I wish I could prepare you for what you're about to hear. I really do.
High doses of tech news can overwhelm the senses and trigger a catatonic state.
Ah, you'll be fine. NVIDIA, fueled by rabid demand for its AI accelerators, briefly hit a $2 trillion
market cap for the first time this morning, joining an exclusive club occupied by Apple and
Microsoft, who immediately started talking about how their neighborhoods really going downhill.
But Axios notes that NVIDIA's climb can't go on forever. The companies that want all those
expensive NVIDIA GPUs to power their fancy new AI features like Microsoft and Google
recently reported earnings that disappointed their own investors.
Because as cool as it is to give everyone free access to a Bing that doesn't suck,
when something is free, it means users don't pay for it. And that is financial advice.
You can take that one to the bank. Where they'll ask you to leave.
Come on, it's a joke. NVIDIA could also soon face competition, as companies continue developing their own
custom AI chips. Microsoft just made a $15 billion deal with Intel on that front.
Although NVIDIA doesn't seem too worried about that, the company listed its top competitors as
Huawei, AMD, Amazon, Microsoft, and Broadcom in its annual report,
which I assume had the Thanos meme as an attachment. But in a sign that NVIDIA hasn't forgotten that some people play games on its GPUs,
it also launched a beta for the NVIDIA app, a supposed replacement for and merging of
GeForce Experience and the NVIDIA control panel on Windows.
It doesn't require you to log in, unless you care about potential account-based rewards.
And overall seems like a much better option than splitting graphics settings across two
separate apps. Some of them just like feel like a control panel thing, you know.
I only hope that NVIDIA doesn't pull a Windows and keep their old control panel around while
they make the new settings app more and more garbage for fun.
Google has paused its Gemini chatbot's capability to generate images after widespread
complaints about how hesitant it was to create images of white people.
Sure, there's no real reason why drawing a hypothetical
pope of color would be problematic, but I'm not sure the same could be said about
depicting your average racially diverse platoon of German soldiers circa 1943.
They were trying to correct historical injustices.
Gemini would even refuse to generate anything if asked about white people specifically,
leading to increasingly creative prompts asking for pictures of a medieval knight
or someone eating a mayo sandwich on white bread.
Which I'm not gonna lie, I would eat. It's all you eat.
Sure, call me out like that. In some cases, the model also refused to specifically depict Latino people,
who, I'm sorry to report, are no longer diverse.
In their blog post, Google explained that when they added Gemini's image generation feature
three weeks back, back when it was still barred, ripped,
they tuned it to ensure that it represented a wide range of types of people,
to avoid the real documented phenomenon of AI models waiting images of white people
more heavily than images of non-white people,
causing a prompt for something like Black Tech News host to give you this.
And if you didn't know I'm white, uh, it's not.
OpenAI does something similar, but it seems like they've managed to do so without turning
all the dials up to 11. If you want to test how well open source image generator stable diffusion did,
version three was just released in early preview.
While its diversity quotient is still unclear, it seems to have largely caught up with mid-journey and dolly in terms of depicting shapes and pets.
The most important. So hopefully Google tunes up their AI models a bit better,
because with Chrome's new Help Me Write feature, AI-generated schlock is going to be just a right click away.
Shapes, pets, and one day Hispanics.
Reddit has confirmed leaks from last week that it would go public,
but because it's Reddit, they had to do so in a quirky way. It's kind of charming, as long as you do it in the right sub.
The company filed its initial public offering yesterday to be listed on the New York Stock
Exchange as Reddit. Sticker symbols are usually just your company name, but cuter.
Interestingly, in addition to offering stocks to your standard institutional investors,
Reddit says they'll also offer them to its top users,
including moderators, as determined by their Reddit karma,
proving that it's not worthless. It's worth the chance to lose your money gambling.
Reddit also confirmed a leak claiming it had struck a content licensing deal with a major
AI company, which turned out to be Google, who will have direct access to Reddit's API for a rumored $60 million a year.
If your Reddit data being collected to train AI rubs you the wrong way,
Reddit points out in their filing that, well, everyone was already doing that anyway,
including OpenAI, whose CEO, Sam Altman, is apparently one of Reddit's biggest investors,
which isn't doing much to dispel the notion that he has a plan to take over the world
through the power of shrewd investments. And scanning everyone's eyes into the crypto ball, that'll help, I'm sure.
Now we have your eyes. Leave my balls alone, Altman.
I don't know about you, but I need me some quickity bits of lickety-split.
You know what I mean? All right, you can cut anytime.
A small number of Vision Pro owners have reported identical issues,
where hairline cracks form on their headsets cover glass.
An unfortunately noticeable problem when more than half of the product's visible surface
is that glass. Even worse, the cracks only make the creepy eyesight feature creepier.
Even worse, some affected owners are being told they need to pay up to $800 to repair the glasses,
since Apple doesn't recognize the issue as a manufacturing defect.
I mean, anything could have caused a group of complete strangers to all develop perfectly
straight hairline cracks in the exact middle of the front cover glass of their $3,500 spatial
computers. Maybe they all have toddlers. Toddlers with the hands of surgeons.
It's a scourge, and we need to do something about it. Surgeon toddlers sweeping across America.
In happier Apple news, the company has announced iPhone 15 batteries live
twice as long as they initially thought.
If you renounce the corrupt so-called European Union and swear fealty to the divine fruit.
Okay, the last part's optional. Apple retested the batteries found in all iPhone 15 models, and they now claim
the phones can maintain at least 80% of their original capacity for 1,000 charging cycles.
Previously, they said it was 500. They found the lightning cable of youth.
However, no one knows why the result has changed so massively.
Did Apple change how they test? Did they initially underestimate the lifespan to avoid a repeat of the iPhone 14's battery
gate class action lawsuit? Did Tim Cook beguile the batteries with his southern charm?
Who's to say? Tim Apple, you saucy mix.
I know you can last for longer, and if you know what's good for you, you will.
Canada's University of Waterloo will be removing M&M-branded vending machines from campus
after it came to light that the machines may have been covertly collecting customers'
facial recognition data. This story was blown wide open when a Waterloo student posted a strange error
message from the machine to Reddit, reading invenda.vending.facialrecognition.app.exe.
Leading to the obvious question of, hey, so why do the stupid M&M machines have facial recognition?
Adaria Vending Services says that the technology acts as a motion sensor that detects faces and
activates the purchasing interface, but does not collect user data, okay?
But maybe this glorified snack dispenser doesn't need to know whether or not I have a face.
Ever thought of that? If Slenderman wants a stickers, that's his own damn business.
Which is what I call myself at home. U.S. Space Exploration Company Intuitive Machines has successfully landed its odysseus spacecraft
near the moon's south pole, making it the first privately developed spacecraft to successfully
land on the lunar surface and the first U.S.-based craft to land there since 1972.
The landing was delayed by an additional two hours due to the discovery that the lander's
laser rangefinders were malfunctioning, meaning that it would be unable to accurately measure
its altitude and velocity, which are important factors in not slamming face-first into the moon.
Luckily, controllers back on Earth were able to upload a software patch that allowed the lander
to use a Doppler LiDAR from NASA to help it land instead.
Presumably, odysseus will stay where it is for the next 10 years and spend the 10 years after
that slowly journeying home, where upon arrival, it will murder everyone who hit on its wife.
If you're not laughing, you just read more. And in commemoration of Doom's 30th anniversary,
Husqvarna will be adding support for the game to their Nera line of robot lawnmowers.
So you'll be able to spend your summer mowing down demons and also dandelions.
You literally play it on the little, like, three-inch screen or whatever with a dial.
Okay, support will begin on April 9th, which is about eight days late for this sort of thing.
And it will end on September 9th, when it's just about time to pack
your devil destroyer back in the shed. It may seem like a strange alliance,
but nowadays, most people who played the OG Doom when it was first released
are now middle-aged dads blowing off steam by beheading weeds.
So it's something for them. And we'd really like it if you steam ahead to the next episode of TechLinked this coming Monday
for more tech news. Did we make a steam blowing off steam?
Oh, I thought it was about the steam like the game. Well, okay.