Want to hear the tech radio segment that I do each week with Chris Smith, on “The Chris Smith Show” on TNTRadio?
It’s easy – the link to the 2nd hour of the Wednesday 31 May 2023 Podbean podcast is here, (and embedded immediately below) and I’m on at the 31 minute and 10 second mark, so please fast forward to that if you want to hear the tech segment, but the entire Chris Smith Show is definitely worth listening to.
1. We started on the topic of robots. Rise of the robots: lifelike humanoid robots are now here, with an article from the Daily Mail showing Ameca wowing everyone with ChatGPT-4 level conversations, from Engineered Arts in the UK. Ameca has the most lifelike facial expressions yet – which are either incredible or incredibly creepy – but what about the US startup that just raised $70 million to create a competitor?
Here’s a video of Ameca in action:
There’s also Elon Musk’s robot demo’d at the Tesla Day in October last year, with the video below from the 2023 Tesla Day, while scientists have also demo’d a new centipede-like robot that could be used for search and rescue missions.
2. We then moved onto Apple and Microsoft news. Next week, starting June 5 at 10am PT in the US, is Apple’s big worldwide developer conference, and we’ll discuss it all next week with Alex to learn about the expected new VR headset, new Macs, new operating systems, news about Apple’s AI and more, and we might even talk on Tuesday afternoon rather than Wednesday as the news will be fresh – we’ll see what Chris says about that, Wednesday is fine too because the news will be MASSIVE and by Wednesday we’ll know even more!
But last week, Microsoft had its own developer conference where they showcased the new Windows Copilot, for Windows 11.
This is AI system that arrives in to beta test in June, and which should success where Cortana failed, and make all of Clippy’s dreams from the 1996 version of Office XP come true – how is this expected to revolutionise the way we use Windows?
You can see the Windows Copilot YouTube video above, read more in my article about it here, and hear more in the Chris Smith TNTRadio show podcast embedded above, too.
3. Elon Musk has been adding new features to Twitter – you can now adjust the video playback speed of videos on Twitter, and you can now watch videos in PIP or Picture in Picture mode, so you can watch something while checking out other tweets, but Alex says the PIP is still in WIP, a “work in progress”, so what’s still to be done with this mode? Hear more in my conversation with Chris above.
4, Retro revolution! Last week we had a retro revolution with Pentax bringing back 35mm cameras, and now HMD Global, the company behind the revival of Nokia’s phones, is riding high on the retro wave of flip phones with two new colours for its Nokia 2660 flip phone model, with a doubling of sales, the claim of battery for weeks, with “screenagers”, Gen Z and Millennials clamouring to #bringbackflipphones. Here’s Nokia’s product page for the 2660 Flip! Nokia has also published this fascinating research on why flip phones are coming back into popularity again, which Chris and I spoke about on the show today.
5. Editing WhatsApp messages is coming very soon! Have you ever sent a message on Whatsapp, and noticed a typo or something else you wanted to change after sending it? Apple brought the ability to edit its own iMessages last year, and now Whatsapp is rolling out the same feature, letting you edit messages up to 15 minutes after they’ve been sent, so when will all Whatsapp users see it? Details are all here.
6. Top AI Scientists Warn: Risk of Extinction from AI on Scale with Nuclear War: Distinguished AI scientists, including Turing Award winners Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, and leaders of the major AI labs, including Sam Altman of OpenAI and Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind, have signed a single-sentence statement from the Center for AI Safety. What is their warning? What are the implications? All the details are here.
