Computex 2023

Computex is an expo mostly for computer hardware and some software. This years Computex was based in Tapei, Taiwan.

It started off with Intel and Nvidia showing off their AI initiatives. Intel demos thier Meteor Lake (14th gen) CPUs with AI acceleration. Nvidia ACE brings AI to game characters, which would allow for lifelike conversations with NPCs. ACE generates the dialogue, speech, and the character animation to have facial expressions to match the tone of the conversation. The demo didn’t have a lot of emotion and the conversation wasn’t very interesting, but there is potential for AI NPCs in the future, just not now. Some other things that were announced on day 1 were some PCIe 5.0 SSDs, laptops with AMDs new laptop CPUs, and a lot of computer cases and power supplies.

Day 2 featured a 49 inch QD-OLED gaming monitor from ASUS. ASROCK showed off some Wi-Fi 7 motherboards and an 8K display. Cases and cooling products are still major parts of the expo. Noctua, one of the best cooling companies, announced their 2nd gen fans and NH-D15 CPU cooler. While there were many cases announced, the coolest one (pun intended) was a case that passively cools up to 600 Watts and cost $1000 from all of the metal needed. The last interesting component of day 2 was solid state cooling from Frore. Solid state means that there is no moving parts, which means no fans. This is useful for places that can not have fans in computers because of debris that might get clogged in fans. Eventually, solid state cooling might completely replace fans if it gets cheaper.

Day 3 was not as interesting. The most notable things were an overclocked core i9 reaching 7 GHz and liquid cooled SSDs. On the last day, Intel showed off their Ponte Vecchio data center GPU, which competes with Nvidia’s A100 GPU. It is faster in some areas but Nvidia is still the leader in AI compute power.

While generative AI is useful for writing papers, you always have to check for errors. Lawyers suing the Colombian airline Avianca submitted a brief where they used ChatGPT to write it. This resulted in the brief being full of previous cases that were just made up by ChatGPT. Lawyer Steven A. Schwartz admitted in an affidavit that he had used ChatGPT for his research. To verify the cases, he did the only reasonable thing: he asked the chatbot if it was lying. ChatGPT said that it was not lying and that the cases were real. It even gave sources of where these cases were from, which was Westlaw and LexisNexis. Both of these sources aren’t real either. This once again highlights the absurdity of using chatbots for research without double (or triple) checking their sources somewhere else.

Nvidiais now one of five U.S. companies that have a $1 trillion market value. The four other companies that currently have more than $1 trillion are Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Amazon. Nvidia’s stock value has tripled in less than eight months, reflecting the surge in interest in artificial intelligence following rapid advances in generative AI. Nvidia is currently the lead consumer and enterprise GPU manufacturer. While their consumer grade GPUs have not been selling well lately, their server GPUs, which are thousands of dollars, have been selling in the thousands.

The headset is coming this fall with a 128GB version available for $499.99 plus “an additional storage option for those who want more space” at an unspecified price. Compared to its predecessor, the Quest 2, the Quest 3’s design is lighter and more comfortable, with a “40 percent slimmer optic profile” (without taking its foam facial interface into account), while a new Snapdragon chip inside has twice the graphics performance. It’s also compatible with the Quest 2’s games, which is good since the old headset is sticking around but at a very familiar lower price. Meta said that starting June 4th, the Quest 2 will drop its price by $100 to $299.99 for the 128GB version, while the 256GB version is getting an $80 price cut from $429.99 to $349.99. That undoes last year’s price hike on the base model and makes the version with additional storage cheaper than it was before. In addition, an upcoming software update for the Quest 2 and Meta’s more expensive Quest Pro will increase their CPU and GPU performance and enable Dynamic Resolution Scaling. Meta plans to share more at its Connect event on September 27th.

Understanding who you can trust online is just a wildly complicated conversation, and for all the good advice we can offer, scammers are always coming up with new tools and techniques to trick people into putting their faith in them. That’s why companies have long endeavored to develop easily understood, at-a-glance tests you can use to verify online identity — like the little blue checkmarks you’ll see next to verified senders in your Gmail inbox. Unfortunately, it seems that at least some bad actors have found a way to abuse Google’s system. Gmail offers companies and organizations the ability to verify their identity with systems like BIMI (Brand Indicators for Message Identification), VMC (Verified Mark Certificate), and DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance). But as cybersecurity engineer Chris Plummer noticed, recently some scammers appear to have found a way to maneuver around Google’s protections. When he informed Google about the behavior, they said it was “intended behavior”. Chris later went onto Twitter to express his frustrations. The tweet ended up getting over 100K views. Only after this did Google actullay do something and acknowledge the problem. Chris tweeted again showing Google’s repose to his issue.

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