It was another sci-fi-heavy year for Apple’s streaming service.
Netflix filed the lawsuit in Califonia federal court Monday, claiming Broadcom subsidiary VMware has cloud software that infringes on five Netflix patents. As reported by Reuters, Netflix says VMware’s vSphere platform for deploying and managing virtual machines infringes on Netflix patents related to virtual-machine communications.
Microsoft is still asking a judge in its AI copyright tussle to produce discovery on how New York Times reporters use chatbots, and it introduced an interesting 2023 Slack chat in a memorandum: apparently the Times product team told developers to avoid using other LLMs because it was rolling out its own. It’s not clear if this would become one of the tools the company has since announced.
This year paved the way for a future where earbuds are much more than audio accessories.
This interesting overview by The New York Times explains how incorrect or misleading results from AI models are helping scientists to track cancer, design drugs, invent medical devices, and uncover weather phenomena by “dreaming” up new concepts to test.
Amy McGovern, a federal AI institute computer scientist says:
“The public thinks it’s all bad.But it’s actually giving scientists new ideas. It’s giving them the chance to explore ideas they might not have thought about otherwise.”
[The New York Times]
Gordon was executive editor for hardware at PCWorld, and he spent 16 years before that at Maximum PC. I’m incredibly lucky to have known him. I’m gonna miss the hell out of him.
If there were any doubt we’d see a new generation of Nvidia graphics hardware at its CES 2025 LAN party, that’s evaporated.
The latest hint comes from @MysteryLupin on X, who’s had early leaks before, with these pictures showing a 16-inch HP Omen Max and specs including an Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX CPU and the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 GPU.
Following a $6 billion investment round announced in June, Elon Musk’s AI company has announced a new round of funding.
Other than the usual investors, the note also mentions participation from “strategic investors” Nvidia and AMD, as it also says xAI will double the size of its AI computer, Colossus, to a total of 200k Nvidia Hopper GPUs to power Grok, Aurora, and other efforts.
[x.ai]
Trump said he’s “gonna have to start thinking about TikTok” this weekend while speaking at an event in Phoenix, Arizona. He added, “Maybe we gotta keep this sucker around for a little while.”
The US is set to ban the platform on January 19th, though there’s a chance the Supreme Court could reverse that.
After plenty of rumors, Universal announced that Nolan’s next film is The Odyssey, a story based on Homer’s ancient Greek epic. Here’s how Universal describes it:
Christopher Nolan’s next film ‘The Odyssey’ is a mythic action epic shot across the world using brand new IMAX film technology. The film brings Homer’s foundational saga to IMAX film screens for the first time and opens in theaters everywhere on July 17, 2026.
It stars Matt Damon, Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway, Zendaya, Robert Pattinson, Lupita Nyong’o, and Charlize Theron.
