With lots of hand-wringing about how AI can be producing things that aren’t true, or how it can copy voices and images of people, it’s irritating to hear that OpenAI has had a watermarking system for Chat-GPT created text and a tool to detect it for about a year now. According to theverge.com, the company hasn’t released it because it feared it would hurt their bottom line! The company found in testing that the system was 99.9% effective for making AI text detectable when there is enough it. Meanwhile, in a survey commissioned by OpenAI, “people worldwide supported the idea of an AI detection tool by a margin of four to one.” On the downside as far as the company was concerned, nearly 30% of those surveyed said they would use the software less if watermarking was implemented. 

Despite quite a bit of information pointing to Apple delaying Apple Intelligence until October, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports that the new iPhone 16 models will still launch in mid September. Although Apple has put off rollouts before due to software not being quite baked, this time around they will stick with the usual timing for hardware release. A good guesstimate of the date is September 10th. Keep in mind that even with the Apple Intelligence features coming in September, Apple has already said it won’t have the Apple Intelligence powered Siri until next spring. 

Made by Google is nearly upon us…it’s happening August 13th. Engadget.com says we an expect to see the new Pixel 9 phones, including a folder that’s been dubbed the Pixel 9 Pro Fold. In addition to phones, Google should show off more tidbits about Android 15, and certainly they will tout their Gemini AI. The Google show will be at 1PM Eastern. 

With all the markets dropping today by a bundle due to recession worries, the so-called ‘mega-cap’ tech stocks took it on the chin. Cnbc.com reports that the top tech companies collectively lost about a trillion dollars in market cap! Nvidia dropped over $300 million at the opening bell, but then recovered about half that. Apple got a $224 million dollar haircut, and Amazon fell by $109 million. Throw in Meta, Microsoft, Alphabet, and Tesla, and the 7 top tech companies got whacked by some $995 million in early trading. Thankfully, they all recovered some as the trading day dragged on. Besides earnings misses and job creation being lower than expected, the big techs were hammered by over-hyping AI. A Goldman Sachs note from June had warned that huge dollars were going into AI with little to show for it.

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