Month: April 2024

Enlarge / The 4th-gen Amazon Echo Dot smart speaker. (credit: Amazon)

Alexa hasn't worked out the way Amazon originally planned.

There was a time when it thought that Alexa would yield a robust ecosystem of apps, or Alexa Skills, that would make the voice assistant an integral part of users' lives. Amazon envisioned tens of thousands of software developers building valued abilities for Alexa that would grow the voice assistant's popularity—and help Amazon make some money.

But about seven years after launching a rewards program to encourage developers to build Skills, Alexa's most preferred abilities are the basic ones, like checking the weather. And on June 30, Amazon will stop giving out the monthly Amazon Web Services credits that have made it free for third-party developers to build and host Alexa Skills. The company also recently told devs that its Alexa Developer Rewards program was ending, virtually disincentivizing third-party devs to build for Alexa.

Enlarge / An Intel handout photo of the Gaudi 3 AI accelerator. (credit: Intel)

On Tuesday, Intel revealed a new AI accelerator chip called Gaudi 3 at its Vision 2024 event in Phoenix. With strong claimed performance while running large language models (like those that power ChatGPT), the company has positioned Gaudi 3 as an alternative to Nvidia's H100, a popular data center GPU that has been subject to shortages, though apparently that is easing somewhat.

Compared to Nvidia's H100 chip, Intel projects a 50 percent faster training time on Gaudi 3 for both OpenAI's GPT-3 175B LLM and the 7-billion parameter version of Meta's Llama 2. In terms of inference (running the trained model to get outputs), Intel claims that its new AI chip delivers 50 percent faster performance than H100 for Llama 2 and Falcon 180B, which are both relatively popular open-weights models.

Intel is targeting the H100 because of its high market share, but the chip isn't Nvidia's most powerful AI accelerator chip in the pipeline. Announcements of the H200 and the Blackwell B200 have since surpassed the H100 on paper, but neither of those chips is out yet (the H200 is expected in the second quarter of 2024—basically any day now).

Enlarge (credit: Cinefootage Visuals | iStock / Getty Images Plus)

Amid a flurry of lawsuits over AI models' training data, US Representative Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) has introduced a bill that would require AI companies to disclose exactly which copyrighted works are included in datasets training AI systems.

The Generative AI Disclosure Act "would require a notice to be submitted to the Register of Copyrights prior to the release of a new generative AI system with regard to all copyrighted works used in building or altering the training dataset for that system," Schiff said in a press release.

The bill is retroactive and would apply to all AI systems available today, as well as to all AI systems to come. It would take effect 180 days after it's enacted, requiring anyone who creates or alters a training set not only to list works referenced by the dataset, but also to provide a URL to the dataset within 30 days before the AI system is released to the public. That URL would presumably give creators a way to double-check if their materials have been used and seek any credit or compensation available before the AI tools are in use.

Enlarge / Look, a generic render that looks vaguely like every other Steam Deck clone. (credit: Playtron)

Remember when "web3 gaming" was the hot new thing in the game industry? Back in 2022, it seemed like every other game maker was flirting with "NFT integration" or "blockchain support" or some other crypto-adjacent buzzword in one form or another. Then, throughout 2023, the whole idea quickly faded away as generative AI became the latest Silicon Valley obsession.

But some are apparently not willing to give up on the crypto gaming dream. Playtron and Mysten Labs has now announced the SuiPlay0X1, a new Steam Deck-alike that is being billed as "the world's first blockchain native handheld games console."

BREAKING: announcement from onstage at #SuiBasecamp: we’re excited to share the first handheld gaming device with native Web3 capabilities – the SuiPlay0X1, powered by @PLAYTR0N! pic.twitter.com/Zubhx6gyXG

— Sui (@SuiNetwork) April 10, 2024

Currently, the device seems to exist only as a few concept renders and vague promises about finally making "web3 gaming" accessible to the ignorant masses who don't even know how much they need crypto features integrated into their gaming portable. But even if those promises all pan out (a very big if), it's hard to see any real value that the 0X1 would provide over the current slate of gaming handhelds.

Enlarge / An X sign at company headquarters in San Francisco. (credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg)

Elon Musk's clumsy brand shift from Twitter to X caused a potentially big problem this week when the social network started automatically changing "twitter.com" to "x.com" in links. The automatic text replacement reportedly applied to any URL ending in "twitter.com" even if it wasn't actually a twitter.com link.

The change apparently went live on X's app for iOS, but not on the web version. It seems to have been a problem for a day or two before the company fixed the automatic text replacement so that it wouldn't affect non-Twitter.com domains.

Security reporter Brian Krebs called the move "a gift to phishers" in an article yesterday. It was a phishing risk because scammers could register a domain name like "netflitwitter.com," which would appear as "netflix.com" in posts on X, but clicking the link would take a user to netflitwitter.com.

(credit: Getty Images)

Apple has always had a strong preference that only its own parts be used in repairs, but only if they're brand-new. Now, soon after Oregon passed a repair bill forbidding devices from rejecting parts with software locks, or "parts pairing," Apple says it will allow for used Apple parts in future iPhone repairs.

While noting that "pairing" is "critical to preserving the privacy, security, and safety of an iPhone," Apple states that it has worked for two years to allow for reusing Face ID and Touch ID sensors (i.e., biometric sensors) as well as moving part calibration from its remote repair certification tools onto the iPhone itself. As a result, "select iPhone models" this fall will allow for reusing biometric sensors and other parts, and anyone ordering parts from Apple can skip sending a device's serial number, so long as the repair doesn't involve a new main logic board.

The new policy "is designed to maintain an iPhone user's privacy, security, and safety, while offering consumers more options, increasing product longevity, and minimizing the environmental impact of a repair," according to Apple's release.

Enlarge (credit: Intel)

Hardware sold for years by the likes of Intel and Lenovo contains a remotely exploitable vulnerability that will never be fixed. The cause: a supply chain snafu involving an open source software package and hardware from multiple manufacturers that directly or indirectly incorporated it into their products.

Researchers from security firm Binarly have confirmed that the lapse has resulted in Intel, Lenovo, and Supermicro shipping server hardware that contains a vulnerability that can be exploited to reveal security-critical information. The researchers, however, went on to warn that any hardware that incorporates certain generations of baseboard management controllers made by Duluth, Georgia-based AMI or Taiwan-based AETN are also affected.

Chain of fools

BMCs are tiny computers soldered into the motherboard of servers that allow cloud centers, and sometimes their customers, to streamline the remote management of vast fleets of servers. They enable administrators to remotely reinstall OSes, install and uninstall apps, and control just about every other aspect of the system—even when it's turned off. BMCs provide what’s known in the industry as “lights-out” system management. AMI and AETN are two of several makers of BMCs.

Enlarge / Poster issued by the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advocating for measles immunizations in 1985. (credit: Getty | National Library of Medicine.)

In 2000, after a decadeslong public health battle and a Herculean vaccination program, the US won a coveted status: measles elimination. The designation means that the extremely infectious measles virus is no longer endemic in the US—defined as continuous transmission in the country over 12 or more months while in the presence of an effective disease monitoring system. The country went from having 3 to 4 million children fall ill with the severe infection each year, to tallying just dozens of mostly travel-linked cases.

But in an alarming turn, the country's elimination status is now at risk. Measles cases in the first quarter of 2024 have increased more than 17-fold over the cases seen in the first quarters of 2000 to 2023. Measles vaccination rates among kindergarteners have slipped in that time, too, with vaccination coverage in the last three consecutive years below the 95 percent target that is needed to prevent sustained transmission. Outside the US, measles cases are exploding in the wake of pandemic-related disruptions to routine childhood vaccination programs. Altogether, the conditions are prime for measles to regain its foothold in the country—and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is clearly anxious.

"The rapid increase in the number of reported measles cases during the first quarter of 2024 represents a renewed threat to elimination," CDC researchers write in a new analysis of the country's measles cases and surveillance system. The analysis was published Thursday in the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

Enlarge / Google's Magic Editor and Photo Unblur. (credit: Google)

Google Photos is opening up its premium editing tools to more users. The company says features like Magic Editor, Magic Eraser, Photo Unblur, and Portrait Light will be open to everyone, though the editor will have some usage limits for free users. Previously these were exclusive to Pixel devices or users subscribing to Google One.

All of these AI-powered photo manipulators will be hit-or-miss depending on your exact photo, but "Portrait Light" will brighten up people's faces, and "Photo unblur" claims to be able to remove blur from movement or camera shake from your photos. Magic Eraser is Google's much-touted photo feature that lets you circle an item and have some AI processing remove it, generating a new background from the existing picture. These features will now all be free to Android and iOS users.

For an even bigger extension of Magic Eraser, there's "Magic Editor" that lets you remove things and move them around. Magic Editor lets you imprecisely circle objects via your touchscreen, and it's entirely up to the AI system to both 1) correctly identify and cut out the object you very roughly circled and 2) replace the background where it used to be. It's a lot to ask of a photo editor. Moving an item won't correct its perspective, and Google's examples all do their best to stay away from that with landscape shots and moving an object only a small amount. The nicest part of the editor is that when it has to generate something, you'll get several different solutions presented in a lineup and can pick the one that looks the best.