Daily Tech News 12 February 2025

• Average CPU speed actually went down in 2024, for the first time in twenty years. (Twitter)
  
  There's a lot of speculation as to why, but no clear answers. The fastest available desktop CPUs are two years old, with no replacement models in sight. Meanwhile Intel has dropped its hyper-threading support - multiple threads per CPU core - which meant multi-threaded scores declined for newer chips.
  
  But this average includes AMD chips which still have hyper-threading, and Apple chips which never had hyper-threading, so who knows?

• A new attack on Google's Gemini AI lets users permanently plant false memories into the system, so that they are shared with unsuspecting users on the same account. (Ars Technica)
  
  As far as I can tell, this doesn't affect the core Gemini training data; that's fixed irrevocably. So it doesn't persist across Google accounts, limiting the damage it can do.
  
  But LLMs are fundamentally insecure to this kind of attack, like kindly grandmothers with confidence tricksters, and every patch is just a Band-Aid atop a growing heap of Band-Aids.
  
  
  
• How Elon Musk's bid for OpenAI could gum up Sam Altman's for-profit conversion. (Tech Crunch)
  
  OpenAI is still, in theory, a non-profit operation with a secondary for-profit company commercialising the product. The bid was made for the non-profit group which owns all the intellectual property.
  
  The state attorneys general in California and Delaware have already filed inquiries with OpenAI over its plans and the valuation of the nonprofit entity, so Sam Altman and the commercial side of OpenAI cannot underbid in their attempt to wrest control.

  "Musk is throwing a spanner into the works," said Stephen Diamond, a lawyer who represented Musk's opponents in corporate governance battles at Tesla, in an interview with TechCrunch. "He's exploiting the fiduciary obligation of the nonprofit board to not undersell the asset. [Musk's bid> is something OpenAI has to pay attention to."

  Which is the last thing Altman wants right now.
  
  
  
• While Tech Crunch has a sane article mentioning Elon Musk, other sites have gone as insane as The Verge. (The Register)
  
  The writer feebly attempts to liken Elon Musk's team rooting out waste and fraud to a CPU microcode exploit, ignoring the fact that in such an analogy the CPU would be on fire to begin with.
  
  
  
• Speaking of AI Google is considering using it to make Chrome change compromised passwords for you automatically. (Ars Technica)
  
  I assume they mean in navigating the password change process for each compromised website; this is not otherwise complicated.
  
  
  
• Smol GPU is an open-source GPU for RISC-V designs. (GitHub)
  
  Meant more as a learning tool than a real product, but if you are synthesizing a small RISC-V core on an FPGA - and who isn't, these days - and need a GPU to go with it, it might be worth a look.
  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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