571: Old Wine New Bottle

Big Tech's latest AI flex? More like a desperate grab for attention. Google, OpenAI, and Microsoft are hyping up underwhelming updates while Sam Altman spills the tea on their shady motives.

Sponsored By:

• Coder QA: Take $1 a month off your membership for a year, and contribute to our show directly! Promo Code: darthjarjar

Links:

• 💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike — Strike is a lightning-powered app that lets you quickly and cheaply grab sats in over 36 countries.
• 📻 Boost with Fountain.FM — Fountain 1.0 has a new UI, upgrades, and super simple Strike integration for easy Boosts.
• Google's I/O 2024 recap is as tedious as the full event — The clear focus of I/O this year is AI, as the technology and how it integrates with Google products took up the entire 2-hours runtime of the keynote.
• We're 'at least a decade away' from solving AI, says NYU Professor Gary Marcus — Gary Marcus, New York University professor emeritus, joins 'Squawk on the Street' to discuss artificial intelligence implications, the future of generative AI, investor decisions, and more.
• Microsoft is bringing ‘Windows Volumetric Apps’ to Meta Quest headsets — Details are slim, but an API is nigh.
• An Xbox VR headset is on the way, but it’s a ‘limited edition’ Meta Quest — Microsoft and Meta’s VR partnership expands to Xbox-branded headsets.
• Microsoft unveils Copilot+ PCs with generative AI capabilities baked in — Microsoft is calling its version Copilot+ PCs, which CEO Satya Nadella described as a "new class of Windows PCs."
• Inside Microsoft’s mission to take down the MacBook Air — Microsoft is convinced its new Copilot Plus PCs will beat Apple’s M3 processor and spark a new generation of Windows laptops.
• New Windows AI feature records everything you’ve done on your PC — Recall uses AI features "to take images of your active screen every few seconds."
• Sam Altman on X — Ilya and OpenAI are going to part ways.
• OpenAI departures: Why can’t former employees talk, but the new ChatGPT release can? — If a departing employee declines to sign the document, or if they violate it, they can lose all vested equity they earned during their time at the company, which is likely worth millions of dollars. One former employee, Daniel Kokotajlo, who posted that he quit OpenAI “due to losing confidence that it would behave responsibly around the time of AGI,” has confirmed publicly that he had to surrender what would have likely turned out to be a huge sum of money in order to quit without signing the document.
• Scarlett Johansson was 'shocked, angered' by ChatGPT voice that sounded like her — The “Her” actor released a statement following OpenAI pulling its “Sky” voice from ChatGPT.
• Hayden Field on X — Just received this statement from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman about the Scarlett Johansson voice controversy.
• OpenAI Pulls Johansson Soundalike Sky’s Voice From ChatGPT — Company said it was not trying to imitate Johansson’s voice