NVIDIA says cryptocurrencies do not 'bring anything useful for society'
We've all lived through the GeForce RTX 30 Series generation, where the rise of cryptocurrencies and mining drove prices up and increased scarcity for GPUs. So this new interview with The Guardian is interesting in that it sees NVIDIA publicly distance itself from something that has negatively affected the PC gaming space.
Speaking with Michael Kagan, Chief Technology Officer at NVIDIA, he explicitly states that the whole crypto boom didn't "bring anything useful for society." Of course, this statement is also born from the current AI boom where NVIDIA hardware sits at the heart of AI technology like ChatGPT.
Even though crypto led to large volumes of sales for NVIDIA and increased scarcity and availability in most markets, the company attempted to minimize the impact on desktop sales by introducing LHR or "Lite Hash Rate" technologies in models like the GeForce RTX 3060.
AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution 3 details emerge, the company's DLSS 3 like tech
When AMD announced its new flagship RDNA 3 GPUs last year, the Radeon 7900 XT and 7900 XTX, the company also briefly teased that it was developing FSR 3. Its next-generation FidelityFX Super Resolution 3 technology would, in effect, present an alternative to NVIDIA's DLSS 3 - specifically Frame Generation.
AMD FSR 3 presentation GDC 2023, image credit: AMD
With FSR 2 being an open DLSS Super Resolution alternative, FSR 3 will follow suit - with the technology appearing at GDC 2023. For the still-in-development FSR 3, AMD aims to achieve a 2x performance increase over FSR 2 by creating new frames.
AMD outlined a high probability that each interpolated or generated pixel in a frame will have a sample. With no feedback loop, each interpolated frame will only be shown once. And with that, AMD notes that the recommendation for FSR 3 is that the input should be at least 60 frames per second.
Your phone might not try to blind you as much with this new update
Have you ever turned on your Android phone and been immediately blinded because the screen brightness was set too high? We're willing to bet that you have, but now it looks like Google is working on a fix for that infuriating problem.
According to a new report, Google has a fix in the works via a future Android software update but it will be a while before you can actually install it on your phone.
The problem comes when you first wake your phone because it doesn't yet know how bright the room is. The ambient light sensor doesn't kick in until after that point, meaning it doesn't have time to turn the brightness down if you're in a dark room in the middle of the night, for example.
Continue reading: Your phone might not try to blind you as much with this new update (full post)
WhatsApp is now finally on WhatsApp
WhatsApp user who wants to make sure that they stay fully up to speed on the latest goings on and new features? You could soon be getting all of that information right inside WhatsApp.
The Meta-owned instant messaging service has started to roll out its own group chat that will allow people to get information about WhatsApp including new features and more.
This feature has been in the works for a little while according to the folks at WABetaInfo, but some people have now started to see the chat appearing in their list of messages for the first time. Unfortunately, there doesn't currently appear to be any way to manually enter that chat, so it's a waiting game we're afraid.
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Elon Musk reportedly left OpenAI after he failed at taking over the company
Tesla, SpaceX, and Twitter CEO Elon Musk reportedly attempted to takeover OpenAI in 2018 but ended up cutting ties with the company after his plan was rejected.
The news comes from Semafor, which recently published an article that claims Musk, a founder and board member at the time, said to Sam Altman, current OpenAI CEO, and other fellow board members that OpenAI was losing to Google. Musk then followed up by offering to lead OpenAI himself, which was rejected by Altman and the other board members. According to the article Musk then stepped down from the board and pulled out his planned donation to the company.
At the time of Musk's departure, the Tesla CEO cited a conflict of interest between Tesla and OpenAI as the reason for his leaving. Musk said that Tesla was creating its own artificial intelligence system and would be competing for talent with OpenAI. However, according to the eight people familiar with the inside story that spoke to Semafor, a power struggle and rivalry started between Musk and Altman following Musk's rejection, which resulted in Musk stepping down from the board of directors and immediately stopping payments of his promised $1 billion donation that would have been rolled out over many years.
Stunning photos show Northern Lights making a rare appearance south
The Northern Lights, commonly spotted in the Arctic, made its way as far south as Arizona last night, stunning onlookers that happened to catch a glance at the rare sighting.
Over March 23 and March 24, Earth was rocked with an unexpected Coronal Magnetic Ejection (CME) from an eruption that occurred on the Sun. The National Oceanic And Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) issued a warning for G4 (severe) geomagnetic storms across the entire North American region, writing in its warning that the following pieces of technology may be affected; power grids, spacecraft operations, atmospheric drag on satellites operating in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) and GPS operations.
Spaceweather.com reports that as of March 25, the origin of the unexpected CME blast remains unknown, but their suspicions lie with the near-miss March 23 CME that may have caused a ripple effect that hit Earth. With the impact of the CME comes auroras as the charged particles from the Sun interact with Earth's atmosphere and magnetic field, causing the incredible phenomena we call auroras. Auroras typically occur close to Earth's poles, but during a geomagnetic storm, the phenomena can move closer to Earth's equator.
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Researchers that built a ChatGPT clone for $600 killed it over safety concerns
It was only a few days ago that a team of Stanford researchers built a clone of OpenAI's ChatGPT for just $600. Now those researchers have taken the demo.
The release of OpenAI ChatGPT put artificial intelligence in the limelight and demonstrated the widespread demand for language models, the underlying technology powering these AI tools. Following the release of ChatGPT, which quickly adopted millions of users, other companies such as Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Amazon began dropping information about their own language models that are currently in development. Microsoft quickly hopped on the OpenAI train by investing billions of dollars into the company in return for its propriety GPT language model.
Researchers at Stanford decided to see how difficult and costly it would be to create their own language model and decided to try and replicate OpenAI's GPT. As previously reported, the Stanford professors took Meta's open-source LLaMA 7B language model and trained it on trillions of tokens of data. The results were the almost-creation of a ChatGPT clone named Alpaca, which came with some key differences. While Alpaca was trained on a large amount of data, it wasn't trained on how to sift through that data to acquire an answer quickly. This led researchers to conclude that Alpaca was much slower than GPT.
Microsoft researchers say GPT-4 is the beginning of a human-level AI
Internal Microsoft researchers have published a paper that explored OpenAI's newest language model, GPT-4, and according to those researchers, it may be the very first step toward Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).
A new research paper has been published on the arXiv pre-print server by internal Microsoft AI researchers that explored the capabilities of OpenAI's newest language model called GPT-4. According to the team behind the paper, an analysis was conducted on an early iteration of the GPT-4 language model, and based on the results, the researchers believe that GPT-4 could be viewed as an early and incomplete version of AGI. Microsoft's testers write that GPT-4 shows a clear leap in several areas compared to OpenAI's previous model, GPT-3.5.
The team found that GPT-4 achieved close to human-level performance in a range of categories that its previous generation lacked. Those categories were mathematics, coding, vision, medicine, law, psychology, and more. According to the paper, GPT-4 also performed exceptionally well in several exams, scoring, respectively, in the 90th, 88th, and 86th percentiles on the Bar exam, LSAT, and Certified Sommelier theory test.
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Epic unveils incredibly lifelike facial animation tech that's uncomfortably good
Epic Games has revealed at its State of Unreal keynote at GDC 2023 its new MetaHuman creator tool that will enable developers to animate their MetaHumans with just an iPhone.
The announcement featured the reveal of the above video that, demonstrates the ease of developers using video footage shot with their iPhones to animate characters. The results are very impressive, with the animation tool showing realistic movements in subtle facial expressions, eye tracking, and graphics quality.
Epic showed off what's possible with the technology by releasing a clip of Ninja Theory's game Senua's Saga: Hellblade II, in which performance capture artist Melina Juergens that plays the game's main character, acts out a scene that is then transformed into a gorgeous animation. The Senua's Saga: Hellblade II technology demonstration was created using expensive motion capture cameras within a studio, hence the impressive end result.
Listen up, Google: Here's what YouTube should do to prevent channel hijacking
Over the past couple of days, the big news was that Linus Tech Tips, a huge YouTube channel with over 15 million subscribers, was hacked. The hackers were able to change the channel name and live stream a fake Elon Musk video trying to get viewers to send Bitcoin to them.
Linus Sebastian, founder of Linus Media Group (Image Credit: Linus Tech Tips Twitter)
Thankfully, Google helped Linus and his team recover his channel. Still, I can only imagine it would have been an incredibly stressful and nightmare-type situation while the recovery was in process. And it's not just Linus Tech Tips that was hacked. A few weeks ago, Andy from eTeknix suffered the same fate after being conned by a fake video sponsorship scheme where the victim is tricked into opening what appears to be an agreement PDF - the "PDF" file is the malware.
Once opened, the malware sends the user's data to the hacker. It does not matter how strong your password is or if you have enabled two-factor authentication. It's not entirely clear which data is sent, but the critical data we know that is sent includes the user's browser data, including actively logged-in session tokens and cookies. Once obtained, the hacker can carefully plan an attack on the unsuspecting victim, usually when they are asleep.