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You're back again? |
You've been consuming a lot of tech news lately. |
I think it's time to talk to someone. |
No, not me. |
I don't count. |
I'm not real. |
Qualcomm has announced a new series of laptop processors |
representing a quantum leap forward in performance and power efficiency. |
So the company has modified their Snapdragon branding |
the only way any executives know how, adding an X. |
It's because they're all teenagers in the 90s. |
But this isn't just a naming change. |
Snapdragon X chips will be the first publicly available processors developed by Nuvia, |
a company founded by a few key members of the Apple Silicon team |
and acquired by Qualcomm in 2021. |
Like Apple's M1 and M2, Qualcomm's upcoming laptop CPUs, |
which will be revealed at the Snapdragon Summit later this month, |
won't simply feature modified off-the-shelf ARM Cortex chips, |
but a fully custom architecture called Orion. |
Building their own custom architecture is partly why Apple was able to achieve |
the mind-blowing performance and efficiency boost they did with the M1, |
which made the PC master race question everything they had ever known. |
Gaben is just a man? |
He can bleed just like us? |
All that said, there's more than a handful of reasons |
to be skeptical that these chips will be good. |
ARM is still suing Qualcomm over not paying the proper royalties for Nuvia-produced products, |
and Qualcomm's existing laptop processors |
have a reputation for sucking almost as bad as the ARM version of Windows. |
So Snapdragon X chips already have their work cut out for them. |
I mean, do we even want Apple Silicon chips for PCs? Sounds dumb. |
Microsoft has gone deep on AI, but they haven't quite figured out how to make any money off of it yet, |
probably because they've been scrolling past a lot of excellent advice from former crypto bros on social media. |
Diamond hands. |
Create pictures of diamond hands. |
GitHub Copilot, Microsoft's coding assistant, costs users $10 a month, |
but reportedly lost Microsoft over $20 per month per user, |
with power users apparently costing Microsoft up to $80 a month in electricity costs and other service fees. |
One and a half million people have already tried GitHub Copilot, |
and Microsoft Service is incredibly popular among coders, |
which is terrible news for Microsoft. |
Even worse, this isn't necessarily a problem that will disappear as users scale, |
because the LLM that powers Copilot sucks up resources like a black hole doing a keg stand. |
That's what we used to call Jimmy in college. |
As of this past April, |
ChatGPT cost OpenAI an estimated $700,000 a day just to run. |
That's probably why both Microsoft and Google |
will be charging an additional $30 per month per user |
for the recently announced AI-powered upgrades to their business software suites. |
AI made up 10 to 15% of Google's energy consumption back in 2021, |
and researchers estimate that if generative AI was added to every Google search, |
it would consume as much energy as the entire country of Ireland. |
That's either a lot or not very much at all. |
I don't typically think of energy in units of Ireland's. |
And crucially, neither do the Irish. |
A California court has ruled that Facebook's ad targeting system is discriminatory |
because it requires advertisers to choose demographic characteristics like age and gender |
to determine which users will see their ads. |
This is then amplified by Facebook's lookalike audience tool, |
which attempts to match businesses with potential customers |
that share similar traits to their current audience. |
To be clear, this wasn't a dispute over ads featuring truck nuts and whiskey-flavored toothpaste. |
Real product. |
Really? |
Yes. I'm getting those ads. |
Rather, an older woman found that she was being excluded from ads |
offering favorable deals on life insurance targeted at younger men. |
If upheld, the decision might require every ad-based platform on the internet |
to restructure their ad targeting systems, |
so Meta is likely to appeal the decision. |
Can't have that. |
Also in California, |
the Delete Act passed into law, |
which means that California data brokers must offer free, simple channels |
for users to request that their information be deleted. |
And an expansive right to repair bill was also recently signed into law, |
though it passed with Apple's blessing, |
so take that with a grain of salt. |
You know what they say, an apple a day keeps the regulators away, |
which must be why there's no apples in Europe. Fun fact. |
Now it's time for Quick Bits, |
brought to you by LTTStore.com. |
Feels weird, but okay. |
They, we, just announced the Stubby Screwdriver last month, |
and it has the same great ratchet as the full-sized LTT screwdriver. |
Its light back force makes it easy to drive any screw, |
whether or not they signed the waiver. |
Old Stubby here is four inches in length, |
so it's super pocketable and legal to carry on planes for self-defense if things come to that. |
The strong magnet in the shaft ensures the six included bits and your screws don't go anywhere |
except into the handle's built-in bit storage |
and the proper screw holes, respectively. |
You just called me a screw hole? What? |
Anyway, Mr. Stubby Screwdriver-son is durable |
and made with chemical-resistant plastics, |
and you can get yours at the link below. |
Oh, Quick Bits, man. |
I could listen to them forever up until we hit five. |
Adobe has announced major updates to AI features across its creative suite, |
including three new generative AI models, Firefly 2, Firefly Design, and Firefly Vector, |