"Think Brita filter, but a thousand times better," says UBC chemical and biological engineering professor Dr. Madjid Mohseni, who developed the technology.

Forever chemicals, formally known as PFAS (per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances) are a large group of substances that make certain products non-stick or stain-resistant. There are more than 4,700 PFAS in use, mostly in raingear, non-stick cookware, stain repellents and firefighting foam. Research links these chemicals to a wide range of health problems including hormonal disruption, cardiovascular disease, developmental delays and cancer.

To remove PFAS from drinking water, Dr. Mohseni and his team devised a unique adsorbing material that is capable of trapping and holding all the PFAS present in the water supply.

The PFAS are then destroyed using special electrochemical and photochemical techniques, also developed at the Mohseni lab and described in part in a new paper published recently in Chemosphere.

While there are treatments currently on the market, like activated carbon and ion-exchange systems which are widely used in homes and industry, they do not effectively capture all the different PFAS, or they require longer treatment time, Dr. Mohseni explained.

Graphical abstract. Credit: Chemosphere (2023). DOI: 10.1016/j.chemosphere.2023.137743

"Our adsorbing media captures up to 99 percent of PFAS particles and can also be regenerated and potentially reused. This means that when we scrub off the PFAS from these materials, we do not end up with more highly toxic solid waste that will be another major environmental challenge."

He explained that while PFAS are no longer manufactured in Canada, they are still incorporated in many consumer products and can then leach into the environment. For example, when we apply stain-resistant or repellent sprays/materials, wash PFAS-treated raingear, or use certain foams to put down fires, the chemicals end up in our waterways. Or when we use PFAS-containing cosmetics and sunscreens, the chemicals could find their way into the body.

For most people, exposure is through food and consumer products, but they can also be exposed from drinking water—particularly if they live in areas with contaminated water sources.

Dr. Mohseni, whose research group also focuses on developing water solutions for rural, remote and Indigenous communities, noted, "Our adsorbing media are particularly beneficial for people living in smaller communities who lack resources to implement the most advanced and expensive solutions that could capture PFAS. These can also be used in the form of decentralized and in-home water treatments."

The UBC team is preparing to pilot the new technology at a number of locations in B.C. starting this month.

"The results we obtain from these real-world field studies will allow us to further optimize the technology and have it ready as products that municipalities, industry and individuals can use to eliminate PFAS in their water," said Dr. Mohseni.

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In addition, oxygen-ion batteries can be produced without rare elements and are made of incombustible materials. A patent application for the new battery idea has already been filed together with cooperation partners from Spain. The oxygen-ion battery could be an excellent solution for large energy storage systems, for example to store electrical energy from renewable sources.

Ceramic materials as a new solution

"We have had a lot of experience with ceramic materials that can be used for fuel cells for quite some time," says Alexander Schmid from the Institute for Chemical Technologies and Analytics at TU Wien. "That gave us the idea of investigating whether such materials might also be suitable for making a battery."

The ceramic materials that the TU Wien team studied can absorb and release doubly negatively charged oxygen ions. When an electric voltage is applied, the oxygen ions migrate from one ceramic material to another, after which they can be made to migrate back again, thus generating electric current.

"The basic principle is actually very similar to the lithium-ion battery," says Prof. Jürgen Fleig. "But our materials have some important advantages." Ceramics are not flammable—so fire accidents, which occur time and again with lithium-ion batteries, are practically ruled out. In addition, there is no need for rare elements, which are expensive or can only be extracted in an environmentally harmful way.

"In this respect, the use of ceramic materials is a great advantage because they can be adapted very well," says Tobias Huber. "You can replace certain elements that are difficult to obtain with others relatively easily." The prototype of the battery still uses lanthanum—an element that is not exactly rare but not completely common either. But even lanthanum is to be replaced by something cheaper, and research into this is already underway. Cobalt or nickel, which are used in many batteries, are not used at all.

High lifespan

But perhaps the most important advantage of the new battery technology is its potential longevity: "In many batteries, you have the problem that at some point the charge carriers can no longer move," says Alexander Schmid. "Then they can no longer be used to generate electricity, the capacity of the battery decreases. After many charging cycles, that can become a serious problem."

The oxygen-ion battery, however, can be regenerated without any problems: If oxygen is lost due to side reactions, then the loss can simply be compensated for by oxygen from the ambient air.

The new battery concept is not intended for smartphones or electric cars, because the oxygen-ion battery only achieves about a third of the energy density that one is used to from lithium-ion batteries and runs at temperatures between 200 and 400 °C. The technology is, however, extremely interesting for storing energy.

"If you need a large energy storage unit to temporarily store solar or wind energy, for example, the oxygen-ion battery could be an excellent solution," says Alexander Schmid. "If you construct an entire building full of energy storage modules, the lower energy density and increased operating temperature do not play a decisive role. But the strengths of our battery would be particularly important there: the long service life, the possibility of producing large quantities of these materials without rare elements, and the fact that there is no fire hazard with these batteries."

The paper is published in the journal Advanced Energy Materials.

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It’s finally happening! After two generations of getting roundly obliterated by Intel in overall CPU performance, it looks like AMD is finally working on an answer to Intel’s incredible big.LITTLE processor core architecture - and that could mean an end to Intel’s long-running market dominance in the CPU space.

For those not in the know, the big.LITTLE architecture (first introduced in Intel’s 12th-gen desktop processors, which we raved about in our reviews) essentially employs two different types of CPU cores to improve overall performance: ‘performance’ cores that carry the processor’s primary workloads, and ‘efficiency’ cores that quietly take care of background tasks to free up system resources.

This architecture proved itself worthy immediately, and has kept Intel sitting at the top of our best processors list for a while now - the current king of the CPU hill is the Intel Core i9-13900K, which also uses big.LITTLE. While AMD arguably has the gaming edge thanks to its fancy 3D V-cache tech (seen most recently in the Ryzen 9 7950X3D), Team Red is still lagging with its standard cores.

That could all be about to change, though. As Tom’s Hardware (opens in new tab) reports, a fresh leak has revealed an as-of-yet unnamed AMD engineering sample, which CPU expert @InstLatX64 (opens in new tab) believes is a trial run of a hybrid-core processor. If true, this could be a huge leap forward for AMD; while we don’t know when it could arrive, equipping the best Ryzen processors with a big.LITTLE equivalent would create a very tangible threat to Intel’s throne.

Analysis: This is big news, but let’s not get carried away

Digging into the details of the leak a little, we can see that the CPU in question - which is named ‘100-000000931-21_N [Family 25 Model 120 Stepping 0]’ has twelve threads spread across six cores. @InstLatX64 claims these are two high-power Zen 4 cores and four energy-efficient Zen 4c cores, meaning this could be the rumored hybrid ‘Phoenix 2’ CPU that allegedly surfaced last year, as reported by German tech news site 3DCenter.

The Phoenix 2 chip, which apparently isn’t related to AMD’s existing Phoenix APU, is claimed to use the same 12-thread configuration as this newly-leaked engineering sample along with RDNA 3 integrated graphics. As Tom’s Hardware noted, there has been some dispute over the exact details, and AMD has not been forthcoming with information - indicating that its own hybrid core architecture is not yet ready to be unveiled.

#AMD 12t #Phoenix2 CPUID A70F80 in MilkyWay@home:https://t.co/xZTMra8Svz https://t.co/a6hQbWi1Uo pic.twitter.com/Pd701SwSzUMarch 16, 2023

However, the circumstances of this leak suggest that Phoenix 2 may be nearing a big reveal: it came from the MilkyWay@Home database, a distributing-computing project (similar to the well-known Folding@Home (opens in new tab)) which leverages unused system resources on participants’ computers to carry out massive computational tasks - in this case, creating an incredibly detailed 3D model of the Milky Way. A mystery CPU was first hooked up to MilkyWay@Home in early March 2023, meaning that it’s already functional and the sample might actually be being tested by someone outside AMD, so this could be a quiet but intentional leak.

In any case, AMD has yet to comment properly on its own hybrid architecture, so we can only speculate wildly as to when Phoenix 2 might actually arrive. But considering that AMD’s Ryzen CPUs already put up a decent fight against Intel’s Core line without hybrid cores, I think Intel needs to start worrying. As a PC gamer, AMD has long been my chipmaker of choice, and this could prove to be the death knell for Intel in the gaming space - unless, of course, Team Blue bites back by revealing its own counter to AMD’s 3D V-cache!

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Google has finally launched its artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot Bard for the public to play with. While the large language model may be fun to play with, users have noted that so far it lags behind competitors, making a number of basic and amusing errors on simple tasks.

One user discovered that the chatbot believed that it had already been shut down due to a lack of interest.

The user discovered that the sole source that the bot had used for this information was a 6-hour-old comment on Hacker News. Bard went on to list more reasons that Bard (which has not been shut down) had been shut down, including that it didn't offer anything new or innovative.

"Whatever the reason, it is clear that Google Bard was not a successful product," Google Bard added. "It was shut down after less than six months since its launch, and it is unlikely that it will ever be revived."

Elsewhere, the chatbot struggled with math.

For comparison, rival OpenAI's ChatGPT solved the question in the style of Cotton-Eyed Joe.

Bard no longer makes this error, and when asked for an answer to the question in the style of Cotton-Eyed Joe it gives it a good old try, vaguely attempting to stick to the rhyming structure and singing:

"If you were traveling at 8 miles an hour
And you wanted to walk 8 miles
It would take you 1 hour
To walk 8 miles
If you were traveling at 4 miles an hour
And you wanted to walk 8 miles
It would take you 2 hours
To walk 8 miles
If you were traveling at 2 miles an hour
And you wanted to walk 8 miles
It would take you 4 hours
To walk 8 miles
So if you want to get there quick
You better walk at 8 miles an hour
Or you'll be walking all day
And you'll still be nowhere"

Users were also disappointed with Bard's programming skills, though others pointed out that Bard would fulfill the request if you tweak the prompt slightly and specify that you want Javascript code.

In one final amusing blunder, it also claimed to be based on its rival.

Bard itself is a slimmed-down version of Google's Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA). 

"This much smaller model requires significantly less computing power, enabling us to scale to more users, allowing for more feedback," CEO of Google Sundar Pichai explained in a blog post ahead of the launch. "We’ll combine external feedback with our own internal testing to make sure Bard’s responses meet a high bar for quality, safety and groundedness in real-world information."

The chatbot failed to impress investors last month, wiping $100 billion off shares after an embarrassing blunder during a video launch. The bot, when asked to list discoveries made by the JWST telescope, claimed that it was the first telescope to photograph an exoplanet. However, that feat was actually performed by the Very Large Telescope in 2004, 17 years before JWST's launch.

It's unclear when or whether LaMDA will be released to the public. Google may feel it is lagging behind its rivals in the AI arena, with OpenAI's Chat GPT-4 already able to code well, do taxes, and excel at many human exams. 

Source

Asus TUF Gaming Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 OC Edition With Traditional 8-Pin Power Design

When Nvidia released GeForce RTX 4090 with 16-pin 12VHPWR power connector. It was expected that all graphics cards in the RTX 40 series would use the same. Looks like that is changing.

A year ago, ATX 3.0 standard was announced by Intel. ATX is a standard which dictates the specifications of motherboards and power supplies.

With ATX 3.0 also came a highly controversial addition to the power supplies. The 16-pin 12VHPWR power cable connector, largely for graphics cards. It’s a single connector that has the ability to supply 600W power to the graphics card.

This is unlike the current 8-pin cables which are rated for 150W and when usually combined with another 8-pin cable, is rated to reach 300W. Add another 8-pin cable and we get 450W.

In all, many felt that a new cable is required for the highly power-hungry new-gen graphics cards. So the 600W delivering 12VHPWR cable does make sense.

When Nvidia released the GeForce RTX 4090, it announced that it’s going to use the new 12VHPWR connector. The problems started appearing after release, when many people started complaining about the issues with the new cable. From damaging user’s 12VHPWR connector or sometimes even the graphics card. Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080, which was released later, too used the same 16-pin connector and was facing the same problem.

It was later found out that it was not cable’s fault as much as it was user fault. People were not inserting the connector properly and was hence it was causing issues. Nvidia was quick to jump onto it. All graphics cards and power supply makers too started advising everyone about making sure that the plug is inserted properly inside the graphics cards.

Sure enough, after the suggestions and people becoming more aware about them, we are not seeing many complaints about it. However, recently new specs for the 12VHPWR were released, insisting on better designed connectors.

But the question is, are these new connectors required on lower powered graphics cards. Nvidia doesn’t think so.

RTX 4070, RTX 4060 Ti and RTX 4060 To Use 8-Pin Power Connectors

According to the information provided by igor’sLAB, the non-Ti model of GeForce RTX 4070 will come with two types of power connectors. Nvidia has asked graphics card makers to use the 12VHPWR (or 2×8 pin) connector whenever the power requirements go up-to 225W. However, when the card is expected to use 200W, the graphics cards will use the conventional 8-pin power.

The article states that it is expected that GeForce RTX 4060 Ti and RTX 4060 too will likely use the 8-pin power connectors too. All this is a highly welcomed move.

Only the Founders Edition cards (sold directly by Nvidia) and factory overclocked RTX 4070 made by card makers are expected to use the 12VHPWR connector.

RTX 4070 Box With 8-Pin Power Connector Confirmed

A tweet posted by @9550pro, shows a Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 graphics card box made by Inno3D. The box shows a 1x 8-pin PCIe cable requirement for powering the card.

The above confirms that yes, what’s getting reported by igor’sLAB is indeed completely true. We might hear more about it soon.

Conclusion

Sometimes it’s a wonder if Nvidia did a right thing switching to the new 12VHPWR connector. It’s relatively small, has the ability to deliver a huge amount of power in 16-pins cramped together in a single plug. Not only that, people need to either upgrade their power supply unit (PSU) or use 2×8 pin or 3×8 pin into 16-pin power adapter which could be of varied quality.

It’s important to mention that AMD hasn’t adapted the new power standard. In fact, AMD’s most powerful current-gen card, the Radeon RX 7900 XTX graphics card, still continues to use the traditional 8-pin design. The card isn’t rated to use as much power as the RTX 4090 does, but some testers have found otherwise. Particularly because Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 is found to be highly efficient and AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX found to be reaching above 400W.

Also, power supply industry veteran JonnyGuru has explained in a highly technical short article that how it’s a misinformed belief that a single 8-pin power plug can supply only 150W.

Reading that makes one think that it’s a good thing that cheaper cards will continue to use it and also, whether it’s worth the effort to switch to the newer one.

Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 & Lower Will Use 8-Pin PSU Connector

“I’m super excited…it makes me very proud of all the time and effort the team has invested to get this far,” said David Petri, system integration and test lead for the Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER). The team recently began assembling the 1,000-pound rover at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.

Engineers have affixed the rover’s lower chassis plate and the lower parts of the frame that will support all of VIPER – from the bottom of its wheels to the tip of its headlights. It all now sits atop a set of risers on a specialized lift table in a clean room at Johnson.

“We’ve just completed the first few steps integrating rover components that will one day be on the surface of the Moon,” said Petri. “Hardware is coming in from all over the world, including some manufactured at several NASA centers – it’s really ‘go’ time.”

In a clean room at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, the engineers have installed the lower chassis plate and lower frame parts that will serve as the support structure for VIPER. This includes everything from the bottom of its wheels to the tip of its headlights. The entire assembly is now elevated on a set of risers using a specialized lift table. Credit: NASA

 

Over the next few months, engineers and technicians will continue the build-up, adding subsystems such as avionics, power, telecommunications, mechanisms, thermal systems, and navigation systems onto the rover, including the specialized scientific instruments and drill that will perform the primary objectives of the VIPER mission. Once integration is complete, they will put the completed rover through a series of stressful function, performance, and operational tests, followed by vibration, acoustic and thermal-vacuum environmental tests ensuring the rover is mission-ready.

Meanwhile, at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley where the mission is managed, software engineers continue developing and testing the brains of the rover, before it is integrated with the rover hardware. And the VIPER science team continues to simulate the fast-paced science operations in preparation for a target lunar landing date of Nov. 10, 2024. Scientists chose the date to ensure that VIPER, a solar-powered rover, receives the most sunlight possible as it makes frequent stops to study and explore a portion of the large flat-topped Moon mountain Mons Mouton. Using a target landing date, the rover’s science team can continue planning the best path for the rover to take to maximize science results while outrunning cold and dark shadows.

The successful arrival of the first flight science instruments is just the beginning – with more expected to arrive soon, and many other parts staged in preparation for integration – NASA is on track to deliver VIPER in mid-2024 to Astrobotic of Pittsburgh, ahead of a launch in late-2024. Astrobotic is scheduled to deliver VIPER to the Moon’s South Pole aboard its Griffin lander as part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative.

Once on the Moon, VIPER will explore and study the environment to better understand the origin and distribution of lunar water and other potential resources. Such findings could be used to help determine where and how the Moon’s resources can be harvested to sustain humans on the Moon for the Artemis program and future human space exploration in deep space.

The Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER), developed by NASA, is a mobile robot that will venture to the South Pole of the Moon to examine the location and density of water ice, which could be utilized to sustain human exploration on the Moon, Mars, and beyond. This mission marks the first resource mapping endeavor on a celestial body beyond Earth.

Scheduled for dispatch to the lunar surface in late 2024 through NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative, VIPER will play a crucial role in the agency’s objective to collaborate with commercial lunar delivery services. This involves utilizing emerging commercial landers to transport ready-to-fly payloads to the Moon’s surface.

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Bard looks like a search engine, though Google says it isn’t one.

Image: Google

Google says its Bard chatbot isn’t a search engine — so what is it?

Are Roblox’s new AI coding and art tools the future of game development?

Spotted by VideoCardz, Gigabyte appears to have accidentally leaked the specifications of the desktop RTX 4060 via its Gigabyte Control Center (GCC) tool. The release notes for the latest GCC version 23.03.02.01 lists support for colours of the RTX 4060 Gaming OC 8GB model. As a bonus, Gigabyte has also confirmed the memory capcity of the RTX 4070 as well. Its Aero OC RTX 4070 apparently has 12GB VRAM, just like the RTX 4070 Ti. The last gen RTX 3060 had 12GB and 3070/Ti featured 8GB.

Here is a screenshot of the release notes showing the 4060 with 8GB and the 4070 with a 12GB memory buffer.

In terms of the core specifications themselves, a report last year suggested that the RTX 4060 will have 36 steaming multiprocessors (SMs) or 4,608 CUDA cores. However, this is still unconfirmed and is unlikely. The laptop variant comes with 3,072 shaders which means the desktop counterpart might pack around 3,840. As for the RTX 4070, it purportedly features 5,888 CUDA cores per previous rumors (via RedGamingTech YouTube channel).

Source: Gigabyte GCC release notes

Gigabyte confirms Nvidia RTX 4060 has less VRAM than 3060, RTX 4070 also leaks out

In a memo to workers that was posted on Amazon's blog, CEO Andy Jassy stated that the cuts would happen sometime in the next few weeks, and would mostly affect employees in its AWS, PXT, Advertising, and Twitch divisions. The cuts come as the company has completed what Jassy called the second phase of Amazon's operating plan, or “OP2." He added:

Some may ask why we didn’t announce these role reductions with the ones we announced a couple months ago. The short answer is that not all of the teams were done with their analyses in the late fall; and rather than rush through these assessments without the appropriate diligence, we chose to share these decisions as we’ve made them so people had the information as soon as possible. The same is true for this note as the impacted teams are not yet finished making final decisions on precisely which roles will be impacted.

Even with these new cuts, Jassy stated that he was "very optimistic about the future and the myriad of opportunities we have" at Amazon.

Last week, Meta announced its own second round of job cuts, as it will eliminate 10,000 more jobs by the end of 2023. The tech industry continues to be hit with big labor cuts, as companies like Microsoft, Google, Dell, Spotify, Zoom, PayPal, and many more have revealed layoffs in the thousands. So far, Apple is the only big tech company that has not revealed mass job cuts, although it has reduced its hiring and has delayed employee bonuses.

Amazon to lay off another 9,000 employees on top of 18,000 earlier worker cuts

Never one to shy away from hot-button topics, it looks like the creators of South Park have used ChatGPT to write parts of a recent episode that pokes fun at the much-hyped artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot.

Released on March 9, 2023, the fourth episode of season 26, titled Deep Learning, sees students at South Park Elementary discover the new technology that can write their homework (an experience that’s no doubt unfolding at schools and colleges around the world at the moment). 

The episode ends with the credits saying “written by Trey Parker and ChatGPT”, although knowing the creators of South Park this could be heavily cloaked sarcasm. The credits also explain that some of the voices in the episode, namely the voice of ChatGPT itself, were created using Play.ht's AI-powered text-to-voice generator. 

If you've been living under a rock recently, ChatGPT is a free-to-use chatbot developed by OpenAI that uses AI to generate human-like replies to questions and demands. The technology is based on neural networks, which mimic the underlying architecture of the brain to process information and learn. 

The initial aim of the chatbot was to develop an AI that has human-like conversations with users, but the latest iterations of ChatGPT are capable of performing complex tasks, whether it be composing emails and essays or even writing TV episodes and computer code.

It has made countless headlines in recent months and has been pitted to revolutionize the way the world works. Nevertheless, as the South Park episode highlights, the AI tool is already raising plenty of questions about ethics, authenticity, and corporate power. 

The ever-controversial creators of South Park, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, are not totally divorced from the incoming tidal wave of AI technology, however. The pair set up their own AI entertainment studio, Deep Voodoo, which recently received $20 million of funding to develop “deep fake technology, cost-effective visual effects services, and original synthetic media projects.”

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Free USB drives

With Dev Channel Insiders being moved to the new Canary Channel recently, users who want to switch to lower channels need to clean install their OS. In order to assist customers in this endeavor, Microsoft is offering free USBs on a first come-first serve basis. The bad news is that delivery for the hardware may take 6-8 weeks, find out how to claim your USB here.

Speaking of Insider channels, Microsoft confirmed that it will not be flighting Dev or Canary Channel builds this week - although the company is working on a new capability for Insiders to receive efatures faster. Instead, Insiders on the Beta Channel netted build 22624.1465 (KB5023775) with improved live captions, touch keyboard settings, VPN status changes, and a couple of bugs. Similarly, Windows 10 and Windows 11 Insiders on the Release Preview Channel received lots of backend enhancements.

It wasn't Insiders that had all the fun though. Customers on stable builds were treated to Patch Tuesday updates. Windows 10 users received security updates and a known issue whereas Windows 11 version 22H2 and 21H2 featured lengthy changelogs with lots of fixes.

Although there wasn't really a lot of activity in the higher Insider channels, Windows Subsystem for Android (WSA) did receive better performance and stability in Dev and Beta. This areais perhaps becoming even more important for Microsoft as it faces competition from Google Play Games, which is coming to more countries soon. Over on the Linux side, Microsoft brought Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2) custom kernel support to Arm.

Those who use Windows 10 for gaming should also know that some OEMs are seemingly turning on virtualization-based security (VBS) in the OS, which could lead to slight performance drops. And since we are talking about performance, it's important to highlight that Yandex has alleged that AMD writes its drivers in a way that unfairly favors Edge and Chrome, compared to Yandex Browser.

And while it's not related to the aforementioned topic, Microsoft says that it is working on new policies for app pinning and default apps as a part of its "long-standing approach to put people in control of their Windows PC experience" (hehe). The company has formally published guidance for family features in Windows 11 and made AppLocker deployment easier across various versions of Windows recently too.

AI everywhere

Microsoft is on a mission to bring its AI capabilities to its mainstream products. To that end, Bing AI is now embedded in the Microsoft Edge Sidebar and it seems like GPT is on its way to LinkedIn too. Microsoft has also announced Microsoft 365 Copilot for its Office productivity apps like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and others. You can also check out a video of this feature in action in PowerPoint here.

The Redmond tech firm is also busy making improvements to Bing Chat. The chatbot is now running on GPT-4, sports daily chat and per session turn limits of 150 and 15 respectively, and allows people to share answers on social media platforms. Faster responses from the AI are being worked upon too. Some people are even reporting that they don't need to get in a queue to access the chatbot anymore. Microsoft is also working on integrating Bing Chat answers directly in Bing Search.

In related news, Microsoft gave customers an inside look at how it combines its Azure cloud with Nvidia hardware to power AI supercomputers, which are also the backbone for ChatGPT's large language model. While its hardware and software are certainly impressive, some might find it problematic that Microsoft has laid off its entire ethical AI team.

When it comes to updates to other Microsoft apps and services, video filters are now available in Teams, while Avatars and 3x3 default video view for Edge and Chrome are coming in May. Speaking of Edge, the stable version now sports Adobe Acrobat PDF reader natively while Dev has tab pinning, video ad blocker on Android, and more. Meanwhile, the Canary version has implementation that disables the Bing button and toggle off rounded corners on webpages. Microsoft is also intent on bringing Bing Search to Windows 10 desktop via Edge, without the AI copilot for now. It has begun testing the browser on iPhone and iPad too.

Finally, Microsoft will begin rolling out the new Outlook client to more users in April, and for those who have the new Microsoft 365 app on Android, you can now quickly jump to recently opened files.

Pirated Windows copies

A somewhat funny story emerged this week when a Windows 10 customer reported that a Microsoft support official activated their copy by leveraging a script that is used to crack the operating system. Yes, you read that right. This was confirmed by the script's creator who noted that their method is illegal and isn't an official way to activate Windows. Overall, there is no harm done since the user in question had already purchased the Windows 10 copy officially, but was having trouble activating it.

In related news, Microsoft has released PowerShell scripts to patch the WinRE BitLocker bypass in order to improve security. Its Patch Tuesday updates have also fixed a critical Outlook 0-day exploit and another reported by Google; it was related to a ransomware bypassing Microsoft SmartScreen. And if you're running a relatively insecure Windows 8.1, you should also know that Power BI Desktop is ending support for the OS in a few months.

In other security news, hackers from North Korea are reportedly invading LinkedIn with fake job listings targeting unsuspecting people. In order to further secure customers against threats like these and more, Microsoft is also publicly previewing custom real-time detections in Microsoft 365 Defender. Lastly, the company is working on implementing an NFT and crypto wallet in its Edge browser (sigh).

Git gud

As has been the case for the past several weeks, we will once again kick off this section with Microsoft's ongoing purchase of Activision Blizzard. The former has signed two more deals with cloud streaming platforms regarding the distribution of Call of Duty, those being Boosteroid and Ubitus. Despite these seemingly consumer-friendly moves, the FTC has accused Microsoft of holding back documents requested regarding the acqusition while the EU has delayed its decision to May. As the acquisition continues to stretch on, Blizzard has confirmed that it currently has no plans to bring Diablo IV to Xbox Game Pass. Ghostwire: Tokyo is coming to the service on April 12 though.

Meanwhile, Microsoft's highly anticipated Starfield has been handed an R18+ rating in Australia due to excessive drug use. This means that it can't legally be sold to minors and Microsoft may have to be careful while advertising the title too. On the other end of the spectrum, Minecraft is now available on select Chromebooks. Moreover, the Xbox app on Windows has been updated with improved filters and game discovery capabilities, read the changelog here.

Coming over to deals and promotions, Xbox Free Play Days has Anno 1800, Session, and Autonauts on offer. Lamentum is free to claim on Games with Gold and NFS Unbound headlines Deals with Gold. However, if console gaming doesn't interest you, check out this Weekend's PC Game Deals curated personally by our News Editor Pulasthi Ariyasinghe.

Dev Channel

• You can now nominate your favorite Windows apps for Microsoft Store Awards 2023

• Tiny10 version 2303 brings modern, lightweight, and serviceable Windows 10 to old PCs

• Satya Nadella remains Microsoft board's chairman, but there is a new lead independent director

• Build 2023 has been confirmed for May 23-25

• SwiftKey for Android has been updated with Unicode 15 emojis and a new theme

• The second preview of Visual Studio 2022 17.6 is now available

• Microsoft 365 Apps version 2302 has resolved issues in Access, Outlook, Project, and Word

• Microsoft has issued a firmware update to fix abnormal shutdowns in Surface Laptop 4

• Rufus 3.22 Beta has added an option to disable BitLocker and removed ISO downloads on Windows 7

• Microsoft has updated WinUI 3 Gallery app to help developers create beautiful Windows apps

   

Under the spotlight

Neowin's John Callaham authored a very interesting piece comparing today's reality with what Microsoft envisioned a smart home to look like in 1999. Read more about the comparison here to find out how accurate Microsoft was in its predictions.

We also have a couple of guides to spotlight. The first is from News Reporter Taras Buria who explains how you can disable the new Bing button in the Sidebar in the latest Edge 111 Stable update.

The other guide is from forum member Adam Bottjen, who detailed the process to enable Back Tap on your iPhone in his latest Tech Tip Tuesday piece.

Logging off

Our most interesting news item in this edition of Microsoft Weekly is about the Redmond tech giant once again pushing ads for Microsoft Edge. This time, this was a full-page ad without the title bar - which meant that you couldn't close the window by pressing the traditional "x" button -, and it displayed after a browser update rather than first launch. This is not being widely reported so far, so it is possible that this ad being served to us after a browser update is a glitch rather than something intentional. But then again, you never know given Microsoft's history in this area.

Microsoft Weekly: Free USB drives, Bing AI in Edge, and pirated Windows

In the year 2023, most homes have "smart" devices of some sort, and smart home products are becoming more and more advanced all the time. However, back when the internet was just becoming a mainstream resource, Microsoft had some ideas about how a smart home might look and act in the "future".

You can take a glimpse at what Microsoft thought a smart home would be like with a 1999 video posted on YouTube. Let's take a look at what Microsoft got right (or at least within the ballpark) and what it got wrong with its smart home concept.

Home security

The beginning of the video shows "Robin" entering the home with an eye scanner. While there are certainly different ways of keyless entry into a house, the eye scanner method is definitely one not used by current homeowners. However, some people do open their front doors with a mobile phone app in 2023.

Also, smart doorbells in 2023 do have cameras for security. In another section of the video, the family is having dinner while some salesperson is trying to visit. The TV does show the unexpected guest to the family, and that's certainly available with video doorbells as they can display what they see on current smart televisions.

In the Kitchen

Robin is in the kitchen with a "kitchen PC". While most people likely don't have a full desktop computer on their kitchen countertop, smart displays like the Amazon Echo Show are available for things like calendars, watching videos for recipes, and much more, Smart displays, which can also include tablets on a kickstand, are being used more frequently in the kitchen.

Robin also scanned some food packages that are sent to a virtual shopping list on her kitchen PC. The "online grocer" will set up a delivery. In our real world, we do have online grocers who will deliver food to your house based on your list. Some smart refrigerators even have their own internet-connected features that will let you see what's inside the fridge while you are at the store so you can pick up food that you are running out of.

Indoor and outdoor notifications

Robin sends a notice to her daughter Jessie who is walking outside to ask if she will be back for dinner. Jessie gets the notification from her "PocketPC" made by Casio and running on Windows CE. Ouch. This has not aged well at all. Of course, Robin could just text message Jessie on her iPhone or Android smartphone (oh, Windows Phone, this could have been you).

When she arrives home, Jessie plays the piano which is connected to the home network and gets a notification when her favorite TV show comes on. Again, this didn't really come to pass as Jessie would likely have a smartphone to get notifications like this.

The "Web phone"

This may be the biggest "swing and a miss" prediction in this video. The "web phone" that has a big display and is connected to the internet and the home network really didn't happen. Instead, we got smartphones that can do tons of things this "web phone" could never do.

Other observations

• The 1999 Microsoft smart home has some touch panels to change the lighting in the house. In today's home, that would more likely be a touchscreen similar to a tablet or a smart display.
• Voice commands are used from time to time in the video. While we have had voice assistants for a while now, they really have not caught on like Microsoft believed they would have in the video.
• There are lots of big-screen TVs in the Microsoft smart home of 1999, which is certainly true today. The family uses WebTV to control what people can watch on each screen. In 2023, the streaming TV revolution is in full effect, so there's no real need for that kind of control.

What did you think of this glimpse into the future from 1999?

A look back at Microsoft's 1999 smart home: What it got right and what it got wrong

Today Microsoft took the wraps off of Microsoft 365 Copilot, its rumored effort to build automated AI-powered content-generation features into all of the Microsoft 365 apps.

The capabilities Microsoft demonstrated make Copilot seem like a juiced-up version of Clippy, the oft-parodied and arguably beloved assistant from older versions of Microsoft Office. Copilot can automatically generate Outlook emails, Word documents, and PowerPoint decks, can automate data analysis in Excel, and can pull relevant points from the transcript of a Microsoft Teams meeting, among other features.

Microsoft is currently testing Copilot "with 20 customers, including eight in Fortune 500 enterprises." The preview will be expanded to other organizations "in the coming months," but the company didn't mention when individual Microsoft 365 subscribers would be able to use the features. The company will "share more on pricing and licensing soon," suggesting the feature may be a paid add-on in addition to the cost of a Microsoft 365 subscription.

In a video demonstrating Copilot features, Microsoft presenters showed Copilot generating emails and PowerPoint slides based on prompts. The core functionality is based on a large-language model (LLM) like the ChatGPT 4-based model used for Bing Chat, helped along by Microsoft Graph-supplied contextual information from elsewhere in Microsoft's cloud. Microsoft says that Copilot's LLM can be trained on data specific to an individual business, using your data "in a secure, compliant, privacy-preserving way" to make Copilot's output more relevant.

Copilot was shown pulling in relevant images from OneDrive, inserting information from confirmation emails and calendar appointments from Outlook, and generating PowerPoint decks based on the information in a Word document. Copilot can also automate repetitive tasks, like adding animations and transitions to a PowerPoint slide show or fleshing out rough notes into a more polished document for public consumption.

Aware that AI content generators are prone to factual errors and other weird mistakes (often called "hallucinations"), Microsoft emphasized that Copilot is most useful for "first drafts" and "starting points." It might not get every single fact in an email or presentation right, but users will be able to go through and tweak text, images, and formatting to make sure everything is correct. Copilot can also be used during the edit process, making points you've written more concise or automatically replacing an image in a PowerPoint deck with another more-relevant image.

"Sometimes, Copilot will get it right," said Microsoft VP of Modern Work and Business Applications Jared Spataro in the presentation. "Other times, it will be usefully wrong, giving you an idea that's not perfect, but still gives you a head start."

Microsoft also stressed its commitment to "building responsibly." Despite allegedly laying off an entire team dedicated to AI ethics, Microsoft says it has "a multidisciplinary team of researchers, engineers and policy experts" looking for and mitigating "potential harms" by "refining training data, filtering to limit harmful content, query- and result-blocking sensitive topics, and applying Microsoft technologies like InterpretML and Fairlearn to help detect and correct data bias." The system will also link to its sources and note limitations where appropriate.

Microsoft has been pushing AI-powered features in all of its biggest products this year, most notably in the Bing Chat preview, but also in Skype and Windows 11. It's part of a multi-billion-dollar partnership with OpenAI, the company behind the ChatGPT chatbot, the Whisper transcription technology, and the DALL-E image generator.

Source

Eurogamer reports that the European Union and its executive arm, the European Commission, will push back the decision to approve or deny the merger from the original date of April 25 to May 22.

The extra time will give Microsoft more opportunities to give some concessions and remedies to the EU and EC so they will feel comfortable approving the acquisition. Previous reports indicated the EC will let the deal go forward without the need for Microsoft to sell off the huge Call of Duty gameplay franchise.

This week, Microsoft has been pledging to offer its Xbox and Activision Blizzard games to two streaming companies: Boosteroid and Ubitus. Microsoft says it has offered a similar 10-year deal to keep Call of Duty games on Sony's PlayStation consoles. However, Sony not only doesn't want to agree to such a deal, it believes Microsoft might even cripple future Call of Duty games on PlayStation to give Microsoft an advantage.

Even if the EU approves the acquisition, Microsoft is also trying to convince both the UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) and the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to sign off on the deal. This week, the FTC accused Microsoft of not giving them all of the documents the agency asked for to examine the company's arguments for the deal to commence.

Source: Eurogamer

EU delays decision on approving Microsoft's purchase of Activision Blizzard until May 22

This week, Google announced that it has stopped selling Google Glass Enterprise Edition, marking another end-of-life for the Glass product that was originally meant to start an augmented reality revolution.

First launched to a limited audience back in 2013, Glass was supposed to be a revolutionary new computing platform. The headset offered users a head-up display and a built-in camera, allowing them to see a small amount of information and capture images of their environment.

While some tech enthusiasts took to it, it was also widely mocked for its geeky appearance, limited functionality, and potential role in violating the privacy of people around the user. The criticism was so fierce that the term "Glasshole" was sometimes used to describe people who wore it.

The initial version, which had mainstream consumer ambitions, was discontinued in 2015. Two years later, Google announced Google Glass Enterprise Edition with a scaled-back ambition of selling the device for narrow uses in industries like medicine and construction. An updated version called Google Glass Enterprise Edition 2 was announced in 2019, and that's the one that was discontinued this week.

Sales ceased on March 15, and support ends on September 15, Google says. No further software updates are planned, but the end-of-support date is the deadline after which Google will no longer replace damaged devices. Glass headsets in the wild will still work after September 15, though, should businesses plan to continue using them.

Google hasn't announced any plans to re-launch the Google Glass brand after this, but the company is known to be working on other kinds of AR glasses for potential future release.

Google acquired smart glasses-maker North in 2020, and it has since been working on an AR wearable internally codenamed Project Iris, which was said in reports last year to resemble ski goggles.

Competitors Apple and Meta have also been working on AR glasses with an eye toward a consumer release sometime in the future, but limitations in both optical and battery technology make it likely that they're still a ways off from mass-market adoption.

Nonetheless, a few current and upcoming VR headsets (potentially including the long-rumored, long-delayed Apple headset that supposedly will finally launch this year) have cameras and passthrough capabilities that can enable some AR-like features.

All that is to say that augmented reality is still a long way off from being a ubiquitous consumer product. But given this second end-of-life for Google Glass and Microsoft's recent layoffs in its mixed-reality division, even enterprise adoption is not moving at a pace that some in the industry hoped for or predicted—at least not yet.

Source

Rolls-Royce has received funding from the UK Space Agency to develop a nuclear reactor for a moon base.

The project will look into how nuclear power could be used to support a future base on the moon for astronauts.

Scientists and engineers at the British company are working on the microreactor programme to develop technology that will provide power needed for humans to live and work on Earth’s natural satellite.

All space missions depend on a power source, to support systems for communications, life-support and science experiments.

Experts suggest nuclear power could dramatically increase the length of lunar missions.

The UK Space Agency has announced £2.9m of new funding for the project, which will deliver an initial demonstration of a UK lunar modular nuclear reactor.

This comes after a £249,000 study funded by the UK Space Agency in 2022.

The science minister George Freeman said: “Space exploration is the ultimate laboratory for so many of the transformational technologies we need on Earth: from materials to robotics, nutrition, cleantech and much more.

“As we prepare to see humans return to the moon for the first time in more than 50 years, we are backing exciting research like this lunar modular reactor with Rolls-Royce to pioneer new power sources for a lunar base.

“Partnerships like this – between British industry, the UK Space Agency and government – are helping to create jobs across our £16bn space tech sector and help ensure the UK continues to be a major force in frontier science.”

Rolls-Royce plans to have a reactor ready to send to the moon by 2029.

It will work with a variety of collaborators including the University of Oxford, University of Bangor, University of Brighton, University of Sheffield’s Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre (AMRC) and Nuclear AMRC.

Compared with other power systems, a relatively small and lightweight nuclear microreactor could enable continuous power regardless of location, available sunlight and other environmental conditions.

Abi Clayton, director of future programmes for Rolls-Royce, said: “This funding will bring us further down the road in making the microreactor a reality, with the technology bringing immense benefits for both space and Earth.

“The technology will deliver the capability to support commercial and defence use cases alongside providing a solution to decarbonise industry and provide clean, safe and reliable energy.”

Dr Paul Bate, chief executive of the UK Space Agency, said: “This innovative research by Rolls-Royce could lay the groundwork for powering continuous human presence on the moon, while enhancing the wider UK space sector, creating jobs and generating further investment.”

Source

Although the use of clean, almost unlimited nuclear fusion power in space has long captured the imagination in sci-fi novels and TV shows, the lunar reactor would use existing fission power.

The hope is that nuclear power could substantially increase the time humans can spend on the moon. The reactor would also be lighter and smaller than alternative power sources. However, unlike fusion, fission creates radioactive waste.

Rolls-Royce, whose new chief executive, Tufan Erginbilgic, has described its financial performance as “unsustainable”, signed an agreement with [sic]

Source

A while ago, Microsoft announced that it will hold a meeting on March 16, 8 am PT but didn't give any additional information. We know the name of it, which is "The Future of Work with AI." Apart from its name, Microsoft also filled out the "about" section but didn't specify any information. "Join us for a special event with Satya Nadella and Jared Spataro to learn how AI will power a whole new way of working for every person and organization. The live stream starts at 8 AM Pacific Time on March 16," says the about section, which clearly is not very precise.

Despite having very limited information, there is a strong possibility that the upcoming event will mainly cover the new GPT-4 integrations to Microsoft 365.

Microsoft 365 is most likely the focus of the Microsoft AI event

First things first, hosts give us a strong clue about what's on the way. The chairman and CEO, Satya Nadella, will be joined by the vice president of modern work and business applications, Jared Spataro. Spoiler alert, Spataro is also the head of Microsoft 365.

It is not a mystery that Microsoft wants to lead the AI industry, as the company makes it obvious with its courageous steps toward the future. It has been investing heavily in OpenAI and recently revealed that Bing will use GPT-4, which was revealed a couple of days ago.

Microsoft has brought new AI capabilities to Teams and wants to bring more to other apps like Outlook and Word. As you may know, Google recently revealed its new AI features for Gmail and Docs. Similar steps are awaited for Outlook and Word by the users. For Outlook, a possible email draft generator, and a writing suggestion feature for Word is expected. Microsoft will probably integrate GPT-4 into these apps.

Apart from those two, the Microsoft 365 family includes some other highly-used apps like OneDrive, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, and OneNote.

Microsoft is not only bringing these AI solutions to 365 but also to its subsidiary companies. Recently, LinkedIn announced new AI features, helping people share ideas easily and save time writing job descriptions and profile bios.

How to watch the event?

Microsoft decided to keep it simpler and live stream the event on LinkedIn. You don't have to do anything other than regular processes, and you also don't need a press card or invitation to be able to watch the live stream. Simply go to this link and hit the play button once the time comes.

You can also click on the "attend" button to let your connections know what you are up to. There is a discussion section at the right of the page where you can share your ideas with people and see others' thoughts. Currently, there are almost 30,000 attendees,  this number might go higher as we get closer to the event.

Microsoft AI event: What to expect?

According to a report by MacRumors, the latest AI event of Apple included very important information. The company revealed internally that engineers, including the Siri team, "have been testing language-generation concepts every week in response to the rise of chatbots like ChatGPT."

The report mentions that Siri is beyond expectations and not being used as anticipated is because of multiple roadblocks to meaningful improvements. One of the former Apple engineers, John Burkey, said Siri is built on a "clunky code that took weeks to update with basic features," in an interview with The New York Times. Apparently, it is very hard to add basic features and improvements to Siri, making it hard for Apple to bring game-changing abilities. Burkey also doesn't believe Siri to become a creative assistant like ChatGPT.

Apple wants to ensure Microsoft doesn't lead AI

OpenAI started a new era with ChatGPT, and now all the tech giants are trying to keep up with it. Microsoft continues its heavy investments in OpenAI and artificial intelligence in general, while Google is trying to launch Bard as well as multiple other projects. OpenAI launched GPT-4 a couple of days ago and set the bar even higher, making it hard for other tech giants even to get close.

Even though Siri has major design issues, Apple is keen on keeping up with the trends and hopping on the bandwagon to catch others. Siri might cause issues for engineers; as Burkey says, even adding a single word to its database takes too much time. Apple might be late for the party as the engineers are clearly taking the longer road.

On a side note, Apple held its internal AI summit last month. Gurman said the event would take place in the Steve Jobs Theather at the Apple HQ, and the in-person event would also be streamed to employees. Exactly the way Apple used to hold media events before the pandemic.

If you want to know how to use Siri as an AI-powered chatbot with OpenAI's ChatGpt, check this article out!

Apple's chatbot ambitions halted by major obstacle

In an article, we explained the differences, advantages and disadvantages of going either way. One of the advantages of DDR4 we highlighted was its reusability as users who were running high-end DDR4 kits could re-use the same when upgrading to LGA1700 sockets for their 12th/13th Gen Intel systems.

However, that advantage may not last for very long as a new report alleges that Intel's motherboard vendor partner MSI is planning to gradually phase out at least some of the Z790 and B760 DDR4 variants according to some Chinese sources. The affected motherboard models:

• MPG Z790 EDGE WIFI DDR4

• PRO Z790-A WIFI DDR4

• PRO Z790-P DDR4

• MAG B760 MORTAR DDR4

   

As a manufacturer of Intel boards, it perhaps makes sense now to slowly kill off DDR4 boards, at least for the high-end segment as competing AMD solutions, ie, Ryzen 7000 series, only have the option for DDR5. DDR5 is also gradually getting faster and cheaper, and support for non-standard memory capacities, like 192GB, is also getting better. Although we hope budget motherboard models still offer some DDR4 variants as DDR4 memory remains highly affordable, and it continues to be supported by AMD's AM4 socket.

Source: Bobatang (Board channels) via Expreview

MSI allegedly killing off Intel 12th, 13th Gen DDR4 motherboards in favor of DDR5

Samsung's Galaxy S23 ad, showing the moon photography mode.

Samsung

 

If you take a photo of the moon on a Samsung device, it will return a detailed photo of the moon. Some people are mad about this.

 

The issue is that Samsung's software fakes some details the camera can't really see, leading a Reddit user called ibreakphotos to accuse the company of "faking" moon photos. The user's post claims to be able to trick Samsung's moon detection, and it went viral enough that Samsung's press site had to respond.

 

Samsung's incredibly niche "Moon Mode" will do certain photo processing if you point your smartphone at the moon. In 2020, the Galaxy S20 Ultra launched with a "100x Space Zoom" (it was really 30x) with this moon feature as one of its marketing gimmicks. The mode is still heavily featured in Samsung's marketing, as you can see in this Galaxy S23 ad, which shows someone with a huge, tripod-mounted telescope being jealous of the supposedly incredible moon photos a pocketable Galaxy phone can take.

 

We've known how this feature works for two years now—Samsung's camera app contains AI functionality specifically for moon photos—though we did get a bit more detail in Samsung's latest post. The Reddit post claimed that this AI system can be tricked, with ibreakphotos saying that you can take a picture of the moon, blur and compress all the detail out of it in Photoshop, and then take a picture of the monitor, and the Samsung phone will add the detail back. The camera was allegedly caught making up details that didn't exist at all. Couple this with AI being a hot topic, and the upvotes for faked moon photos started rolling in.

 

On one hand, using AI to make up detail is true of all smartphone photography. Small cameras make for bad photos. From a phone to a DSLR to the James Webb Telescope, bigger cameras are better. They simply take in more light and detail. Smartphones have some of the tiniest camera lenses on Earth, so they need a lot of software to produce photos that are anywhere near reasonable in quality.

 

"Computational photography" is the phrase used in the industry. Generally, many photos are quickly taken after you press the shutter button (and even before you press the shutter button!). These photos are aligned into a single photo, cleaned up, de-noised, run through a bunch of AI filters, compressed, and saved to your flash storage as a rough approximation of what you were pointing your phone at. Smartphone manufacturers have to throw as much software at the problem as possible because no one wants a phone with a giant, protruding camera lens, and normal smartphone camera hardware can't keep up.

 

But lighting aside, the moon basically always looks the same to everyone. While it spins, the Earth spins, and the two spin around each other; gravitational forces put the moon in a "synchronous rotation" so we always see the same side of the moon, and it only "wobbles" relative to Earth. If you make an incredibly niche camera mode for your smartphone specifically targeted at only moon photography, you can do a lot of fun AI tricks with it.

 

Who would know if your camera stack just lies and patches in professionally shot, pre-existing photos of the moon into your smartphone picture? Huawei was accused of doing exactly that back in 2019. The company allegedly packed photos of the moon into its camera software, and if you took a photo of a dim light bulb in an otherwise dark room, Huawei would put moon craters on your lightbulb.

 

That would be pretty bad. But what if you took one step back from that and simply involved an AI middleman instead? Samsung took a bunch of photos of the moon, trained an AI on those photos, and then set the AI loose on users' photos of the moon. Is that crossing a line? How specific are you allowed to get with your AI training use cases?

 

Samsung's press release mentions a "detail enhancement engine" for the moon, but it doesn't go into much detail about how it works. The article includes a few unhelpful diagrams about moon mode and AI that all basically boil down to "a photo goes in, some AI stuff happens, and a photo comes out."

 

In the company's defense, AI is often called a "black box." You can train these machine-learning models for a desired outcome, but no one can explain exactly how they work. If you're a programmer that hand-writes a program, you can explain what each line of code does because you wrote the code, but an AI is only "trained"—it programs itself. This is partly why Microsoft is having such a hard time making the Bing chatbot behave.

The press release mostly talks about how the phone recognizes the moon or how it adjusts brightness, but those points are not the issue—the issue is where the detail comes from. While there's no choice quote we can pull, the above image shows pre-existing moon images being fed into the "Detail Enhancement Engine." The whole right side of this diagram is pretty suspicious. It says Samsung's AI compares your moon photo with a "high-resolution reference" and will send it back into the AI detail engine if it's not good enough.

 

That does feel like Samsung is cheating a bit, but where exactly should the line for AI photography be? You definitely wouldn't want an AI-free smartphone camera—that would be a worst-in-class camera. Even non-AI photos from a big camera are just electronic interpretations of the world. They're not "correct" references of how things should look; we're just more used to them. Even objects viewed with the human eye are just electrical signals interpreted by your brain and look different for everyone.

 

It would be a real problem if Samsung's details were inaccurate, but the moon really does look like that. If a photo is completely accurate and looks good, it's hard to argue against it. It also would be a problem if the moon detail was inaccurately applied to things that aren't the moon, but taking a picture of a Photoshopped image is an extreme case. Samsung says it will "improve Scene Optimizer to reduce any potential confusion that may occur between the act of taking a picture of the real moon and an image of the moon," but should it even do that? Who cares if you can fool a smartphone with Photoshop?

The key here is that this technique only works on the moon, which looks the same for everybody. Samsung can be super aggressive about AI detail generation for the moon because it knows what the ideal end result should look like. It feels like Samsung is cheating because this is a hyper-specific use case that doesn't provide a scalable solution for other subjects.

 

You could never use an aggressive AI detail generator for someone's face because everyone's face looks different, and adding details would make that photo not look like the person anymore. The equivalent AI technology would be if Samsung trained an AI specifically on your face and then used that model to enhance photos it detected you were in. Someday, a company may offer hyper-personalized at-home AI training based on your old photos, but we're not there yet.

 

If you don't like your improved moon photos, you can just turn the feature off—it's called "Scene Optimizer" in the camera settings. Just don't be surprised if your moon photos look worse.

Moon-gate: Samsung fans are mad about AI-processed photos of the moon

ChatGPT is not GPT 3.5

Before delving into the differences, it's important to note that ChatGPT is not a version of OpenAI's large language model; instead, it is a chat-based interface that interacts with the model that powers it. While ChatGPT was initially identified as GPT-3.5, it is merely a means of communicating with GPT-3.5 and now with GPT-4.

Now that we have clarified this distinction, let's explore the distinctions between the beloved chatbot and its recently enhanced successor.

GPT-4 is multimodal in its approach

The latest improvement to this adaptable machine learning system is its ability to process 'multimodal' information, which means it can now understand multiple modes of data. In comparison, ChatGPT and GPT-3 were restricted to text-based interactions, being capable of reading and writing but little else - though this was sufficient for numerous use cases.

GPT-4's improved design enables it to comprehend and process relevant information within images, extending beyond simple image recognition tasks. For instance, OpenAI has showcased GPT-4's ability to explain the humor behind an image depicting an oversized iPhone connector. However, the partnership with Be My Eyes highlights a more significant potential of the model. The video demonstrates GPT-4's diverse capabilities by showcasing the utility performing various tasks. This indicates that GPT-4 has the potential to understand and interpret image data in a comprehensive and multifaceted manner.

GPT-4’s memory is more extensive

Large language models like GPT-4 are trained on vast amounts of text data, including web pages and books. However, during actual conversations with users, these models have limits to how much information they can keep in their attention function. The previous versions, GPT-3.5 and the original ChatGPT, were limited to 4,096 'tokens,' which roughly translates to 8,000 words or four to five pages of a book. Beyond this point, the model would start losing track of the conversation.

In contrast, GPT-4 has a token limit of 32,768, which is equivalent to around 64,000 words or 50 pages of text. This increase in token count allows the model to remember up to 50 pages of information during a conversation or text generation. For instance, it can recall a topic discussed 20 pages back in a conversation or refer to an event that occurred 35 pages ago in a written story or essay. While this is an approximate description of how the attention mechanism and token count work, the general idea is that GPT-4 has an expanded memory capacity, enabling it to handle more complex tasks.

It’s harder to lead GPT-4 astray

Despite their advancements, contemporary chatbots are prone to getting misled easily. With just a little bit of coaxing, they can be manipulated to say strange and sometimes unsettling things.  For instance, chatbots can be persuaded to elaborate on what a 'bad AI' would do, or they can collaborate on 'jailbreak' prompts to overcome their restrictions.

However, GPT-4 has undergone extensive training on malicious prompts, which users generously provided to OpenAI over the past couple of years. As a result, GPT-4 surpasses its predecessors in terms of factuality, steerability, and its ability to remain within established guidelines. According to OpenAI, GPT-3.5 (which powered ChatGPT) was a 'test run' of a new training architecture. The lessons learned from that experience were applied to the new model, resulting in a model that is 'unprecedentedly stable.' Additionally, OpenAI was able to predict the model's capabilities more accurately, resulting in fewer surprises.

GPT-4 processes more languages

The field of AI is primarily dominated by English-speaking individuals, and the majority of data, testing, and research papers are in English. However, the capabilities of large language models can be applied to any written language, making it imperative to make them available in other languages.

GPT-4 takes a significant step in this direction by showcasing its ability to accurately answer thousands of multiple-choice questions across 26 different languages, ranging from Italian and Ukrainian to Korean. While the model performs best on Romance and Germanic languages, it generalizes well to other languages as well.

While this preliminary testing of GPT-4's language capabilities is promising, it does not constitute a comprehensive adoption of multilingual abilities. The testing criteria were initially translated from English, and multiple-choice questions do not necessarily represent everyday language usage. However, the model performed remarkably well on this task, despite not having been explicitly trained for it. This suggests that GPT-4 could be significantly more accommodating to non-English speakers.

GPT-4 takes on different personalities

The concept of 'steerability' in artificial intelligence pertains to an AI system's ability to adapt its behavior according to specific requirements. This capability can be beneficial, as in assuming the role of an empathetic interlocutor, or potentially hazardous, such as when individuals manipulate the AI into exhibiting malevolent or despondent traits.

GPT-4 incorporates steerability more seamlessly than its predecessor, GPT-3.5, enabling users to customize the default ChatGPT personality, characterized by a consistent verbosity, tone, and style, to better align with their preferences. The development team emphasizes that this customization has its limits, acknowledging that pushing the model too far may result in breaking character.

Previously, users could indirectly achieve a degree of steerability by priming the chatbot with prompts like, 'Imagine you are a dungeon master in a tabletop RPG' or 'Respond as if you are a guest on a cable news interview.' However, this approach merely offered suggestions to the default GPT-3.5 personality. GPT-4 now empowers developers to incorporate a specific viewpoint, communication style, tone, or interaction mode from the outset.

GPT-4: AI for the next generation of tech

OpenAI's latest AI model, GPT-4, has introduced significant improvements and features that set it apart from its predecessors. With the ability to comprehend images, increased token counts, improved factuality, steerability, and multilingual capabilities, GPT-4 has the potential to revolutionize the field of AI. Additionally, the model's native steerability feature allows users to tailor the chatbot's conversational style and interaction methods to better suit their needs. While there is still room for improvement, GPT-4 is undoubtedly a remarkable achievement that will pave the way for even more advanced AI systems in the future.

Introducing GPT-4: OpenAI's Latest Language Model

LAST NOVEMBER, AT the Stockholm University of the Arts, a human and an AI made music together. The performance began with musician David Dolan playing a grand piano into a microphone. As he played, a computer system, designed and overseen by composer and Kingston University researcher Oded Ben-Tal, “listened” to the piece, extracting data on pitch, rhythm, and timbre. Then, it added its own accompaniment, improvising just like a person would. Some sounds were transformations of Dolan’s piano; some were new sounds synthesized on the fly. The performance was icy and ambient, eerie and textural. 

This scene, of a machine and human peacefully collaborating, seems irreconcilable with the current artists-versus-machines discourse. You will have heard that AI is replacing journalists, churning out error-riddled SEO copy. Or that AI is stealing from illustrators, who are suing Stability AI, DeviantArt, and Midjourney for copyright infringement. Or that computers are rapping, or at least trying to: the “robot rapper” FN Meka was dropped by Capitol Records following criticism that the character was “an amalgamation of gross stereotypes.” In the most recent intervention, none other than Noam Chomsky claimed that ChatGPT exhibits the “banality of evil.”

These anxieties slot neatly among concerns about automation, that machines will displace people—or, rather, that the people in control of these machines will use them to displace everyone else. Yet some artists, musicians prominent among them, are quietly interested in how these models might supplement human creativity, and not just in a “hey, this AI plays Nirvana” way. They are exploring how AI and humans might collaborate rather than compete. 

“Creativity is not a unified thing,” says Ben-Tal, speaking over Zoom. “It includes a lot of different aspects. It includes inspiration and innovation and craft and technique and graft. And there is no reason why computers cannot be involved in that situation in a way that is helpful.”

SPECULATION THAT COMPUTERS might compose music has been around as long as the computer itself. Mathematician and writer Ada Lovelace once theorized that Charles Babbage's steam-powered Analytical Engine, widely hailed as the first computer, could be used for something other than numbers. In her mind, if the “science of harmony and of musical composition” could be adapted for use with Babbage’s machine, “the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent.”

The first book on the subject, Experimental Music: Composition with an Electronic Computer, written by American composer and professor Lejaren Hiller Jr. and mathematician Leonard Isaacson, appeared in 1959. In popular music, artists like Ash Koosha, Arca, and, most prominently, Holly Herndon have drawn on AI to enrich their work. When Herndon spoke to WIRED last year about her free-to-use, “AI-powered vocal clone,” Holly+, she explained the tension between tech and music succinctly. “There’s a narrative around a lot of this stuff, that it’s scary dystopian,” she said. “I’m trying to present another side: This is an opportunity.”

Musicians have also reacted to the general unease generated by ChatGPT and Bing’s AI chatbot. Bogdan Raczynski, reading transcripts of the chatbots’ viral discussions with humans, says over email that he detected “fright, confusion, regret, guardedness, backtracking, and so on” in the model’s responses. It isn’t that he thinks the chatbot has feelings, but that “the emotions it evokes in humans are very real,” he says. “And for me those feelings have been concern and sympathy.” In response, he has released a “series of comforting live performances for AI” (emphasis mine).

BEN-TAL SAYS HIS work presents an alternative to “the human-versus-machine narrative.” He admits that generative AI can be unsettling because, on a superficial level at least, it exhibits a kind of creativity normally ascribed to humans, but he adds that it is also just another technology, another instrument, in a lineage that goes back to the bone flute. For him, generative AI isn’t unlike turntables: When artists discovered they could use them to scratch records and sample their sounds, they created whole new genres.

In this vein, copyright may need a substantial rethink: Google has refrained from releasing its MusicLM model, which turns text into music, because of the “the risks associated with music generation, in particular, the potential misappropriation of creative content.” In a 2019 paper, Ben-Tal and other researchers asked readers to imagine a musician holodeck, an endpoint for music AI, that has archived all recorded music and can generate or retrieve any possible sound on request. Where do songwriters fit into this future? And before then, can songwriters defend themselves against plagiarism? Should audiences be told, as WIRED does in its articles, when AI is used?

Yet these models still present attractive creative capabilities. In the short term, Ben-Tal says, musicians can use an AI, as he did, to improvise with a pianist outside of their skill set. Or they can draw inspiration from an AI’s compositions, perhaps in a genre they are not familiar with, like Irish folk music. 

And in the longer term, AI might fulfill a wilder (albeit controversial) fantasy: It could effortlessly realize an artist’s vision. “Composers, you know, we come up with ideas of what music we would like to create, but then translating these into sounds or scores, realizing those ideas, is quite a laborious task,” he says. “If there was a wire that we could plug in and get this out, that could be very fantastic and wonderful.” 

More urgently, mundane and pervasive algorithms are already mangling the industry. Author Cory Doctorow has written about Spotify’s chokehold on music—how playlists, for instance, encourage artists to abandon albums for music that fits into “chill vibes” categories, and train audiences to let Spotify tell them what to listen to. Introduced into this situation, AI will be the enemy of musicians. What happens when Spotify unleashes its own AI artists and promotes those? 

Raczynski hopes he will catch the wave rather than be consumed by it. “Perhaps in a roundabout way, like it or not, I am acknowledging that short of going off the grid, I have no choice but to develop a relationship with AI,” he says. “My hope is to build a reciprocal relationship over a self-centered one.”

Source

Users who visit the Bing website and activate the Chat link at the top of the webpage may still get the waitlist prompt that explains that access to the new Bing is required for access to the Chat mode.

The "join the waiting list" button, however, activates access immediately now. It is still necessary to sign-in with a Microsoft account, or create a new one, to gain access to the new Bing.

Most Windows 10 and 11 customers have access to a Microsoft account already, as Microsoft made it the default option when setting up the PC for the first time. While there are still options available to create a local account during setup, it is no longer as easy as pressing a button in the interface.

Microsoft's launch of the new AI-powered Bing has been a success for the company. Recently, Microsoft revealed that its search engine crossed the 100 million daily active users mark.

Up until recently, interested users had to join a waiting list, if they wanted to gain access to Bing Chat and the new Bing. Some users waited weeks for access in the beginning.

Microsoft has not confirmed the change yet, but it is possible that the company will announce it later today during its AI event. The event's main speakers are Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella  and Microsoft corporate vice president of modern work and business applications, Jared Spataro.

The event, The Future of Work with AI, will be streamed live on the Internet. Interested users may join it on LinkedIn. While Microsoft has not revealed any details regarding the event, it is expected that Microsoft is showcasing integration of AI into Office applications and Microsoft 365.

Microsoft did add Bing Chat to Microsoft Edge 111, which it released earlier this week. The integration did not sit well with some browser users. The new Bing icon in Edge feels oversized to some, and it activates on hover.

We have published a guide on disabling the Bing icon in Microsoft Edge, and a follow-up article on Microsoft adding an option to turn off the Bing button directly in Edge.

We confirmed the skipping of the waitlist today, and colleagues over at The Verge, Windows Central, and Dr. Windows came to the same conclusion. It is possible that Microsoft has free slots to give away, and that the waitlist will kick in when these are used up. For now though, it appears that anyone may start using Bing Chat right away, without having to wait days or even weeks for access.

Microsoft opens up access to Bing Chat for everyone