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

Happy New Year! Smartology is BACK! It's been a long hiatus, but we're officially re-tooled, re-branded, and ready to bring you all the juicy, tasty tech news. So, keep an eye out for weekly downloads every Sunday in your inbox.

Welcome to this week's download! All the news you need to keep you relevant for the week of 1/8/2023. Highlights include:

• CES is this week. A recap of the hottest tech.

• Amazon job cuts...what else is coming?

• ChatGPT: The robots are closer to replacing us.

 Total read time: 4 minutes 27 seconds Let's gooooo!

CE-YES

CES, arguably the technology industry's biggest show, kicked off its 2023 expo this week with previews of some of this year's hottest electronics and gadgets. The list of cool toys is extensive and includes glasses-free 3D laptops from Asus, 5k TV from Samsung, a smartwatch that does everything except tell you the time, and even an eco-friendly electric speed boat. However, the absolute coolest thing to come out of this (in my humble opinion) is a real-life flying car six months after George Jetson was born. Part helicopter, part ATV, for $789,000, Aska's A5 will have you zipping around with Astro sitting shotgun.

A League of their Drone

2023 is turning out to be the year when drone deliveries finally go mainstream. Some US customers in states like Texas, North Carolina, Virginia, Ohio, and Utah are already seeing drone deliveries from Walmart, and companies like Grubhub and Doordash are aggressively seeking out deals with drone companies to bring your Starbucks latte to you in under 5 minutes. By the end of 2023, small trips to the school could be a thing of the past. The only thing really standing in the way are pesky privacy and safety regulations.

Big Tech cuts jobs

On Wednesday, Amazon announced 18,000 jobs to be cut, primarily focused on the store division (Amazon Fresh and Amazon Go). This comes on the back of Salesforce announcing 8,000 jobs being cut last week. There are mixed opinions about whether this signals a problem for Big Tech or is just a blip. Some say this is more evidence that we're entering a recession. In contrast, others view this as a market correction tied to high-interest rates affecting a company's ability to borrow money.

6G: Humans are the antennas 

While 5G is still limited in availability around the world, scientists are already beginning to develop experimental technology for 6G. One such type of technology uses VLC (Visible Light Communication), similar to how fiber optics work but wirelessly. The science (basically) goes like this: LED lights (which are everywhere) emit a type of energy waste (Side Channel RF signals) that can be harvested. Once the extra energy is harvested, it can be transmitted wirelessly (like an AM/FM radio signal only using light waves). Scientists have found that copper is the best tool to gather RF signals, which, when attached to a human being, collects ten times more energy than anything else they've tried. The current prototypes have people wearing copper bracelets to get 6G service to power wearables, smartphones, and other personal electronics. Read more about it here.

Fly Delta for free Wi-Fi

Starting 2/1, you can get free Wi-Fi on all Delta flights, courtesy of T-Mobile. The nice thing here is that you don't have to be a T-Mobile customer. You simply have to be a Delta SkyMiles member. Free Wi-Fi AND Biscoff cookies? Sounds like a win to me.

Spotlight story

ChatGPT: Amazing tool or disaster for humanity?

A little background in case you don't already know: ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI (a research non-profit founded in 2015 backed by Microsoft, Elon Musk, Sam Altman from Y-Combinator, and a few other investors), is the most disruptive AI chat tool on the market because it uses Large Language Models (LLM) to add any text to its database and learn how any language is used in conversational formats. ChatGPT was training by feeding it just about every Reddit thread while data scientists taught it how to talk like some sort of sci-fi Ms. Rachel.

Most of us are familiar with Alexa or Siri answering a question it doesn't understand with "hmm...I'm not sure". ChatGPT's conversational approach is dynamic, and it will ask the user questions to better understand what the user wants through RLHF (Reinforced Learning with Human Feedback). One of the ways people use ChatGPT is as a better search engine than Google. However, ChatGPT is not always accurate and has been shown to provide wildly incorrect answers because it's trained to give answers that feel right to humans, even if it doesn't have the correct information.

ChatGPT was in the news this week for two reasons: The first is that it's raising additional capital at a 30 billion dollar valuation which is wiiiiild considering it has zero revenue. The second reason that ChatGPT is in the news is that they've been banned from NYC public schools due to cheating and plagiarism concerns. Teachers have caught students using ChatGPT to write essays, solve mathematical equations, and other educational mischief.

Plagiarism is the least of my concerns, though. The real fear is that we're now giving robots the ability to talk and sound like us.

Rapid Fire

• FTC proposes new rule to make non-compete agreements illegal

• 2023 brings Crypto chaos

• Smart technology is the new trend for landlords

• Video: Self-driving strollers for parents on the "go"

• Samsung profits in the gutter

• Twitter hack exposed 200 million user's email addresses

• Microsoft to relaunch Bing with ChatGPT feature

• Lenovo's remarkable dual-screen laptop

• Video: Amazon/Ring's flying indoor security camera

• Facial recognition's alarming pitfalls

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