You know, there's tech news, and then there's, well, you know, like, tech news, and you're
about to get one of those for sure. 5G has been the fastest cellular network technology since it really started rolling out in 2019,
just in time to inject it into our bodies. But now, China's state-owned telecom, China Mobile, has announced it's rolling out something
called 5.5G, which sources indicate has about another half a G.
Xiaomi says their 14 Ultra flagship phone supports the tech, reaching speeds of more
than 5 gigabits per second, while Oppo CEO Pete Lau posted a photo of his company's
Find X7 Ultra with a little 5GA in the top bar.
That's because the official name for 5G and a little bit more is actually 5G Advanced,
according to the group of standards bodies responsible for developing such tech, collectively
known as 3GPP, which is short for 3rd Gen Peepee.
That's only .5 of a joke, we're having fun.
It appears that Huawei started popularizing the term 5.5G last year as their brand name
for 5G Advanced, which is fair enough, because that just sounds like the premium tier of
5G, and I don't need another monthly subscription, unless it's to floakland.com, I'm sorry.
But Americans don't have to worry about any fractional bonus Gs anytime soon, as the
FCC and US carriers can't decide whether the 6GHz spectrum band should belong to 5G
Advanced or 6G, which I think will be provided to the population as pills this time.
OpenAI's flagship large language model GPT-4 Turbo has been surpassed by another model on
chatbot arena for the first time since chat GPT dropped onto society like a bomb being
ridden by Will Smith eating spaghetti. That's how it felt.
The new king of LLMs, according to the crowdsourced chatbot arena leaderboard, is Anthropics
Claude III Opus, which launched a few weeks ago along with less powerful Claude III variants
Sonnet and Haiku, which are neck and neck with some less powerful GPT-4 variants themselves.
The upset is even more upsetting for OpenAI given that Anthropic was founded by former
OpenAI employees, and now they're getting another $2.7 billion investment from Amazon
so Jeff Bezos can talk to better AIs who understand him like no human can.
But in equally interesting AI news, XAI just unveiled their updated GROC 1.5 chatbot which
is better at math and has a larger 128,000 token context window which will probably just
make the boomer cringe humor worse. OpenAI announced they're testing usage-based monetization on the GPT store which could eventually
provide a revenue stream for developers of all those custom GPTs that are awesome for
generating not just copyright violations but TOS violations as well.
OpenAI also revealed Voice Engine, a model that can replicate any voice off of a 15-second
sample. Some of the most amazing habitats on Earth are found in the rainforest.
In typical OpenAI fashion though, they're letting you know that they have it, but that
it's far too dangerous to release until they get more investors on board.
To be fair though, it seems like Voice Engine, or any of the other pretty good AI voice cloning
tools out there, could easily dupe something like Chase Bank, which has let customers log
in using voice identification since 2018 and haven't yet reconsidered that decision
for some reason. You sound weird today, anyway, here's your money.
Apple's mysterious machine that can update iPhones while they're still sealed in the
box is real. A photo of the device, called Presto, was published by French-language tech site, AigÃ©nolation.
I thought that was a tape of pasta, no that's prego.
Presto is reportedly being rolled out to Apple stores across the US this month, allowing
iPhone users to skip the annoying initial updating process and get right to that undeserved
feeling of superiority. But while Presto is undoubtedly cool, it would be more cool if it worked for AirPods, which
cannot be manually updated at all. Putting your devices close together and hoping the update happens would feel better if there
was a magic box involved. Speaking of updates though, Google lets slip on a landing page for Android messages that
iOS support for RCS, or rich chat services, will arrive this fall.
It looks like they didn't mean to let that slip though, Google's now taken that part
of the site down, but TechCrunch confirmed it's still there in the source code.
When that rolls out, iPhone users, you have my permission to feel superior.
Only the richest of chats for you.
How expensive was this chat? What would life be like without any quick bits?
I don't know, they never let me outside. The China specific GeForce RTX 4090D can apparently be overclocked to non-D levels.
The 4090D is a cut down version of NVIDIA's flagship 40 series cards, meant to comply
with US sanctions on China that the full fat card did not comply with.
Now a Hong Kong based tech and review site has shown that the ROG Strix 4090D specifically
is able to be overclocked, achieving performance comparable to a Founders Edition 4090, but
not defeating the point of D's nuts.
Qualcomm has apparently been giving demos to select members of the press to show off
their ARM powered Snapdragon X Elite laptop chips gaming prowess.
The company flew several influencers to their headquarters in San Diego to give demos of
Baldur's Gate 3, Control and Redout 2.
While many are calling the games playable in their coverage, there are some important
caveats, especially to the Baldur's Gate 3 demos.
It looks like these machines were apparently able to achieve about 30 FPS at 1080p with
low settings, but the demos are all of the prologue fight, which is set in a small area,
not the demanding open world of the rest of the game.
It's kind of like demonstrating you can swim by standing up in the shallow end of the pool.
A new GPU made entirely by a one man operation can run quake at 60 frames per second.
Pack it up, NVIDIA. Fury GPU is the brainchild of game software developer Dylan Berry, who has been working
on the project in his spare time for the last four years.
The GPU runs off a custom Vulcan-like graphics API and does not feature programmable shaders.
Berry intends to open source the whole project after he sorts out some legal issues.
Apparently, since the project is tangentially related to his day job, he needs to make sure
he's not breaking any agreements that he's signed.
But as soon as he does that, get ready to LAN party like it's 1996, baby.
New York City's My City chatbot, which is intended to answer questions related to starting
a business, has instead been caught freestyling and telling users to break the law.
To be clear, the bot isn't straightforwardly advocating a life of crime, it's just hallucinating
an alternative set of laws where it's not illegal to discriminate against tenants on
rental assistance and it's totally cool to fire an employee whistleblower in retribution
for reporting safety violations. Don't worry though, it's an equal opportunity merchant of chaos because it also claims that
you can't fire an employee for taking a trip to the zoo on company time or evict a tenant
for setting fire to the building. So all bets are off.
And researchers at ETH University in Zurich, Switzerland have used machine learning to
teach a quadripetal robot called enimal parkour.
The enimal, which looks and moves like a possessed lawnmower, uses a camera and an advanced neural
network to learn how to navigate obstacles through trial and error and murder.
The robot is intended to one day be used to scout unstable terrain that might be dangerous
to human workers or terrain in which human workers could hide from it.
And on a scale of 1 to 10, our next episode is at least an 8.
So come back on Monday for a talk linked on Florida's social media ban for kids under
14. We're taking the day off so you can listen to what Jacob and I had to say about that.