I'm gonna be on the radio tonight! I'll be on 3RRR's Byte Into IT between 7PM and 8PM. Melbournians can tune in to 102.7FM or 3RRR Digital, the rest of you can listen on the 3RRR website. There will be a podcast later, but listening to something live on the radio is fun and cool.
Not much has changed with OpenAI the last 24 hours. Still don't know if Sam Altman will return or if he's going to Microsoft and we still don't know if the OpenAI board will listen to its employees and quit. While management is sucking each other off, someone in the product team made the voice feature in ChatGPT free for all users. If you've never used it, I strongly suggest giving it a shot, it's like Siri/Alexa/Google Assistant but 10x better. Also in AI land, Anthropic updated its GPT-4 competitor Claude with "an industry-leading 200K token context window" and "significant reductions in rates of model hallucination", while Stability AI showed off a demo of Stable Video Diffusion that can turn text into short videos, but it is "not intended for real-world or commercial applications at this stage".
Google confirmed that Chrome extensions will need to use the Manifest V3 format by June 2024 as Chrome will be updated to drop support for Manifest V2. This is bad because Manifest V3 adds a "completely arbitrary limit on how many rules content filtering add-ons can include, which are needed to keep up with the nearly infinite ad-serving sites that are out there", effectively nuking ad blocking extensions - a situation I'm sure Google isn't losing any sleep over. Google has also been busted adding a "five-second delay when loading YouTube videos on Firefox, which disappeared when the user agent was switched to Chrome". Finally in Google related news, it came out in court that Google gave Spotify a secret sweetheart deal of only 4% on the Play Store when user paid for Spotify via Google and 0% when they used Spotify's own system.
The Communications Minister announced a review of the Basic Online Safety Expectations (aka BOSE/"the expectations"). They wanna add "ensuring the best interests of the child is a primary consideration for all services used by children, and that services should implement measures to prevent children accessing age-inappropriate content", "minimising the creation and amplification of unlawful or harmful material through generative artificial intelligence", "processes for detecting and addressing hate speech which breaches a service's terms of use" and "regular transparency reports to explain steps being taken to keep Australians safe online". You've got until the 16th of Feb to have your say on the changes. Unfamiliar with the BOSE? Read up on eSafety's website.
Mapbox recently announced an EV Charge Finder API. It allows anyone to make mapping software (web, app, in-car, etc) with route planning that's EV friendly. It'll take into consideration the terrain and your car and give you an approximation on how much energy that route will use. The API can also display any chargers along the route too. It's basically A Better Route Planner, but an API. Dunno where it sources its charger location and other information from and Australian geography isn't supported yet, but very cool either way. The EV stuff is still in private preview, but you can play around with it a little in the Mapbox Studio. Here's some documentation.
IBM has unveiled a new chip technology, called CMOS Integrated Silicon Nanophotonics chip technology, which enables a 10X improvement in integration density and produces smaller, faster and more power-efficient chips than is possible with conventional technologies. (IBM Research / Flickr)
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