Google is shifting things about to cater more for its Bard AI rather than Google Assistant, according to a new report.

Google's pretty clear that Bard remains 'experimental' thus far (Image Credit: Google)

CNBC tells us that an internal Google reshuffle is detailed in a memo entitled 'Changes to Assistant and Bard teams' that details changes to 'heavily' prioritize the development of Bard at the expense of Assistant.

Direct personnel changes include the departure of Jianchang Mao, who was vice president of engineering at Google Assistant. Mao will be replaced by Peeyush Ranjan, who was vice president in Google's commerce organization, the CNBC report claims.

ChatGPT has only just been upgraded to version 4, and we're already hearing leaks about the next-gen incarnation of the chatbot which we're told will be 'indistinguishable' from the experience of chatting to a human.

The next incarnation of ChatGPT, GPT-5, is being worked on by OpenAI and should be ready to roll towards the end of 2023.

According to a new report aired by BGR - citing Siqi Chen, a developer and entrepreneur on Twitter (see above) - GPT-5 might be set to reach a big milestone, namely achieving AGI or artificial general intelligence.

Images snapped by NASA and the European Space Agency's (ESA) Hubble Space Telescope have led to the discovery of what could be the biggest black hole known to date.

The team of astronomers analyzed images snapped of the Abell 1201 galaxy cluster by the Hubble Space Telescope and, from those images, used gravitational lensing to magnify the background objects. Notably, gravitational lensing is a phenomenon that occurs when the gravity of an object bends the light that is passing through it, causing a magnification effect. Astronomers commonly use this natural phenomenon to see much further into the cosmos than they could if they were exclusively using human-made telescopes such as Hubble.

Using gravitational lensing, astronomers were able to spot the giant black hole in the background of one of Hubble's images. According to statements from the astronomers, this black hole has an estimated mass of approximately 30 billion suns and is one of, if not the largest black hole ever discovered. Astronomers made these conclusions after simulating how much light was bending around the foreground galaxy and analyzing the gravitational lensing magnification. Before arriving at their conclusion, researchers tested the size of thousands of black holes and eventually found a solution to what they were observing.

The AI race has spawned the apparent need for companies to acquire individuals that have skills with artificial intelligence systems, with some companies paying hundreds of thousands of dollars per year to people that can confidently teach other individuals how to effectively use the software.

It's no surprise that the rush to develop the most advanced artificial intelligence system has created the need for individuals capable of teaching company employees how to leverage these systems to their advantage properly. A new report from Bloomberg outlines new positions under a "prompt engineer", which are people that are very good at getting chatbots such as ChatGPT or Bing Chat to respond with the desired answer to a problem. Essentially, these people are good at asking the AI the right questions to generate the best answers.

Individuals capable of this are becoming extremely valuable as companies around the world watch closely at the emergence of AI and ponder how it will impact their industry and how they can best position themselves to adapt to it. Individuals capable of teaching other people how to use these systems effectively are very valuable to these companies.

Hubble has snapped a new image that has recently been released of a mysterious object located approximately 390 million light years away from Earth. This object is called Z 229-15.

Z 229-15

Z 229-15 resides in the constellation Lyra, and according to a blog post by the European Space Agency (ESA), the more researchers look into Z 229-15, the more difficult it becomes to classify it. According to the blog post, Z 229-15 falls into a special category of celestial object that fits multiple definitions at once. As the ESA writes, researchers have classified Z 229-15 as a galaxy but also an AGN, an active galactic nucleus. A galaxy is given this classification when it harbors an active supermassive black hole at the galaxy's center.

The powerful gravitational pull of the supermassive black hole pulls large amounts of matter toward it, forming a disk around the black hole that emits a bright light across the electromagnetic spectrum when it's heated up. The definitions or classifications don't stop there, as Z 229-15's AGN is also a quasar, which astronomers label as a specific subtype of AGN, that is only given to a galaxy when it displays an extreme level of brightness over a very long distance. Since Z 229-15 is located 390 million light-years away from Earth and Hubble's image showcases an extremely bright center, Z 229-15 fits this classification also.

The artificial intelligence race has already begun, and now leading technologists, along with AI experts, are calling for it to grind to a halt.

The recent launch of OpenAI's new language model, GPT-4, has made waves across the internet, with countless reports demonstrating its impressive capabilities. Perhaps what is most impressive is just how much better GPT-4 is compared to its predecessors and just how fast OpenAI's developers were able to achieve this. Notably, OpenAI released its GPT-3 in 2020, which was superseded by GPT-3.5, which was released in November 2022 alongside ChatGPT. GPT-4 was released on March 14, 2023, and is the newest OpenAI model.

The improvements between each of these iterations are simply staggering. GPT-4 was trained on a much larger and more diverse data set than GPT-3.5 or GPT-4 and features 100 trillion parameters, compared to GPT -3's 175 billion parameters. This leap in parameters and an increased dataset size enables GPT-4 to provide much more accurate responses, overall be more reliable, creative, and handle more nuanced instructions. Furthermore, OpenAI threw in a new feature with GPT-4, text-to-image capabilities.

NASA has taken to its blog to announce that a study has been conducted on what is being described as the "brightest of all time" explosion that recently hit the solar system.

The space agency writes that on October 9, 2022, a pulse of intense radiation known as a gamma-ray burst (GRB) passed through the solar system and that this wave, which is known as the most powerful type of explosion in the universe, blinded NASA's eyes in space. NASA writes that the event named GRB 221009A was so bright that it effectively blinded most gamma-ray instruments in space, which means that NASA was unable to detect the true intensity of the explosion.

However, the space agency says that researchers were able to reconstruct the data from NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope and compared their results against data being worked on by teams of researchers in China and Russia. NASA writes that research suggests an event such as this occurs once in every 10,000 years and that it was 70 times brighter than any other GRB humans have detected yet. So, where did it come from?

Micron, one of the biggest names in storage technology, has posted its latest financial report for the second quarter of 2023. And it's pretty bleak, with Micron reporting a net loss of USD 2.31 billion.

This figure is based on revenue of USD 3.69 billion for the quarter, which represents a significant drop from the USD 7.79 billion from the same quarter last year. Micron also notes that it had to write down inventory worth over a billion and is cutting expenses to preserve its "technology and product portfolio competitiveness."

It cites a challenging market environment for the losses it's experiencing in the 3D NAND and DRAM markets. And with year-over-year revenues dropping by over 50%, Micron will be letting a number of employees go - cutting its overall headcount by 15% this year. That said, Micron expects demand for memory and storage to improve in the coming years.

GALAX's HOF (Hall of Fame) range is well-known in the GPU space as being blinged-out models built for extreme overclocking, and now the company is looking to add a bit of that HOF style and performance with new HOF Extreme 50 PCIe 5.0 SSDs.

GALAX HOF Extreme 50 PCIe 5.0 SSD, image credit: GALAX

With sequential read speeds of up to 10 GB/s, the new HOF Extreme 50 SSDs will be available in 1TB and 2TB variants, and yes, they will feature chunky cooling. A large copper heatsink sporting the HOF aesthetic with the addition of a cooling fan will reportedly keep the drive's operating temperatures within the 40 to 45-degree range.

The cooling fan will require a standard 4-pin PWM fan connector, making it another PCIe 5.0 SSD with extreme cooling due to the increased speed and heat with the latest generation of PC storage. At least for now, active cooling will be the norm for high-speed PCIe 5.0 SSDs.

It looks like NVIDIA is prepping to release a range of new GeForce RTX 40 Series GPUs soon, covering everything from mid-range to entry-level. With the non-Ti GeForce RTX 4070 set to arrive next month, the RTX 4060 Ti will release before the end of May, with the RTX 4060 and even the GeForce RTX 4050 set to follow.

The latter is news today, with MEGAsizeGPU stating that the desktop RTX 4050 is on track for a June release. Even though previous reports have noted that the RTX 4060 Ti and RTX 4060 would launch in May, this new info puts the date for the RTX 4060 as "undecided."

The GeForce RTX 4050, like the RTX 3050 before it, will represent the entry-level model for the current Ada Lovelace generation. But, regarding the VRAM question, MEGAsizeGPU responded to a query by stating that the RTX 3050 will ship with 6GB. A step down from most Ampere-based RTX 3050 models available with 8GB, so this will undoubtedly be a point of contention if true.