It's time for tech news, and you know what that means.
I know what it means, but I Why don't you say it so I know you know? So,
OpenAI just had a weekend that puts the one at Bernie's to shame. The twists and
turns have honestly made my head hurt, but here's our summary. Late Friday
evening, CEO Sam Altman was fired by the
four other members of the OpenAI board, while president Greg Brockman was
removed as chairman. They wanted an old man. You're too much of a normal man.
Upon hearing the news, Greg quit and tweeted his account of recent events,
implying, possibly unintentionally, that OpenAI chief scientist and board member
Ilya Sutskever was the Brute in this
Shakespearean drama. Most of you will get that. What's that knife for, bro?
You too, Brutus? It's still not clear what the board's exact reasons for
the shakeup were, and the story is complicated by OpenAI's truly weird
corporate structure, where the nonprofit board controls the capped profit
company. But, some speculate that Sam seeking investment for a new AI chip
company played a role, as OpenAI's board accused him of being not consistently
candid in his communications with them, despite a later memo from OpenAI COO
Brad Lightcap, cool name, definitively
claiming that Sam was not fired for malfeasance, a French word meaning
weasel. If that confused you, then you know how
everyone, including the OpenAI board, felt this weekend. They apparently
agreed to step down and bring back Sam
and Greg, right before Microsoft swooped in and announced they'd hired Sam, Greg,
and a bunch of other OpenAI employees. Right after that, OpenAI hired Twitch
co-founder Emmett Shear as interim CEO,
replacing day-and-a-half-old interim CEO
Mira Murati, presumably because she just needed more experience. And her name
sounds like a car. We can't have that. But really, Emmett may have been chosen
because, like the safety-minded board members, he said he wants AI development
to slow down. He also said that CEO jobs
could be replaced by AI. So, slowing down means he could enjoy his new
position for longer than 5 minutes. So, that's probably Emmett may soon be
captain of a ghost ship, though. A letter from OpenAI employees threatening
to resign unless the board steps down and brings back Sam. And conduct ours to
the break room. And what? Was signed by 650 of the company's 770 employees on
Monday morning. Including Ilya Sutskever. Et tu, Brute? What? Brutus?
You're back. What are you doing here? Confusingly, Ilya tweeted that he deeply
regrets his participation in the board's actions, a tweet Greg reposted with a
heart emoji. Mira Murati also replied with a heart to Sam's tweet saying, "I
love OpenAI." So, I don't know whether these people are actually still trying to be friends despite all the drama or
whether they just don't know what emojis mean. Now, here's the real kicker. The
Verge claims multiple sources are saying that Sam and Greg's Microsoft situation
isn't a done deal and that they are still willing to return to OpenAI if the
board resigns. And Sam did recently imply that the OpenAI team are all going
to work together some way or the other. As for Microsoft, well, they've invested
billions in OpenAI. So, whether they get Sam or Sam returns to OpenAI with a new
board, this is really a win-win for them. And hey, how about a seat for old Satya while
we're playing musical chairs, eh?
Okay, back to work making a digital god. This whole thing sounds like the most
hard to follow polycule I've ever heard in my life. Honestly, I'm just proud of
myself for following it all the way through. Sunbird, the company Nothing
partnered with on their Nothing Chats iMessage compatible app for Android, has
apparently comically misrepresented the security of their services. Multiple
professional and amateur investigators have claimed that the full contents of
messages sent through Sunbird's service are accessible in plain text by not only
Sunbird, but by anyone with a smattering of hacker know-how, despite Sunbird
claiming not to collect any data because they use end-to-end encryption. On
Twitter, Sunbird tried to dismiss security researchers' concerns, but all
of their points seem to have been systematically refuted by a team from
texts.com. When enough had been enough,
nothing removed the chats beta from the Play Store on Saturday, saying they were
delaying the launch to fix several bugs in what the Sunbird team's brains?
These are probably like southern hemisphere bugs. Like rhino beetles. Yeah. And Sunbird themselves put their
services on hold. Now, this is another story where it's very unclear what's
actually going on. A texts.com engineer was banned from Sunbird's Discord after
making a tool that lets users delete Sunbird's copies of their stored data,
which Sunbird is apparently storing. You
know what? I think we better delay the launch though. Yeah, just let Just let it all blow over. Now, it's time for
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Yeah! Nice bits you got there.
Be a shame if someone quickened them. Reviews are out for
AMD's Ryzen Threadripper 7970X and
7980X, and the general consensus is
that these chips are sick AF. If your name isn't Brutus, that means they're
good. Not only that, but they stand as a formidable and currently uncontested
entry into the niche of prosumer processors for high-end desktops.
Ironically, a term coined by Intel. Doesn't feel good. The top SKU, the
7980X model, has 64 cores, 128 threads,
a base clock of 2.5 GHz, and a turbo clock that can hit up to 5.1 GHz.
Finally, a fitting heir to the Threadripper 3000 series. Here's hoping
AMD won't get bored and completely skip a generation like they did with the
purely hypothetical Threadripper non-pro 5000 series, just leaving the throne
unfilled. It's not right. Drop the crown, king. YouTube seems to
be intentionally slowing itself down on Firefox and Safari, at least for some
users. It looks like a hard-coded 5-second delay that disappears when the
site is fooled into thinking it's running on Chrome. Now, it's tempting to
assume that Google is simply punishing users for using a competing browser, but
it's also plausible that this is a bug introduced by Google's heavy-handed ad
block filtering. Always remember Hanlon's razor, and never attribute to
malice what can adequately be explained by neglect or incompetence.
Except in this case, it's you know, it's Google.
They've done this before, but we don't know. NVIDIA and SK Hynix are working
together on a new GPU design, according to Korean news site Joong Ang. The
design would have HBM4 memory chips stacked directly on top of the GPU, like
a hat that makes you much better at remembering what you said to Amanda in
fourth grade. Like, what were you thinking? Ah, get it off! This structure
sounds similar to AMD's 3D V-Cache used
in the company's X3D processors, which are really good at gaming because they
help you remember where the bomb sites are in Counter-Strike 2. That's what I
think they do. I I don't design processors. And, you know, Valorant for
the win. I don't play that either. Details of Intel's upcoming Lunar Lake
MX have leaked showing that the CPU, GPU, and memory will all be on the same
SOC, like Apple's unified memory architecture. Ooh, whoa. No, my watch.
Stop that. This will be the first commercial release of the technology
that Intel showed off to the press earlier this year at their Arizona fab.
This leak is so big, it almost makes you forget that Meteor Lake the architecture
Lunar Lake MX is meant to replace, hasn't actually been officially released
yet despite Intel's promise of a 2023 launch. But, I haven't forgotten, Pat.
Your mind tricks don't work on me. And if you paper launch the Meteor Lake you,
I'm not sending you a Christmas card this year. That came out of nowhere.
You're getting coal. An auto tech company, Valeo, is suing NVIDIA after a
video call gaffe exposed alleged trade
secret theft. Basically, a Valeo employee left for a job at NVIDIA and
took Valeo's work with him. This came to
light months later when he accidentally screen shared stolen code during a video
call with Valeo employees. All because one employee couldn't make a normal
video call mistake, like forgetting to wear clothes.
It wouldn't be nearly as embarrassing or criminal. And you shouldn't forget to
come back on Wednesday for more tech news. Also, you know,
got to put some pants on. Just basic basic respect for me.