Transcript
Daily Tech News Host (0:01)
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Ryan Reynolds (0:12)
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Mint Mobile Representative (0:30)
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Monday.com Advertiser (0:42)
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Freddie Wong (1:12)
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Rob Dunwood (2:05)
These are the daily tech headlines for Tuesday, February 18th, 2025. I'm Rob Dunwood. Xai introduced Grok 3 on Tuesday, highlighting its significantly enhanced compute power over 10 times that of its predecessor and claiming it surpasses OpenAI's GPT4O graph, Google's Gemini, and DeepSeq's V3 in early test. Featuring advanced reasoning capabilities, Grok 3 belongs to a class of AI models designed to tackle complex queries by breaking them into smaller tasks and self fact checking to improve accuracy, a method also employed by competing models such as OpenAI's O1, Deepsea's R1, and Google's Gemini's flash thinking. In other X news, the company has significantly increased the price of its Premium plus subscription plan, which provides users access to Grok 3 to almost $50 per month. This is the second price for the Premium plus plan in recent months, with the price rising from $16 to $22 per month in December. The new plan will be more than double the current cost for Premium plus subscribers. Additionally, Xai is making some Grok 3 features such as deep search and reasoning exclusive to a separate Super Grok plan, meaning they will no longer be available to Premium plus users. Tracking cookies in Google's Chrome browser will finally be disabled by a one time global prompt upgrade, giving Chrome users the choice, akin to Apple users between being tracked and more likely not being tracked. Google, however, has reintroduced digital fingerprinting, which it prohibited as wrong in 2019. As of February 16, fingerprinting has also been expanded to track all user devices such as smart TVs and gaming consoles, providing a substantial new source of user data for the advertising industry. Privacy campaigners criticized Google's online tracking rules, stating that users can't stop this form of tracking. Semaphore reports that the New York Times has approved the use of AI for both its product and editorial teams. This includes the implementation of internal AI tools for tasks like generating social copies, SEO headlines and code. Additionally, the company has announced AI training for the newsroom and the launch of a new internal AI tool called Echo. The Times has also provided editorial guidelines for AI usage and introduced a range of AI products to support web product development and editorial ideation. Meta's WhatsApp has reached a key user milestone that may subject it to stricter regulations under the EU's Digital Services Act. According to a February 14 filing, WhatsApp open channels, which are considered akin to a social Network under the DSA, average approximately approximately 46.8 million monthly users in the latter half of 2024. European Commission spokesperson Thomas Rayner confirmed in a statement that the WhatsApp user numbers now exceed a threshold for classification as a very large online platform under the dsa. A BBC report raises concerns that the noise canceling feature in modern headphones may be linked to a potential health risk, suggesting it could be altering brain function in frequent users. The article explores whether regularly blocking out background noise might be rewiring the brain highlighting the case of 25 year old British woman who, despite normal hearing tests, struggled to focus on sounds and was later diagnosed with auditory processing disorder, a neurological condition that affects the brain's ability to interpret sounds and speech. Newspaper publishing giant LI Enterprises disclosed that it is experiencing disruptions across its business due to an ongoing cyber attack, now in its third week. In a filing with the U.S. securities and Exchange Commission, Lee stated that it is conducting a forensic analysis to determine if sensitive personal data was stolen in the ransomware attack. Preliminary investigations indicate that the threat actors unlawfully accessed the company's network, encrypted critical applications and exfiltrated certain files. Lees anticipates the outages to last for several more weeks as it restores affected systems and has notified law enforcement. JPMorgan Chase will soon block Zelle payments to social media contacts in response to a surge in online scams exploiting the service for fraud. While Zelle enables quick and secure bank to bank transfers, it lacks purchase protection, making it risky for transactions with unknown sellers. In a policy update, Chase advised users against using Zelle for purchasing goods from retailers, merchants or through social media platforms and messaging apps. And finally, new research suggests that while AI tools have significantly improved at answering legal questions, they still fall short of matching even a junior lawyer's competence. British law firm Linklaters tested chatbots with 50 challenging questions on English law, finding OpenAI's 2019 GPT2 model to be ineffective, while its O1 model, released in December 2024, performed much better. Linklaters concluded that these tools are approaching a level where they could be useful for real world legal work but still require expert human supervision. For more analysis of the tech news of the day, subscribe to dailytechnews show.com and if you enjoy the show, remember to tell a friend to check us out. Thanks for listening. We'll talk to you next time.