Issue 1707 - Thursday 6th October, 2022

In Today's Issue

The News

Google has its own AI based video generator, Imagen (not a typo)

Last week we saw Meta's impressive Make-A-Video artificial intelligence research that'll generate video clips based on a text prompt. Now Google's gone and one-upped its Californian cousin with Imagen Video. It'll take text description and generate "a 16-frame, three-frames-per-second video at 24-by-48-pixel resolution. Then, the system upscales and "predicts" additional frames, producing a final 128-frame, 24-frames-per-second video at 720p (1280×768)". One thing Imagen does better than other AI-art generators is render text properly. None of this stuff is perfect, but there's already a CG video guy on Hacker News shitting themselves at being disrupted by future versions of Make-A-Video or Imagen.

Tesla removes ultrasonic sensors from new cars, will use cameras & AI instead

Tesla is going to stop installing ultrasonic sensors in their cars, relying on cameras and AI instead to determine how close you are to objects. This means new cars won't have "Park Assist, Autopark, Summon, and Smart Summon" as the cameras aren't up to the task yet. They'll return once "they perform equally well using its camera-based system". A few months ago Tesla did the same thing with the radar sensor used for adaptive cruise control and recently figured "Tesla Vision" was so good that it disabled the radar on cars with one. This resulted in an increase of dangerous "phantom braking" reports to the NHTSA. Personally I haven't had any issues with the vision-only cruise control on my Model 3 in the month or so since that update dropped.

Intel Arc graphics cards reviews are out, hardware good but drivers suck

Intel's Arc A750 and A770 GPUs are finally in the hands of reviewers. Anandtech is a shadow of its former self, so that leaves Gamers Nexus on YouTube (ugh, video) as the best review out there. They found that the cards are pretty good and the A770 competes with the RTX 3600 very nicely at the 1080p/1440p level for less money - with a catch. The drivers seem to be a steaming pile of shite. Buggy to the point that the Arc cards have trouble connecting to some monitors and crash some games. Intel will probably fix this stuff sooner or later, but unless you're very tolerant of what Gamers Nexus classifies as a "beta" piece of hardware, wait, or grab an AMD RX 6600 XT instead.

Something I Saw On The Internet

Optus class action, experts say Tesla's robot is average, Aus Post now sells NBN

Bargains

The End

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