Ah, I have so much tech news to give you, but I don't know if you're ready.
Some of it may unsettle you, cause you some discomfort might make you feel a little bit
woozy. Intel is reportedly working to finalize commitments from NVIDIA to have Team Blue's Foundry
division manufacture Team Green's Gaming GPUs, an eerily perfect setup for the tech
industry version of the Red Wedding from Game of Thrones.
And Team Red isn't even involved. Intel, no get out of there!
The news comes from industry analyst Timothy Arcuri, who wrote in a note to investors
that securing foundry customers like NVIDIA, or less likely Broadcom, is a major goal of
the company's new CEO, Litbu Tan. Even if NVIDIA doesn't love the idea of having their chips made by a competitor in the gaming
GPU market to be extremely charitable towards Intel, the deal could make sense if only to
avoid the tariffs US President Trump may still place on chips made by NVIDIA's existing
partner TSMC. And who knows, maybe Intel could help NVIDIA stock more than like four graphics cards
at each retailer. Scalping and supply issues are part of why AMD sold 10 times more RX9070 XTs in the first
week than its predecessors. Or at least, that's what CEO Dr. Lisa Su said in an interview with ASUS China.
I gotta say, I did not have Radeon graphics cards are dominating the market, so NVIDIA
and Intel have to team up to take them down on my 2025 bingo card.
Because I don't have a bingo card at all. That's gambling.
Lots of notable AI developments this week, with the arrival of new Gemini 2.5 thinking
models from Google DeepMind that the company says are mighty powerful, by which they mean
they're just slightly better on some common benchmarks.
But a new benchmark could show that all the AI suck.
Hold on, that's for the end of the story. OpenAI finally rolled out native image generation for ChatGPT's 4.0 model, meaning it no longer
needs to use Dali for that. The update has made ChatGPT shockingly good at reproducing text in generated images while
maintaining the consistency of characters and environments through multiple iterations.
It's a feature that OpenAI has apparently been holding onto since 4.0 was unveiled nearly
a year ago. I guess they decided to wait until two weeks after Google launched the same thing in Gemini.
Ba-doom, gotcha. Notably, guardrails for these image generators have been loosened.
OpenAI's system card for GPT-4.0 says they're not blocking the capability to generate public
figures as long as their adults. And public figures who wish for their depiction not to be generated can opt out.
I didn't see how in the document.
I guess try DMing Sam. Guess what, there's more. NVIDIA is now rolling out Project Geassist, its AI assistant that can run locally on your
GPU and is apparently named after the company's fake AI assistant from their April Fool's
joke in 2017. Eight years from parody to reality, is this normal?
The real Geassist won't play games for you, but in addition to giving gaming tips, it
can actually control third-party accessories like wall lights and even change some of your
PC settings if you ask it to, instead of just telling you that you can open the settings
app and find and enable dark mode.
And how did NVIDIA make a more useful AI assistant for Windows PCs than Microsoft?
Meanwhile, chatbot service character.ai, which is very popular among teens, as evidenced
by all those uplifting articles about the things it's done, has announced a new parental
insights feature which lets users under 18 send a weekly activity report to their parent
or guardian if they want to.
Uh, it's parental controls for the good kids that don't need them.
Now in case you're worried that AI is getting too smart, too fast, there's a new benchmark,
ARC-AGI2, which requires fluid intelligence to complete novel tasks instead of testing
AI's on their ability to solve problems that are probably in their training data somewhere.
And nearly every model is horrible at this new test, so we should have some time left
before we all feel the AGI in the form of robot feet on our neck.
Did that news disquiet, disturb, or perturb you?
I'm sorry, these quick bits should feel much better entering your ocular and auditory orifices.
Why did I say it like that? ASRock has published a slightly confusing update after investigating issues experienced
by some owners of the company's motherboards, while ASRock acknowledged some of its BIOS
versions caused boot issues with, quote, random 9000 series CPUs.
They say their new BIOS 3.20 fixes that issue, and it's not related to the other issue that
caused burn damage on the CPU socket.
They didn't exactly say what could have caused multiple users to report burnt CPUs and pins
on the motherboard, but implied it was caused by debris in the socket, which they removed
leading to the system passing long-term stress tests, so there was just some, you know, stuff.
Unfortunately for ASRock, many are still calling for further investigation as
there was something in there, isn't it? Is a less than satisfying answer.
What was it? Well, I have some variety of gunk.
Some promising Windows 11 features have popped up in a new preview build, including a controller-friendly
keyboard and, more importantly, an improved Windows search, which will only be available
on co-pilot plus PCs, because I guess Microsoft needed advanced neural networks to make search
almost as useful as it was in Windows 7. Apple has once again been barred from participating in Google's upcoming antitrust hearing after
an appeals court denied the tech giant's motion to testify about how much it would
suck for them to lose the $20 billion Google pays them every year to be Safari's default
search engine. This is so sad. They just want to be together for the hearing and conduct shady deals.
I ship them. Canada has banned Tesla from receiving any federal electric vehicle rebates in the future
weeks after the company filed for $43.1 million in rebates, claiming that four of its Canadian
stores had sold 8,653 vehicles in three days.
That would be 120 EVs per hour.
The sales all happened the weekend before a previously announced pause in the EV rebates
program, so I can understand why all those Canadians rushed to get one before the deadline.
And a company called Gravidx has been awarded funding by the US Space Force to develop what
is essentially an aircraft carrier in space.
Awesomely referred to as an orbital carrier, the craft would actually hold, maintain, and release
satellites into orbit, which would save on having to launch them from Earth.
However, the company didn't say they wouldn't also be used eventually for transporting squadrons
of starfighters, so I'm considering that a feature that's coming later on.
Also arriving later, more tech news on Friday specifically because that's when tech news
happens next, because that's when I make the tech news happen.
I think that's how it works.