August 2023

Moemate’s AI avatar analyzes your whole screen, with spotty but intriguing results

August 17, 2023
As evidenced by the slow death of Cortana, it’s clear that the AI assistants of yesteryear aren’t meeting expectations. And so they’re being remade. Amazon is building a new large language model akin to OpenAI’s GPT-4 to power its Alexa voice assistant. Meanwhile, Google is reportedly planning to “supercharge” Google Assistant with AI that’s more […]

Back to school: Our favorite student apps

August 17, 2023
Summer is coming to an end, which means students will (hopefully) be in air-conditioned classrooms and away from this unrelenting heat wave. It also means that they’re probably on the hunt for mobile apps that can help prepare them for the long school year. From math problem solvers and note-taking tools to book trackers and […]

Ford aims to secure battery material supply with new Canada facility

August 17, 2023
Ford is partnering with South Korean battery manufacturers SK On and EcoPro BM to build a cathode manufacturing facility in Quebec, Canada. The CAD $1.2 billion (USD $890 million) joint investment will provide battery materials to supply future Ford electric vehicles. The onshoring of battery factories in the U.S. has boomed since the passage of […]

San Francisco presses CPUC to halt Waymo, Cruise robotaxi expansions

August 17, 2023
California regulators gave Waymo and Cruise the OK last week to scale up their robotaxi services in San Francisco, but now it seems the city itself won’t have it. On Wednesday, San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu filed motions with the California Public Utilities Commission to pause the firms’ plans to offer and charge for […]

What is a liquid neural network, really?

August 17, 2023
The initial research papers date back to 2018, but for most, the notion of liquid networks (or liquid neural networks) is a new one. It was “Liquid Time-constant Networks,” published at the tail end of 2020, that put the work on other researchers’ radar. In the intervening time, the paper’s authors have presented the work […]

Intel’s modernization strategy could face setback with end of $5.4B Tower deal

August 17, 2023
In 2021, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger announced a comprehensive modernization strategy he dubbed IDM (integrated device manufacturing) 2.0. As part of that vision, the company announced a $20 billion investment to build two new Fabs (chip manufacturing facilities) in Arizona along with plans to increase capacity in other parts of the U.S. and Europe. In […]