In an exclusive interview with Inverse’s Deputy Editor of Reviews Raymond Wong, Carl Pei, NothingCEO and OnePlus co-founder, confirmed that the next Nothing Phone a.k.a. the (2) will be “more premium” than the Nothing 1 with a U.S. release in “late 2023”.
The Nothing Phone (1) is a mid-range device spec-wise with an unusual and attractive design. We did not review it, but, from the photos and the descriptions, I can tell that I like the eye-catching Glyph Interface, a customizable 900+ LED lights system that draws patterns on the back of the phone according to caller IDs and notifications.
Unlike its name, the device does not look like nothing, and Carl Pei launched the brand to tackle consumer electronics boredom and bring back the fun into smartphones. For the second iteration of the Nothing device, he aims at making the U.S. market his “No. 1 priority” and explains that it was difficult to build the team while developing the first products during the first year.
As more of the negative comments from experts on the Nothing 1 revolved around the software, Carl Pei confirmed that “software will be a big focus area” for his team.
The Trevor Project’s “Learn with Love” features a reunion between a conservative Texas man and his grandchild, who is trans, after more than five years.
Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger are returning to the app game with a new innovative startup since leaving the ‘gram in 2018. Artifact is a new social media platform that will provide a feed of articles and facts aimed to create a dialogue between users to discuss things of interest.
Starlink, the satellite-based internet service from SpaceX, has an active presence on the continent of Africa, with the company announcing yesterday that Starlink is now available in Nigeria.
PayPal is about to become the latest tech company to lay off a substantial part of its workforce. The payments firm announced Tuesday plans to cut approximately 2,000 employees, a number that equates to about seven percent of its total staff. According to PayPal president and CEO Dan Schulman, the layoffs will occur over the next few weeks, with some parts of the company affected more than others.
“We will treat our departing colleagues with the utmost respect and empathy, provide them with generous packages, engage in consultation where required and support them with their transitions,” Schulman said. “I want to express my personal appreciation for the meaningful contributions they have made to PayPal.”
The company joins a growing list of tech companies that have announced layoffs in recent months. Earlier this month, Google disclosed plans to lay off 12,000 employees, or about around six percent of its global workforce. Before that, Microsoft said it would cut 10,000 jobs. Schulman, like his counterparts at Microsoft, Google and other tech firms, blamed PayPal’s layoffs on the “challenging macro-economic environment” the company finds itself in recently. “While we have made substantial progress in right-sizing our cost structure, and focused our resources on our core strategic priorities, we have more work to do,” he said.
It’s worth noting the US economy has not entered into a recession yet. At 3.5 percent, the national unemployment rate is at a 50-year low, and the gross domestic product grew over the last quarters. Turning specifically to PayPal, the company beat Wall Street expectations during its most recent earnings call, with revenue and income increasing by 11 percent and 7 percent year on year, respectively.
OpenAI has released a tool to help you determine whether text was more likely written by a human or AI. However, the ChatGPT maker warns that its equivalent of Blade Runner’s Voight-Kampff test can also get it wrong.
The tool includes a box where you can paste text that’s at least 1,000 characters long. It will then spit out a verdict, like “The classifier considers the text to be very unlikely AI-generated” or “The classifier considers the text to be possibly AI-generated.”
I tested it by prompting ChatGPT to write an essay about the migratory patterns of birds, which the detection tool then described as “possibly AI-generated.” Meanwhile, it rated several human-written articles as “very unlikely AI-generated.” So although the tool could raise false flags in either direction, my (tiny sample size) test suggests at least a degree of accuracy. Still, OpenAI cautions not to use the tool alone to determine content’s authenticity; it also works best with text of 1,000 words or longer.
The startup has faced pressure from educators after the November release of its ChatGPT tool, which produces AI-written content that can sometimes pass for human writing. The natural-language model can create essays in seconds based on simple text prompts — even passing a graduate business and law exam — while providing students with a tempting new cheating opportunity. As a result, New York public schools banned the bot from their WiFi networks and school devices.
OpenAI
While ChatGPT’s arrival has been a buzzed-about topic of late, even extending into media outlets eager to automate SEO-friendly articles, the bot is big business for OpenAI. The company reportedly secured a $10 billion investment earlier this month from Microsoft, which plans to integrate it into Bing and Office 365. OpenAI allegedly discussed selling shares at a $29 billion evaluation late last year, which would make it one of the most valuable US startups.
Although ChatGPT is currently the best publicly available natural language AI model, Google, Baidu and others are working on competitors. Google’s LaMDA is convincing enough that one former researcher threw away his job with the search giant last year by claiming the chatbot is sentient. (The human tendency to project feelings and consciousness onto algorithms is a concept we’ll likely hear much about in the coming years.) Google has only released extremely constricted versions of its chatbot in a beta, presumably out of ethical concerns. With the genie out of the bottle, it will be interesting to see how long that restraint lasts.
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In an exclusive interview with Inverse’s Deputy Editor of Reviews Raymond Wong, Carl Pei, Nothing CEO and OnePlus co-founder, confirmed that the next Nothing Phone a.k.a. the (2) will be “more premium” than the Nothing 1 with a U.S. release in “late 2023”.
