Month: February 2024

While Toyota helped lead the hybrid charge with its Prius, the company has been less active in EV production. But that might be in the past, as Toyota has announced another $1.3 billion for its Kentucky facility, with a focus on EVs. In particular, the company is building a new three-row electric SUV that will be available for US customers. 

Toyota’s Kentucky operation is its flagship facility, with nearly 9,400 employees. “Today’s announcement reflects our commitment to vehicle electrification and further reinvesting in our US operations,” Kerry Creech, president of Toyota Kentucky, said in a release. “Generations of our team members helped prepare for this opportunity, and we will continue leading the charge into the future by remaining true to who we are as a company and putting our people first for generations to come.”

Little is known so far about the three-row electric SUV, as Toyota only mentions it briefly in relation to the investment. However, it follows the company’s prior announcement of its Urban SUV concept slated to launch in Europe this year. 

The $1.3 billion investment will also go towards creating a battery pack assembly line at its Kentucky factory (a separate manufacturing plant in North Carolina produces the batteries). Toyota has big plans for its battery production, previously announcing three battery ranges focused on higher performance and low cost slated for 2026 and onward. The company is also working on its first solid-state batteries, which have the potential to charge an EV from 10 to 80 percent in 10 minutes. Toyota’s bZ4X EV currently takes 32 minutes to do so. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/toyota-announces-a-three-row-electric-suv-for-us-customers-092545458.html?src=rss

Apple isn’t one of the top players in the AI game today, but the company’s new open source AI model for image editing shows what it’s capable of contributing to the space. The model called MLLM-Guided Image Editing (MGIE), which uses multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to interpret text-based commands when manipulating images. In other words, the tool has the ability to edit photos based on the text the user types in. While it’s not the first tool that can do so, “human instructions are sometimes too brief for current methods to capture and follow,” the project’s paper (PDF) reads. 

The company developed MGIE with researchers from the University of California, Santa Barbara. MLLMs have the power to transform simple or ambiguous text prompts into more detailed and clear instructions the photo editor itself can follow. For instance, if a user wants to edit a photo of a pepperoni pizza to “make it more healthy,” MLLMs can interpret it as “add vegetable toppings” and edit the photo as such.

Apple

In addition to changing making major changes to images, MGIE can also crop, resize and rotate photos, as well as improve its brightness, contrast and color balance, all through text prompts. It can also edit specific areas of a photo and can, for instance, modify the hair, eyes and clothes of a person in it, or remove elements in the background. 

As VentureBeat notes, Apple released the model through GitHub, but those interested can also try out a demo that’s currently hosted on Hugging Face Spaces. Apple has yet to say whether it plans to use what it learns from this project into a tool or a feature that it can incorporate into any of its products.  

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/apple-releases-an-ai-model-that-can-edit-images-based-on-text-based-commands-081646262.html?src=rss