Oh, thank god you're here. I've been absorbing tech news all day and my head is starting to feel like a balloon
filled with concrete. But now I can let it all out.
Come share in my pain. Google is reportedly considering charging users for AI-powered searches once the tech
giant presumably comes up with a better name than Search Generational Experience.
It has to be good if it's gonna endure the year and a half before Google kills it.
The report came from the Financial Times and Google has not denied that it entertained
those thoughts, partially due to the rise of other AI-powered conversational search tools
which make it a lot harder to plunk misleading sponsored links at the top of search results.
Just how paywalling Google's AI search would stop users from turning to other AI tools
that skim regular Google search results isn't clear.
And neither is the answer to whether OpenAI used YouTube videos to train its wildly impressive
video generator, Sora. YouTube CEO Neil Mohan says if they did, that would break YouTube's rules.
A clarification it was necessary for him to make after OpenAI's CTO, Mira Muradi, told
The Wall Street Journal she's actually not sure about whether Sora was trained on YouTube
videos but not before taking a full three seconds to gift the internet with a new reaction
for all the AI Zoomers. In other AI news, courtesy of the King of Apple Rumor Dispersion, Mark Gurman...
Now that Apple's accepted that the Apple Car isn't happening, it's begun research
on an AI-powered home robot that could follow its user around their home so Tim Cook can
see what you're up to. Oh, you're going to make a cup of tea now, that's...
Oh, no, it's coffee, I love that.
Such an AI robot, which I think legally could not be its name, may benefit from Apple's
recent extensive research into optimizing language models to run on low-powered hardware
like iPhones. I don't have a transition into this last AI story, but guess what, Waymo Autonomous
Cars are now delivering food to Uber Eats customers in Phoenix, Arizona because AI is
supposed to have taken all our jobs by now, we gotta speed this up.
Windows is being ditched in favor of Linux by Schleswig Horstein, one of Germany's
16 states and probably the name of a bottled drink you can't afford.
The state government's approximately 30,000 employees will be joining the Linux Legion
and replacing their use of various other Microsoft services like SharePoint and Outlook with
open source options like NextCloud and Mozilla Thunderbird.
Ascend my children, join me.
The state already announced plans to switch from Microsoft Office to Libra Office back
in 2021 and it looks like their resolve has only been strengthened since, probably thanks
to Microsoft Edge continuing to act like the browser version of Legend of Zelda's Navi
with ADHD. Hey! Hey!
This isn't the first time a German region has tried to quit Microsoft though, the city
of Munich switched to Linux back in 2003, but eventually came crawling back in 2017.
Open source software has come a long way though, so to the state government employees of Schleswig
Horstein, allowing us to say this to you, viel GlÃ¼ck!
Microsoft announced a breakthrough in quantum computing error correction that could, crucially,
allow quantum computers to actually be used to compute things instead of what they're
used for now, which is generating esoteric press releases.
By pairing Microsoft's new Qubit virtualization system with IonTrap hardware, made by a company
called Quantinuum, I'm assuming as a joke, researchers from the two companies were able
to run more than 14,000 individual experiments without a single error.
And they even diagnosed and corrected logical Qubits without destroying them, a development
that gave Microsoft's VP of quantum computing goosebumps, and I think gave me a second
headache. I mean, it does sound kind of dope though. It sounds great.
In all seriousness though, as far as my puny mind can tell, this is a big step forward
for this technology, and Jacob says it is too, so he knows about space.
I mean, I only studied, I studied astrophysics. It's such a big step that Microsoft is announcing the industry is now moving from level one
foundational to level two resilient quantum computing, a proclamation that for me kind
of skirts the line between the George Bush Mission Accomplished banner and Google declaring
quantum supremacy back in 2019, like the tech giant version of Michael Scott.
What are Qubits for the answer?
Look deep inside your mind, whoop, not that deep, that's, oh, oh god.
Roku, the Portland main of smart TV makers.
Apparently wants to become the bond villain of smart TV makers by showing ads on the company's
TVs, even when you're just using it to play Xbox or PS5.
Roku filed a patent for a system that would allow Roku TVs to detect when a device connected
to it via HDMI has paused, at which point the TV can display an ad.
I mean, you're not using it, you might as well. The patent also explores ways to determine what content you are interacting with, of
course, so they can display more relevant ads. It's not just evil, it's boring evil.
This is why Amazon and Google are beating you. You could be evil, but like be interesting, you know, that's all I'm saying.
YouTube is experimenting with a new feature called Jump Ahead among a limited group of
YouTube premium subscribers. They say the feature will skip right to what its algorithm thinks you're looking for based
on a user's behavioral data. They also said AI a whole bunch, which has got to be a compulsion of some kind.
How it works is that after a user double taps on mobile to skip forward 10 seconds, they'll
be given a button that lets them jump ahead to whatever the computer thinks is the next
best moment for you, which is probably when Riley Murdock whips out his Tim Cook impression.
Haha, he is so funny, that Riley. Jessica, you really think I'm funny?
No. Sony has announced a new medium format image sensor with a whopping 247 megapixels in a
package approximately the same size as the 150 megapixel sensor in Hasselblad's H6D
series cameras. Break that down for me, right, dog? That's exciting, isn't it, Andy?
And while it's true that photographers and videographers are so over the megapixel race,
it's unquestionably noteworthy that a medium format sensor could produce an image with
a resolution of 19,200 by 12,800 pixels.
19K by 12, you just bought an 8K TV, you look so stupid right now.
To be fair, according to Sony's website, this sensor is for industrial use in visual
inspection devices, but such sensors have found their way into consumer cameras before,
so this was definitely worth telling you about. A San Diego startup has designed a new chip architecture that can run CPU, GPU, and AI
workloads simultaneously on the same cores.
Startup Xsilicon Inc. hopes their CGPU platform will be heavily adopted in segments with strict
power to performance ratios like the automotive and embedded computing markets.
The startup's work joins the likes of Libre SoC, an open source project that apparently
had its funding pulled in February.
Hopefully Xsilicon won't have that issue, since they're making CGPU open standard.
It's like open source, except that it's very different and you get to make money.
And Nothing, the tech company, has announced two upcoming Nothing Earbuds on the Nothing
website by which I mean Twitter. Haha.
Haha. However, it seems that following the Nothing Ear 2, they've decided to go the Valve route
and give up on trying to count any higher. They've thus announced the Nothing Ear and the lower end Nothing Ear Open Bracket Lower
Case A Closed Bracket. Alright. Haha.
According to Nothing, they've removed the numbers in order to focus on the product and
the unique experience it delivers, which is a bit like admitting you can't walk and
chew gum at the same time. It's hard. But I can thank you for watching at the same time as I tell you to come back on Monday for
more tech news. It's not actually true, because I did that sequentially, but...
Yeah! Come back!