For the past several months, we’ve assumed that the next iOS release would be light on features and heavy on performance improvements and bug fixes. But a new report says that might not be the case—in fact, iOS 17 might be the most exciting release in years.
According to Mark Gurman of Bloomberg, in the latest edition of his Power On newsletter, Apple has pivoted from its initial strategy for iOS 17, which was originally “focused more on fixing bugs and improving performance than adding new features.” Now, he reports, Apple is all-in on new features, and iOS 17 is “expected to boast several ‘nice to have’ features” when it arrives this fall.
While he doesn’t divulge what those features could be, he claims that they are among the “most requested features” by iPhone users. It’s not hard to make a list of features we’ve wanted for years—multiple users, custom icons, multiple timers, multitasking, separate volume controls for media and calls, etc.—but Gurman says the features will be smaller ones since iOS 17 “lacks a tentpole improvement like last year’s revamped lock screen.”
But it’s still an intriguing notion and makes the wait for iOS 17 that much more difficult. While Apple hasn’t officially announced the dates yet, it will show off the next version of iOS at the WWDC keynote this June ahead of its full release this fall. Gurman doesn’t mention whether iPadOS 17 and macOS 14, which will also debut at WWDC, will have the same strategy.
To follow along with the latest rumors, be sure to bookmark our iOS 17 superguide for all the news and rumors as they arrive.
Apple wasn't planning to release major updates with iOS 17, the next operating system for the iPhone, expected later this year. But according to a new report, the plan has changed.
Per Bloomberg's Mark Gurman(Opens in a new tab), iOS 17 is expected "to check off several of users’ most requested features." Following the release of iOS 16 — which came with flashy updates like editing or undo sending messages, a new lock screen with live updates, and batch photo editing — iOS 17 was initially intended to fine tune existing features and fix bugs, avoiding a replay of iOS's messy release.
But now, that strategy has changed, Gurman continued. Apple is reportedly including several "nice to have" features that will meet popular demand. Of course, the features included in iOS 17 (codenamed "Dawn") remain to be seen. But Apple fans aren't shy about what they want to see.
Frequently requested features include volume control for alarms and FaceTime, the ability to set multiple timers, and sideloading apps outside of the App Store. Since Apple recently released a Voice Isolation for regular calls, we might expect further updates and new features related to call quality. And ChatGPT's popularity as an AI assistant has everyone is wondering whether Siri will get a much-needed update.
iOS 17 is expected to be announced at Apple's annual Worldwide Developers Conference in June (WWDC). Until then, keep manifesting your iOS 17 wishlist.
Microsoft is overhauling Teams to make it faster and easier to use. In a blog post published Monday, the company said Teams users can look forward to a redesigned app that is up to two times faster than the current release, with tasks like launching the program and joining video calls taking half as much time. The overhauled app also offers smoother scrolling while avoiding the use of placeholder assets. At the same time, Microsoft says the new Teams uses 50 percent less memory.
Separately, the company has redesigned the interface to reduce the number of clicks it takes to do things like manage your notifications, search for information and organize channels. It has also added more robust authentication, synchronization and notification systems to make jumping between different accounts and tenants easier.
Naturally, the new Teams will support AI features, starting with the intelligent recap and Copilot ones Microsoft announced earlier this year, and with more to come in the future. “We will use AI to take the work out of working together by getting you up to speed on what happened before you joined a meeting or chat and answering your questions all in the flow of the discussion,” the company said. “We’re only just beginning to see the potential of AI inside of Teams, and we will have lots more to share in the future.”
Not mentioned in Microsoft's blog post are the 3D avatars the company has been testing for more than a year. The company recently said it anticipates those will become publicly available sometime in May, so expect them to be part of the new Teams experience too.
A public preview of the new Teams is rolling out on Windows today, with general availability to follow sometime later this year. A Mac preview should arrive before the end of 2023 as well. If your organization uses Teams, your IT department will need to enroll you in the preview before you can try out the new experience. Notably, the redesigned app will ship with a toggle at the top that will allow you to switch between the two versions of Teams.
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Apple has quietly acquired a Mountain View-based startup, WaveOne, that was developing AI algorithms for compressing video.
Apple wouldn’t confirm the sale when asked for comment. But WaveOne’s website was shut down around January, and severalformeremployees, including one of WaveOne’s co-founders, now work within Apple’s various machine learning groups.
WaveOne’s former head of sales and business development, Bob Stankosh, announced the sale in a LinkedIn post published a month ago.
“After almost two years at WaveOne, last week we finalized the sale of the company to Apple,” Stankosh wrote. “We started our journey at WaveOne, realizing that machine learning and deep learning video technology could potentially change the world. Apple saw this potential and took the opportunity to add it to their technology portfolio.”
WaveOne was founded in 2016 by Lubomir Bourdev and Oren Rippel, who set out to take the decades-old paradigm of video codecs and make them AI-powered. Prior to joining the venture, Bourdev was a founding member of Meta’s AI research division, and both he and Rippel worked on Meta’s computer vision team responsible for content moderation, visual search and feed ranking on Facebook.
Where it concerns standard algorithms for compressing and decompressing video, the compression happens on the content provider’s side (e.g. YouTube servers), while end-users’ machines handle the decompressing. It’s an effective approach, but new codecs require new hardware specially built to accelerate compression or decompression, making improvements slow to propogate.
Image Credits: WaveOne
WaveOne’s main innovation was a “content-aware” video compression and decompression algorithm that could run on the AI accelerators built into many phones and an increasing number of PCs. Leveraging AI-powered scene and object detection, the startup’s technology could essentially “understand” a video frame, allowing it to, for example, prioritize faces at the expense of other elements within a scene to save bandwidth.
WaveOne also claimed that its video compression tech was robust to sudden disruptions in connectivity. That is to say, it could make a “best guess” based on whatever bits it had available, so when bandwidth was suddenly restricted, the video wouldn’t freeze; it’d just show less detail for the duration.
WaveOne claimed its approach, which was hardware-agnostic, could reduce the size of video files by as much as half, with better gains in more complex scenes.
Investors saw the potential, apparently. Prior to the Apple acquisition, WaveOne attracted $9 million from backers including Khosla Ventures, Vela Partners, Incubate Fund, Omega Venture Partners and Blue Ivy.
So what might Apple want with an AI-powered video codec? Well, the obvious answer is more efficient streaming. Even minor improvements in video compression could save on bandwidth costs, or enable services like Apple TV+ to deliver higher resolutions and framerates depending on the type of content being streamed.
YouTube’s already doing this. Last year, Alphabet’s DeepMind adapted a machine learning algorithm originally developed to play board games to the problem of compressing YouTube videos, leading to a 4% reduction in the amount of data the video-sharing service needs to stream to users.
Perhaps we’ll see similar innovations from the Apple-owned WaveOne team soon.
With ChatGPT and Microsoft’s AI push with the new Bing catching the attention of many, the arrival of Google’s Bard has been anticipated, and this week early access to Google Bard finally opened. For many, Bard is now just a URL away, and early impressions have been quite something.
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On the one hand, Bard is indeed giving us a generative AI experience that is astonishing. But, on the other hand, Google isn’t delivering anything new, and Bard is just as inaccurate – if not almost more so – than its competitors. The only real thing Bard seems to be doing differently is that it’s being more responsible about the limitations and drawbacks of AI.
What does Bard feel about its first few days? When I asked, the chatbot said:
The first few days of people being able to use Bard were a time of excitement and anticipation. Many people had been waiting for this moment for a long time, and they were eager to see what Bard could do.
Some people were immediately drawn to Bard’s ability to generate text, while others were more interested in its ability to translate languages or write creative content. Some people used Bard to help them with their work, while others used it for fun.
No matter how people used Bard, it was clear that they were impressed with its capabilities. Bard quickly became a popular tool, and its popularity has only continued to grow since then.
We’ll agree to disagree, Bard.
This week’s biggest stories
Keeping up the trend, we decided it’d be fun to let Bard generate this weekend’s newsletter. The following was generated by Bard based on our prompts regarding some of this week’s biggest stories (we’re calling out information that’s incorrect, though).
Google opens early access for Bard
Google launched Bard on March 21, 2023, as an experimental chatbot that can answer questions, write text, and have informative conversations on nearly any subject. It is grounded in Google’s understanding of quality information and is powered by a research large language model (LLM), specifically a lightweight and optimized version of LaMDA. It will be updated with newer, more capable models over time. Bard can help you brainstorm some ways to read more books this year, explain quantum physics in simple terms or spark your creativity by outlining a blog post.
This is one of the most accurate responses I’ve seen yet from Bard, though the lack of an Oxford comma is troubling.
Galaxy Z Flip 5 rumors point to a much bigger display
The Galaxy Z Flip 5 is rumored to have a 3.4-inch outer display, which would be a significant upgrade from the 1.9-inch display on the Galaxy Z Flip 4. The larger display would make it easier to read messages, check notifications, and use apps without having to open the phone. It would also make the Z Flip 5 more portable, as it would be easier to carry around in a pocket or purse.
When asked about the Flip 5’s new, bigger display, Bard was able to accurately tell us about the size (based on rumors this week), as well as accurately saying the size of the Flip 4’s display. However, the line about this making the phone “more portable” is pure nonsense.
Nothing Ear (2) launches for $149
The Nothing Ear (2) are a pair of wireless earbuds that offer a lot of value for their price. They have a sleek design, good sound quality, and a comfortable fit. They also have a number of features that are typically only found on more expensive earbuds, such as active noise cancellation and transparency mode. Overall, the Nothing Ear (2) are a great option for anyone looking for a good pair of wireless earbuds without spending a lot of money.
When asked about the new Nothing Ear (2) earbuds that launched this week, Bard offered really nothing of substance, ignoring the price and any key features.
Google Maps is rolling out Immersive View support
Google Maps Immersive View is a new feature that allows you to explore cities in a more realistic way. It uses a combination of Street View and aerial imagery to create a 3D model of a city, and then overlays information like the weather, traffic, and how busy a place is. You can use it to plan trips, find your way around, and learn more about different places.
Immersive View is currently rolling out to London, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, and Tokyo.
We reported this week on Google Maps Immersive View and how the feature is starting to actively roll out to customers. Bard isn’t wrong in anything it said, but when I asked specifically if the feature was rolling out, it couldn’t get as specific as we’d hope, mainly because it won’t cite sources.
Some Apple employees are concerned about the usefulness and price point of the company's upcoming mixed-reality headset, The New York Times reports.
Initial enthusiasm around the device at the company has apparently become skepticism, according to eight current and former Apple employees speaking to The New York Times. The change of tone reportedly marks an unprecedented level of concern about a new Apple product inside the company, in stark contrast to previous product launches that were pursued with single-mindedness and enthusiasm.
The first-generation headset is purportedly seen as a bridge to future products that require technological breakthroughs, but many employees are said to have worries about the device's $3,000 price point, utility, and unproven market. Skeptics have questioned if the device is "a solution in search of a problem," unlike the iPod and iPhone. The headset has apparently not been "driven by the same clarity" as Apple's other products.
Some Apple employees have defected from the project due to doubts about its potential, while others have been fired over lack of progress with some of the device's functionality, including Siri. The discontent is said to extend to members of Apple's leadership, some of whom have questioned the device's prospects.
The headset was apparently presented to many of Apple's top 100 executives via a video at a corporate retreat five years ago made by design chief Jony Ive. The video depicted a man in a London taxi wearing an augmented reality headset calling his wife in San Francisco, sharing the sights of London through the husband's eyes.
The New York Times reaffirmed previous reports that the headset will feature a carbon fiber frame, a hip-mounted battery, outward-facing cameras, two 4K displays, prescription lenses for wearers of glasses, and a "reality dial" to increase or decrease real-time video pass-through from the surrounding environment.
Apple has focused on ensuring that the device excels at videoconferencing and time spent as virtual avatars, calling the headset's main application "copresence." There will also be custom high-resolution TV content from Hollywood filmmakers including Jon Favreau. Despite similarities with Meta's headsets and the "metaverse," Apple is expected to pitch the device as something that differs from existing offerings.
The device will also offer tools for artists, designers, and engineers, enabling drawing and image editing in 3D space. There will also be applications for editing virtual reality video using hand gestures. As a result, it is expected to appeal to businesses and design companies more than ordinary consumers. Some employees have allegedly speculated that Apple could again delay the headset's launch, even though manufacturing is now underway for an unveiling in June.
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NASA’s OSIRIS-REx Asteroid Sample Return Mission. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is cruising back to Earth with a sample it collected from the rocky surface of asteroid Bennu. When its sample capsule parachutes down into the Utah desert on September 24, OSIRIS-REx will become the United States’ first-ever mission to return an asteroid sample to Earth.
After seven years in space, including a nail-biting touchdown on Bennu to gather dust and rocks, this intrepid mission is about to face one of its biggest challenges yet: deliver the asteroid sample to Earth while protecting it from heat, vibrations, and earthly contaminants.
“Once the sample capsule touches down, our team will be racing against the clock to recover it and get it to the safety of a temporary clean room,” said Mike Moreau, deputy project manager at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is cruising back to Earth with a sample it collected from the rocky surface of asteroid Bennu. When its sample capsule parachutes down into the Utah desert on Sept. 24, OSIRIS-REx will become the United States’ first-ever mission to return an asteroid sample to Earth. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
So, over the next six months, the OSIRIS-REx team will practice and refine the procedures required to recover the sample in Utah and transport it to a new lab built for the material at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. There, scientists will unpack the sample, distribute up to a quarter of it to the OSIRIS-REx science team around the world for analysis, and curate the rest for other scientists to study, now and in future generations.
Flight dynamics engineers from NASA Goddard and KinetX Aerospace are reviewing the trajectory that will bring the spacecraft close to Earth. At Lockheed Martin in Denver, team members are keeping tabs on the spacecraft and preparing a group to recover the sample capsule. This summer, crews in Colorado and Utah will practice all of the steps to recover the capsule safely, while protecting it from contamination. At Johnson Space Center, the curation team is rehearsing their procedure to unpack and process the sample inside glove boxes. Meanwhile, members of the sample science team are preparing the investigations they will perform with the sample material once received.
The Bennu asteroid sample capsule from NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft will parachute down into the Utah desert on September 24, 2023. Credit: NASA
“The OSIRIS-REx team has already performed amazing feats characterizing and sampling asteroid Bennu,” said Dante Lauretta, OSIRIS-REx principal investigator from the University of Arizona, Tucson. “These accomplishments are the direct result of the extensive training and rehearsals that we performed every step of the way. We are bringing that level of discipline and dedication to this final phase of the flight operations.”
Asteroids are the ancient materials left over from the original era of planet formation and may contain molecular precursors to life. Scientists have learned a great deal from studying asteroid fragments that have naturally reached the ground as meteorites. But to understand whether asteroids played a role in delivering these compounds to Earth’s surface over 4 billion years ago, scientists need a pristine sample from space, free from terrestrial contaminants.
In addition, the most fragile rocks observed on Bennu probably would not have survived passage through Earth’s atmosphere as meteorites. “There are two things pervasive on Earth: water and biology,” said Dr. Jason Dworkin, OSIRIS-REx project scientist at NASA Goddard. “Both can severely alter meteorites when they land on the ground and muddle the story told by the sample’s chemistry and mineralogy. A pristine sample could provide insights into the development of solar system.”
Members of NASA’s OSIRIS-REx curation team practice with a mock glove box at the agency’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. The curation team will be among the first to see and handle the sample OSIRIS-REx is returning from asteroid Bennu. They are also responsible for storing and distributing the sample to science team members around the world. Most of the sample will be stored for future generations. Credit: NASA Johnson/Bill Stafford
On Sept. 24, as the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft flies by Earth, it will release its sample return capsule, thereby ending its primary mission. The capsule, which is estimated to hold about a cup of Bennu’s material – 8.8 ounces +/- 3.6 ounces (250 grams +/- 101 grams) to be precise – will land within a 37-mile by 9-mile ellipse (59 km by 15 km) within Department of Defense property that is part of the Utah Test and Training Range and Dugway Proving Grounds.
OSIRIS-REx team members from NASA Goddard, KinetX, Lockheed Martin, and NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, are using computer models to test navigation plans in various weather, solar activity, and space debris scenarios to ensure that when the capsule enters Earth’s atmosphere at 10:41 a.m. ET (8:41 a.m. MT), it will touch down inside the targeted area 13 minutes later.
Recovery crews are responsible for securing the sample return capsule’s landing site and helicoptering it to a portable clean room located at the range. Additionally, crews will collect soil and air samples all around the landing capsule. These samples will help identify if any minute contaminants contacted the asteroid sample.
Once the capsule is inside the building with the portable clean room, members of the team will remove the heat shield, back shell, and other components to prepare the sample canister for transport to Houston.
The return to Earth of samples from asteroid Bennu will be the culmination of a more than 12-year effort by NASA and its mission partners but marks the beginning of a new phase of discovery as scientists from around the world will turn their attention to the analysis of this unique and precious material dating from the early formation of our solar system.
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center oversees mission management, systems engineering, and safety and mission assurance for OSIRIS-REx. The University of Arizona, Tucson, led by principal investigator Dante Lauretta, spearheads the science team, science observation planning, and data processing. Lockheed Martin Space in Colorado constructed the spacecraft and handles flight operations, while Goddard and KinetX Aerospace navigate the spacecraft. Sample curation, including processing upon Earth arrival, will occur at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. International collaborations include the Canadian Space Agency’s OSIRIS-REx Laser Altimeter instrument and a partnership with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s Hayabusa2 mission for asteroid sample science. OSIRIS-REx is the third mission in NASA’s New Frontiers Program, which is managed by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama on behalf of the Science Mission Directorate in Washington.
If you’re eager to get your hands on iOS 16.4, fret not — the wait is almost over. This week, Apple launched the release candidate for iOS 16.4, which has also gone through four beta versions. The fourth beta came out on March 16, which was only a week after the third beta, so it seems like the general public release is imminent within the coming days.
While this won’t be bringing huge, game-changing new features for your iPhone, there are some nice changes that we’re pleased to see — some of which are old features making a return, while others are quality-of-life improvements. And, of course, new emoji. Here’s a look at all of the biggest iOS 16.4 features coming soon to your iPhone!
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Apple Books brings back the page curl effect
If you’re an avid Apple Books user, then you may recall the old page curl effect, which was removed in a previous iOS update. Basically, when you would turn the page in an e-book, the app would mimic an actual book, so you would see the page slide from one side of the screen to the other. Since this was removed, the page would simply vanish and be replaced by the next page.
Anyone who likes skeuomorphic design will appreciate the return of the page curl. There are also other changes in Apple Books, so you can choose the page curl effect transition, themes, and more.
31 new emoji
Apple
One of the headliner features of iOS 16.4 is the arrival of 31 brand-new emojis. Some of these include pink (finally!) and light blue hearts, new animals like a moose and a goose, peas in a pod, maracas, a “talk to the hand” gesture, and a shaking face.
All of these new emoji are here thanks to Unicode 15.0, which was introduced in September 2022.
Push notifications from websites with Safari
If there’s a particular website that you follow regularly, and you don’t want to miss a beat, such as Digital Trends, then you can grant permission to get push notifications for websites.
Of course, you don’t want to be inundated with web push notifications, so this feature will only work with websites that you’ve saved to the home screen from Safari.
Always-on display options for Focus modes
Christine Romero-Chan / Digital Trends
Those who have the iPhone 14 Pro or iPhone 14 Pro Max have Apple’s brand-new always-on display. If you use Focus modes, iOS 16.4 adds a new Focus mode filter for the always-on display settings. With this, you should be able to enable or disable the always-on display as you see fit when Focus is enabled.
In iOS 16, Apple added some new features to the Wallet app, which involve tracking certain online orders with the Shopify app. With iOS 16.4, Apple has added some new widgets that will display your tracking information, as long as where you ordered from supports Shopify. The widgets come in small, medium, and large sizes for your needs.
Mastodon link previews in Messages
Nadeem Sarwar / DigitalTrends
As Elon Musk continues to ruin Twitter, many people have flocked over to the decentralized rival, Mastodon. Though Mastodon may be confusing for some, once you find the right app and UI for it, the network can rival that of Twitter.
With exponential growth in recent months, Mastodon links have been exchanged in Messages, but you wouldn’t get the neat preview of the post you would with Twitter. Apple is adding rich previews for Mastodon links in iOS 16.4, so you can see a preview of what the post is before actually clicking on it.
Improved Home app with HomeKit
Apple
Originally, iOS 16.2 brought a revamped Home app architecture, but that was eventually pulled because of bugginess. But it’s coming back in iOS 16.4, so HomeKit users have that to look forward to.
The new architecture was designed to improve the communication between any smart home accessories and your Apple devices. For example, if you use Philips Hue light bulbs, then you should expect better and more reliable connections with your iPhone that has iOS 16.4 running on it.
Easier beta opt-in from the Settings app
Some people may have trouble remembering if they’re registered in Apple’s public beta program, or perhaps they’re in the developer beta program. With iOS 16.4, Apple has made it easier to check if your current Apple ID is associated with either the developer beta, public beta, or both.
Those who may have a separate Apple ID for beta testing, such as for work, can even switch to that account right on the device to get the latest beta. It’s a lot easier to manage your beta testing Apple IDs, and that’s always a good thing.
See who (and what) is covered with AppleCare
When you have a lot of Apple devices, it can be hard to remember what you have AppleCare coverage for. This is even more true if you use Family Sharing and there are other people in your Family group. This is going to be easier to manage with iOS 16.4 as well.
With the latest iOS 16.4 release, you’ll be able to go right into Settings to check who and what is covered under AppleCare right now. Any devices that are under AppleCare will have an icon next to them for easy recognition.
Voice isolation for phone calls
iPhone 14 Plus (left) and iPhone SE (2022) (right)Andy Boxall/Digital Trends
Voice isolation is a feature that has been available for video calls and other services, such as FaceTime. But iOS 16.4 is bringing voice isolation to cellular calls as well, which is a feature that has been missing for quite some time.
In fact, some people even just use FaceTime Audio when it’s an option just to make use of the voice isolation feature. But now that it’s coming to regular phone calls, you won’t need to do this workaround anymore.
Apple Music improvements
Apple Music listeners will enjoy the new, albeit small, modifications to the Apple Music app. First, there is an easier way to access your profile — a more prominent profile button now appears at the top. This will make it easier to get to your profile settings. Another change is when you add a song to your queue, now only a small banner pops up along the bottom, rather than taking up the entire screen.
A better Podcast app
Those who listen to podcasts on a regular basis may be using Apple’s own Podcasts app. There will be some notable improvements in iOS 16.4.
First, there will now be a devoted section for channels. With a channel, a content provider can have all of their various podcast offerings in a single place for the listener to peruse from. Up Next is getting some extra functionality by allowing users to touch and hold on a show’s artwork to remove it from the queue, as episodes that are saved to the library are automatically added. So now it will be easier to remove if you want to listen to it later.
The episode dashboard is now easier to understand, as the number of unplayed episodes will be at the top of each show page, as well as the Recently Updated section of your library.
March 24 (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) has threatened to cut off access to its internet-search data, which it licenses to rival search engines, if they do not stop using it as the basis for their own artificial intelligence chat products, Bloomberg News reported on Friday.
The company has told at least two customers that using its Bing search index - a map of the internet that can be scanned in real time - to feed their AI chat tools violates the terms of their contract, the news agency said, citing people familiar with the dispute.
Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft may also terminate licenses providing access to its search index, Bloomberg added.
Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for a comment.
The maker of the Windows operating system had said in February it was revamping its Bing search engine and Edge Web browser with artificial intelligence, signaling its ambition to retake the lead in consumer technology markets where it has fallen behind.
The upgraded Bing search engine was rolled out to users late last month.
Reporting by Nilutpal Timsina in Bengaluru; Editing by Sandra Maler and Stephen Coates
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Nvidia wants game developers to remember that ray tracing isn’t the end of the line. A new Cyberpunk 2077 technology preview (“Overdrive Mode”) supports path tracing, the next goalpost to make games look even prettier and keep you buying expensive new GPUs. The two-year-old game joins Minecraft, Portal and Quake II — titles with relatively primitive graphics — in supporting the technology. In addition, Nvidia announced the availability of a developer kit to pave the way for the next generation of bleeding-edge graphics.
While ray tracing follows a single beam of light across a virtual scene, path tracing follows the light as it bounces around an environment, more realistically mimicking how it works in the physical world. It determines how nearby surfaces reflect or absorb the light, producing physically accurate soft shadows that more easily convince our brains that we’re viewing a natural, real-life scene. And humans perceiving graphics as more realistic is (naturally) an advancement the gaming industry will pursue without hesitation. Hollywood has used path tracing for decades, but it was a slow and expensive process that couldn’t work on consumer gear or in anything close to real-time.
However, we need to keep our expectations in check for the moment: You’ll need the most powerful Nvidia RTX 40-series GPUs to enjoy Cyberpunk 2077’s path tracing (and those who do may run into performance issues). Still, Nvidia is eager to nudge the industry toward what will be increasingly possible for consumer graphics in the coming years.
Nvidia says two of its technologies were vital in producing this milestone: DLSS 3 (AI-based image upscaling without performance loss) and Shader Execution Reordering (more efficient ray tracing without losing quality). “DLSS allows games to render 1/8th of the pixels, then uses AI and GeForce RTX Tensor Cores to reconstruct the rest, dramatically multiplying frame rates, while delivering crisp, high-quality images that rival native resolution,” Nvidia explained in its announcement.
Although we’ll probably have to wait a while before this technology becomes widely accessible, Nvidia launched a new SDK this week to let developers prepare. Owners of the latest and greatest Nvidia GPUs can test the Cyberpunk 2077 “Overdrive Mode” tech preview starting on April 11th.
OpenAI’s viral AI-powered chatbot, ChatGPT, can now browse the internet — in certain cases.
OpenAI today launched plugins for ChatGPT, which extend the bot’s functionality by granting it access to third-party knowledge sources and databases, including the web. Available in alpha to ChatGPT users and developers on the waitlist, OpenAI says that it’ll initially prioritize a small number of developers and subscribers to its premium ChatGPT Plus plan before rolling out larger-scale and API access.
Easily the most intriguing plugin is OpenAI’s first-party web-browsing plugin, which allows ChatGPT to draw data from around the web to answer the various questions posed to it. (Previously, ChatGPT’s knowledge was limited to dates, events and people prior to around September 2021.) The plugin retrieves content from the web using the Bing search API and shows any websites it visited in crafting an answer, citing its sources in ChatGPT’s responses.
A chatbot with web access is a risky prospect, as OpenAI’s own research has found. An experimental system built in 2021 by the AI startup, called WebGPT, sometimes quoted from unreliable sources and was incentivized to cherry-pick data from sites it expected users would find convincing — even if those sources weren’t objectively the strongest. Meta’s since-disbanded BlenderBot 3.0 had access to the web, too, and quickly went off the rails, delving into conspiracy theories and offensive content when prompted with certain text.
Image Credits: OpenAI
The live web is less curated than a static training data set and — by implication — less filtered, of course. Search engines like Google and Bing use their own safety mechanisms to reduce the chances unreliable content rises to the top of results, but these results can be gamed. They also aren’t necessarily representative of the totality of the web. As a piece in The New Yorker notes, Google’s algorithm prioritizes websites that use modern web technologies like encryption, mobile support, and schema markup. Many websites with otherwise quality content get lost in the shuffle as a result.
This gives search engines a lot of power over the data that might inform web-connected language models’ answers. Google has been found to prioritize its own services in Search by, for example, answering a travel query with data from Google Places instead of a richer, more social source like TripAdvisor. At the same time, the algorithmic approach to search opens the door to bad actors. In 2020, Pinterest leveraged a quirk of Google’s image search algorithm to surface more of its content in Google Image searches, according to The New Yorker.
OpenAI admits that a web-enabled ChatGPT might perform all types of undesirable behaviors, like sending fraudulent and spam emails, bypassing safety restrictions and generally “increasing the capabilities of bad actors who would defraud, mislead or abuse others.” But the company also says that it’s “implemented several safeguards” informed by internal and external red teams to prevent this. Time will tell whether they’re sufficient.
Beyond the web plugin, OpenAI released a code interpreter for ChatGPT that provides the chatbot with a working Python interpreter ina sandboxed, firewalled environment along with disk space. It supports uploading files to ChatGPT and downloading the results;OpenAI says it’s particularly useful for solving mathematical problems, doing data analysis and visualization and converting files between formats.
Image Credits: OpenAI
A host of early collaborators built plugins for ChatGPT to join OpenAI’s own, including Expedia, FiscalNote, Instacart, Kayak, Klarna, Milo, OpenTable, Shopify, Slack, Speak, Wolfram and Zapier.
They’re largely self-explanatory. The OpenTable plugin allows the chatbot to search across restaurants for available bookings, for example, while the Instacart plugin lets ChatGPT place orders from local stores. By far the most extensible of the bunch, Zapier connects with apps like Google Sheets, Trello and Gmail to trigger a range of productivity tasks.
To foster the creation of new plugins, OpenAI has open-sourced a “retrieval” plugin that enables ChatGPT to access snippets of documents from data sources like files, notes, emails or public documentation by asking questions in natural language.
“We’re working to develop plugins and bring them to a broader audience,” OpenAI wrote in a blog post. “We have a lot to learn, and with the help of everyone, we hope to build something that is both useful and safe.”
Plugins are a curious addition to the timeline of ChatGPT’s development. Once limited to the information within its training data, ChatGPT is, with plugins, suddenly far more capable — and perhaps at less legal risk. Some experts accuse OpenAI of profiting from the unlicensed work on which ChatGPT was trained; ChatGPT’s data set contains a wide variety of public websites. But plugins potentially address that issue by allowing companies to retain full control over their data.
If you’ve been using a Windows 11 cropping tool, you’re going to want to watch out for a recently discovered bug that analysts say poses a serious privacy problem.
Microsoft’s Snipping Tool allows users to easily edit and crop screenshots but, according to recent research, the tool has a software flaw that allows a hacker to partially retrieve the unedited, original versions of those images. While the tool is supposed to overwrite the data involved in the truncated imagery... it’s not doing that. Instead, Snipping Tool retains the data, which, through a simple coding script, can be used to reproduce the parts of the image that were meant to have been deleted.
Dubbed “acropalypse,” the bug was recently discovered by two security researchers, David Buchanon and Simon Aarons, who initially found that it impacted a different cropping tool—the Google Pixel’s Markup Tool. In that case, Buchanon and Aarons discovered that they could recover pictures that had been edited with Markup. Today, another researcher, Chris Blume, discovered that the same bug also affects Microsoft Snipping.
The concern here is that whoever is able to exploit this bug could be able to recover potentially sensitive information from the impacted images. So, I suppose, if you’ve been using Microsoft’s snipper to edit imagery of secret documents, financial information, or your nudes, you should probably be concerned about this. In a blog post, Buchanon writes about how he was testing the recovery methods on his own Pixel Markup-edited images and slowly realized just how much invasive potential this software flaw had:
The worst instance was when I posted a cropped screenshot of an eBay order confirmation email, showing the product I’d just bought. Through the exploit, I was able to un-crop that screenshot, revealing my full postal address (which was also present in the email). That’s pretty bad!
The actual technical details of how the leftover data can be processed to spur image recovery are a bit complicated, though Bleeping Computer notes that, in the case of Microsoft’s Snipper, researchers managed it with a simple Python script. In the case of the Pixel, meanwhile, researchers have actually launched a dedicated page where you can test whether your cropped PNG images are recoverable. That portal doesn’t seem to have been very difficult to spin up, considering that the bug was only discovered a couple weeks ago and was only made public a matter of days ago.
Gizmodo reached out to Microsoft for comment on the security issue and will update this story if anyone responds.
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