Shall I compare the tech news to a summer's day?
Why would I do that? They have nothing in common. At their unpacked event this morning,
Samsung unveiled the Galaxy S24, S24 Plus, and S24 Ultra,
packed with new features powered by Galaxy AI,
which as we'll see in most cases actually means Google AI.
These companies are showing so much PDA, it's making me a little uncomfortable.
The S24s all support Wi-Fi 7 and are powered by the slightly tweaked
Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 4 Galaxy.
At least in the US. Everyone else is going to get a Samsung Exynos processor,
which have historically sucked. Promising 53% better ray tracing performance
and the Twitch streamer that Samsung referred to as Pokemon said she's excited about that
because ray tracing is one of the main reasons she's a PC gamer, even though consoles have it too
and you're talking about gaming on a phone anyway, it doesn't matter. The S24 Ultra has a peak brightness of 2,600 nits,
beating the iPhone 15 Pro and Pixel 8 Pro
and making this Samsung guy say it's perfect for him
since he loves gaming outdoors. I love gaming outdoors myself.
There's just something about the squinting and the sweaty and or cold fingers that really works for me.
I wanna fight a bear. As for camera upgrades, interestingly,
the S23's 10X optical zoom has been cut in half.
The S24 can only do 5X optical zoom
and 10 times at optical quality, although it is the first Samsung phone
with five times optical zoom on 8K video
and it can still do pretty good digital zoom up to a hundred times,
which Mr. Beast was very excited about.
He's always excited, just loves life. Samsung built the S24 Ultra with a titanium frame
because that went so well for the iPhone 15 Pro, added brand new stronger Corning Gorilla Armor
and is offering the phones in a range of gender-neutral colors.
Thank goodness, I do not wanna seem like a p***y.
Then there's the new AI features presented with the tagline Epic just like that,
which has to be written by AI. The S24 lineup supports real-time translation
in voice calls and text messages and in the latter, it can even translate your tone
if you don't make words good. Generative edit can replace parts of a photo
and fill outside the edges using Google's Imogen 2
while Instant Slomo will insert AI-generated frames
to your existing video if you wanna see what your skateboard trick
would look like if you were dreaming or high on something. Galaxy AI features use some on-device processing
powered by Google's Gemini Nano model or extra cloud processing, if you enable it,
using Gemini Pro, which can summarize text in notes,
voice recorder, and Samsung keyboard. That's not all Google helped Samsung with.
On January 31st, the Galaxy S24 series will be the only phones other than the Pixel 8 and 8 Pro
to support Circle to Search, which lets you circle anything in any app
to Google it with Google Lens. Galaxy phones starting with the S24 series
will also now get seven years of security and OS updates,
just like pixels. Plus, now that Samsung's QuickShare
works with every Android phone, it's definitely the airdrop of Android now.
Samsung and Google, why are you guys together all the time? And why did Samsung announce they're making a smart ring?
OMG, Samsung's gonna propose?
I couldn't think of a cuter tech giant couple.
But that marriage may get off to a rocky start. It's otherwise been a bad week of news for Google
who are reportedly laying off hundreds of employees from their ad sales team.
For at least the last few months, the company has been moving staff away
from serving its largest advertising clients as it increasingly automates those services
through AI-powered products like Performance Max.
Essentially, Google is replacing many of its former sales force
with the AI created by Google's own engineers,
which has got to make the water cooler talk a little awkward.
Perhaps trying to avoid further negative attention, Google also quietly updated its incognito mode disclaimer
in a canary build of Chrome to inform users that the company is, in fact,
collecting their information while they're in incognito mode and they always have been in the aftermath
of a class action lawsuit. In not Google's fault, but definitely Google's problem news,
a recent study by German researchers has confirmed that Google search results
are indeed getting worse, as are all other search engines,
because they're absolutely swamped with SEO spam.
Worse, Google's attempts to address this flood of informational sewage seems to have only
a minor temporary impact. But there was one bright spot in Google's week so far.
Turns out that the noticeable slowdown on YouTube for ad blocker users wasn't a punishment from Google,
but a bug within ad block and ad block plus itself
after their recent update. Guess we'll chalk one up for the little guy,
the massive international conglomerate little guy.
The Supreme Court has declined to hear either Epic
or Apple's appeal in their longtime legal dispute
over Apple's iOS store rules, meaning that the case is mostly over
and the lower court's ruling stands. I say mostly because now Apple is seeking $73.4 million
from Epic in order to cover its legal fees. And Apple needs the money,
considering how it was overtaken by Microsoft as the world's most valuable company just last week,
despite Apple selling the most phones out of any OEM in 2023.
Basically broke. I mean, Tim Cook hasn't left his office.
He's just sobbing. As a refresher, the lower court ruling wasn't totally in Apple's favor,
however, and they will be forced to relax their anti-steering policies for the US App Store
and allow app developers to direct users to alternative payment methods.
However, according to Apple's newly revised App Store guidelines,
Apple will still take a commission on those sales, 12% for members of the App Store small business program
and 27% for everyone else. Thus, while this doesn't eliminate App Store fees,
given the sheer number of developers involved, it does make them harder for Apple to collect and enforce.
It'd be like if instead of lowering taxes, the government just banned the IRS from snooping.
Snooping dropped the G. Some are born quick, some achieve quickness,
others have quick bits thrust upon them. This episode is all about the modified quotes.
With the US presidential election coming this year, OpenAI has announced new rules intended to prevent
its AI tools from being used to propagate political misinformation,
including banning chatbots intended to impersonate government officials or political candidates.
Though considering that OpenAI has also banned AI girlfriends
and its own GPT store is still packed to the rafters
with robo waifus, it's not entirely clear how well enforced
these new rules will be. OpenAI has likewise silently deleted language
from its terms of service, banning military use of chat GPT.
So I'm personally looking forward to this November
when an AI-powered Hatsune Miku gets voted into the White House in a landslide
and immediately declares war on someone. It's gonna be the cutest war you've ever seen.
Time for the Miku Fizz. Huh, Hatsune? Dell's pretty cool CAM memory technology,
they announced a few years ago, was adopted as a new standard
by the JEDEC Solid State Technology Association last month under the name LP-CAM2
and modules were unveiled by Micron last week.
The new standard allows for the benefits of faster LP DDR memory
without soldering it directly to the motherboard and it requires much less space
than the existing SODIM standard. I feel bad for SODIM being replaced,
but I kind of had it coming with a name like that. Executives of Fujitsu have finally acknowledged
that the company should help compensate the victims of the British post office scandal
where over 900 postal service contractors were falsely charged with theft and fraud
between 1999 and 2015 due to errors caused
by the buggy Fujitsu accounting software. Fujitsu has also admitted
that the company knew the software was defective even as it helped the Royal Mail
prosecute hundreds of innocent people leading to imprisonment, bankruptcy,
and at least four suicides. Postal workers traditionally hold a place of trust
and respect in British society and many children grew up
watching classic stop motion cartoon Postman Pat.
Little did they know that the show would end with poor Pat doing hard time
after he gets framed for high crimes and misdemeanors by a malfunctioning computer.
I had never heard of this story before today and it's wild.
Non-profit organization Fairly Trained has launched a new certification program
for AI models that respect relevant copyright
similar to the Fair Trade label on coffee and other similar goods.
Fairly Trained was founded by stability AI's XVP for audio,
Ed Newton Rex, cool name, who reportedly left the company over concerns
that they were exploiting creators. In order to acquire the Fairly Trained stamp of approval,
generative AI models must have clear permission to use all of the copyrighted material they're trained on.
Wow. Now, if only we had some way to tell which AI models are gluten-free, non-GMO, and organic.
It's none of them. And Will I Am is launching a serious XM podcast
and co-hosting it with an AI. Because of course he is.
Will.i.am is so 3008
that he has already transcended mortal concerns like how to spell names without periods
in the middle of them. Naturally, his AI co-host name is spelled Q-D-Period-P-I,
but pronounced Q-D-Pi. Again, of course.
The AI is powered by Williams AI app, FYI,
which stands for Focus Your Ideas.
What tremendous advice from the writer of the 2005 masterpiece, My Humps.
And you better write a comment promising to come back on Friday for more tech news.
We won't have an AI co-host as far as you know, but seriously, there's no AI here.
There isn't.