A week's worth of tech news that takes you 5 minutes to read

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Welcome to this week's edition, Super Bowl style! We cover all the technology news and trends each week so you can stay informed and show off in your Monday morning staff meetings.

Speaking of the Super Bowl, did you know...

1. 94 cameras are being used in today's game, with an additional team of drones capturing footage inside and outside the stadium

2. Super Bowl LVII is the first Super Bowl able to be aired in 4K

3. Attendees of this year's Super Bowl can navigate Phoenix autonomously through Robotaxi's

4. State Farm Stadium overhauled its network and added 800 new access points to boost capacity by 60%

5. On Super Bowl Sunday, Americans will spend $1.3 billion, on beer. I chipped in about $20 of that.

Ok, let's get on with the good stuff. Highlights of this week's issue include:

• Tech takes center stage during Super Bowl commercials

• The AI wars heat up

• The Death of Big Data?

Total read time: 4 minutes and 35 seconds. Let's Goooooo! 🏈

The AI Wars Heat Up🔥

This week, Google and Microsoft took turns portraying themselves as AI leaders in an ongoing struggle between two corporations whose technology affects 90% of daily life. In each case, the adjustments were made possible by new AI technology, which enables more conversational and complicated responses.

On Tuesday, Microsoft announced the long-awaited redesign of the Bing search engine, which would use the capabilities of ChatGPT, the viral AI tool developed by OpenAI, a firm in which Microsoft just invested billions of dollars.

Bing will not only display search results, but it will also answer questions, converse with users, and develop content in response to user inquiries. There are even reports that Microsoft may have another event next month to show off the improvements in its Office products, including Word, PowerPoint, and Outlook.

Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, has developed an experimental conversational AI tool called Bard. The ChatGPT competitor may respond to user questions and participate in chats. It's currently available to a restricted group of reliable testers and will be made more broadly available in the coming weeks. Bard will use information acquired from the internet to provide high-quality responses.

Pivchai also distributed an internal "all hands on deck" memo to staff last week, asking them to help develop Bard and test the API interface that would allow others to utilize the same technology. This is in reaction to investor and staff demand to compete with Observe.AI and ChatGPT.

However, Google and Microsoft are not alone in this race. This week, Chinese IT titans Alibaba and Baidu announced the launch of their own ChatGPT-style platforms.

It's Gotta Be The Shoes

Shift Robotics, based in Pittsburgh, invented "shoes" that allow you to walk 250% quicker without wasting more energy. "Moonwalkers," a hybrid of shoes and powered roller skates, can increase a wearer's walking speed by 250%.

How they work: Moonwalkers are designed to be worn on the bottom of your existing shoes. According to the manufacturer, the shoes can even manage difficult urban terrain, such as highly fractured pavements. Shift is currently selling Moonwalkers for $1,399 to clients in the United States, with deliveries set to begin in the summer of 2023.

Check out the video.

Scanify?

Daniel Ek, co-founder of Spotify, has taken to the healthcare industry. In a LinkedIn article, Ek is identified as the co-founder of Neko Health, an AI-driven body scanning firm he helped develop. The Swedish firm has developed a non-invasive full-body scanner that can detect and track the development of moles, scars, and other skin disfigurements.

According to Neko, the company's 360-degree body scanner is equipped with more than 70 sensors that can collect more than 50 million data points on skin, heart, vasculature, breathing, microcirculation, and more. The self-learning AI-powered system interprets this data and presents the findings to doctors and patients.

Tech-mo Bowl

Tech companies are stepping up their Super Bowl commercial presence this year in an attempt to take on beer and soda companies for capitalistic dominance. The cost of a 30 second Super Bowl ad? Somewhere between $6 and $7 million. Among the heavy spenders includes:

• T-Mobile (John Travolta uses "Summer Nights" to sing about home internet)

• Dexcom (Nick Jonas fights diabetes)

• Square Space (Creepy Adam Driver)

• Rakuten (Reviving Alicia Silverstone's career)

• WorkDay (Please, corporate America, stop calling yourselves "rock stars")

• Alaska Airlines (ChatGPT wrote this)

• Google (The Pixel helps us erase people from our memories...or something like that)

• Dialpad (What can AI do for you?)

• Interestingly absent from the lineup: Crypto

Fight night: The Dawn Project used about half a million dollars to attack Tesla with an ad showing the dangers of their self-driving technology. It only aired in 5 cities, so you can see it here.

To Infinity...

On Twitter, Elon Musk has announced that, barring any unforeseen problems, a Starship launch will be attempted next month. SpaceX has recently completed a thorough wet dress rehearsal of its Starship rocket, and in the following days, it will conduct a 33-engine static fire test on Booster 7. In an effort to surpass NASA's Space Launch System, which is now the most powerful operational rocket in the world, Starship has been developed. The spacecraft will be the first of its kind to be capable of repeated uses and transporting humans.

The Skyscraper that was built Upsidedown

The Exchange tower in Detroit is almost done. It is a 207-foot-tall proof-of-concept for a new way of building with modules. Each floor was built on the ground first, then lifted up on central spines and put in place from the top down. Liftbuild's building method is a hyper-modular version of a technique called "lift slab," which dates back to the 1950s. Once each 500-ton floor is ready, it is lifted to the top of the spines by eight strong strand jacks. It takes about 10 hours to lift the top floors.

Liftbuild says it can be 10–20% cheaper and up to 50% faster than traditional building, with a lot fewer workers needed. But as its methods get better, it will have to prove these claims in future builds, and its building partners and contractors will find the best way to use the system.

As of the end of January, all of the floors that could be lifted and set in place had been done. Only the two bottom floors, which will be built the old way, remained.

Is Big Data Dead?

For 10 years, sales reps and engineers across the country have made a fortune selling hardware to store data, floor space at data centers to store it, and software to analyze it (not to mention tools to keep the data secure). Is all that still necessary? Jordan Tigani (former leader at Google on product and engineering for BigQuery) doesn't think so.

You can read the article yourself (which includes handy charts and graphs) but the gist of it is this: data files are smaller which means companies are using less data than they think they are.

Rapid Fire

• How Google fell behind in the AI race

• Sports-tec: Predicta-ball technology on the PGA tour

• Tech ties with China: What to avoid

• Twitter goes to 4,000 characters 

• Someone tested the new ChatGPT Bing. Spoiler alert: It's awesome.

• The Four Horsemen of the Tech recession

• China clones cows that make 50% more milk

• Electric truck maker Rivian is making electric bikes

• All the rockets launching into space

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