Alarmo is the quintessential Nintendo product: It's a fun and quirky spin on a bedside alarm clock (with a motion sensor!) that mines your love for everything Nintendo. It's a $100 device entirely meant to surprise and delight you. But there are also usability issues that make me think the company's engineers haven't encountered any modern gadgets over the past decade (which is how long they've been developing Alarmo).
Here's an example: There's no easy way to input your Wi-Fi password if you ever want to download new themes. Instead you have to patiently spin its bulbous top button until you land on the character you need, then press it down like Mario squashing a Goomba. That may not sound like much of an issue, especially since you may only need to do it once, but it's needlessly frustrating if you have a complex password with multiple letter cases, numbers and symbols. My password is all lowercase letters, thankfully, but it still took me three minutes to punch it in. Instead of getting some rest, it just made me want to throw Alarmo out of my window(-o).
But then I had it lull me to sleep with the sounds of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. At 6:30am, rascally Koroks roused me from my slumber and made their telltale noises as I shuffled around my bed. And once I got up, they performed Hestu's traditional celebratory dance, much to the chagrin of my sleeping cats. All was forgiven.
Devindra Hardawar for Engadget
So, what is Alarmo?
Nobody actually needs Alarmo (officially dubbed the "Nintendo Sound Clock: Alarmo"), but its appeal to Nintendo fans is obvious. It wouldn't be out of place as a prop in Mario Odyssey, with its cartoonishly round, red case, nubby feet and prominent control knob (which glows, naturally). Its 2.8-inch screen is surprisingly small and square, not round like some of Nintendo's promotional videos make it seem, and its speakers are loud enough to fill even large bedrooms with undistorted nostalgia bombs. Controlling it is relatively simple: Twist and push the knob, or use the back button to return to the previous screen. You can also view notifications, like updates on your sleep cycle, by tapping the message button.
I'll admit my bias: I was practically raised on Nintendo consoles, so it's almost as if Alarmo was built specifically for someone like me. I don't really mind that Alarmo's large red case doesn't really fit with the clean aesthetic of my bedroom. But I'm sure it'll be a tougher sell if you're sharing a bed with someone less Nintendo-pilled. (More on that below.)
While Alarmo is mostly pitched as an alarm clock with Nintendo themes — at launch, there are sounds and characters from Mario Odyssey, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Splatoon 3, Pikmin 4 and (strangely enough) Ring Fit Adventure — it also adds a bit of Nintendo charm throughout your day. Alarmo can produce hourly chimes, and also play "Sleepy Sounds" related to your theme. For Breath of the Wild, that includes the crackling of a campfire, nocturnal animals and delightful snippets of the game's score. (I could be mistaken, but it also sounds like there's a bit of score from the moments before a Blood Moon arrives. I hope Nintendo snips that out eventually — nobody wants to go to bed dreading a Blood Moon.)
Devindra Hardawar for Engadget
Does Alarmo actually work?
As an alarm clock, Alarmo gets the job done. It managed to wake me up successfully every day over the past week, and it did so far less jarringly than my iPhone's blaring speaker. It simply felt pleasant to be welcomed into the world by Koroks and Mario. Every toss and turn triggered more sound effects, which slowly nudged me awake. In its default "Steady Mode," Alarmo also gets progressively louder the longer you stay in bed, and more nefarious characters like Bowser might make an appearance. But if you just want things to stay super chill, there's also a "Gentle Mode" that doesn't escalate noise. Alarmo also responds to the mere act of getting out of bed with a huge celebration — honestly, it's about time someone recognized the effort.
While Nintendo provides some rudimentary sleep statistics, based on Alarmo's motion sensing and your alarm settings, they're mostly useless. I think my numbers may have been skewed by my three cats, who sleep on my bed for most of the day, and may be triggering the device's motion sensor. I certainly wish I could have slept for the 17 hours it recorded at one point. (I'm lucky to get six hours these days.) Even if Alarmo's sleep-tracking was functional, there's not much you can do with the data, since it's all stuck on the device. That's one of many areas where having a separate app would have been useful. (You'd think it would work with Pokemon Sleep, but no!)
Devindra Hardawar for Engadget
Another issue? Alarmo's unique motion sensing technology is only made for a single sleeper (just like Google’s latest Nest Hub). If you're in bed beside a partner or unruly kids, Nintendo recommends switching to "Button mode," where you have to tap the top knob to disable the alarm. At least it's easy to change Alarmo's modes, and if you leave the sensor on by mistake, it's not the end of the world when it actually goes off. You'll hear a bit more noise than usual, but you can still hit the top button to quiet things down.
Setting up Alarmo
There are only three things inside Alarmo's box: The device itself, a USB Type A to USB-C cable and a small instruction booklet. Notably missing is a USB power adapter. That's something we've grown used to with smartphones and some of Nintendo's handhelds, but not bundling one is still a pain for anyone who doesn't have spare power adapters. I can just imagine a parent trying to set up Alarmo for their eager child, only to be delayed for a day because they need to run out and buy a separate adapter. That's not surprising and delightful, Nintendo. It's just annoying.
The actual onboarding process is pretty straightforward. Once you plug it in, Alarmo teaches you how to use its top dial and button, and explains how the back button works. You can also rotate the dial to adjust its volume and the device directs you to wave your hand in front of it to test its motion sensing. You have to direct Alarmo's orientation towards your bed and make sure it has a clear view of your sleeping area at the edge of a nightstand or table. The motion sensing won't work if it's too high.
Devindra Hardawar for Engadget
To finish off the setup process, you have to lay down and make sure Alarmo can actually detect your movement. That worked without much fuss on my end, but when it asked me to sit up and lean in a specific direction, there was a delay of a few minutes before it noticed correctly when I was leaning to the right.
At the very least, Nintendo didn't force me to connect to Wi-Fi during the initial setup. Instead, that's triggered when you choose to update its themes, and the entire process required is just frustrating, as I described above. Now, it's not as if Nintendo hasn't learned to use QR codes via websites and apps to simplify logins. You also have to sign in to your Nintendo account once Alarmo is connected to Wi-Fi, but I was thankfully able to use a QR code to do so over my iPhone.
I suppose Nintendo wanted to have a simpler onboarding experience for Alarmo, one that didn't require external authentication or an additional app. But that desire for simplicity still leads to needless frustration.
It would be nice to see a wider selection of themes, as well. I’m not sure many Nintendo fans are clamoring to re-experience the characters and music from Ring Fit Adventure, after all. Where’s Kirby? Where’s Mario Kart? If there’s room for Splatoon and Pikmin, there should be room for Nintendo’s more iconic franchises.
Devindra Hardawar for Engadget
Is Alarmo worth it?
I'm no stranger to tech-infused alarms. My nightstand is already overloaded with gadgets, including an Amazon Echo Dot (which I use to play radio stations), an older Phillips SmartSleep rise light, a Homedics white noise machine, my iPhone 15 Pro Max (charging on a Belkin MagSafe stand) and a Hatch Baby video monitor. As much as I appreciated having bits of Nintendo magic in my bedroom, I didn't love it enough to replace any of the devices I'm already using.
But my daughter Sophia is another story. We've played through most of Tears of the Kingdom together, and I've done my best to teach her in the ways of Nintendo. (I'll save the issues with the company's extreme litigiousness for when she's older.) She's eager to use Alarmo to wake up on her own, without my early-morning badgering. She also loves Koroks, so I'm pretty sure the Zelda theme will be permanently enabled. At least, until Kirby arrives.
I'm not going to try and justify the need for a $100 alarm clock. If you're a big enough Nintendo fan, you've probably already locked in your pre-order. And there's a chance it'll become more compelling over time, if Nintendo manages to add themes and drive down the price. For now, though, it’s a reminder that Nintendo can do more than just churn out consoles and games. There’s still room for the company to take weird swings, it’s just too bad Alarmo is expensive and imperfect.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/nintendo/nintendo-alarmo-review-charming-yet-frustrating-194432214.html?src=rss
Another year, another flagship Qualcomm mobile chip. But things are reportedly a bit different with the Snapdragon 8 Elite, the company's newest offering headed to premium smartphones. For one, it's using the Oryon CPU that debuted in X Elite chips for laptops last year, according to a leaked slide from Videocardz. It's also using a new 3nm process node, instead of last year's 4nm node. That helps the Snapdragon 8 Elite deliver 45 percent faster single and multi-core performance while using 27 percent less power than the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3.
While we're still waiting for more details on the Snapdragon 8 Elite at Qualcomm's Snapdragon Summit later today, there's still a lot we can learn from that single leaked slide. As expected, the company is doubling down on its generative AI capabilities, with a 45 percent faster NPU (neural processing unit) than before, and gaming performance will also see a 40 percent boost. The 8 Elite will reach a maximum speed of 4.32 GHz across two cores, according to Videocardz, and it'll hit up to 3.53 GHz in six smaller cores.
Qualcomm
Given how impressed we were by the Snapdragon X Elite in the Surface Pro and Surface Laptop Copilot+ PCs, it wouldn't be too surprising to see the Oryon CPU working out well on smartphones. According to Smartprix and Onleaks, early benchmarks of the Snapdragon 8 Elite show it scoring 3,025,991 in Antutu, compared to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3's best of around 2.1 million.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/mobile/qualcomms-snapdragon-8-elite-is-its-next-premium-mobile-chip-173525493.html?src=rss
Amazon finally did it: This week the company announced the Kindle Colorsoft, its first color E Ink e-reader. In this episode, Devindra and Cherlynn discuss where this device sits in a world of cheap tablets, and they dive into the updated Kindle Paperwhite and the writable Kindle Scribe. Also, we've got final thoughts on the Meta Quest 3S, the updated iPad Mini and tons of news.
Listen below or subscribe on your podcast app of choice. If you've got suggestions or topics you'd like covered on the show, be sure to email us or drop a note in the comments! And be sure to check out our other podcast, Engadget News!
Amazon announces new Kindle Colorsoft, updated Kindle Scribe and Paperwhite – 0:51
Devindra’s Meta Quest 3S review: impressive VR for a fair price – 38:14
Apple quietly drops new iPad Minis – 45:25
Tesla’s Robotaxi event: lots of big promises that will be hard to fulfill – 51:38
Amazon and Google go nuclear (power) – 54:44
Android 15 starts to hit Pixel devices – 55:51
Analogue 3D will give you 4K N64 games, just don’t call it an emulator – 57:14
Working on – 1:00:48
Pop culture picks – 1:04:38
Livestream
Credits
Hosts: Devindra Hardawar and Cherlynn Low Producer: Ben Ellman Music: Dale North and Terrence O'Brien
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/mobile/engadget-podcast-why-were-intrigued-by-the-kindle-colorsoft-113050334.html?src=rss
You can think of the $300 Meta Quest 3S as a basic Honda Accord of VR headsets. It doesn't have the same high-quality optics as the $500 Quest 3, which is more like a Touring-grade Honda for enthusiasts, but they both get you to the same place: Truly immersive virtual reality. After testing the Quest 3S for the past week, I see it less as a step down and more like an upgrade over the Quest 2. That headset also launched at $300 four years ago, but its price fluctuated up and down depending on supply chain issues, and, over time, it was hampered by aging hardware.
But now Meta has a $300 VR entry that's powered by a much more capable processor, offers better hand and controller tracking, and lets you dip your toes into mixed reality (overlaying digital objects atop a camera feed of real life). While the Quest 3S might just appear to be a less capable Quest 3, it has the potential to be one of the most significant VR products Meta has made yet.
Hardware
As I mentioned in my initial hands-on, the Quest 3S doesn't look very different compared to the Quest 3, aside from its triangular sensor array. It still has a sturdy plastic case, a healthy dose of cushioning around your eyes, and an adjustable Y-shaped strap. You'll have a genuinely hard time telling the headsets apart while they're facing each other, I found myself peeking at their front sensors often while testing them on the same workbench.
Look a bit closer, though, and you'll notice some key differences. For one, you can easily see the telltale concentric circles of Fresnel lenses on the Quest 3S. Meta also used them on the Quest 2, and they've historically been common among cheaper VR headsets. The Quest 3, on the other hand, uses pancake lenses, which have a smooth surface. (More on the technical differences between those two lens types below.)
Devindra Hardawar for Engadget
One way Meta was able to drive down the cost of the Quest 3S was by re-using the 1,830 by 1,920 pixel per eye screen from the Quest 2. The Quest 3's screen offers 30 percent more pixels (2,264 by 2,208 pixels per eye), to deliver a sharper and more realistic image.
The Quest 3S doesn't have a headphone jack, either, so you'll have to plug in a USB-C adapter to get better sound, or connect to wireless headphones. While I'll go to my grave as a defender of 3.5mm audio jacks, but I suppose it makes sense to lose it here. Most Quest 3S users will likely be just fine with its built-in speakers, and anyone who demands the fidelity of a wired connection likely wouldn't mind paying more for the Quest 3 (or shelling out for a $10 USB-C to 3.5mm adapter).
Also gone is the nifty dial for adjusting lens spacing from the Quest 3, instead you have to manually push the lenses into three positions to approximate the best pupillary distance. This involves putting the headset on and taking it off several times (exactly the sort of friction that could easily turn off VR newcomers), but at least it's something you only have to sort once. It could be a bigger problem if you're sharing the headset with your household, though.
Meta added an action button for quickly swapping between mixed reality mode, which shows a camera feed of your room, and a completely immersive VR view. This is something the Quest 3 doesn't have at all — instead, you have to tap its right front corner to jump into mixed reality. Having a dedicated button is simply better for usability, especially for new VR users, so I don't mind that it slightly disrupts the curves of the Quest 3S's design.
The Quest 3S also uses the same Touch Controllers as its more expensive sibling, and they're once again excellent. They've lost the clunky motion tracking ring from the earlier models, now they're simply light controllers that fit your hand like a glove. The joysticks feel smooth and accurate, and the buttons deliver some wonderfully responsive feedback. That's nothing new, though: I've been impressed by Facebook's gamepads since the first Oculus Touch controllers were released in 2016.
Devindra Hardawar for Engadget
What's most important about the Quest 3S is the hardware Meta brought over from its more expensive headset. There's the Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2 processor, which the company claims offers double the graphics performance as the Quest 2, as well as 8GB of RAM. That's only a slight leap from the Quest 2's 6GB of memory, but it's essential for storing more detailed textures.
Now instead of worrying about how a game would perform on the slower Quest 2, developers can simply build for a single hardware specification. Less headaches for devs, ideally, should mean more software on the Meta Quest store. And the hope is that a wealth of new apps will lead to people buying more headsets. Which leads to more apps sold. It's a virtuous cycle that could potentially help Meta out of the death spiral the consumer VR market has been circling for years.
Photo by Devindra Hardawar/Engadget
In use: Snappy and functional VR
The first thing I noticed after donning the Quest 3S: Wow, it sure feels fast. Stepping through the headset onboarding process, downloading a few apps and navigating around the Meta home environment was simply snappy and responsive. That's something I remembered from the Quest 3, as well, but it feels like even more of a revelation on a $300 headset. There was none of the lag or occasional slowdowns I grew used to on the Quest 2.
The actual VR experience looked detailed and immersive, as well. I didn't notice the resolution loss from the Quest 3 much, but it was easily apparent that the cheaper Fresnel lenses led to more artifacts. Edges looked a bit fuzzier, I'd occasionally see haloing around objects, and God rays from extra bright objects often appeared in games like Pistol Whip. There's no doubt the Quest 3's pancake lenses, which aren't as susceptible to the same visual issues, look far sharper.
But here's the thing: I don't think the Fresnel lenses will make much of a difference for VR newcomers. I enjoyed VR headsets for years while living with those same artifacts. And if going with cheaper lenses helped Meta drive the cost of the Quest 3S down to $300, it was worth it. The biggest barrier to the world of VR isn't fidelity, it's cost.
Once I started spending significant time inside the Quest 3S, I also noticed the visual issues less. I was far more interested in trying to conduct the perfect symphony in Maestro, which did a fantastic job of simulating the live orchestral experience thanks to the headset's accurate hand tracking and immersive audio. It was also fun to pick up a random pen from my desk and transform it into a virtual baton. The game certainly looks a bit clearer in the Quest 3, but I would wager many people won't be directly comparing the two headsets.
I also spent an hour playing Mobile Suit Gundam: Silver Phantom — which is less a game and more of an interactive anime film, but it was engrossing enough that I started to ignore the Quest 3S's artifacts. If you're immersed in a genuinely great VR experience, they simply don't matter. Naturally, I also checked out classics like Pistol Whip and Superhot, which are still a blast to play after all these years.
Sadly, the Quest 3S doesn't solve the problem of looking like an absolute buffoon while using VR. That was particularly noticeable while playing I Am Cat, a game that had me climbing up walls, digging up a litter box and absolutely terrorizing the old woman in my virtual house. I was having a blast, but my six year old daughter started to wonder if I was going mad.
I ended up streaming the game to the Meta app on my iPhone, and screen mirroring that to my Apple TV, to give her a live view of everything I was seeing. That, of course, led to her coming up with all sorts of ways for me to wreak kitty havoc in VR. (Pro tip: You can totally make the old lady eat a cat poop sandwich.)
Just like the previous Meta standalone headsets, the Quest 3S can also stream more intensive VR experiences from gaming PCs, either wirelessly or via a USB-C cable. I was able to connect to my rig over Wi-Fi and play 15 minutes of Half-Life: Alyx without any noticeable lag. Sure, it didn't look as great as it did on the Valve Index, but that whole setup still costs $1,000. And, of course, the Index doesn't give you the option of playing wirelessly without a PC. I was also able to stream some non-VR Xbox Cloud Gaming titles, including Halo Infinite and Fortnite, after pairing my Xbox controller. W2D gaming isn't the ideal thing to do in a VR headset, but being able to virtualize an enormous screen still makes it worthwhile, especially if you don't have a large TV.
While Meta positioned the Quest 3 as a mixed reality device, thanks to its color cameras and more capable room mapping, I never found it as useful as the Vision Pro. That's a headset I can wear for hours at a time while I move around my home. The Quest 3's cameras were simply too fuzzy to use for long, and the Quest 3S suffers from the same problem. It's fun to play Meta's First Encounters demo and have aliens invade your home, or jam out in Synth Riders, but the Quest 3 and 3S headsets need far better cameras to truly recreate reality.
That's also why I couldn't stomach using Meta's Remote Desktop app to replicate my PC for too long. The virtual display looked decently sharp, but I had a hard time focusing on that alongside a fuzzy view of my office. I'd much rather just take off the Quest 3S and look at my monitor to get some work done.
Devindra Hardawar for Engadget
As an entertainment device, the Quest 3S is a comfortable way to sit back and enjoy movies, TV and 360-degree videos. Home theater heads might notice that videos don't leak nearly as sharp as they do on the Quest 3, and the contrast and black levels are lightyears away from the Vision Pro's MicroLED displays, but for most people the Quest 3S is perfectly fine. It's certainly better than watching something on a laptop or tablet (or god forbid, a phone).
Throughout my week of testing, the Quest 3S would typically last around two hours and 20 minutes before needing a recharge. That's slightly better than what I saw on the Quest 3, which could drain its battery in just two hours. This is one area where the Quest 3S's lower resolution displays may be a benefit, since they're less demanding on the GPU. You could always plug in a 10,000 mAh external pack to extend the Quest 3S’s 4,324 mAh built-in battery, or just leave it plugged into a charger for extended play sessions.
Devindra Hardawar for Engadget
Pricing and the competition
The Quest 3S starts at $300 with 128GB of storage, but you can double that to 256GB with the $400 model. If you need 512GB of space, then the $500 Quest 3 is your only option. Given the optics advantage of the more expensive headset though, the $400 Quest 3S doesn't exactly seem like a smart buy. If you need more than 128GB of storage, you're better off saving up until you can snag a Quest 3.
Meta still doesn't have much competition in the world of inexpensive standalone VR headsets. HTC's Vive Focus 3 lineup, which now includes the new Focus 3 Vision, starts at $1,000 and is geared more towards enterprises and business customers. HTC Vive's storefront also has far fewer games and apps than Meta's, so their platform doesn't make much sense for average users.
Devindra Hardawar for Engadget
Wrap-up
The Meta Quest 3S is the best $300 standalone VR headset we've ever seen. It's comfortable to wear, and it delivers a snappy VR experience. It's so good, you likely won't notice that it's not as sharp as the Quest 3, or that it also has more visual artifacts. When you’re truly immersed in VR, those problems will fade away.
Alongside the company's Ray-Ban smart frames, its Orion augmented reality glasses, and the billions it's already spent on VR, Meta clearly believes the future of computing rests on your face. But even light smart glasses are still glasses, something that many people avoid wearing by shoving contact lenses onto their eyeballs instead. We don't know how, exactly, the public will respond to true AR glasses. But really, that's a problem for the future. For now, we can just enjoy the Quest 3S for what it is: Great VR at a relatively inexpensive price.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ar-vr/meta-quest-3s-review-impressive-vr-for-300-130013596.html?src=rss
This week, we’re joined by tech critic Paris Marx to discuss Data Vampires, his latest Tech Won’t Save us podcast series. We chat about how data centers suck up vast amounts of power, water and other resources, and why the AI boom is exacerbating those issues. Also, Devindra and Ben dive into a few news stories, including the DOJ inching closer towards a Google antitrust breakup; Nintendo's adorable motion sensing alarm clock, Alarmo; and why Google's Deepmind AI head won the Nobel Prize for chemistry.
Listen below or subscribe on your podcast app of choice. If you've got suggestions or topics you'd like covered on the show, be sure to email us or drop a note in the comments! And be sure to check out our other podcast, Engadget News!
Interview with Tech Won’t Save Us host Paris Marx on his new series, Data Vampires – 2:09
U.S. regulators continue to float the possibility of breaking Google up in antitrust ruling – 25:54
Nintendo announces new hardware…Alarmo, a motion sensing alarm clock – 39:33
Apple Intelligence likely arrives October 28 – 42:27
343 Industries rebrands as Halo Studios and shows off Unreal Engine 5 demo – 44:46
Pop culture picks – 50:36
Livestream
Credits
Hosts: Devindra Hardawar Guest: Paris Marx Producer: Ben Ellman Music: Dale North and Terrence O'Brien
Transcript
(Produced together with Descript's AI transcription.)
Devindra: What's up, Internet? Welcome back to the Engadget Podcast. I'm senior editor Devindra Hardawar. This week I'm joined by podcast producer Ben Ellman. Hey, Ben.
Ben: Hello. Let's talk about Nintendo. And also Google. Google more important.
Devindra: And also all sorts of things. Let's talk about data centers. We've got special guest on Paris Marx, the author, podcast host, and tech critic.
He has a new series at his podcast, Tech Won't Save Us, about data center vampires. So, um You know, we will talk a bit about that. But first folks, if you're enjoying the show, please subscribe to us on iTunes or your podcatcher of choice, leave us a review on iTunes and drop us an email at podcastinggadget.
com. You can also join us Thursday mornings around 10 45 AM Eastern on our YouTube channel for our live stream. This week we did a fun Q and a, which is actually not in this not in the recorded episode at all. So if you want to join us for that fun or go check that out, go take a look at our YouTube channel.
All right. So. I sat down with Paris Marx, who I think has been doing great work over at Tech Won't Save Us, which is a much more, it's a critical look at the tech industry, and Paris has the time and energy to really focus on what the industry is doing wrong. His most recent series, Data Vampires, is pretty much all about data centers and the, The impacts they have on our environment, the resources they use when it comes to power, which is obscene.
They're requiring more and more power from our grid, which is already kind of a mess. You've probably seen the news. We've talked about this too, I think, about Microsoft re upping Three Mile Island, like turning it back on just to power AI data centers. A lot of other companies are thinking about this too.
Water is a big thing. There was a story a couple of years ago about Google essentially hiding the metric crap ton of water they were using from a town in Oregon. And because they didn't want people to know like how much it took to cool those data centers down and things like that. So anyway, Paris and I.
Had a really good chat about this series. So, take a listen, and I'm sure you'll learn a thing or two about data centers and cloud computing. Paris Marx, thank you so much for joining us on the Engadget podcast.
Paris: Absolutely, great to join you.
Devindra: Can you tell us briefly, what are you trying to cover with Data Vampires, and why you're specifically focusing on data centers right now?
Paris: Yeah, it's a really good question, right? And I feel like data centers have gotten more in the public's consciousness through the generative AI moment, but also to a certain degree crypto as well, right? Remember when we were talking about how much energy use crypto was having and, you know, the impacts of these major miners as they were setting up in places around the world and the concerns about them keeping like fossil fuel energy online or even reviving fossil fuel plants.
We've seen a lot of those similar concerns with generative AI. But the thing that really stood out to me is that in certain places where a lot of data centers have been being built for some time, places like Northern Virginia or Ireland, for example, we were seeing these concerns in the communities for some years now, pre pandemic and kind of well before, right?
But what we've seen in the past few years is that as the number of these, especially hyperscale data centers that these major cloud companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Google have been building around the world, have You know, accelerated. What we've seen is not only those issues in, say, Northern Virginia and Ireland get more acute, but that in more and more communities around the world where these things are being built, we're seeing similar concerns and similar opposition.
And so it felt like something to really want to tap in and pay attention to. So the series, you know, looks at why. We're building all these, you know, hyper scale data centers. Looks at some of that community opposition in different parts of the world. You know, the growing kind of climate impacts of something like this and the broader potential harms of generative AI and the types of things that these data centers are powering.
And then, of course, looks at the broader ideology behind all this, that these tech billionaires are trying to push.
Devindra: This is actually really good timing Paris, because I forget if it was during our live stream or a recent podcast episode our listeners were asking the questions about AWS, you know, where did AWS come from kind of, how did we get here?
And I had to like, just pull back from what I remember from reporting over the last few years, but I'm very glad you guys covered that in the first episode because I feel like that sets the stage for. Kind of where we are, right? Like AWS, an offshoot of Amazon trying to figure out its own infrastructure, but basically coming up with the idea that they could rent servers time and server space to two other companies rather than those companies building their own server infrastructure.
Can you talk a bit about that and like how that plays out? basically helped get us here.
Paris: Yeah, definitely. Cause it's such a key moment, right? Not just for what I'm talking about with the series, but for so much of how, you know, digital technology and the internet have developed in the years since, right?
Because so many of these you know, online services and things are built on the cloud now and the cloud really comes out of Amazon web services. So, you know, you go back to the early two thousands and you're starting to have these ideas percolate within Amazon itself, the company, right? Because they're trying to make their processes more efficient, you know, because they're, they are an e commerce company, you know, generally a quite low margin business.
And so they want to do things like as efficiently as possible is, you know, how the story is told. Right. And so, you know, at a certain point these particular people at the company, Chris Pinkham is one of them starts to develop this proposal for something that would, you know, basically create this web service for Amazon itself, you know, by so that all these different teams working on these different projects wouldn't have to spin up their own servers or, you know, figure out their own kind of web services and, and whatnot.
And then what happens then is they say, okay, this, you know, Isn't just something that would be useful inside of Amazon, but it's something that we can then sell to other companies. And I think even in that moment, so this is around you know, 2004, 2005, they're, they're really working on spinning this up.
And Chris Pinkham gets permission to go back to South Africa, where he's from to put a team together to work on this. Cause he wanted to go, you know, back to the country where he came from. And Amazon wanted to keep him. So they said, you go back there, you work on this, you know, you kind of figure it out.
Right. And, and then. You know, they kind of come up with this proposal. I think, you know, they have an idea that this is probably something that's going to be useful. But then there's this interview I found with Jeff Bezos in 2008 where, oh, Malik, you know, the, the tech journalist was asking him about, you know, Whether he was expecting like cloud startups to, to, you know, be built on AWS.
And even at that time, he was like, the venture capitalists are all pushing them to, and we'll serve them if, you know, that's going to be helpful. So even then it's you know, it's still quite nascent. You know, if you think back now, like it's so hard to, to, you know, think of a time, like pre smartphone, like that's even you know, the iPhone is just kind of like getting launched, you know, this is like early days for the transformations that are going to come with like Web 2. 0 and the mobile internet and all this sort of stuff. So it's really like the smartphone and cloud computing that really set the stage for what happens through the 2010s. I think,
Devindra: yeah, this is the birth of cloud computing as we know it.
Because yeah, before companies, if they, they wanted data storage or other, other sort of processes, they had to set up their own servers, which they did. But. I feel like for the likes of like maybe Dell or HP, there's less of a reason for them to do that when they could just get space from Amazon, especially if like usage is is like volatile, like you don't know how much people are going to need.
So you don't want to build out too much hardware. I want to say I've been reporting on startups since 2009, 2010, and like clearly the cloud. Computing element is a big reason why so many of these startups were able to become a thing, right? They didn't have to worry about infrastructure.
They could just have an idea. Instagram didn't need to build a ton to data centers to store photos. They could just get some Amazon time, just a couple of dudes to build a photo filter app and then get bought for a billion dollars. So it all kind of led to that. And Amazon is not the only one we've talked about Microsoft and Azure and everything.
And Azure is doing gangbusters for Microsoft. Like when I write up their earnings, it really is just, yeah, Azure money just keeps coming in and it doesn't look like it's slowing down anytime soon. It's really funny to draw that line, I guess, because I also remember Paris, like when I was doing it work in college, right.
That was like, Oh, one to Oh five. I remember like our email service was an exchange server on site. That is how people used to do computing. Then 05 hit and Gmail came about, right? And then, oh, all of a sudden, viable web email became a thing. And I don't think I've configured an email client since then. So we also shifted a lot of our computing to the cloud just as users.
I guess it makes sense that the companies did that too.
Paris: Yeah, absolutely. Like it was so much more convenient to do that. Especially as these companies made it the convenient thing to do right to try to incentivize that to happen. But even with the companies, as you're saying you know, I talked to Dwayne Monroe, who's a cloud technologist, who's been doing this for 20 years, over 20 years, you know, for the for the series, and he was kind of like giving me these different examples of like, why different companies move to the cloud and things like that.
And in some cases, he was like, you know, the company itself. Was resistant to moving to the cloud. You know, this is like kind of back in the early days, say late 2000s, early 2010s because they didn't want to be dependent on you know, Amazon's infrastructure or one of these major tech companies infrastructure,
Devindra: but
Paris: they but they also didn't want to spend the money on like the capital expenses.
to build out the server infrastructure that they actually needed. You know, as the demand for their website and stuff was growing, right? Like he talked about a book business in particular that was seeing like orders be lost at, at peak times because you know, there was so much demand on, on the servers there.
And so the people at the company itself, like spun up this cloud solution, taking advantage of Amazon web services and then presented it to like management later and was like, look, this works. This is solving our problem. Either we do this or you give us the money for the servers and management was just like, okay, I guess we're going to, you know, use this solution.
And it's one way that these companies got onto it. But then of course the other way was that Amazon and Microsoft and Google all told these companies that if you come onto the cloud, it will be cheaper. You know, you'll save money by not having. You know, so much of your own server infrastructure.
And, you know, that was partly the case. But it has certainly become more expensive over the years as they've sold them more you know, AI tools and all that kind of stuff that you get by being on one of these cloud services. But, you know, I think for a lot of these big companies, there's still plenty of reason to be on you know, one of these cloud providers because of the benefits that it provides and because then they don't need to keep up with their own you know, Microsoft Mechanics infrastructural servers and all the costs and concerns that come along with that.
And they can focus on the things that are much more core to their businesses.
Devindra: It's kind of, it's kind of like, it's a very smart, smart business strategy, right? Like you're telling people, we'll make you, we'll do this cheaper than if you did on your own, but also it makes you dependent on them. And then it's a closed ecosystem.
So you continue to use other products that they have. And that's kind of Microsoft's whole deal with Azure too. Like they're tying co pilot and everything into all of that. So it is kind of a vicious circle of I dunno, of just money and a commitment to these specific companies.
Paris: I think that's an important point you make though, right?
Because earlier you were, you were talking about how, you know, in the early days, all these startups were founded on the cloud and how you know, without the cloud being there, without Amazon web services and Google cloud and Amazon Azure. You know, being these options for these companies, it would have been much more difficult for this kind of startup boom in the post recession times to have really happened.
Right. As we were seeing all this excitement in like the early 2010s about all these companies coming out of the tech industry and whatnot. And so that's one element of that. And then you fast forward to the past few years and Without that massive centralized computational infrastructure that Amazon, Microsoft and Google have built up, it would have been very difficult to see this kind of generative AI boom and generative AI hype that we have, you know, been experiencing for the past year and a half or so or almost two years now, really because, you know, These massive models that use that require so much data and so much computation to train and to use are basically not possible without the centralized infrastructures that these companies have built up.
And so that's another piece of this, too, right? Even when you look at these stories of, like, how open I had this agreement with Microsoft and when Microsoft made its further 10 billion investment, Semaphore reported that a lot of that investment was actually in cloud credits for the company. Cloud computing platform, right?
Because they need all this to make it work. So it's really fascinating to see these connections and how the cloud has been so central to these developments, you know, like I was saying that we've seen over, you know, basically for the past two decades,
Devindra: I feel like we don't talk about the, the term big data anymore, but big data was the idea that, yeah, you just have a lot of your systems.
stuff, your information in the cloud. And then, you know, everybody just kind of wave their hands. Yeah, we will do some sort of processing on that. I think the dream of generative AI is that, Oh, Oh, actually now there is something that could do something with all this data, we can build these models on them.
We just saw the news that Jeffrey Hinton one of the like originators of the idea of the transformer model was just where the Nobel prize too. So and he's somebody who's out there saying is actively speaking against. AI now too, like after making millions from it. They're a very interesting fellow, that man.
But it is hard to I'm both skeptical of the idea of a lot of these companies saying AI will really transform the way we lives. I'm certainly from I do, you know, movie movie criticism and things like that, and artists specifically are really worried about what these tools can do, because they're just kind of deploying them things that can, Replicate someone's face or voice or something or generate entire actors out of thin air.
They're worried about what that could mean for them. But I think looking at the infrastructure of it is a, is a really important thing too. Paris, you bring up a lot of good points in terms of like just resources. That these data centers need thinking water, but also power is certainly going to be a big part of all of this now to can you tell us like, just give us like a surface level of what you've learned and what you've been most surprised about by covering this stuff.
Paris: One of the most surprising things to me was just how much energy and how much water these, these infrastructures require. Right. And how. You know, there's a certain scale there that makes this all really difficult, right? Because you think about data centers of the past and you know, data centers have been around for decades.
Like the creation of a data center and a collaboration of servers is like not a, not a brand new thing. It's the scale that these companies are operating on. That is the more novel thing that we've seen arise over the past couple of decades in particular. Right. And in particular How quickly they are building more of these hyperscale data centers around the world.
And thus, when they build these things near these communities, and often they target these kind of, you know, smaller communities, maybe more rural communities you know, places that maybe had industrial industries in the past and have now been left behind. So they're kind of desperate for something else.
What these communities start to find is that. It creates these real strains on the other, the energy grid or the water system. Right. In the sense of you know, the, the dows in Oregon, where Google built its first company on data center and, you know, has built other ones since they became really concerned about the water use and, you know, listeners probably have.
Seen this in the past few years, but there was this lawsuit that was launched to try to stop the amount of water that Google was using in the city to even be shared with the public, right? Because Google considered this a trade secret and eventually relented in 2022. But then they found that Google was using like almost a third of the water of the whole city.
And that that had significantly increased over the years previous. And even more recently you know, reporting in Ireland showed that now over 21 percent of all of the energy that, you know, the whole country uses all of the electricity from the grid goes to these data centers. And that's not only making it so that in the winter they have these amber alerts where they ask people to reduce their energy consumption because the grid, you know, might not be able to supply everybody and they might have to do rolling blackouts.
But is also making it so that, you know, as they're building more renewable energy to try to displace the fossil fuels, they're not actually able to do that, right? Because they need so much more energy. And we're seeing stories like this across the United States as well where fossil energy is staying online, or there was even a report.
I can't remember who was in the Financial Times or Bloomberg last month. But that the United States is investing in new fossil infrastructure at the fastest rate in, in like years. That's not
Devindra: surprising. There was also the report about Microsoft basically just reviving three mile Island to, to kind of bring that back.
I do want to. It's always tough when I talk about nuclear power with people and I'm kind of unsure where people land, but I've put this out there. Personally, I do think we kind of made a mistake by just completely giving up on the idea of it like decades ago, because what that ultimately led to was far more of a reliance on coal power plants and then eventually natural gas.
There are certainly dangers with nuclear. We don't know what would have happened if we kept building out as much as we were before, but I, at the, on the flip side, what we have is like clearly coal. And all of its you know, all of its refuse in the air has led to asthma for people who live nearby.
It's it's all led to certain issues. But now we're looking back at nuclear because these companies are just kind of desperate to get more power. It's have in your like discussions has nuclear been a thing more people are talking about when it comes to data centers to
Paris: Oh yeah, absolutely. You know, you hear Bill Gates say it, you hear Sam Altman say it, like they're all in on nuclear now, right?
Because they want to power these data centers and generative AI with nuclear. But of course the flip side of that is someone like Sam Altman, of course, saying that he thinks we're going to need a ton more energy and to supply that we're either going to need a technology breakthrough in nuclear energy or to geo engineer the planet until we figure it out.
Or you know, you probably saw this interview with Eric Schmidt that's been going around where he basically says, we're going to miss our climate. targets. So, you know, we may as well bet on on AI and give it whatever the energy it needs and, you know, just hope it solves the climate crisis for us.
This is all deeply disheartening. Social suicide. Yeah,
Devindra: it's very, Eric Schmidt is also the guy who was like, yeah, just steal stuff, you know, steal stuff if you're an AI company and then we'll, we'll deal with it later. Your investors will help you out. I feel
Paris: I feel like when you're thinking about nuclear energy though, like I feel like my position on it is we're, we're in the present.
present right. And we need to think about how we're going to address this you know, as quickly as possible. And I feel like the thing with nuclear is that building new nuclear just takes so long. I live in Georgia,
Devindra: Paris, and it took like almost 20 years to build up a new nuclear plant here. And it went way over budget.
Georgia regulators barely even exist. So it seems like a lot of that costs went into building The pockets of people, you know, supporting the nuclear plan. Georgia power is basically a monopoly down here and also all the customers power bills basically rocketed up. We're paying like at least an extra 30 a month because of that.
That's a bad way to do nuclear. Maybe there's a way to do it, but what is truly sad to me is that we're at a point now where clearly like we need to start thinking about being more efficient, start trying to think about meeting some climate goals. And instead of doing that. What the like capitalist drivers in our, in our world have been doing is a betting on fake money with cryptocurrency and just using up tons of power and resources for that.
And also now generative AI, which is a really cool party trick. But I think it's still like genuinely unproven as a technology that so many of these companies should be like basing their entire businesses around. I am generally, I am just shocked at what Microsoft has done because I have covered this company for so long.
They are so conservative. They barely. Barely change things up. And then as soon as open AI and that partnership happened, they're ready to just flip the table and be all in on co piled and everything. It's a big bet. I don't know if it's going to pay off for them at all. Do you, do you find that reality just kind of sad Paris?
What are you thinking about this? Like we need to be better about this. In fact, no, it's just more power, more power, more resources. That's kind of the road we're going down.
Paris: Like I, I find it very disappointing, right. Which is part of the reason that I made the series. You know, and, and what we see is that, you know, the emissions of Microsoft, the emissions of Google are like through the roof.
There was this reporting recently in the Guardian that said that even the emissions numbers, these companies are providing are like very deceptive because they're relying on offsets to make it seem like they're emitting a lot less than they really are. So like the real story is even worse than the bad story that, That we're getting from them, right?
And I feel you know, I feel like when we talk about data centers and when we talk about AI, and when we talk about the costs of say, cloud computing and things like that, the companies often come back at us and say, well, if you challenge this, then you're not going to have Netflix anymore. And you're going to lose your.
Email and all this kind of stuff, right? The things that you rely on that you expect from digital technology, the things that are convenient. And I think that the thing that they want to distract us from is that the things that are using the most computation and the most storage are, you know, the generative A.
I. S. Of the world, but also this broader model that they have developed over the past several decades that relies on mass data collection on everybody in order to create these advertising profiles to target us with these you know, different things to target us with product ads and all this kind of stuff.
That is actually like hugely determinative to the amount of computation that we require, the amount of storage that we require, why we need to build all these data centers in the first place and why everything needs to become so much more computationally intensive, right? If you're a company like Amazon, Microsoft or Google, you are incentivized now to do that.
To make sure that we are collecting more data on everybody to make sure that we are making everything that we do more computationally intensive because that drives demand for cloud infrastructure. Right? And these businesses need to grow year on year. They always need to be, you know, building more. And as you were saying earlier, they are really Yeah.
Often the profit centers or, or some of the key profit centers of these businesses, you know, less so for Google, I think, because they rely so much on the digital ad money, but like Amazon in particular, a ton of its profits come from Amazon web services. And those profits have fueled its growth into all these other industries, you know, the kind of the monopolization concerns and oligopolization concerns that we've been talking about for the past few years now with Amazon in particular, a lot of that has been driven by corporate Cloud profits and their ability to basically not make any money or make very little money.
And so many of these other businesses. And so when we think about the concerns of this model, it's not to say we need to choose between having the internet or not having the internet. It's is this version of the internet that these major tech companies have created for us? The one that is best serving the public and best delivering what we want to see from digital technology and the benefits that it can provide.
Or can we imagine a different way of doing this that would be far less energy intensive, far less computationally intensive than the one that they are, they are trying to create because that works for their bottom lines and their vision for how this should work. And, and that's kind of the message that I'm trying to get across with the series less so than let's just burn everything down, you know, which also sounds appealing sometimes.
Devindra: I mean, when you go on vacation, you can disconnect a bit. Like it is possible to survive without constant access to all these cloud services. It's much harder. And I don't know if we're like, we can ever really step back, but it is, it's a funny thing to point out because a lot of these companies are like pushing for more computing, you know, usage, more resource consumption, even though that I feel like that has gone at odds with the way computing has tended to go, which is make our chips more efficient, make the data centers a little more efficient, make our mobile devices and everything.
faster, but also trying to reduce less power. We're also seeing devices do things like like the new iOS 18 has really smart charging features so that there's a mode where you could just like charge when I'm, you know, when my grid is using renewable power, it's trying, they're trying to do smart things like that.
And But it is, it feels like all those little tweaks for efficiency are dropping the bucket when these companies are just like, yeah, we're just going to burn power and water and everything to, you know, create a generative AI search that you can't even tell is, is fully accurate or not. It feels like we have.
Just missed the boat on something here. I'm sure you're going to have some sort of follow up series, Paris. So I'm looking forward to seeing maybe if you dive deeper onto generative AI or cryptocurrency these are all topics like we're bringing up this stuff all the time, but you have the ability to go deeper.
I appreciate that. So yeah. Congrats on the work in the series so far. Where can people find Data Vampires and what else should people know about your work?
Paris: Yeah, definitely. You know, if they just find Tech Won't Save Us, my podcast on whatever podcast platform they listen to it'll be coming out on that feed every Monday for the rest of October.
You know, it'll be a four part series and, you know, I'm on all the social media platforms and everything. If people want to find me at Paris Marks, but it was great to talk to you and thanks so much for having me on the show. Yeah,
Devindra: great. I also want to point out like a Patreon subscribers, right? They can listen to the whole series.
Straight up. That's
Paris: right. Yeah. Thanks for the, yeah, I'm always thinking about that too. So yeah, if, yeah, if anyone wants to support on patrion. com slash tech won't save us, they can get the full series today instead of waiting for it to continue to drop through the month.
Let's move on to some other news, and I think the most interesting story that hit this week is more details about the Justice Department's plans for Google after it found that they were a monopoly for its search engine. There's still nothing firm happening yet, but the latest news is that the Justice Department has submitted a court filing.
Saying it's considering quote behavioral and structural remedies that would prevent Google from using products such as Chrome play and Android to advantage Google search and Google search related products and features. And it's currently considering the company from considering limiting or prohibiting Google from signing contracts with other companies like it did with Apple to prioritize its search.
And it really seems like the government is genuinely floating the idea that maybe some parts of Google should be broken up. We are not. anywhere further along than we were when we last talked about this thing. But it is interesting to see the government still talking about this. Ben, has your thinking around this changed at all since then?
Because I've been looking more and more at other situations where the government forced a major monopoly to kind of break apart. The biggest example is like AT& T. Which held a stranglehold on phone service across America for a long while, it was broken up into smaller baby bell services.
And the, from everything I've read, like those services ended up flourishing. Like they were all successful on their own. Some of them were reabsorbed back into AT& T as an entity, but Verizon, Verizon started out as a baby bell and now is like a legitimate competitor. And this whole, that whole thing lowered prices for consumers.
gate, like just the idea of having more competition out there. Just generally made the consumer market a bit better. There were arguments that maybe it delayed the development of high speed internet. Because all these different companies then had to manage their own lines and everything. And if AT& T was its own thing, it could just push high speed service lines and things much faster.
So that was maybe the cost, but I do think the overall consumer benefit was better. What's your thinking now?
Ben: So the thing that struck me in this article was that Of course, like Google's public policy head said, Hey, this is going to stifle innovation, just like what you were saying with maybe internet rolling out a little bit slower because it wasn't run by a monopoly, but the same logic has been used for saying we can't not have workers work 12 hours a day.
That means the factories will shut down. So you don't really know what would happen if you break up. A company until it actually happens. It's possible that Android or like in the entire pixel division, if it were broken off, could be come like a really interesting company that does smart home and phones and, you know, maybe TVs and stuff we haven't.
Let them really spread
Devindra: their wings and fly and I will also say I have complained a lot about Google as a product company I think they are very bad as a consumer product company, especially when it comes to hardware And just making things that they just kind of kill off and Google as a company didn't start out doing that, right?
Google was a search company. That was their thing. Then they became an advertising company. And then the mobile web started becoming a thing. And they saw what Apple was doing. They were like, okay, yes, let's start making devices too. Initially, that was through partners. That was through like Motorola and LG and everybody.
So they have been really, really late to making their own hardware. I don't think they ever got the hang of it. Look at what happened to nest and just kind of a disaster. That was Fitbit kind of got absorbed into the whole Google thing. There is a good argument to carve out the device side of the company, or carve out what Android is, and let the search and advertising part of the company be its own thing.
Yeah, I think that could ultimately be better for consumers, because then And then they can, then the hardware people can actually do some good user interface and user experience work without being like, be beholden to what middle managers and the other higher ups want, which from all the reporting is the constant problem with Google.
And would we
Ben: be more likely to see those cute little marshmallow cars actually on the road if Google were only focusing on Google stuff rather than absolutely everything under the alphabet umbrella.
Devindra: Yeah, yeah, and also I don't think yeah, Google's alphabet, but even that rebranding never really took, right?
It was more of a conceptual thing, whereas when Facebook rebranded as meta and became its own thing it was very much Okay, this is actually the guiding force of what the company is going to do say what you will about Facebook and meta Like at least Mark Zuckerberg's crazy idea to rebrand itself for the metaverse actually put them in a good position for VR AR maybe AI stuff.
What is alphabet? It's just a soup of companies. Like that's really, that's really all it is. It doesn't, it doesn't really actually mean anything. So yeah, we've talked about Google search getting worse. We've talked about so many experiences getting worse, Chrome eating up all your RAM. There, there is a good argument that just by having these people focus on their own things without building in interoperability between all their different fingers that we'd ultimately have better products.
So. We shall see. I do want to bring in a good legal expert to talk about this too. Yeah.
Ben: Also we haven't seen a actually huge antitrust case in a while. The people who watched Ma Bell be broken up, they're in nursing
Devindra: homes now. They are. Well, I watched the Microsoft antitrust trial, which was the other big tech one, and that led to nothing.
Yeah, nothing happened with Microsoft. It was a slap on the slap on the wrist fine. And it was like, okay, Microsoft, you gotta make people choose their browsers, right? Yeah. 10 years later, basically over 10 years later, after that happened, I was a young blogger writing up the news in like 2010 ah, yes, Microsoft is finally responding to the end of the antitrust inquiry where they were, you know, determined to be monopolizing with their Explorer and having that bundled by the time any action happened.
It didn't make a difference. I do wonder if the D. A. J. Has Taken all this in and it's just maybe we should be a little more proactive and a little more forceful about how we push these things. It is, we don't know what will happen. We don't know how it'll affect like the free market or whatever.
But I also think like we have seen these services degrade so much because of Google's own monopoly on search and also like now they're just so focused on AI. Are they going to be caring about fixing these other product issues? I don't really think so. I don't know. Okay. Speaking of Google, by the way, like there's a bunch of other news going around.
Two
Ben: Nobels were Google related this year. Demis
Devindra: Hassabis the head of Google DeepMind that is their AI arm. So it's the Google AI stuff essentially Google's DeepMind AI head, this is a guy not directly working on physics, is one of two people who won a Nobel Prize chemistry award.
Ben: Help the development of A modeling program for protein folding.
There you go. So, the really funny thing about this is that hopefully in the next few weeks, we're going to have a segment on the show about protein folding and distributed computing. Because months ago, someone emailed us asking a question about whether or not folding at home is still relevant in the age of AI modeling of similar biological processes.
And I was like, Hey, that's really interesting. Like I did a little bit of research on it and then we just ended up getting pulled away from that question by, you know, the tides of following weekly news. Now, since we had a. Episode where it seemed like we had a space for another subject. I was like, okay, let's look into this again So I started looking into it this week and then literally yesterday, Wednesday, October 9th They announced that DeepMind founders and and higher ups won the Nobel Prize for protein folding.
So this is really interesting I hope to get someone to talk really knowledgeably about this on sometime soon The prize was Demis Hasis John Jumper, and then a guy who is a professor at the University of Washington who has done similar work with like machine learning, figuring out protein folding, the, these,
Devindra: these all really seem like Nobel prizes for ai.
We also saw the news that well, one of somebody who used to work at Google. Also won a Nobel prize in physics. That's Jeffrey Hinton, who he left Google last year. We talked about, there were a lot of articles about him talking about the dangers of developing AI, but he and his team, I believe were one of the first to start doing the inherent.
The initial technology around machine learning, or at least was it neural nets? Like the idea of building for a neural net was something they, he had worked on. What is interesting here, both so really AI being highlighted in the Nobel prizes. Does everybody remember why the Nobel prizes, why the Nobel prize is the thing?
At all.
Ben: Because the guy who invented dynamite said, Hey, maybe I've done more harm than good, So I'd like to award people doing more good than harm.
Devindra: So, anyway, those examples of AI Certainly could be used for good. Better chemistry modeling, better protein folding modeling. But it does feel a little weird now that we're like, Yeah, yeah, give AI all the things.
Surely this will be a net good for humanity.
Ben: Something that really strikes me about this is that the Nobel Prizes are usually really okay with being a bit behind the curve. So, a scientific discovery might have happened and then 10 or 15 years later, the Nobel Committee will look at it and say, at, you know, everything that happened in the wake of this scientific breakthrough.
Let's say it's in, you know, x ray crystallography a long time ago, or gene editing with CRISPR like 10, 15 years ago, they are totally okay with not like giving the. Award to like the newest hottest thing which makes me wonder. Do they know something that we don't? I is this like a way of heralding in okay Yeah, guys, we are in a new era.
Like we are giving out a couple of Nobel Prizes for Artificial intelligence related stuff because it is
Devindra: that big a deal It's it feels like an early like they just don't want to be left out You know, just so that they're doing this. Can you, you should read the description of why These two guys were awarded the the prize in physics
Ben: Yeah, so the royal swedish academy of sciences said that it awarded the prize to john hopfield and jeffrey hinton This is the nobel prize in physics Because they used tools from physics to develop methods that are the foundation of today's powerful machine learning It is revolutionizing science and engineering Engineering and daily life.
That is a very interesting stretch. Again, like the Nobel prizes are usually given out for a new method of figuring out how like a subatomic particle moves or something like a really novel approach to some tiny little thing that usually comes out of CERN does not come out of Palo Alto or Mountain View.
Devindra: It's just I do feel like, yeah, we would have maybe waited a little until generative AI and a lot of the, the machine learning tools genuinely did more for our society, but I feel like they're just trying to get ahead of themselves. Okay, but on the
Ben: other hand generative AI, that's like a relatively new thing, so, the Nobel Prize is not being awarded for that.
It's being awarded for maybe all of the advances that have been happening in machine learning for the last 25, 30 years.
Devindra: The, the neural networking stuff, the stuff that has kind of gotten us to this point or the idea of training computer like this, I'm, you know, we have talked a little bit about quantum computing and what that could mean.
And to me, that feels like the thing that could actually be really useful for science is if we could ever get a handle on it. But that is the idea of you know, information, you know, points existing as like super states, you know, where it's not just binary bits.
Ben: And my not so hot take is that we're not going to get anywhere close to AGI until we actually have a quantum computer that works.
And we barely can get qubits to work right now.
Devindra: We can barely get qubits to work. That's the, that's the whole thing. But I do feel like those two may be interconnected. I don't know about AGI, but I've written, I've read enough about the singularity in my lifetime, Mr. Michio Kaku, who was on the show at one point too, was a big like proponent of that.
To think like people have been kind of hoping for this thing. I just don't know if it's legit or if it's like people waiting for the second coming of Jesus. Or something like it feels a little bit of like it
Ben: is pretty religious But you know what other people feel religious about nintendo and nintendo released a new piece of hardware But it's not the switch to tell us more about it.
Devindra: It's not the switch to I don't know if you all saw this because this just dropped last well yesterday But nintendo unveiled alarmo a 100 motion sensing alarm clock It looks like a cute little it's round has like nintendo fonts You On it, like for, for the time and everything, you can choose different themes from different games, like Super Mario Odyssey, Legends of Zelda, Breath of the Wild, Splatoon 3, Pikmin 4, and Ring Fit Adventure.
You can set wake up time. So what's kind of cool, it's similar to the Amazon motion sensing alarm clock we've talked about before. It starts to make the noise of, of the like game you choose. And as you move, as you like, you know, toss and turn in bed, trying to wake up. Okay. It'll start making noises.
So like the Mario theme makes like ring makes like coin noises as you're like tossing around and when you get up and leave the bed, There's like a big celebratory noise, at least according to the video. So that's,
Ben: yeah. And as I understand it, it's not just making coin noises as you roll around in the middle of the night.
It's like kind of trying to get you out of bed. So the more that you're moving, it's rewarding. It will, it
Devindra: seems like it also does track your, your sleep cycle a little bit too. So like there, there is like some data that's happening there.
Ben: It doesn't have integration with Pokemon sleep. That seems like a missed opportunity.
The article on Engadget talks about Hey, if you want like Nintendo themed sleep tracking, use Pokemon sleep. It seems like such an easy slam dunk to just put those. You had one job, Nintendo. You had one job.
But otherwise it's just. Feels like surprisingly Nintendo, like every now and then Nintendo comes out with just a thing out of total left field. You know, Labo what's another example of something that came out before Labo because Nintendo has been doing this
Devindra: for
Ben: a long time.
Devindra: Just like a standalone.
I mean, you know, the game and watch stuff. Those were like little portable tiny things, but I think it's something like Ring Fit Adventure where Nintendo does the thing and you just look at it and go huh. Okay, that's, that's weird. But then like it sort of percolates in your brain a little and you're like, that's actually pretty cool.
I would actually like that. Remember the whole it was at least two or three months then where people were really hot on Ring Fit Adventure. Was that around the time of the pandemic? It might've been. It was like early pandemic too. It was like good timing of us just all being stuck at home.
Okay, Nintendo made this weird squishy circle thing. That's cool.
Ben: But also people were wondering like, how do I work out if I'm not at the gym? It feels very Japan just to be a game company that just comes out of left field and does an alarm clock. Intelligent, kind of intelligent clock to Apple intelligence, Apple intelligence finally arrives on October 28th.
What do you think about that?
Devindra: I mean, I just want to bring it up because, Hey, we have a time. We have a, you know, a general sense of when it's coming. I've been testing out these features for a while. And I think a lot of them are really cool. The notification summary has been is it's so good because sometimes.
Friends would just be like texting, right? Like you get five or 10 texts all at once. And you're like, what, what is happening? And you take one look down. It's somebody is mad about this. Yada, yada, yada. Like the summaries have generally been very good for me. And I think that stuff is good. Removing background objects from photos.
Good stuff just really really helpful in the moment. What's that feature called on pixel phones? I forget what Android in general about Android specifics. But yes, there there was like a magic erase option there, too Yeah, I was going to say magic eraser, but that is a that's a clean thing it's something like that too, but It works really well like in terms of highlighting a specific object and removing it there are instances where it's too big and it can't like extrapolate like what should be a background so it looks really messy but sometimes like it just like smooths out a bright ugly object in the background was just like general unfocused stuff and that actually may be better.
For a particular photo. So, and you know, I like those things. I think people are really gonna enjoy this. If you want to try them out early, you can just go install the public, the public test release. That's better than the developer candidates stuff I've been using. So. You can, you can get a good look at this.
We're not getting the series stuff yet. The features will all be rolled out piecemeal. I do have the new Siri that I've been testing just in terms of the look of it. And also that is very cool. I've talked about that being cool. So I don't know. I'm looking forward to it. Ben, like this is probably a good year for you to upgrade your poor little iPhone SE to see what you can get for that, or that could, that could just be your China phone.
You know, whenever, whenever that happens.
Ben: Yeah, whenever I bring it to China and I don't want to get spied on. But I'm also thinking like it's just good to have kind of like a backup phone knocking around because I also have like my old iPhone SE. I actually still have every iPhone that I've gotten to date.
Like up until, or like I officially switched in 2014. So I have a five C an se, an SE two, and you know, it might be time for a big boy phone sometime soon. Okay. So let's talk about Halo. Let's talk about Halo Three Four. Free Industries is now Halo Studios. How do you feel about that?
Devindra: I feel good about that.
I'm gonna start playing this video too.
Ben: I'm pretty sure that the reason that they rebranded from 3, 4, 3 to Halo Studios is only because 3, 4, 3 industries. Has become known as the one that released the bad Halo games and they want to distance themselves from that.
Devindra: I mean, yeah, there, there is sort of that too, but I think like the sometimes.
A rebranding is good, because I don't think the people who were initially at 343 when the whole like Bungie break off happened, like that was when Bungie left, right? And then they went off to do Destiny and do their own thing, so Microsoft kept the Halo brand, kept the Halo stuff. That team became 343 Industries.
They had a bad run. Because they were so trapped in terms of doing what Halo did in an era where Call of Duty was coming up. Shooters were getting faster and more dynamic. So basically, I just want to say we saw this news that 343 has talked about rebranding to Halo Studios. But also, more interestingly, it's moving to Unreal Engine 5, and they produced a demo video that shows us like what Unreal Engine 5 was.
It is very great. And it's very, it's very, Pretty. It looks very un Halo. It looks almost it's just so detailed and photorealistic and lifelike. The engine they were using before. People were saying there is stuff in there going back to Halo Reach. Going back to, like, when 343 initially started working on the game.
So that made it really
Ben: Was that their own engine?
Devindra: That, that was. That was a custom engine, too, which is No developer wants to do that. Everybody goes to unreal or other things like because they want to, they want to have a platform that's easier to maintain and manage, and they don't want to do all that work themselves.
I think Capcom is one of the rare ones to have a good hit with its own RE engine, which started with Resident Evil seven, right. And that ended up being used across so many other things. But the, the footage we see here. Looks good. They don't look like Halo environments. They look like more detailed There is they talked about several games being made in the Halo universe right now I've got a lot of feelings about Halo because I I spent a lot of my time in college playing the first Halo in like Local, you know LAN matches with other people at college and that was before Xbox Lives That was before online multiplayer was just people gathering around TV You You could hear shouting and other dorm, like other dorm rooms down the hall.
When you beat somebody, there was like a fun, visceral element to
Ben: that. I really wonder what master chief is going to look like with that much detail. Is it going to look a little bit unreal? Unreal Tournament? No.
Devindra: Unreal Engine? Wow. The show gives you, it gave you a pretty good look at what a super realistic Master Chief could be like.
The, the main thing is New engine's good. I think it's a good thing to have a fresh start and also being able to use more modern technology. Yeah, Brie brand is good. And also,
Ben: why don't you decentralize the master chief? I know that the master chief is going to be like your big thing. And that's what sells like all of the other merch, the shirts, the like little statues of John one, one seven and all of that.
But you know what the people actually want? Unreal T2.
Devindra: I mean, yeah. Let's talk about ODST, which was a cool experiment of a game. Kind of novelistic, had a cool jazz soundtrack, that's like very late era Bungie. No Master Chief. No Master Chief at all. Was, it told a very specific story. No Spartans at all, right?
No Spartans, yeah. That was about humans, right? ODST was mainly humans.
Ben: That was the Helldivers of the or the Starship Troopers of the Halo universe. This
Devindra: is, this whole thing is sort of like the Star Wars problem, right? Where the franchise became so big, it is really hard to steer the ship into doing new things and exciting things.
And Microsoft is not a company that's really known for taking chances too, especially with a flagship franchise. But maybe things have gotten so bad because Halo Infinite took so long to develop, was such a mess to develop. I actually really like that game. I think the single player campaign is a lot of fun.
It's very open world. I've done almost a hundred hours of multiplayer in that game. Like it's just a good experience. Cause I miss Halo. I like Halo quite a bit as like an experience. So. Infinite was good, but it was not the success they needed. It was delayed by a year. It didn't arrive when the new Xboxes arrived.
So Microsoft needs something that can kind of help them. Listen, open it up. Don't just do Halo, like CG tactics like that. What were, what were those called? Oh yeah. That it was, I think it was
Ben: literally just,
Devindra: Halo tactics, but you know. If you're going to do tactics experiment a little bit with the forum, give us give us something that looks like a 2d tactics games, because that is what that's what people want right now between like stuff we've seen, like project triangle give us like a halo, you know, visual novel of some kind, because one thing that really pulled me into that universe were the early books, which really gave us some background that the games didn't really cover.
So there's a lot of, oh yeah. So there was halo tactics and then there was, I think, Halo Wars too. Yes. Halo, Halo's good stuff. I think this is a good sign. It will be years before any of this actually leads to anything. I don't know. Halo Infinite was supposed to be this thing where they existed for a while.
Forever Halo, right? Halo that you keep playing, you, you keep doing the the battle pass. Maybe they add more content to it or something. I don't know if the idea is that they will eventually change the engine for Halo Infinite. That seems like too much work for a game that they've already spent, poured too much time into.
But I would love to see like what they do with this. I don't know, like a classic normal Halo game starring Master Chief just seems like the worst thing to do at this point. So Yeah, let's move on to our pop culture picks for the week. What do you got Ben?
Ben: So a couple weeks ago, I saw this documentary called set exclamation point it's about a table setting competition at the California State Fair And it's not like classy table setting where you're using like fine China and everything It is like its own world of God, the taste is honestly just so bad.
It feels like a lot of these people are, you know, grown ups doing high school dioramas or something. It was an interesting look into a very specific world, just you know, any other documentary about, you know, Competitions, especially, you know, there've been a bunch on dog shows. Sideways was a fiction movie, but it was about, you know, the wine industry.
Right. But I feel like it didn't go deep enough into the actual personal lives of the people who were competing. Why are they doing this? What is their like? overall life background. Some of them say that they spend like thousands of dollars on setting these tables every year, and they might do multiple competitions a year too.
So what's going on here? There was this one couple the wife was, you know, a yearly competitor in the table setting competition. And her husband was just like, Yeah, I participate. You know, whenever they had him in the sit down confessional interviews, it seemed like he was really gritting his teeth, but I wanted to know so much more about that.
So, if you want a fun documentary that's a little bit like reality TV, check out Set. I think it's on Travel Channel or something? It's also, it, it is from the Travel Channel. I know that it's on Apple TV. Travel Channel's
Devindra: still making stuff, huh? I, I only started watching them for Bourdain's thing at that point.
That was no reservations. Good stuff. Okay. Thank you. Thank you for that, Ben. I would never think of watching a table setting documentary. I want to quickly shout out the new Uzumaki show. This is the latest Jinji Ito adaptation after we've had so many bad adaptations. This is one like co produced by Adult Swim too.
So it has a higher budget or like supposedly. Supposedly like more went into this than the other ones, like the Junji Ito series on Netflix, which was terrible and really crummy. This is only going to be four episodes. It's already mired in controversy. I love the very first episode. Uzumaki is a story.
About a town that's infested with spirals. I don't know if you're aware of this story, Ben, but it is. Junji Ito goes full horror, you know, in fun, cosmic, creepy body horror ways. And Uzumaki is like his, his masterpiece, right? The first episode covers I think some of the more like well known the early stories of the of the manga.
I've not seen the second episode yet, but immediately people were like freaking out because the first episode is really well animated. It has the stark black and white style of his, you know, his illustrations.
Ben: Yeah, it looks like the manga page just became animated, which is really, really cool.
Yeah,
Devindra: just moving and really nice flow, like hair moves, character moves. There's a lot of like nice detail to it. From what I've seen, there was a big fall off, wasn't there? It was a huge fall off in episode two. People are freaking out about it. I've also seen some people say, it's not as bad as you say, but even, I think the, even the showrunner was talking about yeah, they were doing the best they could with what they had.
And I think the first episode took forever, took a lot of money to make and they had to move it along much more quickly. And I don't think the studio wanted to give them more time to work on it faster too. So once again, another like Jinji Ito adaptation, that's like going through kind of a mess, but the first episode is good.
So at least go check that out. It's streaming on Max, the one to watch for HBO right now. Or if you have a Delta Swim, it's there too. So yeah, I was going to play the trailer and then I thought, thought better because I don't want to, don't want to inflict Jujito's imagery on people if they don't, if they're not ready for it.
Ben: Thank you so much, everyone. Our go to Theme music is by game composer Dale North. Our outro music is by our former managing editor, Terrence O'Brien. And the podcast is produced by me, Ben Elman. You
Devindra: can find Devindra at Devindra on Twitter, BlueSky, Mastodon, all the fun places. Oh, I also did a guest spot on the Extra Hot Great Podcast this week.
So check me out there. I talked about the new HBO of the new Mac series, The Franchise, which is the superhero spoof sort of thing. It's, it's a lot of fun to check out that. That's a podcast about movies and TV at the filmcast, thefilmcast. com.
Ben: The best way to reach me is sending us an email at podcast at engadget.
com. I'm the one checking that inbox the most often leave us a review on iTunes and subscribe on anything that gets podcasts that includes Spotify.
Devindra: Thanks folks. We're
Ben: out.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/computing/engadget-podcast-hunting-data-center-vampires-with-paris-marx-133050414.html?src=rss
Alongside its new family of Arrow Lake desktop hardware, Intel today also gave us a few tidbits around its upcoming Arrow Lake H mobile chips for high performance laptops. First off, they're not expected to arrive until the first quarter of 2025 — but the slight wait might be worth it, as Intel says they will offer powerful new Xe GPUs with XMX. Thanks to that upgrade, the GPU alone will offer four times better AI workload processing than its previous chips, alongside double the ray tracing performance and twice as much cache (8MB L2).
Notably, though, these new chips will still lag behind the company's less powerful Lunar Lake processors when it comes to NPU and overall AI TOPS (tera operations per second) figures. Arrow Lake H's NPU will hit 13 TOPS, the new GPU will reach 77 and the CPU will offer 9 TOPS. Taken altogether, it'll offer up to 99 TOPS of performance. Lunar Lake, meanwhile, sports a 48 TOPS NPU and up to 120 TOPS of system-wide AI performance.
Intel
The difference makes sense when you consider what these chips are meant for. Lunar Lake is mostly geared towards ultraportables and slim workstations, while Arrow Lake H chips are targeted at demanding notebooks with desktop-like performance. While they can technically be called AI PCs, Arrow Lake H's low NPU performance doesn't meet the bar for Microsoft's Copilot+ badge (those require at least 40 TOPS NPUs). You'll be able to run basic AI features, like Windows Studio Effects in video chats, but not more complicated tasks like Recall.
Intel didn't have many other details to share about Arrow Lake H, but we'll likely hear more at CES 2025.
Intel
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/computing/laptops/intels-upcoming-arrow-lake-h-laptop-chips-will-offer-beefier-gpus-for-ai-workloads-150021214.html?src=rss
Instead of cramming more technology into its Quest VR headsets, which would inevitably escalate their price, Meta has taken the opposite approach with the Quest 3S. It's a slightly bulkier, slightly less sharp version of the Quest 3 starting at $300, almost half off that headset's $500 launch price. The Quest 3S pitch is clear for consumers and developers alike: It's a more powerful and feature-rich budget device than the now defunct Quest 2, and since it has the same processor and GPU as the Quest 3, developers don't have to worry as much about supporting older headsets either.
Based on my brief hands-on time with the Quest 3S (our full review is in the works), it's easy to see how this could be another hit for Meta. Despite its lower price, it doesn't look or feel inferior to the Quest 3 at first. The only noticeable external difference is that it uses a triangular array of sensors up front, instead of three pill-shaped modules. While it's a bit larger than the Quest 3, it still sits comfortably on my face, and is easily adjustable via its rear and top straps.
I winced when I noticed it no longer had a 3.5mm jack, leaving you to use wireless headphones or a USB-C dongle instead, but its absence makes sense for a cheaper product. I'd wager the people who care most about a headphone jack would also opt for the Quest 3, instead.
Meta cut corners all over the place to drive the Quest 3S's price down. There are only three lens adjustment positions to match your pupillary distance, whereas the Quest 3 has finer controls. And instead of pancake lenses, the Quest 3S uses Fresnel lenses which can lead to additional glare or other artifacts. Those also pair together with lower quality displays, which offer 1,832 by 1,920 pixels per eye (like the Quest 2), instead of the Quest 3's 2,064 by 2,208 resolution.
Photo by Devindra Hardawar/Engadget
What's more important for consumers is what Meta does include in the Quest 3S. It sports the same Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2 processor and 8GB of RAM, and uses the same updated touch controllers. So while the Quest 3S might look a bit fuzzier than the Quest 3, it should perform the same.
That's something I immediately noticed upon booting up the Quest 3S. Navigating its main menu and the Quest store felt effortless and snappy, with little lag between screens or apps loading. The touch controllers still feel very responsive, too, something I confirmed with a few Beat Saber sessions. While it does get a bit warm, like its pricier sibling, the Quest 3S trucked along without any noticeable slowdown while I was installing several large games. The mixed reality experience was also similar to that on the Quest 3 — it's far from lifelike, but it's clear enough to read text on your monitor or phone in a pinch.
Based on a few hours of testing, the Quest 3S clearly manages to deliver an immersive VR experience at a lower price point. But we’ll have to spend a bit more time in virtual reality to determine how, exactly, it differs from the Quest 3.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ar-vr/meta-quest-3s-hands-on-a-300-vr-headset-without-major-compromises-133012786.html?src=rss
At this point, you probably either love the idea of making realistic videos with generative AI, or you think it's a morally bankrupt endeavor that devalues artists and will usher in a disastrous era of deepfakes we'll never escape from. It's hard to find middle ground. Meta isn't going to change minds with Movie Gen, its latest video creation AI model, but no matter what you think of AI media creation, it could end up being a significant milestone for the industry.
Movie Gen can produce realistic videos alongside music and sound effects at 16 fps or 24 fps at up to 1080p (upscaled from 768 by 768 pixels). It can also generative personalized videos if you upload a photo, and crucially, it appears to be easy to edit videos using simple text commands. Notably, it can also edit normal, non-AI videos with text. It's easy to imagine how that could be useful for cleaning up something you've shot on your phone for Instagram. Movie Gen is just purely research at the moment —Meta won't be releasing it to the public, so we have a bit of time to think about what it all means.
The company describes Movie Gen as its "third wave" of generative AI research, following its initial media creation tools like Make-A-Scene, as well as more recent offerings using its Llama AI model. It's powered by a 30 billion parameter transformer model that can make 16 second-long 16 fps videos, or 10-second long 24 fps footage. It also has a 13 billion parameter audio model that can make 45 seconds of 48kHz of content like "ambient sound, sound effects (Foley), and instrumental background music" synchronized to video. There's no synchronized voice support yet "due to our design choices," the Movie Gen team wrote in their research paper.
Meta
Meta says Movie Gen was initially trained on "a combination of licensed and publicly available datasets," including around 100 million videos, a billion images and a million hours of audio. The company's language is a bit fuzzy when it comes to sourcing — Meta has already admitted to training its AI models on data from every Australian user's account, it's even less clear what the company is using outside of its own products.
As for the actual videos, Movie Gen certainly looks impressive at first glance. Meta says that in its own A/B testing, people have generally preferred its results compared to OpenAI's Sora and Runway's Gen3 model. Movie Gen's AI humans look surprisingly realistic, without many of the gross telltale signs of AI video (disturbing eyes and fingers, in particular).
Meta
"While there are many exciting use cases for these foundation models, it’s important to note that generative AI isn’t a replacement for the work of artists and animators," the Movie Gen team wrote in a blog post. "We’re sharing this research because we believe in the power of this technology to help people express themselves in new ways and to provide opportunities to people who might not otherwise have them."
It's still unclear what mainstream users will do with generative AI video, though. Are we going to fill our feeds with AI video, instead of taking our own photos and videos? Or will Movie Gen be deconstructed into individual tools that can help sharpen our own content? We can already easily remove objects from the backgrounds of photos on smartphones and computers, more sophisticated AI video editing seems like the next logical step.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/metas-movie-gen-looks-like-a-huge-leap-forward-for-ai-video-but-you-cant-use-it-yet-165717605.html?src=rss
This week, Microsoft started rolling out the Windows 11 2024 update, but it quickly became clear that the company was far more eager to unveil new features for its Copilot AI and Copilot+ AI PCs. In this episode, Devindra and Cherlynn chat about Microsoft's current AI priorities, and what it means for people with older PCs. Also, we discuss the death of HoloLens and Microsoft giving up on AR as Meta, Apple and even Snap build for an augmented reality future.
Listen below or subscribe on your podcast app of choice. If you've got suggestions or topics you'd like covered on the show, be sure to email us or drop a note in the comments! And be sure to check out our other podcast, Engadget News!
The new Windows 11 update goes all in on Copilot integration – 1:25
Amazon announces Fire HD 8 tablet line along with a few (pretty boring) AI features – 28:28
Tech debt led to Sonos’ disastrous app relaunch, will they be able to win users back? – 37:48
Google is making Gmail summaries more useful and adding a “happening soon” tab to your inbox – 41:11
Harvard students hack together facial recognition for Meta’s smart glasses that instantly doxes strangers – 44:00
Reddit introduces a policy change that will make site wide protests harder – 46:58
Around Engadget: Dan Cooper’s reMarkable Paper Pro review – 51:31
Working on – 55:53
Pop culture picks – 57:08
Livestream
Credits
Hosts: Devindra Hardawar and Cherlynn Low Producer: Ben Ellman Music: Dale North and Terrence O'Brien
Transcript
Devindra: What's up, everybody, and welcome back to the Engadget Podcast. I'm Senior Editor Devindra Hardawar.
Cherlynn: I'm Deputy Editor Cherlynn Low.
Devindra: This week it's all about Microsoft. I guess Techtober has officially begun, Cherlynn, even though it feels like We've been doing Techtober since August, thanks to Samsung and Google and everybody.
yes.
Cherlynn: Yeah, it
Devindra: just never, it never freaking ends. But yeah the wave of tech news, which we used to call Techtober, which is now just TechFall, I guess, the fall of our lives and our productivity. Yeah. That is all happening. Microsoft announced that the Windows 11 2024 update is going out this week.
But I honestly think Microsoft is way more interested in the AI capabilities that it's bringing to CoPilot and also CoPilot Plus systems. And I think that's kind of funny. I think Cherlynn, you and I as Windows nerds and PC geeks I think it's something worth exploring because more so than even last year, this feels like a major shift for Microsoft.
So that's our first topic. We'll talk about a couple other things too, including HoloLens [00:01:00] 2 and basically the entire HoloLens family dying. As always, folks, if you're enjoying the show, subscribe to us on iTunes or your podcatcher of choice, leave us a review on iTunes. That's always appreciated. Drop us an email at podcast@engadget.com.
com and join us Thursday mornings, typically around 10 45 AM Eastern on our YouTube channel for our live stream. If we have gadgets, we'll do you know, sometimes we'll show them off. We'll do Q and A's. It's a fun time. Join us. Sherilyn, I'm sorry that I basically threw these giant stories at you ahead of ahead of the.
Big news announcement this week. A lot of big stuff happening from Microsoft Windows 11 2024 update, but also new features coming to co pilot plus AI PCs including more information about privacy and recall new features for the co pilot AI assistant. How did you notice something odd?
About these stories as I sent them to you, Cherlynn.
Cherlynn: Beyond it seemed like Microsoft might have given you the information incredibly close to the deadline. Well, there's
Devindra: that there's at least we got a heads up, but something that I don't know if you've noticed because I think you had [00:02:00]access to these docs too The news was essentially, Hey, this update is coming.
Everybody get ready for it. We love windows. We love windows updates. And then my entire, the entire document was like, Oh, by the way, copilot plus AI PCs, that's all we care about. So I got this document that was just like all new features. And then one little paragraph at the end, Oh, by the way, when this 11 update, you get HDR backgrounds, you get all this stuff, like literally 10 sentences.
But the entire like presentation for Microsoft is we love Copilot plus AI PC systems. Did that feel weird to you?
Cherlynn: I mean, I know that there was this the main post that you filed was like at the end where you said, Oh, by the way, there are these Windows 11 updates as well coming. And I think it didn't feel weird to me, I guess, because I was like, yeah, of course they're all in on Copilot and everything is about AI.
And maybe that's why, maybe I'm so over You're just so used to
it.
Right, the incremental cadence of every platform update being like little things, even though you know, before 10, we had a big significant jump to 10, and then 10 to 11 just felt kind of [00:03:00]minor because it was built for like better arm based improved performance, and then Now AI seems to be the mad rush here.
So I agree with you. It is weird, but it took you pointing it out for me to realize or feel it. You know?
Devindra: I mean, I totally agree with you. Like typically when we talk about windows updates, especially the annual cadences, like they're not huge things. And even windows 11 itself felt like a weird half step update where the most compelling thing was like, Hey, we put the task bar in the middle of your screen.
Rather than the side of your, that was the only thing people were talking about. I think, yeah, Microsoft is aware that the thing that could be more exciting now to people is Copilot Plus, first of all, and I think that's also key. I think more so than the Copilot AI Assistant, which is going to be in, you know, pretty much most Windows 11 machines, the Copilot Plus stuff, that is for the newer systems basically released this year.
So stuff like with the new snap track and processors, go ahead.
Cherlynn: Yeah no, I mean, the thing you're pointing out is exactly the thing that, got me questioning while I was reading your pieces because it wasn't about the windows 11 updates. It was more [00:04:00] you clearly have a distinction between co pilot and co pilot plus, and I was like where?
And then I had to like, I sussed it out for myself eventually, but I was like, Oh, so there is co pilot versus co pilot plus, and there's a bit of a difference here, right? There's, I mean, there's a total,
Devindra: yeah. So when I covered, I went to Microsoft's campus in May, right. Head of WWDC and everything.
That's when they announced the co pilot plus. PC initiative. And that was these custom, not custom, but these like systems that had a certain level of quality, right? So they launched with the new Qualcomm Snapdragon X elite and X pro chips. But basically there was a minimum standard of 16 gigabytes of RAM, right?
40 tops NPU. So really powerful NPU for AI work. So it could do a lot of stuff locally rather than sending AI stuff to the cloud. You know, decent amount of hard drive space too. But that's the thing. It's like a certain level of computing quality. And that's the sort of thing Microsoft had to basically launch as an initiative with Qualcomm, AMD, Intel, everybody.
Whereas when Apple did their big push for ARM [00:05:00] based and new chips and everything, they could just be like, well, here's our new thing. We did it all. We did all the work and developers just have to catch up with us. So the copilot plus features are things like recall, but also new things that they talked about.
There's something called click to do, which if you hold down the windows button and right click, there will be contextual things you could be doing within that dropdown menu. So if you're in the photos app, I believe you can like, you can have it like just blur the background. Just remove this object if you click on an object.
So that's kind of useful. We're kind of getting a sense of what Microsoft wants to do with these new NPU powered features in the photos app, you can also super resolution photos, which is something you could do in Adobe stuff and Lightroom and other apps Pixelmator does that on the Mac too, but.
That's kind of cool. If you have a Lowr resolution photo and the AI basically interpolates a lot of stuff in that image to give you a bigger file that also looks pretty sharp. I've used that in Pixelmator. It's pretty good. Yeah, just a couple improvements down the way the recall stuff is interesting [00:06:00] too, because Microsoft also basically held a call last week to be like Hey, Recall privacy.
This is actually very important to us. And we're going to be very clear about this. And this follows the whole debacle after the recall launch where the recall announcement where everybody was like, there are gaping security holes here. Security researchers found things like where if you were an administrator, or actually, no, if you were able to hack into a computer, even without admin access, you could get access to the recall database, which is the screenshot of everything it's recording that you're doing on your system.
So Microsoft had to. Delay that feature by several months. Didn't even release it to testers to really lock that down. So the whole it sounds better now. It sounds like they're encrypting the entire database. Recall itself is running in what they're calling. Let me see here. A VBS enclave. So not even just like an encrypted thing, but like a virtual package of like where the program is too.
So hackers can't like directly access it. Windows Hello biometrics is necessary by default. And [00:07:00]also, Oh, the feature is not turned on by default. You have to turn it on. And these all came from complaints from everybody. I also asked Microsoft specifically, so what did you learn from this whole mistake, like this whole situation, which is they announced recall and they were like, this is one of the coolest things you can ever do.
You can remember anything you've ever done in your computer. Was completely mired in controversy. So, I talked with, or I sent a question to Pavan Devaluri, which is the head of windows. He's the head of windows. He knows we had an interview with him on this podcast months ago. He knows our complaints and our criticisms of surface and windows and everything.
And he basically said that they realize now that users want to have. Extra confidence with anything involving like their sensitive data, or especially AI things that are recording all their data. And also AI involves a rethinking of how Microsoft and other companies think about security on a Windows system, right?
Typically, if you have an administrator account on a Windows computer, The thinking is you could just go in and do anything, right? You could [00:08:00] do anything on any other accounts. You are an administrator of that PC. You have really like basically broad privileges, but now if you're using these AI features, which are sucking in a lot of data and a lot more data than windows PCs used to, maybe there's a good.
excuse for not giving the administrator full access to that, you know, to whatever that database is. So there's just things that they're thinking of that they didn't think of before. And that's a shame, but they're saying like that basically this whole fiasco they're taking into consideration. I don't quite know if I trust them yet, but how do you feel about their turnaround I
Cherlynn: think it took quite long.
And I re I realize it's more than just allow people to opt in. There's the holes they had patched the access to admin versus like user. Encrypting everything
is an encryption.
It still felt like it took a little long, but I mean, It just goes to show how little Microsoft had any forethought, right, about this sort of [00:09:00] privacy concern.
That it took public backlash to be like, Ah, crap. And that they had to, it felt like a ground up attempt to fix all these issues. And it doesn't bode well for me for any of their future sort of features based around your information. Like I think they are, I tend to think of Microsoft as the most engineer brain of the top three, like AI companies out there.
They're very engineer brain. They're very like, Oh yeah, this is convenient. Oh, it works. Let's ship it. They don't think about what about all these other things? What about people who are using your product that are not engineer brain that are going to break it in some consumer way, right? So I think it took a while, but I'm glad they're at least considering, and I hope it's a lesson, to be considering these things ahead of time, you know?
Devindra: Yeah, most definitely. They're also like, let me see here. I like the security things. Revamped copilot apps are getting some interesting features too. I think this is all kind of interconnected. So they basically announced this whole new [00:10:00] strategy called copilot labs, where they're going to talk about where they're going to let people play with new features ahead of time.
Let me see here. Copilot vision is one of those, and this is a weird thing. This is like literally the thing we're worried about. That's. It's going to basically see everything you're doing in your web browser showing and be able to basically give you tips on it. It's basically involving constant eyes on what you're seeing.
That's a lab feature. And also think deeper. Which is the ability to just give it a task and have it process a little longer to maybe get you some more helpful advice. These are all Copilot Labs features, these are like extra experimental if you think about the old Google Labs stuff. And right now only people paying for Copilot Pro subscriptions, so those are the 20 a month thing.
Only those folks can test it for now. I think at the very least, Microsoft is being very careful about how it's rolling this stuff out. It is showing it to people, but also a very small audience and taking that feedback before it rolls out broadly. And the thing about recall, they were just like, Hey, here it is.
Look, everybody, this is so [00:11:00]cool. We're capturing everything you're doing on your computer. And they were more excited about it than I think they realized. P other people would be because they didn't realize how little people trusted Microsoft, right?
Cherlynn: Yeah, I think the conundrum of having to pay for access to some of these extra features ahead of time is Both like a joy and a risk that you're taking and I guess we talked about this early adopter mindset a lot on the podcast which is Yeah.
You pay a premium to get to access things like prototypes, right? And these features in the labs are basically prototypes, but then you're also risking exposing yourself to a lot of potential, like, vulnerabilities. I guess. I don't think the word is exploits. I don't think the word is like bad. Like it's not bad.
It's just you have to be aware. The vulnerabilities is
Devindra: the world. Yeah. Is the word.
Cherlynn: Yeah. And, you know, I guess, cool, pay for that but at the same time, these are people who are paying there for early adopters, probably already much more on top of their security and knowing the risks they take.
It's just like Microsoft selling it to people [00:12:00] who are paying, meaning they're selling it to people who are fans, who are less likely to question is, you know, curious, in my opinion.
Devindra: I think it makes sense just being careful and also not too long after the show when we both went to Apple's campus and they announced Apple intelligence and it seemed like even Apple intelligence was launched with, The awareness of everything that went wrong with recall, right?
Like even Apple and other companies are kind of learning from all this. It's a learning experience for everybody, but the people going first usually take the first hit. So in this case, it was Microsoft. It's often open AI. We saw Google bar, you know, stumble right out of the gate too. And Apple at least is able to sit back and just watch and see how it can make things more useful.
Speaking of So this is the CoPilot app itself. CoPilot on the web, CoPilot's mobile app. There are some new features coming there too. CoPilot voice, which gives it a more personable assistant like voice. So you can actually have a back and forth conversation with it. That's kind of cool.
I think that's, that just makes it feel more more [00:13:00] useful to a lot of people. Copilot Vision, we talked about, they're going to do this thing called Copilot Daily, which that voice will also give you like a daily rundown of news and also things you may have scheduled or on your calendar. They want you to think of Copilot as like this thing that you can basically always turn to.
It feels like Copilot is your new computing interface in a way. And that's also probably why they're a little more excited about it rather than A Windows update, even though the Windows update is pretty big according to Microsoft, it is a full OS reconstruction. So it is not just like a minor step up.
It is like a full re installation and a full re architecture of Windows. Maybe following along the lines of what they did for the ARM stuff, back around the Copilot Plus launch, that version of Windows that went out with the ARM systems is very different. They had to rebuild Windows a lot.
To deal with arms. So I feel like we're going to see more of that basically on the Intel and AMD side. Any questions for one? This is, I see the chat is talking about this too. [00:14:00]This is just kind of wild to me. Cause last year we went to the Microsoft event and ended up being a surprise event about AI and we were all very confused.
How do you feel about like their standing now around AI and windows and everything?
Cherlynn: Yeah, I think you're pointing to the fact that Simon B. in the chat asked who is leading in AI, Windows OpenAI or Google for the consumers. And I mean, the rest of this episode. Windows is OpenAI
Devindra: at this point.
Cherlynn: Yes. The rest of this episode I think talks sort of about that, right?
We're getting to some Amazon news later in this episode that was announced this week as well. But what we're seeing, and to your point, Devindra, compared to this time last year or like last year in April or February, I forget. It was being AI. It was like the first time we had to contend with like consumer facing versions of these features.
But now here we are a year and a half after the fact, and every company has pushed out their own version of writing tools, summaries, basically, Chad GPT. And then we've got other companies doing their own implementations, you know, co pilot, we've got Google stuffing AI [00:15:00] into literally anything it makes.
We've got Apple with the redesigned Siri, which is still in classic Apple style, not actually here yet, right? Apple intelligence, slow to the party. And Amazon will see in a bit, gave us kind of, a teaser at what AI on it's going to look like. And it's much more of the same, but here's what you said got me to thinking, right?
You say that it's a, their new, basically the new interaction mode is the new interface, right? Well, how people are going to interface. I think I saw this trend when Tik Tok started becoming more of a thing, like short form videos started becoming more of a thing and I was like skeptical of it ever really taking off.
And yet you see. That generations for example, that, that story from the verge a while ago, where kids don't even use directories anymore, they just search in their file, explore for the file they're looking for. I was like, Oh crap, I guess. Yeah. You don't need to organize how
Devindra: files work. Yeah,
Cherlynn: I did. And I thought that was the way and these things are changing.
I think we're at. The start of [00:16:00]maybe gen alpha, whenever they get their first laptop, whenever they start using these Google services are going to be so used to AI that they'll use it in a way that we never thought, you know, and I, it's disappointing to me because I think it's even more critical thinking or kind of offloading to a computer as opposed to having our own brain process.
But I could also see human beings finding new, unique, creative ways to interact with AI. So I don't know, it's, Ooh it's
Devindra: it's
Cherlynn: weird, you know?
Devindra: It is weird. I am, I'm still unsold on the idea of the AI stuff taking over everything. Like I think at the end of last year, I wrote like Microsoft is really all in on copilot AI, but doesn't really have a vision for what it is going to be.
Now we're kind of seeing more of that, but also at the same time, like the basic copilot search is not super useful to me, I would rather search the internet and get actual results from, and go look at those results rather than have this. Machine feed information back to me and me not under, like it playing a game of telephone and us [00:17:00]not knowing if that information is actually accurate.
And then I have to go back and check that. Meanwhile, the actual Bing search is still as useless as ever. Which is funny to me I use edge a lot because I use different browsers for work and personal stuff, so I sometimes stumble into Bing search and it's still man, I wrote, I literally know I wrote this article about this thing.
It is at Engadget. com. And Bing just doesn't know it exists. I can put almost the full title of the whole thing there and Bing can't find it. And yeah,
Cherlynn: Not to okay. So disclosure, our parent company is Yahoo, which is owned by Apollo. Right. And even on yahoo. com
come on. Yeah.
Yahoo. No I've used Yahoo because I was forced to because of my corporate machines to hold to Yahoo as a search engine.
Sadly. Even Yahoo is I'll be like Engadget iPhone review or something. And the first result is not. Engadget, Yahoo, iPhone review, it's something else. And I'm like, what? Thankfully, because we know the people at Yahoo, we can be like, what is going on? This [00:18:00]search is bonked. And then they're like, oh, let's fix it.
So they'll, they can fix it. To your point though, like Bing AI, Bing search is pretty useless still. I think we're going to get to this later in the episode too. But I think Google search, Is also getting worse and worse. I've seen this online for a very long time, right? Yeah. With the ads placements up top, with the shopping modules up top, with the top stories and the discover boxes up top, it used to be helpful.
Now it's just getting the actual results further down the page, the things that I actually want to do. I don't care what Google wants to put in front of my eyes. I want to go and look into the results myself, maybe because I was born in the eighties, but
Devindra: This is why I like, I'm not so chilling on this AI driven future because Google is forcing it at us.
Microsoft is the Google search right now. You will see generative AI stuff at the top, usually then sponsored topics and other ads and stuff, maybe Google shopping. And then towards the bottom, you get to the results you want. So all these things are making our. Computing experience is worse. And I wonder like there it's high time [00:19:00]for some sort of user revolt on this stuff.
Like we looked at one look at recall and we were like no, thank you. Not like this. And Microsoft had to scramble back into its cave and fix it. Society took one look at Google glass and was like, no, thank you. That's not going to fly right now. We are just not ready for this, but also there are so many problems with this tech.
I do think we're going to get see a lot more pushback now, personally,
Cherlynn: I will say to be contrary. And I will point out that in our chat, Lee Woods says they use Gemini advanced several times a day just to summarize articles. You're hoping that they figure out a way to integrate Gemini into the Chrome browser.
Look, I think summarize is could be one of the easiest, like the best things that I can do if it's accurate and reliable. And I think For a lot of people who've been trying out the Apple intelligence stuff on betas, they found notification summaries to be quite accurate and super helpful. Yeah. There are tools that are going to be helpful.
We're just going to figure out and weed out, you know, the bad from the good. Yeah.
Devindra: Yeah. I mean, it's all about how we use this information. [00:20:00]Yeah, notifications. You know, what sucks right now in modern life and modern computing life is notifications. Too many notifications solve that problem for me.
Thank you. Less of a problem. Is finding stuff on the internet, but also making it harder for me to find stuff on the internet because you want to sell me this service that you, Oh, I'm so glad you love Gemini Google. That's cool. Nice. Good for you, Google. I would just like to use Google. I would just like to use Google search.
So yes. There is a point where it's getting in our way and these companies care more about it than we do. And then I think there are companies that are being, trying to be a little more thoughtful. Apple is doing some of that. Microsoft is getting there with some of the Copilot plus AI features, but we shall see.
I don't want to sound like an old man shouting at the clouds, but sometimes when things are dumb and things are stupid, I think you have to be like, the emperor has no clothes here. You know, last year at that event, Trillian, I distinctly remember talking to Microsoft executives and being like, how can you have this thing, which you know, is not always accurate, is not [00:21:00] always correct.
How can it be the basis of all these new interactions that are going to be a big part of windows and they're just like, this is a learning experience. I think people will understand if we make mistakes, that's not. It's not how computers should work, folks. Like I don't, you don't want to calculate or to have a learning experience as you're trying to, you don't calculate a critical figure for you.
You want me to just do the specific task. And even Microsoft was unaware of that. We shall see how all this goes kind of related to this. We also saw the news that Microsoft is killing HoloLens too. And there's no plans for a followup device. It's going to be using I think I heard. That they may be going to Anduril's headsets.
Like they're going to be doing software for that for military uses or something, but essentially HoloLens is dead, which is funny to see after literally last week, Facebook was just like, this is the future of augmented reality computing. Here are Orion glasses. [00:22:00]We saw Snaps glasses. We saw Vision Pro last year.
It seems like finally this category is heating up and Microsoft's response is okay, no, thank you. No, once there's
Cherlynn:competition, we're out. Sorry.
Devindra: Yeah. I mean, it doesn't help. Remember the HoloLens guy, Alex Kipman, I believe was booted out of Microsoft for being kind of a dirt bag. Just like we, he was like a weird sexist horny guy who really liked his AR.
Glasses. So that was the story going around. He just did not make that team a really good environment. So if you lose the guy who's like leading that technology, that's one thing, but also if you have Facebook, if you have meta, who's willing to spend tens of billions of dollars to really get ahead and Apple, who's clearly thought harder about vision pro than I think Microsoft has about HoloLens when it comes to making a consumer product.
It just seems like Microsoft was here early, but it can't compete. This is such a pocket PC situation for Microsoft. They had some Hardaware, they had some ideas. This is a web TV moment, but. Ultimately, they just [00:23:00] couldn't make it work and that's a shame. I liked HoloLens too. Like they, if they were willing to, I think there is space for Microsoft to play here.
I don't know. Did you ever try a HoloLens too? Or do you
Cherlynn: have feelings
Devindra: around this? I,
Cherlynn: I can't remember if the one I tried was an old one or the two, the second, I believe it was the second gen and it was like an event in Times Square. It was one of those art events and they were really trying to steal it.
So I'm going to be talking about how you can sell the potential of HoloLens outside of industrial and workplaces. I mean, I remember when the first few demos of HoloLens were just so interesting, where you could use these hand gestures, you could like, collaborate with teammates on this virtual diagram or whatever.
And I got to say, like in the headset wars, right? I mean, everyone made their own. There was the Mirage, the Quest. I mean, the Quest obviously with Meta having bought them became kind of the front runner right now, in my opinion, for more consumer friendly devices but HoloLens did stick around for a while there as something that people used in like factories or like more industrial places and commercial uses, and it [00:24:00] definitely had.
Felt to me for a while that Microsoft won in that category, even if it was very niche. And like you said, the defense category is somewhere where they can probably make a lot of money out of, but I, it's sad to see that just as it's getting, you know, to a point where the race seems to be properly heating up that like Microsoft's no, we're good.
Thanks.
Devindra: No, thank you. Yeah, we're it's a little, it seems like you guys are far ahead of us right now. So we're just tapping out. I did a demo. If you go back and read about I think it was called Microsoft mesh, which was their like virtual meeting software. And they sent me a HoloLens too. And I sat here in my office and I had a group Call with Microsoft executives and like 10 other journalists.
And it felt like they were all just, we were all just sitting near each other, even though we were all at our own homes. It was like 2021 maybe. So pandemic was still like keeping people away from each other. And that's, it felt good. It felt like it worked. It wasn't super clunky, but the Hardaware was just too expensive and I [00:25:00]don't think they wanted to do the work to like really make that cheaper.
They also had the whole like, you know, Windows mixed reality stuff for them to try to get into VR, but that felt like a little too late. Because Oculus was doing stuff before HTC Vive was doing stuff before. So Microsoft was too late to VR, too early for AR. And now everybody else is just like trekking ahead for maybe in 10 years, we'll get like the true AR glasses that everybody's dreaming of.
And honestly, I also feel like we as a society are not ready for those either. But yeah, just kind of, kind of sad to see. So RIP HoloLens. Maybe the, They look so cool is the thing. I kind of do want one when they're like 50 bucks being thrown out in a couple of years, I would love a HoloLens just to put on my shelf, just like I have a Microsoft Kin.
I have both Microsoft Kin phones in a drawer somewhere.
Cherlynn: I continue to hold on to Engadget's Google glass. So I understand
Devindra: the aliens are going to find our drawers full of like old tech and be like, [00:26:00] well, no other humans have these things. Why do these people like, what is the story here? What happened here? Anyway. Yeah. A shame for HoloLens, but yeah, we'll see. We'll see what happens.
Cherlynn: Maybe they'll come up with co pilot glass.
You know what I mean?
Devindra: They're going to do, they're going to work on integrations for everybody else. So that's the thing. Microsoft rather than. Being the platform being the Hardaware. They're gonna try to work with everybody else's stuff That's why we're seeing Xbox and quests and everything right now.
So yeah, just a shame to see and Let us know what you folks think I mean I feel like maybe just because I'm a 90s PC kid who grew up on Windows like I have an affinity for old Windows I think about the way it works a lot If you have thoughts about Microsoft's new trajectory Drop us an email at podcastsandgadget.
com.
All right, let's move on to some other news. We got some stuff from Amazon and, oh boy, [00:27:00] is this, Sherilyn, we make fun of Amazon for being really boring when it comes to Hardaware, except for like their crazy random stuff, this is a nothing burger of a news hit. We got a new Fire HD 8 tablet, everybody. It's slightly faster.
It has a better camera. It's still a fire HD eight. I guess the crazy thing is it is available for 55 on sale. If you go for the ads and everything. So that's not, that's pretty good for a tablet with just free to sit down and watch stuff and it's faster than before. So there's that, but also like they want to do AI stuff with it.
Sure. Okay. Of course. Everybody wants to do AI summaries and whatnot. Is there anything special about these tablets, Rowan?
Cherlynn: So to be clear, Amazon announced the Fire HD 8 and two variants, the HD 8 for kids and I think like Pro is the other version. Anyway Alongside the launch of the Fire HD 8, it also announced some AI features are coming with the HD 8, but we'll also be rolling out to compatible Kindle tablets that already have been in the market for a very long time.
So [00:28:00] I was most intrigued by that. I want to do clarify that the HD 8 normally will retail at 99. 99, so 100. And right now it's on sale up until the end of Prime Day, which is from today. I, I don't know if you've opened your Amazon app, you'll see the big ad October 8th, October 9th, Prime Day.
Yay. I guess we needed another one. And up until then, the HD eight will cost, I think closer to 50, I forget if it's 55, but like somewhere in that ballpark. Anyway, what did jump out at me when I saw the press release was A, this is not the Amazon Hardaware event we've been waiting to happen in October, right?
This is just a drop ahead of Prime Day. And B, the AI tools. So, I was looking at it, I was like, first thing that came to my mind, I was like, Have we heard of AI? Amazon's AI features like this because it was like writing summer. It was summaries, writing tools and that sort of stuff. Yeah. I was like, Oh, this might be our first look at Amazon's own AI for devices.
Right. We've heard about some of their chat [00:29:00] bots. We've heard about, you know, it's improvements coming to its voice based assistant, which I will not say the name of right now, but like this for devices is basically rehashing what we've seen before, except for with an Amazon spin. So the only thing that stood out at.
To me was that you can get the AI to generate new wallpapers for the tablet, which cool. I guess the Alcatel idol four could do that. You know, it's just so many Android's material. You to quote a more recent example. So nothing super groundbreaking. But the fact that it's going to be available on a cheaper device, the fact that it's coming to a tablet.
Just to recap, like last week Samsung had the its FE event where it said it was bringing Galaxy AI to all, right? Samsung hammered home the point that with its new Galaxy Tab S10 series, that now you've got Galaxy AI on a phone, a tablet, and a watch. It's, you know, Samsung. It's, quote, bringing its AI to all, I guess, form [00:30:00]factors.
And Tab S10 starts at, I want to say, 650, maybe 700. So it's, yes, it's coming to a different form factor, but it's not necessarily super accessible. And so now, if you want to get a cheap little tablet for your kids for 50, you can. can get one that has AI, or if your existing fire tablet, I have a list of what's compatible.
If you want to upgrade that software, you can also get access to Amazon's AI tools, which are basically like every other chat GPT clone we've seen in the last year and a half. And that just brings me back to the point we were making earlier in this episode that it's becoming more and more prevalent.
We don't know how people are going to use it, but now that more people are going to be able to use it and kids. Ostensibly using a lot of fire HD tablets. We got it. We're gonna start seeing people Mass adopt these I guess I don't know. That's where I'm at with. Yeah.
Devindra: Yeah I mean, it's compelling because these are such cheap tablets.
I don't know about like base model You're giving up a [00:31:00] lot by staring at those Amazon ads folks, but it's hard to deny The usefulness of a 55, eight inch tablet. The kids stuff is cool because they keep saying first of all, there's ad free content, their parental controls. Amazon says that they are going to, they will still replace those tablets if they break, which is like the number one nightmare for a parent.
It's that. Tablets are just screens, like giant screens with glass, and they will be destroyed by your kids. The kids version of the E Fire HD puts them in a nice protective case. They have this guarantee from Amazon, so you feel a little better about it. I still have not done this for my kids.
Like we, I basically buy iPads on sale. I buy old iPads on sale and that's really what we've used as a family. So my son is using an iPad from like 2017 with a cracked screen, but that's what he uses, like in the car, if he needs to watch a video or something. My daughter has a 10 inch, one of the more recent 10 inch iPads.
But we, she wants to play Minecraft. She wants to play like a games from Apple arcade. And you can't, you are very limited [00:32:00] in what you get in a Fire tablet. These are sLowr machines. They have a limited library of games. They can't access all the apps that Android tablets can too, because of the Google stuff is not included.
So just be aware of what you're losing with a cheap tablet. That's all.
Cherlynn: Yeah. And that's why they're good for, I guess, kids, but to Dpro9's point in the chat, this is e waste right out the gate. Yeah,
Devindra: kind of, kind of. No, you're
Cherlynn: not wrong. I don't, I can't argue.
Devindra: It's a digital catalog. For buying stuff on Amazon, also for watching stuff on Amazon prime.
That's really what they want you to be doing. And then, oh, by the way, it can also do Netflix. It can also do these other things, but they just, they care about their own stuff. I
Cherlynn: see. I see the appeal of it being like a cheaper Kindle with a not great screen. And I can only imagine what a summary AI tool on a Kindle book might do.
Like it's not, I think, going to work with Kindle titles, but one day, Final Evolution, don't read books. Just read these AI summaries. I mean,
Devindra: the AIs can already summarize books. So I do. Yeah. [00:33:00]I don't know if you'll get it all within text, but it'll, they'll do it through the cloud or whatever. And then who needs to read who needs to really engage with content and wrestle with complex moral choices like just let's Smooth brain all the way AI brain means no tough choices for any of us And that's where we're going as a society.
Love it. Love to see it
Cherlynn: I will point out that a person in our chat. I think it was I've missed it, but you pointed out that you were you're doing your master's Tom Rogers or Someone that you're using the Kindle scribe and that's the like Tablet that Amazon makes you can write on which like this week, you know We are also gonna talk about a bit more about writing tablets.
And I think For me, that's where Amazon's Hardaware is still intriguing. And to be clear, no new Kindle has yet been announced this year season slash whatever. So we could still be waiting to see stuff from Amazon. And I wonder what would happen if they decided to stuff AI into a Kindle. Like I have no clue.
Devindra: It's mainly the [00:34:00] ink technology that keeps Kindles the price that they are. They occasionally go down, but they, those do not have super fast processors. Those are like really like basic devices. I would imagine they could easily get some cloud AI stuff. So like cloud source, Hey, some interesting topics that, you know, that these people have, or also when you go on Amazon now, you get AI crowdsourced user reviews.
I can imagine that being a thing. In the kindle like store when you're browsing around. Yeah,
Cherlynn: I could see that I could see also with the kindle scribe Like I said being a writing or drawing tablet like they could not only give you prompts for drawing. They could also Start an outline for you teach you calligraphy or teach you show like I used When I was reviewing the Kindle scribe originally, I used it a lot for Japanese, you're not going to practice.
So like handwriting practice for a different language. I could see if AI would just generate worksheets for me. That would be interesting. Hire me, Amazon. I will think of these ideas for you. That would be actually useful.
Devindra: I don't think [00:35:00] you want to work with Amazon. No, I don't know very few people don't work at Amazon.
I want to point out a thank you, Mark Dell for this wonderful comment, because it also fits into a bunch of things. But he says somebody needs to make an AI pin that just listens to everything and makes every decision in your life. Perfect. For those who are bad at decision making, it'll be the last decision you ever make.
That is a black mirror episode just waiting to happen. That certainly is going to be a thing. Also, Yeah shout out to the Yorgos Lanthimos movie, Kinds of Kindness, which is sort of about that too, which is sort about the idea that humans, we kind of all just want to let go a little bit and let people make decisions for us and then be like little subservient little slobs.
So depending on your view of humanity, you don't even need AI for that. You just need you just need a Dom to basically build your entire life. Let's move on to some other news. How about that?
Cherlynn: Did you see, did Sonos stuff,
Devindra: Sherilyn?
Cherlynn: I did not, but please explain to me. I mean, I saw it floating around and I kind of [00:36:00] have the TLDR, but I'd love to hear your details.
The
Devindra: TLDR is that Sonos released an app overhaul earlier this year. It was supposed to be a big redesign for them and it was a disaster. It was buggy. It crashed a lot. I honestly had trouble like connecting to my speakers properly. It lost features, including things like setting alarms that the original app did.
Disaster. Like literally Sonos, your only job is to give us the software to send music to your speakers. That's all you have to do. And what came out is that basically Sonos is a company that's been sitting on a lot of technical technical debt over the last few years. So there's a lot of stuff.
The old app was. Basically built on a lot of things and there were things they never cleaned up. The kind of underlying technology is something they never cleaned up. As Sonos was racing ahead to launch this app, a lot of people inside the company were complaining about it and kind of raised the alarms and saying this is not up to snuff, we should not release this.
And people were ignored. People were kind of bullied for even bringing up issues. So [00:37:00] that's a great corporate environment that you want to see. And now Sonos is at the point where they're just like fully fully. Apologizing and basically saying that they're going to do everything it can to fix this.
So, the quota here is our priority since its release has been and continues to be fixing the app. There were missteps and we first went in, went deep to understand how we got here and then moved to convert those learnings into action. I love when everybody said, anybody says learnings, by the way. Such wonderful corporate speak.
The quote continues. We are committed to making changes to get us back to being the brand people love by offering the best audio system for the home and beyond. And the quote I believe the Sono CEO so they're saying they're going to do a lot of changes. They're going to do a lot more testing.
And they're extending the manufacturer warranty for all home speaker products, including home theater gear and plug in speakers. I saw the news that the CEO is also declining to take a bonus this year, which is like the least you could do. You're still going to get paid millions, tens of millions of dollars.
Cherlynn: Rejecting this little bonus on top of my multi million dollar salary. Okay.
Devindra: Yeah. But at least [00:38:00] it's more than most CEOs do often when a company screws up, either somebody gets fired but rarely is somebody like, Hey, like I'm just going to take a direct hit for this. So, Hey, that's something good to see.
I would love to know what your stories are. With with Sonos speakers at this point, folks, I still use them, but it's stuff for sometimes I'm within Spotify and I like to send audio from Spotify straight to Sonos that's hit or miss these days. The Sonos app itself is still all over the place. I still like Sonos speakers cause they sound so much better than a lot of them in the actual networking.
The actual synchronization stuff is great. But just kind of a mess. I feel like they should discount some of these things. Be aware of the ARC whatever the new headphones are too. That was kind of the thing they were rebuilding the app for. And
Cherlynn: the
Devindra: ACE headset. Yeah. Those also don't seem like they're really worth buying at all too.
So check out our review of that whole thing. Yeah, Sonos is still keeping it real, I guess, trying to fix all these mistakes. You have something you want to mention from [00:39:00]Google, Cherlynn. Yeah, just a
Cherlynn: really quick bunch of news from Google. There was this is like a drive by recap, really, because the stuff that I want to talk about apparently isn't happening yet.
Gmail is getting better summaries, and Google is adding a happening soon tab to its Gmail service. I like that. I mean, like sometimes Google has really improved Gmail. Like I think Inbox was an app we all loved for a time and then they killed it. But the Inbox was really where they surfaced a lot of these good features.
Oh, there's a pack you know, like notification. You say
Devindra: we all very broadly, but it was certainly, I mean, the people
Cherlynn: online at that time,
Devindra: I remember Inbox. being launched. I'm like, what the hell is this? This was like when Google had 10 different video conferencing apps and couldn't decide on it either.
So I was mainly confused by Inbox, but yes, those designs did come over to main email. Yeah.
Cherlynn: I think there were some really interesting features that debuted on Inbox. And then finally when they did get integrated into Gmail and then, you know, cohesively bringing all of them into one app is the choice to make.
I agree with that. I just think there was some [00:40:00] nostalgia for Inbox. I still see online sometimes. Anyway. I mean, I like when like for example, last two weekends ago or something like that, I was watching James McAvoy movie that I cannot remember the title of anymore. Speak No Evil or something?
Devindra: Yeah.
Cherlynn: Okay I bought the ticket on an iPhone and had a Pixel 9 Pro next to me. Both had their SIM cards in them. And the Pixel 9 Pro had the SIM card. Tickets just like the instant I hit pay and it pulled up the tickets on Google pay because gmail was so good at parsing the receipt That I got in my inbox and just pulling that information.
I mean, yeah, it's a little creepy, but it's also very convenient for me whereas like You know, other features like track your packets, there's an event in this email, I will add it to your calendar that sort of stuff is really helpful in Gmail. And honestly, I think it's not a bad thing. I don't know if there's a net loss overall in terms of security and privacy, but we'll see.
So anyway Google also updated its Chrome Plus Chromebook Plus Slate of products this [00:41:00] week. Go to Engadget. com for all the details. Nate covered it for us, but yeah, I mean, as we continue to see all the big companies fight it out over AI it's nice to, you know, I guess, see what else is being put out there.
Devindra: That's something. I mean, it's also, I guess we're still waiting for are we waiting for like a Google Hardaware event again?
Cherlynn: No, thank God. I hope to God. No, if they did, I would be very upset.
Devindra: I mean, looking forward, we were waiting for possibly an iPad event slash Mac book event from Apple. Something more from Amazon.
Cherlynn: Exactly. I'm just waiting on Amazon.
Devindra: It's a whole bunch of that. There was a cool story. Did you see this one? It's really about a pair of students put facial recognition technology onto meta smart glasses basically to instantly dox strangers. They're not going to be releasing this code. This is more of like a project they did to prove what is possible.
And things that, that basically are kind of trivial to add to something like smart glasses. Did you see the story?
Cherlynn: I saw the headline, but what you're describing sounds a lot like that black mirror contact lens situation, right? Where you like scan people face [00:42:00] recognition and immediately pull up their like profile info.
There are social network and it's not just black mirror, right? It's a lot of science fiction movies have done that, but yeah, I, that's what it sounds like they're doing. I don't know if I'm mistaken.
Devindra: So essentially like they, it looks like it's going through the glasses, but also going straight to the information is going to a smartphone.
We're actually seeing it too. So you're kind of getting more information there. I will say there is a certain. Especially from a company like Meta, which I'm sure has looked at this stuff. Like we have all your, we have all your friends. We know who your friends are. We have all these databases of faces and names.
So we have that information too. I'm sure once Meta is ready to do like true AR stuff, this is going to be something that they do. I also think, and I think I learned this later in life is that I'm probably a little face blind. I used to think I was just bad at remembering people. But I personally think Oh, I have, I genuinely have a problem like deconstructing a face, unless you're somebody with like really distinctive [00:43:00] hair or something like that, or like a really distinctive face, things just kind of blur together for me.
So just professionally, I could see it being kind of useful or socially, I guess. So I see the uses, but yeah.
Cherlynn: Like that scene in Devil Wears Prada where like Anne Hathaway and Emily Blunt are instructing, walking out to her. That's your like nightmare.
Devindra: Which is which?
Cherlynn: Yeah, but then like with the glasses, you never have to worry maybe, but again, AI has to be like reliable.
What if it recognizes, what if AI is also face blind and it's this is the governor or of, I guess, I don't know, Minnesota. I think I already
Devindra: know to distrust my brain when it comes to faces. So now it's just okay, you're just helping. Maybe I distrust you a little bit too, but you probably. You are probably better than me at some of
Cherlynn: this stuff.
However, to be clear, it's not as if Emily Blunt was all that reliable in the movie as well. Anita and Hathaway, the update pack to help her. So we, that's
Devindra: a great movie.
Cherlynn: You know, I saw that in
Devindra: theaters. It's a great movie. Anyway, this is a story from 404media. So yeah, check them [00:44:00] out at 404media. co. Love their work and love that they picked this whole thing up.
I also love to see like students doing this sort of work because this is what you want to see people doing, like not being like, I can't wait till I get a job at Google or Meta or wherever, but also taking this technology and like pushing it to its limits and like showing what is possible and what could be dangerous about it too.
So this is super cool. Did you have any thoughts, Cherlynn? Cause I know you went to talk about this before, but Reddit's policy changes to make site wide protests nearly impossible. We saw this story float up too. Kind of interesting there. Maybe a little disappointing from Reddit. Yeah.
Cherlynn: I am a chronic Reddit.
So I am
Devindra: as well. Yeah.
Cherlynn: Yeah.
Devindra: Yeah.
Cherlynn: When I'm not playing match factory, I am trying to rot my brain by doom scrolling Reddit, and I know that Reddit has had a lot of issues recently too that's got a lot of us up in arms. There was like that, that, you know, what is it called? Boycott. Thank you.
There
was a boycott last year or earlier this year.[00:45:00]
Time is a blur, but there was a boycott earlier because Reddit was being just. Awful. And, but now today or this week, I guess on Monday it, Made it harder to site wide protest. Basically it's changed his rules so that moderators of subreddits need admin approval to switch it from public to private.
It is, that's one of the rules that's being changed and is being interpreted as a way to kind of curb subreddits from protesting and, you know, have being able to do so all at once. Multiple subreddits cannot all go private at once without Reddit. Admin approval. It is very strange. It feels as if this was related to the protest from last year because a post on subreddit, our mod news written by the VP of community said the ability to instantly change community type settings has been used to break the platform and violate our rules in the past.
Right. So. It seems as if this could be one of the [00:46:00] reasons. It's only,
Devindra: yeah, I mean, Reddit, a site which is full of content that is created by the company Reddit, right? Fully editorialized content from edit. No, Reddit is a company that exists because people love to just post their own stuff. You exist because of the users.
So now they're afraid of the users, basically. This is what this is showing once again,
Cherlynn: there's a lot of other issues with reddit recently. I mean, the fact that the initial protest was in reaction to the API changes that forced third party apps to shut down. That also led to a lot of accessibility problems.
And then the company during those. The boycott just went in and took complete control of one of the big subreddits that had participated and then also recently licensed its content to train AI models So red has been making a lot of missteps lately. This seems one of the more recent ones anyway, it won't I don't think stop people from protesting in creative ways for me [00:47:00] My funny reaction to this is people will just keep posting more pictures of Sexy John Oliver.
That's it.
Devindra: Flood the zone. Flood the zone with Sexy John Oliver. I've also started doom scrolling Reddit, Cherlynnn, because sometimes it's or Twitter is terrible, especially when it gets I still see random right wing ads on Twitter, but it's also, that's where my friends are, so that's why I can never fully leave Twitter.
Blue sky is kind of up its own butt sometimes with some of those users and Mastodon is fine, but it's just the tech nerds. Like I don't have as like engaging conversations there. So sometimes you just want to like the internet as it was somebody asking, am I the asshole? Like that's,
Cherlynn: am I overreacting?
Am I overreacting?
Devindra: It's okay, that's addictive stuff, but it's all user generated content. And that is the danger. Reddit, when you build your entire company. I. On contributions from your users. So at some point, yeah,
Cherlynn: just a quick note too, that I don't actually think a lot of the advice given on Reddit is good.
Like some of them like default to run and I'm like what are you reading? Two paragraphs and deciding that this person's entire life is boiled down to one word. Stop, [00:48:00] but Reddit is also a very fun place. Like I just, I enjoy a lot of the inside jokes. Some of them get a little overused and stale, but.
It is a very fun thing. It is a thing.
Devindra: And also we've talked about how Reddit has basically taken over parts of the internet where rather than googling questions often like people just search in Reddit to learn how to fix something. Yes, exactly. Often when I'm googling things, like I end up going back to Reddit threads because that's what Google indexes.
Yes. Yes, exactly. Because there's
Cherlynn: multiple people with different expertise going in and giving you the answer on something and maybe one answer is wrong, but some other answer below is probably correct. We should talk more
Devindra: about Reddit at some point.
Cherlynn: We really could. I love Reddit.
Devindra: Alright, let's move on to some stories from around Engadget.
And speaking of writing on e paper, Mr. Daniel Cooper wrote about the Remarkable Paper Pro. It's a color ink tablet that you can write on. It seems super cool. Are you, and he gave it, he scored it 90. Hehehehe. So that's pretty high. The only thing is this thing is super expensive. So I think that's the main problem here, but the actual tech, like color ink is something I feel like [00:49:00] we've been waiting for a long time.
Price, let me hear it's 579 with the standard marker, 629. If you want the marker plus, and you can add a case for 89 and the leather one for 179. So this is a very expensive e ink tablet. Are you compelled by this, Cherlynn?
Cherlynn: That was the first thing I told Dan after I finished editing his review. I was like, I want to buy one of these and I might have to save up for it.
Yeah, 570. I look, I am a Kindle scribe user. I pick it up once a month to jot down my thoughts. Do I think once a month of scribbles is worth 570 as a starting price? I don't know, but it's cool as hell. And it's a, this, one of the pitches and one of the reasons we gave it a high score is that it is a distraction free writing tablet, right?
It's again, like the ink tablets, like the remarkable, like the Kindle scribe you know, books, I guess is another competitor. You don't have that. It's not as easy to just go over to Reddit, right. And in a minute. As it would be on a regular tablet. So [00:50:00]that's appealing. I think Dan was a little nervous about giving such a high score because, you know, it's not a tablet, it's limited in functionality but in its category, I think Dan firmly believes this is the best.
And for me, it's like a 90 means it is the best in this category. I can
Devindra: firmly also see Dan, lovely, funny, British man, just really quaking in his boots about this course. Oh man, is this, am I showing too much emotion here? Is this too effusive for me?
Cherlynn: I will say he was wavering between 89 I was like, no, the only difference here is that we give it a different color award.
Devindra: Yeah. Yeah. But I'm glad. I'm glad Dan likes it. It looks, I've looked at the remarkable stuff for a long time. Does this one also require a subscription? Because that was like a sticking point for me before.
Cherlynn: So, Dan doesn't mention the subscription in his review. And that is a good point. He does mention that the software has been meticulously fine tuned to make it easy Kindle scribe.
I will point out that Amazon has done a [00:51:00] lot of good hard work to improve some of its syncing over the year or months. It's been like six years since I reviewed the Kindle scribe so that like you can now, you know, sync your notes across your Amazon app toting devices, but you can, it's editing them is still tricky.
I don't know. It's not an easy space to be in. Let's say
Devindra: yeah. Oh, I see. So the subscription is required for clouds thinking. That is like a requirement for me. If I have something like this, like I want to be able to access my digital notes anywhere. So
Cherlynn: anywhere, exactly.
Devindra: Put that into the price too.
But I've been intrigued by the remarkables for so long. And this one is just like the dream of color ink. We're almost there. It's super expensive, but it does exist. So. That is, that's super cool. Yeah. Maybe we'll all get to play with it at some point. Also want to shout out Mr. Team Stevens has written a test drive for us of the Polestar 3.
They're a long awaited SUV. They're it's a compact SUV. But it's like a flagship one for Polestar. I'm sort of intrigued by this too, because Polestar is sort of like a sister brand to [00:52:00]Volvo and I'm into like what all the Volvos are right now. Tim also did the Volvo EX90 video for us a couple of weeks ago or months ago.
That's also worth checking out, but this one looks really cool. If you want a premium luxury electric, have you driven an electric car yet? She'll end. Cause I know you're in the process of learning how to drive.
Cherlynn: Oh, I don't know. Electric. I've driven plenty of gas cars, electric fuels.
Devindra: I feel like we get to record that video of just you, like having that experience of the instant torque.
And it feels real different. Things can go bad really quickly with an electric car.
Cherlynn: Yeah.
Devindra: We shall see. We gotta get Trillian on video. That should be a video series at any gadget. That'd be cool. That
Cherlynn: might be, yeah. It can happen. Anytime.
Devindra: All right, let's move on to what we're working on. I reviewed the Asus ZenBook S14, the new one with Intel's Lunar Lake AI chips.
Really liked it. So it's a nice laptop. I wish we had more access to the to the Copilot plus features that it, that update is not fully out yet. So I can't test recall. I can't test all those things, but this is sort of Copilot [00:53:00] ready. It is a nice piece of Hardaware. They're using like a weird ceramic metallic top two at the top of the lid, which I think feels good, looks unique and yeah.
Just really dig it. So pretty solid ultra portable. We're going to have a whole slate of like really decent laptops coming soon. So looking forward to that. Anything you want to shout out, Cherlynn?
Cherlynn: We just continue to plan for upcoming events and reviews. Not a lot of gadgets will be coming in. We just can't really talk about a lot of them yet.
And then I'm hopeful that I'll be taking some time off in October. All right. Maybe you might not hear me for a couple of episodes on the podcast. I know. It's always every time I put requests for a time off, it's always like maybe a tentative request. Cause the only reason, it's not that my team doesn't want me to go off, it's the tech companies that are like, surprise event.
And there goes my, like I could still take it off.
Devindra: Yeah. All right. Let's move on to our pop culture picks for the week. What do you have, Cherlynn?
Cherlynn: So mine's not so much a pop culture pick as a just like general life tip. And not anything that should surprise anyone. So I've been [00:54:00]spending a lot of time watching YouTube more than anything.
So I think I sort of already talked about this. The last time I was on that I canceled Hulu just cause it was getting way too expensive. And I also already have Disney plus. And then, you know, watching more YouTube, I paid for YouTube premium. So that's something that, you know, as a piece of advice that everyone's been giving YouTube premium is actually a pretty good, solid thing to pay for.
So much stuff to watch
Devindra: basically. Yeah,
Cherlynn: exactly. There's a lot to watch by creators, but also even from you know, filmmakers that are Hollywood titles out there. There's I was watching, bring it on the other day again for the 300th time on YouTube. But I don't really generally like to like recommend things that we cover.
So I tried to stay away but we have a really good. necessarily cover this. I just recently started a course on Coursera. It's the, I can't remember if it's the Harvard course or the Yale course, but one of the IVs, they have a course on psychology. So it's intro to psychology. So far I'm really enjoying it.
I think yeah. This program was designed very nicely. [00:55:00] The modules are a mix of recommended readings on the internet, and they're all free by the way, but also these like specially created videos by the academic institution itself and the lecturer who teaches the course at Yale, they've combined it with this voice, a transcript, as well as these animations that make it very digestible.
So I really liked that. And I think. My tip isn't Coursera specifically, but it's more like lifelong learning. I think you're never too old to keep learning. And it's so much more information's available out there, whether it be YouTube or Coursera or any number of learning platforms, I have been finding it really fascinating to dive into those.
So instead of, you know, and I'm not binge watching.
Devindra: You're doing something constructive with your time. First of all, Trillian, of course, for you to relax. You give yourself schoolwork. You're literally assigning yourself homework. So this says a lot about when I'm
Cherlynn: not, when I'm not doom scrolling, read it to learn about people or playing match factory.
I am sitting on the toilet on Coursera. So you're doing fantasy
Devindra: schooling [00:56:00] right now because you just miss the homework and the pressure and everything. It's great. But I agree. You never stop learning. I watch a lot of documentaries on YouTube. I, this is, I've just been like consuming stuff over audible more now too.
So like I found like nonfiction books are work really well for me over audible. So that's been a good way to digest a lot of that stuff. I'm glad you're digging this Shrillen. I'm glad it's been helpful for you, but yeah, I cannot get over, of course this is how Shrillen is unwinding. She's just giving herself more work.
Overachiever
Cherlynn: vibes. Yes. Overachiever
Devindra: vibes. Totally. Speaking of overachievers, I feel like you should go to the theater and check out Megalopolis, which is the Yeah,
Cherlynn: I have been wanting to. Yeah.
Devindra: Because this movie is kind of a, it is a spectacular disaster of a film, but it's also like a very singular, weird type of thing.
It's a Francis Ford Coppola movie that we've been waiting for decades, literally decades, he's been talking about. Yeah. He has spent, I think, 120 million of his own money to make this thing happen. This is a movie about a man who's trying to build a magical utopian city because he thinks [00:57:00] his country, or New Rome, his city, is kind of falling apart, like America today, and New Rome is also New York, and the imagery is all really blunt, the performances are all over the place, but it is kind of fun to watch.
Just how wild it is. Like Adam driver stars is essentially a Robert Moses stand in this architect who is destroying parts of the city to build his utopia built with a new new material. He discovered children. It's called Megalon. It's a living, it's a living building material. Isn't that.
Something. This movie is just all over the place. Tonally performance wise. Aubrey Plaza is in it as a character named Wow Platinum. She is a financial journalist slash broadcaster, and she's also bringing her like her, like spunkiness to this. I enjoy the interesting people to cast less a fan of it.
Like bringing people like Shia LaBeouf, who I don't want to see on movie screens anymore because he's a piece of garbage, but. The movie itself, like you have Lawrence Fishburne monologuing also working as like the assistant to Adam driver. [00:58:00] His voice just lends so much gravitas to this. It is a big, dumb thing.
That is it is a wild swing is a wild performance swing. I think for theater kids. I think maybe for you too, Cherlynn, like, I, I think you fit within the theater kid mold, but
Cherlynn: I'm kind of a theater kid. It is,
Devindra: it is very much within that. It's a wild swing about Oh, society is crumbling and what can save it?
Maybe one genius man. If we just follow him, maybe this could be it. At one point Adam driver does the, to be or not to be soliloquy and just. Does the whole thing because he does that to prepare, like it's a thing he does to get into his acting mode. And I think at one point, Francis Ford Coppola was like, yeah, we're just going to keep it in the movie.
We're just kidding. You're walking around the set. The to be or not to be has nothing to do. With what is actually happening in the movie, he likes, he liked it. So they kept it in this movie is all over the place. It's not going to, it's doing terribly in theaters. It may go away soon, but it sure is a spectacular thing to watch on a big [00:59:00]screen.
And yeah, talk about overachievers, like Mr. Francis Ford Coppola, who, you know, was tasked to do the Godfather at the age of 29. He was a really young man when he started working on that movie to make some of the best movies ever made and then to. Basically have a really weird late stage career where he is continually trying to reinvent cinema.
This is his big dream project. It's a mess, but it is it's not boring, you know, it is a really interesting thing to see. You can see clips of the performances. Just a thing I'll recommend, especially if you have time and you want to see like a wildly ambitious thing. Something I do think you'll showing, because I know you've watched anime in the past and you're a fan.
There is a new show that everybody's been waiting for. It's called Dan Da Dan. It is premiering today, or yeah, it's premiering today on Netflix and Crunchyroll. This show is like watching FLCL for the first time. It is just a big dose of wild anime energy. It's crazy. It is about, it's about two high school kids, a girl who [01:00:00]believes in ghosts and doesn't believe in aliens and a boy who believes in aliens and doesn't believe in ghosts.
I think I talked about this last week too, but I wanted to recommend it to you specifically Sherwin. Wild anime. I've I'm going to check out more episodes. The animation is fantastic. It's from Science Saru. But mainly for you, Cherlynn, because we did talk about this before. It is fantastic stuff.
I also finished season two of Interview with the Vampire, which is also good stuff. Amazing stuff. And I'll talk more about that. And I'll try to convince Cherlynn to watch that series to see some what is on Netflix right now.
Cherlynn: Well, that's it for the episode. This week, we're Week everyone. Thank you as always for listening. Our theme music is by Game Composer Dale North. Our outro music is by our former managing editor, Terrence O'Brien. The podcast is produced by Ben Elman. You can find DRA online at
Devindra: Oh yeah, I'm at DRA on Twitter, mastodon blue sky, all over the place.
I'm also talk about movies and TV at the film cast. At the film cast.com.
Cherlynn: If you have any great ideas for what actually useful things AI can do, you can send [01:01:00] them to me. I can take credit for them and pitch them to the big companies. I'm at Cherlynn Low on Twitter or X. C H E R L Y N L O W I am at Cherlynn's Instagram on threads.
You can also email, um, Cherlynn at engadget. com. Email us your thoughts about this show at podcast at engadget. com or any questions really you have that you want us to answer. Leave us a review, please, on your podcast platform of choice and subscribe anywhere you get podcasts.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/computing/engadget-podcast-why-the-windows-11-2024-update-is-all-about-copilot-ai-113026863.html?src=rss
Now that we're a few years into Microsoft's obsession with AI and its Copilot assistant, it's clearer than ever that Windows 11's role is to show off the company's artificial intelligence prowess. At least, that's the message I took away from today's announcement that the Windows 11 2024 (version 24H2) update is now beginning to roll out. While the OS itself is getting a few new features, like long overdue File Explorer tweaks, Microsoft is far more eager to hype up new Copilot+ AI PC capabilities.
There's "Click to Do," which triggers Copilot to assist you with whatever is on your screen, like removing an object in the Photos app, or summarizing a long article. It's seemingly easy to use — just hold the Windows button down and click your target — and Microsoft says it'll offer contextually relevant tips. As with so many of the company’s AI features, you can think of Click to Do as an on-demand super-powered version of Clippy, its infamous software helper from years past. But since Click to Do appears at your whim, and there are actually some potentially useful AI features, it should hopefully be far less annoying than that damn paperclip.
Click to Do in Windows 11.
Microsoft
You'll also be able to upscale pictures in the Photos app by up to eight times their resolution. A slider will let you adjust precisely how much you'd like to increase the quality. This isn't particularly new—Adobe has its own AI-powered Super Resolution capability, as does the popular Mac photo editing app Pixelmator. But at least it's helpful to have it built directly into your OS. Generative AI-based fill and erase options are also coming to Paint, allowing you to remove objects or easily create new ones.
Microsoft has hinted at some AI-powered search improvements in the past, and it looks like those are finally arriving with the Windows 11 2024 update. Now you can find files using your own words, without worrying about esoteric search syntax. If you want to find pictures of your dog by the beach, you can just type that.
And of course, there's Recall, the company's debut Copilot+ feature for retrieving anything that happens on your computer. It was immediately criticized for being surprisingly insecure — researchers discovered that hackers could access the Recall screenshot database without administrator privilege. Microsoft immediately delayed Recall to revamp its security model: It's now making the feature completely opt-in, instead of flipping it on by default. Windows Hello biometric authentication is required to use Recall, and it's also encrypting the screenshot database and other interactions.
Recall timeline in Windows 11.
Microsoft
Last week, the company detailed more of its security methods, including using VBS Enclaves to further isolate Recall from hackers. David Weston, Microsoft's VP of OS and enterprise security, noted in a blog post that "you are always in control" of the Recall experience. That reassurance may not be enough for users turned off by Microsoft's initial security flubs, though. If anything, Recall's rollout was a clear example of how the company was cutting corners to move quickly and be seen as an AI industry leader.
"Copilot will be there for you, in your corner, by your side, and always strongly aligned with your interests.," Mustafa Suleyman, the company's head of AI, wrote in an overly enthusiastic blog post. "It understands the context of your life while safeguarding your privacy, data and security, remembering the details that are most helpful in any situation."
Security will undoubtedly be a major concern for Copilot users moving forward, and according to Microsoft's Windows head, Pavan Davuluri, the company has learned from its troubled Recall launch.
"Ultimately, users want to have confidence with anything happening with sensitive data caches," he said in a briefing with press, adding that he believes the company has "gone above and beyond" to create that confidence. He also acknowledged that AI features enable "new attacks and defenses." For example, Windows has traditionally allowed administrator accounts to have total access to everything on a machine, but now users may want to see "additional rings of protection" with AI features.
The Surface Pro Copilot+ AI PC.
Photo by Devindra Hardawar/Engadget
Davuluri stressed that community feedback helped Microsoft make Recall more secure for users, and the company will continue listening as it carefully rolls out more AI-infused capabilities. That's also why all of the above Copilot+ features won't be rolling out to everyone immediately — they'll be available to Windows Insiders first, and then arrive via a phased rollout to "select devices and markets" in November. The Windows 11 2024 update will also have a staggered rollout starting today. If you're eager to snag it, make sure you've enabled "Get the latest updates as soon as they're available" in Windows Update.
And what about features from this Windows 11 update that don't require Copilot+ PCs? They appear at the tail-end of Davuluri's blog post today, almost as an afterthought: There's Wi-Fi 7 support, HDR backgrounds, Energy Saver improvements to prolong battery life and better hearing aid support using Bluetooth LE. They sound like the Windows upgrades we used to see before Microsoft became completely AI-pilled, but they're certainly not as exciting as something like Click to Do.
Of course, that's all intentional. If you want to join the Copilot+ AI PC party, you'll probably have to get a new computer. And that's precisely what Microsoft and PC makers want.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/computing/microsoft-delivers-new-copilot-ai-pc-features-with-windows-11s-2024-update-140048807.html?src=rss