I was gonna start you off with a joke about how this isn't the tech news.
It's actually just the intro to the tech news, but then I decided that would be a little too meta.
Speaking of which, MetaConnect 2024 was today
and Mark Zuckerberg dropped some big news. There was the official reveal of the Quest 3S,
basically a cheaper version of the Quest 3. Shipping on October 15th,
the 3S's starting price is $200 less than the three,
but with most of the same features. A brief live demo showed off the 3S's pass-through
and judging by the bystander one seat over,
it's ability to make people nearby uncomfortable. Thanks Mark.
A crucial aspect of VR. That's what meta is about.
It's tradition. In AI news, Mark revealed Lama 3.2,
the company's first quote open source multimodal model.
Open source here means you have to request access to it
and also it isn't currently available in the EU. It's that kind of open source.
Meta's AI studio will now let influencers create virtual speaking AI versions of themselves.
Something Zuck demonstrated by ignoring a real man
to instead chat with the man's AI clone. This is, what are we doing here guys?
Just because Mark has gotten an unfathomable Riz upgrade,
doesn't mean I have to be okay with this. It's creepy. In MetaSmart Glasses news, multimodal video AI
is being added to the Ray-Ban MetaSmart Glasses. So Meta AI can give you real time help,
even referencing objects that you passed and are no longer in view.
Finally, Zuck revealed the prototype Orion holographic AR glasses,
which create a similar effect to the Quest 3's pass-through,
but in a much smaller form factor.
Because it's not actually pass-through, you're just actually seeing the world, imagine.
What if you could see but also it sucked? What if the real world, but with ads?
The glasses can be controlled with your voice, hand and eye tracking, or a wrist-based neural interface?
Because why not? Zuck said all of this while wearing a shirt
that read, Zuck or Nothing in Latin. Some claim it's a reference to the phrase Caesar or Nothing,
but come on, a billionaire who has all of our personal data comparing himself to one of history's greatest dictators,
that's a bit scary. Maybe he just likes nerf and dead languages.
I don't get it, nerf? Do you get that? Nerf or Nothing.
ChatGPT's advanced voice mode is rolling out to all paid subscribers this week.
The advanced voice feature uses GPT-4O,
so it can now detect emotion, and if you're using your camera to prompt it with visuals,
it can respond to nonverbal cues like body language.
But OpenAI also says they've added custom instructions,
memory, five new voices, and improved accents.
You mean like this one?
It's not even an Apple story. It can also apparently say sorry in over 50 languages,
which will be handy after AI technology accidentally destroys human civilization.
Sorry to hear, bud. The rollout comes with one major caveat.
The feature is not available in the EU and several closely related countries,
namely Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, Switzerland, and the UK.
While OpenAI didn't specify the reason for this exception
in their announcement, the most likely answer is the EU AI Act, which, among other things,
restricts AI systems that are capable of inferring the emotions of a natural person.
Oh man, aka human being from workplaces and schools.
The intent of the prohibition is to prevent invasive surveillance like an AI system
that makes sure fast food workers look happy or else.
But for now, it appears to be blocking this relatively benign feature from expanding to Europe.
In GPT adjacent news, Microsoft apparently plans
to fix that tricky AI hallucination problem
with what else more AI? The company has released a preview
of their new correction tool as part of their Azure AI Content Safety API.
Correction is a service that flags AI generated text
that might contain a factual error, then cross references it with a document
known to be trustworthy in order to fact-check it, like a natural person might.
One researcher, Oce Keys, says that this might cause
additional problems because the fact-checking model itself
may also hallucinate and introduce errors and trying to eliminate hallucinations from generative AI
is like trying to eliminate hydrogen from water. So let's just keep using it, I guess.
Marques Brown Lee, aka MKBHD,
tech reviewer, YouTuber, and noted Frisbee enthusiast,
released his new Panels app, which offers access to a curated collection
of wallpapers for mobile devices. These wallpapers are free at lower resolutions
but can be downloaded at full resolution for a subscription of $12 monthly or $50 annually,
which comes out to around four bucks a month. The launch sparked immediate backlash,
some of which was sort of justified. Brown Lee acknowledged community concerns
about the kinds of permissions the app was requesting, which included usage data and user location,
and promised to fix the issue. Embarrassingly though, with the little digging,
it was discovered that all of the wallpapers in the app
were stored in a publicly accessible bucket, whoops.
Yeah, devs have come out and said that the app appears to be built from a template
or it's simply an old app that has been rebranded
based on the fact that the app's Twitter account is listed as joining the service in late 2021.
Marques has confirmed, however, this is just because they bought that handle on Twitter.
Other complaints, because yes, there were more, focused on the amount of ads in the free version of the app
and the price of the subscription, and all that is totally fair.
However, the wallpapers are real art by real human artists
and the app offers a 50-50 profit split,
which sounds great until you realize that's actually even worse than the iOS app store's
3070 cut with developers. I don't know if that's comparable,
I'm not in the wallpaper app market. Perhaps the weirdest thing to me personally though
is the fact that a high proportion of the artists on the app seem to be just current MKBHD employees.
The CEO of Rabbit, the company behind the R1 AI
not-a-phone device, Jesse Liu, even got a meme in.
He hasn't had a good Twitter post in a while. Though in MKBHD's defense,
you don't actually have to buy the app, you can just ignore it, and at least he didn't shove it
into completely unnecessary custom hardware and charge 200 bucks for it.
Y'all ready for the quick bits? No!
Too bad! Content delivery network Cloudflare
will now allow customers to block bots used to scrape websites for AI training
with a single click. This is part of a larger suite of tools called AI audit,
which also allows users to see which bots are crawling their site and gives them more information
on where they're from and how they're being used. Users can also choose to only block certain bots
and will eventually be able to sell access to their website,
like a little virtual toll booth for webcrawlers. AI, but I want it's pictures of Spider-Man!
Get out of my office! Kaspersky, the Russian antivirus software
deemed a national security concern and banned by the US government, started deleting itself
from American users PCs last week. Sounds expected, except for the part
where the app also automatically installed a different antivirus on the way out.
Ultra AV made by a company called Pango.
Kaspersky had told customers via email they'd be receiving cybersecurity protection
from their trusted partner, Ultra AV, but they didn't mention the whole automatic install thing,
which is kind of like coming home to find your key doesn't work and then having the rando
who changed your locks let you in. I am Kaspersky's buddy.
You got me. Don't worry, we got you. Good news, everyone.
We're gonna nuke an asteroid. Scientists at the Sandia National Laboratory
have been blasting silica with bursts of X-rays
powerful enough to vaporize rock. And they say that we could probably use nukes
to deflect asteroids that are around two and a half miles across.
This would work by superheating one side, causing material to vaporize
and push the asteroid in the opposite direction.
Just giving a little nudge out of its collision course with Earth later.
It won't be enough to save us from bigger rocks like the one that killed the dinosaurs,
but it's a step up from shooting Ben Affleck and Bruce Willis into space
and getting them to figure it out. Twitter has released its 2024 transparency report,
the first one since 2021. Despite the very public fight Elon Musk picked
with Brazil's Supreme Court, he seems to be more open to government takedown requests
behind closed doors. The platform complied with 71% of the legal requests
that received this year, compared to around 30% of requests
in a typical year under previous management. Meanwhile, X has changed its block feature
so that a user's public posts are now visible to people they've blocked,
but they just can't engage with them. What, you thought you should be able to completely block people you don't like?
That's a privilege. X slash Twitter only affords to certain special entities
like the Turkish government. And Panasonic is apparently repurposing
an outdoor air conditioning system called Silky Fine Mist
to create what I'd like to call wet holograms.
I'll explain. The Silky Fine Mist in question is a spray of extremely small water droplets
around six to 10 microns in size, which quickly evaporate removing heat
without making users feel damp, wet only in name.
At some point, however, Panasonic realized that this mist could also be used
as a transparent projector screen for extremely cool
and cooling art displays.
Unfortunately, the system is heavy, bulky, and prohibitively expensive, which is no good
when you're trying to get a message out to a Jedi hermit hiding on Tatooine.
We need to get more efficient with this. How, that can't fit that in a droid.
Panasonic, you're my only hope. But you shouldn't hide from more tech news.
Come back on Friday for another episode. It won't be scary. It'll be positive.
Everything's fine. Everything's fine out there. So, okay.