Chip Wars, Tesla, Social Media, and So Much More

Simplified Tech News from the Week of April 15th - Part 1

Author

Walter Wimberly
April 18, 2024

Welcome back my Tech Curious People! This week started off with a bang, with a cold war getting hotter, and didn’t slow down. In fact, there was so much information, I’ve split this week into two emails. Our first is only for Monday through Wednesday. We’ll release the second half of the week’s news this weekend. This way we can keep the content short, to the point, and get your regularly scheduled lives.

Table of Contents

The Tech Cold War Heats Up

Cold Tech War Turns Hot

Military assets are not the only means of waging wars. Some countries fight on the Economic Battlefield. Over the last couple of years, the US has moved to limit Chinese chips in their telecom devices over fears of potential electronic eavesdropping, as well as potential sabotage. They have moved to limit exports to China for various industries, including AI research.

China has again retaliated and announced that they will block US chip manufactures to be used in China after 2027. This could direct effects US companies such as Intel, AMD, and more.

10% of Tesla’s Workforce Disappears

Employee Disappearing

Tesla laid off approximately 14% of all it’s workers this week across most departments including communication, engineering, manufacturing, and more. This while Elon Musk’s $56,000,000,000 compensation package is back up for a vote.

While this seems like a pure business move, it is also coming in part because of sagging EV sales. Sales are slumping because of increased competition, and the prospective market for new sales is shrinking. Therefore, there isn’t as much demand to develop this new tech.

Microsoft is Investing a mere $1.5Billion in AI Firm

Piles of Money on the Desk

Microsoft is investing $1.5 billion in UAE AI firm G42 to expand its cloud computing business. This is part of their ongoing strategy to expand their cloud computing footprint across the Middle East, allowing them to compete with the Amazon AWS and Google Cloud services.

Read more here.

Social Media Inherently Unsafe?

Well, for teens at least. Mitchell Prinstein, chief science officer of the American Psychological Association (APA), may be the person who teenagers like the least.

On Tuesday, the APA released its most recent social media report and found that few, if any, changes have occurred. This is despite warnings about including "hypersensitivity to social feedback," disrupted sleep, "underdeveloped impulse control" and exposure to what it calls "harmful content."

They claim social media is designed for adults and might harm younger individuals because of the above risks.

Meta was Students to Learn via Virtual Reality

Meta Quest VR Headset in Use

Just because Social Media might not be the best thing for your child’s well-being, doesn’t mean that social media companies aren’t trying to find new ways to capture that target audience.

Meta is looking to roll out Virtual Reality (VR) enabled training using their VR Quest headsets for this coming school year. One use for VR is virtual field trips. These would be potentially faster and cheaper, especially if they are to faraway places where students wouldn’t be able to attend.

However, there are other questions regarding the fair use of VR. These include will they work with people with vision impairments, motion sickness, and more. Those issues, along with costs, and more will have to be worked out to make this a viable option.

Side note: I actually proposed a similar idea over 20 years ago, but the tech for VR headsets just wasn’t practical at that time, as they weighed 12-20 pounds and required a $1M computer to operate.

iPhone Can’t Even Beat this One Android Developer

Apple has a challenge. They’re up against the entire Android community. But their high price,and closed approach, is coming at a cost for them. Not only are they struggling against all of Android, they aren’t even keeping up against a Android manufacture - Samsung.

iPhone sales dropped almost 10%, in part due to sales being limited in China. this means that worldwide, Samsung has taken over at the largest worldwide mobile phone developer.