Happy Friday! Here's everything cool that happened in tech, AI and other spaces this week.
Meta lays off "Fact Checkers" - copies Elon Musk instead
Earlier this week, Meta shared a blog post citing that they wanted to be more "hands off" with certain political content. Basically they would strip out their third party fact checkers and move the buck to their users who can add context and corrections on their own accord, starting in the US. If this feels familiar it's because this is the exact same model Elon Musk implemented on Twitter soon after he took over, which makes copying this feature an interesting choice given their dynamic.
Nvidia announces all kinds of goodies at CES
Nvidia were a crowd favorite at CES this year, carrying two massive announcements - the first of which is the 50 Series of GPUs. This time the series will only start with four cards, but the lowest tier will be able to match the 4090 if DLSS 4 is used, further bolstering Nvidia's AI and software claims to fame.
You will notice a pivot from how Nvidia used to brag about CUDA cores, or other gaming related metrics, to AI TOPS this year. Seems they have realised AI is where the real money is for them, at least until the bubble bursts. I don't blame them per se, but I also think this should have been a separate product line.
The next announcement from Nvidia was a small computer they are calling Digits.
Digits is planned to be a $3000 personal supercomputer, boasting a custom Grace superchip and up to 128GB of RAM and 4TB of storage, it can handle up to one quadrillion AI calculations a second - a VERY enticing metric for those who want to self host large language models.
Lenovo Legion Go S - Powered by SteamOS!
Lenovo unveiled their new Legion Go S handheld at CES -boasting a 120hz display, a new AMD z2 CPU, and removes the detachable controllers. It also ships with a SteamOS variant, which is the first of its kind.
Valve published a blog post the same day, specifying that they also plan to have a beta candidate for a general, universal SteamOS image ready before the handheld launches in late January.
VideoLAN demos local auto subtitling for VLC
In a surprise announcement, VideoLAN was also at CES, and showed off real time AI transcription and subtitles in VLC. The demo used a fully offline model that runs directly on your machine, and could translate the captions to the user's language.
VLC automatic subtitles generation and translation based on local and open source AI models running on your machine working offline, and supporting numerous languages!
— VideoLAN (@videolan) January 8, 2025
Demo can be found on our #CES2025 booth in Eureka Park. pic.twitter.com/UVmgT6K4ds
Dell pulls an Apple - and it ain't slick
This week Dell decided to throw out every established brand name they had and..
Yeah. They really went with Dell Pro Max Premium for their best laptop.
I'm not joking.
You aren't slick, Dell.