While Elon Musk showed off robots that had to mainly be operated by people behind the scenes, Boston Dynamics plows ahead with their electric version of the Atlas robot. Now, techcrunch.com reports that “The robot is able to detect and react to changes in the environment (e.g., moving fixtures) and action failures (e.g., failure to insert the cover, tripping, environment collision) using a combination of vision, force, and proprioceptive sensors.” This puts Boston’s robot out ahead by a ways form those of Figure, Apptronik, and Tesla. The machine was used to pick parts in an automotive setting. This is logical, since Boston is now owned by Hyundai. Hyundai has also done a deal with Toyota’s research wing, so they are all in on robotics. Large robot units have been used for decades by the auto industry. I can remember in the 1980’s, the CEO of Daimler-Benz (now just Daimler) saying that they used robots to save backs, not replace hands. Even Jelly Belly has robots (one of which tends to leak hydraulic fluid…one of the reasons Boston Dynamics switched Atlas from hydraulic to electric.) Boston claims that Atlas has been improved, and can move accurately and quickly cutting down on unneeded motions as it completes its tasks autonomously. 

Continuing with their week of announcements, Apple today rolled out new 14 and 16 inch MacBook Pro models with the M4 Pro and M4 Max chips. Cupertino also showed an entry level 14 inch MacBook Pro rocking the M4 chip. According to Macrumors.com, the new M4 Pro and Max laptops come with 24 gigs of Unified memory…up from 18 gigs of the prior models. They both have 3 Thunderbolt 5 ports, which has 3 times the bandwidth of the Thunderbolt 4. The M4 Pro has a 14 core CPU, and the Max a 16 core CPU. All 3 new models have an HDMI port…the Pro and Max machines can drive up to 3 monitors. Both have SDXC card slots and Mag Safe charging, as well as a headphone jack…just like my seemingly old M1 MacBook I wrote this on. They are available for preorder now, and will be available Friday, November 8th… starting at $1599.

Google is now using AI to write over a quarter of its new code. That’s what Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai says. PCmag.com notes that all that code has to be reviewed then accepted by engineers…but Google claims it allows engineers to do more and move faster. It is worth mentioning that using a generative AI model to write code isn’t exactly a new idea…an earlier form of it has bene going on for years. One knotty issue…using AI to write code could pose copyright issues or create security flaws if it’s trained on licensed or old code. And some companies using AI-crafted code have already reportedly experienced outages and cybersecurity problems as a result, primarily due to a lack of adequate human oversight. Alphabet’s stock price is up about 2% in the last day, and 36% in the past year, partly based on the promise of AI.

You may not use or be all that aware of Reddit, but a heck of a lot of people are. Reddit just turned its first ever profit, reporting $29.9 million on $348 million in revenue…that’s up 68% year over year. Reddit has been around for 20 years, and never made money, but is now up to nearly 100 million daily users the last few months…exceeding 100 million on a few days. Reddit just went public earlier this year. 

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