It’s a sad time in the blerd community.
A long time supporter, colleague, and friend, Hass Parrish, passed away yesterday. Hass is one of the co-founders of Blerdcon. The first and greatest Black Nerd Convention. Hass was a big supporter and booster of our projects. He and Hilton are a treasure to the blerd community and Hass was propping up in times when I was hurting professionally and personally. He will be missed.
It’s another Thursday, and I’m back on the air with Mark Starling, John, and the First News 570 crew. This week’s hot and fresh tech news: Ex-Google exec starts a rival search engine, Musk says he’s going to be Twitter…again, and Google announces a new video generating AI. You can listen to me and Mark Starling point and laugh at all things tech every Thursday at 643 am ET live on the radio or the iHeartRadio app.
ELON MUSK SAYS HE’LL BUY TWITTER AFTER ALL
In the culmination of an abusive relationship, Elon Musk has stated he will buy Twitter after all. This news is coming after he said he would, then said he wouldn’t, got dragged into court, and finally said he would. The Delaware court case has brought several interesting things to light. One of them being how so many tech luminaries have fawned over Musk and kissed his a$$ over text messages. The other being that these so called masters of the universe, really aren’t that sophisticated. Larry Ellison, the former CEO of Oracle, Marc Andreesen, inventor of Netscape and managing partner of Andreesen Horowitz, and others just said, I’ll give you hundreds of millions or a billion to Musk without even asking for due diligence. More due diligence is performed on the average person filling out a credit card application. These people live in another land.
There are a lot of questions accompanying this deal.
Who’s going to run Twitter?
Will Tesla’s value be impacted by his wild purchase? (Yes)
Does he have the money? (Maybe)
Will he have to sell more stock to raise it? (Yes)
Did Musk really delete Signal messages? (Probably)
EX-GOOGLE AD MAN LAUNCHES COOKIE FREE SEARCH ENGINE
Google’s former ad executive, Sridhar Ramaswamy, has launched his own search company after working for El Goog for 16 years. He launched Neeva because he believed Google and other technology companies have exploited consumer’s information to no end. His company was launched last year and has raised $77.5 million dollars as it launches in the UK, Ireland, and Germany. Neeva claims to not use any trackers on its consumers. It’s currently a free search service, but is offering a paid for subscription service for tracking free searching.
GOOGLE’S LATEST AI GENERATES HIGH DEF VIDEO FROM PROMPTS
The AI wars continue to heat up. We’ve waved philosophical about GPT-3’s ability to write passable text, Wall-E and Midjourney being able to generate images from prompts, and the onslaught of music generators. Yesterday, El Goog, of Alpha Go and Sentient/non-Sentient chatbots, announced Imagen Video. An AI service that can generate high definition video. Google announced Imagen in a research paper hailing how the AI can take stylistic cues from famous painters like Van Gogh and generate moving 3D objects while maintaining their structure. Google says the system works by taking in text prompts and generating ultra low resolution videos at 3 frames per second then upscaling it to high res. The training data, like most biased AI/ML tools, comes from the LAION-400M image data set. Imagen Video hasn’t been released to the public yet, and Google says it’ll be a while before it does. I know what the first thing some fool is going to generate…porn.
Thanks for reading and listening another week. Last month’s episode of The Cloud is clocking in as one of our more popular episodes. We’ll be speaking with an autonomous vehicles expert for this month’s edition. Listen out for it soon!