Hi, it's me, Jake Tyvee, and I love technology, computers, and hard drives so much that if
someone else says they're not really into that stuff, my face gets hot and I have to
find an object and strike it. Anyways, here's the news. Apple appears to be joining the AI arms race, according to a Financial Times report claiming
that Apple has been steadily investing in hardware, AI startups, and key staff with
the aim of getting generative AI to run locally on Apple products.
Cupertino has been criticized for being slow to incorporate AI, but if these reports are
accurate, the company is actually targeting something far more ambitious than what any
other OEM has been able to accomplish. Extremely lightweight LLMs along the lines of Meta's Llama have been demoed running
on a small device like a phone or a raspy, but they don't run well, less Usain Bolt
and more asthmatic kid with concrete sneakers.
Which explains why the Rabbit R1, the ultra-hyped pocket AI assistant device, apparently took
20 seconds to answer a prompt in a recent TikTok.
But if anyone can smooth out that experience, it's Apple. An analyst project that a new AI-powered Siri will launch with iOS 18.
In the meantime, the most recent iOS update includes opt-in stolen device protection that
requires additional steps like Face ID and Touch ID to access sensitive data on the iPhone.
To change their Apple ID password or remove biometric security scans, users will have
to first pass those scans and then endure a one-hour security delay.
Of course, these steps won't apply if the user is in a familiar location, but I guess
if the burglar is currently standing in your home, you've got bigger problems than just
your phone password. What are you going to feed him? Gun bullets.
Relying on biometric scans clearly isn't the perfect security solution though, because
Apple required Face ID in order to pre-order a Vision Pro, and the scalpers just used bots
with that data hard-coded in. How much are resellers expecting in return for this asinine bit of ingenuity?
$10,000 on eBay. Well, you want them to do it for free? No.
They've got to get paid for their hard work. It's a market. It's a free market.
AMD is now shipping its new Instinct MI300X AI Accelerator GPUs to enterprise customers,
according to one of their customers, Lemini AI. Lemini.
Hopefully I said that right. Previously, MI300 series chips were reserved for supercomputer clients, but AMD is already
projecting that these chips will be its fastest product to $1 billion in sales since its founding.
According to AMD's benchmarks, the MI300X outdoes NVIDIA's 80GB H100, though we've
yet to see how it will fare against the upcoming H200.
Beyond AMD's underdog journey to fight NVIDIA for control over the AI chip money pit, let's
talk about chips that normal people can actually buy. Leaked benchmarks for the Ryzen 7 8700G and the Ryzen 5 8600G APUs seem to show that the
new processors are 50% to 67% faster than their direct predecessors, with particularly
strong numbers shown on multi-threaded tests. This would place them only just below AMD's 7000 series CPUs in terms of performance, although
one caveat to these numbers is that this lineup hasn't been updated in two and a half years.
It's still impressive, but it's like your grandma seeing you for the first time in months
and congratulating you on getting so tall. I'm the same height, grandma!
I've been six foot for like ten years, I swear. I'll have another grandma better.
It's only Wednesday and it's already been a big weekend's space. Not that space isn't already pretty massive.
Sierra Space demonstrated the strength and resilience of their new inflatable space station
habitat the way that any eight-year-old boy would, by inflating it until it exploded.
The soft habitat is designed to be light and compact enough to send into space, but it'll
expand once it gets there, allowing astronauts to live far more comfortably aboard the ISS.
I thought they didn't have air in space. Even aboard the ISS?
Yeah. But if you want people to feel safe living in what is effectively a space-age bouncy castle,
you've gotta show that it's safe. Which they did by inflating it to 77 psi, 500% of its normal operating pressure, before
it bursts like a tomato hitting a windshield. Does that happen to you?
Let me know in the comments. In other news, NASA has managed to establish contact with its helicopter on Mars.
But less happily, a second moon mission has failed this week, this time without even reaching
the lunar surface. Astrobiotic's unmanned peregrine moon lander experienced a post-launch propulsion malfunction
that resulted in it falling back to Earth and burning up in the atmosphere, alongside
a few of NASA's little science fair projects, leading the entire team to get an F and call
home to their parents. Hi, I'm still Jake Tyvey, and you know what?
I'm kind of over this technology stuff. Just kidding.
I will never ever stop loving tech ever.
I'm scared. Quick move. Disney park Imagineers appeared to have solved one of the holy grails of VR by inventing
an omnidirectional treadmill that looks like it's made out of breath mints.
The hollow tile floor is modular, expandable, and can be used by multiple people at this
same time, and can even be used to move objects around using motion controls.
Disney's research fellow and Imagineer Lanny Smoot, who has been inducted into the National
Inventors Hall of Fame, said you can dance on it without actually moving, which has been
a dream of nerds for centuries. Following a non-fatal accident that saw a fuselage panel blow off of an Alaska Airlines
plane mid-flight, the airline's fleet of Boeing 737s was thoroughly inspected, revealing
a shocking number of loose bolts, which, given that these are airplanes that could kill you,
is literally any amount of loose bolts.
In response, the Federal Aviation Administration has grounded all 737 Max 9s with mid-cabin
door plugs. For Boeing, an industry insider says that the panel was removed from repair, then improperly
reinstalled by Boeing's own mechanics. Even worse for Boeing?
Yesterday in Atlanta, a 757 lost nosewheel while preparing for takeoff.
You know what? Maybe I'll just walk to Seattle.
Only a week after open AI banned using chatGPT to impersonate political candidates, the company
has suspended the account of the developer behind a bot used to impersonate US presidential
hopeful Dean Phillips. Notably, the bot was created by supporters, but it comes with a disclaimer that says,
while it was designed to sound like Phillips, it's possible that it could say things that
are wrong, incorrect, or shouldn't be said. So perhaps this was for their own good.
This election season has already seen far more malicious uses of AI, such as robocalls
using the artificial voice of Joe Biden, used to tell citizens to not vote in the New Hampshire
primary. That doesn't sound anything like Joe Biden. Where's the part where he rambles for 10 minutes about Amtrak?
You're a gristle. There's some great trains. That's not my president.
We live in Canada. France has fined Amazon the equivalent of around 35 million US dollars.
I'm saying that with emphasis, but that's really not a lot of money for Amazon.
For excessively intrusive worker surveillance. France's data protection agency said Amazon's French ARM was tracking worker activity so
precisely that employees potentially had to justify every break they took.
To give you an idea of how precisely they were being tracked, Amazon could tell if workers
spent 1.25 seconds quality checking an item or not.
In a statement, an Amazon spokesperson wrote that the government's conclusions were factually
incorrect. Unfortunately, the spokesperson was fired soon after because they took an extra millisecond
to finish typing. 1.26 A young British man is in Spanish court on charges of public disorder for what Spanish
authorities are calling a bomb hoax, and what the young man in question described as a
private joke between friends. While boarding a flight in 2022, 18-year-old Aditya Verma messaged his buddies over Snapchat,
On my way to blow up the plane, I'm a member of the Taliban.
It's unclear how British intelligence intercepted the message, but they alerted the Spanish
military, who now wants Verma to cover the over $100,000 cost of sending a fighter jet
to respond to the incident. And this is why we need to warn our children about the dangers of Snapchat.
An unencrypted Wi-Fi, that's the real message here.
But there's no danger in coming back on Friday for more tech news. It'll be right here, the way you remember it.
But a little different, because it's the news. And they'll be hard drives.