Bitcoin Pizza Day plus which companies are pushing the limits of AI... and not in a good way?

Tech News Stories from the week of May 19th...

Author

Walter Wimberly
May 23, 2024

Welcome back my Tech Curious friend. I’m so glad you’re here. Below you can find information about the most recent tech news. So let’s get started.

Table of Contents

Taking Inspiration Too Far?

In 2014, a movie called "Her" was released, which revolves around a man who becomes emotionally attached to his digital assistant. Turns out this is a favorite of Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI.

However, instead of heading its warnings, he released the closest thing to it yet. And while Scarlett Johansson was originally asked to be its voice, she declined. However, many have noticed its similarities between her voice and the Sky voice in Chat GPT-4o. This has led her to have her lawyers reach out to OpenAI, which has currently pulled the voice of Sky.

CoPilot+ Cools Desire for Windows?

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella just unveiled its biggest new feature for Windows in a while, known as Recall. The plan is to have an AI assistant (Co-Pilot+) work with Recall to track everything you do, to make it a better personal assistant. This will include tracking your apps used, as well as taking periodic screenshots.

While Microsoft is claiming no data will be sent to third-party organizations and all data will use high levels of encryption, this is still concerning for many in the data privacy and security fields as it would become a prime target for hackers (and who knows what Microsoft will do with this data).

Only the Copilot+ PCs will have access to Recall’s features for now. Although we can assume the plan is to roll this out to all Window’s machines, which means many individuals may think twice before installing Windows.

Bitcoin Pizza Day

bitcoin

May 22nd is known as BitCoin Pizza day, in honor of the first time someone used Bitcoin to purchase a physical item all they way back in 2010. It only took 10,000 of them, and if you can’t tell from the title, it was for two pizzas.

The value of those coins today… about $700,000,000. But back then, who knew if Bitcoin would take off and do anything or not?

And while it’s not likely to be a regular method for purchasing physical items (could you imagine trying to buy a loaf of bread with Bitcoin?) it is fun to think of what it was, and what it still could be.

Who’s Backing a Big AI Player?

Amazon and Meta aren’t putting all of their AI eggs in one basket. They have both backed Scale AI in a Series F fundraising round. Their investment puts Scale AI value around $14 Billion.

Scale AI works on identifying and classifying information before it is brought into AI systems so they can properly learn from the data to train their own LLMs.

Nvidia’s Stock Soars

Nvidia stock when over $1,000 a share for the first time after their first quarter report because of higher than projected sales, mostly from AI tech companies.

Nvidia said its data center category rose 427% from the year-ago.

As part of this announcement, Nvidia said they were planning a 10 to 1 stock split.

Alexa’s AI Upgrade

Amazon is looking to upgrade Alexa with an improved AI, and more natural language interface. However, this will not be a free upgrade, as they are looking to charge an additional monthly fee for it. This will be to help cover the development costs.

Apple is supposedly looking to update Siri with similar technology.

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