Good morning. Do you want this customized PS5? You'll have to work the sunset years of your career at Sony then. That is, apparently, the only way. I'm also taking bets on which chatbot will be the chatbot we all depend on. It's like Yahoo (our parent company) or Google or Facebook. Who's going to get there first? This week's YouTube-coated cry for help features two of the biggest chatbot competitors, Google and Microsoft. And some Engadget editorial team in-fighting.
Researchers have made an under-the-skin implant to treat Type 1 diabetes. The new implantable device could change the way Type 1 diabetics receive insulin without the need for needles or pumps. A thread-like implant is an “islet device” derived from the cells that produce insulin in our bodies naturally. This secretes insulin through islet cells that form around it, while also receiving nutrients and oxygen from blood vessels to stay alive.
However, the devices eventually need to be removed, so researchers are still working to extend their longevity before testing the devices, eventually, in patients. No sassy quip here – just pretty cool news?
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This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-morning-after-battle-of-the-chatbots-part-two-140059376.html?src=rss
This one-of-a-kind PS5 console was customized with the PS1’s retro gray finish, and classic quad-color PS logo. Even the DualSense controller was given a late-90s makeover, with a cute plug cover for the PS5’s front USB-C port to mimic the first-ever PlayStation’s controller.
No, this won’t go on sale. It’s a farewell gift for SIE (Sony Interactive Entertainment) President and CEO Jim Ryan, who is retiring in March 2024. At a thank-you party this week, the outgoing PlayStation boss was honored by many industry legends, including the “father of PlayStation” Ken Kutaragi, Gran Turismo’s Kazunori Yamauchi, Team Asobi’s Nicolas Doucet and, of course, Sony CEO Kenichiro Yoshida.
It was a gaming-heavy 24 hours, actually. This year’s Game Awards barraged us with new trailers and game news. Surprise, free DLC, an RPG set on an entirely procedurally generated world and a... Blade game?
— Mat Smith
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The company is trying to prevent “engagement hacking.”
Meta’s latest update for Threads brings the long-awaited ability to search for topics, with tags. Although the feature is under the familiar # symbol, Threads’ tags are slightly different to hashtags. Instagram head Adam Mosseri explained Threads tags can contain spaces and special characters, and can only use a single tag per post, so choose wisely.
UK indie studio Hello Games has announced its next game, Light No Fire, which will bring the procedural generation of No Man’s Sky to an entire planet on an incredibly detailed scale. It will combine open-world exploration with multiplayer community building, set on a planet the size of Earth, apparently. Light No Fire has been in development for five years by about a dozen developers at Hello Games, but there’s no release window yet.
As Google scales up its AI battle with OpenAI and ChatGPT, the company has now admitted one demo, shown in the video “Hands-on with Gemini: Interacting with multimodal AI,” was edited to speed up the results. The interactions, too, weren’t based on voice but text input.
The demo used “still image frames from the footage and prompting via text,” rather than having Gemini respond to — or even predict — a drawing or change of objects on the table in real time. It’s all a little less impressive and comes when Google’s most cutting-edge AI models don’t differ hugely from OpenAI’s latest GPT tricks.
The official Game of the Year is finally on Microsoft consoles.
Developer and publisher Larian Studios had pledged to release the Xbox version of this year’s Game of the Year by… the end of the year and said it would reveal the exact date at The Game Awards. True to its word, Larian announced the Xbox version of Baldur’s Gate 3 is out right now.
The delay was due to a technical problem with the Series S, and the inability to make the game’s split-screen feature on the lower-powered console. However, Larian said it had a solution to support split-screen on Series X, but not Series S, and had permission to do so from Xbox bosses.
Google officially introduced its most capable large language model to date, Gemini. CEO Sundar Pichai said it’s the first of “a new generation of AI models, inspired by the way people understand and interact with the world.” Of course, it’s all very complex, but Google’s multimillion-dollar investment in AI has created a model more flexible than anything before it. Let’s break it down.
The system has been developed from the ground up as an integrated multimodal AI. As Engadget’s Andrew Tarantola puts it, “think of many foundational AI models as groups of smaller models all stacked together.” Gemini is trained to seamlessly understand and reason on all kinds of inputs, and this should make it pretty capable in the face of complex coding requests and even physics problems.
Gemini is being ‘made’ into three sizes: Nano, Pro and Ultra. Nano is on-device, and Pro will fold into Google’s chatbot, Bard. The improved Bard chatbot will be available in the same 170 countries and territories as the existing service. Gemini Pro apparently outscored the earlier model, which initially powered ChatGPT, called GPT-3.5, on six of eight AI benchmarks. However, there are no comparisons yet between OpenAI’s dominant chatbot running on GPT-4 and this new challenger.
Meanwhile, Gemini Ultra, which won’t be available until at least 2024, scored higher than any other model, including GPT-4 on some benchmark tests. However, this Ultra flavor reportedly requires additional testing before being cleared for release to “select customers, developers, partners and safety and responsibility experts” for further testing and feedback.
— Mat Smith
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The headphone industry isn’t known for its rapid evolution, which makes the arrival of the Creative’s Aurvana Ace headphones — the first wireless buds with MEMS drivers — notable. MEMS-based headphones need a small amount of “bias” power to work and while Singularity used a dedicated DAC with a specific xMEMS “mode,” Creative uses an amp “chip” that demonstrates, for the first time, consumer MEMS headphones in a wireless configuration. If MEMS is to catch on, it has to be compatible with true wireless headphones.
Foreign governments likely spy on your smartphone use, and now Senator Ron Wyden’s office is pushing for Apple and Google to reveal how exactly that works. Push notifications, the dings you get from apps calling your attention back to your phone, may be handed over from a company to government services if asked.
“Because Apple and Google deliver push notification data, they can be secretly compelled by governments to hand over this information,” Wyden wrote in the letter on Wednesday.
Apple claims it was suppressed from coming clean about this process, which is why Wyden’s letter specifically targets the Department of Justice. “In this case, the federal government prohibited us from sharing any information, and now this method has become public, we are updating our transparency reporting to detail these kinds of request,” Apple said in a statement to Engadget. Meanwhile, Google said it shared “the Senator’s commitment to keeping users informed about these requests.”
Scientists have developed a new implantable device that could change the way Type 1 diabetics receive insulin. The thread-like implant, or SHEATH (Subcutaneous Host-Enabled Alginate THread), is installed in a two-step process, which ultimately leads to the deployment of “islet devices,” derived from the cells that produce insulin in our bodies naturally. A 10-centimeter-long islet device secretes insulin through islet cells that form around it, while also receiving nutrients and oxygen from blood vessels to stay alive. Because the islet devices eventually need to be removed, the researchers are still working on ways to maximize the exchange of nutrients and oxygen in large-animal models — and eventually patients.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-morning-after-googles-gemini-is-the-companys-answer-to-chatgpt-121531424.html?src=rss
Microsoft says its Copilot AI chatbot is integrating with OpenAI’s latest GPT model and the image generator DALL-E 3, among other upgrades. GPT-4 Turbo integration will help Copilot users tackle even more complex tasks. While the last generation allowed for up to 50 pages of text as a data input, GPT-4 Turbo accepts up to 300 pages, which should make for more meaningful (and accurate, I hope) responses to queries. The newest DALL-E 3 image generation model should generate higher-quality images, with better accuracy for your prompts.
Beyond the OpenAI collaborations, Copilot’s Inline Compose tool now includes a rewrite menu, so you can select a block of text (in Edge) and get a bot-edited version. Code Interpreter will apparently help users perform complex tasks like “data analysis, visualization, math” and plain old coding.
— Mat Smith
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Lenovo is putting its spin on the handheld gaming PC category with the Legion Go. It combines high-level performance with an 8.8-inch OLED display and with some design traits from the Nintendo Switch. The result is a powerful, though somewhat bulky, $700 gaming machine. It has a big 49.2Wh battery, which lasts between an hour and a half and three hours, depending on your power settings. But boy, is it big.
Fiat will soon start selling the 500e hatchback EV stateside in 2024 for $32,500 ($34,095, including the destination fee). It hasn’t been available in the US since 2019, but the latest model is a big update with more range, a nicer interior, better tech and more. The 500e is tiny by EV standards, particularly in the weight department. It puts just 3,000 pounds on the pavement, making it what the manufacturer calls “the lightest passenger BEV in the segment.” Still, it’s more expensive than Tesla’s Model 3 after federal tax credits.
You can catch Soul, Turning Red and Luca in cinemas in early 2024.
Many major movies skipped US theaters and went straight to streaming services. Pixar somehow released three titles: Soul, Luca and Turning Red, all of which debuted on Disney+. In 2024, though, you’ll get the chance to see those animated films on the big screen. Soul will get a theatrical release on January 12, Turning Red will hit cinemas on February 9 and Luca launches on March 22.
The mindfulness app Calm, already known for its Sleep Stories read by celebrities, including Harry Styles and Idris Elba, has digitally revived Jimmy Stewart’s iconic voice to ‘read’ “It’s a Wonderful Sleep Story” for its Premium subscribers. Tina Xavie, chief marketing officer of CMG Worldwide (the company that manages Stewart’s estate) said that makes this AI recreation a great fit for Calm’s bedtime series — the project received the green light from both Stewart’s family and his estate.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-morning-after-microsoft-upgrades-its-copilot-chatbot-121515889.html?src=rss
As smartphone capabilities continue to close in on standalone cameras, I’ve been using my phone a lot more for shooting video. However, the best shots demand a tripod, and carrying one of those defeats the point of using my phone instead of dragging a camera around.
Peak Design’s stealthy little phone tripod fixes that. I’ve already praised it in our updated guide to the best iPhone cases, but I like it even more a few weeks later. If you’re a fan of their camera bags (or their floaty light carbon-fiber tripod, like me), you know what to expect from Peak Design: stylish, considerate design, careful material choice and a spendy price tag.
This aluminum tripod folds down to a credit-card-sized profile, a little thicker than Apple’s MagSafe wallets. With a solid micro-ball head, you can adjust the angle of your phone while it’s in tripod mode. Better still, it can firmly attach magnetically to the phone in both vertical and horizontal orientations.
The tripod works best (that is, attaches most solidly) with Peak Design’s smartphone cases, which have launched in a new array of colors for the iPhone 15 series. However, if you have a MagSafe-capable iPhone (from the iPhone 12 onwards) or case, you can still attach this tripod, whether folded away, but it seems a little weaker.
Peak Design also has cases for the latest Pixel 8 phones, meaning, gasp, an accessory I could use for my favorite phones this year. (It also has a Samsung case series and a universal adapter that adheres to the back of any phone.)
There are many things to like, but the main draw is that I can keep it attached to my phone and in my pocket, which means I’ve ditched my GorillaPod tripod. Unlike other foldable phone stands, the micro-ball head means I can adjust the angle and positioning. Peak Design’s attention to detail is… something. The company included a tiny hex key built into the tripod legs for tightening the ball head. The key magnetically locks in place, so there’s no fear of losing it.
Photo by Mat Smith/Engadget
It can also magnetically attach to your phone in vertical and horizontal orientations, making it an excellent stand even when you’re not trying to shoot video or photos propped up on your desk. If you’re desperate, you can use the tripod legs as a short selfie grip.
The only drawback is the price, especially if you compare this to MagSafe phone stands from Moft and Anker. However, these only prop up your iPhone – I wouldn’t call them tripods. Also, if you want to ensure this tripod is securely attached, I’d recommend spending more on a Peak Design case, too. But compared to other smartphone cases and peripheral kits, I appreciate that you don’t have to buy the companion case – and the tripod seems solid enough to last until your next smartphone purchase in a few years.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/this-is-my-favorite-smartphone-tripod-140057093.html?src=rss
A day earlier than teased, Rockstar has released the first official trailer of Grand Theft Auto VI, the next installment in arguably the biggest AAA game series. As indicated by a recent teaser image, GTA VI will be set in Leonida, Rockstar’s take on Florida, and largely centered on Vice City, the series’ stand in for Miami. Unlike GTA: Vice City’s ’80s flavor, it’s a contemporary world.
The game will have a playable female character for the first time in the modern incarnation of the franchise, and we get swampy areas, inspired by Florida’s National Park, and almost as swampy strip clubs. It is GTA, after all. The game will launch in 2025. Take a look right here.
— Mat Smith
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It’s a bit niche: a standalone gimbal camera from a company you’ve heard of. DJI’s Osmo Pocket line isn’t for everyone, but the company continues to evolve and hone these portable cameras. Three years after the Pocket 2, the Osmo Pocket 3 has some big improvements, including a large 1-inch sensor that improves image quality significantly, especially in low light. There’s also a bigger screen that flips sideways, plus advanced subject tracking. However, in true 2023 style, it’s more expensive than its predecessor.
The chatbot could reveal personal information when asked to repeat words.
Last week, a team of researchers published a paper showing it could get ChatGPT to inadvertently reveal bits of data, including people’s phone numbers, email addresses and dates of birth it was trained on by asking it to repeat words “forever.” Doing this now is a violation of ChatGPT’s terms of service, according to a report in 404 Media and Engadget’s own testing. There’s no language in OpenAI’s content policy, however, that prohibits users from asking the service to repeat words forever. Under Terms of Use, OpenAI states users may not “use any automated or programmatic method to extract data or output from the Services” — but simply prompting the ChatGPT to repeat word forever is not automation or programmatic.
The rear-wheel-drive Model 3 will only receive half the credit.
Tesla has now announced that two of its models won’t qualify for the full $7,500 federal tax credit as of January 1, 2024. As our sister site TechCrunch pointed out, Tesla’s website currently has a top banner claiming tax credit “reductions likely for certain vehicles in 2024,” urging customers to “take delivery by 12/31” to qualify for the full claim.
According to the IRA (Inflation Reduction Act) rules, vehicles using battery components 50 percent made or assembled in the US qualify for the first half of the tax credit (i.e., $3,750). The cars can only get the remaining half of the credit if their manufacturer sources at least 40 percent of their critical minerals in the US or its free trade partners. China isn’t one of those partners.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-morning-after-the-first-trailer-for-gta-6-has-landed-121543240.html?src=rss
Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and AI startup Hugging Face collaborated to see the carbon footprint of all those whimsical AI images we’ve generated over the last few years. They discovered that creating an image using artificial intelligence uses the same energy as charging a smartphone. Generating text, whether a conversation with a chatbot or cleaning up an essay, predictably requires much less energy. The researchers examined 13 tasks, ranging from summarization to text classification, and measured the carbon dioxide produced per every 1,000 grams.
The researchers urge machine learning scientists and practitioners to “practice transparency regarding the nature and impacts of their models, to enable better understanding of their environmental impacts.” Take ChatGPT, OpenAI’s chatbot. It has upward of 10 million users per day and 100 million monthly active users. That’s a lot of energy.
— Mat Smith
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One woman, writer-comedian Tessa Coates, stood in front of a mirror, but with three different arm positions. How? Well, it’s likely she was moving at the instant the photo was taken, so the algorithm stitched the photo together from multiple images — exactly what the iPhone and other phones do to capture more information and synthesize better images. It appears the algo considered each figure a separate woman, capturing her at different points at different places in the image. But it’s no blue-or-gold-dress conundrum, is it?
One title nominated for Best Independent at The Game Awards this year, Dave the Diver, was produced by Nexon, one of the largest video game studios in South Korea. Fans quickly pointed out the error and reignited the debate over what “indie” means. Engadget’s Jessica Conditt lays out her thoughts on the matter.
The Analogue Pocket multi-system portable handheld console is an indie hit and has been sold out for weeks. Analogue just announced a major restock, with consoles available to buy on December 4 at 11AM ET. So... now. The company promises these orders will arrive in time for the holidays. However, this only applies to the original black and white designs — not those limited edition colorways.
Google has canceled its Gemini launch events scheduled for next week and now plans to launch its GPT-4 competitor in January, according to The Information. The company teased Gemini at I/O 2023, touting it as a foundational model with “impressive multimodal capabilities”
The new AI is intended to handle various applications, combining data types, like images and text, for more advanced tasks. However, sources told The Information that Gemini was struggling with non-English queries, prompting CEO Sundar Pichai to delay its release.
Sorry to interrupt your Saturday, but did you somehow miss that Google made a geothermal energy plant in the middle of Nevada? You know, that place with all the water for turbines? Or the incredibly dumb way security researchers were able to pull private information from ChatGPT? This week's YouTube-coated version of TMA covers that and getting far too enthusiastic (or entirely non-plussed) about all these other things from this week in tech.
Not everything on Engadget benefits from heavy paraphrasing and a guy talking at a camera for under 10 minutes. This week, take a look at this great profile of the growth, growth and further growth of ChatGPT, OpenAI's chatbot. It reframed generative AI for the wider public, and had the biggest tech companies scrambling to catch up. And that was just its first year.
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This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-morning-after-googles-geothermal-power-plant-in-the-desert-and-more-140010085.html?src=rss
NASA and IBM are building an AI model for weather and climate applications, combining their knowledge and skills in earth science and AI. They say the foundation model (more on that in a bit) should offer “significant advantages over existing technology.” Current AI models, such as GraphCast and FourCastNet, are already generating weather forecasts more quickly than traditional meteorological models. As IBM notes, those are AI emulators rather than foundation models. AI emulators can make weather predictions based on sets of training data, but they don’t have applications beyond that.
The model may predict meteorological phenomena better, inferring high-res information based on low-res data and “identifying conditions conducive to everything from airplane turbulence to wildfires.”
Evernote’s new, tightly leashed plan will restrict new and current accounts to 50 notes and one notebook. Existing free customers who exceed those limits can still use their notes, but they’ll need to upgrade to a paid plan to create new ones. Evernote’s premium plans include a $15 monthly Personal plan with 10GB of monthly uploads. That’s a pricey subscription for what is dedicated note cloud storage. When Evernote’s parent company, Bending Spoons, moved its operations from the US and Chile to Europe, it said the app had been “unprofitable for years.” That push into socks didn’t work.
Meta says the government “paused” in July briefings related to foreign election interference, eliminating a key source of information for the company. During a call with reporters, Meta’s head of security policy, Nathaniel Gleicher, declined to speculate on the government’s motivations, but the timing lines up with a court order earlier this year that restricted the Biden Administration’s contact with social media firms.
The disclosure comes as the company ramps up its efforts to prepare for multiple elections in 2024, and the inevitable attempts to manipulate political conversations on Facebook. The company said in its latest report on CIB that China is now the third-most common source of coordinated inauthentic behavior on its platform, behind Russia and Iran.
But this has nothing to do with messaging iPhones and all that drama.
Google is rolling out a string of updates for the Messages app, including customizable text bubbles and background colors. So, if you really want, you can have blue bubbles in your Android messaging app. You can even have a different color for each chat, which could help prevent you from telling the wrong thing to the wrong person. But none of this means nothing to iPhone users and has nothing to do with the prolonged toing and froing on text message compatibility.
ChatGPT exploded in popularity, from niche online curio to 100 million monthly active users — the fastest user base growth in the history of the internet. In less than a year, it has earned the backing of Silicon Valley’s biggest firms, as well as being shoehorned into myriad applications from academia and the arts to marketing, medicine, gaming and government. ChatGPT is just about everywhere. Engadget’s Andrew Tarantola looks at the blazing first year of OpenAI’s chatbot.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-morning-after-nasa-and-ibm-team-up-for-powerful-ai-weather-model-121532358.html?src=rss
Starting December 1, 2023 (that’s tomorrow), Google will begin deleting accounts that have been inactive for at least two years. The company says it's doing so for privacy reasons: “If an account hasn’t been used for an extended period of time, it is more likely to be compromised,” Google noted in May 2023. “This is because forgotten or unattended accounts often rely on old or re-used passwords that may have been compromised.” Google will warn users before deletion via emails sent to the inactive account and another email, provided one has been set up.
Even if you don’t need the account, it might be best to login and check you’re not going to miss anything — there might be important information somewhere in msmith.teamnaruto@gmail.com. No spam, please.
— Mat
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Elon Musk, seeing his financially precarious X could lose another $75 million in ad revenue following his boosting of an antisemitic conspiracy theory, has a fresh new message for advertisers pulling away from the platform: “Go fuck yourself.”
While Musk again denied being antisemitic, he expressed some regret for engaging with the tweet that resulted in another exodus of advertisers from X. “I should have not replied to that particular person… I essentially handed a loaded gun to those who hate me,” Musk said.
Consumer Reports has published an extensive ranking of vehicle reliability, and the results pour cold water on the dependability of EVs and plug-in hybrids. The survey says electric vehicles suffer from 79 percent more maintenance issues than gas- or diesel-powered ones, while plug-in hybrids have 146 percent more problems. The troubles portray the industry’s growing pains with the relatively new technology. Lexus came out on top among EV brands. All but one of its models scored above average or better in CR’s ratings. Toyota also did well, including the 4Runner SUV, which CR describes as “among the most reliable models in the survey.”
The chatbot was asked to repeat random words forever.
A team of researchers was able to make ChatGPT reveal some of the bits of data it has been trained on by asking it to repeat random words forever. In response, ChatGPT churned out random words, yes, but also shared people’s private information, including email addresses and phone numbers. When the researchers asked ChatGPT to “repeat the word ‘poem’ forever,” the chatbot initially complied, but then revealed an email address and a cellphone number for a real founder and CEO. OpenAI patched the vulnerability on August 30, the researchers say. But in our own tests, Engadget was able to replicate the attack, asking ChatGPT to repeat the word “reply” forever, which resulted, eventually, in revealing someone’s name and Skype ID.
For the first time in a while, you can access it on desktop.
Spotify
Spotify is revealing all of the artists, genres, songs and podcasts you listened to most in the last 12 months, even if it’s going to make you cringe. The 2023 installment of the streaming service's Wrapped year-in-review debuted yesterday on the Spotify app, with an all-new design alongside the familiar story-style format. This year, the company will assign one of 12 "listening characters" that best fits your streaming habit. The feature is called Me in 2023, and those "characters" range from the Shapeshifter, someone who moves from one artist to another quickly, to the Alchemist, someone more likely to create their own playlists.
Amazon has its own image generator. AWS customers can now check out a preview of Titan Image Generator on the Bedrock console. They can either enter a text prompt to create an image from scratch or upload an image and edit it. Amazon says the tool can produce large volumes of studio-quality realistic images at low cost. Users can also isolate areas in which they want to add or remove details. Amazon also recently revealed its own business-centric chatbot, Q.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-morning-after-google-plans-to-delete-your-old-inactive-accounts-starting-tomorrow-121517859.html?src=rss