Daily Tech News 17 June 2023

• Welcome news from unexpected places, part one: The EU, in its eternal quest to meddle in absolutely everything, is planning to force device manufacturers to make batteries replaceable. (TechSpot)
  
  This follows legislation coming into effect next year to require all mobile phones to be chargeable over USB-C.
  
  Okay. Sure. I won't make fun of you for an entire day.
  
  
  
• Welcome news from unexpected places, part two: Facebook plans to continue releasing its AI code as open source, free for individual and commercial use. (The Information)
  
  You need a subscription to read the whole thing, but you don't need to read the whole thing.
  
  This is a broadside aimed at Google and OpenAI. Individual researchers have taken Facebook's existing AI code and already made it almost as good as ChatGPT at a tiny fraction of the cost.
  
  If you can't buy the competition, make their business model untenable by giving away their product.
  
  
  

• Mistral AI's mega fundraise is a red flag. (Tech Crunch)
  
  Yes, indeed it is. This is obviously a bubble and it will all come crash-
  
  For many concerned with inclusivity.
  
  Go stick your head in a pig.
  
  
  
• Feel good story of the day: High-tech AI-controlled vertical lettuce farms are going broke. (Bloomberg)
  
  You have to understand that when they say "lettuce farms", they're not actually talking about lettuce farms, they mean... Nope, sorry, they really do mean lettuce farms.

  In 2021, AeroFarms, an early vertical-farming pioneer based in Newark, New Jersey, had plans to go public through a blank-check merger that had an equity value around $1.2 billion. The growth potential seemed limitless.

  But as interest rates began to climb, investors started to scrutinize profitability in a way they hadn't for years, and soon came to realise that they had set their money on fire.

  Yes, it's lettuce. It literally grows on trees.
  
  What?
  
  Really?
  
  Okay, it figuratively grows on trees.
  
  
  

• Bytedance, parent company of Chinese spy agency TikTok, has bought $1 billion worth of high-end Nvidia GPUs so far this year. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  If you were wondering why Nvidia doesn't care that the outrageous pricing and mediocre performance of its RTX 4000 series has turned away millions of gamers, this is your answer. Margins on these high-end cards are much better; the company would need to sell millions of mid-range gaming cards to match what one customer spent on high-end cards in six months.
  
  
  

• More on why the AI bubble is a bubble. (IEEE Spectrum)
  
  Key quote:

  Our analysis of this phenomenon also allowed us to compare what's actually happened with theoretical expectations. Theory tells us that computing needs to scale with at least the fourth power of the improvement in performance. In practice, the actual requirements have scaled with at least the ninth power.

  This ninth power means that to halve the error rate, you can expect to need more than 500 times the computational resources. That's a devastatingly high price.

  Companies like OpenAI don't want to fix this problem because it's the barrier that keeps smaller competitors at bay. If there is a solution, it will come from people working on Facebook's open source code in the evening, not from OpenAI or Google, or even from Facebook.
  
  
  

   

• In 2026 Intel is expected to release 80 core mainstream desktop chips - 16 Performance cores and 64 Efficiency cores. (WCCFTech)
  
  Which used to be a lot.
  
  That's not the story, but it's the most interesting point in the article.
  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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