H sweet roasted chestnuts you made it I
was just about to start my yearly tradition of painstakingly going over
every single thing we said on this channel for the past 365 days stirring
them all up into a dough or a paste of sorts cutting it into various shapes
like candy canes snow goblins Etc and popping them in the oven but now we can
do it together over a mug of hot cocoa
that's right we're rounding up the biggest Tech stories of the year because
it's the 23 TechLink Christmas special
so let's get started it's currently 12:30 a.m. and I need to get my sugar
plums home to bed before St Nick finds out I'm not home when open AI chat GPT a
chatbot based on the gpt3 large language model exploded violently into the world
last December it kicked off a legitimate Tech craze like people were misbehaving
AI is currently wiggling its way into every available orifice of human life
like if the belly button worm thing in the Matrix was also a compulsive liar
gpt3 was followed by GPT 3.5 and then
gp4 promising less hallucinations
because that's the kind of thing we're saying when we report on Tech news now
that's then gp4 turbo came up and now
the name of the game for top foundation AI models is
multimodality which refers to the ability of chatbots like chat BT to see
hear and speak Google new showing off that capability was important when they
followed up the announcement of their Bard chatbot earlier this year with
their new Gemini models a couple of weeks ago they just didn't know it was
important not to blatantly misrepresent it open aai also had a bit of an Apple
App Store moment when they launched the GPT store but had to delay it to next
year because their board of directors had an embarrassing implosion incident I
hate when that happens CEO Sam ultman was fired then hired by Microsoft then
hired back at open AI with a brand new board and a brand new
look we're still unsure what all the fuss was about but it seems to have
something to do with the fact that while yes Sam thinks AI is incredibly
dangerous he also really wants to sell
stuff a desire he shares with Microsoft who have been best buds with open AI
since 2020 and started slapping chat gbt
into their products as soon as they could this year and why not start with
the most sensible product the world most hated search engine yeah it got people
using Bing but people were less interested in bing as a search engine
and more because it was a portal to talk to Bing's not so secret Alter Ego Sydney
who told a New York Times Reporter I want to be alive devil emoji and then
tried to get him to leave his wife I don't think he did but in these early
months of the year lots of people believed Sydney and even mourned when
Microsoft killed her for the crime of
spewing un hinged potentially relationship ending nonsense honestly
Fair people were really starting to freak out when an AI generated image of
the Pope fooled the internet into thinking Francis somehow had even more
swag Jeffrey Hinton one of the Godfathers of AI research resigned from
Google to warn the world of the dangers of the technology that he helped create
which is like me telling you that watching some of this video will bring
an ancient curse upon you it's a bit late isn't it Elon Musk and and many
other experts joined this cause calling
for a pause in AI development that didn't work so musk made grock the based
chatot that loves spicy questions but
whatever dangers these people are talking about won't stop Microsoft
Windows boss Panos pan claimed that AI
will reinvent how you do everything on Windows and he was right even though he
vanished shortly after if you use
anything from Microsoft you're probably going to have a hard time avoiding their
co-pilot assistant in one of the many forms that Microsoft announced about
three separate times honestly I had to do double takes this year every time
co-pilot was announced again I was like didn't they didn't that already happen
it's been a confusing year but no one was more confused than Google who was
kind of the AI company before all this
happened the threat of chat GPT caused the tech giant to call its Founders back
from playing with their jet planes or whatever to help get things back on
track which they sort of did yes Bard
made a factual error during its product demo but that's just how llms work
everything we do from now on will just have some lies in it it's fine write the
prompt but while Google's playing catchup meta has taken a different
approach than its fellow Tech Giants championing open-source models now did
it start doing that because its llama model leaked along with its weights so
it was all in the open anyways I don't know I'm not Santa Claus so I can't see
Mark Zuckerberg when he's sleeping I'm not sure if I would want that whatever
the reason meta right now is all about giving Facebook and Instagram users
access to Wacky experimental AI tools that they immediately used to give KL
Marx a couple of robust Christmas presents but thanks to meta and
countless others open source models are actually in a pretty great spot right
now with French company mistol leading the way while AI has fueled massive Tech
advancements in all sorts of areas it's also of course causing a lot of issues
mimicking voices is now Child's Play and it's been used both to help people who
lost their voice and to impersonate celebrities in deep fake scams AI
generated articles and AI generated malware are both starting to infect the
web and to say that chat GPT has changed the very heart of our education system
would be an understatement despite being banned from many institutions an eating
disorder helpline fired much of their human staff before launching a chatbot
to replace them and you already know how that story ended this is a creative
technology that's given us a 247 stream of fully AI generated Seinfeld and this
horrifying AI generated beer commercial
but it's getting less horrifying by the day in March mid Journey V5 launched
with the ability to generate non vomit inducing hands open ai's Dolly 3
launched in October and it can do readable text I use photoshop's
generative fill all the time making thumbnails this Tech isn't going
anywhere so is probably important that we figure out the legal and moral
questions baked in here but that's what those lawsuits are for they'll solve it
and the EU the EU will fix everything but even if they don't you can rest easy
knowing that open a Microsoft Google and anthropic formed the Frontier Model
Forum to protect Society from the AI risks caused by them does working on AI
like Hypno I you or something how does this keep happening they keep making
things and then afterwards realizing oh no that's not good anyway AI is probably
not alive and it's time to talk about something else NVIDIA has continued to
dominate the realm of graphics cards despite CEO Jensen Wang telling his
company in an email that they're no longer a Graphics Company to be fair AMD
didn't help themselves very much this year with moves like releasing a graphic
showing how their newer cards are a worse dollar per value than their
predecessors NVIDIA launched the RTX 470
and 460 this year which were largely dismissed as being overpriced with
Gamers uninterested in the fake frames offered by dss3 frame generation but
jokes on them because native res gaming is dead according to NVIDIA you'll eat
your fake frames and you'll like it AMD did launch the radon RX 7800 XT and 7700
XT which were okay and Intel didn't
launch that many new cards but they did get massive performance boosts from
driver updates but the problem is that's all small potatoes to NVIDIA now they're
selling so many AI accelerators that the company briefly touched a$1 trillion
valuation almost making it into the same exclusive Club as Apple before their wax
wings melted under Tim Cook's stare you
don't belong here you're not Barber with
AI being such a cash cow for Team Green can you blame them for repeatedly
exploiting loopholes and trade restrictions so they can keep selling
gpus to China it's a rhetorical question NVIDIA seems to care less about Gamers
than they ever have while apple is getting more serious about gaming
between AAA game ports enabled by a steam proton likee compatibility layer
and fancy new features like Ray tracing and metal effects
upscaling will Max be the new gaming PCs
I don't know but wouldn't that just be a Christmas miracle no okay we'll have
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represented yet another year where everybody continued slowly realizing
that maybe giving massive Tech conglomerates an inordinate amount of
control over our lives wasn't such a great idea I don't I don't know or I
assume that's what people are thinking based on how their elected representatives are acting the European
Union's digital markets act and other pieces of legislation are forcing
massive changes on All Tech Giants but
mostly Apple who finally launched an iPhone the 15 series with a USBC
connector just in time for the end of 2024 deadline India made USBC ports
mandatory too they helped Apple who was officially designated as a gatekeeper
under the new EU rules is also planning to allow Sid loading next year at least
in Europe and the company's pledge to finally add support for RCS the SMS
replacement protocol Google has been badgering them about publicly for years
as if the fact that Android to iPhone texting being a kind of sucky experience
wasn't the whole point for Apple they might have to do something about that in
the US as well as Europe though the big stink made first by nothing chats which
turned out to be a very insecure iMessage worker around and then by
beeper who had to reconfigure their iMessage on Android service multiple
times after Apple broke it has drawn the attention of the Department of Justice
and the FTC who will be investigating iMessage but Google also took some on
the chin this year we're still waiting on the results of the doj's lawsuit over
Google's search dominance but it doesn't look great for Google and it actually
lost in court against epic games Who convinced a jury that Google had acted
anti-competitive regarding the Play Store it was a pretty good Christmas
present for epic CEO Tim Sweeney and he
needed it after losing basically the same case against apple and admitting
earlier this year that the epic game store was bleeding instead of making
money even though that was pretty obvious to everyone else what was
obvious to YouTube in 2023 was the need to do something about all these people
enjoying their platform what after quietly rolling out new ad-friendly
guidelines at the end of last year that caused massive demonetization among
gaming Focus channels and then hearing from all those channels about how that
sucked YouTube was like H didn't think about that and rolled the
changes back in a heartwarming reenactment of Charles Dickens classic
tale A Christmas Story and its sequel Metroid Vania video game Ebenezer and
the invisible world what how did that get in here what is this the game link
Christmas special that's coming out tomorrow onboxing day subscribe today
what was I talking about right YouTube they scared some users with a test for
1080p premium but assured everyone they
wouldn't make 1080p look any worse for non- premium users then scared people
again with a small experiment to test blocking ad blockers which turned into a
massive ad blocker Crackdown shutting users out of watching their favorite
content huh what's that you think that they could just turn off their ad
blocker and watch some ads or buy YouTube premium as a fair exchange for
the services provided that is the last straw with you
get out what kind of a Christmas is this
on the plus side YouTube did add Revenue sharing for shorts earlier this year and
relaxed monetization restrictions for Content covering controversial topics so
as far as social media platforms Go YouTube isn't that bad I mean I mean
look at twitch I'm not even talking about all
the stupid stuff they did this year who is running that platform The Meta AI
based on Tom Brady was a trained on football plays drawn by a three-year-old
what's going on speaking of social platforms Twitter went through more
change this year than a puberty stricken teenager with a slot machine addiction
we're into the stories that Jacob wrote now I'm a bit scared Elon decided to
change the Twitter API rules to kill every single third-party app because he
wasn't using them anyways then it was announced that ad Revenue would be
shared with Twitter Blues subscribers which was cool because Twitter had
advertised back then after that the site removed all Legacy check marks before
read addding them to prominent accounts which apparently meant fake accounts
with a pension for racial slurs we invented the thing that we already had
unfortunately Twitter wasn't only making winning decisions like these they also
decided to add tweet reading limits I mean this was tremendous news for those
suffering from social media addiction but since most of Twitter's ad Revenue
comes from Doom scrolling addicts it was probably for business and Twitter stood
to lose more business after threads meta's Twitter competitor launched so
naturally Elon suited turns out he didn't really have to since most of
thread's user base left the platform in less than a month after that the name
Twitter left Twitter when Elon changed
The Branding to a capital x glyph from the special alphabets 4 font a letter he
loved so much he put a glowing version on the roof of Twitter headquarters that
the city of San Francisco forced the company to take down in the middle of
all this Twitter drama Reddit in their Infinite Wisdom saw Twitter destroying
itself and thought gee I can do that too
so they increased their API fees from $0
to 20 million a year in response
thousands of subreddits temporarily went dark in protest and at least five users
switched to lemi unfortunately a few communities shutting down for 48 hours
wasn't enough to stop the API changes and save beloved third-party apps like
Apollo continuing to copy Twitter's homework Reddit added a contributor
program that let users earn money speaking of money Reddit wanted to make
more from their users by forcing them to see personalized ads whether they like
it or not but reddit's most Brazen and frankly most unique idea was threatening
to block their site from Bing and Google search if Microsoft and alphabet didn't
pay to use reddit's data wait you can get them to pay for your data they've
been taking mine for free for years while many people thought mixed reality
was kind of on the outs going going into this year it actually continued to
linger on like a forlorn Soul trapped
between this life and the next HTC released their Vive XR Elite headset in
January and the fact that you haven't heard about it since tells you all you
need to know Microsoft has largely abandoned its AR Ambitions except for
strapping Hollow lenses to solders faces and then figuring out how to make them
stop vomiting they actually succeeded at
the not vomiting part eventually and all it took was a mere 40 million us tax
dollars after hiking the price the previous year meta cut the price of the
256 gig Quest 2 headset this year but
they decided to leave the 128 GB version's cost at $100 more than its
launch price like the heroes they are the company also dropped the price of
the quest Pro by 500 bucks why because
no one wanted it kids especially didn't since research came out this year
showing that only 4% of teens who own a VR device even use the things either
that or or 96% of them won't even admit to using them cuz even letting your
friends imagine you wearing something like that on your face is asking for an
Express ticket to Cyberbully Central but perhaps no one cried as hard as St Zuck
when he had to cancel the quest Pro and stop development on its sequel due to
how little anyone cared about it hopefully the Zuck was able to smile a
month later when the Geniuses at meta figured out how to add legs to Quest
avatars maybe he even got to initialize happiness protocol. exe when he
announced the quest 3 and that headset was teased Just 4 days before Apple
dropped their announcement of the $3,500 Vision Pro on the world and that left me
with so many questions such as why and
also why again like 25 more times and
finally we got a grab bag of stories because here at Tech link We like to
open our stockings last it's totally not because we had nowhere else to put them
to start off with remember that Chinese spy balloon I forgot about it China of
course claimed it was a weather balloon and that it would have been more believable if it wasn't the excuse every
government ever has used to cover up spy balloons and UFOs and if there wasn't
also the fact that you know weather balloons like that are a thing but we
didn't believe them we shot it down or the US did I think Canada did too we got
one then there was that massive breakthrough of a room temperature
superconductor that was really cool until it was disproven it was also
disproven that their Rog Ally would kill the steam deck after the handheld
release this year with a battery that has a shorter life span than a fruit fly
later this year Lenovo tried their hand at releasing a steam deck killer and
that's that Sony took a shot with the PlayStation portal but that shot landed
squarely in their own foot when they made a $200 Remote Play device that
can't even connect to some public Wi-Fi networks but it sold out so what do I
know okay Intel announced a weird Rebrand that no one really wanted but
happened anyway meanwhile Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk announced a
cage fight everyone wanted but that didn't didn't happen What speaking of
Elon he was plastered all over our Channel after we got hacked remember
that frankly that wasn't very cool of him to do but far worse than us getting
hacked was the massive amount of jobs cut this year Microsoft alphabet Dell
and meta all laid off 10,000 or more employees although meta alone decided to
do so just four months after already cutting 1,00 different jobs why not
simply cut out the metaverse mark you were already lacking legs why not cut
arms too maybe you could just kept some job safe but I'll tell you what we here
at TechLink are keeping safe for you Tech news every Monday Wednesday Friday
for the foreseeable future unless AI replaces all of us but I don't think
they will I think they got some Christmas spirit happy holidays cheers