Hey, thanks for waiting a whole week for fresh tech news while I was away.
I thought I had another week before I would be assaulted by wacky CES news
about sentient toilets or something, but apparently that's starting now, so strap in.
LG has unveiled a bendable 45 inch OLED monitor
at the apparently unprecedented resolution of 5120 by 2160.
In their press release, unveiling the monitor, LG says it's set to be unveiled at CES next week,
where it has somehow already won three CES 2025
innovation awards. I was expecting CES news to be more 3D printed sandwiches
and less time paradoxes, but sure, let's roll with it.
Turns out those CES innovation award winners were actually announced in November.
That's how I found out about Zeiss getting an award for their holographic transparent camera,
which has already been pre-ordered by Wonder Woman to go with her invisible jet.
Nope. An order that was placed in 1942.
No, stop it. The camera is apparently sensors built into the frame
of a window reconstructing an image from the ambient light that hits it,
which sounds just bonkers, but so does LG announcing a microwave
with a built in 27 inch display. So you can easily check on your food,
maybe keep gaming while you wait for your hot pockets,
or if it's anything like LG's actual TVs,
get great product recommendations served directly to your kitchen.
Hot food and hot deals? No, destroy it.
AMD was also expected to unveil their next gen GPUs at CES,
which were named the RX 8000 series at some point,
but multiple leaks now indicate that instead of an RX 8800,
AMD will be announcing the RX 9070,
skipping a generation number and copying NVIDIA's naming convention.
AMD pulled a similar stunt with their CPU names, apparently having learned brand strategy
from the people behind popular movie franchises, Transmorphers, and Magic Wizard School,
starring Hermione Grinder.
Bench Life claims the RX 9070 will actually launch at the end of January.
Fingers crossed that NVIDIA and AMD's plans to stockpile graphics cards
before those tariffs hit pays off. Intel, a resurgent player
in the desktop graphics card space, is expected to unveil another gaming focused card,
but apparently they're also prepping a battle mage powered Arc Pro GPU
with 24 gigabytes of memory, which is a lot, but hopefully not enough
to remember Hermione Grinder, the top student at Chogboards.
Sorry, that didn't help.
You're a special boy with magic powers.
Sorry, I'm so, okay, no, stop. OpenAI took the mask off on Friday
and announced plans to transition into a mostly for-profit organization
with a bit of non-profit on the side. Previously, the capped profit ARM of OpenAI
was controlled by the non-profit ARM, which was controlled by a board of directors
who didn't care about profit at all as long as robots took all our jobs.
But now the for-profit ARM will become a Delaware Public Benefit Corporation
required to balance the interests of shareholders
and the public, and the non-profit
will have shares in that company. I mean, it's so much more simple
for the purposes of more money.
This is exactly what Elon Musk was trying to prevent
when he filed an injunction against OpenAI in early December,
a filing that just received public support from a non-profit, ooh, irony maybe,
called ENCODE, who even had one of the Godfathers of AI,
Jeffrey Hinton, on board. I'd never heard of ENCODE before,
but apparently they're run by young people concerned about where AI is heading.
While Elon is an old guy, just mad that this is happening after he left.
This is not right to do without me.
Quick bits. They're here and then they're gone.
Like most things. YouTube is testing a new floating action button
in the Android app, kind of like Google's I'm Feeling Lucky button.
It just starts playing a random video to distract you from those pesky thoughts.
They actually started testing this a year ago with a simple black play button,
but in the more recent tests spotted by nine to five Google, the button now says play something,
play something, anything. Also, I love how nine to five Google's example
of the something is a video by nothing.
Is this what you want? iOS 18 appears to enable a feature
called Enhanced Visual Search by default,
which lets you identify landmarks in your photos, but requires sending some photo data to Apple.
As pointed out by app developer Jeff Johnson, Apple says they do this privately,
but it's a weird move for a privacy-focused company
like Apple to just decide that you're probably okay
with Apple seeing your photos in this scenario.
I mean, that what happens on your iPhone stays there, billboard was all the way back in 2019.
Things have changed. You can't just walk around not knowing
that that's the Arc de Triomphe. Oh, it's like a big door.
Embarrassing. NVIDIA's VP of robotics, Deepu Tala,
told the Financial Times this week that the chat GPT moment for robotics
is just around the corner. But NVIDIA would say that a gold rush is imminent
when they're the one selling shovels and shovel accessories.
Oh yeah, that puppy needs a scope.
But they might not just be advertising their services. There have been many advances in robotics recently.
Researchers at Stanford and Johns Hopkins just demonstrated surgical robots
learning to complete tasks simply by watching videos for the first time.
The training data was mostly TikTok ASMR. I mean, it turns out robots get the tingles too.
And Meta has figured out they should probably use some of their immense wealth to do something
about the software update that has bricked some users Quest 2, 3 and 3S headsets for weeks.
While they initially said owners would simply have to buy a new device
if theirs was out of warranty, this week the tech giant indicated
some users might be considered for a free replacement
regardless of warranty status. I mean, what else can we expect
from the company that thinks it's a good idea to flood Facebook and Instagram with AI bot accounts
so you can have even more fake friends you never see in real life?
Speaking of which, you can see me again on Wednesday and I'll give you more tech news.
It'll be New Year's Day. So maybe we can turn over a new leaf in our friendship,
which is real.