Quick heads up about two conferences happening in Melbourne during in March that Sizzle subscribers are involved in organising. First up is Everything Open, a gathering of open source people sharing their passions, put on by the Linux Australia team. Later in the month is /dev/world and X World, the Apple University Consortium's yearly shindig. Both great events put on by great people in the best city in Australia.
Tesla held their "Master Plan 3" investor day this morning. If you've read The Big Switch by Saul Griffith, that was basically the first 30 minutes. Electrify everything is feasible and Tesla wants sell a shitload of batteries along the way. Then there was a bunch of executives talking up Tesla's achievements in manufacturing which to a layperson like me, seem impressive. Elon returned and re-iterated his robotaxi/"full self driving" nonsense and showing a video of cyborgs that he said will outnumber humans if "assuming the things I'm saying are true". No firm date for the Cybertruck and no information regarding a lower priced car beyond a quick mention that they're working on "a next generation vehicle" that'll be built in Mexico. The entire event is up on YouTube, all 4 hours of it.
Mark Zuckerberg has made yet another product announcement that feels like a brainfart. This time it's "a new top-level product group at Meta focused on generative AI to turbocharge our work in this area". This team will "focus on building creative and expressive tools. Over the longer term, we'll focus on developing AI personas that can help people in a variety of ways". I can't wait. Meanwhile, Open AI has announced that Whisper (speech to text) and ChatGPT (aka "gpt-3.5-turbo") are now available via their API and their partner in crime, Microsoft, has shown off Kosmos-1 - "a multi-modal model that can reportedly analyze images for content, solve visual puzzles, perform visual text recognition, pass visual IQ tests, and understand natural language instructions" - something that's key to artificial general intelligence.
Automotive News has a great article about Toyota's generational change of leadership and explores how it will try to move this behemoth of a company towards manufacturing electric vehicles, after betting on the wrong horse in hydrogen. In it is a quote that will be used by every Tesla fanboy you know - "taking the skin off the Model Y, it was truly a work of art" - said by a Toyota executive after doing a teardown of a vehicle made in Tesla's Austin factory using the much hyped giga casting process. Another Toyota executive called it "a whole different manufacturing philosophy" and that "we need a new platform designed as a blank-sheet EV". Very high praise from the masters of manufacturing. If I was Tesla I would be very proud hearing that.
A dashboard of Snowy Hydro's generation assets on display at the Snowy Hydro Discovery Centre in Cooma, NSW (Me! I took this photo)
📻 Rebellion (Lies) - Arcade Fire
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