In an effort to look cooler, I've been learning to read tech news off a teleprompter while wearing sunglasses.
Unfortunately, it didn't work. I can't see.
NVIDIA is closer than ever to owning the
entire GPU market, according to a new report from John Petty Research, which
has NVIDIA sitting at 94% of all discrete graphics card shipments. For a
hot second, there was hope that competition would make this not so. In
Q4 2024, NVIDIA had diverted production to data center GPUs, and AMD was able to
hold steady around 15%. But not for long. AMD is now sitting at 5% while
Intel is guarding that 1% market share they won last year with their life. It's
sad, but as much as I love the idea of voting with one's wallet, the fact is
that gamers see more value in the performance and features offered by
GeForce. NVIDIA's action-packed 2009 film about a team of guinea pig
commandos and its accompanying video game still available on Steam for $26.
That's like a whole combo at McDonald's. This economy. Speaking of Steam, the
Steam hardware survey appears to agree with this research. The RTX 5070 became
the most popular card on Steam recently, though analysts suspect Chinese New Year
internet cafe traffic and a Valve reporting bug may have inflated those
numbers somewhat. But still, if you take a look at AMD's best card on the chart,
it's in 17th place under a whole slew of
NVIDIA's offerings. As a final insult, leaks suggest NVIDIA is planning a new
RTX 5050 variant with 9 GB of VRAM. Not
even a nice even 8 GB. 9 feels weird,
but who's going to stop them, huh? Now, that's not to say AMD's out of the
graphics game entirely. The newlyannounced nextG Xbox console, code
named Project Helix, which we talked about on Game Link yesterday, runs on an
AMD chipset and will play PC games, making it a PC, and so many people are
going to buy this and then that AMD share of GPUs will shoot up. Okay, I
know that's not how it works. Just let me have this. Anthropic is vowing to sue
the Pentagon over the company being designated a supply chain risk. Now,
this comes days after Secretary of War Pete Hegsith declared on Twitter that no
contractor, supplier, or partner of the US military can do business with
Anthropic because Anthropic CEO Dario Ammedday refused to allow the Pentagon
to use Claude for mass surveillance of Americans and the deployment of fully
autonomous weapon systems and that sucks. Amday responded yesterday to
Hegsth on Anthropic's blog to say he doesn't believe this designation is
legally sound and that he has no choice but to challenge it in court. Oof. I'm
not sure if it's just me, but there's some serious heated rivalry energy
coming off of Hegath and Amday, except instead of hockey, it's mass
surveillance and autonomous murder robots. And I'm I'm not excited anymore.
Despite going to war against the literal Department of War, Anthropic has found
itself with some notable allies. Senator Kirsten Gilbrand called the Pentagon's
move short-sighted, self-destructive, and a gift to our adversaries. And
Microsoft has stated that after reviewing the designation, it will
continue to do business with Anthropic, which is good news because Anthropic is
going to need that business. Now, that according to the AI industry sugar daddy
and shovel salesman Jensen Wong, NVIDIA will be holstering the money gun. it's
had pointed at the AI bubble. It shoots money. Hang said at a Morgan Stanley
conference this week that NVIDIA's recent investments in both OpenAI and
Anthropic, 30 billion and 10 billion respectively, are likely to be its last.
And the whopping 100 billion OpenAI NVIDIA deal that Wong announced last
September is officially dead. I guess that announcement about investing up to
hundred billion uh was just something that Wong said in the heat of the moment
and he never really meant it. So, Anthropic might just survive, but XAI is
in real trouble, according to CEO and melting wax sculpture Elon Musk. XAI
just failed to block a California law passed in late 2024 requiring AI
companies to publicly disclose what data they used to train their models. XAI's
arguments cited everything from trade secrets to free speech to the fact that
people would just be kind of bored by all the stuff in the disclosures and
like wouldn't even want to see them anyways. Unfortunately, it wasn't enough
to convince US District Judge Jesus Bernal, who said XAI failed to show the
law would force them to reveal any actual trade secrets and that the
company traded in frequent abstractions and hypotheticals instead of real
evidence of harm. The lawsuit will continue, but XAI has to comply with the
law in the meantime, which could see Musk sharing information he'd rather
Open AI had no knowledge of. Information like who our sponsor is. Why do they
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Little fun fact before we head into the quick bits. I was joking before. We
don't read off a teleprompter. We make up the script as we go. Okay? None of
this is real. So, hm, let's make up
something about how Apple is now blocking US from downloading Bite
Dance's Chinese apps, even if they have a valid Chinese app store account.
Before the Tik Tok US entity deal was reached, Apple had listed 11 Bite Dance
apps that would no longer be available in the US starting January 19th, 2025.
And it looks like that policy is now being enforced for the apps that weren't
covered by the deal, which include Duen,
Dubau, Fanky, Novel, Flip Cut, Hypic,
Lark, Quank, and Goth. Banning apps
seems bad. However, these are apps you think about so little you didn't even
realize two of them were made up. And I guarantee you it's not the ones you
think. One thing that's luckily not made up is that Apple Music will be rolling
out transparency tags for AI generated music, labeling tracks across four
categories depending on how much AI was involved in making them. The catch, it's
entirely optin, meaning labels and distributors only have to disclose the
use of AI tools if they feel like it, which is great because record labels
have such a long and storied history of being completely honest about
everything. This is totally going to work, guys, and it will absolutely fix
the platform 100%. The first MacBook Neo benchmarks
just hit Geekbench, and since the $599
laptop runs the same A18 Pro chip as the
iPhone 16 Pro, the scores are nearly identical, sitting just 61 points ahead
in single core and 327 points ahead in multi-core. According to Tom's guide,
that puts single core performance well ahead of the M1 MacBook Air. No doubt
partially thanks to the newer 3nanmter process, though multi-core is roughly
the same. We've now got iPhones that are more powerful than MacBooks from a few
years ago. So, we're putting those phone chips back in MacBooks, which may be now
one of the best bang for your buck options on the market from Apple. Times
are wild. Wikipedia editors have discovered that a nonprofit called the
Open Knowledge Association has been paying contractors to translate
Wikipedia articles using ChateBT and Gemini, which is against Wikipedia's own
rules. Unsurprisingly, those translations have been stuffing articles
with hallucinated citations, fabricated sources, and paragraphs pulled from
completely unrelated material. Wikipedia's response was to keep using
them anyway, but with stricter oversight. The OKAS's fix. Deploy a
second AI to check the first AI's work. If you hallucinate a hallucination, is
that hallucinception? Should probably ask Chat GPT. And Roblox
is rolling out a realtime AI chat filter that doesn't just block profanity, it
rephrases it. So instead of your messages appearing as a bunch of
hashtags when you call someone a naughty word, the AI rewrites it into something
civil while preserving your original intent, like turning hurry TF up into
just hurry up. Much better. The feature was developed with Roblox's Teen
Council, a carefully selected group of teenagers who inadvertently became wise
beyond their years after being groomed on Roblox. So now when you announce to
your Phantom Forces So now when you announce to your Phantom
Forces lobby that you will in fact end their bloodlines because of what they've
done, the AI can translate that internal rage into something how about how you
don't have to have kids to lead a fulfilling life. And I guarantee your
life will be fulfilled if you come back on Monday for some more completely
unscripted tech news that we say out loud as soon as it pops into our head.
And thank goodness. Uh could you imagine if all of this stuff was true? Um,