When I say it's time for tech news, I'm not screwing around. It's time.
Right after I finish this little thing that I'm...uh, what? What is this?
Valve might be working on something like a SteamOS-powered set-top box to compete with the
NVIDIA Shield, according to a Reddit post from the user CoolBeho3k, featuring an impressive
level of research and reasonable speculation. He's a CoolBeho in my book.
But this mysterious device is also tied to ChromeOS in some way.
See, CoolBeho3k spotted a change to the Steam Deck kernel made by a Valve employee
working on a device that includes the ChromeOS-embedded controller,
a chip that handles some background tasks in a ChromeOS device.
That's making some people think that instead of a SteamBox running SteamOS,
it could be a ChromeBox with special Steam integration,
after all Chromebooks already have official support for some Steam games.
The device is associated with a platform codenamed AMD Lilac, which Geekbench listings
indicate means some kind of Ryzen 5 8540U configuration, so whatever this thing is,
it'll have some gaming chops, leading some to speculate that maybe this device isn't a box at
It's the rumored SteamVR headset codenamed Deckard.
Just want to point out that would still be kind of a box, you strapped your face, a lot of different boxes in the world, it's fine.
For the third day of OpenAI, the company gave to me,
Sora. Yep, OpenAI has officially released a public version of the mind-blowingly
realistic video generator they first showed off in February.
Although they didn't give it to me, because I don't have a chat GPT+,
or pro subscription, if you do, then they gave it to you.
But only after they gave it to professional ultimate Frisbee player,
Marques Brownlee, who used it to fake himself making an amazing catch, this guy.
You know, he's really gone downhill. You know, when it comes to the Frisbees.
Anyway, OpenAI says they are releasing the turbo version of Sora,
complete with a new interface with a variety of controls and features like
remix, which will let you tweak specific parts of an existing generated video,
and combine, which can bleed two clips into each other.
There are a boatload of Sora clips out there now, so we can see that it's still really good at aerial landscape shots,
and surprisingly good at slow motion, because the janky AI movements seem less alien in that medium.
But of course, Sora will also make videos with a bunch of errors,
especially when there's lots going on, and will definitely pop a second phone into the hand of Marques's AI clone,
only to vanish it a second later.
Unless you're going to tell me he's a pro magician too, which is frankly too many things to be a pro at.
Although I guess he made up for it with the app thing. It's better now, they fixed a bunch of it, stop.
Reddit, the so-called front page of the internet,
is tired of living in the shadow of the Googles and the open AIs of the world,
so they're announcing Reddit Answers, a new AI-powered search interface that will bring up curated summaries of
relevant conversations and details from across Reddit,
presenting it in sort of a perplexity AI style generated report.
Now you might say, okay well I can just search Google and add Reddit to the end.
That's exactly the problem!
That was Reddit, that was being right. In press interviews Reddit representatives spoke about how a major way that people use the internet now
is just searching for Reddit posts. Their massive repository of posts by real humans looking for information from other real humans
has become increasingly important as large swaths of the internet
slide downward in quality, like loosened chunks of earth sliding off a cliff into an ocean of AI slop.
Of course Reddit is not immune from this, announcing a number of unpopular changes in recent years,
but Reddit's point is that maybe if you want to search Reddit,
you could search on Reddit, and now it's time for quick bits.
But first I have to tell you that it's time, but do I have to?
Google has apparently achieved two significant breakthroughs in quantum computing,
which the tech giant shared while unveiling their new quantum processor Willow this morning.
The first breakthrough is that Willow broke the quantum error connection threshold.
Google was able to exponentially decrease the system's error rate
by increasing the number of qubits involved, holding quantum information stable for an average of an hour.
We can only manage like 10 minutes max. The second breakthrough is taking five minutes to run a benchmark
that Google says would take one of the fastest supercomputers in the world
10 septillion years to complete.
And by that point, I think you'd be ready for an upgrade.
NVIDIA is now being investigated for anti-competitive behavior by China
in a move that some analysts are characterizing as retaliation for the US government imposing restrictions
on the export of NVIDIA chips to the country. And while the US has ramped up such restrictions recently,
they're also investigating NVIDIA for antitrust.
Now both sides are going to have to put their sunglasses on puff up their chests and say, this is my investigation.
Well, I have a warrant. This is not going to be pretty.
Freakin' Pat Gelsinger is tweeting through the pain of being ousted as Intel CEO,
congratulating new Intel board members once they get appointed,
and helping fellow Pat, an industry analyst, Patrick Morehead,
to correct misinformation about Intel's yields on the 18a process node being horrible.
Pat's together strong. You know what they say.
Post-firing, Gelsinger's tweeted that he's very proud of the Foundry team
and is even publicly praying for them to stay strong.
I don't know how likely this is, but science says there's a slim chance Pat could actually tweet himself back into the CEO's office.
I mean, Sam Altman did it. TikTok has filed for a temporary pause on the law that would see the company banned
if its owner ByteDance doesn't sell it to someone else,
since, with just over a month left to go until the deadline
and a new presidential administration coming in, we should just pause everything and, you know, until we figure out what the hell is going on.
TikTok seems to think President Trump might save them, as he implied he will do,
but in a Sunday interview with Meet the Press, Trump implied he might still want ByteDance to sell TikTok,
saying the government has the right to ban it, quote, if you can prove that the Chinese companies own it.
Which they do. I think it's more about the Chinese government controlling things.
You can't have Chinese companies. Okay. And Ubisoft has released patches for Star Wars Outlaws and Avatar Frontiers of Pandora,
which fix the crashing issues caused by Windows 11's 24H2 update.
Players might still run into some performance issues, but at least they can play, while Assassin's Creed Origins,
Odyssey, and Valhalla are still properly borked.
While Microsoft is partially to blame for the Ubi issues,
ask yourself why the original AC games with Desmond weren't affected.
Why did they drop that storyline? May have helped this whole situation, we can't know.
But I can know what would help me, you coming back here on Wednesday for more tech news.
That is the next time at which tech news happens. I don't know why it skips days.
I only know that the Desmond Modern Day storyline gave me a greater context
that made those games more interesting. That's all I know.