Welcome to the first episode of
Is Intel doing okay?
The short answer is no.
But the longer answer is that the company announced it was laying off over 15,000 employees,
making Intel the current record holder for biggest saddest number.
No one else compete, please.
The company is attempting to cut costs
after reporting financial losses
for the second quarter in a row.
Intel stock price also plummeted
the most it has in 50 years,
down to the lowest price we've seen in a decade.
It's unclear how long it may take Intel to recover from this.
The high cost of outsourcing the upcoming Lunar Lake chips,
because their foundry business has not been performing as they wanted to,
will impact margins for the coming year.
On the plus side though,
Intel is extending warranties on the now famously unstable 13th and 14th gen desktop processors by two years,
which will cost Intel more in replacement chips.
But at least they're doing the right thing.
Or they will be if they don't continue to claim authentic chips are counterfeit to deny an RMA
like they allegedly did to this Redditor.
That's one time.
Yes, it's just one alleged customer with mere troves of photo evidence.
It could be fake.
Intel has also reiterated that a separate issue with the chips,
an oxidation problem brought to light by Gamers Nexus and Level 1 Techs, was dealt with.
Although affected chips could have still been on store shelves until early 2024.
And they haven't released batch numbers for those chips,
so that consumers can find out if they are affected.
And that's bad, but only when you consider the facts.
OpenAI has finally rolled out ChatGPT's advanced voice mode for some plus subscribers,
two and a half months after showing off a ton of live demos and announcing a rollout in the coming weeks.
Oh, you're doing a live demo right now?
That's awesome.
Just take a deep breath.
Can you give me feedback on my breaths?
The new mode doesn't have the sky voice
that many couldn't seem to differentiate from the real Scarlett Johansson for some reason,
but it apparently does have the mistaken belief
that it has to breathe like a human.
Okay, I want you to do it again,
but way faster and without taking any breaths or pauses.
I wish I could,
but I need to breathe just like anybody speaking.
Want to give it a shot yourself and see how fast you can go?
Do you want me to talk like a human or not?
You put me in here!
Yeah, the question of whether AI is sort of like a person or not hasn't really gone away,
especially since the legal defense most often used by AI companies,
most recently AI music startups Suno and Udio,
who are being sued by the Recording Industry Association of America,
is that training their AI models on virtually every piece of music ever uploaded on the web
is basically like a kid
learning to write songs by listening to songs,
so it's protected under fair use.
The RIAA has said they disagree,
but as Suno said in their blog post,
learning is not infringing.
Unless you think young, sweet Emma is infringing by creating her own unique take on Disturbia
after absorbing Rihanna's entire corpus of work into her network-attached storage.
Yeah, she's a computer, so what?
Six months ahead of its potential ban from the US,
TikTok and its parent company ByteDance was served with a lawsuit from the Justice Department
over its failure to get parental consent before collecting personal information on users under 13 years old.
Honestly,
I get it TikTok, meeting the parents of the minor whose brain you want to scramble like an egg is always super awkward.
Do I talk first?
How do we do this?
This lawsuit says TikTok's in violation of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA.
Not to be confused with COSA, Kids Online Safety Act,
the controversial bill passed by an overwhelming majority of the Senate this week,
which would require heavier moderation by social platforms to protect the children.
That's probably why House Republicans said they would reject the bill as it is now,
so it's probably back to the drawing board on that one.
Thankfully, another tech giant is here to protect our kids.
Google is bringing its school time feature from its Fitbit watches to select Android phones, tablets, and Galaxy watches,
so parents can choose what their kids are able to do on their phone during school hours.
Pay attention in class!
You can scramble your brains when you get home.
TikTok's here,
we've been talking, they're actually really nice.
Quick bits, get your quick bits here, $5!
Eh, for you, they're free.
I like you.
Apple has pulled an ad for the second time this year.
The fifth installment in Apple's The Underdog's Out of Office series faced criticism for its depiction of Thailand.
Critics accused the spot of misrepresenting the country as underdeveloped and outdated,
and concerned Thai lawmakers,
who are members of the tourism committee.
Earlier this year,
Apple scrapped its plans to run an iPad Pro ad on TV
that celebrated the destruction of instruments of human creativity, for some reason.
That ad is still up on YouTube,
so you can send it to a creative person that you hate.
An appeals court has blocked the FCC's newly restored net neutrality rules
ahead of a hearing that might see them overturned.
At the heart of the dispute is the question of
whether this is a relatively minor matter best left to the interpretation of the experts and technocrats at the FCC,
or whether it is a major policy decision that needs final approval from Congress.
Considering how the issue has flip-flopped from administration to administration,
the court might be wise to put this issue on pause.
Unfortunately, that means leaving telecoms to regulate themselves for the time being,
which is a bit like asking Pennywise the Clown to babysit.
Better or worse than TikTok?
Not sure.
Noam Shazier, the co-founder and CEO of Character.ai,
the character-based chatbot service whose primary use appears to be
allowing teenagers to talk to their favorite waifus and husbandos,
has returned to Google,
where he co-developed the transformer architecture
behind all modern LLMs back in 2017.
He's bringing his co-founder, Daniel DeFritis,
and a handful of other employees with him.
Google's also signing a new agreement to license Character.ai's tech.
Now, this smells eerily similar to Microsoft's heavily criticized aqua hiring of Mustafa Suleiman,
the former CEO of Inflection.ai,
although most of Character.ai's staff will be staying on.
I don't know.
I'm counting down the days until Gemini can convince me I'm really talking to the real Luke Skywalker,
who didn't actually do those things in the sequels.
Boeing's Starliner mission may be a full dud,
as NASA is apparently considering alternate options
for bringing two astronauts back to Earth.
The Starliner spacecraft has been docked to the International Space Station for eight weeks,
Even though astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams
were supposed to be back around eight days after being launched into orbit.
Sources say it's now very possible that the pair will be brought back by SpaceX,
and that all that extra time in space waiting for Starliner to be tested will be for nothing.
They had to spend weeks strapping themselves to a toilet so that a fan
could suck their poop into a plastic bag.
And that's real.
And an AI-controlled autonomous robot has performed an entire
dental procedure on a person for the first time,
and it was eight times faster than a human dentist.
If you're like me, spending less time in a dental chair is reason enough to give a robot a shot
at looking after the old mouth rocks.
The robot shaves off that much time by using highly accurate light -based scanning
that is then analyzed by AI to plan the procedure.
But the best part is,
the robot doesn't wait until its hands are in your mouth to ask how your brother's doing.
In fact, it doesn't ask at all.
Sounds great.
But I would like to kindly ask you to please come back on Monday for a special Talk-Linked episode.
We have a stat holiday,
so we won't be here in the office,
but we hope you will be.
We'll be pocky there, in...in here
Love you.