Welcome to the TechMemeRideHome for Thursday, September 28th, 2023. I'm Brian McCulloch today. The MedicConnect keynote was yesterday and announced a whole bunch of stuff including AI chatbots, a new Quest III and the continuation of those Rayband smart glasses that are actually getting kind of interesting. Looks like OpenAI is serious about working with Johnny Ive, a big new open source LLM is available to download now, and the new Raspberry Pi 5.
Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Meta held their Connect event yesterday, announcing a whole bunch of things. So much in fact, I'm going to break it up a bit. They announced AI-generated chat stickers for Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger, and unveiled new AI-powered image editing tools for Instagram. So again, this is what I was talking about recently when we were talking about AI coming to social. Goatting the Verge.
AI-powered photo editing on Instagram includes two new features, RESTYLE and Backdrop. With RESTYLE users input a text prompt, Meta's examples include watercolor or magazine collage, and the tool updates the existing image based on those directions. The Backdrop feature also utilizes a text prompt by the user to add new AI-generated backgrounds to images, surround me with puppies, for example.
For both editing features, Meta says it will identify when images are created using AI tools so audiences can discern whether what they're seeing is synthetic or human generated. The company says it's experimenting with other labeling features including visible and invisible markers. They also showed off AI assistance for WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram, which feature 28 AI characters based on celebrities like Mr. Beast, Charlie Demelio, and Snoop Dogg. Goatting the Verge.
For anyone who has used OpenAI's chat GPT or other chatbots like Anthropics Claude, Meta's AI will immediately feel familiar, Meta sees it as a general purpose assistant for everything from planning a trip with friends and a group chat to answering questions you'd normally ask a search engine.
On that latter piece, Meta is announcing a partnership with Microsoft's Bing to provide real-time web results, which sets Meta AI apart from a lot of the other free AI's out there that don't have super recent information. Another big aspect of the Meta AI is its ability to generate images like mid-journey or Open AI's dolly via the prompt slash Imagine. In my brief demo, it produced compelling high-res photos in a few seconds.
Like all of Meta AI's features being announced this week, this image generation tool is totally free to use. Alongside Meta's assistant, the company is beginning to roll out an initial roster of 28 AI characters across its messaging apps. Many of them are based on celebrities like Charlie Demelio, Duane Wade, Kendall Jenner, Mr. Beast, Snoop Dogg, and Paris Hilton. Users are a theme to specific use cases like a travel agent.
An interesting twist is an aspect of these characters that all dolly calls embodiments. As you chat with one of them, their profile image subtly animates based on the conversation. The effect is more immersive than the 2D chatbots I've interacted with to date. For now, Meta AI isn't trained on public-user data across Instagram and Facebook, though it sounds like that is coming.
It's easy to imagine asking it to show me reels from the south of Italy and that being a compelling use case that other chatbots can't replicate, we see a long roadmap for us to tie in some of our own social integrations as part of the assistant to make it even more useful. Says Aldali, Meta's spokesperson end quote. Meta also debuted the $500 Quest III, thereby upping the price for their run of the mill VR headset a whopping $200.
It does feature a 30% higher resolution than the Quest II, double the processing power, new lenses, a thinner design, and new controllers, however. Quoting Bloomberg. The device looks similar to the previous version but has three sensors on the front. The left and right modules are cameras while the center sensor is a new component for determining where objects and walls are located within a user's room.
This allows the device to automatically place virtual guardrails so a user doesn't say walk into a table. You can also be used for gaming such as one title that allows players to shoot items on a wall. After struggling to make money in VR headsets, Meta is seeking to generate a profit from the Quest III. It's raising the price of the device by 67% for a model with 128GB of storage. The Menlo Park California based company is also offering a $650 version with 512GB of space.
The Quest III goes on sale October 10. Boosting prices in the face of sluggish sales is a gamble for Meta. This failed to attract consumers to its upscale model, the Quest Pro, which costs $1,000. But all the products in its lineup will cost a fraction of Apple's new Vision Pro, which is due in early 2024. Addy Robertson at the verge got a hands-on with the Quest III and says it's an iterative update.
But its mixed reality, pass-through video is less grainy than the Quest Pro and it offers color unlike the Quest II. Now and I can't believe I'm going to say this, but maybe the most interesting thing they announced yesterday was the $299 plus Ray Ban Meta Smart Glasses featuring a 12 megapixel camera, speakers, 5 mics, a Snapdragon AR1 Gen1 chip, and more, shipping October 17, coating the verge. These glasses have two primary purposes. The first is to replace your headphones.
The Smart Glasses have a similar personal audio system like Amazon's Echo Frames and the Bose Tempo series, all of which play music but endeavor to make sure only you can hear it. With the new generation of glasses, Meta also upgraded the microphone system in a big way. The specs have 5 mics, including one in the nose bridge, which should make both your calls and voice commands much clearer. The story's only had one mic and it kind of fell apart in louder windy conditions.
The other job of the glasses is as a camera. The Smart Glasses have small camera lenses on each right temple, just like the stories, but these cameras take 12 megapixel photos and 1080p videos, both big upgrades from the previous generation. You can store roughly 500 photos and 130 second videos, that's the maximum length the glasses allow. Before you fill up the 32GB of internal storage and everything sinks through the Meta view app.
It also lets you quickly share anything you capture to Meta's many, many sharing platforms. In addition to taking photos and videos on the camera, you can also now start a live stream to Facebook or Instagram with just a couple of taps on the stem of the glasses. When you're recording a white light around the lens, pulses to indicate you are recording. Adding live streaming exacerbates a lot of the products already serious privacy questions.
It's also one of Meta's attempts to answer the big questions surrounding all Smart Glasses. What are you supposed to do with them? Meta reportedly struggled to keep users interested in wearing its stories, with more than 90% of buyers eventually giving up on their devices. Last time Meta's big pitch was messaging. This time, it's pitching the Smart Glasses as more of a creator tool, so you can cook or play drums or do any number of two handed activities while still recording.
One report earlier this year said that the glasses would even let viewers talk back to you, but Meta didn't mention that capability. More confirmation of this rumor, sources have told the financial times that OpenAI and Johnny Ives love from are indeed in advance talks with Masayoshi Sahn to raise more than a billion dollars from Softbank in order to build what is being called the iPhone of artificial intelligence.
Quote, Altman and Ive have held brainstorming sessions at the designer San Francisco Studio about what a new consumer product centered on OpenAI's technology would look like the people said. They hoped to create a more natural and intuitive user experience for interacting with AI in the way that the iPhones, innovations in touchscreen computing unleashed the mass market potential of the mobile internet.
The process of identifying a design or device remains at an early stage with many different ideas on the table they said. Sahn, Softbank's founder and chief executive has also been involved in some of the discussions, pitching a central role for ARM, the chip designer in which the Japanese conglomerate holds a 90% stake, as well as offering financial backing.
Sahn, Altman and Ive have discussed creating a company that would draw on talent and technology from their three groups, the people said, with Softbank investing more than a billion dollars in the venture. Discussions are said to be, quote, serious, but no deal has been agreed, they cautioned, and it could be several months before a venture is formally announced. Any resulting hardware product is likely to take years to bring to market, end quote.
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Quoting tech crunch. The most popular language models out there may be accessed via API, but open models as far as that term can be taken seriously, are gaining ground. Mistral AI French AI startup that raised a huge seed round in June has just taken the Raps Office first model, which it claims outperforms others of its size and it's totally free to use without restrictions.
The Mistral 7B model is available today for download by various means, including a 13.4GB Torrent, with a few hundred cedars already. The company has also started a GitHub repository and Discord channel for collaboration and troubleshooting. Most importantly, the model was released under the Apache 2.0 license, a highly permissive scheme that has no restrictions on use or reproduction beyond attribution.
That means the model could be used by a hobbyist, a multi-billion dollar corporation, or the Pentagon alike, as long as they have a system capable of running it locally or are willing to pay for the requisite cloud resources. Mistral 7B is a further refinement of other small, large language models like LLM2, offering similar capabilities according to some standard benchmarks at a considerably smaller compute cost.
Foundation models like GPT-4 can do much more, but are far more expensive and difficult to run, leading them to be made available solely through APIs or remote access. Our ambition is to become the leading supporter of the open, generative AI community and bring open models to state-of-the-art performance, wrote Mistral's team in a blog post accompanying the model's release. Mistral 7B's performance demonstrates what small models can do with enough conviction.
This is the result of three months of intense work in which we assembled the Mistral AI team, rebuilt a top performance M-LOPs stack and designed a most sophisticated data processing pipeline from scratch. SpaceX has landed its first US Space Force contract, valued at up to $70 million, offering the military custom satellite communications via the company's Star Shield service, quoting Bloomberg. The previously undisclosed task order adds to SpaceX's growing portfolio of Pentagon business.
That includes its competition against United Launch Alliance, a joint venture of Lockheed Martin and Boeing, to send up national security payloads, as well as a June Pentagon contract of undisclosed value to provide Starlink satellite communications to the Ukraine military and a Falcon 9 launch of 13 satellites this month for the Pentagon's Space Development Agency. SpaceX's one-year contract for Star Shield was awarded September 1, according to Air Force spokeswoman Anne Stefannock.
The contract, with a $70 million ceiling quote, provides for Star Shield end-to-end service via the Starlink Constellation, User Terminals, Ancillary Equipment, Network Management, and other related services, she said. By September 30, about $15 million will be obligated to SpaceX with funding that supports 54 mission partners across the Army Navy Air Force and Coast Guard, she said.
The Star Shield contract quote is for a service, but how SpaceX or any other company provides that service is up to them. Lieutenant Colonel Omar Villareal, a Space Force spokesman, said in an email, I am unable to get into specifics, but requirements were received from the Army Navy Air Force, finally today the Raspberry Pi 5 has launched with a 64-bit quad-core ARM Cortex A7-6 processor up to 8GB of RAM, 2.4K HDMI ports with HDR.
It's available in October, starting at $60 for the 4GB model, quoting the verge. Powering the brain of the Raspberry Pi 5 is a 64-bit quad-core ARM Cortex A7-6 processor that runs at 2.4GHz, allowing for 2-3 times the performance boost when compared to the 4-year-old Raspberry Pi 4. The device also comes with an 800MHz video course 7 graphics chip that the Raspberry Pi Foundation says offers a substantial uplift in graphics performance.
I got to try out the device for myself, and while I didn't have time to do much tinkering with it, I found that it boots up pretty quickly, while also loading webpages fast when compared to my older Raspberry Pi 3 model B+. It does get pretty hot, but luckily Raspberry Pi sent over an active cooling component that I could mount directly on the board.
Additionally, the Raspberry Pi 5 features a component made by the Raspberry Pi Foundation for the first time, the Southbridge, also known as a part of the motherboard that helps it communicate with peripherals. With the RP1 Southbridge, the Raspberry Pi Foundation says the Microcomputer, quote, delivers a step change in peripheral performance and functionality, enabling faster transfer speeds to external UAS drivers and other peripherals.
It also opens up two four-lane 1.5 GBPS MIPI transceivers that let you connect up to two cameras or displays. There's also a new single-lane PCI Express 2.0 interface for the first time, offering support for, quote, high bandwidth peripherals. However, the Raspberry Pi Foundation notes that you'll still need a separate adapter such as an M2 hat or hardware attached on top for you to take advantage of it.
In terms of ports, you can expect dual 4K P60 HDMI display outputs with support for HDR, a microSD slot, 2 USB 3.0 ports, 2 USB 2.0 ports, gigabit Ethernet, and a 5-volt DC power connection via USB-C. Some other nice-to-haves include support for Bluetooth 5.0 and Bluetooth low-energy, and peak SD card performance that's doubled with the SDR 104 high-speed mode.
Together, all these upgrades make the Raspberry Pi 5 even more versatile, whether you're using it as an ultra-budget desktop PC, a media server, or even a DIY security system. The Raspberry Pi 5 will come with a couple of different RAM options at launch, costing $60 for the 4GB version and $80 for 8GB. That makes it slightly more expensive than the Raspberry Pi 4, which is priced at $55 for 4GB of RAM and $75 for 8GB. The Raspberry Pi 5 will be available to purchase before the end of October.
Nothing for you today, talk to you tomorrow.