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

Welcome to this week's Smartology Sunday Download! What we do is simple: give you a week's worth of tech news in 5 minutes or less so you can stay informed and up to date on the latest technology news and trends.

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Ok, lots of stuff to go through this week, so let's not waste any (more) time. Highlights of this week's issue include:

• GPT-4 changes the game (again)

• SVB's fall out

• TikTok's never ending dance with the US government

Total read time: 5 minutes and 12 seconds. Let's goooooo! 🚀

Unleashing GPT-4

The AI game is still in the 1st quarter, and there's already a game-changing moment with OpenAI releasing GPT-4, currently only available for ChatGPT Plus paid subscribers. It does everything GPT-3 can do, but way better. It's more creative and coherent than GPT-3 while maintaining its California charm.

GPT-4 is multimodal, which is a fancy way of saying it was trained on both images and text and can identify and describe what’s in an image using natural language.

To show off its multimodal abilities (only some of which have been released as the company evaluates them for misuse), OpenAI president Greg Brockman sketched a schematic of a website on a pad of paper during a developer demo. Next, he took a photo and asked GPT-4 to create a webpage from the image. In seconds, the algorithm generated and implemented code for a functional website. In another example, described by The New York Times, the algorithm suggested meals based on an image of food in a refrigerator.

If you want to see a great example of GPT -4's mindblowing capabilities, check out this Twitter thread headlined "I gave GPT-4 a budget of $100 and told it to make as much money as possible". 🤯

More AI...

While the GPT-4 announcement made the most noise, it was not the only AI news this week. Microsoft and Google have revealed AI upgrades to their most popular apps, setting a mandate for AI integration.

Microsoft's digital assistant, dubbed "Copilot" (think Clippy📎 on steroids), is being integrated into commonly used programs such as Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, Teams, and others. In addition, its release includes a new "Business Chat" feature that recognizes what a person has in their email, calendar, chats, and files and may encourage them to do things like write a project status report that's then shared with the team.

It even has the ability to help create customized applications through simple language cues. Here's a screenshot of what it looks like:

In other news, Microsoft-owned LinkedIn has expanded its generative AI assistant to help with recruiting advertisements and profile writing. The AI-powered writing recommendations are based on the latest GPT models.

Meanwhile, Google said that AI technologies would be added to Workspace's productivity package, including Gmail, Docs, Sheets, Meet, Slides, and Chat. First, though, it should be mentioned that Google has been a little vague about the whole vision, merely stating that it would "enable processes for getting things done," The assumption is that they're just trying to keep up with Microsoft, who is kicking their Googlyness up and down the schoolyard.

The big message being sent here is that new products or updates will have an "AI First" mentality from the two companies that control 95% of our business life.

Speaking of Google...

Google Glass, Google's misunderstood piece of augmented reality technology, is no longer available. It's so misunderstood that I've always thought it was called Google Glasses, not Google Glass🤦, but I digress...

Google stated this week that the latest iteration of Glass, Glass Enterprise Edition, will be discontinued on March 15. (but continue to support existing customers until September 15). You probably recall that Glass, which marked its tenth anniversary this month, never entirely caught on, becoming the subject of mockery and parodies even after shifting its focus from consumer to enterprise.

The discontinuation of Glass does not mean that Google has given up on augmented reality or smartglasses, though. Last summer, Google previewed a different pair of smart glasses that could translate and transcribe speech in real-time and said it would continue to test augmented reality glasses prototypes in public.

And in a move guaranteed to irritate the cord-cutting movement, YouTube (owned by Google) has announced that it’s raising the price of its YouTube TV subscription to $72.99 per month — an $8 increase from the current $64.99 monthly fee. The Google-owned company blames a rise in “content costs” for the change. (Perhaps not coincidentally, YouTube TV recently announced a streaming deal with NFL Sunday Ticket, which is reportedly worth $2 billion per season.)

TikTok is trending for all the wrong reasons

Will they ban TikTok, or won't they? This is probably what ByteDance executives are thinking about as they decide whether to spin off the U.S. operations of the TikTok app or risk having the app entirely banned in the U.S. People on both sides of the aisle in Congress are against TikTok, which is unusual at a time when they can't seem to agree on anything else. This makes the possibility of a ban look more likely. ByteDance's case isn't helped by the fact that the FBI and DOJ are looking into how ByteDance used TikTok to spy on journalists.

The U.S. and other Western markets are taking steps to lessen the threat of TikTok. This week, New Zealand banned TikTok from all government devices, just days after the UK did the same. The moves come after the app was banned by law in Canada, Belgium, and the E.U.

For now, TikTok is trying to convince lawmakers that it is safe by offering an audit by the U.S. tech company Oracle.

But a total ban might end lawmakers' immediate worries about the CCP spying on U.S. citizens or trying to influence the public with pro-China propaganda. The genuine concern is that lawmakers can't agree on rules to protect the privacy of U.S. user data for all apps, not just those from China.

The hearing with TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew in front of Congress next week should be fun excruciatingly exhausting to watch.

SVB: 🗑️🔥

SVB Financial has filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy, the next logical step, one week after trading was suspended and authorities took control of the parent company for Silicon Valley Bank and its subsidiaries. This means that SVB Financial may, and intends to, petition the courts to continue operations. At the same time, it seeks purchasers for its assets, including the sale of SVB Securities and SVB Capital.

Curious which companies are actually impacted by the dumpster fire that is SVB? Here's a list of companies that have (hopefully still have) cash at SVB:

• Roku has $487 million of it's $1.9 billion in the bank (26%)

• Roblox has $150 million of it's $3 billion in the bank (5%)

• Etsy couldn't/still can't pay some of its sellers but isn't saying how much money was in the bank

• BlockFi has $227 million (but they've recently filed for bankruptcy as well)

• Compass Coffee's entire payroll fund is tied to SVB, so they can't pay their employees

• Several others that are impacted (but with little details) are Pintrest, Vox, Camp and Rippling,

Apple news Roundup

• Apple launched a new way to shop for iPhones with help from a live specialist. The sales rep can't see you, but you can see them while asking questions about models, features, offers, trade-ins, and more.

• Apple is reportedly moving forward with its AR/VR headset this year.

• Apple rolled out its fourth developer betas for iOS 16.4, iPadOS 16.4, watchOS 9.4, and tvOS 16.4.

• There are zero meaningful AI announcements from Apple, so regardless of the rumors, the movie "Her" is not coming to real life any time soon.

Which begs the question...

Why are Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant losing the AI race? The New York Times has an idea.

Check out the article here, but the main point is that the foundational technology used for voice assistants is clunky and cannot run the type of advanced functionality we see from chatbots.

To offer a proper comparison: ChatGPT and Bard (which use generative AI and large language models) play at the Major League level. On the other hand, Siri and Alexa (voice assistant technology) are at the level of my son's Saturday morning T-ball park district program. To catch up, voice assistant technology will need to entirely rip and replace its foundational code and build something capable of keeping up.

It's getting hot in herrre 🩹

A public pool in the UK is expected to save £20,000 (about $24,000) and cut carbon emissions by 25.8 tons annually by warming their pool with waste heat from a data center from startup Deep Green whose mission is to "take the heat generated by our edge data centers and put it to good use."

The computers are submerged in mineral oil that captures the heat, which is then transferred into pool water with a heat exchanger. If required, the pool still has a gas boiler to boost the water's temperature. Deep Green claims it's transferring about 96 percent of the energy used by its computers and reducing a pool's gas heat usage by 62 percent. Deep Green is paying the Exmouth Leisure Centre for all the electricity its data center uses and any setup costs, and the Exmouth Leisure Centre gets the heat for free.

According to the report, Deep Green's data center can heat the Exmouth Leisure Centre's 25-meter pool to 86 degrees Fahrenheit 60 percent of the time.

Rapid Fire

• Bots are everywhere on social media and no one can tell the difference

• Via acquires Citymapper

• Chinese version of ChatGPT fails miserably

• Dish customers have no answers almost 2 weeks later

• Google launches open source "build your own healthcare app" platform

• New Google Pixel is released and it looks 🔥

• Snapchat adds new parental controls

• Meta cuts 10,000 jobs in it's "year of efficiency"🙄

• What to watch: The 43 best shows on Netflix

• Is Amazon making a new web browser?

• Samsung caught faking moon photos 

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