8 hours Ago
Another week, another AI tool. The boffins over at Google Labs have designed a generative AI engine called Whisk. Not just another image generator, but this one can create based on other images you may share as prompts; it doesn’t need elaborate, descriptive text prompts instead.
Important to note this right away—it isn’t available in India at the time of writing this, but that’s likely to change in the coming weeks. It’ll be interesting to see how this develops, in terms of capturing an essence of the original image’s style, generated detailing and advanced customization options. We’ll keep an eye out.
PRE-LOVED That’s a terminology car enthusiasts often (such as myself, I’ll admit) use for pre-owned or ‘used’ cars. It is a trend which is now becoming commonplace with tech and gadgets too. Two reasons for that—new tech is becoming more expensive, and the human urge to step up within a limited budget.
Little surprise then, that an aspiration to buy an iPhone when the budget is a bit more restricted, has led us to a refurbished smartphone ecosystem. That has been the springboard to a broader trend, something I've tried to decode. Estimates suggest India’s refurbished electronics goods market will be worth $11 billion by 2026, up from around $400 million in 2021.
The high interest categories, smartphone aside, now include laptops, tablets and smartwatches. A new Apple iPhone 15 Plus with 256GB storage is priced at ₹ 89,900; whereas a properly refurbished one could cost around ₹ 56,000 onwards—that’s the money you’d be paying for Android flagship killer (as good as they are, they’re no iPhones). Little surprise, brands such as HP and Asus too are focusing on the refurbished product portfolio in-house.
Again, parallels to be drawn with the automobile market, where brands including Maruti and Kia have their own pre-owned vehicle retail arms. It all makes sense, if you can find value. ARGUMENT There is an argument brewing.
Tech giant Meta, is reportedly urging authorities in California to block OpenAI’s planned transition from a non-profit to for-profit entity. Their point does have weightage—why should OpenAI be allowed to reappropriate assets that the AI startup put together as a not-for-profit business, to now be used for potentially massive monetary gains. Turns out, Meta and Mark Zuckerberg are aligned with Elon Musk on this point—quite some time has clearly passed since the two rich tech leaders showed some intent about a cage fight a few months ago.
OpenAI started a few years ago as a not-for-profit, but the rethinking clearly commenced once ChatGPT found tremendous success, and Microsoft made significant investments. CEO Sam Altman has often mentioned the need to shed that early days positioning to be a more attractive proposition for future investments, which it’ll need, if OpenAI has to follow through on its plans that include artificial general intelligence (AGI). OpenAI’s former execs, and where they are now.
.. Search is coming: OpenAI, in the meantime, says that ChatGPT Search will be available to all users over the coming months.
It was unlocked for paying Plus and Pro subscribers a while ago. At this time, there is precious little in terms of specifics such as daily usage limits or what a free-tier account would or wouldn’t allow. Yet, the core methodology remains as you’d expect it—sign in, ask a query and if the response demands it, Search will be invoked.
Users could also be allowed to force a query be routed through search. OpenAI is also integrating ChatGPT Search and Advanced Voice mode. KNOW Instagram is finally allowing scheduling of direct messages on the platform.
After typing out the message, you’ll have to long-press the send icon to choose a date and time from the future when your message should land in the recipient’s inbox. That said, only text messages can be scheduled for now. That means any post forwards, images or videos must be send and delivered in realtime.
As suddenly as it became relevant, scheduling on Instagram DMs faded away from relevance—this inbox is mostly for sharing media and posts, and not really texts. Is it? The HDMI Forum says that the HDMI 2.2 standard will be officially announced next month.
There’s the promise of a wide range of higher resolutions and refresh rates being supported, but at the core of this development is the fact that it’d require a new cable for the HDMI 2.2 standard to be ticked off in your life’s checklist. This succeeds HDMI 2.
1 that was first introduced in 2017 (but has received iterative updates since), supports 48Gbps bandwidth with up to 120Hz variable refresh rates, and resolutions up to 10240 x 4320 pixels. Turns out, not all HDMI cables must be the same!.
