Thank you for listening to this week’s radio shows, the first of which is with Chris Smith on TNTRadio.live, then on ABC Radio Hobart on Friday, and on Saturday 30 September, on Radio 2CC in Canberra. Here we go!

  1. The latest macOS 14 Sonoma has launched today at long last, you can learn about some of the top features here. This page at Apple has all of the major features, and this PDF from Apple lists them all!
  2. Apple isn’t having all the fun with new operating systems today, Microsoft is here to spoil the party with its new AI-enhanced Windows 11 update, a free upgrade for Windows 11 users that features the new Copilot front and centre.
  3. It’s AI, AI and more AI today as ChatGPT announces it can now speak, see and hear, with the feature rolling out in two weeks to paid ChatGPT Plus users, and coming to the free version in the future, too.  
  4. Australian Consumer Advocate Organisation “Choice” releases research revealing 2 out of 3 people agree digital platforms aren’t doing enough to protect people from scams, with its investigation finding Google, Facebook and Instagram are failing to prevent scammers from posting fake retailer ads.
  5. Google’s Pixel 8, 8 Pro and Pixel Watch 2 are due to launch in the US on October 4, which is October 5 for Australians, and there have been some interesting leaks – 7 years of updates and feature drops for Google’s own Pixel phones, a free Pixel Watch 2 with Google Pixel 8 Pro pre-orders, the ability to take a series of photos and replace the face of people with better versions of them from previous photos, and potential price hikes. 
  6. Samsung is looking to spoil Google’s party with the announcement it will also be launching its more affordable” FE or fan edition devices, which includes the Galaxy S23 FE, Buds FE (wireless earbuds) and Tab S9 FE. 
  7. A nasty virus is stalking Android users at the moment, and is targeting people with US bank accounts and crypto currency wallets – what do people have to look out for to avoid getting infected? 
  8. Spotify is going to clone the voices of its podcasts hosts using ChatGPT’s capabilities,: they are going to clone your voice and have ChatGPT automatically translate your podcast into different languages, but the spoken version in another language will still sound like you through realistic voice synthesis 
  9. Microsoft is smarter than Australia’s Federal Energy Minister, Chris Bowen – it is looking for a nuclear expert to help it with SMR nuclear reactors to power its data centres. 
  10. Amazon is investing US $4 billion in Anthropic, a company that is challenging ChatGPT and others for the AI crown, with Amazon set to take a 10% stake in the company, with Anthropic also making the Claude 2 ChatGPT clone.  

Anthropic CEO and co-founder Dario Amodei said at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference earlier this week:“The last 10 years, there’s been this remarkable increase in the scale that we’ve used to train neural nets and we keep scaling them up, and they keep working better and better,” he said. “That’s the basis of my feeling that what we’re going to see in the next 2, 3, 4 years… what we see today is going to pale in comparison to that.”