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 There's a big accessory sale happening on Amazon this week, with the year's best prices on Anker chargers, Samsung monitors, Sonos audio products, and much more.
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The 19th-century French novelist Honore de Balzac is believed to have said that behind every great fortune lies a great crime.
That's even more true today than it was 200 years ago — just look at how Big AI, including Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and others have built their trillion-dollar fortunes.
They all use vast amounts of copyrighted material to train their large language models (LLMs) without paying the copyright holders. In other words, they steal it. They don't call it stealing, though. They call it "fair use," which in this case amounts to the same thing.
Generative AI (genAI) training requires massive amounts of text. The better-written and more information-dense that text is, the more it helps. AI gets a lot smarter a lot faster when it's trained on well-written books and magazine and newspaper articles than when it's trained on social media banter (or most everything else you find on the internet).
Since the dawn of AI, companies have been hoovering up copyrighted material wherever they find it — on the open web, behind paywalls, even in manually scanned books — and then used the scanned text. And they do it all without asking authors' or publishers' permissions, and without paying them.
It's the greatest intellectual property theft in history by a long shot — billions and b
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 OpenAI's hardware roadmap has sharpened considerably in recent months, with its first device now identified, a smartphone said to be arriving as soon as next year, and a wider lineup taking shape behind them.
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Just in time for the iPhone's 20th anniversary, Apple is moving closer to becoming a service company. It is set to launch its new deal with Klarna next week and when it does, Apple enthusiasts in the US will effectively be able to subscribe to their favorite Apple hardware, with the cost spread across up to three years.
This matters because when combined with Apple One and Apple's Creator Studio subscriptions, the Klarna arrangement brings Apple closer to offering a full subscription model for hardware, software, and services. The only thing you don't get under the new arrangement is AppleCare, for which you'll allegedly need to pay extra.
Moving closer to hardware-as-a-service
Apple has slowly been transitioning toward hardware-as-a-service for almost a decade. Back then, Forrester analyst Frank Gillet predicted the company would eventually offer bundles of services and products for a monthly, all-in, fee.
This isn't quite where we are yet; you still need at least three subscriptions to get close. But, after the better part of a
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