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Toyota has unveiled a high-performance SUV concept featuring 3D-printed components, marking a shift in manufacturing practices.

This concept, based on the Toyota Fortuner and developed by Toyota Customizing & Development (TCD) Asia’s motorsport division, incorporates innovative materials such as 3D-printed parts and Tafnex, a unidirectional carbon fiber-reinforced polypropylene resin sheet.

Materials and Design

The SUV’s front bumper and hood vents are adorned with Tafnex, while direct pellet-fed 3D-printed parts enhance the hood air duct bezels. These materials, developed in collaboration with Japanese firms Mitsui Chemicals and ARRK Corporation, reduce the vehicle’s weight and improve performance. The Hyper-F Concept SUV also features four sport seats, offering a unique user experience compared to traditional two-seater models.

3D Printing

TCD Asia leveraged advanced 3D printing technologies from Mitsui Chemicals and its partners, including the high-speed EXF-12 3D printer from ExtraBold Inc.

This direct pellet-fed 3D printing method uses plastic pellets to form structures, providing benefits over traditional 3D printing by increasing plastic discharge stability and enabling the rapid creation of large parts.

This moldless technique reduces development lead times and initial investment costs, ideal for high-mix, low-volume production. Additionally, it supports sustainable manufacturing by allowing 3D-printed items to be recycled into pellets for future use.

Tafnex Material

Tafnex, created by Mitsui Chemicals, is a lightweight, rigid, and moldable tape with customizable features, suitable for various applications including automobiles and drones. It can reinforce injected or pressed molded parts and be processed into tubes or laminated sheets. Its non-water absorbing properties maintain high bending strength underwater and in high-temperature environments.

These advanced materials and the Hyper-F Concept SUV will be showcased at the Bangsaen Grand Prix 2024 and the Bangkok Auto Salon 2024, highlighting their potential in automotive design and manufacturing.

Toyota Unveils High-Performance SUV Concept With 3D-Printed Parts

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The golden age of superhero movies led by Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man films was like no other, the webbing on which every Marvel movie that followed bounced into the stratosphere off of. They gave us Tobey Maguire as Peter Parker with Kirsten Dunst as MJ, facing off with nefarious foes like the Green Goblin (Willem Dafoe)…

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Apple is finally loosening some restrictions on third-party repairs. The tech giant said in its latest white paper, Longevity, by Design, that it will extend software support to third-party replacement batteries and displays installed into iPhones later this year. This means that it won’t deactivate True Tone and battery health data for iPhone users who receive those third-party repairs.

In case you don’t know what True Tone is, it’s a feature that adjusts the iPhone display’s white balance to match your environment. Currently, Apple disables that feature if the iOS detects that you installed a third-party replacement screen. You won’t suffer that loss anymore as the company “will allow consumers to activate True Tone with third-party parts to the best performance that can be provided” later this year. However, it pointed out that True Tone may not display accurate colors or perform well because third-party displays don’t always gel with Apple’s hardware, so you can choose to disable it if the screen doesn’t work the way you expect it to.

As for third-party replacement batteries, Apple will show their health metrics but it will notify users that it isn’t able to verify them. The company says that an internal analysis that found that second-hand batteries with manipulated metrics are sometimes sold as new, and the iPhone’s metrics will mark the maximum capacity at 100 percent even though the battery’s current state won’t reflect that.

Apple has a long history of antagonizing third-party repairers of iPhones, but it’s slowly opening up to them. In 2022, it made the iPhone 14 easier to repair upon release but its restrictions on third-party replacement displays made it difficult for third-party vendors to fix the broken original screens. In April, it announced that iPhones will be repairable with genuine used parts starting this fall with the iPhone 15 and newer models.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/iphone-users-wont-lose-true-tone-other-features-after-third-party-repairs-232926095.html?src=rss

This is your periodic reminder that AI-powered chatbots still make up things and lie with all the confidence of a GPS system telling you that the shortest way home is to drive through the lake.

My reminder comes courtesy of Nieman Lab, which ran an experiment to see if ChatGPT would provide correct links to articles from news publications it pays millions of dollars to. It turns out that ChatGPT does not. Instead, it confidently makes up entire URLs, a phenomenon that the AI industry calls “hallucinating,” a term that seems more apt for a real person high on their own bullshit.

Nieman Lab’s Andrew Deck asked the service to provide links to high-profile, exclusive stories published by 10 publishers that OpenAI has struck deals worth millions of dollars with. These included the Associated Press, The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, The Times (UK), Le Monde, El País, The Atlantic, The Verge, Vox, and Politico. In response, ChatGPT spat back made-up URLs that led to 404 error pages because they simply did not exist. In other words, the system was working exactly as designed: by predicting the most likely version of a story’s URL instead of actually citing the correct one. Nieman Lab did a similar experiment with a single publication — Business Insider — earlier this month and got the same result.

An OpenAI spokesperson told Nieman Lab that the company was still building “an experience that blends conversational capabilities with their latest news content, ensuring proper attribution and linking to source material — an enhanced experience still in development and not yet available in ChatGPT.” But they declined to explain the fake URLs.

We don’t know when this new experience will be available or how reliable it will be. Despite this, news publishers continue to feed years of journalism into OpenAI’s gaping maw in exchange for cold, hard cash because the journalism industry has consistently sucked at figuring out how to make money without selling its soul to tech companies. Meanwhile, AI companies are chowing down on content published by anyone who hasn’t signed these Faustian bargains and using it to train their models anyway. Mustafa Suleiman, Microsoft’s AI head, recently called anything published on the internet “freeware” that is fair game for training AI models. Microsoft was valued at $3.36 trillion at the time I wrote this.

There’s a lesson here: If ChatGPT is making up URLs, it’s also making up facts. That’s how generative AI works — at its core, the technology is a fancier version of autocomplete, simply guessing the next plausible word in a sequence. It doesn’t “understand” what you say, even though it acts like it does. Recently, I tried getting our leading chatbots to help me solve the New York Times Spelling Bee and watched them crash and burn.

If generative AI can’t even solve the Spelling Bee, you shouldn’t use it to get your facts.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/please-dont-get-your-news-from-ai-chatbots-000027227.html?src=rss

This is your periodic reminder that AI-powered chatbots still make up things and lie with all the confidence of a GPS system telling you that the shortest way home is to drive through the lake.

My reminder comes courtesy of Nieman Lab, which ran an experiment to see if ChatGPT would provide correct links to articles from news publications it pays millions of dollars to. It turns out that ChatGPT does not. Instead, it confidently makes up entire URLs, a phenomenon that the AI industry calls “hallucinating,” a term that seems more apt for a real person high on their own bullshit.

Nieman Lab’s Andrew Deck asked the service to provide links to high-profile, exclusive stories published by 10 publishers that OpenAI has struck deals worth millions of dollars with. These included the Associated Press, The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, The Times (UK), Le Monde, El País, The Atlantic, The Verge, Vox, and Politico. In response, ChatGPT spat back made-up URLs that led to 404 error pages because they simply did not exist. In other words, the system was working exactly as designed: by predicting the most likely version of a story’s URL instead of actually citing the correct one. Nieman Lab did a similar experiment with a single publication — Business Insider — earlier this month and got the same result.

An OpenAI spokesperson told Nieman Lab that the company was still building “an experience that blends conversational capabilities with their latest news content, ensuring proper attribution and linking to source material — an enhanced experience still in development and not yet available in ChatGPT.” But they declined to explain the fake URLs.

We don’t know when this new experience will be available or how reliable it will be. Despite this, news publishers continue to feed years of journalism into OpenAI’s gaping maw in exchange for cold, hard cash because the journalism industry has consistently sucked at figuring out how to make money without selling its soul to tech companies. Meanwhile, AI companies are chowing down on content published by anyone who hasn’t signed these Faustian bargains and using it to train their models anyway. Mustafa Suleiman, Microsoft’s AI head, recently called anything published on the internet “freeware” that is fair game for training AI models. Microsoft was valued at $3.36 trillion at the time I wrote this.

There’s a lesson here: If ChatGPT is making up URLs, it’s also making up facts. That’s how generative AI works — at its core, the technology is a fancier version of autocomplete, simply guessing the next plausible word in a sequence. It doesn’t “understand” what you say, even though it acts like it does. Recently, I tried getting our leading chatbots to help me solve the New York Times Spelling Bee and watched them crash and burn.

If generative AI can’t even solve the Spelling Bee, you shouldn’t use it to get your facts.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/please-dont-get-your-news-from-ai-chatbots-000027227.html?src=rss