Intel is putting its foot on the gas with the new Lunar Lake chip. Theverge.com reports that the new system-on-a-chip design triples the size and more that quadruples the performance of its AI accelerator, while promising a 14% faster CPU at the same clock speed. Intel also brags about 50% more graphics performance and up to 60% better battery life than last year’s model. A really big change…no separate memory sticks or chips. Lunar Lake has either 16 or 32GB of memory right in the package itself. The downside? No ability to add more RAM. The move does cut power consumption by 40% though. Intel says for those needing more memory, they will roll out the Arrow Lake chip family later this year. 

Threads has made some recent revisions to its interface, and now they have added swiping right to like a post, or left to indicate you aren’t interested. The movements echo those of Tinder, where you can swipe to like or ignore potential people. According to mashable.com, Threads and Instagram chief Adam Mosseri said “We’ll use those signals to show you more posts like the ones you swipe right on and fewer of those you swipe left on. I hope this helps you find more posts that you’re interested in.” The feature can be a little confusing as you can only swipe left or right when scrolling through your feed (thankfully, a little heart or crossed out eye icon shows up to let you know what’s up when you start swiping). If you’re looking at a single post on Threads, you won’t be able to swipe left, and swiping right will bring you back to feed view.

There has been plenty of noise about AI developer firms playing fast and loose, and now comes an open letter from a number of former and current OpenAI employees describing concerns about the artificial intelligence industry’s rapid advancement despite a lack of oversight and an absence of whistleblower protections for those who wish to speak up. Cnbc quotes the letter as saying “AI companies have strong financial incentives to avoid effective oversight, and we do not believe bespoke structures of corporate governance are sufficient to change this.” The letter goes on to say “We also understand the serious risks posed by these technologies,” they wrote, adding that the companies “currently have only weak obligations to share some of this information with governments, and none with civil society. We do not think they can all be relied upon to share it voluntarily.” Besides the OpenAI employees and alums, the letter was signed by a couple Google DeepMind people. 

A patent has turned up that indicates Apple may be going to add respiration tracking to the Vision Pro headset. Zdnet.com reports that the patent filing doesn’t really specify precisely what the respiration tracking would do for you, but code for it shows up under the Mindfulness app, so that’s a clue. Perhaps a personalized breathing exercise routine to reduce stress or such. It also isn’t clear when the feature might be released, but we may learn more after next Monday’s WWDC keynote. We will cover the World Wide Developers Conference keynote Monday for you with a recap you can scan or view…so no need to sit through the hype and Apple ‘reality distortion field.’ 

I’m Clark Reid and you’re ‘Technified’ for now.