Month: March 2020

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  The Aston Martin Valhalla is the third and final car to emerge from a partnership between the car company and the Red Bull Racing F1 team. It will also be the cheapest, although that's a very relative term here. [credit: Jonathan Gitlin ]

It must be hard, being James Bond. Not only does he have to worry about secret plots and supervillains, but there's also the dilemma of what to drive. No Time to Die might be delayed now, but when it does finally come out, the film will be packed with Aston Martins, requiring 007 to make a choice of which one to drive, and when.

There's the classic DB5, now avec miniguns, as seen in the trailer. That's where we also got a glimpse of a DBS, reflecting the British carmaker's current range, as well as what looked a lot like a 1980s-era Vantage. That makes three, but in fact NTtD also reportedly features one of Aston Martin's future products. It's a brand-new mid-engined hybrid hypercar, developed in conjunction with legendary F1 aerodynamicist Adrian Newey.

But it's not the mid-engined hybrid Aston Martin hypercar you might be thinking of. The Valkyrie, which promises near-F1 level performance, is nearing full production, but only 150 of those will be built, and at $3.2 million each, they are presumably beyond 007's civil-servant budget. Which is where the Valhalla comes in. It looks quite a bit like the Valkyrie, which is to say it will resemble little else on the road, its shape honed as it is by the need to bend airflow to its will. It will be cheaper and built in larger volume, too, although build numbers here will still only stretch to 500 examples, and at more than a million dollars it still isn't exactly what you'd call affordable.

Enlarge / Microphones are how our machines listen to us. (credit: Teddy Mafia / Flickr)

We're outsourcing ever more of our decision making to algorithms, partly as a matter of convenience, and partly because algorithms are ostensibly free of some of the biases that humans suffer from. Ostensibly. As it turns out, algorithms that are trained on data that's already subject to human biases can readily recapitulate them, as we've seen in places like the banking and judicial systems. Other algorithms have just turned out to be not especially good.

Now, researchers at Stanford have identified another area with potential issues: the speech-recognition algorithms that do everything from basic transcription to letting our phones fulfill our requests. These algorithms seem to have more issues with the speech patterns used by African Americans, although there's a chance that geography plays a part, too.

A non-comedy of errors

Voice-recognition systems have become so central to modern technology that most of the large companies in the space have developed their own. For the study, the research team tested systems from Amazon, Apple, Google, IBM, and Microsoft. While some of these systems are sold as services to other businesses, the ones from Apple and Google are as close as your phone. Their growing role in daily life makes their failures intensely frustrating, so the researchers decided to have a look at whether those failures display any sort of bias.

Enlarge / The Snapdragon 865. (credit: Qualcomm)

Qualcomm really threw a wrench into the flagship SoC market for 2020 with the Snapdragon 865. The new chip was a big departure from previous years thanks to Qualcomm's aggressive push for 5G, which comes with design requirements that make phones bigger, hotter, and more expensive than previous years. While we've already seen Samsung and many Chinese OEMs step up with 865-powered super-flagships that are more expensive than ever, for some OEMs, it seems like the cost is just too high. A pair of recent reports indicated that both Google and LG are skipping out on the Snapdragon 865 this year, opting instead for a cheaper chip.

For Google's next flagship smartphone, the Pixel 5, a few signs have popped up indicating it won't use the Snapdragon 865. Pixel phones always pop-up in the Android code repository with fishy codenames before release, and in January, XDA Developers spotted three devices codenamed "Sunfish," "Redfin," and "Bramble." A recent teardown of the Google camera app gave us definitions for each of these codenames. "Sunfish" was labeled as "photo_pixel_2020_midrange_config," aka the Pixel 4a, while Bramble and Redfin were labeled "photo_pixel_2020_config," which should be the Pixel 5 and Pixel 5 XL.

As reported by XDA in January, the Pixel 5 and 5 XL don't actually use Qualcomm's flagship Snapdragon 865. In the Android code base, both are running the Snapdragon 765G, a chip that's one step down from the 865 in Qualcomm's lineup. There isn't actually a Snapdragon 865 Google phone in the Android repository.