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 goblins. OpenAI is killing Sora, its
slop video generating TikTok clone, less than 6 months after launch. Users will
lose access to video generation via the mobile app, website, the API, and even
in ChatGPT itself. According to the Wall Street Journal, it's part of a strategic
pivot to productivity tools with OpenAI merging ChatGPT, Codex, and its Atlas
browser into one desktop super app,
which is likely corpo speak for C Dads 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 dollars in
revenue. The announcement apparently prompted Disney to pull out of its
planned 1 billion dollar 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 slop 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. Oof.
Disney has said they plan on pursuing similar deals with other AI companies.
That's right, girl. You were too good for him anyways. Uh, play Brit- play
Britney Spears' Toxic, quick. I remember that. 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 US dollars 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 dollars 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. Aw, boo-hoo. 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 Zuckercorn. It's my new favorite nickname for him. But I
guess with such a massive user base, you can say it was kind of
inevitable. So 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 Neoverse V1 CPU. It's a 3-nanometer 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 they're its 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 dollars 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 design 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, Squarespace. In the year 2026,
cyberspace has become a vast and lawless frontier. Websites lie abandoned, their
CSS crumbling, their links broken. But
there is one safe haven in this digital wasteland, Squarespace. an all-in-one
website platform whose design intelligence combines two decades of
design expertise with AI, so anyone can build a beautiful, personalized website
and create a digital identity that all denizens of the cyber waste fear and
respect. Or also it could be like a cat website. Um Squarespace payments makes
managing money simple. Onboard in a few clicks and start receiving payments
right away with Klarna, Apple Pay, and more. Heck, we use Squarespace for the
Linus Media Group website. >> And it's the only thing keeping the
cyber wolves at bay. Start building your website today and get 10% off your first
purchase at squarespace.com/techlinked.
The court will now hear five minor charges. The quick bits, uh they have
been sworn in and I must warn you they are hostile witnesses.
What is this? Is this I've never been in a court. Intel just launched the Arc Pro
B70, which is the first card using Big Battlemage, aka the full fat BMGG31 GPU.
The B70 comes with 32GB of GDDR6 for
only 950 bucks, with a cheaper Arc Pro B65, also with 32GB 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. Aw.
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. And 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 NT Sync and the performance gains
are reportedly stupid good. According to Wine contributor and people who do a lot
of other things, too, CodeWeavers, we're talking 110 FPS to 860 in Dirt 3.
Resident Evil 2 jumped from 26 to 77.
And unlike the old Fsync/Esync 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. AyaNeo has suspended pre-orders for its AMD Strix
Halo-powered next two Windows gaming handheld claiming that production costs
now approach twice the selling price, which already started at 2,000 bucks.
AyaNeo 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.
AyaNeo says the suspension is temporary and they may consider resuming sales if
the prices come back down. But it turns out next two 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 Typhoon and Salt Typhoon cyberattacks. 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 taurine and a
stinky compound called ethanolamine
ethanolamine to give nails a small electric charge. I'm 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, has science gone too far?
Are we like Icarus flying on wings of wax too close to the sun? For what? To
fulfill the hubris of our fathers, Daedaluses, seeking only to serve their
own egos? Is there no rest or respite? No moment where we say we have come far
enough and turn 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 sentenced to being discussed
again on Friday. Uh the defendant showed no remorse.
Never does.