Meta showed off a prototype pair of augmented reality glasses called Orion. It does stuff like the Apple Vision Pro, but looks like a normal pair of glasses instead of ski goggles. As a prototype, the frames are pretty chunky (100 grams), but damn, as someone that has to wear glasses anyways, I would fucking love to augment them with some smart shit like this, I'd pay a few thousand bucks for it too. Orion comes with a wireless wristband to detect gesture inputs along with a wireless "compute puck" you carry with you that does all the heavy lifting. The Verge got a hands on demo and likes it (video here), saying Orion's wristband is "truly of the most magical experience I've had with a piece of new technology", but it's probably years away from being something we can buy. Honestly this is the first gadget I've been genuinely excited about since the iPhone X and it upsets me that it's by goddamn Meta.
Lots of drama at OpenAI today. They've been a non-profit since inception, but Reuters reckons they're finally dropping that facade, restructuring the company to give Sam Altman shitloads of equity while the non-profit entity owns a "minority stake". Dunno if it's related, but maybe this is a reason why Chief Technical Officer Mira Murati is resigning. That name might sound familiar as she was one of the key instigators in a hilarious attempt to remove Altman from OpenAI that backfired spectacularly a few months ago. There's not many of the original founding crew left at OpenAI except for Altman these days. Meanwhile, Altman has been hanging around the White House begging for policies to reduce the cost and red tape of building more "5 gigawatt" data centres, using some sinophobia to get his argument across the line. To put that into perspective, current electricity demand in the entire state of Victoria is at 4GW right now, and OpenAI wants multiple of these in the US.
Google's lodged a complaint with the European Commission that centers around the cost of licences to Microsoft software on other cloud platforms. They use the example of companies that already have Windows Server licences on their on-premises computers wanting to use those same licences on their cloud infrastructure, but Microsoft's licence agreement extracts loads of extra cash for that privilege that makes it really expensive versus simply using Azure. Google also claims that Microsoft "introduced additional obstacles over the last few years, such as limiting security patches and creating other interoperability barriers". Interesting that they're doing this in the EU, not the USA, despite both companies being American. I wonder if it's because the EU has more power in this space to actually do something versus the USA?
Marques Brownlee is getting roasted for selling a US$12/m wallpaper app called Panels. Putting aside the fact that paying for what appears to be mostly AI-generated wallpapers is extremely lame (at least pay for some humans creating cool art!), Marques put out a statement on X apologising for "excessive data disclosures" due to the advertisements in the free version of the app and claims its now a "personal challenge" to deliver US$12/m of value. Even Daring Fireball took a dump on Panels, oof. It looks like a lot of the startup bros who dislike Marques for being honest when he roasts their shitty products are taking the opportunity to give him a taste of his own medicine.
Stockbyte 136 Business X-Ray (Internet Archive / ShivaShaw)
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