It’s Sunday morning, which means it’s time for us to recount our winner and loser in tech from the final week.
Samsung launched two new mid-range updates to its A collection this week within the type of the Galaxy A54 and the Galaxy A34. Qualcomm introduced the Snapdragon 7 Plus Gen 2, whereas Spotify reassured music followers that its hi-res Spotify HiFi tier was nonetheless within the works.
Our winner this week is Valve as the corporate introduced some thrilling information relating to the Steam Deck, whereas Microsoft made a questionable choice within the midst of its latest Bing success.
Winner: Valve
Valve celebrated the Steam Deck’s first birthday with the information that the hand-held gaming PC could be included within the firm’s Steam Spring Sale.
Which means all three configurations might be listed at 10% off till the sale ends on March 23.
Extra particularly, the 64GB mannequin has dropped from £349 to £314.10, the 128GB model has gone from £459 to £412.10 and the 512GB Steam Deck has been lowered from £569 down to only £512.10.
Not solely that, however it can save you fairly a bit of money on video games within the sale, together with standard titles like Hades, Stray and Cyberpunk 2077. Meaning you will get the console and cross a few video games off your to-play listing abruptly.
We had been extremely impressed with the Steam Deck once we examined it out final yr. In the event you’re searching for a tool that’ll assist you to play loads of any PC sport on the go, you must positively try our assessment of the Steam Deck earlier than heading to the Steam sale to swipe one up for your self.
Loser: Microsoft
In the meantime, Microsoft caught flak for reportedly shedding its complete AI ethics workforce proper as the brand new ChatGPT-powered model of Bing is taking off.
In keeping with a report by Platformer, Microsoft has gotten rid of its AI organisation’s ethics and society workforce – a division of Microsoft devoted to making sure the corporate adheres to AI rules. The cuts got here as half of a bigger batch of layoffs which have affected round 10,000 staff throughout the corporate.
This information feels terribly timed contemplating Bing is lastly getting its hour within the highlight with the success of its newest replace. The brand new Bing leverages expertise from OpenAI, together with its ChatGPT-4 mannequin, the most recent and most superior model of the AI chatbot up to now.
In reality, we’d argue that there hasn’t been a extra necessary time for Microsoft to have an AI ethics workforce onboard.
The workforce had already been lower to round seven folks again in October as strain mounting by higher-ups resulted in different members of the workforce being relocated to completely different areas inside the organisation.
In keeping with assembly audio following the reorganisation of the workforce and obtained by Platformer, John Montgomery, company VP of AI at Microsoft, defined that CTO Kevin Scott and CEO Satya Nadella had been placing strain on its AI groups to implement OpenAI’s fashions sooner.
Now, the workforce has apparently been dismantled altogether, elevating questions on Microsoft’s strategy to AI and ethics.
