Apple cans electric car project, Oppo introduces prototype smart glasses

Apple is canceling its plans to build an electric car, according to multiple outlets, ending a secretive project that has consumed immense resources over the past decade. Executives from the company made the unexpected announcement during an internal team meeting on Tuesday, forecasting layoffs and telling employees that many of them would shift to working on generative artificial intelligence, per reports. Apple is believed to have spent billions of dollars attempting to develop an electric, semi-autonomous vehicle under the codename Project Titan, and its decision to kill the program is a major retreat from its previous strategy. The Guardian 

Oppo is another major tech giant to announce a new product at MWC 2024. Today, the company revealed its future plans about AI and the new Air Glass 3 XR (extended reality) eyewear prototype. The glasses can access Oppo’s AndesGPT model via a smartphone, providing a “burdenless” AI experience. The company obviously thinks pressing a button on your phone is too much effort and it’s trying to do something about it.

Oppo introduces eyewear XR prototype Air Glass 3 at MWC 2024

The Air Glass 3 weighs 50 grams and features a self-developed resin waveguide with a refractive index of 1.70. It has peak eye brightness of more than 1,000 nits. Oppo claims these features ensure an experience close to that of a regular pair of glasses while also providing the best full-color display of its kind. GSM Arena 

OpenAI is now boldly claiming that The New York Times “paid someone to hack OpenAI’s products” like ChatGPT to “set up” a lawsuit against the leading AI maker. In a court filing Monday, OpenAI alleged that “100 examples in which some version of OpenAI’s GPT-4 model supposedly generated several paragraphs of Times content as outputs in response to user prompts” do not reflect how normal people use ChatGPT. Instead, it allegedly took The Times “tens of thousands of attempts to generate” these supposedly “highly anomalous results” by “targeting and exploiting a bug”. Ars Technica

A recent update to Microsoft Copilot’s beta build puts the AI assistant at the forefront of your Android phone and is now able to replace Google Assistant or Bixby as your preferred digital assistant. Google’s Android doesn’t restrict users to only being able to use Google Assistant as the default digital aid. For a while, you could choose between Google’s choice and Bixby. Even now, Google is letting users replace the Assistant with the AI-driven Gemini.  The only one that has been missing is Microsoft Copilot. 9 to 5 Google 

Insomniac Games, which developed Spider-Man 2, is one of the studios affected by the cuts. Image: Insomniac Games

Sony has announced it will lay off 8% of PlayStation employees globally, amounting to approximately 900 people. In addition to cuts in the US and Japan, the gaming giant said this would mean closing PlayStation’s London Studio entirely. In a blog post sharing an email sent to employees, boss Jim Ryan called the move “sad news” and said it was “a difficult day at our company”. “We have concluded that tough decisions have become inevitable,” he said. BBC 

The Government’s Building Digital UK (BDUK) agency appears to have scrapped the relatively user-friendly website for their Gigabit Broadband Voucher Scheme (GBVS), which instead redirects interested consumers and businesses to a somewhat less user-friendly GOV.UK information page that lacks even a simple availability checker. Just to recap. The GBVS generally offers grants worth up to £4,500 for rural homes and businesses to help them get a gigabit-capable broadband (1Gbps) ISP service installed, which is available to areas with speeds of “less than 100Mbps.” ISPreview

Chris Price