WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:06.320 It's February 21st, 2025, and we got tech news, but we won't have any on Monday, February 24th. 00:00:06.320 --> 00:00:09.360 I'll have the day off, but I probably won't be able to relax, 00:00:09.360 --> 00:00:16.320 as I'll be too excited to return on Wednesday. I love tech news more than my family, and I hope they never find out. 00:00:16.320 --> 00:00:21.760 NVIDIA's launch of the RTX 50 series has had another wrench thrown in its gears 00:00:21.760 --> 00:00:25.840 after tech power-up and others discovered that some 5090s 00:00:25.840 --> 00:00:31.600 have fewer ROP or raster operations pipeline units than they should, 00:00:31.600 --> 00:00:36.320 leading to lower performance than so-called normal 5090s. 00:00:36.320 --> 00:00:44.400 Is it okay to say that? The issue was first spotted on a Zotac model by tech power-up forum user WuxiGamer, 00:00:44.400 --> 00:00:51.120 but reports soon emerged of similar ROP shortages on an MSI RTX 5090D, 00:00:51.200 --> 00:00:55.760 the China exclusive version, as well as a Manly 5090. 00:00:55.760 --> 00:00:58.160 But what does that even mean in 2025, you know? 00:00:59.040 --> 00:01:06.960 It's the brand. Leaker Megasize GPU claims what we're seeing is a small defective batch of GB202 chips, 00:01:06.960 --> 00:01:10.160 which power the 5090, making it into the supply, 00:01:10.160 --> 00:01:13.840 which has reportedly led NVIDIA to initiate investigation 00:01:13.840 --> 00:01:18.240 that could potentially delay the launch of the RTX 5070, 00:01:18.240 --> 00:01:24.400 ruining AMD's plans to reactively price its upcoming RX 9070 series, 00:01:24.400 --> 00:01:29.920 or more likely, follow its historical pattern of pricing things horribly for no reason. 00:01:29.920 --> 00:01:38.320 Not that any of this really matters. This week's RTX 5070 Ti launch had the same stock issues as the 5080 and 5090, 00:01:38.320 --> 00:01:45.120 despite both NVIDIA and New Egg reviving their COVID-era direct buying GPU programs. 00:01:45.120 --> 00:01:49.200 So even if you get your hands on a new card, it might be borked. 00:01:49.200 --> 00:01:54.960 Hey, have you heard about reading books? I think that's like the third time of me that joke in recent memory. 00:01:55.680 --> 00:02:01.200 Apple is axing its advanced data protection feature for users in the UK. 00:02:01.200 --> 00:02:04.960 After the government there issued a pretty wild order, 00:02:04.960 --> 00:02:09.920 demanding Apple provide a backdoor through the feature's end-to-end encryption. 00:02:09.920 --> 00:02:13.360 Doing so would expose the data of users not only in the UK, 00:02:13.360 --> 00:02:16.480 but anywhere in the world to the UK government. 00:02:16.480 --> 00:02:21.520 But they were like, ah, we don't care, let us in, knock knock. 00:02:21.520 --> 00:02:25.600 New Apple users in the UK will no longer be offered ADP encryption, 00:02:25.600 --> 00:02:29.520 and existing UK users will be required to disable it sometime soon, 00:02:29.520 --> 00:02:32.960 making it so the government can access their data no problem, 00:02:32.960 --> 00:02:39.440 although they'd need a warrant to do so. Amazingly, some are characterizing this as Apple defying the government 00:02:39.440 --> 00:02:42.560 by not giving them the backdoor they wanted. 00:02:42.560 --> 00:02:45.600 But as Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney points out, 00:02:45.600 --> 00:02:49.200 Apple's simply opening the front door instead, 00:02:49.200 --> 00:02:53.920 which at least is a polite gesture I'm sure the British will appreciate. 00:02:53.920 --> 00:02:59.440 OpenAI is now rolling out its computer using agent operator for 200 bucks a month 00:02:59.440 --> 00:03:04.480 chat GPT Pro subscribers in most countries where chat GPT is available, 00:03:04.480 --> 00:03:08.480 including Canada, who just won a hockey game against the US, 00:03:08.480 --> 00:03:12.080 which means we can keep being a country according to chat GPT. 00:03:12.720 --> 00:03:16.880 Agents are all the AI rage right now. Humane might be dunzo, 00:03:16.880 --> 00:03:21.360 but Rabbit just showed their Android agent controlling a tablet, 00:03:21.360 --> 00:03:24.880 which of course they used to generate a revenue plan 00:03:24.880 --> 00:03:30.240 from a business idea and share it with contacts. The most important use case for AI, 00:03:30.240 --> 00:03:33.920 bothering your friends with your Ponzi scheme ideas. 00:03:33.920 --> 00:03:40.560 But what about physical agents? Robotics company Figure just demoed their bots running Helix, 00:03:40.560 --> 00:03:46.720 their new generalist action model, which allowed them to follow instructions given by their Californian dad 00:03:46.720 --> 00:03:52.000 to put away groceries, even passing items to each other while sharing very slow, 00:03:52.000 --> 00:03:55.840 but knowing looks that seem to say, I'm dad's favorite. 00:03:55.840 --> 00:04:00.480 No, I am, you b**ch. This action model is similar to Google's RT2, 00:04:00.480 --> 00:04:05.600 which combines multiple perception and language models so robots can do stuff. 00:04:05.600 --> 00:04:11.520 But Microsoft's new magma is a single multimodal model that can do all of that. 00:04:12.080 --> 00:04:19.360 Not that we could verify it, it's all closed source, but Deepseek has announced it will do one better than just being open weights 00:04:19.360 --> 00:04:24.000 and will be fully open sourcing five of their repos starting next week. 00:04:24.000 --> 00:04:27.680 So instead of the CCP controlling what Deepseek models say, 00:04:27.680 --> 00:04:31.600 you do, you can be China. If tech news is my family, 00:04:31.600 --> 00:04:35.520 quick bits are the Legos on the floor after my son destroyed the set 00:04:35.520 --> 00:04:40.560 I spent an hour building for him. Stepping on them hurts on multiple levels. 00:04:40.560 --> 00:04:44.960 YouTube will soon launch a cheaper version of premium in the U.S. 00:04:44.960 --> 00:04:50.880 called Premium Light, which would remove ads on all content except music videos, 00:04:50.880 --> 00:04:57.680 according to Bloomberg, who described YouTube as a vast library of podcasts and how-to clips. 00:04:57.680 --> 00:05:01.760 And if those are the other options, I guess we post music videos? 00:05:01.760 --> 00:05:05.280 Premium Light has reportedly been in testing in other countries, 00:05:05.280 --> 00:05:10.640 but soon users in the U.S. will be able to see if they like tariffs on their music videos. 00:05:10.640 --> 00:05:13.760 I don't think that's a proper analogy, but okay. 00:05:13.760 --> 00:05:20.880 HP instituted a policy that added a 15-minute wait time to the company's support calls, 00:05:20.880 --> 00:05:29.840 according to the register, as a way to, quote, encourage more digital adoption by nudging customers to go online to self-solve. 00:05:29.840 --> 00:05:36.240 While there certainly is a place for tough love, I'm not sure making people wait even longer on the phone 00:05:36.240 --> 00:05:40.560 with support staff is the way to do it. And HP seemed to agree, 00:05:40.560 --> 00:05:45.520 as they rescinded the policy after widespread reporting on how dumb it was. 00:05:45.520 --> 00:05:50.080 Although we don't know what the whole music was. If they're playing bangers, I might be okay with it. 00:05:50.080 --> 00:05:53.200 Your computer's busted, but hey, time to get funky. 00:05:53.200 --> 00:05:58.560 Meta has said that even if they did torrent 82 terabytes of pirated books, 00:05:58.560 --> 00:06:05.040 it's no big deal if you don't seed them, as seen in a filing from the social media giant this week. 00:06:05.040 --> 00:06:10.240 You see, it's not the training AI on unlicensed pirated content, that's the issue. 00:06:10.240 --> 00:06:14.000 It's performing the common courtesy of helping others do the same thing. 00:06:14.000 --> 00:06:20.400 Like, come on, that's illegal. This whole thing has got real, I did not inhale, vibes. 00:06:21.040 --> 00:06:24.160 Yes, I put the ebooks in my mouth, but... 00:06:24.160 --> 00:06:32.720 Earlier this week, Microsoft announced Muse, an AI game generator that was trained on and could only recreate 00:06:32.720 --> 00:06:35.920 low-resolution slot versions of the gameplay 00:06:35.920 --> 00:06:39.520 from Ninja Theory's failed MOBA, Bleeding Edge. 00:06:39.520 --> 00:06:47.840 Which is, I think, something all of us were asking for. Ex-boss Phil Spencer suggested Muse could help with game preservation 00:06:47.840 --> 00:06:52.320 by emulating any game based on gameplay footage. 00:06:52.320 --> 00:06:57.120 A suggestion AI researcher and game designer Dr. Michael Cook called 00:06:57.120 --> 00:07:00.560 Idiotic. Because that's kind of like preserving the Mona Lisa 00:07:00.560 --> 00:07:04.640 by having your toddler draw it from memory. I mean, the spirit is there. 00:07:04.640 --> 00:07:09.120 And Google released an AI tool called Coscientist this week, 00:07:09.120 --> 00:07:12.720 which can generate hypotheses for researchers to investigate. 00:07:12.720 --> 00:07:20.720 The BBC claimed in an article that this tool had cracked a super bug problem in two days that took scientists years. 00:07:20.720 --> 00:07:24.160 That sounds amazing, but as another article from New Scientist 00:07:24.160 --> 00:07:27.600 and excellent science YouTuber Angela Collier points out, 00:07:27.600 --> 00:07:31.040 what actually happened is the Coscientist AI suggested 00:07:31.040 --> 00:07:37.920 a number of hypotheses to explain a problem. And the top suggestion matched unpublished research the scientists 00:07:37.920 --> 00:07:42.960 had been working on for years. But the AI didn't provide a novel solution to the problem, 00:07:42.960 --> 00:07:48.240 the suggestion was based on a previous paper the team had published in 2023. 00:07:48.240 --> 00:07:52.880 And I don't know if you could call providing a list of possible solutions 00:07:52.880 --> 00:07:56.720 cracking the problem. But hey, I'm not a scientist. 00:07:56.720 --> 00:08:01.360 But if you come back on Wednesday for more tech news, remember no TechLinked on Monday, 00:08:01.360 --> 00:08:05.520 then I think that makes you a scientist, right? 00:08:06.960 --> 00:08:09.040 Maybe I don't actually know what they do.