All rise, the honorable court of tech news is now in session.
Today's docket is full and the defendant is the entire tech industry.
May God have mercy on your bleeps and bloops, you computer goblets.
OpenAI is killing Sora, its slot video-generating TikTok clone, less than six months after launch.
Users will lose access to video generation via the mobile app, website, the API, and even in chatGBT itself.
According to the Wall Street Journal, it's part of a strategic pivot to productivity tools
with OpenAI merging chatGBT, Codex, and its Atlas browser into one desktop super app,
which is likely CorpoSpeak for CDAN's 2.0 is eating our lunch and Sammy Boy doesn't want to look like a dingus.
Hey, you're actually a dingus either way.
Sora's downloads had already plunged from $3.3 million in November to just $1.1 million by February,
generating a grand total of $2.14 million in revenue.
The announcement apparently prompted Disney to pull out of its planned $1 billion OpenAI investment,
which was part of a deal which would have seen over 200 Disney characters licensed for use in the Sora app,
which has, again, departed for the great slot bucket in the sky.
Disney, who was reportedly blindsided by the announcement, released a statement with all of the energy of a recent divorcee,
saying that they respect OpenAI's decision to exit the video generation business and to shift its priorities elsewhere.
A confidential source told Reuters that it was a big rug pull, saying Disney wasn't informed of the move beforehand,
despite the fact that they had been in a meeting with the OpenAI team just 30 minutes before.
Disney has said they plan on pursuing similar deals with other AI companies.
That's right girl, you were too good for him anyways.
Play Britney Spears Toxic, quick.
We can't, we can't. A pair of landmark social media rulings were handed down this week that could set legal precedents.
The first one dropped yesterday, when a New Mexico jury ordered Meta to pay $375 million
after finding the company misled parents about the safety of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
The second one dropped just this morning, when an LA jury found Meta and YouTube negligent
for harming kids through addictive platform design, awarding the plaintiff $3 million in damages.
During the New Mexico trial, Zuckerberg, seen in these courtroom drawings looking like an elderly boy,
and in this footage of him exiting the courtroom looking like a haunted puppet.
This is important details. Attempted to refute the evidence by stating that harms to children were inevitable on his platforms due to their massive user bases.
Yikes, dude. I guess his PR team forgot to explicitly tell him that real humans don't love it when you refer to harming children as an inevitability.
Meta has already stated their plans to appeal both cases, saying they work hard to keep people safe on our platforms.
Oh boohoo, I'm so sorry, your 17 strike safety policy didn't cut it.
These rulings are seen as so significant because they reject the common Section 230 defense,
which has historically shielded tech companies from liability over user-generated content.
As it stands, neither of the cases is totally over with the LA jury deliberating on punitive damages
and the New Mexico case moving to a second trial in May where a judge will rule on public nuisance claims.
Equating social platforms with the weird guy who hangs out in the public square.
These two cases are bellwethers for a glut of similar cases waiting in the wings.
So, the bleeding isn't over for Old Zuckercourt.
That's my new favorite nickname for him. But I guess with such a massive user base, you can say it was kind of inevitable.
How does that feel? ARM, the company that spent 35 years licensing chip designs to basically everyone,
just announced that it's making its own physical chip for the first time.
That's right, it's our turn now. The Switzerland of Chips declared war, and to the front lines, they brought the ARM AGI CPU.
It's a 3nm data center chip with 136 cores and a 300 watt TDP.
Low enough to be air-cooled! Huh? We're air-cooling in here.
It packs 12 channels of DDR5, which is great for ARM, and painful for me,
since I still can't find RAM for my second channel.
But happy for you, though. Meta actually co-developed the chip with ARM, and there it's lead customer,
and will be pairing the chip with their own custom accelerators to melt kids' brains faster than ever before.
ARM claims that a single air-cooled rack fits over 8,000 cores with twice the performance per rack
compared to x86, a potentially $10 billion saved per gigawatt of data center.
And that's all cool, and like, you know, we're all very happy for ARM,
but why are they starting to compete with their own customers,
considering Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and NVIDIA already designed their own ARM-based chips?
Well, when asked if NVIDIA might find this move concerning, CEO Rene Haas replied,
Does it piss off NVIDIA? I'd imagine it will piss off Intel and AMD more.
Piss off everybody.
Got it. Good strategy. Hey, he could be frustrated from trying to make a website without our sponsor.
The court will now hear five minor charges.
The quick bits. They have been sworn in, and I must warn you, they are hostile witnesses.
What is this? I've never been in a court.
Intel just launched the Arc Pro B70, which is the first card using Big Battle Mage,
aka the full-fat BMG G31 GPU.
The B70 comes with 32 gigabytes of GDDR6 for only $950,
with a cheaper Arc Pro B65, also with 32 gigabytes of VRAM, set for an April launch.
Intel finally built the big GPU that could be great for gaming,
and it's, of course, a workstation AI card.
Well, but considering NVIDIA's RTX 4000 Pro with only 24 gigs of memory
is priced around 1900 USD, nearly double the B70,
these cards are a good deal. I mean, as far as RAM goes, I guess the only thing Intel is battling right now
is their refusal to let us play games on their best silicon.
They're battling a few other things, but... Wine 11 has rewritten how Linux runs Windows games at the kernel level
with a new feature called NTSync, and the performance gains are reportedly stupid good.
According to Wine contributor and people who do a lot of other things too,
Code Weavers were talking 110 FPS to 860 in Dirt 3,
Resident Evil 2 jumped from 26 to 77,
and unlike the old F-Sync slash E-Sync workarounds,
NTSync is baked into the mainline Linux kernel starting at version 6.14,
so any distro shipping that kernel gets it automatically.
Reddit users are already confirming the gains are legit.
I don't know, it might be time for Microsoft to adopt a new marketing slogan.
Windows 11, the best way to download the OS that runs our games better.
Ionio has suspended pre-orders for its AMD Strix Halo-powered Next 2 Windows gaming handheld,
claiming that production costs now approach twice the selling price,
which already started at 2000 bucks. Ionio had to make the call after storage and RAM suppliers quoted prices several times higher than before,
which was obviously caused by AI data centers going all hungry hungry hippos on the global memory supply.
Those scamps. Ionio says the suspension is temporary and they may consider resuming sales if the prices come back down,
but it turns out Next 2 is the amount of decades left until you can afford RAM, I guess.
The FCC just banned all new models of foreign-made consumer routers from US sales,
citing national security risks related to the Volt, Flax and Salt Typhoon cyber attacks.
Small problem, though. Virtually every consumer router sold in the US is made overseas.
Even American brands like Netgear are built in Vietnam and Taiwan.
Existing models can still be sold, but new models will need conditional approval from the DOD or DHS.
And all this makes a ton of sense because the Typhoon hacks were largely carried out on American-made Cisco Enterprise equipment,
not consumer routers. But that's the way they like it. Made in America, hacked in America.
At least they're keeping jobs domestic. And an undergrad at Centenary College of Louisiana has developed a nail polish that lets people with long fingernails actually use touch screens.
Despite giving themselves a leg down in that area seemingly on purpose,
the new clear coat uses a blend of torene and a stinky compound called ethanolamine.
Ethanolamine, to give nails a small electric charge.
A little more scared now than I was before. Which could also help people with zombie finger,
a condition I just learned about that causes fingers to not register on touch screens.
It's in moments like this that I wonder, a science gone too far.
Are we like Icarus flying on wings of wax too close to the sun?
What? To fulfill the hubris of our fathers?
Deadlesses seeking only to serve their own egos?
Is there no rest or respite? No moment where we say we have come far enough and turned back from the precipice of innovation.
Or will we be forever pushed out beyond the edges of the map
by those behind us clamoring to see territory still unclaimed?
For here be monsters, my friends, and I fear
that those monsters are us.
And court is adjourned.
The tech industry has been found guilty on all counts
and sentence two being discussed again on Friday.
The defendant showed no remorse.
Never does.