I've been swimming in tech news all morning, and I would say come on in, the water's fine,
but it's not. Here, let me dry off.
While Chinese AI company Deepseek didn't fully burst the AI bubble, it did send NVIDIA stock
into a tailspin this week, as investors questioned the need for NVIDIA GPUs when Deepseek's models
are just so dang efficient. Maybe part of the reason they're so efficient is because Deepseek didn't spend any time
developing jailbreak defenses. AI security researchers from the University of Pennsylvania and Cisco found that Deepseek's
reasoning model, R1, completely failed to protect itself against a barrage of 50 popular
chatbot jailbreak techniques, which I'll admit sounds very disorienting.
Deepseek also apparently didn't devote any time to protecting their internal database
of user chat histories and API keys, which was found by security researchers from WIZ
just sitting there without even a password to protect it.
Between that and the whole sending data to China thing, multiple countries are banning,
restricting, or investigating the use of Deepseek models, including Italy, Taiwan, South Korea,
France, and even Belgium, who's usually pretty chill.
But Deepseek hype remains high, and OpenAI had to do something, so they launched their
O3 mini reasoning model, which surpasses O1, particularly in science, math, and coding
performance, and also doesn't immediately tell you how to make cocaine and explosives
when you ask nicely. Or worse, explosive cocaine.
Limited use of O3 mini is free through ChatGPT, but paid users can use it more, with $200
ChatGPT Pro subscribers getting unlimited use.
Meanwhile, Microsoft now offers OpenAI's O1 model through the Think Deeper feature in
its co-pilot assistant for free. And despite saying it's investigating whether Deepseek improperly used OpenAI models to
train their own, Microsoft is also hosting Deepseek R1 on its cloud services.
But you know what they say, keep your friends close and your enemies safely contained in
a server farm. NVIDIA wasn't kidding when it warned about stock shortages for the RTX 50 series cards.
When they launched yesterday, inventory for the RTX 5090 and 5080 sold out in minutes
at retailers across the US, the UK, and probably elsewhere, sorry I didn't check every country.
In some European countries, it almost seemed like stock was never there in the first place,
thanks to the leak of a distributor order link.
And if you're thinking, wow, people are more passionate about top tier PC gaming than ever,
oh my sweet summer child.
This was reportedly due to incredibly low stock numbers and determined scalpers, with
RTX 5090s being listed for as high as 9,000 USD on eBay.
YouTuber Jay-Z Fittysent tweeted yesterday that he spotted a 5090 he had just signed
at a Micro Center launch event that morning being listed on Facebook Marketplace for $5,800.
Now all that, despite the RTX 5080 representing objectively bad value compared to previous
80 series cards, as laid out so clearly in this glorious graph made by Paul's hardware
for his recent video. Paul really knocked it out of the park with this graph.
It's a good graph, Paul. But hey, it's not all bad news, NVIDIA also surprise dropped a new feature in its GPU
driver called Smooth Motion, a spatial frame interpolation feature which can bring less
powerful frame generation to almost any game, kind of like AMD's fluid motion frames.
Which would be cool if NVIDIA didn't say that for now, it's exclusive to the RTX 50 series,
which is, if you didn't catch it earlier, so out of stock, stores are sending people
home with paper vouchers just to feel like they got something.
I dragged myself off, but I still feel like a sticky residue.
Oh, it's because there's still quick bits. Intel released their company financial results yesterday and you can find the link in our
news sources below, but I wouldn't unless you just kind of want to feel sad.
TeamBlue says Panther Lake laptop CPUs are coming later in 2025, but Nova Lake, the successor
to the truly depressing Aero Lake desktop chips, aren't expected until 2026.
Intel also announced that rather than competing with NVIDIA's AI accelerators, they're canceling
their Falcon Shores AI GPU for now, giving off some real EOR energy.
It probably wouldn't have been any good.
But hey, it's not like Intel is done yet. Microsoft just announced their existing Surface Pro and Surface laptop for businesses can be
configured with Intel Lunar Lake processors instead of Qualcomm Snapdragon X chips.
They'll just cost around $400 extra for the privilege of feeling like you've been
Thanos snapped, but you're disintegrating extra slowly.
Apple has filed a motion to delay proceedings in Google's antitrust trial after a judge
denied the company's request to intervene in the case.
It's a heartwarming story of massive tech giants sticking up for each other, because
one wants to continue getting paid $20 billion a year to have Google be the default search
engine in Safari. Wow. I mean, without that money, Apple might have to cancel more projects like the Mac-connected
AR glasses, which are no longer in development according to master of Apple secrets Neil
Girmstron, by which I mean Mark German. Don't worry, Meta's Mark Zuckerberg told investors he plans on selling billions of
AR glasses, so there'll be lots to go around.
We'll just have little pairs, we'll just slap on babies right out of the womb.
And you know what, let's have some positive stories to round off this episode.
After launching Spider-Man 2 on Steam this week, Sony announced the game won't require
players to sign in with a PlayStation network account and neither will God of War Ragnarok,
The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered, and Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered.
Okay. Also, the Video Game History Foundation opened digital access to more than 30,000 files in
its archive of game materials. And there's no playable games, but there's some cool art.
And if you're looking for a quick way to get a real search result instead of Google's
AI overviews, just make your search sound more angry with some curse words.
It'll skip right to the good ****. Ah, **** yeah.
And you better **** be here on Monday for more tech news, or so help me, I'll have
some choice words for you. Like, I miss you.
Please reconsider your decision.