Daily Tech News 20 July 2023

• OpenAI has not made GPT-4 dumber, says OpenAI. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  However, GPT-4's ability to figure out whether the number 17077 is prime (it is) has fallen from 97.6% in March to 2.4% in June.
  
  This highlights a couple of problems with the whole notion of GPT-4 and other Large Language Models:
  
  1. They literally know nothing. It's all word games. If you understand what a prime number is it might take you a few minutes to run through the possible factors on a calculator and get the right answer, or even better program a computer to do it for you. GPT-4 is incapable of doing that.
  
  2. They literally learn nothing. If someone keeps asking you if 17077 is prime (it is) you might want to remember the answer, maybe even write it down. GPT-4 is incapable of doing that as well.

• Linux now accounts for nearly half the desktop Linux market. (The Register)
  
  The other half of the desktop Linux market is owned by ChromeOS, which is also Linux but pretends not to be.
  
  
  
• Intel's N50 CPU, with two E cores, is very slow. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That's it. That's the story.
  
  
  
• A balanced article about Robert Oppenheimer. (Science)
  
  Not quite the Fauci of the day. He was actually a competent scientist - maybe second-tier, but the first tier was people like Einstein and Dirac and Fermi, so that is no shame. But he was also a communist who craved the sense of power.
  
  He is not on record as having tortured dogs, which is another plus in his column.
  
  
  
• Genoa-X and Bergamo put to the test. (Hot Hardware)
  
  Genoa is AMD's current mainstream sever CPUs. Genoa-X is the same design with extra cache dies stapled to the top to deliver up to 1152MB of cache per socket. And Bergamo is a more compact design running at lower clock speeds but increasing core counts from 96 to 128.
  
  Interesting to see how they each fare on a long list of different tasks. Bergamo is ideal for cloud providers like AWS, while Genoa-X runs away from the pack but only in certain very specific benchmarks.
  
  (Genoa-X is the server edition of the 7800X3D, currently the fastest gaming CPU available, but actually slower than a regular 7800X for other tasks.)
  
  
  
• Elon Musk is annoying all the right people once again by increasing Tesla's revenues by 50% year-on-year. (Tech Crunch)
  
  Margins are down due to price cuts, but the company actually is making it up on volume, with sales increasing more than enough to compensate.
  
  Tesla stock is down 5% in after-hours trading because no good quarterly report goes unpunished.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile the District of Columbia has awarded a $680,000 contract to fit all its electric vehicles with pine-scented prayer beads. (Ars Technica)
  
  Rather, they awarded the contract for a blatant free energy scam, which has significantly less utility than pine-scented prayer beads.
  
  
  
• The Cyber Trust Mark is a voluntary IoT label coming in 2024. What does it mean? Absolutely nothing. (Ars Technica)
  
  It's a voluntary label with federal government involvement, so possibly less than nothing.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:15 AM

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