Apple enters AI era and EU adds EV tariffs

Hi, this is Yifan from Silicon Valley, your #techAsia host this week. Like many tech reporters, it has been a crazy busy few weeks for me as every major player in the space, from OpenAI to Google, unveiled their latest AI developments.

And this week is Apple's time to shine. At its annual developer conference, WWDC, the iPhone maker finally gave us a sneak peak of how it intends to leverage generative AI. By teaming up with OpenAI's ChatGPT, Apple promised its next-generation devices will be more like an intelligent personal assistant that can help with everything from rewriting emails to editing photos.

The long-awaited unveiling of its AI strategy pushed Apple's stock price to an all-time high and many are cheering Apple Intelligence as the catalyst for AI to be truly adopted by the masses.

I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I can't wait to see how the AI-enhanced iPhone will make my life easier. But on the other hand, I can't help but wonder what this means for the environment. While we all hope AI can change the planet for the better, the additional computational needs of AI have led to drastic increases in energy and water usage and carbon emissions.

As AI models get larger and more people adopt the rapidly developing technology in their daily life, can we avert a climate crisis while harnessing the power of artificial intelligence?

In arguably one of the cleverest marketing campaigns this year, Apple named its AI strategy "Apple Intelligence," billing it as a personal intelligence system for the iPhone, iPad and Mac.

Apple Intelligence features new AI-powered functions, such as more intuitive interactions with the voice assistant Siri, rewriting emails and texts, one-click photo editing and text-to-emoji