Meta has unleashed BlenderBot 3, "the first 175B-parameter, publicly available chatbot complete with model weights, code, datasets, and model cards". Meta says BlenderBot 3 is an experiment and the purpose of making it public (US only at the moment) is so people can interact with BlenderBot and tell Meta when it does dumb stuff and they can refine it. Vice/Motherboard played around with BlenderBot and found its "responses are also just generally not very realistic or good", "frequently changes topics apropos of nothing, and gives stilted and awkward answers that sound like a space alien who has read about human conversations but never actually had one".
Nvidia's Q2 financials are probably going to suck because they're releasing some info early so the bed wetters (aka investors) don't have to buy a new mattress. They forecasted US$8.1b in revenue but only achieved US$6.7b. Nvidia reckons it's due to companies like Gigabyte and Asus not ordering as many GPUs as expected. Why would there be such a lull in demand for what are arguably the best graphics cards money can buy? The cryptocurrency crash and in particular, Etherum. It's no longer profitable to mine Etherum so all those mining rigs/fire hazards are up for sale and flooding the 2nd hand market, with gamers picking up some deals instead of buying new. AMD actually increased its gaming revenue in the same period but their GPUs aren't used by crypto miners.
During WWDC 2022 Apple showed off an iOS 16/macOS 13 feature called Continuity Camera that allows you to use an iPhone as a webcam, no cables required. The good news is that it seems to work well and offers superior image quality than the built-in webcam on a Mac. Desk View was the feature I'm most interested in as I had no idea how a camera pointing at you could give a usable image of what's on the desk! In practice it's a bit wonky. Anything flat seems to work well, but anything with some height (like hands) looks weird. Here's a video of Desk View in action. Looks useful in very specific situations.
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