Yes! Ooh! Mm, mm, mm.
Ha ha ha ha. Oh, damn. Bam, sucker.
Oh, wow. Yeah.
AMD has finally properly unveiled their new
Radeon RX9070 and 9070XT graphics cards.
And honestly, I'm glad they waited this long. The vibes were off at CES.
And going through NVIDIA's dumpster fire of an RTX 50 series launch in the meantime,
really makes you appreciate this launch more. Because the RX9070 will start at $550 U.S. dollars
with the 9070XT starting at 600.
Although it's pretty apparent that even after a two month delay, AMD was still unsure
about the final prices. Their presentation stream has obvious audio replacements
anytime they mention it. By our DNA4 is able to deliver fantastic performance
for $150 less. But that price means that despite the 9070XT
performing about 2% worse than the RTX 5070Ti,
with Team Red's card, you get 23% more performance per dollar.
And there are overclocked versions that perform much better,
which will be available for way more than 600 bucks.
But listen, these aren't like NVIDIA's Melty GPUs, okay?
They'll all use standard eight pin power connectors.
Although the Sapphire 9070XT Nitro Plus
has a 12 volt two by six plug in the back, okay?
That one gets its freak on a little bit, okay? But the rest are normal.
According to AMD's benchmarks and slides and whatnot,
their new FSR for upscaling tech is way better
and will work with more than 30 games at launch.
Although it is exclusive to the new
RDNA4 based 90 series cards, boo.
But there's lots to be excited about here, better encoding, better ray tracing,
better AI capabilities. And both cards come with a healthy 16 gigabytes of VRAM.
Check out the LTT video, I guess, for a more thorough breakdown
and sit tight for proper reviews before the 90 series actually launches
next Thursday, March 6th. And also maybe sit tight for an RX 9060,
because as spotted by video cards with a Z, AMD reps said during their Chinese launch event,
that card will be coming in Q2. And I had Dennis confirm it.
Hmm, do I trust him? Also, there might be a higher end XTX model.
We're getting carried away here, okay? Let's calm down. OpenAI finally launched the heavily teased GPT 4.5,
but despite being their biggest model ever,
the company described it as not a frontier model
before removing that from the official documentation.
AI people are kind of struggling to grok this release,
because in some math and science benchmarks, GPT 4.5 does worse than XAI's grok 3.
The new model doesn't seem very good on paper,
but some users are agreeing with Sam Altman's claim
that it's more emotionally intelligent.
It's about the vibes, man. In the race to build a hyper-intelligent machine god,
right now we're at the stage where we build a chatbot that's comfortable
passing the duchy pond the left-hand side.
Okay, but really, Sam, what gives? Why the low numbers?
His answer, straight up, we're out of GP use.
We don't know where they went. And other AI companies are giving excuses too.
In a memo to employees, Google co-founder Sergey Brin wrote
that we could totally have artificial general intelligence, or AGI, if you guys just worked 60 hours a week.
He called it the sweet spot of productivity. Brin went on to say,
don't work more than 60 hours a week,
but also make sure you don't work less, or you could end up demoralizing your coworkers.
And then we definitely won't make it to AGI.
A term that Google DeepMind boss Demis Hasabis
just admitted is becoming kind of a meaningless term
while still somehow remaining very important.
I don't know, there's just a vibe about it. Mozilla has once again changed language
in their terms of service that really makes it sound
like the company owns and will sell the personal data of Firefox users.
Why would anyone think that when all they did was delete an explicit promise
to never sell users personal data? Ah, you know what, I see it now.
This isn't the first time that language in Mozilla's documentation
has caused concern, but as in previous instances,
it seems like Mozilla might just be really bad
at doing words good. In responses on forums and to news outlets,
the company has tried to clarify that they don't own Firefox user data.
They aren't selling personally identifiable information
and the non-exclusive royalty-free worldwide license
to information gathered through Firefox is necessary for basic functionality,
but many users remain skeptical, somewhat justifiably, given all that language.
Oh, you already thought it was good and then QuickBits was through the hoop
for the buzzer beater overtime snack?
Ha, ha, ha, yeah. Instagram Reels users were surprised this week
when many of their feeds turned into a never-ending scroll
through gruesome videos of violence and dead bodies.
After enough people were traumatized, Meta revealed that this wasn't a fun takeover collab
with 4chan, but an error for which the tech giant apologized
in a statement given to 404 Media and other outlets.
Oopsies, hope your kid didn't grab your phone that day.
What the? Microsoft has announced they're shutting down venerable video calling app Skype
for good. Oh, well.
Anyway, Meta, oh, they're back. They've shown off a second-gen prototype
of their Aria smart glasses, which could lead to next-gen Meta ray bands
with state-of-the-art sensors, including six degrees of freedom slam cameras.
I don't know what those are. I just knew I wanted to say slam cameras at some point today,
but Meta could face competition from an AI company called Sesame,
who's creating their own smart glasses to host their own voice assistant,
which is currently blowing journalists' minds with how natural it sounds
and how much it wants to hear more about what they think.
Easily pleased. This week, Warner Brothers shut down Monolith Productions,
the studio behind the Shadow of Mordor franchise, which was loved for its nemesis system
that generated unique orc villains that actually remembered
how you frickin' embarrassed them in front of their orc buddies multiple times.
But rather than let other studios use that system, WB just locked it behind a patent until 2036.
And for the sake of contrast, EA just released the source code
for four classic Command and Conquer games
because, you know, they're insecure and need to hear praise.
You're not tricking me, EA. And someone has invented Tastovision yet again.
A team of international researchers published a study showing their prototype device
called what else, eTaste. It could successfully reproduce complex flavor combinations
by dispatching gels through an electromagnetic pump.
This could allow you to try menu items before you order or taste the ocean salt
off of Mario's torso. Ah, what, ah, I'm sorry, ah, I'm sorry.
I'm sorry, that image just never left my brain. Why did Nintendo do that?
Look, just come back on Monday for more tech news and let's just forget I ever said anything, okay?
Any of it. As far as anyone else is concerned, we just both stood here and made facial expressions.
There are some really good ones.