The News

Turns out Nvidia ain’t the only game in town

After quite a hot-streak, Nvidia’s complete dominance of AI chipmaking may be facing its first serious challenger in Google. When Google launched Gemini 3 last week, it announced that it had trained this model on its own tensor processing units (TPU), not Nvidia’s sought after GPUs (Google). These were invented by Google in the early 2010s to run its search engines but now can apparently do the tasks that 90% of the market used Nvidia’s GPUs for (Bloomberg, $). Now, Meta is apparently in “advanced talks” with Google to actually buy TPUs and Anthropic has already inked a deal to get some (Bloomberg, $) after they’d only been available for renting via Google cloud before. Nvidia, naturally, says it’s still a “generation ahead” (CNBC)

The Sizzle: With all the AI bubble talk, everyone has been looking for a reason to jump off Nvidia. I think people are getting over their skis with assuming that Google’s chips present a serious challenge to Nvidia’s. It’s a bit beyond my pay grade but my understanding is that GPUs remain a lot more flexible with how they work, and that a lot of the AI ecosystem’s infrastructure has been built on Nvidia’s frameworks too. Even if TPUs prove to be a valid alternative, I reckon hyperscalers will still buy as much as Nvidia will sell them.

That being said — Nvidia has been invincible for a few years now. That may no longer be true!

Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

Teen social media ban is facing a legal challenge

Two weeks before Australia’s teen social media ban comes into effect, a group has launched a last minute legal challenge (Crikey, $). Digital Freedom Project, led by Libertarian Party MLC John Ruddick, filed court documents this morning challenging the ban on the grounds that it violates Australia’s implied constitutional freedom of political expression. The case will argue that the ban’s benefits don’t outweigh its harms, and that those harms can be addressed in other ways.

Meanwhile, politicians behind the ban are telling people to expect “problems” and “controversies” about the ban not working perfectly (Crikey, $).

Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

YouTube’s videos are disappearing from view

You might remember earlier this year, I shared a blog post that noticed how YouTube’s homepage had gone from showing dozens of suggested videos to five (plus one advert). The author graphed it out and predicted that YouTube’s homepage would only show one video by May next year.

Turns out we’re ahead of schedule. The same author opened up YouTube on his Apple TV and was presented with one video… and one advertisement, naturally.

Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

Leftovers

Australia:

Rest of the world:

Discuss these links in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

Oh, Also

How bad can you make a date picker?

It’s that time of year again! The Bad UX World Cup has come around again (thanks to rholmes in the Slack for flagging).

There were some great entries for the worst design for a date picker this year! I quite liked Aussie Leigh’s DateHack, but scroll through the page and try em all if you want to have your blood pressure spike <3.

Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

Bargains

Electrical & Electronics

Computing

Mobile

The End

😎 The Sizzle is written by Cam Wilson and emailed every weekday. It was created by Anthony “decryption” Agius.

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