Month: July 2023

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

It has been a tough year for PC companies and companies that make PC components. Companies like Intel, AMD, and Nvidia have all reported big drops in revenue from the hardware that they sell to consumers (though the hardware they sell to other businesses is often doing better).

Microsoft contributed another data point to that trend today, with fourth-quarter 2023 financial results that showed modest growth (revenue up 8 percent year over year, from $51.9 billion to $56.2 billion), but no thanks to its consumer software and hardware businesses.

Revenue from the company's More Personal Computing division, which encompasses Windows licenses, Surface PCs and other accessories, Xbox hardware and software and services, and ad revenue, was down 4 percent year over year. This decrease was driven mostly by a drop in sales of Windows licenses to PC makers (down 12 percent because of "PC market weakness") and by reduced hardware sales (down 20 percent, though the company didn't say how much of this drop came from its accessory business and how much came from Surface PCs). Microsoft makes its own PCs and PC accessories and sells the software that most other PC makers use on their hardware, so when the entire PC ecosystem is doing poorly, Microsoft gets hit twice.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Chris Delmas)

Elon Musk's decision to rebrand Twitter as "X" wouldn't be complete without a change to the company's official Twitter account. The @X handle was already taken by a user who registered it over 16 years ago, but that wasn't much of an obstacle—Twitter simply took over the username and offered its longtime owner some merchandise but no monetary compensation.

San Francisco-based photographer Gene X Hwang was @X on Twitter from March 2007 until yesterday. "They just took it essentially—kinda what I thought might happen," Hwang told The Telegraph. "They did send an email saying it is the property of 'x' essentially."

Hwang confirmed to Ars today that "there was no financial compensation" offered to him. The company offered "to switch the @x account and its history/followers etc to a new handle once I select one that is available," Hwang told us. "They also offered some merch and to meet with the management team as well."

Enlarge / Boeing's Starliner is seen atop an Atlas V rocket at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. (credit: Trevor Mahlmann)

A difficult summer for the Starliner program continued this week, with Boeing reporting additional losses on the vehicle's development and NASA saying it's too early to discuss potential launch dates for the crewed spacecraft.

Throughout this spring, NASA and Boeing had been working toward a July launch date of the spacecraft, which will carry two astronauts for the first time. However, just weeks before this launch was due to occur, Boeing announced on June 1 that there were two serious issues with Starliner. One of these involved the "soft links" in the lines that connect the Starliner capsule to its parachutes, and the second problem came with hundreds of feet of P-213 glass cloth tape inside the spacecraft found to be flammable.

On Wednesday, as a part of its quarterly earnings update, Boeing announced that the Starliner program had taken a loss of $257 million "primarily due to the impacts of the previously announced launch delay." This brings the company's total write-down of losses on the Starliner program to more than $1.1 billion. Partly because of this, Boeing's Defense, Space, & Security division reported a loss of $527 million during the second quarter of this year.

Enlarge / The Renault Zoe (left) and Nissan Leaf (right) were two early mass-market EVs. (credit: Nissan)

Nissan has agreed to invest $663 million (600 million euros) in Ampere, Renault's electric vehicle operation, the two companies announced today. It's a sign of a renewed alliance between the two automakers that have been in a partnership since 1999, but relations have strained following the 2019 arrest of Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn.

"With the finalization of the definitive agreements, we have entered the next phase of collaboration with Renault and Mitsubishi Motors in mutually beneficial areas of innovations," said Nissan CEO Makoto Uchida. "This will create additional value through initiatives aligned to Nissan's Ambition 2030 and electrification strategy. The investment opportunity in Ampere complements and strengthens Nissan’s ongoing electric push in Europe and will deliver numerous synergies, including cost efficiencies, regulatory compliance, and a broader range of EV products and powertrains."

Both Nissan and Renault have been early entrants into the EV market, with more than a million Nissan EVs sold since 2010 and about 300,000 Renault Zoes delivered since that car went on sale in 2012.

Enlarge (credit: OpenAI)

On Tuesday, OpenAI released an official ChatGPT app for Android, now available in the Google Play Store in four countries: the US, India, Bangladesh, and Brazil, with more coming soon. As a client for OpenAI's language model family, the GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 models run on the cloud and provide results to your Android device. It also integrates OpenAI's Whisper model for speech recognition.

ChatGPT, launched in November, is a conversational AI language model interface. As an AI assistant, it can help with summarization, text composition, and analysis. OpenAI bills its use cases as a way to seek "instant answers," "tailored advice," "creative inspiration," "professional input," and "learning opportunities."

A series of images showing OpenAI's proposed uses of the ChatGPT Android app, taken from the Google Play Store. (credit: OpenAI)

However, as we've noted in the past, ChatGPT is occasionally prone to confabulation (that is, making things up)—especially the GPT-3.5 model—so it's not entirely trustworthy as a factual reference. It can come in handy as a way to analyze data you provide yourself, though, so long as you're familiar with the subject matter and can validate the results.

Enlarge / Neither of these test BMWs has a human in the driver's seat. (credit: BMW)

On a large empty slab of asphalt, two BMWs take off. They drive in figure eights and along an oval path separate from each other but nearly in tandem, like two ice skaters practicing the same routine on a piece of black ice before coming to a stop.

Neither of the cars has a driver. That's not that impressive; self-driving cars in testing environments shouldn't impress anyone at this point. Essentially the automaker tells the car to drive a route, and it does it. The important thing here is why these cars, outfitted with additional sensors, are driving along the same route again and again, each time depressing the accelerator the same amount and applying the exact amount of pressure on the brakes: They're testing hardware with the least amount of variables you can encounter outside of a lab.

A closer look at one of the instrumented BMWs. (credit: BMW)

"It's boring for human drivers," says BMW's project lead for driverless development, Philipp Ludwig. When a human is asked to perform the exact same task repeatedly, the quality of the work diminishes as they lose interest or become fatigued. For a computer-controlled car, it can do this all day. And it has done exactly that.