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Apple CEO Tim Cook Meets China's IT Minister During Beijing Visit

FILE PHOTO: Apple CEO Tim Cook gives a presentation as Apple holds an event at the Steve Jobs Theater on its campus in Cupertino, California, US, Sept. 9, 2024. REUTERS/Manuel Orbegozo/File Photo
FILE PHOTO: Apple CEO Tim Cook gives a presentation as Apple holds an event at the Steve Jobs Theater on its campus in Cupertino, California, US, Sept. 9, 2024. REUTERS/Manuel Orbegozo/File Photo
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Apple CEO Tim Cook Meets China's IT Minister During Beijing Visit

FILE PHOTO: Apple CEO Tim Cook gives a presentation as Apple holds an event at the Steve Jobs Theater on its campus in Cupertino, California, US, Sept. 9, 2024. REUTERS/Manuel Orbegozo/File Photo
FILE PHOTO: Apple CEO Tim Cook gives a presentation as Apple holds an event at the Steve Jobs Theater on its campus in Cupertino, California, US, Sept. 9, 2024. REUTERS/Manuel Orbegozo/File Photo

Apple CEO Tim Cook met on Wednesday with China's Minister for Industry and Information Technology Jin Zhuanglong during a visit to Beijing this week, the ministry said in a statement.
During the meeting, Jin told Cook that he hoped Apple would continue to deepen its presence in China, increase investment in innovation, grow with Chinese companies and share the dividends of high-quality development, the statement showed.
The trip is Cook's second to China this year. His posts on the X-like Weibo social media platform showed he visited an organic farm and toured ancient neighborhoods with artists including local photographer Chen Man, Reuters reported.
China is the world's biggest smartphone market where, in recent quarters, the iPhone maker has been losing market share to domestic rivals. Apple began China sales of its latest smartphones on Sept. 20, the same day local champion Huawei launched a rival handset. The new iPhones got off to a strong start with sales rising 20% in the first three weeks of launch compared with the year-earlier model, showed data from researcher Counterpoint.
However, overall iPhone sales in China fell 2% on year during the three-week period due to declining sales of older models and increased competition with Huawei's Mate and Pura series, Counterpoint said.

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Anthropic Releases AI to Automate Mouse Clicks for Coders

Anthropic logo is seen in this illustration taken May 20, 2024. (Reuters)
Anthropic logo is seen in this illustration taken May 20, 2024. (Reuters)
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Anthropic Releases AI to Automate Mouse Clicks for Coders

Anthropic logo is seen in this illustration taken May 20, 2024. (Reuters)
Anthropic logo is seen in this illustration taken May 20, 2024. (Reuters)

Anthropic, a startup backed by Alphabet and Amazon.com, released a pair of updated artificial intelligence models on Tuesday, along with a new capability to autonomously perform computer tasks and save users keystrokes.

The new "computer use" feature can tell AI "where to move the mouse, where to click, what to type, in order to do quite complicated tasks," Anthropic's Chief Science Officer Jared Kaplan said in an interview.

The capability is tailored to software developers and represents a move toward AI agents, programs that require little human intervention to carry out multi-step actions. Researchers have touted agents as a frontier for AI development beyond chatbots, which easily conjure prose or computer code though not actions.

Anthropic demonstrated a use case for the feature that entailed coding a basic website, and another that used various programs including Google Search and Apple Maps to plan a sunrise outing.

Anthropic offers software developers three versions of Claude, its family of AI models, at price points that vary based on their performance. This week's updates come to Sonnet, the mid-tier model, and Haiku, the cheapest.

The new 3.5 Haiku can generate computer code in a manner "almost comparable" to the version of Sonnet released in June, according to Kaplan. CEO Dario Amodei told Reuters at the time that the company intended to update Opus, the most capable model, by the end of the year.

The computer use feature is currently limited to the new version of Claude 3.5 Sonnet and comes with safeguards to prevent its application toward spam, fraud and election-related misuse, Anthropic said. Kaplan said the AI still makes mistakes.

Mike Krieger, a co-founder of Instagram who joined Anthropic this spring as chief product officer, said the company wants feedback from business customers to learn where to focus development of the feature. Meanwhile, a labs team inside Anthropic is exploring how to make the capability available for consumers, something Krieger said he personally wants.

"I was booking flights," he said. "I really just want this to be completely automated."

Microsoft on Monday unveiled an application for its clients to build their own agents that can handle queries, identify sales leads and manage inventory.