You again? I swear, if you ask me for tech news one more time, you're gonna get it.
Tech news, that's what you're gonna, 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. No, the DOJ wants Google to sell Chrome, and OpenAI is interested, according to head of product for chatGPT, Nick Turley.
OpenAI's ambitions to build their own web browser are well known, 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 ob-
Did I hear my name? Ah, jeez, nope, nobody said anything.
You wanna 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 FTC 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 OK Apology for making its Aero Lake chips suck at gaming so hard.
I didn't buy them, but I accept. The new profile enables significant bumps in fabric, die to die and memory frequencies for the 285K, 265K and KF and 245K and KF on select motherboards with select memory kits.
YouTuber Der Bauer has already got some updated benchmarks of the 285K on his channel showing that while it's still not going to touch the Ryzen 99950X3D,
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. Stop yelling at me.
An AI service called Cluly 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 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 spell check and Google with going on a date, 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 peddling vaporware
because, yeah, hands-on impressions of Cluly indicate that it kind of sucks.
As weird as it is to say NVIDIA's local AI-powered Project G Assist might actually not suck.
NVIDIA 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.
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 Cluly. In other AI news, GROC 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. 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 percent.
Now, obviously that's crazy, so this morning they brought it down to 3,403.96 percent.
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 suck talking, by the way.
Hello? And MIT researchers have created a metamaterial, 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.
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.
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 Endor. If I haven't, then I'll be doing that.
But you still come back here, just in case.