Artificial Intelligence has been with us for a long time, but up until recently it was mostly operating behind the scenes, making everything from our spell-checkers to smartphone battery management better. In recent months, though, it’s moved front and center, and it’s getting smarter at an exponential pace.
Since last year, we’ve been playing with AI image-generators that have Picasso-like skills, and talking to chatbots who appear to be better writers than us. And now AI and chatbots are merging with search engines.
I’m writing this Week in Review from the air (thank you, 21st century inflight Wi-Fi), on my way back to New York from Microsoft’s surprising and exclusive ChatGPT-infused Bing update event at its campus in Redmond, Washington. I know what you’re going to say: you don’t use Bing; nobody uses Bing – but it may be hard to ignore Microsoft’s 14-year-old search engine after this. This seamless integration of one of the most remarkable AI developments in years is quite something.
So Microsoft threw down the gauntlet to reigning search king Google, and Google responded.
Strike that. Google held what seemed like a thrown-together Paris event that mostly rehashed Google/O 2022 announcements and offered very little news. It was weird because the company had announced the super-limited release of its own Chatbot, Bard (with promised search engine integration to come) a week earlier, but it didn’t use this moment to trump Microsoft and tell us that, “Surprise, Bard is live for all now!”
That’s what I was hoping for, but the event felt lackluster and disjointed. At one point a presenter lost her phone and couldn’t show us one of Google’s cool new things. There were some highlights, though, including a new way for Android users to use Google Assistant to perform a search on anything they see in an image.
AI may have dominated the week, but there were plenty of other cool developments across some of our favorite categories and technologies, so let’s dive in while I fly by at 580mph – and if you’d like to email me with your thoughts on the AI revolution of anything else, please do so (just put 'NEWSLETTER' in the subject line).
The OnePlus 11 is affordable, but lacking in flagship features (Future)
I’ve long been a fan of OnePlus smartphones. They’re good-looking, often powerful, fun to use, and sometimes have really wild features like a pop-up camera. In recent years, the innovation has been more in the areas of software and partnerships than mechanical prowess. Still, I looked forward to this week’s big OnePlus 11 launch, which the TechRadar team covered like demons.
But as I followed the event, I was struck by the lack of pizzazz. I even asked our US Mobiles Editor Phil Berne if the new phone had any weird, head-turning features. He noted a giant vapor chamber for heat management. Uh, okay.
Then I read Phil’s review of the new phone, and my disappointment deepened. Yes, the OnePlus 11 is a big-screen Android phone that easily beats the best and brightest flagship phones on price – which isn't hard, because the best flagships are getting increasingly expensive (which, according to Apple’s Tim Cook, is our fault).
But it’s also a new flagship that lacks IP68 protection. That means it won’t survive a drop in your toilet (you know you’ve done it). Worse yet, photography, an area where OnePlus has long excelled, is now a “mixed bag.” It’s worth reading Phil’s full review, which could help you decide if the savings are worth the pitfalls. Oh – and if you thought you could just wait for the OnePlus 11 Pro to arrive, forget about it.
Axel’s three-year old pods suddenly stopped working, and just when he thought he’d have to pony up for a new pair, he found out that Apple would replace them for free. Why would Apple do this? Turns out there was a known AirPod glitch, and Apple was making up for it by simply replacing the malfunction buds for free. It’s welcome news in these cash-strapped times.
Perhaps it’s time to take another look at those dead AirPods you’ve been keeping in a drawer, and pay a visit to your local Apple Store.
Tiny11 has much lower hardware requirements than Windows 11, but there are compromises (NTDEV)
Tiny11 is an adorable name for an operating system, but is it a good idea for one? After a long gestation, this custom, stripped-down version of Windows 11 is ready for people to try. It runs on just 2GB of RAM, which sounds awesome – until you read all of Darren Allan’s very reasonable concerns.
The biggest one is that this might not be the most secure OS. My take? If you want to really save on system resources, or be able to run an OS on a much older PC, try Linux instead. Ubuntu is my personal favorite.
Elon Musk continues to innovate at Twitter, for better or worse (Rafael Henrique/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
It was another banner week for Twitter and Elon Musk – and by 'banner,' I mean 'awful'. Most people focused on the platform outage that left many unable to tweet for almost an hour. But as Josie Watson points out, the meltdown was a symptom of yet another controversial Twitter change, mostly likely ordered by Elon Musk himself.
Apparently, Twitter is limiting the number of tweets and DMs you can post in a day. The numbers are high – much higher than any normal human could generate in one day – but Josie points to the possibility of this becoming a slippery slope, and further proof the ongoing decay of our once-beloved platform.
“...if the existing tweet limit were to reduce further down the line to, say, 240 tweets a day, and unless you pay for Twitter Blue, what would that spell for the Twitter user base?” Josie asks. I think her concerns are well founded.
Movies like Glass Onion, and other content, could soon look a lot better on your browser (Netflix)
Sorry, but I’m not done talking about AI, because it’s also behind a Google Chrome update that could upscale the resolution of in-browser video to make it look much, much better.
According to this story, the update is using Nvidia’s RTX Video Super Resolution to upscale 1080p video to 4K. That’s a big quality leap, and if the AI is good enough, movies and other content could look like native 4K video in a relatively small desktop browser window.
The bad news is that this technology requires one of Nvidia's newer graphic cards, and it also has to be a certain class of card. Oh, and did I mention that this is only in a beta version of Chrome? Maybe don’t get too excited just yet.
The sail deployed by a satellite during ESA's test mission (ESA)
There is a lot of junk in space. Some of it is debris, and some of it is disused hardware, like aging satellites that take years to deorbit and then either crash back to Earth or burn up in our atmosphere. Now, according to our friends at Space.com, the European Space Agency may have a new solution: sails.
A defunct satellite recently successfully deployed space sails that could help to accelerate its orbital decay, and remove it from Earth’s increasingly crowded Earth orbit in a matter of months, rather than years it would normally take. The ESA hopes to produce even larger sails for larger satellites.
It’s impressive stuff, even if the image above resembles a giant sheet of kitchen foil more than something from Star Wars, and it has me wondering if the ESA might be able to help me declutter my backyard…
The Sign-off
That's all for this Week in Review. I was tempted to ask Bing and its new AI to help me draft this conclusion, but then I wondered why I hadn't just got it to write the entire thing. Maybe because… bing!... that's a terrible idea. I'm sure Bing would get a lot of the detail right, but would the writing have my winning personality? On second thought, don't answer that.
Have a great weekend, and if you have any comments or questions, drop me a line.
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