as challengers emerge to the country’s dominant state-backed SNCF amid rising demand for rail travel.

Antin Infrastructure Partners is investing €1bn in Proxima, which launched on Thursday as one of the first start-ups to take advantage of the liberalisation of the country’s rail network.

Proxima, which aims to connect cities across France’s western coast, such as Rennes, Nantes and Bordeaux, with Paris, has signed an initial contract for 12 double-decker trains from French manufacturer Alstom that it will take delivery of in 2027, according to its founders.

France has one of Europe’s most extensive high-speed train networks, alongside Spain, but is one of the last big markets to open up its passenger lines to competition following the liberalisation of Europe’s rail network. The country’s intercity lines have long been monopolised by SNCF services, which have grown increasingly crowded, while ticket prices have risen.

Barriers to entry in the French rail market are high, with steeper levies paid by operators to maintain the lines than in some other European countries. But Proxima is anticipating high demand for its services, which will add more trains to several routes operated by the SNCF.

Proxima is launching at a time when environmental concerns are driving demand for rail travel from both policymakers and consumers. In 2020 Air France stopped flying domestic routes where there were rail or coach alternatives that took less than two and a half hours, as part of measures agreed with the French government.

Meanwhile, changing working habits since the Covid-19 pandemic are also fuelling the need for high-speed commuter connections, according to Rachel Picard, a former SCNF executive who is one of Proxima’s co-founders. 

“There are new lifestyles emerging. You can live in Nantes and work in Paris,” Picard said. 

France’s passenger rail market opened up to private operators after the EU introduced rules to encourage more competition across the bloc’s network, measures that came into effect in 2019.

Italian operator Trenitalia and Spain’s Renfe began to offer their own passenger services in France last year but are more focused on international connections to Milan or Barcelona from the French mainland than journeys within the country. And several companies are now exploring competing services to Eurostar’s monopoly on the cross-channel service between Britain and France.

But Europe’s train market remains costly and technically challenging, not least due to the safety and compatibility authorisations that new services must secure.

Antin’s chair and chief executive Alain Rauscher said Proxima — which may operate under a different brand name — was ordering trains from Alstom, which already supplies SNCF, to help speed up those approvals.

Antin, which was listed on the Paris stock market in 2021, already has investments in rail, including train leasing company Porterbrook in Britain. It will initially fund the Proxima investment through its own funds but is also lining up a pool of banks for financing.

Proxima will add 10mn seats a year to the routes it operates on, in a high-speed rail market in France that used by a record 122mn passengers last year. 

“We’re coming to add a new offering alongside the SNCF, knowing that we have one common adversary — not so much airplanes, but cars,” said Picard.

The added capacity should eventually help ticket prices come down, she added.

“It will . . . bring new breathing space and availability into the market and that will be good for passengers,” Picard said.

Commission has sent subpoenas to tech giant and startup, asking whether their partnership evaded required government review

The Federal Trade Commission is investigating whether Microsoft MSFT 1.91%increase; green up pointing triangle structured one of its latest deals with an artificial-intelligence startup to avoid a government antitrust review of the transaction.

Microsoft in March hired Inflection AI’s co-founder and almost all of its employees and agreed to pay the startup around $650 million as part of a licensing fee to resell its technology. Inflection’s investors were told they would be repaid over time by the sales proceeds.

Companies are required to report acquisitions valued at more than $119 million to federal antitrust-enforcement agencies, which have the option to investigate a deal’s impact on competition. The FTC or the Justice Department, which share antitrust authority, can sue to block mergers or other investments if an investigation finds the deal would substantially reduce competition or lead to a monopoly.

The FTC has already been sifting through AI investments made by leading companies such as Microsoft and Google-owner Alphabet. FTC Chair Lina Khan has expressed concern that tech behemoths could eventually acquire or control the most promising AI applications, giving them a tight grip on systems that have humanlike abilities to converse, create art and write computer code.

The FTC is now drilling down on Microsoft’s deal with Inflection, seeking information about how and why they negotiated their partnership, according to a person familiar with the matter and records viewed by The Wall Street Journal. Civil subpoenas the commission sent recently to Microsoft and Inflection seek documents going back about two years. The agency is trying to determine whether Microsoft crafted a deal that would give it control of Inflection but also dodge FTC review of the transaction, the person said.

If the agency finds that Microsoft should have reported and sought government review of its deal with Inflection, the FTC could bring an enforcement action against Microsoft. Officials could ask a court to fine Microsoft and suspend the transaction while the FTC conducts a full-scale investigation of the deal’s impact on competition.

Tech companies often buy startups to scoop up their talent, a tactic known as an “acquihire.” In Microsoft’s case, the company picked off Inflection’s specialized workforce of AI researchers but didn’t purchase the company outright.

Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, Inflection AI built one of the world’s biggest large language models, and launched an AI chatbot with that technology called Pi. Inflection is one of the tech companies that built and sold access to large language models. The others include OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, and Google.

Microsoft was an investor in both OpenAI and Inflection. The FTC in January opened a broad investigation of Microsoft’s investment in OpenAI and Alphabet’s relationship with Anthropic, a rival of OpenAI that was founded by former OpenAI engineers in 2021.

At Microsoft, Inflection co-founder Mustafa Suleyman and his former team established a new division called Microsoft AI that was tasked with developing AI products for consumers. That includes AI assistants for Bing, its search engine, and Windows.

Inflection is continuing operations under a new management team but pivoted away from Pi, a consumer product, and toward services for corporate clients.

Ted Shelton, Inflection’s new chief operating officer, said he wasn’t aware of an FTC investigation. But Inflection wasn’t acquired by Microsoft, he said. “We are a wholly independent company,” Shelton said. “Microsoft has no investment in our company.”

Entrepreneur Reid Hoffman and venture-capital firm Greylock Partners are now the principal investors in Inflection, Shelton added.

The hires resembled how Microsoft earlier moved to hire Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, after his board of directors pushed him out in November. Altman returned as chief executive of OpenAI after a five-day standoff with the board. The directors had alleged Altman wasn’t completely candid in his communications with them.

OpenAI’s nonprofit board oversees a for-profit arm that has outside investors. Microsoft invested around $13 billion in OpenAI, acquiring a claim to 49% of any profit it generates.

Toronto-based Cohere locked up a $450 million investment from big-named corporate investors at a $5 billion valuation, per a Reuters report.

Investors in the round included chip giant Nvidia, Salesforce Ventures and Cisco, as well as Canadian pension fund PSP Investments. The investment is expected to be only the first tranche in the round as Cohere continues fundraising, per the report.

The new valuation is more than double Cohere’s previous value. The company raised a $270 million Series C led by Inovia Capital at a valuation of $2.2 billion last June. Investors in the round included Nvidia, Oracle, Salesforce Ventures, DTCP and SentinelOne — as well as financial institutions and VC firms Mirae Asset, Schroders Capital, Thomvest Ventures and Index Ventures.

Cohere builds large language models that allow AI to learn from new data, and can be customized and put into applications for features such as interactive chat or to generate text.

Of course valuation jumps for AI startups is nothing new. In early May, AI cloud infrastructure startup CoreWeave locked up a $1.1 billion round led by Coatue that values the company at $19 billion, per The Wall Street Journal. The new value represented an almost threefold increase from the company’s valuation just five months ago, when it was valued at $7 billion following a secondary sale.

Also in May, it was reported that Paris-based Mistral AI — a competitor to OpenAI and Anthropic — was closing in on a round of about $600 million from existing investors General Catalyst and Lightspeed Venture Partners that would value it at $6 billion. That would triple Mistral’s value from just last December when it raised approximately $415 million at a $2 billion valuation, per a Bloomberg report.

Finally, just last week Elon Musk’s generative AI startup, xAI, officially announced its long-awaited fundraise — a $6 billion round that included investment from Valor Equity Partners, Vy Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Fidelity Management & Research Co., Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal and Kingdom Holding Co., among others. The new funding values the 10-month-old company at $24 billion post money, making it the second-most-valuable generative AI company in the world behind only competitor OpenAI.

Cisco and its investment arm, Cisco Investments, weren’t done making news on Tuesday.

It also announced the launch of a $1 billion AI investment fund “to bolster the startup ecosystem and expand the development of secure and reliable AI solutions.”

As part of the announcement, Cisco said it had made strategic investments in Cohere, Mistral AI and Scale AI in previously announced rounds, and has already committed nearly $200 million of the investment fund to date.

In previous years, Cisco made over 20 AI-focused acquisitions and investments, the company said in a release.

If you’re an investor who’s turned negative on Amazon Web Services because of its much-reported growth slowdown of 2023, you might want to look again. While the pioneer of cloud computing is no longer posting red-hot topline expansion numbers, growth picked up meaningfully in the first quarter. Meanwhile, its profit margins are looking healthier than ever. And it’s a good bet AWS will keep them that way, despite the big investments required by artificial intelligence products.

AWS’ operating profit margin hit a record high in the first quarter of nearly 38%, 8 percentage points higher than the fourth quarter and roughly 10 percentage points above the average annual margin it had reported since 2018. While some of the margin improvement is due to accounting changes and layoffs, AWS’s new boss, Matt Garman, should be able to make some of it last.

That would be a big deal for Amazon. In the 12 months ending March 31, AWS’ operating profit totaled $29 billion, or about 60% of Amazon’s total. AWS’ ability to permanently lift its profit margin buttresses the entire company’s prospects.

What’s particularly notable is that some of the improvement in AWS’ margin likely comes from recently introduced products that carry higher profit margins than its older cloud services, according to TD Securities equity analyst John Blackledge.

The company has made a steady stream of announcements in recent months about improvements to longstanding products such as Amazon Connect, which helps suggest actions to customer service agents during their calls, and AWS AppFabric, a service that connects different software applications to one another. Notably, sales growth accelerated to 17% in the first quarter, compared with 12% to 13% over the preceding three quarters. Executives attributed the recovery to customers once again shifting computing to the cloud, after a period where customers pulled back a bit on cloud spending.

And it’s not just software that presents an opportunity for AWS to fatten its margins. At the infrastructure layer, Amazon has been tweaking its own custom silicon chips, such as Trainium. If it can get enough AWS customers to buy them, that could help improve AWS’ margins. That’s a big if, though. AWS customers typically prefer to use Nvidia chips to train and run their AI models. But CEO Andy Jassy told investors last month that many, including AI model-builder Anthropic and social media firm Snap, have started using Amazon’s custom chips because they are cheaper than the alternatives.

“Amazon is saving a ton of money and not spending as much on Nvidia chips… If more customers used Amazon’s chips, Amazon would be internalizing all the margin that Nvidia is capturing right now,” said Ram Ahluwalia, CEO of investment advisory firm Lumida Wealth.

In the future, new AI-powered applications released by Amazon could also prop up its margins. One example is its AI assistant, Q, that helps software engineers write code, which Amazon released to the public last week.

Depreciation and Layoffs

Another factor which likely helped in the first quarter: layoffs. Throughout 2023, Amazon cut employees from every unit including AWS, an effort that has continued this year. Amazon confirmed last month that it was slashing hundreds of workers from the AWS sales and marketing teams, as well as some who built the technology it had used in its physical retail stores.

While AWS can’t lay people off indefinitely, there are probably other layers of fat to cut. Notably, Amazon in January shifted a finance executive, John Felton, from its stores business to AWS as CFO. Felton did a lot of cost-cutting at the stores unit. It’s likely he can repeat that feat at AWS.

Still, the single biggest factor driving the quarterly uptick was an accounting change made by Amazon effective in January, where the company increased its estimate of how long its servers would last, to six years from five. That allowed it to spread the depreciation for the servers over a longer time period, lifting operating profit.

When CFO Brian Olsavsky announced the accounting change, he said it would add $900 million in operating income to Amazon’s results in the first quarter. Olsavsky added in April that AWS got most of that benefit.

Even excluding that depreciation reduction, AWS’ margin would have been about 34% without the accounting change, which is still very high relative to the recent past.

The cut in depreciation prepares AWS for an expected increase in the same expense, thanks to the fortune Amazon is spending developing AI. Like other tech companies, Amazon signaled when it reported first quarter earnings at the end of April that its capital expenditures would rise steadily in the coming quarters, as it adds chips and servers needed for training and running AI models. (AWS’ capex has already risen steeply in recent years, more than doubling to $27.8 billion in 2022 from 2019, although it fell slightly in 2023, securities filings show.)

That capex will eventually flow through to higher depreciation expense, as it will for all the big tech companies, which will hurt operating margins.

Long Term Deals

TD Securities’ Blackledge suggested one simple theory that supports the idea that Garman will be able to maintain AWS’s high margins, even as its depreciation expense starts to rise. Cloud firms have been increasingly striking long-term deals with customers, giving cloud firms more certainty about near term revenue, which at least in theory makes it easier for them to manage their fixed costs, he said.

Indeed, Microsoft’s “Intelligent Cloud” unit—which includes Azure and other services such as healthcare speech-recognition tool Nuance—also showed a strong improvement in its profit margin in March. Google Cloud has also begun reliably turning a profit, although its margin badly trails its rivals, just below 10% for the March quarter.

For AWS, though, expectations are sky-high. Ahluwalia noted that of all the “Magnificent Seven” stocks – Microsoft, Apple, Nvidia, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Tesla – Wall Street analyst projections are highest for Amazon in terms of its ability to grow its free cash flow. With AI demanding a boatload of new investment, Garman and his colleagues may have to work overtime to keep clearing the high bar AWS has now set for itself.

After years of playing it safe with general artificial intelligence, Apple is set to unveil new features next week

For those who saw them, the demonstrations inside Apple AAPL 0.78%increase; green up pointing triangle earlier this decade of a revamped Siri offered a showcase of the amazing capabilities a powerful AI voice assistant could have.

The famed assistant, one of the last projects Apple co-founder Steve Jobs worked on before his death, had been given a total overhaul. Capable of running on an iPhone and without an internet connection, the new Siri impressed people with its improved speed, conversational capabilities and the accuracy with which it understood user commands. Code-named Project Blackbird, the effort also imagined a Siri with capabilities built by third-party app developers, according to people familiar with the work.

Yet a competing project won out in an internal contest ahead of the 10-year anniversary of Siri’s launch. Known as Siri X, the more-modest upgrade involved moving more existing Siri software onto iPhones from remote servers to improve the voice assistant’s speed and privacy. The Siri X enhancement was unveiled in 2021.

Next week, at Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference, the company is set to join an AI arms race that many think will define the future of technology. The iPhone maker is trying to catch up with Microsoft, Alphabet’s Google and other rivals that have begun to integrate generative AI into their core products.

Apple’s caution and characteristic secrecy, as well as the care it takes in upgrading devices—where hardware and software are seamlessly integrated—have hobbled its early efforts in the AI arena, the people said. It now finds itself in the unusual position of having to take risks.

The company is set to announce an array of generative-AI upgrades to its software products, including Siri, said people familiar with its plans. The AI features include assistance in message writing, photo editing and summarizing texts.

While Apple isn’t expected to catch up with leading AI innovators soon, the company is preparing to unveil AI features with impressive capabilities that also maximize privacy for users—a concern that will be central to unlocking the full potential of AI assistants. Apple is also expected to unveil one or more potential partnerships with major AI developers after holding talks with OpenAI, Google and Cohere, the people said.

Apple has long prided itself on perfection in its product rollouts, a near impossibility with emerging AI models. While OpenAI systems have dazzled more than 180 million users with their generation of writing, images and video, they are prone to occasional errors, often called hallucinations. Apple has had limited tolerance for such issues.

“There’s no such thing as 100% accuracy with AI, that’s the fundamental reality,” said Pedro Domingos, a professor emeritus of computer science and engineering at the University of Washington. “Apple is not compatible with that. They won’t release something until it’s perfect.”

Apple has weighed whether to allow users to choose a third-party AI provider that could supplant or help power Siri, one of the people said. It is unclear in what way Siri could be powered, augmented or replaced by third-party AI providers, or whether Apple will move forward with a version of that idea.

Bloomberg earlier reported on an OpenAI partnership, and The Information reported on efforts to overhaul Siri.

Google, Microsoft and Samsung Electronics have begun rapidly integrating generative AI into their devices and services. While Apple finds itself behind in a generational shift taking place in the tech industry, many investors and AI experts have said the company will find a way to bring generative AI to the masses.

“Apple can do pretty much anything they set their minds to,” said Vineet Khosla, a former engineering manager on the Siri team who is currently chief technology officer at the Washington Post. “There is a consumer focus that exists at the company. The focus of their AI is to make it work in a very privacy-sensitive manner.”

Over the years, Apple has made improvements to Siri and incorporated smaller AI features throughout all of its products. In the recently released headset Vision Pro, AI is extensively used for tracking eyes and hand positions.

When Siri launched in 2011, Apple was ahead of rivals in seeking to establish the first AI assistant. Jobs, who spearheaded the acquisition in 2010 that led to Siri, encouraged the team to keep the assistant’s dry wit and sense of humor. The early launch demonstrated the company’s willingness to take risks.

“Siri was the last thing Apple was first on,” said Dag Kittlaus, co-founder of the Siri startup that Apple bought, who left Apple soon after the product’s launch.

As Apple struggled to keep advancing Siri, the company hired one of Google’s top engineering executives to run its AI strategy: John Giannandrea. In 2018, he was elevated to the role of senior vice president, reporting directly to Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook.

In early team meetings, Giannandrea made it clear that improving Siri was a main focus. He was also tasked with centralizing much of Apple’s fragmented efforts regarding AI. He began building up his AI team by recruiting Google employees and through startup acquisitions, but his team had difficulty fitting in with the rest of Apple, according to people familiar with their work.

The new AI group operated much like parts of Google, where deadlines are more loosely defined. Teams inside Apple need to maintain rigorous deadlines to have products ready for release events every fall. Efforts to collaborate between other parts of Apple that were building products and the AI team at times fell apart because they couldn’t agree on deadlines, the people said.

Instead of working with the AI team, other parts of Apple busy building software products maintained their own, separate AI capabilities. For example, the software group run by Senior Vice President Craig Federighi continued to invest in and build up the AI behind its image- and video-recognition capabilities, said former Apple employees.

Another limiting factor for Giannandrea’s AI team was the lack of access to computing resources, said former executives and engineers. Compared with rivals, Apple in recent years has secured fewer chips known as graphical-processing units that are essential for training AI models, said people familiar with Apple’s internal infrastructure.

Much of the AI team had to rely on external cloud services—Google’s cloud was preferred by many of the former Google employees on Giannandrea’s team—to train their AI models, the people said.

When ChatGPT launched in late 2022, everything changed. Federighi, the software chief, became a convert that Christmas break after he began playing around with the Microsoft-owned GitHub AI coding tool called Copilot, which is powered by OpenAI’s technology, said people familiar with his experience.

After that moment, across Federighi’s software-engineering organization, employees were tasked with coming up with new ways of incorporating generative AI into products and given resources to pursue these projects, said former executives and engineers. At internal meetings, Federighi said that he had come to appreciate generative AI technology and that it would be incorporated into all aspects of Apple’s software.

Apple stepped up efforts to build its own internal generative AI. In February, the company canceled its decadeslong effort to build its own electric car. Some of the employees had been redeployed into these generative AI projects.

Some of the new features and updates Apple is expected to announce this year will be powered by Apple’s internally built generative AI models, but Apple has been looking at potential external partnerships for more advanced AI. Giannandrea and Federighi have met with Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive officer, said people familiar with the discussions.

With a new urgency on AI technology, Kittlaus, the Siri co-founder, said this year could be an important one for Siri as the company plans to incorporate thoughtful AI features into the iPhone. “Siri has been stuck in the mud for years,” he said. “But I absolutely see a renaissance coming.”

Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference next week promises to be a pivotal moment in the iPhone maker’s history. Though the Vision Pro debuted at last year’s event, don’t expect hardware to be the main attraction at WWDC 2024, which kicks off Monday at 10 a.m. PT.

WWDC is for developers, and much of the focus will be on iOS 18. The Cupertino tech giant will showcase how it’s chosen to integrate AI technology into its devices and software, including through a historic partnership with OpenAI. As the big event nears, all sorts of leaks have emerged about what iOS 18 and its rumored AI-powered apps and features have in store.

Among the changes, Apple is said to be powering some of its new AI features with its Ajax LLM. Other reports indicate that Apple plans to process data from AI in a way that even employees won’t be able to access, which would help Apple continue to deliver on its promise of data privacy for its users.

Below, we’ll take a look at how Apple is said to be adding AI to its apps and services in the next big update for the iPhone, alongside other improvements and changes coming to iOS 18.

• Apple’s digital assistant is prepared to get an AI revamp. The digital assistant will leverage Apple’s own large language models and will allow Siri to control individual features inside applications. This will work without any necessary setup by developers or users, like App Intents or Siri Shortcuts currently require. Instead, users will be able to ask Siri to do things like delete an email or edit a photo.
• Some of Siri’s upgraded AI capabilities won’t be ready until next year. For example, the ability for Siri to handle tasks with multiple steps is likely delayed.
• A more advanced Siri will also come to Apple Watch for on-the-go use. You could use Siri on your Watch to play music on another device, one report said.
• Siri will receive more natural-sounding voices.
• Siri will be able to summarize notifications that include people, companies, calendar events, locations, dates and more.
• Could Siri’s new look be hinted at in the animations below?

• Users will be able to ask for AI recaps of Notes.
• GenAI will also help to transcribe audio in Notes.
• In-app audio recording will be supported alongside audio transcription and AI summarization.
• Math Notes will help users create graphs and solve equations through AI by recognizing the text of mathematical equations and then helping you to solve them.
• Notes users may also have the option to auto-complete their mathematical equations when typing.
• Project Greymatter is the code name for a set of AI tools that are being integrated into core like Safari, Photos and Notes, Bloomberg reported.

• Real-time transcription for voice memos is also coming.

• Generative AI emojis will be supported, letting users create their own emojis with technology.
• AI recaps of missed texts will also be available.
• Overall deeper Siri integration is expected.
• Tapbacks will get new icons.
• Message effects for individual words will be supported in addition to effects for the message itself.
• Messages will offer suggested replies generated by Apple’s on-device Ajax LLM to make texting back easier.
• RCS support is also expected to arrive this year to bring read recipes, typing indicators and high-quality video and images when texting with Android users via iMessage.

• Apple’s LLM will be able to communicate with the Calendar app to check for events when composing responses to messages.

• Mail will also get suggested email replies generated by Ajax.

• Settings will hopefully get less confusing with a revamped interface and updates that include better organization and improved search.

• A new Music widget will be available — possibly to feature larger artwork?
• Improvements to HomeKit for smart home integrations.

• AI recaps of missed notifications will be available.
• Apple is working on something called “Enhanced” notifications.

• Spotlight is expected to get faster, more reliable search.

• iOS 18 will bring the ability to place app icons wherever you want, instead of having to align them to the grid without spaces in between them.
• Users will also be able to change the color of app icons, perhaps as Apple’s answer to Google’s Material You.

• Maps will support custom route creation in iOS 18, which lets users design their own routes for a trip.

• Apple Music may take on Spotify with its own AI-powered auto-generated playlists.

At the time, I noted that a single big round or two could quickly cause this narrative to change. But I hadn’t anticipated it would happen so quickly.

Turns out, it did. This morning, Denver-based Xcimer Energy announced it raised $100 million in a Series A financing led by Hedosophia and joined by Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Lowercarbon Capital, Prelude Ventures, Emerson Collective, Gigascale Capital and Starlight Ventures. The company is working on what it describes as a transformative technology for laser-driven inertial fusion.

Xcimer says it will use the funding to build a prototype laser system including the “world’s largest nonlinear optical pulse compression system.” Founded in 2022, Xcimer received $9 million in grant funding from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Milestone-Based Fusion Development Program, which is working to put fusion energy on the power grid.

Tally totals rise

As a result of Xcimer’s funding announcement, fusion investment tallies are looking up. The financing took total funding to fusion-focused startups to the highest quarterly level since Q2 2023.

Still, it doesn’t entirely change the trajectory of fusion investment. Overall, funding to startups focused on fusion energy has declined sharply in recent quarters after hitting a high 2 1/2 years ago.

Including Xcimer, roughly $158 million has gone to companies innovating around the future of fusion as a potential power source so far this year, per Crunchbase data. By contrast, more than $2.4 billion went to the space in the fourth quarter of 2021, the peak period for funding.

Looking back, there was something resembling a fusion gold rush in late 2021. That’s when a series of giant financings got done.

By far the biggest was a Series B of over $1.8 billion for Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Commonwealth Fusion Systems, led by Tiger Global.

Everett, Washington-based Helion Energy came in second with a $500 million Series E led by Sam Altman — with an opportunity for an additional $1.7 billion tied to performance milestones.

Besides Commonwealth Fusion and Helion, a few other fusion companies have been prodigious fundraisers over the years. Janesville, Wisconsin-based Shine Technologies picked up over $500 million in equity financing, while British Columbia-based General Fusion, has taken in over $350 million in funding to date.

For the most part, generous financings coincided with a period in which investors were used to writing big checks in a multitude of startup sectors. Global startup investment hit a record high in Q4 2021 and has fallen considerably since.

- No additional cases were reported during the epidemiological investigation

- The source of the H5N2 exposure is this case is currently unknown but avian flu viruses have been reportedly in poultry in Mexico

- WHO assesses the current risk to the general population as "low"