Daily Tech News 14 February 2023

• Search is dead.
  
  Google recently announced its AI search tool Bard, and lost $120 billion in market value on the same day. (The Register)
  
  Yes, Bard got an answer wrong in the tech demo, regarding discoveries made by the James Webb telescope, but they have a long way to go to match Microsoft.
  
  
  
• The newly ChatGPT-enhanced Bing will confidently tell you that the population of Mars is 2.5 billion. (Imgur)
  
  That's not including North America. With North America included, the number comes to 6.5 billion.
  
  When I tried it, they had fixed it. Changing the question to how many people live on mars gave me a response of 110, which is still obvious nonsense.
  
  Bing makes lots of other mistakes but they're not as funny. (DKB)
  
  ChatGPT is a language model, not an information model. It answers questions by matching words together. It has no concept of truth, though it can match words to argue that it does. It's a pathological liar, because it truth simply does not factor into its answers.
  
  Everyone knows this, but Microsoft integrated it into Bing anyway.
  
  

• Twilio is laying off 17% of its staff. (Tech Crunch)
  
  Their last round of layoffs - 11% of staff that time - was in September.
  
  Expect more of this. Tech companies other than Twitter are still carrying huge amounts of dead weight.
  
  
  
• All of Elon Musk's tweets now show up in the For You feed. (The Verge)
  
  Stop using For You. It's Bing-level garbage.
  
  
  
• Western Digital's 2TB SN850X is available for $160. (WCCFTech)
  
  This is a PCIe 4.0 NVMe drive with TLC flash and DRAM cache, with peak read/write speeds of 7300/6600MBps. Which means there's nothing to complain about. It's one of the fastest drives around and the price is great. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  When it first reached the marked its MSRP was $290. That was in September.
  
  There's a 4TB model as well, for $399. Also very good value.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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