Sure, Halloween's Michael Myers' wordlessly standing his big ass in your
yard staring at you is pretty scary, but not nearly as scary as me silently
standing here not telling you the tech news.
Oh, that's too freaky. I got to tell you some tech news. YouTube will begin
automatically upscaling all videos under 1080p from SD to HD, the company
announced this morning with plans to support upscaling to 4K in the future.
But unlike their experiment earlier this year sharpening YouTube shorts to an
uncomfortably fine edge, YouTube is graciously allowing creators to opt out
of having their content upscaled as well as letting viewers toggle between
original resolution and the new super resolution. Today, YouTube also
announced a few policy changes. For one, they'll soon expand their prohibitions
on content that directs viewers to online gambling sites. Before, doing
this was okay if the stuff being gambled
was digital like video game skins, cosmetics, and NFTs. Under the new
rules, that will not be allowed and neither will be watching video game
content with lifelike human characters committing large-scale violence against
unarmed people or torturing someone if you're under 18. That
that's just standard adult stuff. Finally, it seems like YouTube will
definitively solve the debate over whether Kratos or a transhuman 40K space
marine can really be called a human. YouTube's also age restricting content
that depicts casino-style games. Unfortunately, that means if you've got
a hankering for social gambling content, you're going to have to go to a sporting
event, turn on the TV, or visit any
other website. Hey. Hey, you want to bet you can find a
gambling ad in under a minute? Please bet me.
I need this. NVIDIA hit a massive milestone today by becoming the first
company ever to reach a five trillion
dollar market valuation. Last I remember
they hit three trillion. Did they skip four and went right to That's what?
Anyway, it's a figure roughly on par with the entire German economy. This
historic jump followed a series of announcements at the company's GTC
conference where CEO Jensen Huang unveiled the new IGX Thor processor
meant to help power a physical AI platform, which is doing absolutely
nothing to help my personal fear of terminators. Years of therapy, wasted.
The company then revealed a plan to deploy a fleet of robotaxis with Uber by
2027 and a one billion dollar investment
in Nokia to integrate AI into 6G
networking. Huh. Whatever that means. They also announced a collaborative
effort with Oracle and the US Department of Energy to build what will be
America's largest supercomputer. Now still feeling the need to pack in even
more announcements that aren't about gaming, NVIDIA introduced NVQ Link,
which is like their GPU interconnection system NVLink but with a Q in it
because that's just a little quirky, but also because it lets classical computer
servers talk good with quantum computers.
So I guess it's really a bit quirky.
See you later, guys. >> [clears throat] >> OpenAI has officially completed its
long-awaited evolution from cap profit
to just profit. The company says that its new for-profit public benefit
corporation will still be guided by its
nonprofit board, you know, like how a parent guides their kid who just bought
a mid-80s GMC Jimmy with their allowance.
Do any of you know what that is? What is a GMC Jimmy? I think it's just a weird
little car. Apparently, we're a channel that makes a
good amount of obscure car jokes now.
I'll allow it. As part of the shakeup, Microsoft trimmed its ownership stake in
OpenAI to 27% while OpenAI themselves
pledged a casual 250 billion dollars in
extra Azure cloud spending. Both sides
have taken to calling this development a natural evolution, which is probably
their way of telling us that they they're still best friends. This is how
it always goes with most friendships. This will ensure that companies can keep
using ChatGPT to replace humans whose jobs were, as Sam Altman said in a
recent interview, not real work. That's
all right though because at least with their new PayPal integration, these now
jobless people will have an even easier time spending their last remaining
dollars to buy furniture through ChatGPT's instant checkout feature. If
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squarespace.com/techlinked. The Halloween franchise is at reboots,
remakes, and alternate timelines, all of varying quality but with the quick bits,
you know they're always going to kick some ass.
Amazon says they're keeping their company nimble and strong by firing
14,000 people. Well, it appears one thing these massive job cuts aren't
keeping nimble and strong is Amazon's MMO New World, which appears to be dead.
Amazon Game Studios informed fans that the game's recently launched season 10
and Nighthaven updates would be the game's final content releases, that
Nighthaven is now free, and that they are committed to keeping the game
servers going through 2026. Amazon's
Beth Galletti says that with these layoffs, Amazon is making exciting bold
bets. And you know I can get behind that. I love a good bet. Please make a
bet with me, Amazon. I need this.
>> [laughter] >> Don't go away. Where are you going? 1X Technologies is now taking pre-orders
for a humanoid home robot called Neo
shipping in 2026 and priced at $20,000
or $500 a month with a subscription, very affordable. Neo is designed to
tackle chores like folding laundry, tidying rooms, fetching items, and
turning lights on and off with basic autonomy up front and more complex tasks
handled via expert mode, which means a
human teleoperator from 1X takes over
the robot remotely with your permission so that so it can learn.
It needs to learn. Aside from the weirdness of allowing some stranger to
remotely get inside your space, you'll also be sharing data from your home so
Neo's AI real-world training can improve. Still, it's hard to be mad at
this button-eyed little weirdo. Just look at the Step Brothers poster-style
portrait of Neo on 1X's website. Grandpa-befriending,
turtleneck-sweater-wearing mother already got me by the heartstrings.
>> [laughter] >> 500 bucks bucks a month is nothing. DRAM prices are set to soar by as much as 50%
and according to a report from Digitimes, major data center customers
in the US and China are only receiving about 70% of their memory orders.
Apparently, this issue is being driven by booming AI workloads that are
diverting RAM production capacity towards more advanced memory production
leaving conventional DDR5 supplies tight. Similarly, according to Korea's
New Daily, Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix, and Kioxia are running their SSD
production lines at full capacity yet high-capacity SSDs of 8 terabytes and
higher are facing delivery delays of over a year. Now, I'm not saying you
should switch your Tesla into Mad Max mode and rip over to your nearest PC
shop to scoop up RAM and SSDs like they're 3,000 liters of the crucial
resource guzzoline, but maybe. China has officially launched
the world's first wind-powered undersea data center combining renewable energy
with deep-sea cooling to reduce emissions and power costs. The facility
is located off the coast of the Hainan province where it has easy access to a
set of offshore wind turbines to supply electricity to the center and it allows
the ocean to be used as its giant heat sink. It's all for us. Developers say
the setup could cut energy use by 40% compared to land-based centers and plans
are already in motion for more data centers of this type. Kind of makes you
wonder though, one wrong cable tug and someone might be getting a seriously wet
tech support ticket. And xAI has launched Grokipedia
fulfilling Elon Musk's dream of replacing Wikipedia by apparently
copying huge chunks of Wikipedia. Reports show the site replicates text
from Wikipedia nearly word for word in some instances, but guys, Wikipedia
isn't trustworthy, okay? Instead, we should trust a chatbot that recently
mistook a US Border Patrol Chief for the artist Cindy Sherman. It doesn't know.
Between plagiarism and identity crises, Grok's looking less like Wikipedia 2.0
and more like Clippy with confidence issues. I'm so confident we'll be seeing
you on Friday for more tech news, I'm going to bet on it. Please take it.
Also, here's a fun fact about John Carpenter's Halloween. Despite being set
during fall in Illinois, the film was actually shot during springtime
in California. Wow, must have been warm in that costume. Okay, bye now.