you again. I swear if you ask me for
tech news one more time, you're going to get
it. Tech news. That's That's what you're
going to uh uh here you go. Google search was ruled a monopoly last August.
So this week, the tech giant and the US Justice Department are back in court to
figure out a way to make this right that doesn't involve Google paying the DOJ
$20 billion a year to use Google as their default search provider. It's like
the only card Google has. Uh, no. The DOJ wants Google to sell Chrome and Open
AAI is interested. According to head of product for ChachiBT, Nick Turley,
OpenAI's ambitions to build their own web browser are wellknown. But what the
company really seems to be interested in is access to Google's search API since,
as Turley put it, OpenAI's had significant quality issues with their
existing search partner referred to as provider number one in the courtroom
because you always want to avoid saying Bing's name out loud for obvious. Did I
hear my name? Ah, jeez. Nope. Nobody said anything. You want to search
something? Oh man. Turley said OpenAI
had asked Google if they could license their search API, but Google declined.
So, even if OpenAI wasn't allowed to buy Chrome, having that license sure would
be nice to restore competition, something Google is going to have to get
into the practice of allowing. During the trial, it came out that Google was
paying Samsung an enormous sum to
pre-install Gemini on Galaxy devices while blocking Motorola from making a
similar deal with AI search engine Perplexity. In other antitrust news, the
FTC just sued Uber for making it too difficult to cancel subscriptions in
what is hopefully a signal that the Trump administration will continue to
rein in big tech. Or maybe the ghost of former FDC chair Lena Khan is haunting
the halls and suing corporations is the only way to let her spirit rest. We
can't know. Intel has begun rolling out 200s Boost, a new BIOS profile that will
let gamers overclock compatible Core Ultra 200S processors without losing
warranty coverage in what some are calling an okay apology for making its
Aerolake chips suck at gaming so hard. I
didn't buy them, but I accept. The new profile enables significant bumps in
fabric, die-to-d memory frequencies for
the 285K, 265K NKF, and 245K NKF on
select motherboards with select memory kits. YouTuber Derbower has already got
some updated benchmarks of the 285K on his channel, showing that while it's
still not going to touch the Ryzen 9 9950 X3D, enabling the 200S boost
profile can boost gaming performance by anywhere from 4% to 19%. Pretty good.
It's just too bad that Intel had to cut 20% of their staff, which is like 20,000
jobs to do it. I know connecting those two pieces of news doesn't make any
sense, but I'm just telling you what happened. Okay, stop yelling at me. An
AI service called Cluey that promotes
cheating on everything by having AI essentially provide you with dialogue
options and information in real time has gone viral thanks to a cluelessly dumb
ad in which the app's creator unsuccessfully tries to date a woman a
few years older than him. He's 21
apparently, but they act like he's a 13-year-old sneaking into a scary movie.
The the vibe is off. But I guess I should expect this from a guy whose
previous product was also about cheating on coding interviews and who equates
using spellch check and Google with
going on a date. Uh, which apparently is not a real use case for the product
according to him. What is this ad? The guy's tweet here reveals that his real
goal seems to be to cheat attention and
go viral by apparently pedalling vaporware because yeah, hands-on
impressions of Cluey indicate that it kind of sucks. Uh, as weird as it is to
say, NVIDIA's local AI powered Project G
Assist might actually not suck. The company just announced that gamers can
now build custom plugins to enable actually useful voice commands with some
examples being telling a plugin to change your system lighting, adjust fan
speed, check if a streamer is live, very useful, and who knows what else. NVIDIA
has posted full instructions on GitHub. Just don't write a plugin to help you
develop exam questions. The State Bar of California did that, angering a ton of
lawyers, which doesn't seem like a smart thing to do. Maybe they got advice from
Culie. I In other AI news, Grock got
vision and multilingual abilities for its real-time voice mode. And
Character.AI unveiled Avatar FX, which
can generate long form voice and video
from an input image. I think long form here refers to like a minute long or
something. It can't do real time chatbot interactions yet. So, don't worry. We
have a few more years left of being able to speak to Gen Alpha and then they'll
be gone. I'm going to tell them about our sponsor, Boot.dev. The smartest way
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first month or first year. You never asked for the quick bits, but you're
going to get them anyway. You know
why? Because earlier this week, the US
Commerce Department imposed tariffs on solar materials imported from Cambodia,
Vietnam, Malaysia, and Thailand of up to
3,521%. Now, obviously, that's crazy.
So, this morning they brought it down to 3,43.96%.
Okay, we're reasonable people. Indeed, President Trump said yesterday that his
tariffs on China will come down substantially, but won't be zero because
companies are starting to feel the squeeze. I mean, China's ban on rare
earth materials exports has caused Tesla to delay the launch of its Optimus
humanoid robot. No. Also, yeah, that's
totally why it's delayed, not because it wasn't ready, which is why they had to
have humans control them. Humans are who are now going to be out of a job since
the launch is delayed. Great. The European Union has fined Apple the
equivalent of $570 million and Meta $228
million for breaching the Digital Markets Act. In Apple's case, by
restricting user access to better deals outside of the App Store and in Meta's
case, by providing insufficient choices for privacy-minded users. Epic Games
issued a press release about this because they're basically a news outlet
that solely reports on news that has almost nothing to do with them as long
as Apple is losing in some
way. I don't do that. Emails released in the other antitrust trial that's going
on right now, Metas, have revealed that in 2022, in order to try and boost
Facebook's popularity, Mark Zuckerberg had a bright idea. Delete everyone's
entire friends list. Maybe removing all
of their social connections on the platform, which they spend a lot of time
building, would somehow keep them on the
platform. Is that would people like that? I wouldn't know. I'm not people.
That was suck. That was Zuck talking by the way. Hello. And MIT researchers have
created a meta material, which means a material made by combining a bunch of
microscopic structures that could be used to build, among other things,
stretchy computer processors. It could also lead to stretchy computer
enclosures like laptops. And if that's
the case, I'm not sure why we'd stop there. I mean, stretchy everything.
Someone get the investors in on this. If we're going to bet the whole economy on
things like crypto and AI, we might as well get some floppy iPads out of the
deal. I Now, here's a deal for you. You come back on Friday and I provide tech
news. That is if I found the time to watch all three initial episodes of
Andor. If I haven't, then I'll be doing that.