Daily Tech News 26 July 2024

• OpenAI has unveiled its Google rival, SearchGPT. (Tech Crunch)
  
  Kill it with fire.

  OpenAI seems to have taken note of the blowback and says it's taking a markedly different approach. In a blog post, the company emphasized that SearchGPT was developed in collaboration with various news partners, which include organizations like the owners of The Wall Street Journal, The Associated Press, and Vox Media, the parent company of The Verge. "News partners gave valuable feedback, and we continue to seek their input," Wood says.

  Kill it with fire and sow the ground with salt.

  The rapid advancements by OpenAI have won ChatGPT millions of users, but the company's costs are adding up. The Information reported this week that OpenAI's AI training and inference costs could reach $7 billion this year, with the millions of users on the free version of ChatGPT only further driving up compute costs. SearchGPT will be free during its initial launch, and since the feature appears to have no ads right now, it's clear the company will have to figure out monetization soon.

  Though maybe if we just wait a bit they'll encounter the delicious salty fires of bankruptcy.
  
  

• OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wants a US-led freedom coalition to fight authoritarian AI. (The Register)
  
  Great. They can start by destroying ChatGPT.
  
  
  
  
• AMD's 128 core Epyc 9755 goes zoom. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  AMD already has 128 core server chips, but those are Zen 4c and this is the full-size Zen 5 core, so it's about 60% faster.
  
  
  
• Runway AI, a startup valued at $1.5 billion, is reported to have scraped its training material from YouTube. (WCCFTech)
  
  Oops.
  
  
  
• AI didn't take my job. (DAVA)
  
  Not your job, maybe. AI still makes a lousy programmer. The latest AI tools sometimes get typeahead right and save me 30 seconds.
  
  And sometimes get it wrong and cost me 30 minutes.
  
  
  
• But if you're an artist working for Activision Blizzard you might well be screwed. (Player One)
  
  Half the artists are being laid off and many of the remaining staff are being tasked with training their AI replacements.
  
  I'm not sure how well that will work. In theory art doesn't need to work; it needs to look like it works. But that's not entirely true when you put art into a computer game.
  
  
  
• Hundreds of motherboards from Dell, Gigabyte, Intel, and Supermicro have completely broken secure boot functionality. (Ars Technica)
  
  They use a brain that was marked Abby Someone.
  
  Pretty much literally.
  
  This matters less than you might think. Your computer will still work perfectly well unless you get a BIOS virus.
  
  So... Just don't do that.
  
  
  
• AOOSTAR (dumb name, I know) has announced an AMD version of its Intel-based four-bay NAS. (Liliputing)
  
  While it still has four bays and two 2.5Gb Ethernet port, the 4 core N100 CPU is replaced with an 8 core Ryzen 5825U (essentially the same as the laptop I am using right now), with up to 64G of RAM and two M.2 2280 slots for SSDs.
  
  The AMD chip is about three times faster than the Intel one, so if you want to run server tasks on your NAS it's a much better option.
  
  
  
• Here's why David Sacks, Paul Graham, and other venture capitalist types got into a spat on Twitter. (Tech Crunch)
  
  Short version: They're Mean Girls with money.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:30 AM

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