In an effort to look cooler, I've been learning to read tech news off a teleprompter
while wearing sunglasses. Unfortunately, it didn't work.
I can't see. NVIDIA is closer than ever to owning the entire GPU market.
According to a new report from John Petty Research, which has NVIDIA sitting at 94%
of all discrete graphics card shipments. For a hot second, there was hope
that competition would make this not so. In Q4 2024, NVIDIA had diverted production
to data center GPUs, and AMD was able to hold steady around 15%,
but not for long. AMD is now sitting at 5%,
while Intel is guarding that 1% market share they won last year with their life.
It's sad, but as much as I love the idea of voting with one's wallet,
the fact is that gamers see more value in the performance and features offered by GeForce.
NVIDIA's action-packed 2009 film about a team of guinea pig commandos
and it's accompanying video games still available on Steam for $26?
That's like a whole combo at McDonald's. This economy, speaking of Steam,
the Steam hardware survey appears to agree with this research.
The RTX 5070 became the most popular card on Steam recently, though analysts suspect
Chinese New Year internet cafe traffic and a Valve reporting bug
may have inflated those numbers somewhat, but still. If you take a look at AMD's best card on the chart,
it's in 17th place under a whole slew of NVIDIA's offerings.
As a final insult, leaks suggest NVIDIA is planning a new RTX 5050 variant
with nine gigabytes of VRAM, not even a nice, even eight gigabytes.
Nine feels weird, but who's gonna stop them, huh?
Now that's not to say AMD's out of the graphics game entirely, the newly announced NextGen Xbox console,
codenamed Project Helix, which we talked about on GameLink yesterday,
runs on an AMD chipset and will play PC games,
making it a PC, and so many people are gonna buy this, and then that AMD share of GPUs will shoot up, okay?
I know that's not how it works, just let me have this. Anthropic is vowing to sue the Pentagon
over the company being designated a supply chain risk.
Now this comes days after Secretary of War Pete Hegseth
declared on Twitter that no contractor, supplier, or partner of the US military
can do business with Anthropic, because Anthropic CEO, Dario Amade,
refused to allow the Pentagon to use Claude for mass surveillance of Americans
and the deployment of fully autonomous weapons systems, and that sucks.
Amade responded yesterday to Hegseth on Anthropic's blog to say,
he doesn't believe this designation is legally sound
and that he has no choice, but to challenge it in court.
Oof, I'm not sure if it's just me, but there's some serious heated rivalry energy
coming off of Hegseth and Amade, except instead of hockey,
it's mass surveillance and autonomous murder robots, and I'm not excited anymore.
Despite going to war against the literal department of war,
Anthropic has found itself with some notable allies.
Senator Kirsten Gillbrand called the Pentagon's move
short-sighted, self-destructive, and a gift to our adversaries, and Microsoft has stated that after reviewing
the designation, it will continue to do business with Anthropic, which is good news
because Anthropic is going to need that business. Now that, according to the AI industry,
Sugar Daddy and Shovel Salesman, Jensen Wong,
NVIDIA will be holstering the money gun it's had pointed at the AI bubble.
It shoots money. Wong said at a Morgan Stanley conference this week
that NVIDIA's recent investments in both open AI and Anthropic,
30 billion and 10 billion respectively, are likely to be its last,
and the whopping 100 billion open AI NVIDIA deal
that Wong announced last September is officially dead.
I guess that announcement about investing up to $100 billion
was just something that Wong said in the heat of the moment and he never really meant it.
So Anthropic might just survive, but XAI is in real trouble according to CEO
and melting wax sculpture, Elon Musk. XAI just failed to block a California law
passed in late 2024, requiring AI companies to publicly disclose
what data they used to train their models. XAI's arguments cited everything from trade secrets
to free speech, to the fact that people would just be kind of bored
by all the stuff in the disclosures and like wouldn't even want to see them anyways.
Unfortunately, it wasn't enough to convince US district judge, Jesus Bernal,
who said XAI failed to show the law would force them to reveal any actual trade secrets
and that the company traded in frequent abstractions and hypotheticals instead of real evidence of harm.
The lawsuit will continue, but XAI has to comply with the law in the meantime,
which could see Musk sharing information he'd rather open AI had no knowledge of.
Information like who our sponsor is. Why do they know?
Little fun fact before we head into the quick bits. I was joking before we don't read off a teleprompter.
We make up the script as we go, okay? None of this is real.
So, hmm, let's make up something about how Apple
is now blocking US users from downloading ByteDances Chinese apps,
even if they have a valid Chinese app store account.
Before the TikTok US entity deal was reached,
Apple had listed 11 ByteDance apps that would no longer be available in the US,
starting January 19th, 2025, and it looks like that policy is now being enforced
for the apps that weren't covered by the deal, which include Duyen, Dubau, Fanky Novel, Flipkut,
Hypec, Lark, Quank, and Goth, Goath.
Banning app seems bad. However, these are apps you think about
so little you didn't even realize two of them were made up, and I guarantee you,
it's not the ones you think. One thing that's luckily not made up
is that Apple Music will be rolling out transparency tags
for AI-generated music, labeling tracks across four categories
depending on how much AI was involved in making them. The catch, it's entirely opt-in,
meaning labels and distributors only have to disclose the use of AI tools
if they feel like it, which is great, because record labels have such a long
and storied history of being completely honest about everything.
This is totally going to work, guys, and it will absolutely fix the platform 100%.
The first MacBook Neo benchmarks just hit geek bench,
and since the $599 laptop runs the same A18 Pro chip
as the iPhone 16 Pro, the scores are nearly identical,
sitting just 61 points ahead in single-core and 327 points ahead in multicore.
According to Tom's guide, that puts single-core performance well ahead of the M1 MacBook Air.
No doubt partially thanks to the newer three-nanometer process,
though multicore is roughly the same. We've now got iPhones
that are more powerful than MacBooks from a few years ago, so we're putting those phone chips back in MacBooks,
which may be now one of the best bang for your buck options on the market from Apple.
Times are wild. Wikipedia editors have discovered that a nonprofit called the Open Knowledge Association
has been paying contractors to translate Wikipedia articles
using chat GBT and Gemini, which is against Wikipedia's own rules.
Unsurprisingly, those translations have been stuffing articles with hallucinated citations,
fabricated sources, and paragraphs pulled from completely unrelated material.
Wikipedia's response was to keep using them anyway, but with stricter oversight.
The OKAs fix deploy a second AI
to check the first AI's work. If you hallucinate a hallucination,
is that hallucin-a-ception? Probably ask chat GBT.
And Roblox is rolling out a real-time AI chat filter
that doesn't just block profanity, it rephrases it.
So instead of your messages appearing as a bunch of hashtags when you call someone a naughty word,
the AI rewrites it into something civil
while preserving your original intent, like turning hurry TF up into just hurry up, much better.
The feature was developed with Roblox's Teen Council,
a carefully selected group of teenagers who inadvertently became wise beyond their years
after being groomed on Roblox. So now, when you announce to your Phantom Forces lobby,
so now when you announce to your Phantom Forces lobby that you will in fact end their bloodlines
because of what they've done, the AI can translate that internal rage
into something about how you don't have to have kids to lead a fulfilling life,
and I guarantee your life will be fulfilled if you come back on Monday for some more
completely unscripted tech news that we say out loud as soon as it pops into our head.
And thank goodness. Can you imagine if all of this stuff was true?