Tech

The “Grok 2 + Aurora” option has vanished from Grok’s model selector menu only a day after it appeared, Engadget reports, replaced by “Grok 2 + FLUX beta” instead. The model still makes photorealistic images, but it was less willing to reproduce celebrities when I asked.

X owner Elon Musk wrote yesterday that the photorealistic and largely unrestricted model is a beta “internal image generator.”

Update: Added testing detail.

Microsoft had stopped offering 24H2 to gamers with certain Ubisoft games installed, but now it will for Avatar: Frontlines of Pandora and Star Wars Outlaws, Microsoft writes in an update spotted by XDA Developers.

Windows Update will offer the download within 48 hours of applying a “temporary” patch, the company says. Assassin’s Creed games like Valhalla remain affected and would preclude your system, though.

It’s been two years since Apple dropped its plan to detect child abuse imagery using client-side iCloud scanning.

Now, the New York Times reports on a class-action lawsuit filed in California saying it harmed a group of 2,680 victims by failing to "implement those designs or take any measures to detect and limit" CSAM, like using Microsoft's PhotoDNA.

Under law, victims of child sexual abuse are entitled to a minimum of $150,000 in damages, which means the total award...could exceed $1.2 billion

Trump mentioned his dinner with the billionaire Amazon founder and Washington Post owner during his interview with Kristen Welker for Meet the Press today, according to NBC News.

He’s heard from Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon and owner of The Washington Post: “We’re having dinner,” he said.

Bezos, who didn’t get along with the President-elect before, recently said he feels “optimistic” about his second term.

A new Apple TV Plus movie called The Gorge sees Miles Teller (Top Gun: Maverick) and Anya Taylor-Joy (Furiosa) standing guard on opposite sides of a mysterious gorge.

They’re only supposed to prevent whatever’s in the gorge from escaping, and they’re not to have any contact with one another — a rule they break, of course. The Gorge debuts on February 24th.

While investigating apps that let livestream viewers pay to watch child abuse, The New York Times reports that it found “more than 80 apps that advertised children” on the Apple and Google app stores.

The livestream apps downloaded from Apple and Google illustrate an even darker aspect of the social media technology boom, particularly for children living in poverty in developing countries. There, with the ease of a smartphone, parents and other adults can connect with pedophiles in the United States and elsewhere who pay to watch — and direct — criminal behavior.

Trigger warning: This Times story includes descriptions of child sexual abuse.

Frog Design’s Hartmut Esslinger once created a slick, but unrealistic-for-the-time handheld Mac concept using Frog’s Snow White design language.

One 3D-printed chassis, a Raspberry Pi 4, and a 3rd-generation iPad display later, YouTuber Kevin Noki shows a functional version they made, using measurements apparently provided by Esslinger himself — with a floppy drive, a full complement of ports, and a pleasingly clicky keyboard, to boot.

Two days after someone shot and killed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in Manhattan, police located the “distinctive” backpack the attacker was wearing. They removed it from Central Park, unopened, using an excavator.

As many people, including Peak Design CEO Pete Dearing, noticed, it appears to be the company’s Everyday V1 backpack, as shown in a photo obtained by ABC News.

Whether it’s during Bandcamp Friday or not, buying music sends more money to musicians than playing a subscription stream. So, it might be worth celebrating this event where Bandcamp waives its cut of the money you spend one last time for 2024 as it continues for the next seven hours or so.

Bandcamp has changed hands twice and had significant layoffs since the pandemic tradition started; we’ll see if it continues in 2025.

TikTok is running out of time and legal recourse to avoid a US ban unless its China-based parent company ByteDance sells it. Here’s the tl;dr on why a three-judge panel unanimously ruled to uphold the law that could expel TikTok, and what comes next.

I’m still working on my GPD Win Max 2 review, and there’s now a more powerful model on sale. It’s pricier at $1,500 — but the 8840U version I’m using is now discounted to $1,000, so that’s great!

This is the best tiny Windows machine I’ve used, though I find I want a mouse. It’s also an OK handheld.

The satellite internet company received a Pentagon contract that will give 2,500 Starlink terminals access to Starshield, its secure satellite service for governments, according to Bloomberg. With this contract, Ukraine will have a total of 3,000 terminals connected to Starshield.

OpenAI just announced an alpha program for a new tool (called reinforcement fine-tuning) that lets developers train models on specific tasks, using example problems and answers. In a post after the livestream announcement, CEO Sam Altman said this will make it “really easy to create expert models in specific domains with very little training data.”

From Perplexity’s blog post:

Today, we’re excited to welcome over a dozen new partners to Perplexity’s Publishers’ Program: ADWEEK, Blavity, DPReview, Gear Patrol, The Independent, Lee Enterprises, Los Angeles Times, MediaLab, Mexico News Daily, Minkabu Infonoid, NewsPicks, Prisa Media, RTL Germany brands stern and ntv, and World History Encyclopedia.

Perplexity kicked off the program earlier this year by signing deals with Time, Der Spiegel, Fortune, and others.

A new Llama 3.3 70B model dropped today, and Meta’s VP of genAI said it matches the performance of the larger 405B version, but runs cheaper and lighter. They also claimed this new model beats competitors Google, OpenAI, and Amazon on key tests like MMLU.

Competitors also really love overlapping their AI announcements — Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and xAI have all dropped announcements this week.