While a graphics card with less VRAM isn't inherently bad, what makes the RX 6300 and the other Navi 24-based RDNA 2 GPUs like the RX 6500 XT and the RX 6400 so unappealing is the extremely limited PCIe bus bandwidth as the Navi 24 only has four PCIe (or x4) lanes. This means whenever the available memory buffer is saturated, the card loses performance on any system which is PCIe Gen3 or older.

Fortunately for the 6500 XT and the 6400, the SKUs packed 4GB of VRAM which is mostly enough for 720p or 900p gaming these days. However, the new RX 6300 comes with just half of that which means the GPU will almost always be limited by its VRAM as most AAA titles these days gobble up the available memory buffer. This means users will only be able to play older titles.

The leaked specs of the card show 2GB of VRAM across a 32-bit wide bus though at least the power consumption of the card is a major redeeming factor. The price of the card appears to be around ~$60, at least when converting Chinese prices.

Another big problem for the RX 6300 is the lack of encoding and AV1 decoding support on Navi 24, which means it won't be a good card for HTPCs either. However, if someone didn't have a ton of AV1 content to play back or no transcoding work, then the RX 6300 could certainly be a decent option as it will be the fastest GPU available at this price in a long time. Perhaps the terrible Nvidia GT 710 can finally die.

Source: @KOMACHI_ENSAKA (Twitter) via HXL (Twitter)

AMD launches a 2GB RX 6300 card in 2023 with limited PCIe but an excellent ~$60 price

Also known as "House of Commons bill C-18," the Online News Act was introduced in April of last year. It laid out rules to compel companies like Meta and Google to negotiate commercial deals and compensate news publishers for their content.

CTV News says that large Canadian media firms and the federal Liberal government have supported the bill. This is because they believe it would level the playing field for news outlets competing with tech companies for advertising dollars.

However, according to a statement by Meta spokesperson Lisa Laventure, the bill would place the company in an untenable position. "A legislative framework that compels us to pay for links or content that we do not post, and which are not the reason the vast majority of people use our platforms, is neither sustainable nor workable," she wrote in an email.

Canadian Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez responded to this in a statement on Sunday, saying that it was disappointing to see Facebook resorting to threats instead of working with the Canadian government in good faith. He added that the C-18 bill had nothing to do with how Meta makes news available to Canadians. "All we're asking Facebook to do is negotiate fair deals with news outlets when they profit from their work," Rodriguez said. "This is part of a disappointing trend this week that tech giants would rather pull news than pay their fair share."

In response to the bill, Google also recently conducted a five-week test that limited access to news for some Canadian users. The test is set to end on March 16. According to Sabrina Geremia, the head of Google Canada, the proposed legislation would "radically change" the framework Google uses to host free news links.

"The bill is a moving target, with key questions left unanswered," she stated. "We don't know if we will be able to continue to link to news as we do today, so we are testing potential changes to the way we currently freely link to news under that framework."

About two years ago, Meta (previously Facebook) removed the ability to view and share news content on Facebook and Instagram after the Australian government forced the company to pay publishers for using their news articles. After a week, Meta unblocked news on its platforms after reaching an agreement with the government.

Source: CTV News, Reuters

Meta to stop news access on its platforms in Canada if Online News Act becomes law

Lately, ChatGPT has been one of the most popular topics on the internet. Microsoft's investments and the current state of the product made a name for itself with its multidirectional problem-solving capabilities. Currently, GPT-3.5 is already impressive for many, but a better version will be introduced next week. The GPT-4 release date is not precise, but the official announcement signals a possible introduction next week, if not a launch.

ChatGPT's success and fame mesmerized regular users and some tech giants. Microsoft partnered with OpenAI after investing $1 billion, hopping on the bandwagon before it was too late. Generative AI is expected to shape the future of enterprises, and most firms have started using it to boost their sales, businesses, and more.

GPT-3.5's current abilities are enough to help firms and regular users until some point, and they continue to benefit from it daily. However, GPT-4 is expected to launch with better features. There were many speculations regarding the upcoming version. Still, the OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman, once told people to keep their expectations low so they won't be disappointed after seeing the final product. The speculations were built upon its parameters that there would be 100 trillion but Altman denied all.

GPT-4 release date: When is it?

Microsoft Germany's Chief Technology Officer, Andreas Braun, said they will introduce GPT-4 next week. Braun gave the information at an event in Germany last week. "We will introduce GPT-4 next week, there we will have multi-modal models that will offer completely different possibilities – for example, videos," Braun said in an interview with Heise. He also added that LLM is a game-changer because it lets machines understand concepts statistically that were previously read and understood by humans only. 

GPT-3.5 is a text-based language model, incapable of understanding and processing imagery or other inputs. The new GPT-4 is expected to have improved abilities like generating a video from a text prompt. Microsoft has been working on a new multi-modal language model called Kosmos-1, which was introduced last week. Kosmos-1 natively supports language, perception-language, and visual activities. GPT-4 will also have similar features and it will be the first step to the multi-modal LLM world for ChatGPT.

ChatGPT is very useful in different methods, even with its sole base version. Recently, OpenAI launched its API, and it also became available for Azure users. Even with its chat-only input model, it is widely used for enterprise solutions and everyday user needs. The GPT-4 release date was highly awaited for both communities because the ceiling of its capabilities can be immense. Braun's "next week" statement was given on March 9, 2023, so the announcement might come before than expected.

In the meantime, other big names and companies are working on competitor chatbots, including Elon Musk, who said ChatGPT is "too woke." Google is also one of the tech giants trying to compete with ChatGPT.

GPT-4 release date and more: Everything we know

Google Cloud's Director of Game Industry Solutions, Jack Buser, asserts that Stadia's failure has influenced the company's new strategy, as it has allowed them to prioritize game developers building their games with Google's cloud infrastructure.

Buser, who was Stadia's 10th employee in 2016, previously worked for PlayStation. The initial launch of Stadia aimed to rival industry powerhouses such as Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo by enabling players to stream games remotely from servers without requiring a home console or PC.

“It was at that moment when we basically had to make decisions about Stadia that we realized that, at Google Cloud, we are at our best when we’re helping other people build this stuff, not necessarily building it ourselves,” Buser told Axios.

Buser's reference to "stuff" refers to a suite of cloud-based services that Google is pitching to major publishers such as Ubisoft, Niantic, and Unity. While this offering may appear similar to cloud-based solutions provided by rivals such as Microsoft's Azure and Amazon, Google is taking a different approach.

Buser elucidated that Google's primary goal is to assist in managing and maintaining live service games, which are games that continuously receive updates, such as the immensely popular game Genshin Impact. It's worth noting that Google is exclusively focusing on live service games, setting them apart from other cloud service providers in the market.

Google is presenting a bundle of services to gaming enterprises that are specifically crafted for the management of live-service games. These games are meant to be played and updated indefinitely, and Google's suite of services is customized to cater to the distinct requirements of this category of games.

"Google is commited to games"

“Google is absolutely committed to games that are such a big part of our messaging,” Buser said. “When we made the decision with Stadia, we were just like, Look, we are committed to games as an industry.”

Beside a server platform, Google's service package for game publishers also incorporates an analytics suite for observing player and game actions, along with a data management program. These provisions are especially vital for live-service games, as they empower developers to efficiently manage and sustain these game types.

Google is positioning its services as a remedy for reducing the risks linked with creating and hosting live-service games. With an eye towards the 2023 Game Developers Conference, the technology behemoth intends to lure fresh high-profile clients to its

service bundle.

Google's move to redirect its gaming strategy towards cloud-based services and backing for live-service games is a daring step. Although the failure of Google Stadia may have been disheartening for gaming enthusiasts, the company's refreshed emphasis on supporting game developers and publishers is a shrewd business strategy that may yield substantial benefits in the long term.

As Google vies with dominant players such as Microsoft and Amazon Games, its focused approach in providing specialized cloud-based services for live-service games could potentially give the technology giant a competitive advantage in the market.

Source

While several tire makers are working on airless tires, most companies wouldn’t say how close they are to hitting the roads beyond the test phase.

“We’re targeting something in the ballpark of the next five years to be able to get something to market,” said Jon Kimpel, president of tire solutions with Bridgestone Americas Inc., which has been working on airless tires for more than a decade.

Michelin, Bridgestone and Toyo Tire Corp. were the only companies to respond to requests about when we might see airless tires.

In January, Michelin started testing its airless tires prototype on DHL Express courier vans in Singapore, Michelin said in an email statement. By the end of the year, the tires will be used for 50 vans.

Since 2020, Michelin has run previous tests on roads in Las Vegas and Thailand, but it didn’t say when the tires could move past the prototype stage.

Airless tires are exactly as they sound. They have rubber treads, like normal tires, but the treads are mounted on a ring and supported by plastic or rubber spokes – which are exposed. Because airless tires are never filled with air, they can’t go flat.

“It is these spokes that replace the role of air in supporting a vehicle’s weight,” David Scheklesky of Toyo Tire Canada Inc. said in an e-mail.

Toyo, which started developing airless tires in 2006, said last year that it has not finalized the timing for launching its airless tires – which use carbon-fibre-reinforced plastic spokes – in Japan or other markets.

So what’s slowing the roll for airless tires? Cost, Scheklesky said.

“Since the production method is fundamentally different from that of pneumatic tires, a large investment in production facilities is required for production,” he said. Also, because airless tires aren’t close to production, governments have not yet established safety regulations.

Why airless?

The biggest advantages are no more flat tires or worrying about air pressure levels. Nor would a puncture mean your tires end up as waste before the end of their expected lifespan. You also wouldn’t need to carry a spare, Scheklesky said.

Airless tires could reduce fuel consumption because they would have lower rolling resistance – the friction between the tire and the road – than some tires now.

That could mean, for instance, that they could help electric vehicles achieve more range. They’re also more durable than regular tires and should have longer lifespans. With regular tires, if they’re not properly inflated, they wear faster. That wouldn’t be an issue with airless tires, Kimpel said.

But there are drawbacks. They’re heavier and more expensive than regular tires. Neither company could say exactly how much more expensive they could be.

“We anticipate that price to be higher than conventional tires – but the cost of ownership would be lower with air-free,” Kimpel said.

They’re also noisier on the road, “although work is being done to reduce this,” Scheklesky said.

Heat is also a concern.

“In a [regular] tire, the air helps to dissipate the heat generated by the tire rolling over the pavement,” Scheklesky said. “In airless tires, this is obviously not the case, so our engineers have to ensure the components of an airless tire can withstand the heat and other pressures placed on a tire.”

Transport trucks first?

Bridgestone’s Kimpel said its airless tires will likely be marketed first to fleets – particularly long-haul transport trucks.

“Long-haul trucks wouldn’t have to check tire pressure and there’d be less downtime caused by underinflated tires,” Kimpel said. So for fleets, there would be increased time on the road, longer tire life and reduced maintenance costs.

Potentially, airless tires on commercial trucks could have new treads applied when they wear out, Kimpel said.

“That tire will last longer – that’s a huge benefit when it comes to sustainability,” he said.

But Toyo’s Scheklesky doesn’t expect airless tires, if they eventually make it to the market, to completely replace regular tires any time soon.

“Research is continuing, but traditional tires will still be here to stay for quite some time,” he said.

Source

"Sorry for killing most of humanity person with smile cap and mustache," says a monitor welcoming a visitor to the "Misalignment Museum," a new exhibit on the controversial technology.

The pieces in this temporary show mix the disturbing with the comic, and this first display has AI disburse pithy observations to the visitors that cross into its line of vision.

"The concept of the museum is that we are in a post-apocalyptic world where artificial general intelligence has already destroyed most of humanity," said Audrey Kim, the show's curator.

"But then the AI realizes that was bad and creates a type of memorial to the human, so our show's tagline is 'sorry for killing most of humanity,'" she said.

Artificial General Intelligence is a concept that is even more nebulous than the simple AI that is cascading into everyday life, as seen in the fast emergence of apps such as ChatGPT or Bing's chatbot and all the hype surrounding them.

AGI is "artificial intelligence that is able to do anything that a human would be able to do," integrating human cognitive capacities into machines.

In this exhibit, AI disburses pithy observations to the visitors that cross into its line of vision.

 

All around San Francisco, and down the peninsula in Silicon Valley, startups are hot on the trail of the AGI holy grail.

Sam Altman, the founder of ChatGPT creator OpenAI, has said AGI, done right, can "elevate humanity" and change the "limits of possibilities."

Paperclip AI

But Kim wants to trigger a reflection on the dangers of going too far, too quickly.

"There have been lots of conversations about the safety of AI in pretty niche intellectual tech circles on Twitter and I think that's very important," she said.

But those conversations are not as easily accessible to the general public as concepts that you can see or feel, she added.

Kim is particularly fond of a sculpture called "Paperclip Embrace": two busts of humans holding each other, made entirely of paperclips.

The work refers to a metaphor by philosopher Nick Bostrom, who in the 2000s imagined what would happen if artificial intelligence was programmed to create paper clips.

Curator Audrey Kim talks about the piece "Paperclip Embrace" at the Misalignment Museum.

 

"It could become more and more powerful, and constantly optimize itself to achieve its one and only goal, to the point of destroying all of humanity in order to flood the world with paper clips," Kim said.

Weighing the pros and cons of AI is a subject that became close to Kim's heart in an earlier job working for Cruise, an autonomous vehicle company.

There she worked on an "incredible" technology, which "could reduce the number of accidents due to human error," but also presented risks, she said.

The exhibit occupies a small space in a street corner building in San Francisco's hip Mission neighborhood.

The lower floor of the exhibition is dedicated to AI as a nightmarish dystopia where a machine powered by GPT-3, the language model behind ChatGPT, composes spiteful calligrams against humanity, in cursive writing.

One exhibit is an AI-generated—and totally fake—dialogue between the philosopher Slavoj Zizek and the filmmaker Werner Herzog, two of Europe's most respected intellectuals.

All around Silicon Valley, startups are hot on the trail of the Artificial General Intelligence holy grail.

 

This "Infinite Conversation" is a meditation on deep fakes: images, sound or video that aim to manipulate opinion by impersonating real people and that have become the latest disinformation weapon online.

"We only started this project five months ago, and yet many of the technologies presented here already seem almost primitive," Kim said, astonished.

She hopes to turn the exhibit into a permanent one with more space and more events.

Source

"If we bring the solar panel manufacturing back to the U.S., it helps us realize decarbonization goals faster," said Haoyue Liang, a doctoral student in systems engineering, who co-authored "Reshoring Silicon Photovoltaics Manufacturing Contributes to Decarbonization and Climate Change Mitigation" with Fengqi You, the Roxanne E. and Michael J. Zak Professor in Energy Systems Engineering.

"As solar photovoltaic panels emerge as a major power source that will characterize the U.S. energy market for the remainder of the 21st century," Liang said, "manufacturing and sourcing panels here will align with our climate targets and our energy policy goals."

Manufacturing crystalline silicon photovoltaic panels in the U.S. solves logistical challenges and eases greenhouse gas problems, according to the paper.

The scientists analyzed production in the U.S. to learn how it could shrink greenhouse gas emissions and energy use. If solar panel manufacturing can return to the U.S. by 2035, the greenhouse gas emissions resulting from panel creation would be reduced by 30% and energy consumption would be cut by 13%, compared to 2020, when the U.S. relied almost entirely on international trading partners.

By 2050, the solar panels made and used in the U.S. will be more efficient, and will reduce the carbon footprint by 33% and use 17% less energy than solar panels sourced globally in 2020.

The climate-change mitigation forecast would be fulfilled by both reshoring the solar panel manufacturing back to the U.S. and having mostly renewable energy on the power grid, which is anticipated in the next decades.

Based on projections about the energy decarbonization transition that happens alongside reshoring, You said, the U.S. will see a larger share of renewable power accounting for primary energy consumption and an overall lower primary energy consumption over the years for solar panel manufacturing.

The federal Inflation Reduction Act—signed into law in August 2022—provides $369 billion in business incentives and tax credits to build a clean energy economy, according to the White House. In addition to wind turbines and grid-scale battery plants, the act provides for the production of than 950 million solar panels.

In 2022, about 4.24 trillion kilowatt hours of electricity were generated domestically at utility-scale plants in the United States, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. About 22% of that electricity came from renewable energy sources, but only 3.4% was generated from solar power.

"By 2050, around half of U.S. electricity will come from solar energy. Now, we only have about 3%," You said. "The U.S. is ramping up. We are going to increase solar capacity from 74 gigawatts in 2022 to a projected 1,600 gigawatts by 2050. That means we will need a lot more panels in the next three decades."

The global supply chain for crystalline silicon photovoltaic panels is increasingly fragile, You said, as the recent shipping crisis during the pandemic and other geopolitical risks threaten to postpone major solar projects.

"The effects of supply chain restructuring continue to propagate throughout the photovoltaic industry," he said, "as the overreliance on global trade structure emphasizes disruptions that jeopardize all countries involved."

The new paper creates reasonable predictions for scenarios that involve a U.S.-centered domestic supply of panels, which could lead to a competitive supply chain of solar panel module components production in regions like Alabama, Florida and Georgia.

"When you consider the solar panel industry will grow by a factor of over 10 until mid-century, those greenhouse gas emission savings could be quite significant," said You, who is also a senior faculty fellow at Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability.

Source

Microsoft's Xbox division joined the discussion this week with its new The Gamer's Guide to the New AI-Powered Bing publication. The guide provides a basic primer on Bing Chat and highlights five "starter queries" that users may ask Bing to get more out of their "gaming experience".

Gamers may use Bing Chat for all kinds of queries, and many Bing Chat users may have used it already to get information.

Microsoft highlights the following five queries that may help gamers get the most out of Bing Chat. Please note that you can phrase these differently and still get the same answers.

Query 1: Tell me about

Tell me about is a basic yet powerful question. It can end with just the name of a game, but also with very detailed information. Tell me about Elden Ring returns information about the game. Tell me about the best PC games with a cyberpunk setting and a male protagonist, is more complex.

It may sometimes be necessary to revise the query, e.g., add restrictions to it to prevent certain types of answers.

Query 2: What's the best * for me?

This query may be used to get recommendations for game strategies.  Gamers could ask Bing Chat "What are the best perks to use in Cyberpunk 2077", "What loadout should I use in Warzone 2.0 multiplayer", or "What Xbox Game Pass games might I enjoy".

Some of these queries may require fine tuning to get better answers. There is also a handy follow-up option: tell Bing Chat to find a video about the perk, loadout or game, and the AI should return at least one video about it.

Query 3: Where can I find

Sometimes, gamers may be stuck in a game. Maybe they need a specific key to open a gate, find a mighty weapon to slay an all-too-powerful level boss, or a specific character in a game like Elden Ring.

If you are stuck, Bing Chat may help you get out of the situation. Just ask "where can I find" and you should get the answer. Again, you may refine the question to get more details.

Query 4: Give me a recap

This is an excellent query if you need a recap. Say, you plan to play Dark Souls 2 and want a recap of what happened in the first game. Or you stopped playing a game and after weeks or months, start playing again. This query may help you get up to speed.

Ask "give me a recap of The Wither 3 after 10 hours", or "give me a recap of Dark Souls 1", and you will get an answer accordingly. Again, queries may need to be refined.

Query 5: How do I

If you are stuck, you may need instructions. While some gamers prefer to find out how to do so by themselves, often in a painful way, others may try and get the answer from the Internet.

How do I helps these gamers. How do I beat the last Elden Ring boss is an example query. Another How do I switch off the pump in Monkey Island 2, which many believe is one of the hardest adventure game puzzles in history.

Closing Words

Bing Chat may be of interest to some gamers, as it may provide quick answers to questions. Classic searches may require more research, as different results may need to be looked at to get the answer to a query. Bing Chat offers an alternative, and most Internet users should see it as an option.

Now You: have you used Bing Chat for gaming?

Microsoft explains how gamers can use Bing Chat to their advantage

Canary Channel

Original image via Wallpaper Access

At the start of the week, Microsoft announced an addition to its Windows Insider Program in the form of a new Canary Channel. This is the place where features which require the most lead time will be seeded, which also means that this will be the most unstable release with barely any documentation due to the pace of releases - do expect Twitter announcements though. It will receive builds with version number 25xxx and could also be the channel where the next major version of Windows is tested. Dev Channel will receive build 23xxx moving forward. Current Dev Channel Insiders are already being migrated to the Canary Channel, but those who want to stay on Dev will need to do a clean-install.

The Canary Channel also received a couple of builds following this announcement. Build 25314 introduced access keys and recommendations to the File Explorer, along with enabling LSA protection. Additionally, it disables the legacy Remote Mailslot protocol by default, with the intention to deprecate and remove it permanently in the future. A couple of days ago, build 25314.1010 was also seeded to test the servicing pipeline.

A Windows Server Insider Preview release was rolled out with version 25314 as well, it has fixes for SCONFIG on startup and WinRE rendering, along with one known issue. The Windows 11 Dev Channel also received some love in the form of build 23403, bringing a ton of new features including some of those present in Canary and live captions in more languages.

As Microsoft releases builds across various channels, enthusiasts have potentially spotted upcoming features for the company's operating system. These include a movable Taskbar with labels and ungrouping of apps, an improved USB4 Settings page, ReFS "Dev Drive" VHD volumes, and theme-aware weather icons for the Windows 11 Taskbar. There is no guarantee that any of the aforementioned features will be rolled out generally though.

Dumb AI

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella made a few interesting comments in a recent interview, noting that voice assistants (including its own Cortana) are "dumb as a rock". Microsoft wants chatbots to be a frontend to access information but Nadella believes that Google Assistant, Siri, and Alexa don't offer this capability. This is why the Redmond tech giant has pivoted to generative AI through Bing Chat. Hindsight is 20/20 indeed.

To that end, Microsoft has been making improvements to Bing Chat in order to make it more user-friendly. Daily turns have now been increased to 120 and you can have up to 10 chat turns per session. There are faster chat responses in Skype and Microsoft is also working on the highly requested capability to save chats.

In the meantime, Bing Chat users have been discovering interesting things that the AI model can do. Apparently, you can get it to impersonate celebrities and play chess. All of this has propelled Bing to reach a milestone of 100 million daily users, 13 years after its inception.

In terms of what's next, Microsoft is working to integrate generative AI capabilities in Dynamics 365, with "The Future of Work with AI" event scheduled for next week. Moreover, ChatGPT is now available for more customers to use through a preview on the Azure OpenAI service. Finally, GPT-4 is expected to release next week with support for multiple modalities.

Outlook authenticator and other updates

Microsoft revealed a few days ago that it is planning to add Authenticator capabilities to its Outlook app for Android and iOS. Basically, if you sign into your work or school email account, you'll be able to use "Authenticator Lite" present in the Outlook app on your phone for multi-factor authentication, without needing to download any other app. The feature is expected to land this month. In related news, the Outlook for Mac app is now completely free to use.

Elsewhere, there were a few interesting updates for other Microsoft 365 apps too. Microsoft is finally adding the Paste Text Only shortcut to Word, along with new shortcuts to zoom. Meanwhile, Teams is slated to get a number of new features, the headliner being spatial audio. Similarly, enterprise customers can now easily save files securely to OneDrive directly through the Microsoft Edge mobile app.

Speaking of Edge, the browser is reportedly getting 14 custom mouse gestures. On the other hand, Translator has added support for over a dozen African languages recently, bringing its total to 124. Other app updates include a Paste As Plain Text shortcut in PowerToys, Notepad++ with an entry in the Windows 11 context menu, Bing Chat in Skype Insider, and a couple of new features in the Surface app.

Over on the hardware and firmware side, make sure to roll back the latest Nvidia GPU driver to get rid of the high CPU usage bug. And if you're an AMD customer, don't forget to install the latest driver patch which fixes timeout errors that led to Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) on Windows.

Git gud

In its bid to block Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard, Sony tried to convince UK regular CMA that if the deal goes through, the Redmond tech giant could intentionally make Call of Duty on PlayStation 5 buggy to get gamers to switch to Xbox. It remains to be seen if this argument makes a dent in Microsoft's proposal.

In some other slightly bad news, Starfield has now been delayed to September with a dedicated Direct event in June. The Starfield Direct will happen after the Xbox Games Showcase in the same month since Microsoft is skipping the E3 showfloor this year. Meanwhile, the latest preview update to Minecraft has introduced the Bedrock world editor as Sea of Thieves celebrates its fifth anniversary with Season 9.

Finally, coming over to deals, we have Civilization VI leading the pack in Game Pass additions, Deals with Gold headlined by Mafia Trilogy while Xbox Free Play Days boasts Rainbow Six Siege, Cities: Skylines, and more. But if console gaming isn't your cup of tea, check out this Weekend's PC Game Deals curated by our News Editor Pulasthi Airyasinghe personally.

Dev Channel

• Exchange Server 2013 is reaching EOL in less than a month

• Microsoft has laid off 689 employees in Seattle

• Microsoft's latest research shows that business email compromise (BEC) attacks can be successful within hours without proper defenses

• Windows-based ransomware IceFire can now infect Linux devices as well

Under the spotlight

A few days ago, I shared some details about my personal life and its relationship to the latest tech trend, generative AI. While the technology continues to blow me away, I'm also a bit scared of the repercussions excessive use could have on individual lives.

On a relatively lighter note, News Reporter Taras Buria penned a listicle about the top 10 most requested features that Microsoft has already brought to Windows 11.

Additionally, Taras shared a concept for an always-on display for Windows 11 and asked our community if they would be open to the idea. Let him know your thoughts here!

On the other hand, our resident Reviewer Christopher White conducted an extensive review of Synology's 5-bay DS1522+ NAS with 10 GbE card. He walked away quite impressed, check out the review here.

Finally, forum member Adam Bottjen talked about how you can enable the delete confirmation dialog box in Windows.

Logging off

Our most interesting news item of this week is related to the prevalence of AI applications in everyday life. Automotive manufacturer General Motors (GM) has announced that it is working with Microsoft to integrate a voice-activated version of ChatGPT in its cars. The idea is to use the large language model in an assistive manner so that it can replace traditional car manuals. Theoretically, it could guide you through the process of changing a punctured tire and even book appointments at repair shops. Timelines for this initiative have not been shared yet.

Microsoft Weekly: Canary Channel, dumb AI, and Outlook authenticator

We can't wait to host our Xbox Games Showcase on June 11 and will share more details later. We also look forward to co-streaming our event as part of E3 Digital and will not be on the E3 showfloor.

This has to be a major blow for the long-running video game trade show, which is holding its first physical event since 2019, due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Nintendo has already confirmed it will not be attending E3 2023. The other major game console company, Sony, has not confirmed any E3 plans, but it has not participated in the show since 2018 and that's not expected to change.

Microsoft's mention that its Xbox Games Showcase online event on June 11 will be "co-streaming" with the E3 2023 Digital Week events does suggest at least some kind of partnership with Microsoft and E3's organizer ReedPop. However, if Microsoft isn't actually on the show floor, we would suspect that the relationship with E3 is pretty minimal.

For its part, ReedPop has begun to slowly reveal its plans for E3 2023. Gamesindustry.biz, which is owned by ReedPop, reports that the trade show will be open to game industry members, along with the media, from June 13-15 in both the West and South halls of the LA Convention Centers. The general public can attend the show from June 15-16 in the South hall. So far, ReedPop has not announced a list of its E3 show floor attendees.

As previously mentioned, E3 2023 Digital Week will begin on June 11 and run through the entire E3 week, with streaming presentations that will include the PC Gaming Show, Future Games Show, Guerilla Collective, and Black Voices In Gaming. A few days beforehand, the 2023 Summer Games Fest will stream its own show, with lots of major game reveals, from the Los Angeles YouTube Theater on June 8.

Source: IGN

Microsoft confirms it will not have an exhibit on the E3 2023 show floor

Discussing the effort, a GM spokesperson said:

“This shift is not just about one single capability like the evolution of voice commands, but instead means that customers can expect their future vehicles to be far more capable and fresh overall when it comes to emerging technologies.”

For the people out there who don’t know too much about GM, the brands that come under its umbrella include Chevrolet, Cadillac, Buick, and GMC. Cars that release with this feature in the future could explain to you how to change a tire if yours is punctured or you could ask the AI what the light flashing on your dashboard means and whether you need to pull over or if it's safe to continue driving. Apparently, it may even be able to book car-related appointments at a repair shop.

One big detail that GM has so far refused to share is what it will name its artificial intelligence system. We’ll probably hear about this in leaks or when the company is finally ready to show off the feature at an event.

Source: Semafor via Reuters

GM wants to replace your car manuals with ChatGPT

We’ve had the pleasure of searching for topics on Google Search for more than 20 years. With so many articles on the internet, it’s helped us find the top answers to our questions. Or has it? ChatGPT has entered the arena, providing better solutions and posing the question: Will we live in a world where Google Search no longer exists?

Before we delve into why ChatGPT is such a threat to the search engine, let’s discuss the current state of Google Search. Less than a decade ago, content creators were cheating the algorithm system, flooding articles with keywords just to rank well on searches. You had terrible phrases and abnormal headings, just so the article could place first on the search list.

Google has apparently been trying to fix this problem, but I don’t believe they have. While there have been massive core updates, they mainly pertain to product placements and reviews. Also, they mainly serve those organizations that pay them well. Today, searches on the engine as still, if not more, pathetic than they were before.

Don’t get me wrong; you’ll still find what you’re looking for, amid ads, featured snippets, company details, and other small windows. Those with high domain authorities dominate the first page results, no matter how bad the article is.

I experienced this myself personally last year, which is when I lost even more faith in SEO and Google searches. One of the new sites I manage is called Bonsai Alchemist. We’ve been building it up for more than a year now, but that’s beside the point.

There was one specific article (I can’t remember the name) where I wrote a long post on how to care for a specific bonsai tree. It had everything you ever needed to know to make sure that tree survived. To this day, when I search for the specific search team, you see the worst results appear. The top one is only about 300 words, not addressing the topic at all, just telling you what the tree is. That tree would die if you relied on that article.

Why are those results at the top? They are either paid-for ads or Google gives them a high-domain ranking for some odd reason from the past. 

What does this have to do with ChatGPT and the future of Google Search? Well, ChatGPT is already showing its superiority in terms of supplying answers quickly. How reliable they are is another question, but at least you have a ready solution. Also, it helps us develop outlines and ideas for content, which is something Google Search doesn’t do well at all. Well, at least not without the right plug-ins.

Here’s a quick experiment I ran for the purpose of this article. I asked both ChatGPT and Google Search “How to care for a japanese maple bonsai tree”. Here are the results presented side by side:

Now just looking at Google’s featured snippet that tells you only about watering, that’s not good enough. Of course, you can go through several of the listed articles, trying to work out which are common facts you can use. Or, you can just use ChatGPT; that’s already done that for you. Of course, my monster article on the Japanese Maple bonsai tree might be a massive read, which is where ChatGPT's solution wins again. Not everyone wants an essay; a quick guide like the above might be enough.

Sure, ChatGPT results aren’t 100% perfect, but the example above is just one way of showing that one day we might live in a world without Google Search. It already has competition from Bing’s new AI system. Who knows; maybe the so-called SEO will be replaced by techniques for getting your information and products recognized by ChatGPT and other AI systems.

Imagine a World without Google Search - ChatGPT may Make that Happen

For the past month, it feels like it's been all about AI and ChatGPT. Well, I've got some news for you. This journey just got started. As AI infiltrates the online world, don't get left behind without knowing what you can do with it.

In February, Microsoft revealed the AI-powered Bing chatbot crowning it “the new Bing.” The one thing I know about the new Bing is that it’s impressive as an automated tool. It can answer questions in full sentences or even long paragraphs, but one thing we didn't know it could do is it can draw information from the most recent web results. 

These web features put Bing above ChatGPT, which commonly can't give any information on recent events and activities. Bing’s ability to cite sources also helps to double-check any uncertain responses from ChatGPT. Before we get lost not knowing what the new Bing can do, I've put together a few cool functions. Here we go.

Create Comparison Tables

The one advantage that Bing has over ChatGPT is that it can search the web for the most recent information. On top of that, it can process the information and deliver it to you in several formats - comparison tables included. The easiest way to get it to do that is to ask it to “ create a table comparing the specifications of the surface laptop 4 and the M2 MacBook Air.”  With whatever prompt you go with, Bing will go ahead and look for the most important specifications and put them out in a readable table. 

Draw Text Art

Drawing text art is also known as ASCII, and it relies on command line tools, text characters, and other computer software. Bing can generate this art with just a prompt. A simple request like “ Create  ASCII art of a person standing next to a car” works fine. This feature is still at the grassroots as it seems to fail more than it works.

 Turn Web Pages Into Quizzes

Despite the inconsistencies, this feature has on Bing. Bing still does it anyway, and it could be of some great help.  Sometimes when creating quizzes the prompts you put in will give you all the questions and answers in one statement, which you will then have to sort out yourself. Here you could use a prompt such as “quiz me with multiple choices based on this page only.” 

Get Up to Speed on Current Events

Bing can be very useful if you’ve no clue on what’s going on and the recent news isn’t helping. You really can use a simple voice prompt like “ Explain Sweden in NATO.” Bing will deliver the answer to you in a few sentences. 

Date and Time Conversions

Although the date and time conversions are nothing out of this world as most search engines can do that. The cool thing with Bing is that it allows you to feed the conversions into other Bing features. For example, if you are planning a party to be held at a specified time, Bing Chat can group the conversions and present the information in different writing styles and formats.

5 Cool Things You Can Do With Bing Chat AI

In an era where we now have CPUs with tons of cores, super high clock speeds, and integrated graphics, it's interesting to look back at a processor that truly was a revolution in the personal computer industry. We are speaking about the first Intel Pentium processor, which launched 30 years ago this month, on March 22, 1993.

The Pentium was designed to be the next chip in the company's x86 series of processors, and it is the successor to the Intel i486 chips. However, according to an article in the New Yorker, Intel couldn't get a trademark on "586". Intel's then-CEO Andy Grove decided to hire a marketing firm, Lexicon, to come up with a new name. Intel's internal marketing team said the new name had to sound like an ingredient, so Lexicon looked at "sodium" and then took the "ium" out of the word. It then created thousands of names with "ium" at the end. As Lexicon's founder David Placek stated:

“I remember being in the office by myself on a Saturday morning and going over a list,” Placek said. On it was the word “pentium.” “The first thing I thought of was the Pentagon, and I thought, Huh, that’s pretty interesting, because it’s a shape.” Then he remembered that “pente” means five in Greek. “I thought, Wait a minute—we’re going from 486 to the fifth generation, the 586.”

After getting approval from Intel, and making sure the name wouldn't violate any other trademarks, Intel officially announced the Pentium in September 1992. By the way, Lexicon went on to create the name "Blackberry" for the revolutionary smartphone from Research in Motion.

The original Pentium was a big step up in performance and hardware specs compared to the Intel i486 chip. The Pentium was able to handle two instructions per clock cycle (IPC) via two integer pipelines, and it had a much faster floating point unit (FPU) compared to the i486. The first version was made on a 0.8 micron or 800nm process. It had a top clock speed of 66MHz and had 8 kB of Level 1 (L1) Cache, 4MB of Addressable Memory, and 3.1 million transistors. By contrast, the current Intel 13th Gen Core chips have a maximum clock speed of 6.0 GHz, up to 24 cores, and over 70 MB of total cache (L1, L2, L3). Intel doesn't officially reveal the number of transistors for its new chips anymore, but there are estimates that there could be as many as 25.9 billion transistors in 13th Gen Core models.

Both the Intel Pentium name and the processor were a big sales hit for the company. However, in 1994, Thomas R. Nicely, a mathematics professor at Lynchburg College, announced he had found a flaw in the Pentium's floating point unit that could cause the chip to create errors in certain high-end computing tasks. While the floating point unit bug was extremely rare, it still caused many Pentium-based PC owners to have concerns. After a wave of bad publicity about the chip issue, Intel finally announced in December 1994 that it would replace any Pentium processor with one without the floating point flaw for free.

Intel managed to recover from that embarrassing Pentium flaw event and continued to release new CPUs under the Pentium name through the 1990s and into the 2000s, as mid or high-level processors for PCs. In 2006, Intel introduced its Core line of processors and regulated the Pentium brand name to cheaper and lower performances CPUs designed for budget PCs. In September 2022, Intel said it was planning to retire both the Pentium and Celeron brands for its mobile processors in 2023, and its likely Pentium won't be used for any of its desktop PCs going forward.

The legacy of the first Pentium processor, and its successors, still lingers today, however. With the rise of the consumer internet in the mid to late 1990s, tons of people bought PCs with versions of Pentium CPUs inside to go online, play games like Doom and Quake, and more. The PC, which was previously something for computer developers and rich families, soon became an essential household item in the 1990s, and the Intel Pentium processor family was inside the majority of those PCs.

Editor's note: This article was updated shortly after publication to clarify that this is the 30th anniversary of the Intel Pentium processor, not 40th. We regret the error.

The Intel Pentium: A quick look back at the landmark PC processor for its 30th anniversary

Apple, Atari, and Commodore, oh my! Explore a deluxe home vintage computer den

Research by professors at the Indiana University Kelley School of Business and the University of Minnesota's Carlson School of Management explains why it may be harder for the creator of the world's largest search engine to write off the situation as a temporary issue.

Although it isn't uncommon for software vendors to release incomplete products and subsequently fix bugs and provide additional features, the research shows this may not be the best strategy for AI.

As seen through a one-day $100 billion decrease in market value for Alphabet, Google's parent company, a botched demo can cause significant damage. Findings in an article accepted by the journal ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction indicates that errors that occur early in users' interactions with an algorithm can have a lasting negative impact on trust and reliance.

Antino Kim and Jingjing Zhang, associate professors of operations and decision technologies at Kelley, are co-authors of the paper, "When Algorithms Err: Differential Impact of Early vs. Late Errors on Users' Reliance on Algorithms," with Mochen Yang, assistant professor of information and decision sciences at Carlson. Zhang also is co-director of the Institute for Business Analytics at Kelley. Yang taught at Kelley in 2018-19.

Known as "algorithm aversion," users tend to avoid using algorithms, particularly after encountering an error. The researchers found that giving users more control over AI results can alleviate some of the negative impacts of early errors.

Kim, Yang and Zhang examined the situation through the lens of their research and present their analysis below:

"Not long ago, search engines simply fetched existing content from the internet based on the keywords users provided. Then, in late 2022, ChatGPT, a conversational AI developed by OpenAI, took the internet by storm. Within just a couple of months, Microsoft announced its multibillion-dollar investment in OpenAI and integrated ChatGPT capabilities into Bing.

"Understandably, Google, the defending champion of search engines, was feeling the pressure, and it was quick to react. On Feb. 6, Google ran an advertisement showcasing its own conversational AI service, Bard. Unfortunately, in its first demo, Bard produced a factual error, and the market was not forgiving of Bard's bad first impression. This error led to a $100 billion decrease in market value for Alphabet, Google's parent company.

"In the aftermath, Google employees criticized the CEO for the 'rushed, botched' announcement of Bard, and Google is now asking staff to help fix the AI's 'bad responses' manually.

"Predictive algorithms and generative AI—broadly referred to as "algorithms" in this article—operate using probabilistic processes instead of deterministic ones, meaning that even the best algorithms can sometimes make mistakes.

"However, users may not tolerate such mistakes, and the term 'algorithm aversion' refers to users' tendency to avoid using algorithms, particularly after encountering an error.

"Not all errors have the same effect on users and, in Google's case, the market. Our research suggests that errors occurring early on in users' interactions with an algorithm, before they have had a chance to build trust through successful interactions, have a long-lasting negative impact on users' trust and reliance.

"Essentially, early errors can create a bad first impression that persists for a long time. In fact, during our experiment, where participants repeatedly interacted with an algorithm, their trust levels following an early error never fully recovered to the level of no error.

"The situation was different, however, for errors that occurred after participants had already had enough successful interactions with the algorithm and built trust. In such cases, participants were more forgiving when algorithms made a mistake, treating it as a one-time fluke. As a result, the level of trust and reliance did not suffer significantly.

"To be fair to Google, it is not uncommon for traditional software vendors to release incomplete products and subsequently fix bugs and provide additional features. However, for AI, this may not be a wise strategy, as the damage from a botched demo can be significant. Our research suggests that Google's road to recovery from the negative impact of the error may be long.

"So, what steps can AI systems take to mitigate the effects of errors like the one made by Google's Bard? Our findings suggest that giving users control over how to use the algorithm's results can alleviate some of the negative impacts of early errors.

"It is possible that Bard's error had such a significant adverse effect because of the confidence with which the incorrect result was presented. When asked, 'What new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope can I tell my 9-year-old about?,' the chatbot responded with bullet points that the telescope took the very first pictures of exoplanets—a factually incorrect claim that Google could have verified by Googling it.

"For algorithms that involve probabilistic processes, there is typically a score marking the confidence level for the result. When the score is below a certain threshold, it may be wise to give users more control. One example could be reverting to the search engine mode, where several credible and relevant sources are presented for users to navigate.

"After all, that is what Google does best, and it may be a better approach than hastily releasing another AI that may confidently return an incorrect answer."

Source

According to NASA, these Space Cups are specially designed mugs that use the concepts of fluid dynamics to mimic the effects of gravity in space. The demo video shows astronaut Nicole Mann pouring coffee from a pouch into a Space Cup. What we see next is that the liquid doesn't spill out of the mug even when she goes on to flip the mug upside down.

Classic cappuccino, meet the space cup. ☕🤝

This demo shows the Capillary Beverage investigation which studies the process of drinking from specially designed Space Cups that use fluid dynamics to mimic the effect of gravity. https://t.co/xFGFTva2Bw pic.twitter.com/M7TQmIwlrC

— ISS Research (@ISS_Research) March 2, 2023

The demo is part of NASA's Capillary Flow Experiment and the agency has been working on the futuristic space tech for more than a decade now. Its patent granted in 2011 is shared by astronaut Don Pettit with mathematicians Paul Concus and Robert Finns.

The agency says its specially-designed cup "uses the combined effects of surface tension, wetting, and cup geometry" instead of relying on gravity, and allows the astronauts to drink the liquid easily. For that, all they need to do is place their mouth on the narrow top part of the Space Cup and coffee automatically gets pulled into their mouth due to capillary action.

Some common examples of the anti-gravity capillary action are how the water moves upwards through tissue paper when placed on a surface of water, or how water travels upwards through plants from their roots. NASA expects these Capillary Beverage studies could make drinking easier in microgravity and also reduce the weight and size of liquid bags sent to space.

Speaking of the drinks served in the space, they include water, juice, tea, coffee, cocoa, and others. And a part of the experiment is to monitor the drinking experience of these liquids. However, NASA believes the Space Cup design could also have potential applications on earth in the field of medical research and drug delivery.

Via: Mashable

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AN ALMOST ENTIRELY 3D-printed rocket is ready to blast off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, then head for low Earth orbit.

Scheduled for a three-hour launch window that opens at 1 pm Eastern time tomorrow, the inaugural launch of Relativity Space’s Terran 1 rocket will constitute a major milestone for the California-based startup, and for expanding the use of 3D printing in the space industry. Relativity and similar companies envision ultimately using the technology to construct tools, spacecraft, and infrastructure while in orbit, on the moon, or on Mars—in those cases, utilizing lunar and Martian dirt for building materials.

But first, company engineers want to see how Terran 1 fares on this crucial test flight, an event the company has dubbed “Good Luck, Have Fun.” “The number one goal for our rocket is to collect as much data as possible and learn as much as possible from the flight,” says senior vice president Josh Brost. He and his colleagues will be closely watching its path through the stratosphere as it reaches a trajectory point called “max q” about a minute after launch, when intense dynamic pressure will put stresses on rocket. Terran 1 is fueled by liquid oxygen and liquid natural gas, and “in history, no brand-new company has had their first liquid-fueled rocket make it all the way into space on its first attempt,” Brost says. “It’s incredibly challenging.”

Despite its unconventional assembly process, the Terran 1 launch vehicle looks like any other: The two-stage rocket stands 110 feet tall and is 7.5 feet in diameter. Eighty five percent of the rocket by mass, including its major structures, were 3D-printed—only the computing system, electronics, and readily available parts like fasteners were not. (The company is shooting for 95 percent for future rockets.) Other companies have used 3D-printed parts before, but this is on another level: Relativity Space refers to Terran 1 as the world’s largest 3D-printed object.

To create the rocket stages and components, the company designed its own massive 3D printers, the biggest of which they called Stargate. The process uses a robotic arm with a printhead that extrudes an aluminum alloy. Brost says the company's next generation of 3D printers will be even larger, able to print a single element that’s 24 feet in diameter and 120 feet long.

Printing most of a rocket offers many advantages, Brost argues. Once the printer’s ready, the company can build many large, complex parts and consolidate them into one, like a big set of Lego blocks. That reduces labor costs and makes the supply chain easier to manage, he says, and will ultimately result in less expensive space hardware.

Relativity Space wants to use Terran 1 to (comparatively) cheaply lift satellites for other companies and NASA into Earth orbit. It also plans to construct Terran R, a larger, more powerful, fully reusable rocket that the company hopes will compete with SpaceX’s Falcon 9, which has a smaller payload capacity and only reuses the rocket’s first stage. In late 2024, Relativity plans to test using Terran R to launch payloads to Mars; another startup, Impulse Space, will provide the lander.

Other companies are also exploring space-related 3D-printing applications. For example, Australia’s Fleet Space has already been producing lightweight, 3D-printed radio frequency antennas for satellites. Next year, using printers half the size of a bus, they plan to create a satellite constellation called Alpha that will be entirely 3D-printed. An advantage for 3D-printing satellites and their components is that new versions can be upgraded and built in 24 hours, without taking months to gather parts from the supply chain, says Flavia Tata Nardini, the company’s CEO.

She believes space-based 3D printing is coming next. “In my ideal future, in 10 to 15 years, I won’t have to launch satellites from here; I can build them up there,” Tata Nardini says.

Since 2016, the company Redwire (formerly named Made in Space) has been conducting a variety of experiments using 3D printers on the International Space Station. “NASA likes to say, ‘Make it, don’t take it,’ and we’ve adopted that,” says Rich Boling, a vice president at the Florida-based company. In the next couple weeks, their bioprinter will print an artificial meniscus (a piece of knee cartilage) aboard the ISS, using a process that’s easier to accomplish in microgravity than on Earth. It could eventually be used to treat injuries among US military personnel. 

Like Fleet Space, Redwire foresees a future of 3D printing in space, including using lunar regolith to make things like astronaut habitats, roads, and landing pads. Mining off-planet resources for future space manufacturing will raise some ethical questions about how those resources will be extracted and who will benefit from them. But for now, the main challenge is testing whether 3D-printed Earth materials can survive the journey to space and be used there. 

Tomorrow’s launch attempt will be the second this week. The Relativity Space team scrubbed an attempt on March 8 after detecting that the oxygen propellant in the rocket’s second stage was outside of expected temperature limits. 

If the team isn’t able to launch on Saturday, the next available launch window opens Sunday at the same time. Video from the launch attempt will be available here.

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US engineering company Applied Materials’ new pattern-shaping tool demonstrates just how difficult it could be for China to catch up with leading-edge semiconductor production technology.

Announced on February 28, the Centura Sculpta should make it possible to reduce the number of EUV (extreme ultraviolet) lithography steps used to manufacture integrated circuits at the most advanced process nodes, significantly reducing both complexity and cost.

US sanctions already ban the export of EUV lithography tools to China. Without them, 7nm and 5nm processes are not economical and 3nm, 2nm and smaller processes cannot be implemented at all.

As efficiency gains drive the adoption of EUV, China is likely to be left farther behind in the race to develop next-generation chips for smartphones, artificial intelligence, quantum computing and other high-tech industries.

This, however, does not mean the end of the Chinese semiconductor industry. As Asia Times’ David Goldman points out, “Older-generation 28nm chips power most of Huawei’s digital infrastructure and industrial applications, and China can produce those itself.”

Factories and logistics controlled by 5G networks are where China’s comparative advantage now lies, Goldman consistently argues.

Sculpta is a sophisticated etching tool that uses a beam of plasma to modify the dimensions of chip features on the silicon wafer, reducing the need for double or multiple patterning.

In order to print feature sizes smaller than the resolution limit of current EUV lithography (13nm), circuit patterns are split in two, each half conforming to the resolution limit; the halves are then combined to produce a finer and denser pattern.

This double patterning requires a “litho-etch-litho-etch” (LELE) process that takes more time and uses additional equipment, materials and energy. Multiple patterning repeats this process. In this way, feature sizes have been greatly reduced but at an ever-increasing cost.

Sculpta offers an alternative to this escalation. “Sculpta is intended for the most critical patterning layers in advanced logic nodes,” says Applied Materials. “Because the final pattern is created from a single mask, design cost and complexity are reduced, and the yield risk from double-patterning alignment errors is eliminated.”

Graphic: Applied Materials

The potential cost savings are enormous. Applied Materials claims that for each EUV double patterning sequence it replaces, Sculpta enables:

• a reduction in capital costs of about US$250 million per 100K wafer starts per month of production capacity;
• manufacturing cost savings of approximately $50 per wafer; and
• significant reductions in energy consumption, use of water and emission of greenhouse gases.

To put all this in perspective, leading chipmaker TSMC is reported to have raised its 5nm production capacity to 150,000 wafers per month.

EUV lithography tools now cost almost $170 million each and ASML’s next-generation high-NA (numerical aperture) tools may cost twice as much. High-NA will bring the resolution limit down to 8nm, reducing the need for multiple patterning – but not immediately; the first machines are not scheduled for delivery until 2024.

In the meantime, lithography accounts for an estimated 35% of the cost of production at 3nm. ASML, of the Netherlands, currently has a monopoly on EUV lithography.

Applied Materials claims that Sculpta pattern shaping could cut the use of EUV lithography by half for some critical layers, while semiconductor industry analysts estimate that it could reduce total unit demand for EUV lithography tools by nearly 20%.

Estimates are rough because it is not yet known how quickly Sculpta might be adopted, whether or not it will live up to expectations and what impact the cost savings might have on semiconductor-making capacity expansion plans.

Sculpta is a new product but pattern shaping is not a new technology, which tips the scales in favor of its success. Applied Materials has been issuing research papers about it for several years and market research organizations report that Intel may introduce it at 1.8nm in 2024 or 2025 (although it could come much sooner). Samsung is expected to be the second user and TSMC the third, most likely at 1.4nm according to industry observers.

Image: Applied Materials

Ryan Russell, a corporate vice president at Intel, says, “Having collaborated closely with Applied Materials in the optimization of Sculpta around our process architecture, Intel will be deploying pattern-shaping capabilities to help us deliver reduced design and manufacturing costs, process cycle times and environmental impact.”

Dan Hutcheson, a highly regarded analyst of semiconductor industry trends now at TechInsights, says, “Sculpta is the most innovative new process step in wafer fabrication since the introduction of CMP.” 

CMP (chemical mechanical planarization), which is used to remove excess material and create a smooth wafer surface, is one of several steps in the manufacturing process – in addition to EUV lithography – that will be affected by the introduction of Sculpta.

Others include photomask making and inspection; photoresist deposition and removal; and materials deposition, etch and cleaning.

Companies whose order flow is likely to be affected include ASML (the Netherlands), Applied Materials itself and Lam Research (USA), Tokyo Electron, JSR, Hoya and Lasertec (Japan), and many others. Etch equipment makers Lam Research and Tokyo Electron will be pressed to introduce their own versions of pattern shaping.

It is tempting to conclude that the only beneficiary will be Applied Materials and its customers but that is not necessarily the case. The semiconductor industry is driven by efficiency gains and cost reduction, and Sculpta has the potential to accelerate progress toward the 1nm process node.

China is doubling down on its indigenous chip-making capabilities but it may be falling further behind. Image: Twitter

Pattern shaping could help Intel catch up with TSMC and Samsung and thereby speed up the growth of the EUV lithography market. It could lead to a quicker and greater return on JSR’s acquisition of metal-oxide photoresist maker Inpria, which is aimed at 1nm.

On the other hand, fewer EUV masks would reduce demand for Hoya’s mask blanks and Lasertec’s mask inspection tools.

None of the companies directly affected is Chinese. But the entire Chinese semiconductor industry is once again reminded that the leading edge is a moving target and being etched outside of its borders.

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ChatGPT might well be the most famous, and potentially valuable, algorithm of the moment, but the artificial intelligence techniques used by OpenAI to provide its smarts are neither unique nor secret. Competing projects and open-source clones may soon make ChatGPT-style bots available for anyone to copy and reuse.

Stability AI, a startup that has already developed and open-sourced advanced image-generation technology, is working on an open competitor to ChatGPT. “We are a few months from release,” says Emad Mostaque, Stability’s CEO. A number of competing startups, including Anthropic, Cohere, and AI21, are working on proprietary chatbots similar to OpenAI’s bot.

The impending flood of sophisticated chatbots will make the technology more abundant and visible to consumers, as well as more accessible to AI businesses, developers, and researchers. That could accelerate the rush to make money with AI tools that generate images, code, and text.

Established companies like Microsoft and Slack are incorporating ChatGPT into their products, and many startups are hustling to build on top of a new ChatGPT API for developers. But wider availability of the technology may also complicate efforts to predict and mitigate the risks that come with it.

ChatGPT’s beguiling ability to provide convincing answers to a wide range of queries also causes it to sometimes make up facts or adopt problematic personas. It can help out with malicious tasks such as producing malware code, or spam and disinformation campaigns.

As a result, some researchers have called for deployment of ChatGPT-like systems to be slowed while the risks are assessed. “There is no need to stop research, but we certainly could regulate widespread deployment,” says Gary Marcus, an AI expert who has sought to draw attention to risks such as disinformation generated by AI. “We might, for example, ask for studies on 100,000 people before releasing these technologies to 100 millions of people.”

Wider availability of ChatGPT-style systems, and release of open-source versions, would make it more difficult to limit research or wider deployment. And the competition between companies large and small to adopt or match ChatGPT suggests little appetite for slowing down, but appears instead to incentivize proliferation of the technology.

Last week, LLaMA, an AI model developed by Meta—and similar to the one at the core of ChatGPT—was leaked online after being shared with some academic researchers. The system could be used as a building block in the creation of a chatbot, and its release sparked worry among those who fear that the AI systems known as large language models, and chatbots built on them like ChatGPT, will be used to generate misinformation or automate cybersecurity breaches. Some experts argue that such risks may be overblown, and others suggest that making the technology more transparent will in fact help others guard against misuses.  

Meta declined to answer questions about the leak, but company spokesperson Ashley Gabriel provided a statement saying, “While the model is not accessible to all, and some have tried to circumvent the approval process, we believe the current release strategy allows us to balance responsibility and openness.”

ChatGPT is built on top of text-generation technology that has been available for several years and learns to mirror human text by picking up on patterns in enormous quantities of text, much of it scraped from the web. OpenAI found that adding a chat interface and providing an additional layer of machine learning that involved humans providing feedback on the bot’s responses made the technology more capable and articulate.

The data provided by users interacting with ChatGPT, or services built on it such as Microsoft’s new Bing search interface, may provide OpenAI a key advantage. But other companies are working on replicating the fine-tuning that created ChatGPT.

Stability AI is currently funding a project investigating how to train similar chatbots called Carper AI. Alexandr Wang, CEO of Scale AI, a startup that carries out data labeling and machine-learning training for many technology companies, says many customers are asking for help doing fine-tuning similar to what OpenAI did to create ChatGPT. “We’re pretty overwhelmed with demand,” he says.

Wang believes that the efforts already underway will naturally mean many more capable language models and chatbots emerging. “I think there will be a vibrant ecosystem,” he says.

Sean Gourley, CEO of Primer, a startup that sells AI tools for intelligence analysts, including those in the US government, and an adviser to Stability AI, also expects to soon see many projects make systems like ChatGPT. “The watercooler talk is that this took about 20,000 hours of training,” he says of the human feedback process that honed OpenAI’s bot.

Gourley estimates that even a project that involved several times as much training would cost a few million dollars—affordable to a well-funded startup or large technology company. “It's a magical breakthrough,” Gourley says of the fine-tuning that OpenAI did with ChatGPT. “But it's not something that isn't going to be replicated.”

What happened after OpenAI announced DALL-E 2, a tool for generating complex, aesthetically pleasing images from a text prompt in April 2022 may foreshadow the path ahead for ChatGPT-like bots.

OpenAI implemented safeguards on its image generator to prevent users from making sexually explicit or violent images, or ones featuring recognizable faces, and only made the tool available to a limited number of artists and researchers for fear that it might be abused. Yet because the techniques behind DALL-E were well known among AI researchers, similar AI art tools soon appeared. Four months after DALL-E 2 was released, Stability AI released an open-source image generator called Stable Diffusion that has been folded into numerous products but also adapted to generate images prohibited by OpenAI.

Clement Delangue, CEO of Hugging Face, a company that hosts open-source AI projects, including some developed by Stability AI, believes it will be possible to replicate ChatGPT, but he doesn’t want to predict when.

“Nobody knows, and we’re still at the learning phase,” he says. “You never really know that you have a good model before you have a good model,” he says. “Could be next week, could be next year.” Neither is very far off.

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SAN FRANCISCO — When Aaron Levie, the chief executive of Box, tried a new A.I. chatbot called ChatGPT in early December, it didn’t take him long to declare, “We need people on this!”

He cleared his calendar and asked employees to figure out how the technology, which instantly provides comprehensive answers to complex questions, could benefit Box, a cloud computing company that sells services that help businesses manage their online data.

Mr. Levie’s reaction to ChatGPT was typical of the anxiety — and excitement — over Silicon Valley’s new new thing. Chatbots have ignited a scramble to determine whether their technology could upend the economics of the internet, turn today’s powerhouses into has-beens or create the industry’s next giants.

Not since the iPhone has the belief that a new technology could change the industry run so deep. Cloud computing companies are rushing to deliver chatbot tools, even as they worry that the technology will gut other parts of their businesses. E-commerce outfits are dreaming of new ways to sell things. Social media platforms are being flooded with posts written by bots. And publishing companies are fretting that even more dollars will be squeezed out of digital advertising.

The volatility of chatbots has made it impossible to predict their impact. In one second, the systems impress by fielding a complex request for a five-day itinerary, making Google’s search engine look archaic. A moment later, they disturb by taking conversations in dark directions and launching verbal assaults.

The result is an industry gripped with the question: What do we do now?

“Everybody is agitated,” said Erik Brynjolfsson, an economist at Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. “There’s a lot of value to be won or lost.”

Rarely have so many tech sectors been simultaneously exposed. The A.I. systems could disrupt $100 billion in cloud spending, $500 billion in digital advertising and $5.4 trillion in e-commerce sales, according to totals from IDC, a market research firm, and GroupM, a media agency.

Google, perhaps more than any other company, has reason to both love and hate the chatbots. It has declared a “code red” because their abilities could be a blow to its $162 billion business showing ads on searches.

But Google’s cloud computing business could be a big winner. Smaller companies like Box need help building chatbot tools, so they are turning to the giants that process, store and manage information across the web. Those companies — Google, Microsoft and Amazon — are in a race to provide businesses with the software and substantial computing power behind their A.I. chatbots.

“The cloud computing providers have gone all in on A.I. over the last few months,” said Clément Delangue, head of the A.I. company Hugging Face, which helps run open-source projects similar to ChatGPT. “They are realizing that in a few years, most of the spending will be on A.I., so it is important for them to make big bets.”

When Microsoft introduced a chatbot-equipped Bing search engine last month, Yusuf Mehdi, the head of Bing, said the company was wrestling with how the new version would make money. Advertising will be a major driver, he said, but the company expects fewer ads than traditional search allows.

“We’re going to learn that as we go,” Mr. Mehdi said.

As Microsoft figures out a chatbot business model, it is forging ahead with plans to sell the technology to others. It charges $10 a month for a cloud service, built in conjunction with the OpenAI lab, that provides developers with coding suggestions, among other things.

Google has similar ambitions for its A.I. technology. After introducing its Bard chatbot last month, the company said its cloud customers would be able to tap into that underlying system for their own businesses.

But Google has not yet begun exploring how to make money from Bard itself, said Dan Taylor, a company vice president of global ads. It considers the technology “experimental,” he said, and is focused on using the so-called large language models that power chatbots to improve traditional search.

“The discourse on A.I. is rather narrow and focused on text and the chat experience,” Mr. Taylor said. “Our vision for search is about understanding information and all its forms: language, images, video, navigating the real world.”

Sridhar Ramaswamy, who led Google’s advertising division from 2013 to 2018, said Microsoft and Google recognized that their current search business might not survive. “The wall of ads and sea of blue links is a thing of the past,” said Mr. Ramaswamy, who now runs Neeva, a subscription-based search engine.

Amazon, which has a larger share of the cloud market than Microsoft and Google combined, has not been as public in its chatbot pursuit as the other two, though it has been working on A.I. technology for years.

But in January, Andy Jassy, Amazon’s chief executive, corresponded with Mr. Delangue of Hugging Face, and weeks later Amazon expanded a partnership to make it easier to offer Hugging Face’s software to customers.

As that underlying tech, known as generative A.I., becomes more widely available, it could fuel new ideas in e-commerce. Late last year, Manish Chandra, the chief executive of Poshmark, a popular online secondhand store, found himself daydreaming during a long flight from India about chatbots building profiles of people’s tastes, then recommending and buying clothes or electronics. He imagined grocers instantly fulfilling orders for a recipe.

“It becomes your mini-Amazon,” said Mr. Chandra, who has made integrating generative A.I. into Poshmark one of the company’s top priorities over the next three years. “That layer is going to be very powerful and disruptive and start almost a new layer of retail.”

But generative A.I is causing other headaches. In early December, users of Stack Overflow, a popular social network for computer programmers, began posting substandard coding advice written by ChatGPT. Moderators quickly banned A.I.-generated text.

Part of the problem was that people could post this questionable content far faster than they could write posts on their own, said Dennis Soemers, a moderator for the site. “Content generated by ChatGPT looks trustworthy and professional, but often isn’t,” he said.

When websites thrived during the pandemic as traffic from Google surged, Nilay Patel, editor in chief of The Verge, a tech news site, warned publishers that the search giant would one day turn off the spigot. He had seen Facebook stop linking out to websites and foresaw Google following suit in a bid to boost its own business.

He predicted that visitors from Google would drop from a third of websites’ traffic to nothing. He called that day “Google zero.”

“People thought I was crazy,” said Mr. Patel, who redesigned The Verge’s website to protect it. Because chatbots replace website search links with footnotes to answers, he said, many publishers are now asking if his prophecy is coming true.

For the past two months, strategists and engineers at the digital advertising company CafeMedia have met twice a week to contemplate a future where A.I. chatbots replace search engines and squeeze web traffic.

The group recently discussed what websites should do if chatbots lift information but send fewer visitors. One possible solution would be to encourage CafeMedia’s network of 4,200 websites to insert code that limited A.I. companies from taking content, a practice currently allowed because it contributes to search rankings.

“There are a million things to be worried about,” said Paul Bannister, CafeMedia’s chief strategy officer. “You have to figure out what to prioritize.”

Courts are expected to be the ultimate arbiter of content ownership. Last month, Getty Images sued Stability AI, the start-up behind the art generator tool Stable Diffusion, accusing it of unlawfully copying millions of images. The Wall Street Journal has said using its articles to train an A.I. system requires a license.

In the meantime, A.I. companies continue collecting information across the web under the “fair use” doctrine, which permits limited use of material without permission.

“The world is facing a new technology, and the law is groping to find ways of dealing with it,” said Bradley J. Hulbert, a lawyer who specializes in this area. “No one knows where the courts will draw the lines.”

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In an event titled "AI in Focus - Digital Kickoff," Andreas Braun, CTO of Microsoft Germany and Lead Data & AI STU, said, "We will introduce GPT-4 next week, there we will have multimodal models that will offer completely different possibilities – for example videos."

Currently, OpenAI's AI solutions allow us to interact through text inputs. But now that GPT-4 is confirmed to have multimodal capabilities, users should ideally be able to interact through multiple modes, including text, images, and sounds.

This is not the first time we are hearing about GPT-4 and its ability to generate videos. Last month, we heard OpenAI was working on a ChatGPT mobile app that will be powered by GPT-4 AI technology. The ability to allow users to make videos with AI assistance was one of the highlighting features of the mobile app.

Besides allowing users to make videos with AI assistance, GPT-4 will create answers faster than the existing GPT 3.5. GPT-4 will also be more human-like, generating answers that will sound more like a human wrote them. All these changes will also be available in the Bing Chat in the near future.

However, Braun did not specifically mention Bing Chat and when it starts getting benefits of GPT-4. But considering the fact that Microsoft has invested billions of dollars in OpenAI, it should not take much time for the former to introduce GPT-4 into Bing search.

Source: Heise (German)

Microsoft says GPT-4 coming next week with video features

San Francisco-based AI startup firm Anthropic has posted a listing for a “prompt engineer & librarian,” a worker whose role will entirely revolve around AI. Their vast salary range spans from $175,000 to $335,000, and candidates will be expected to work in the San Francisco office “25% of the time.”

The company’s AI technology, an assistant called Claude, rivals OpenAI’s ChatGPT, a bot that can hold conversation, generate thoughtful responses, and (depending on who you ask) mimic human interaction. In the job listing, Anthropic calls their tech among "the most capable and safe in the world,” but  acknowledges that “large language models are a new type of intelligence, and the art of instructing them in a way that delivers the best results is still in its infancy.”

Developing these models calls for someone adept in programming, instructing, and teaching. That prompt engineer and librarian will be tasked with figuring out "the best methods of prompting our AI to accomplish a wide range of tasks" and documenting them "to build up a library of tools and a set of tutorials that allows others to learn prompt engineering or simply find prompts that would be ideal for them.”

That’s no small order, which Anthropic also acknowledges. The listing goes on to say that because the entire field of prompt-engineering has only existed for fewer than two years, “this position is a bit hard to hire for!” They just ask applicants to demonstrate their prompt engineering skills by “spending some time experimenting with Claude…and showing that you’ve managed to get complex behaviors from a series of well crafted prompts.”

A good fit for the role, first and foremost, will “have a creative hacker spirit and love solving puzzles.” They’ll also be an excellent communicator and have an organizational mindset and “a passion for making powerful technology safe and societally beneficial.”

Founded by former OpenAI employees, Anthropic’s mission is to create reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems. “We want AI to be safe for our customers and for society as a whole.”

The company received over $500 million in funds from Sam Bankman-Fried, the former CEO of crypto exchange FTX, months before FTX spectacularly imploded, according to Cointelgraph. It has raised over $700 million total.

As Anthropic’s lucrative listing proves, though AI may be replacing handfuls of jobs at some companies, it’s creating new ones, too.

“There is a lot of excitement regarding the use of ChatGPT,” ResumeBuilder.com’s chief career advisor Stacie Haller told Fortune, adding that AI will reshape work as we know it just like all tech advancements before it. “As with all new technologies, companies’ use of ChatGPT will be continuously evolving, and we are only at the onset.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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