Before I give you the tech news, I just want to ask, is this what you really want?
Like there is a faint chance that I could give you too much tech news
and your head might explode from knowledge.
Microsoft has shared its radical vision for what Windows computing will look like in the year 2030,
when apparently AI interaction will be so great
using mice and keyboards will be a foreign concept.
The world of sort of mousing around and keyboarding around and typing
will feel as alien as it does to Gen Z to sort of use DOS.
That's according to Microsoft's corporate VP for enterprise and OS security.
David Weston, maybe better known as Dwizzle. The captioning AI spelled Dwizzle with three Zs,
but the AIs of the future won't make those kind of mistakes, hopefully.
Because apparently at that point we'll have already incinerated all the mice and keyboards.
Don't worry gamers, you won't miss using yours. In fact, you won't even have to play.
Just tell the AI to play for you. Xbox insiders can get a taste of this bright future today
with early access to Microsoft's Xbox co-pilot assistant
in the Windows 11 Xbox app. You can ask it things like, what am I looking at?
If you've always struggled to know a Kraken's tentacle
when you see one. One thing that may prompt me to ask an AI
what the I'm looking at are these limited edition Windows XP Crocs.
Microsoft is apparently making them to celebrate its 50th anniversary
by remembering when Windows was a real operating system
instead of an ad delivery service. They even come with a six pack of XP themed gibbets,
the little ornaments you can stick on the Crocs. And if you didn't know that, I'm sorry,
you are not cool or hip enough to wear these. And besides, Microsoft employees apparently get first dibbets.
It's been a wild week for AI. Google announced Genie 3,
their new frontier world model, which is what we're calling it
when AIs can hallucinate a nice blurry little lucid dream
for you to stroll around in. I don't want to be too harsh right off the bat though,
because Genie 3 is a massive improvement over Genie 2,
generating higher fidelity worlds for longer. And although users with early access can describe a scene
and then play through the world's worst video game,
the model now has world memory, which means environments stay consistent when you look away,
a never before seen innovation. Honestly though, we have not seen other models
with this level of quality, summon men in chicken suits, obnoxious jet skiers,
or oblivious dragons on the fly, or seamlessly transition out of a VO3 video
into a playable flight game.
They don't want to call them games because there's something more.
Take this exchange. A DeepMind researcher tweeted a video
of staff playing with Genie 3. Someone replied to say,
oh, they thought this was like a video of people playing with Genie 3
that was generated by Genie 3. So wouldn't that be funny?
Oh, it can do that.
Whoa, this is fine. We're actually all gonna be fine probably.
Although it was enough to make this Twitter wonder whether this is evidence
for Talbot's holographic universe.
Better ask Grock. To Grock's credit, it does give a reasonable answer.
Like we're not peering into the fabric of reality here.
It's an AI video. It's not that deep. You can give the same prompt to chatGPT
and it very well might be like, hmm, maybe, totally could be a definite maybe.
Oh, you're so smart. I love you. Speaking of open AI,
they actually released their first open models
since GPT-2 six years ago.
They're a pair of open weight models that can be run on your laptop
and they're apparently pretty good. Although they're about to be eclipsed
by the release of GPT-5 probably on Tuesday
as evidenced by little clues like the company's head of applied research
tweeting this week that he's excited to see how the public receives GPT-5
and the main open AI account screaming, live stream Thursday, 10 a.m.
There was so much AI stuff you may have missed that Anthropic squeezed a little 0.1 onto Claude Opus-4
and that 11 Labs launched 11 music which generates AI music that's apparently cleared
for nearly all commercial uses. Okay, how's your head feeling?
Got room for quick bits in there? If you feel any pressure at all, just tell me
and I will actually not stop. I am compelled onwards.
US President Donald Trump took a break from winning his sixth golf championship in 2025
because he's as good at that as Elon is at Diablo to announce he'd impose a 100% tariff
on semiconductors made by companies that aren't building in the US.
TSMC is doing that, but Trump reportedly told them
that if they want the same 15% tariff as Japan and South Korea,
they'll have to buy half of Intel and invest another $400 billion in the US.
I mean, it's the least you could do, Taiwan, be reasonable. I mean, Apple just committed another $100 billion
to US manufacturing and Epic Games in the EU stole all their Apple taxes.
They're basically poor now. AMD has officially, but quietly,
announced the Radeon RX9060 non-XT
and that's appropriate because this is a fairly modest card.
Targeted at 1080p gaming with eight gigabytes of slower GDDR6 non-X memory,
it will only be available through system integrators. I mean, it doesn't even have an MSRP
because what would be the point? This is what GPU releases look like now, I guess.
Okay, moving on. Battlefield 6 and Call of Duty Black Ops 7
will both require TPM support and secure boots
to be enabled on Windows 10 and 11 PCs
in order for their anti-cheat solutions to work properly,
which will make sure there's no cheating and everyone plays by the rules just like real war.
Despite that though, more than 9,000 people were seen
queuing up for the upcoming Battlefield 6 beta.
That's almost as many players as there are currently playing Battlefield 2042.
IGN mistakenly wrote that it looks like EA may have a hit on its hands
when really they just have 9,000 people whose optimism has survived somehow,
EA's every attempt to destroy it. Hey, don't buy a pixel.
Right now, as Android Authority warns, there are new ones coming imminently on August 20th
and there's also the fact that besides the constant hardware issues
that seem to plague pixels perpetually, Google also just pulled refurbished Pixel 6As
from their store following an update meant to stop their batteries from exploding,
which seems to have been successful at least some of the time.
So don't buy a pixel right now, but do download the update that fixes the issues
with the back gestures. We don't think that should cause any explosions,
but we can't know. AI search company Perplexity actually has people defending it after Cloudflare
named and shamed the company earlier this week for trying to circumvent websites attempts
to block the company's webcrawlers. But in an official response, Perplexity points out
that websites are sometimes trying to block bots that are sent by an AI assistant
to retrieve an answer for a user. They're not trying to scrape the data for training
this time anyway. And the difference is important.
I mean, this is a moral issue about who gets to access information on the open web.
Ah, geez, don't start with, what are we discriminating against these poor bots now?
Or against tools like Google's AI Overviews which the tech giant says
is not killing click-through traffic to websites. No, they didn't provide any data
to refute the growing pile of research that says the opposite.
I mean, searches are up. Sure, no one's clicking anything, but searches are up.
And NVIDIA has come out strongly against the idea of putting backdoors or kill switches or spyware
in their GPUs. Company representatives recently got summoned
to testify in China after US lawmakers
proposed requiring such backdoors. And so NVIDIA wants to be clear.
They would always oppose backdoors. And especially the ones they'd be legally barred
from telling you about. Meanwhile, I'm not legally barred from saying
thanks for watching. No one has any say on whether I can say that.
And it feels good, but not as good as it would feel if you came back on Friday for more tech news.
I won't actually be here on Friday or on Monday, but listen, Adam and Elijah are writing.
And when we talked about it today, they had some twinkles in their eyes.
So I think it's gonna be good, okay? All right, okay, be back soon.