The future is here, whether some like it or not, and artificial intelligence is already impacting the film industry. But just how far can, and should, it go?
Last year, Rachel Antell, an archival producer for documentary films, started noticing AI-generated images mixed in with authentic photos. There are always holes or limitations in an archive; in one case, film-makers got around a shortage of images for a barely photographed 19th-century woman by using AI to generate what looked like old photos. Which brought up the question: should they? And if they did, what sort of transparency is required? The capability and availability of generative AI – the type that can produce text, images and video – have changed so rapidly, and the conversations around it have been so fraught, that film-makers’ ability to use it far outpaces any consensus on how.
“We realized it was kind of the wild west, and film-makers without any mal-intent were getting themselves into situations where they could be misleading to an audience,” said Antell. “And we thought, what’s needed here is some real guidance.”
Company after company is swallowing the hype, only to be forced into embarrassing walkbacks by anti-AI backlash
Earlier this month, a popular lifestyle magazine introduced a new “fashion and lifestyle editor” to its huge social media following. “Reem”, who on first glance looked like a twentysomething woman who understood both fashion and lifestyle, was proudly announced as an “AI enhanced team member”. That is, a fake person, generated by artificial intelligence. Reem would be making product recommendations to SheerLuxe’s followers – or, to put it another way, doing what SheerLuxe would otherwise pay a person to do. The reaction was entirely predictable: outrage, followed by a hastily issued apology. One suspects Reem may not become a staple of its editorial team.
This is just the latest in a long line of walkbacks of “exciting AI projects” that have been met with fury by the people they’re meant to excite. The Prince Charles Cinema in Soho, London, cancelled a screening of an AI-written film in June, because its regulars vehemently objected. Lego was pressured to take down a series of AI-generated images it published on its website. Doctor Who started experimenting with generative AI, but quickly stopped after a wave of complaints. A company swallows the AI hype, thinks jumping on board will paint it as innovative, and entirely fails to understand the growing anti-AI sentiment taking hold among many of its customers.
As Llama 3.1 405B is made freely available, investors are asking when the huge industry spend will pay off
Spending on artificial intelligence could hit a staggering $1tn, according to analysts concerned about whether there will be a return on such a spree. Mark Zuckerberg’s answer this week to such jitters was to release his latest AI system for free.
Meta’s Llama 3.1 405B is its most powerful yet, it says, and one of the most capable in the world. While the tech company didn’t disclose how much it cost to train, Zuckerberg, its co-founder and chief executive, has previously disclosed a $10.5bn (£8.9bn) investment in just the chips required to power its AI data centres – with the rest of the electronics, the electricity itself, and the physical building an additional cost on top of that.
Team of two new AI systems score one point short of gold medal in global maths contest for gifted students
Even though computers were made to do maths faster than any human could manage, the top level of formal mathematics remains an exclusively human domain. But a breakthrough by researchers at Google DeepMind has brought AI systems closer than ever to beating the best human mathematicians at their own game.
A pair of new systems, called AlphaProof and AlphaGeometry 2, worked together to tackle questions from the International Mathematical Olympiad, a global maths competition for secondary-school students that has been running since 1959. The Olympiad takes the form of six mind-bogglingly hard questions each year, covering fields including algebra, geometry and number theory. Winning a gold medal places you among the best handful of young mathematicians in the world.
Let ABC be a triangle with AB < AC < BC. Let the incentre and incircle of triangle ABC be I and ω, respectively. Let X be the point on line BC different from C such that the line through X parallel to AC is tangent to ω. Similarly, let Y be the point on line BC different from B such that the line through Y parallel to AB is tangent to ω. Let AI intersect the circumcircle of triangle ABC again at P ≠ A. Let K and L be the midpoints of AC and AB, respectively.
Prove that ∠KIL + ∠YPX = 180◦.
Turbo the snail plays a game on a board with 2024 rows and 2023 columns. There are hidden monsters in 2022 of the cells. Initially, Turbo does not know where any of the monsters are, but he knows that there is exactly one monster in each row except the first row and the last row, and that each column contains at most one monster.
Turbo makes a series of attempts to go from the first row to the last row. On each attempt, he chooses to start on any cell in the first row, then repeatedly moves to an adjacent cell sharing a common side. (He is allowed to return to a previously visited cell.) If he reaches a cell with a monster, his attempt ends and he is transported back to the first row to start a new attempt. The monsters do not move, and Turbo remembers whether or not each cell he has visited contains a monster. If he reaches any cell in the last row, his attempt ends and the game is over.
$10 UberEats vouchers sent to people who helped after global IT outage are flagged as potential fraud
An attempt by the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike to thank workers who tackled the recent global IT outage with a $10 UberEats voucher hit a stumbling block after Uber flagged the gesture as potential fraud.
CrowdStrike confirmed that it sent the $10 voucher to “teammates and partners” who helped customers affected by a faulty software update it issued.
The quantum computing firm PsiQuantum is partnering with the state of Illinois to build the largest US-based quantum computing facility, the company announced today.
The firm, which has headquarters in California, says it aims to house a quantum computer containing up to 1 million quantum bits, or qubits, within the next 10 years. At the moment, the largest quantum computers have around 1,000 qubits.
Quantum computers promise to do a wide range of tasks, from drug discovery to cryptography, at record-breaking speeds. Companies are using different approaches to build the systems and working hard to scale them up. Both Google and IBM, for example, make the qubits out of superconducting material. IonQ makes qubits by trapping ions using electromagnetic fields. PsiQuantum is building qubits from photons.
A major benefit of photonic quantum computing is the ability to operate at higher temperatures than superconducting systems. “Photons don’t feel heat and they don’t feel electromagnetic interference,” says Pete Shadbolt, PsiQuantum’s cofounder and chief scientific officer. This imperturbability makes the technology easier and cheaper to test in the lab, Shadbolt says.
It also reduces the cooling requirements, which should make the technology more energy efficient and easier to scale up. PsiQuantum’s computer can’t be operated at room temperature, because it needs superconducting detectors to locate photons and perform error correction. But those sensors only need to be cooled to a few degrees Kelvin, or a little under -450 °F. While that’s an icy temperature, it is still easier to achieve than what’s required for superconducting systems, which demand cryogenic cooling.
The company has opted not to build small-scale quantum computers (such as IBM’s Condor, which uses a little over 1,100 qubits). Instead it is aiming to manufacture and test what it calls “intermediate systems.” These include chips, cabinets, and superconducting photon detectors. PsiQuantum says it is targeting these larger-scale systems in part because smaller devices are unable to adequately correct errors and operate at a realistic price point.
Getting smaller-scale systems to do useful work has been an area of active research. But “just in the last few years, we’ve seen people waking up to the fact that small systems are not going to be useful,” says Shadbolt. In order to adequately correct the inevitable errors, he says, “you have to build a big system with about a million qubits.” The approach conserves resources, he says, because the company doesn’t spend time piecing together smaller systems. But skipping over them makes PsiQuantum’s technology difficult to compare to what’s already on the market.
The company won’t share details about the exact timeline of the Illinois project, which will include a collaboration with the University of Chicago, and several other Illinois universities. It does say it is hoping to break ground on a similar facility in Brisbane, Australia, next year and hopes that facility, which will house its own large-scale quantum computer, will be fully operational by 2027. “We expect Chicago to follow thereafter in terms of the site being operational,” the company said in a statement.
“It’s all or nothing [with PsiQuantum], which doesn’t mean it’s invalid,” says Christopher Monroe, a computer scientist at Duke University and ex-IonQ employee. “It’s just hard to measure progress along the way, so it’s a very risky kind of investment.”
Significant hurdles lie ahead. Building the infrastructure for this facility, particularly for the cooling system, will be the slowest and most expensive aspect of the construction. And when the facility is finally constructed, there will need to be improvements in the quantum algorithms run on the computers. Shadbolt says the current algorithms are far too expensive and resource intensive.
The sheer complexity of the construction project might seem daunting. “This could be the most complex quantum optical electronic system humans have ever built, and that’s hard,” says Shadbolt. “We take comfort in the fact that it resembles a supercomputer or a data center, and we’re building it using the same fabs, the same contract manufacturers, and the same engineers.”
Correction: we have updated the story to reflect that the partnership is only with the state of Illinois and its universities, and not a national lab
Research commissioned by Google estimates 31% of jobs would be insulated from AI and 61% radically transformed by it
Almost two-thirds of British jobs could be “enhanced” with AI, Google has claimed, with only a tiny proportion at risk of being “phased out” entirely.
Instead of worrying about job losses caused by AI, the focus needed to be on making sure the millions of Britons who could work in smarter and faster ways with AI tech got the support to use it, the company said.
If you, like me, were a teenager in the 2000s, I bet you have memories of the Windows XP login window. Me and my four siblings all had our own accounts, indicated by user names and clip art graphics. Once I logged in, the computer felt like mine—it worked just the way I set it up and all of my school documents were there. Then, when my sibling needed the device, they logged into their account where their stuff was. It worked then and it can still work now.
And yet most people—myself included—forget that this feature even still exists. A friend of mine recently bought a new laptop to use outside the house—they'd been sharing a laptop with their spouse to use when away from their desktop computer at home. The breaking point: they were tired of not being able to log into their own services on the shared device. I pointed out they could have created separate user accounts—the thought hadn't occurred to them.
A big part of this is that, at this point, most people have their own computers. But there are times when it makes sense to share a computer. Maybe you and your partner use desktop computers at home but share a laptop. Maybe there's a single gaming computer in your house used by multiple people. Or maybe you're traveling with someone and don't want to carry multiple computers. Whatever your reason for sharing your device, the experience is a lot better with multiple accounts.
Adding more users is simple
Adding a new account to a computer isn't hard. On Windows 11 you can open the Settings app, click Accounts in the left-hand sidebar, then click the Add account. From here you can add a Microsoft account or a local one.
Credit: Justin Pot
On macOS you need to open System Settings, scroll down to Users & Groups in the sidebar, then click Add User. You can choose a name, username, and password, then you're done.
Credit: Justin Pot
From now on, whenever the computer boots up or locks, you can decide which user account you want to use. Each user can configure their desktop environment however they like without affecting the other user. And you can even have multiple users signed in at once, meaning their windows and documents can stay open in the background while another user is on the device.
None of this is new—it's been offered on both the Mac and Windows environment since the 1990s. It's just kind of been forgotten.
iPads, sadly, don't work this way
If there's one device that seems designed to be shared, it's the iPad. In most houses, after all, the iPad sits on a coffee table, where it's easy for whoever is closest to pick it up and scroll a little. There's a problem, though: the iPad doesn't support multiple user accounts. This means that my wife sees my text notifications while playing games on the iPad. It also means she can't really check her email on the device.
This is a shame. Sharing devices in this way can reduce waste and save money. Multiple user accounts on one device make sharing that device a lot smoother. It would be nice if more people used the feature, and if more devices offered it.
Banking and healthcare firms, major airlines expected to suffer most losses, according to insurer Parametrix
The global technology outage sparked by CrowdStrike’s faulty update will cost US Fortune 500 companies $5.4bn, insurers estimated, as the cybersecurity firm vowed to make changes to prevent it from happening again.
The projected financial losses exclude Microsoft, the tech giant whose systems suffered widespread failures in the crash.
Windows 11 Home | Snapdragon X Elite - 3.4GHz | 16GB (RAM) + 512GB (eUFS)
Copilot began as Microsoft's version of ChatGPT, and is now being integrated into high-end laptops called Copilot+ PCs. The Galaxy Book4 Edge is one of the latest examples from Samsung—it comes with aSnapdragon X Elite 3.4GHz, which is a high-performing processor for power users who need to multitask or create multimedia. It has 16BG of RAM and comes with 512GB of storage. The screen is a 14-inch touchscreen AMOLED display and has 2,880 by 1,800 pixels of resolution.
According to the review above from Ho Young Won, the speakers aren't great, with distortion at high volumes. The multitasking performance seems flawless, and is good enough to run most games on Steam without overheating, as long as you don't mind some loud fans running. As is the case with most new laptops, there are fixable bugs that will likely be addressed with updates. Samsung says the battery will run for up to 20 hours, but most users will get about six to nine hours, which is on par with most Windows laptops.
The 43-inch Smart Monitor M7 is also new, launching on June 4, 2024. It is a 4K smart monitor that comes with Samsung TV Plus, so you can watch live TV channels and your favorite streaming apps.
“Where did CrowdStrike go wrong” is, if anything, a slightly overdetermined question.
We can work backwards. Pushing an update to every single computer on your network at the same time means that by the time you discover a problem, it’s too late to limit the fallout. The alternative – a staged rollout – would see the update pushed to users in small groups, usually accelerating over time. If you begin by updating 50 systems at once, and then immediately lose all contact with every single one of them, hopefully you spot it before you update the next 50 million.
Want to quickly power through a lecture or educational video, but don't want to distort the speech of the speaker? The browser extension Jump Cutter can do exactly this by speeding up only the silent pauses during a talk or lecture.
This free and open-source tool scans the audio of the video you're watching and speeds up playback when there's no audio. This is particularly useful if you're listening to a lecture by...someone who...pauses...unnecessarily...before getting back to their point. To get started, simply download the extension for Chrome, Firefox, or Edge, then load any video in your browser. You can also load videos saved to your computer using the extension—just click the extension icon, then click open a local file and you can drag the video over.
Whatever video you're playing, you can click the extension's icon to see it in action. The bar will show you the volume of the video over time. Anything marked in red indicates a pause. You can decide to speed the video up during those pauses up to eight times the original playback speed. The result: you can get through a talk a lot faster.
You can customize a few things, including the volume point that's considered quiet, how much the video should speed up during pauses, and whether to leave a margin before and after pauses. You can also speed up speech overall, if you want, though of course that will more severely distort the speech of the presenter.
I, personally, think such tools should only be used when you're severely crunched for time, or when a speaker's excess of pauses is consistently driving you nuts. It's also worth noting that pauses aren't necessarily dead space—they're essential for things like comedic timing, for example. So I wouldn't leave this on if you're watching a stand-up comedy routine, or even just a professor who is known for getting a few good jokes in.
With all of those caveats aside, though, this is a simple tool that does the job its advertised for. It's no wonder this tool is popular with college students, sure, but I could imagine using it for catching up on work meetings too.
But experts says full recovery from Friday’s IT failure could take weeks
A “significant” number of the 8.5m devices affected by last week’s global IT outage are back online, according to the cybersecurity company at the centre of the incident.
CrowdStrike said it was also testing a technique to reboot systems more rapidly, amid warnings from experts that a full recovery from Friday’s IT failure could take weeks.
‘C the Signs’ artificial intelligence program scans medical records to increase likelihood of spotting cancers
Artificial intelligence that scans GP records to find hidden patterns has helped doctors detect significantly more cancer cases.
The rate of cancer detection rose from 58.7% to 66.0% at GP practices using the “C the Signs” AI tool. This analyses a patient’s medical record to pull together their past medical history, test results, prescriptions and treatments, as well as other personal characteristics that might indicate cancer risk, such as their postcode, age and family history.
The home affairs minister, Clare O’Neil, says the company at the centre of the world’s largest ever IT outage has told the federal government it is close to an automatic fix which would allow systems to return online.
The global outage on Friday afternoon occurred after the cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike updated a widely used cloud-based software product called Falcon.
Error that caused a global standstill reveals fragility of a networked world that has been created for efficiency rather than resilience
One bit of good news about the “epic IT crash” that brought the western world to a temporary standstill is that it was a product of human error rather than a Russian cyber-attack like the SolarWinds hack of 2020 that had a similar modus operandi.
Last week’s outage was caused by an update that a big US cybersecurity firm, CrowdStrike, pushed to its corporate clients early on Friday morning, which conflicted with Microsoft’s Windows operating system, rendering devices inoperable – with predictable consequences, given that virtually every large organisation in the world is using Microsoft Windows.
Flights continue to be cancelled while GP surgeries and hospitals will be dealing with impact of backlogs
The aftershocks of the Microsoft IT outage continued to ripple across the UK on Saturday as holidaymakers and patients suffered the brunt of the computer systems failure.
Customers experienced flight cancellations, faulty train ticket machines and failures in GPs’ prescription and appointment systems after a flawed security update from CrowdStrike, a US cybersecurity firm, crashed 8.5 million devices across the world running the Windows operating system.
Cash provides essential fallback when digital payments break down, Payment Choice Alliance points out
Campaigners say the chaos caused by the global IT outage last week underlines the risk of moving towards a cashless society.
Supermarkets, banks, pubs, cafes, train stations and airports were all hit by the failure of Microsoft systems on Friday, leaving many unable to accept electronic payments. The impact was especially severe for businesses that no longer accept cash.
Travellers advised to check with providers for ‘extra steps’, with at least 45 UK flights cancelled on Saturday
NHS England has warned of “continued disruption” to GP services into next week after Friday’s global IT outrage, as air passengers continued to face delays and flight cancellations.
Passengers had their travel plans ruined on Friday as thousands of flights were cancelled internationally after a botched software upgrade hit Microsoft’s Windows operating system. The incident caused havoc worldwide across a number of services, with hospital appointments cancelled, payroll systems seizing up and TV channels going off air.
There is a further update on the situation at the Port of Dover in England, which was mentioned earlier (see 9.41am BST).
Chief executive Doug Bannister told the PA news agency:
We operate a turn up and go system here. However, we do insist you have a book on busy days, even if people are doing this on the drive down. The greater visibility we have the better.
But we are here to service people who want to travel. So I would say to displaced airport passengers ‘come on down. We have the capacity’.”
We start to get busy about 5 or 5:30 in the morning. We’ve opened new infrastructure today which is working really well. So far there is no congestion in the town of dover. Approach roads are busy but moving. Everything is running well.”
The worst of this is over because the nature of the crisis was such that it went very badly wrong, very quickly. It was spotted quite quickly, and essentially, it was turned off.”
Until governments and the industry get together and work out how to design out some of these flaws, I’m afraid we are likely to see more of these again.
Within countries like the UK and elsewhere in Europe, you can try and build up that national resilience to cope with this. But ultimately, a lot of this is going to be determined in the US.
For decades now, anyone who’s wanted to know everything about anything has asked Google. But is the platform losing its edge – and can we still trust it to tell us the truth?
I didn’t know I was dead until I saw it on Google. When I searched my name, there it was: a picture of my smiling face next to the text “Tom Faber was a physicist and publisher, and he was a university lecturer at Cambridge for 35 years”. Apparently I died on 27 July 2004, aged 77. This was news to me.
The problem was the picture. When you search the name of a notable person, Google may create what it calls a “knowledge panel”, a little box with basic information taken from Wikipedia. Somewhere along the way, the algorithm had confused pictures of my face with the biography of another man who shared my name. According to his obituary, he was “a distinguished physicist with a literary hinterland”. Google provides a feedback form to resolve this type of bug. I filled it in several times, but it made no difference.
The “Blue Screen of Death” inside Terminal C in Newark Liberty International Airport, after United Airlines and other airlines grounded flights because of a worldwide tech outage.
Supermarkets, banks, airlines and industries across Australia are slowly recovering on Saturday morning from the massive global Windows outage caused by a CrowdStrike software update gone wrong, with experts warning it could take weeks to resolve.
On Friday morning, the CEO of the Texas-based cybersecurity company, George Kurtz, apologised for the outage, and said it was not a cyber-attack, but a software update issue on its cloud-based cybersecurity platform Falcon for Microsoft Windows. It had since been fixed.
Software made by US cybersecurity company was intended to protect against crashes and disruptions in vital systems – it ended up taking them down
A global technology outage on Friday grounded flights, disrupted health services, crashed payment systems and blocked access to Microsoft services in what experts believe is one of the largest IT failures in history.
The cause of the disruptions originated from a cybersecurity firm called CrowdStrike, which provides software to a wide range of industries. An update to one of CrowdStrike’s pieces of software, Falcon Sensor, malfunctioned, throwing a wrench into computers running Windows, leading to major tech failures around the world, the company said.
Services began to come back online on Friday evening after an IT failure that wreaked havoc worldwide. But full recovery could take weeks, experts have said, after airports, healthcare services and businesses were hit by the “largest outage in history”.
Flights and hospital appointments were cancelled, payroll systems seized up and TV channels went off air after a botched software upgrade hit Microsoft’s Windows operating system.
Planes grounded, trains delayed, television stations off air, hospital appointments cancelled, electronic payments halted. No, it wasn’t the start of a massive cyber-attack from Russia, or the backdrop to a Hollywood blockbuster, but an IT upgrade that unexpectedly went disastrously wrong.
That it had such widespread effects is to some extent testament to the ubiquity of Microsoft’s Windows’ operating system, a well-known global dependency, and more particularly to a faulty software update pushed out by the security and anti-virus company CrowdStrike to its widely used Falcon software system.
MIT Technology Review Explains: Let our writers untangle the complex, messy world of technology to help you understand what’s coming next. You can read more here.
Windows PCs have crashed in a major IT outage around the world, bringing airlines, major banks, TV broadcasters, health-care providers, and other businesses to a standstill.
Airlines including United, Delta, and American have been forced to ground and delay flights, stranding passengers in airports, while the UK broadcaster Sky News was temporarily pulled off air. Meanwhile, banking customers in Europe, Australia, and India have been unable to access their online accounts. Doctor’s offices and hospitals in the UK have lost access to patient records and appointment scheduling systems.
The problem stems from a defect in a single content update for Windows machines from the cybersecurity provider CrowdStrike. George Kurtz, CrowdStrike’s CEO, says that the company is actively working with customers affected.
“This is not a security incident or cyberattack,” he said in a statement on X. “The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed. We refer customers to the support portal for the latest updates and will continue to provide complete and continuous updates on our website.” CrowdStrike pointed MIT Technology Review to its blog with additional updates for customers.
What caused the issue?
The issue originates from a faulty update from CrowdStrike, which has knocked affected servers and PCs offline and caused some Windows workstations to display the “blue screen of death” when users attempt to boot them. Mac and Linux hosts are not affected.
The update was intended for CrowdStrike’s Falcon software, which is “endpoint detection and response” software designed to protect companies’ computer systems from cyberattacks and malware. But instead of working as expected, the update caused computers running Windows software to crash and fail to reboot. Home PCs running Windows are less likely to have been affected, because CrowdStrike is predominantly used by large organizations. Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“The CrowdStrike software works at the low-level operating system layer. Issues at this level make the OS not bootable,” says Lukasz Olejnik, an independent cybersecurity researcher and consultant, and author of Philosophy of Cybersecurity.
Not all computers running Windows were affected in the same way, he says, pointing out that if a machine’s systems had been turned off at the time CrowdStrike pushed out the update (which has since been withdrawn), it wouldn’t have received it.
For the machines running systems that received the mangled update and were rebooted, an automated update from CloudStrike’s server management infrastructure should suffice, he says.
“But in thousands or millions of cases, this may require manual human intervention,” he adds. “That means a really bad weekend ahead for plenty of IT staff.”
How to manually fix your affected computer
There is a known workaround for Windows computers that requires administrative access to its systems. If you’re affected and have that high level of access, CrowdStrike has recommended the following steps:
1. Boot Windows into safe mode or the Windows Recovery Environment.
2. Navigate to the C:\Windows\System32\drivers\CrowdStrike directory.
3. Locate the file matching “C-00000291*.sys” and delete it.
4. Boot the machine normally.
Sounds simple, right? But while the above fix is fairly easy to administer, it requires someone to enter it physically, meaning IT teams will need to track down remote machines that have been affected, says Andrew Dwyer of the Department of Information Security at Royal Holloway, University of London.
“We’ve been quite lucky that this is an outage and not an exploitation by a criminal gang or another state,” he says. “It also shows how easy it is to inflict quite significant global damage if you get into the right part of the IT supply chain.”
While fixing the problem is going to cause headaches for IT teams for the next week or so, it’s highly unlikely to cause significant long-term damage to the affected systems—which would not have been the case if it had been ransomware rather than a bungled update, he says.
“If this was a piece of ransomware, there could have been significant outages for months,” he adds. “Without endpoint detection software, many organizations would be in a much more vulnerable place. But they’re critical nodes in the system that have a lot of access to the computer systems that we use.”
Passengers have described “bedlam” at UK airport check-ins after a global IT outage on what was due to be the busiest day for flying since the start of the Covid pandemic, while train networks have also been disrupted.
More than 5,000 flights have been cancelled worldwide after Microsoft Windows operating systems used by airlines, airports and some air traffic systems were affected.
Businesses and institutions around the world have been knocked offline after an IT outage. In the UK, GP doctors’ surgeries have said they are unable to access patient records or book appointments. Sky News was off air for a few hours but resumed broadcasting, while Britain’s biggest rail company warned passengers to expect disruption because of “widespread IT issues”.
Around the world, banks, supermarkets and other major institutions reported computer problems disrupting services, with some airlines warning of delays and others grounding flights. Here is what we know so far:
We’d like to hear from people who have been affected by the global outage caused by a CrowdStrike software update
Widespread outage linked to Windows workstations caused by a CrowdStrike software updatehas affected major companies such as Sky News UK, Melbourne Airport and Thameslink and infrastructure, including health services around the world.
Businesses including banks, airlines, telecommunications companies, TV and radio broadcasters, and supermarkets have been taken offline after blue screen of death error screens were seen on Windows workstations across the globe.
Meta is discussing taking a stake of as much as 5 percent of EssilorLuxottica, which makes eyewear brands like Ray-Ban and Oakley, people with knowledge of the talks said.
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, announces the new Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses during the keynote at the Meta Connect conference at the company’s headquarters in Menlo Park in 2023.
When there's no external display connected to your MacBook, closing it puts the entire laptop to sleep. That's straightforward enough. When there is an external display, mouse, and keyboard connected, closing your MacBook allows you use it in "Clamshell" mode—that is, you can use the computer using the external display and controls.
This default behavior should cover most use cases, which is probably why Apple doesn't allow much configuration. But maybe you want the MacBook to go to sleep when you close it, even if there's a display connected. Or maybe you want the computer to shut down entirely? If that's you, check out Clamshell, a free app that lets you choose.
The application lives in the menu bar and gives you five options. There's the default behavior, which we outlined above, and then four more. Sleep will put your MacBook to sleep as soon as you close the lid, even if there's another display connected. This is great if you use an external display but never use your MacBook in clamshell mode. Beautiful.
Shut Down goes a step further by shutting your computer down entirely (this requires installing a system-wide background helper). Shutting down your computer is great if you want to preserve battery life, but is in other ways extreme—you might lose any unsaved work, and you'll need to start the laptop up again. Still, if you're using your MacBook in a public place, this is the most secure option—it's really hard to access a Mac without the password if it's completely shut down.
Those two features are easy enough to understand, but there are two more that are a touch more tricky. The first of these, Keep External Displays On & Prevent Idle Sleep, will keep the display on and also keep your displays from going to sleep. It's great if there's something on your display that you want to ensure stays visible, even if you're not actively using the laptop.
The next option, Turn Off Displays & Prevent Idle Sleep, will turn off your displays but not your device. This is great if you want your MacBook to keep playing music or downloading files while the screen is turned off. Note that this won't happen if you're not connected to power, meaning you don't have to worry about this option draining your battery.
All of these are great options to have around, which is why I'm surprised Apple doesn't offer some way to configure them in settings. The good news is that Clamshell is free and does the job well.
It is far too easy to fill the Mac menu bar with clutter. This can be a problem on modern MacBooks, which have a notch in the middle of the menu bar for the webcam—install too many apps and you'll run out of space. This, and a universal dislike of clutter, is why there are plenty of apps to clean up your menu bar out there, but those apps also can cause problems. Some apps won't launch consistently if you enable them, for one thing, and they're also yet another piece of software constantly running on your device.
A free application called Menu Bar Spacing by developer Sindre Sorhus avoids all of this by changing the spacing between menu bar icons. Even better: You don't need the application to leave the applications continuously running in order for the change to stick around—it changes the spacing at the system level, so you can launch it once and never have to open it again.
To get started, simply download and install the app. You can drag the slider to adjust the number of pixels between icons.
Credit: Justin Pot
The change will happen instantly, though it's worth noting that all of your applications will need to quit and re-load (in theory they all re-load automatically but I had to manually restart a couple).
Credit: Justin Pot
To be clear, you don't need this application to change the spacing between your icons—there's an obscure Terminal command you can use for the job. The application just makes things easier—you can adjust the spacing with a slider and you don't need to restart your computer in order to see the change in action. It also offers a button, to the right of the slider, that changes your menu bar back to the default spacing. It's worth keeping the application around for that alone.
At some point, macOS became boring. What was long ago a quirky operating system, today feels sterile and corporate. You can add a bit of humanity back by installing kinda useful (but kinda dumb) software from independent developers.
I write a lot about useful applications. This is not one of those articles. Which isn't to say that the apps featured here are completely useless—they're not—but none of them are the most efficient way of doing something. I'm talking about animated flies circling your trash bin and emojis that replace your battery indicator—that sort of thing. Here are some of the oddest ones I've found.
BananaBin: Animated, realistic flies when your trash is too full
Credit: Justin Pot
It's really easy to let your computer's trash fill up without noticing. BananaBin is a playful app that adds flies to your dock's trash bin when it gets too full—you can decide whether 10MB, 1GB, or 10GB is your threshold.
The flies are ... shockingly realistic. They circle your trash icon and even scatter when your mouse pointer gets too close. I've had to fight the reflex of trying to catch them. On one hand, this is obviously silly. On the other hand, if you're the kind of person who likes to regularly free up space on your device, this serves as a helpful reminder—if you see flies, it's time to empty the bin.
Juice: Replace your battery indicator with emoji or text
Credit: Justin Pot
The Mac battery icon is boring. Juice doesn't have to be. This application allows you to replace the battery icon with emoji, ASCII art, or even weird strings of text that say things like "i'm full." You can use one of the built-in sets or get truly weird and design your own. This won't make you any more efficient, sure, but it might make you smile, and life is too short to not occasionally do dumb stuff on your computer.
FuzzyTime: Know slightly less about what time it is
Credit: Justin Pot
Do clocks stress you out? FuzzyTime can't reduce the existential horror of time, but it can dampen that horror just a bit. This app can be used to replace your clock with a string of fuzzy text—for example, it will say "ten to three" when it's roughly that time. Set this up and disable the clock in the menu bar settings and you'll be able to think about time in a less precise way. Just don't blame me if you end up missing meetings.
Rocket: Slack-like emojis in every application
Credit: Justin Pot
One of the best Slack features is the ability to type a colon and then a few letters in order to quickly search for and add an emoji. Rocket is a free Mac app that brings this power to every application on your system. If you're the kind of person who uses a lot of emoji this application is for you—you'll wonder how you lived without it.
Now, have any of the applications on this list made you a better, more productive individual? Probably not. But they've made your computer just a little bit more personal, and dare I say human. That's why I love finding small applications like these, and why I hope you'll get in touch and let me know if you know of any others. I'm looking forward to hearing what you found.
Raspberry Pis were hard to find a bit during the pandemic, but the cheap system-on-a-chip computer is finally back in stock, so it’s time to get back to your projects. You can use a Raspberry Pi to build a basic computer, a custom retro game console, or even a weather station. The beauty is in how small, simple, and affordable Raspberry Pis are to work with—whenever a project calls for brains, a Raspberry Pi is usually the best answer. And thanks to Prime Day, you can get a starter kit at a pretty hefty discount.
You have a few options here depending on your budget and needs, but for ease of use, you’ll always want to make sure you have a few basics. Unless you have a specific use case in mind for it already, you don’t want to get your motherboard in the mail and find out there’s nothing you can do with it out of the box. For ease of use, be sure to get a kit with a power supply included, and preferably a case. A Micro SD card is a nice bonus, if you don’t have any spares laying around, and you may want a heatsink or fan based on how hard you intend to push the little computer.
With that in mind, the cheapest deal I could find at the moment was for the Raspberry Pi Zero W, with a kit containing all the essentials on sale for $24 (down from $50). This is a smaller, older, and somewhat weaker Raspberry Pi, so it’s best for lighter projects. Still, its inclusion of Wi-Fi 4 allows it some basic connectivity that you could use to offset processing elsewhere.
For something stronger, this $128 Raspberry Pi 5 starter kit (down from $160) gives you everything you need to get started, including a case with a fan and even a 128GB Samsung EVO+ Micro SD card. The Raspberry Pi 5 is the current top-of-the-line, making it better for more demanding projects.
Finally, there’s the slightly cheaper Raspberry Pi 4, which is still respectable when it comes to specs. This kit is discounted to $120 from $140, and is the one I use at home. I used it to make a Steam in-home-streaming box before I got my Steam Deck, and it worked great for playing Final Fantasy IX, a game that has become a favorite of mine.
Since the day I got my NAS (network-attached storage) two years ago, I've been following the large hard drive market like a hawk. Be it Black Friday, Prime Day, or just a regular sunny day, I'm always on the lookout for good deals on hard drives above 10TB. While it's not specifically a Prime Day deal, the best discount I've found this week is on the Seagate Expansion 14TB, which is currently 25% off.
The Seagate Expansion 14TB is a great external drive, and provides plenty of storage space for a typical external drive use. However, if you have a NAS like me, you can also shuck it and use the drive inside. Shucking means removing the enclosure to use the internal hard disk inside, which you can use for your PC, NAS, or other supported devices. Just be sure to test the drive before you do, and know if you ever need to claim the warranty, you'll have to reassemble the enclosure.
Whatever your intended use, this hard drive is $180 right now, which is 25% off its usual price. When you're looking for deals on hard drives, you should calculate the price per terabyte to see if it's a good value. Anything under $15 per TB is typically a deal, and the Seagate Expansion 14TB is around $13 per TB.
Personally, all my Seagate drives are from the EXOS enterprise series, and the hard drive inside the Seagate Expansion 14TB is likely to be from the same lineup. It's a bit noisy, but known to be quite reliable, so I'd recommend this particular Seagate model.
WD Elements 20TB External HDD
If you want even more storage in an external drive, the WD Elements 20TB is available at a compelling $275 (with a coupon code), about 45% off its usual price. That means you get this drive for around $13.75 per TB of storage. This makes it a good deal for another external drive that can be shucked.
When looking into buying a new laptop, it isn’t just about Mac vs. PC. Consider the Chromebook: It’s a great option for anyone looking for an inexpensive and light notebook, especially if they do most of their work in a browser. Chromebooks are already much cheaper than comparable Windows laptops, and Prime Day sales can make them even more compelling.
You’ll find many different styles of Chromebooks on sale right now—some with spinning screens and some with uncommon processors. While there's all kinds of worthwhile deals today, I want to highlight the Acer Chromebook Plus 514 in particular.
This Chromebook retails for $379.99, but after a 21% discount, you can get it for just $299.99. With it, you get an Intel Core i3 processor, 128GB SSD, 8GB RAM, a 14-inch Full-HD IPS display, two USB-C ports, and up to 11 hours of battery life.
Most cheap Chromebooks compromise in some way or another. You’re either stuck with a less powerful Celeron processor, or a 720p screen. Which is why it's best to avoid Chromebooks that cost under $250. But there's often little point in spending more than $400 on a Chromebook: the upgrades won't scale up with price and you'll probably be better with a cheap PC.
However, The Acer Chromebook Plus 514 has a trick up its sleeve. The "Plus" in its name means that it's part of Google's AI push, and it comes with free access to Google Gemini's paid upgrade for a year.
Other great Chromebook deals:
If you're looking for something cheaper, or different, or perhaps something without Google AI, here are some other great options for the Prime Day sale.
Asus Chromebook CX1
The Asus Chromebook CX1 comes in at just $179.99 (was $269.99) for the Prime Day sale, and it's one of the cheapest good Chromebooks that you can buy right now. It has a 11.6" HD NanoEdge display, Intel Celeron N4020 Processor, 64GB eMMC storage, and 4GB RAM. Nothing amazing, but if you want a small, cheap, and lightweight computer to browse the web or give to your kids, it's not a bad choice.
HP Chromebook 14
Kicking things up a notch is HP's Chromebook 14, with a 14-inch 720p display, Intel Celeron N4120 Processor, 4GB RAM, and 64GB Storage. Again, nothing huge, but you do get a decent Celeron processor and a screen that's large enough to handle online work and meetings. The HP Chromebook 14 is down to $210.59 for Prime Day (was $249).
Asus Chromebook Flip CM5
At $299.99 for the Prime Day sale (was $439.99), the ASUS Chromebook Flip CM5 is the Chromebook to beat for the sweet spot. You don't get any Google AI features from the Chromebook Plus model, but what you do get makes for a really solid everyday Chromebook experience.
There's a big 15.6" touchscreen Full HD NanoEdge Display, AMD Ryzen 3 3250C Processor, 64GB eMMC storage, and 4GB RAM. The screen, combined with the fast AMD Ryzen 3 chip, means you can use it for college or working online in Google Workspace without any issues.
Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 3i
Lenovo's IdeaPad Flex 3i is a great all-rounder Chromebook with a decent amount of SSD storage. It's down to $350 (was $399.99) for the Prime Day sale. With this laptop, you get a touchscreen and 15.6” FHD Display, Intel Pentium N6000, 8GB RAM, and 128GB SSD. The Chromebook can also be used in tablet mode, and the fact that it has 8GB RAM will help you when you're surfing the web.
Generative AI has great potential for scaling and automating security practices, but to be effective, organizations need to have a strong security foundation.
Headmen, shamans, and mothers: natural and sexual selection for computational services "The human brain, which evolved to acquire, store, and process information to make beneficial decisions, is likewise energetically expensive to build and maintain yet plausibly has idle capacity much of the time. We propose that humans evolved to use advantages in information or computational resources to provide computational services to others via a language-based "network" in exchange for payments of various sorts that helped subsidize the energetic costs of the brain."
Amazon’s Prime Day sale is upon us, and there are quite a few laptop bargains to go around, from everyday college laptops, to MacBooks, to even high-end gaming machines. If you are in the market for a laptop, or were planning to buy one soon, this is a great time to start shopping. From July 16-17, there are deep discounts on models from many makers—including Apple.
No matter what your budget is, there’s going to be something here for you. These are the best laptop deals we could find right now.
Let’s start off with everyday Windows laptops. Something that everyone, from college students to office or remote workers, can use. These are lightweight, with long battery life and dependable performance.
Asus Vivobook Go offers you a 15-inch Full HD screen, AMD Ryzen 7320U processor, 8GB RAM and 128GB SSD for just $239.99 (was $299.99).
Acer Aspire 3 features at 15.6-inch Full HD IPS touch panel, AMD Ryzen 5 7520U Quad-Core Processor, AMD Radeon Graphics, 16GB LPDDR5, 512GB NVMe SSD, all for just $399.99 (was $519.99).
If you're looking for something cheaper, the Acer Aspire 3 A315-24P-R7VH is a great buy for $299.99 (was $321.99). It features an AMD Ryzen 3 7320U processor, 8GB RAM, 128GB SSD and Wi-Fi 6.
Lenovo IdeaPad 1 Laptop is also a great budget option that offers a faster AMD Ryzen 5 5500U CPU. You also get a 15-inch screen, 8GB RAM, and 512GB SSD for great all-rounder performance. All for just $289.99 (was $329.99)
Prime Day also has a lot of discounts on Apple laptops, both for everyday users and for professionals.
The 13-inch MacBook Air, with the M3 chip, is discounted to just $899.99 from $1099.
If you don't mind an older model, the M2 MacBook Air can be yours for just $799, down from the original price of $999.
The 14-inch MacBook Pro with an M3 chip is down to $1,399 from $1,599. You get 8GB RAM, 256GB storage, the fast chip, and the same great screen and design from the higher end models with the Pro chips.
Want to buy a beefy gaming laptop, but don’t want to spend a ton of cash? This is the right time. Some high-end laptops are now practically in the budget category, and you’ll get a lot of value out of these advanced gaming laptops.
Asus TUF Gaming A14 laptop features 15.6-inch FHD 144Hz Display, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050, AMD Ryzen 5 7535HS, 8GB DDR5, 512GB PCIe Gen4 NVMe SSD, all for just $649 (was $799.99).
Acer Nitro V Gaming Laptop features a 15.6-inch FHD 144Hz display, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4050 Laptop GPU, Intel Core i5-13420H Processor, 8GB DDR5, and 512GB PCIe Gen 4 SSD for $659.99 (was $779.99).
ASUS ROG Strix G16 features a 16-inch 16:10 FHD 165Hz Display, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060, Intel Core i7-13650HX, 16GB DDR5, 1TB PCIe Gen4 SSD, and Wi-Fi 6E for $1099.99 (was $1399.99).
Razer Blade 16 features a 16-inch 16:10 QHD 240Hz Display, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080, Intel Core i9-14900HX, 32GB DDR5, 1TB PCIe Gen 4 SSD, and Wi-Fi 7 for $3,299.99 (was $3,599.99).
The search giant’s negotiations to buy Wiz, a cybersecurity start-up, for $23 billion, come as the Biden administration has taken a hard line against consolidation in tech and other industries.
Microsoft’s all-in moment on artificial intelligence has been defined by billions in spending and a C.E.O. counting on technology with huge potential and huge risks.
All of a sudden, it seems that AI is everywhere, from executive assistant chatbots to AI code assistants.
But despite the proliferation of AI in the zeitgeist, many organizations are proceeding with caution. This is due to the perception of the security quagmires AI presents. For the emerging technology to reach its full potential, data must be secured through every stage of the AI lifecycle including model training, fine-tuning, and inferencing.
This is where confidential computing comes into play. Vikas Bhatia, head of product for Azure Confidential Computing at Microsoft, explains the significance of this architectural innovation: “AI is being used to provide solutions for a lot of highly sensitive data, whether that’s personal data, company data, or multiparty data,” he says. “Confidential computing is an emerging technology that protects that data when it is in memory and in use. We see a future where model creators who need to protect their IP will leverage confidential computing to safeguard their models and to protect their customer data.”
Understanding confidential computing
“The tech industry has done a great job in ensuring that data stays protected at rest and in transit using encryption,” Bhatia says. “Bad actors can steal a laptop and remove its hard drive but won’t be able to get anything out of it if the data is encrypted by security features like BitLocker. Similarly, nobody can run away with data in the cloud. And data in transit is secure thanks to HTTPS and TLS, which have long been industry standards.”
But data in use, when data is in memory and being operated upon, has typically been harder to secure. Confidential computing addresses this critical gap—what Bhatia calls the “missing third leg of the three-legged data protection stool”—via a hardware-based root of trust.
Essentially, confidential computing ensures the only thing customers need to trust is the data running inside of a trusted execution environment (TEE) and the underlying hardware. “The concept of a TEE is basically an enclave, or I like to use the word ‘box.’ Everything inside that box is trusted, anything outside it is not,” explains Bhatia.
Until recently, confidential computing only worked on central processing units (CPUs). However, NVIDIA has recently brought confidential computing capabilities to the H100 Tensor Core GPU and Microsoft has made this technology available in Azure. This has the potential to protect the entire confidential AI lifecycle—including model weights, training data, and inference workloads.
“Historically, devices such as GPUs were controlled by the host operating system, which, in turn, was controlled by the cloud service provider,” notes Krishnaprasad Hande, Technical Program Manager at Microsoft. “So, in order to meet confidential computing requirements, we needed technological improvements to reduce trust in the host operating system, i.e., its ability to observe or tamper with application workloads when the GPU is assigned to a confidential virtual machine, while retaining sufficient control to monitor and manage the device. NVIDIA and Microsoft have worked together to achieve this.”
Attestation mechanisms are another key component of confidential computing. Attestation allows users to verify the integrity and authenticity of the TEE, and the user code within it, ensuring the environment hasn’t been tampered with. “Customers can validate that trust by running an attestation report themselves against the CPU and the GPU to validate the state of their environment,” says Bhatia.
Additionally, secure key management systems play a critical role in confidential computing ecosystems. “We’ve extended our Azure Key Vault with Managed HSM service which runs inside a TEE,” says Bhatia. “The keys get securely released inside that TEE such that the data can be decrypted.”
Confidential computing use cases and benefits
GPU-accelerated confidential computing has far-reaching implications for AI in enterprise contexts. It also addresses privacy issues that apply to any analysis of sensitive data in the public cloud. This is of particular concern to organizations trying to gain insights from multiparty data while maintaining utmost privacy.
Another of the key advantages of Microsoft’s confidential computing offering is that it requires no code changes on the part of the customer, facilitating seamless adoption. “The confidential computing environment we’re building does not require customers to change a single line of code,” notes Bhatia. “They can redeploy from a non-confidential environment to a confidential environment. It’s as simple as choosing a particular VM size that supports confidential computing capabilities.”
Some industries and use cases that stand to benefit from confidential computing advancements include:
Governments and sovereign entities dealing with sensitive data and intellectual property.
Healthcare organizations using AI for drug discovery and doctor-patient confidentiality.
Banks and financial firms using AI to detect fraud and money laundering through shared analysis without revealing sensitive customer information.
Manufacturers optimizing supply chains by securely sharing data with partners.
Further, Bhatia says confidential computing helps facilitate data “clean rooms” for secure analysis in contexts like advertising. “We see a lot of sensitivity around use cases such as advertising and the way customers’ data is being handled and shared with third parties,” he says. “So, in these multiparty computation scenarios, or ‘data clean rooms,’ multiple parties can merge in their data sets, and no single party gets access to the combined data set. Only the code that is authorized will get access.”
The current state—and expected future—of confidential computing
Although large language models (LLMs) have captured attention in recent months, enterprises have found early success with a more scaled-down approach: small language models (SLMs), which are more efficient and less resource-intensive for many use cases. “We can see some targeted SLM models that can run in early confidential GPUs,” notes Bhatia.
This is just the start. Microsoft envisions a future that will support larger models and expanded AI scenarios—a progression that could see AI in the enterprise become less of a boardroom buzzword and more of an everyday reality driving business outcomes. “We’re starting with SLMs and adding in capabilities that allow larger models to run using multiple GPUs and multi-node communication. Over time, [the goal is eventually] for the largest models that the world might come up with could run in a confidential environment,” says Bhatia.
Bringing this to fruition will be a collaborative effort. Partnerships among major players like Microsoft and NVIDIA have already propelled significant advancements, and more are on the horizon. Organizations like the Confidential Computing Consortium will also be instrumental in advancing the underpinning technologies needed to make widespread and secure use of enterprise AI a reality.
“We’re seeing a lot of the critical pieces fall into place right now,” says Bhatia. “We don’t question today why something is HTTPS. That’s the world we’re moving toward [with confidential computing], but it’s not going to happen overnight. It’s certainly a journey, and one that NVIDIA and Microsoft are committed to.”
Microsoft Azure customers can start on this journey today with Azure confidential VMs with NVIDIA H100 GPUs. Learn more here.
This content was produced by Insights, the custom content arm of MIT Technology Review. It was not written by MIT Technology Review’s editorial staff.
Spotify might be the least keyboard-friendly music player ever made. I spend so much time clicking around in this application when I'm trying to find something to listen to and it all just feels so...slow. That's why I love spotify-player, which goes to the extreme the other way. It's a complete interface for Spotify that you control entirely from the command line.
Yes, I realize this is ridiculous. I've been trying it out for a couple of days hoping to write a joke article but I've found myself actually using it. And I was going to list all the things you can do in Spotify's desktop app that you can't do in spotify-player, but after using it for a few days the only thing I've noticed is that podcasts and audiobooks aren't offered (which is, to me, a plus) and I can't get the AI DJ to launch. Everything else—creating and managing playlists, radio stations, browsing or searching for playlists—works, if you put the time in to figure it out. If something else is missing I haven't found it.
This application requires a Spotify Premium account and works on Mac, Windows, and Linux. To install and use it, you're going to need to be at least a little bit comfortable with the command line. The simplest thing to do is to grab a binary—on Windows you can just launch it directly and it will open, which is an easy way to try it out. On Mac I recommend installing it using Homebrew, which is a tool any Mac user who is interested in this app should probably have set up anyway. (Linux users know more than I do about how to install this on their operating system so I won't attempt a clumsy summary—you've got this.)
After getting the application installed and running, you will be asked for your Spotify username and password. Provide that and you will be brought to your Spotify library.
Credit: Justin Pot
You can use the arrow keys to go up and down inside a list and the tab key to switch between lists. Hit enter to open a playlist, album, or artist, then hit enter to play a specific song. It's all extremely speedy, which I love.
Are you looking for the searoch? You can press G then S. From here you can search—the results will be spread across four lists—tracks, albums, artists, and playlists. Again, you can use tab to switch between these lists.
Credit: Justin Pot
Open an artist and you'll see their top tracks, albums, and related artists. The more you use this the more you realize that it gives you access to everything Spotify does in just a few keystrokes.
There are a lot more keyboard shortcuts—way more than I could break down here. You can type a question mark from anywhere in the user interface to see a complete list; you'll get a handle on it faster than you think.
As technology goes, the internet of things (IoT) is old: internet-connected devices outnumbered people on Earth around 2008 or 2009, according to a contemporary Cisco report. Since then, IoT has grown rapidly. Researchers say that by the early 2020s, estimates of the number of devices ranged anywhere from the low tens of billions to over 50 billion.
Currently, though, IoT is seeing unusually intense new interest for a long-established technology, even one still experiencing market growth. A sure sign of this buzz is the appearance of acronyms, such as AIoT and GenAIoT, or “artificial intelligence of things” and “generative artificial intelligence of things.”
What is going on? Why now? Examining potential changes to consumer IoT could provide some answers. Specifically, the vast range of areas where the technology finds home and personal uses, from smart home controls through smart watches and other wearables to VR gaming—to name just a handful. The underlying technological changes sparking interest in this specific area mirror those in IoT as a whole.
Rapid advances converging at the edge
IoT is much more than a huge collection of “things,” such as automated sensing devices and attached actuators to take limited actions. These devices, of course, play a key role. A recent IDC report estimated that all edge devices—many of them IoT ones—account for 20% of the world’s current data generation.
IoT, however, is much more. It is a huge technological ecosystem that encompasses and empowers these devices. This ecosystem is multi-layered, although no single agreed taxonomy exists.
Most analyses will include among the strata the physical devices themselves (sensors, actuators, and other machines with which these immediately interact); the data generated by these devices; the networking and communication technology used to gather and send the generated data to, and to receive information from, other devices or central data stores; and the software applications that draw on such information and other possible inputs, often to suggest or make decisions.
The inherent value from IoT is not the data itself, but the capacity to use it in order to understand what is happening in and around the devices and, in turn, to use these insights, where necessary, to recommend that humans take action or to direct connected devices to do so.
Enlarge/ A single logical qubit is built from a large collection of hardware qubits. (credit: at digit)
One of the more striking things about quantum computing is that the field, despite not having proven itself especially useful, has already spawned a collection of startups that are focused on building something other than qubits. It might be easy to dismiss this as opportunism—trying to cash in on the hype surrounding quantum computing. But it can be useful to look at the things these startups are targeting, because they can be an indication of hard problems in quantum computing that haven't yet been solved by any one of the big companies involved in that space—companies like Amazon, Google, IBM, or Intel.
In the case of a UK-based company called Riverlane, the unsolved piece that is being addressed is the huge amount of classical computations that are going to be necessary to make the quantum hardware work. Specifically, it's targeting the huge amount of data processing that will be needed for a key part of quantum error correction: recognizing when an error has occurred.
Error detection vs. the data
All qubits are fragile, tending to lose their state during operations, or simply over time. No matter what the technology—cold atoms, superconducting transmons, whatever—these error rates put a hard limit on the amount of computation that can be done before an error is inevitable. That rules out doing almost every useful computation operating directly on existing hardware qubits.
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