Hasta La Gadget!

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva accepted Biden’s invitation to visit Washington early next month.

Instagram has revealed a home screen refresh, due in February, that axes the Shop tab and moves the Create button back to the center of the bottom navigation bar. The social network’s Adam Mosseri said shopping will still exist in your feed, Reels, Stories and ads – because of course it will – it’s just not a dedicated tab anymore. The change may also be part of a larger strategy shakeup. The Information claims an internal memo in September indicated Instagram would cut many of its shopping features. Instead, the site would concentrate on commerce efforts “more directly tied” to ad revenue. Simply put, the shopping push doesn’t appear to have helped.

Who exactly was browsing the randomized world of Instagram shopping ads for their next purchase, anyway? My shopping tab currently shows me a $10,000 oven, a vegan cheese selection box and stabilizers for a children’s bike. I guess I’d take the fake cheese.

– Mat Smith

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The biggest stories you might have missed

• The first-ever UK space flight fails to reach orbit

• HBO’s ‘The Last of Us’ successfully trades hordes of monsters for emotional depth

• Google’s Pixel 7 phones are up to $150 off right now

• Apple’s iPad mini is back on sale for an all-time low of $400

• Meta rolls out AI ad-targeting tech in an effort to reduce discrimination

• YouTube will begin sharing ad revenue with Shorts creators on February 1st

• The best of CES 2023

Raspberry Pi launches some more modern camera modules

Module 3 variants include standard and wide-angle FOVs as well as autofocus.

Raspberry Pi has launched the Camera Module 3 with big improvements, including higher resolution, infrared, HDR, autofocus, a wide-angle field of view and more. Not counting an interchangeable lens model introduced in 2020, it’s the company’s first new camera module in six years. Where the previous module had fixed autofocus, Module 3 has built-in powered autofocus capability. That makes it a bit thicker (up to 12.4mm compared to 9mm) but more versatile, letting you focus on objects ranging in distance from 5cm (2 inches) to infinity.

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The best laptops for 2023

These are our favorites, already.

A new laptop is an expensive purchase that warrants some thought. Despite continued chip supply woes, companies are still making a ton of new laptops, and there’s plenty of choice. While most laptops with top of the line specs can cost around $1,800 to $2,000 these days, you can still get a good system for under $1,000. Then again, if you do most of your work in a browser (lots of online research, emails and Google Drive), then a Chromebook might be a cheaper alternative. We lay out the best options.

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The right-to-repair battle hits John Deere and US farmers

A new deal allows farmers to repair their own equipment.

Jon G. Fuller/VW Pics/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

The right to repair isn’t limited to replacing your smartphone battery. Tractor and farm-vehicle maker John Deere has resisted right-to-repair regulation, but it’s now willing to make some concessions. Deere & Company has signed a memorandum of understanding with the American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF) that lets US farmers and independent repair shops fix equipment, rather than requiring authorized parts and service centers. Why now? President Biden ordered the Federal Trade Commission to draft right-to-repair regulation in 2021. If Deere didn’t act, it risked legal battles that could limit where and how it does business in the country.

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NASA’s 38-year-old science satellite finally falls back to Earth

The re-entry comes as officials hope to cut back on space debris.

NASA’s 38-year-old dead satellite has returned to Earth without incident. The Defense Department confirmed the Earth Radiation Budget Satellite (ERBS) re-entered the atmosphere off the Alaskan coast at 11:04 PM ET on January 8th. The ERBS traveled aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger in 1984 and was only expected to collect ozone data for two years. It was actually retired in 2005 — over two decades later.

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Microsoft has shown off its latest research in text-to-speech AI with a model called VALL-E that can simulate someone’s voice from just a three-second audio sample, Ars Technica has reported. The speech can not only match the timbre but also the emotional tone of the speaker, and even the acoustics of a room. It could one day be used for customized or high-end text-to-speech applications, though like deepfakes, it carries risks of misuse. 

VALL-E is what Microsoft calls a “neural codec language model.” It’s derived from Meta’s AI-powered compression neural net Encodec, generating audio from text input and short samples from the target speaker.

In a paper, researchers describe how they trained VALL-E on 60,000 hours of English language speech from 7,000-plus speakers on Meta’s LibriLight audio library. The voice it attempts to mimic must be a close match to a voice in the training data. If that’s the case, it uses the training data to infer what the target speaker would sound like if speaking the desired text input.

Microsoft

The team shows exactly how well this works on the VALL-E Github page. For each phrase they want the AI to “speak,” they have a three-second prompt from the speaker to imitate, a “ground truth” of the same speaker saying another phrase for comparison, a “baseline” conventional text-to-speech synthesis and the VALL-E sample at the end. 

The results are mixed, with some sounding machine-like and others being surprisingly realistic. The fact that it retains the emotional tone of the original samples is what sells the ones that work. It also faithfully matches the acoustic environment, so if the speaker recorded their voice in an echo-y hall, the VALL-E output also sounds like it came from the same place. 

To improve the model, Microsoft plans to scale up its training data “to improve the model performance across prosody, speaking style, and speaker similarity perspectives.” It’s also exploring ways to reduce words that are unclear or missed.

Microsoft elected to not make the code open source, possibly due to the risks inherent with AI that can put words in someone’s mouth. It added that it would follow its “Microsoft AI Principals” on any further development. “Since VALL-E could synthesize speech that maintains speaker identity, it may carry potential risks in misuse of the model, such as spoofing voice identification or impersonating,” the company wrote in the “Broader impacts” section of its conclusion.

In an email sent to users, Meta said it will continue supporting Quest 1 with a few — but pretty big — changes. While owners can still use the device and the apps available for it, the Quest 1 will no longer be receiving new features. In addition, Meta will only be rolling out critical bug fixes and security patches to the headset until 2024. As The Verge notes, the device has mainly been getting the same updates as its successor over the past few years, but now Quest 1 owners will have to make do with the features the device already has. 

It’s possible that Meta is having difficulties making sure new features are also working on the Quest 1’s aging hardware. The company released the first headset back in 2019, when it was still known as Facebook and the device was still under the Oculus branding. It’s powered by a Snapdragon 835 chip that was released in 2017 and was already two years old at that point. The Quest 2 was a huge upgrade when it came out in 2020, and its Snapdragon XR2 processor provided a significant power boost that enables it to play more complex games and experiences. 

That said, the first Quest is also losing access to some abilities it already has: Users will no longer be able to create or join parties going forward. Further, users who have access to Meta Horizon Home’s social features will no longer be able to access them starting on March 5th, 2023. That means they’ll only have a couple of months left to invite other users into their Home or visit someone else’s Home.

The South Carolina senator was offered a bar of soap after the Fox News interview.