I was flummoxed this week. My wife sent me an Amazon link touting an AI-powered toothbrush. The toothbrush uses brushing data flossed from other brushers on the Internet to adjust the brush profile used to clean your teeth. I swear.

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: Amazon offers free AWS Cloud skills training, voice synthesizing company conducts fake Steve Jobs interview, and Microsoft and Facebook bore you in the metaverse. 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.

PSA: AMAZON OFFERING FREE CLOUD SKILLS TRAINING

It’s no secret I’m a fan of Amazon Web Services, Amazon’s cloud computing infrastructure. This week, AWS announced free AWS Skills training at training centers at Headquarters in Seattle, Washington and HQ2 in DC. What’s notable here is that this training is free and in-person, Amazon is announcing more skills training centers will open in other locations in the country in 2023. It’ll still cost money to take their certification exams, but you can gain the knowledge to ace those exams free of charge. Yes, AWS is offering these courses virtually. This is an inexpensive way to get in the growing field of cloud computing and get certified.

MICROSOFT AND META BRING BORING OFFICE MEETINGS TO METAVERSE

We surely love the dystopian. Just when you think you’ve settled down for the weekend, and donned your VR headset to journey to the metaverse, you get interrupted by an avatar from the office asking you about your TPS reports. You decide to take the call, and the next thing you know, you’re whisked from an iHeartRadio Roblox party back to a boring ass virtual conference room.

Microsoft and Facebook-Meta have partnered with each other to bring office telecons to the godforsaken metaverse. Microsoft will be bringing Teams, Office, and Xbox Gaming Services to Meta’s Quest VR headsets. On the software end, Meta will allow people working in their Wookrooms product to join Microsoft Teams meetings and vice verse in-VR with their preferred avatars. Just don’t show up wearing your Bangalore avatar armor. Don’t fall asleep.

FAKE INTERVIEW BETWEEN STEVE JOBS AND JOE ROGAN LATEST AI STUNT

I know it sounds like I’m hating on the AI game, but I’m not. I’m hating on the players. AI technology abuse is just running rampant. A Dubai-based voice synthesizing company, Play.ht, is running a PR stunt called Podcast.ai to advertise its voice synthesizing services. The stunt features an interview with Steve Jobs, who is dead, and Joe Rogan. Steve Jobs’ voice was synthesized using machine learning models, and his interview responses were AI-generated using GPT-3 an AI text generation algorithm. Steve Jobs’ voice experienced digital chop in areas, but it was pulled off. It just pains me that so much time is wasted on these toys, and right now people are wondering how to synthesize elected officials’ voices for nefarious means. Imagine a synthesized Joe Biden, or Hell Donald Trump, calling up someone at DoD.

Thanks for reading, have a great weekend.

Stay safe out there.

Hey there, fans of The Cloud. Our next episode covers the possibilities enabled by autonomous vehicles. We’re joined by Eric Werner, one of our friends from US Ignite. The next episode will drop in about a week. You can check out our latest episode, STEM Isn’t the Answer, now on your local podcast platforms.

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!

I’m in LIVE and in-person with Mark today!

Click, swipe, and tap on the interwebs and listen to me, Mark Starling, John, and the First News 570 crew. This week’s hot and fresh tech news: Google nerds predict AI will end humanity, Adobe announces mega deal, and Getty bans AI images. 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.

GOOGLE NERDS SAY AI WILL END HUMANITY

This is why I work with a non-profit working to bring more equitable AI outcomes. Last week, researchers from the University of Oxford and Google DeepMind’s researcher Marcus Hutter, published a controversial paper saying that a Super Intelligent AI is likely, and…the AI will eliminate humanity. The paper was published and has been peer reviewed by AI Magazine. Since the paper and story broke last week, Google DeepMind has walked back their involvement and disavowed the paper. Google has come out against the work on the paper and is stating that they make products that are within ethical guidelines. We are adopting AI and machine learning technologies at a continuously increasing rate. We should really be careful about how and where we adopt these technologies.

Me, seeing this headline after writing a reasonable paper @Google then losing my job alongside my Black female co-lead @timnitGebru: I bet the still-employed Google author referenced here is neither a woman, nor Black.
This is what disparate treatment looks like.
Prove me wrong? pic.twitter.com/b0C6q0caNs

— MMitchell (@mmitchell_ai) September 14, 2022

ADOBE TO ACQUIRE COLLAB TOOL FIGMA IN MEGA DEAL

In weekly mega deals this week, Adobe has announced plans to acquire the online collaboration and design tool, Figma, for $20 billion. Adobe announced the purchase last week as a cash and stock deal. Figma was founded 10 years ago by the creative designers, Dylan Field and Evan Wallace. Figma was competing against Adobe products since the beginning and Adobe decided to buy the company. What’s interesting about this deal is that it’s straining Microsoft’s relationship with Adobe. Microsoft developers use Figma to design the Office suite. Microsoft has moved many Office functions to the web and Adobe is trying to muscle in on that market. We’ll see what happens next.

GETTY IMAGES BANS AI GENERATED IMAGES

Rounding the AI conversation, AI generated art and images is finding its way in more and more places. Yesterday, Getty Images says it’s banning AI generated art and images from being sold on its platform. They’re enforcing the ban because copyright issues and licensing haven’t been worked out on the platform. Ordinary peoples can create interesting and even spectacular images using Stable Diffusion, DALL-E, Midjourney. Even yours truly has generated some really interesting images. Of course human artists are upset that computers are moving in on their territory. We have to figure out a balance between using AI to improve our lives and furthering the human experience, rather than cutting us out.

It’s been a busy week in the technoworld, and the last 24 hours have been overheating. Google loses its appeal in the EU’s anti-trust case, Twitter shareholders approve Elon Musk’s takeover bid, and the former Queen of England makes this week’s news.

Click, swipe, and tap on the interwebs and listen to me, Mark Starling, John, and the First News 570 crew. This week’s hot and fresh tech news: Apple watches, Apple phones, and China. 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.

EU SLAPS GOOGLE WITH RECORD ANTI-TRUST FINE

Yesterday, El Goog lost its appeal to being assessed a 4.125 billion, with a ‘B’ (that’s about $4 billion), euro fine by the EU General Court citing anti-trust activities the company took when forcing Android device manufacturers to use its Android operating system. The fine was levied in 2018. The EU accused Google of forcing Android phone manufacturers of favoring Google apps and browser instead of their own software or third-party apps. Google argues that it has created more choice for everyone and is disappointed with the court’s ruling. 4.125 billion euros sounds like a hefty sum, but is a drop in the bucket for Google.

TWITTER SHAREHOLDERS VOTE FOR MUSK DEAL LEADING TO COURT SHOWDOWN

A majority of Twitter shareholders have approved Elon Musk’s hostile takeover offer to buy Twitter for $44 billion. The approval came on Tuesday, one day after Twitter’s former security officer turned whistleblower, Peter Zatko, testified before Congress. Zatko said Twitter’s security is so lax that half the company can access user accounts. Twitter and Elon Musk are set to begin their 5-day trial on October 17th. Musk had sent Twitter a letter of termination as recently as Monday. He said, Twitter’s outgoing severance payment of $7 whole million violated the acquisition agreement.

QUEEN OF ENGLAND’S FLIGHT SETS ALL-TIME TRACKING RECORD

The Royal Air Force plane carrying the Queen of England’s coffin set a flight tracking record being the most tracked flight ever. Flightradar24 reports that almost 5 million people went online to follow the plane’s route from Edinborough to London. That number includes 4.79 million online and another 296 thousand people watching on YouTube. The previous record was held by Nancy Pelosi’s for her visit to Taiwan. 2.9 million tuned in to watch her fly.

Thanks for reading this week’s Top Tech News. We’re mixing down the latest episode of The Cloud. We’re dissecting STEM education and exploring its impact on today’s students. The episode will be dropping soon, so subscribe at thecloudpodcast.net.