Microsoft isnât launching a new version of Windows next week, but what itâs about to unveil could be just as significant. After nearly four years of falling behind Appleâs MacBooks, sources inside Microsoft tell me that the company is confident it can finally beat Appleâs own chips that power the MacBook Air.
Technology
The Mac vs. PC war is back on
Microsoft is getting ready to launch a new wave of Windows on Arm devices. Itâs confident these laptops will beat the MacBook Air.
On Monday, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella will detail the companyâs âAI vision across hardware and softwareâ at an event hosted at Microsoftâs campus in Redmond, Washington. Itâs a pivotal moment for Microsoft and Windows because it wonât involve the typical chip partnership with Intel that weâve seen for decades. Instead, Microsoft will set the stage for a summer of Arm-powered laptops thanks to a close collaboration with Qualcomm.
Iâm told Microsoft has full confidence that Qualcommâs upcoming Snapdragon X Elite processors will begin a new era for Windows laptops...
Technology
X-Men â97 understood the power of perfect timing
X-Men â97 had a real chance to flourish because Disney Plus stuck to weekly releasing schedules rather than going all in on binge-watching.
It was hard to get a solid read on X-Men â97 immediately after its debut because of how many different things it was trying to do. Even though â97âs premiere picked up threads from the classic â90s cartoon, the new showâs fresh plotlines, updated music, and flashier production values all made it feel different in unexpected ways. But the showâs first season â which just came to an end with episode 10, âTolerance Is Extinction - Part 3â â proved week after week that â97 had the heat and illustrated how much there is to be gained from letting shows (and the people watching them) breathe.
Because we live in a world where streamers are allergic to being truly transparent about how well their projects are performing, itâs always difficult to know when something is a proper hit in terms of being both widely watched and part of the pop-culture discourse. Itâs easy for studios to tout how many hours people have generally spent watching a movie or show, but itâs far harder to quantify the degree to which a new project has reached Game of Thrones or Stranger Things-like status â especially at the outset.
Though WandaVision helped steer the MCU into its current multiversal era of diminishing returns, it was also one of the first Disney Plus shows that everyone â not just comic book fans and TV obsessives â seemed to be buzzing about. A lot of that had to do with post-Endgame hype and the covid-19 pandemic giving Marvel a somewhat captive audience. But WandaVisionâs weekly release schedule also gave people time to develop a relationship with its story and become invested as they watched it evolve one episode at a time.
Very much like WandaVision, X-Men â97 felt a little rough around the edges in its two-episode premiere that reintroduced Charles Xavierâs team of superstudents as some of the worldâs most powerful and persecuted heroes. But the exposition heaviness that plagued âTo Me, My X-Menâ and âMutant Liberation Beginsâ quickly gave way to a winding but propulsive narrative that highlighted how Marvelâs animated mutants have always been soap opera stars first and superheroes second.Â
There is so much more to Marvelâs Inferno 1989 comics crossover event than whatâs detailed in X-Men â97âs âFire Made Flesh,â but the episodeâs twisty exploration of how Jean Grey was secretly cloned brought meaty drama (and the pretext for psychic infidelity) to the series. And while Stormâs godlike feats of strength were the centerpieces of many of X-Men â97âs bigger action sequences, âLifedeath - Part 2â hammered home how fascinating she is as a character in stories that frame her powers as more than weapons. Both of those episodes, and other weightier ones like âRemember It,â definitely felt like concentrated distillations of much bigger comics storylines because they were, and itâs fair to say that X-Men â97 stripped away some context that might have been helpful.
But the week between each episode gave viewers time to go read those old comics and ponder what was going to happen on the show next. People had a chance to catch up if they were behind and make memes when they needed to remind the world how wild the latest episode was. Social media buzz isnât a reliable indicator of a showâs success, but the way phrases like âmilky way ghettoâ flooded X after âLifedeath - Part 2â debuted spoke to how people were sticking with the show despite all its convoluted twists and turns.
That kind of organic buzz is something studios tend to want because of the way it draws people (read: potential customers) in. And while there is only so much that companies can do to shape the form and tone buzz ultimately takes, drawn-out releases are one of the biggest ways they can position series to become the kinds of events people want to talk about.Â
It can also lead to uncanny (positive) accidents. Marvel probably did not know that Storm would reclaim her powers right after BeyoncĂ© dropped an album more or less about the same thing. Itâs a coincidence that a real-world electromagnetic storm gave people across the world the ability to see the (typically) northern lights the same week âTolerance Is Extinction - Part 2â featured Magneto floating down from the heavens with an asteroid in a sea of aurora. But those are the sorts of weird things that just happen sometimes, and while streamers canât exactly rely on them, they can give their shows chances to be engaged with in a larger context rather than presenting them as things to be inhaled instantaneously.
Of course, X-Men â97 had to stand on its own legs because memes alone are not enough to make shows hits. But for all of the streamlining the show did to make the comics fit into 30-minute chunks, each episode was also doing a surprisingly good job foreshadowing the deeper story about the X-Men and technopathic android Bastion (Theo James) that comes to a head in the seasonâs final three episodes.
Between its cameos, characters returning from the dead, and set pieces that feel like they could play on a bigger screen, each piece of âTolerance Is Extinctionâ delivers on what a show like X-Men â97 needs for its closing act. And while the finaleâs cliffhanger ending opens up all kinds of possibilities about how X-Men â97 could continue, part of whatâs promising about the way the show closes out is how unconcerned with the larger Marvel universe it appears to be.
Ms. Marvelâs integration into the X-brand and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madnessâ X-Men cameos both felt like last-ditch plays to wow audiences with the unexpected. But thereâs a different energy to the way X-Men â97 is finishing just ahead of Deadpool & Wolverine this summer. Though the two newer projects couldnât be any more tonally different, theyâre both examples of Marvel finally letting its mutant IP shine rather than sequestering it off to the sidelines. Theyâre also testaments to how the long wait for more X-Men adaptations has primed fans to see what the studio can do with the characters now that it has full control of them again.Â
It might be a while until we see X-Men â97 return for its third season (the secondâs production has already wrapped for the most part), but these first 10 episodes make it pretty clear that itâll be worth the wait.
Technology
Redditâs deal with OpenAI will plug its posts into âChatGPT and new productsâ
Reddit and OpenAI have signed an arrangement that makes the siteâs posts available in ChatGPT and allows Reddit to build new tools using OpenAIâs models.
OpenAI has signed a deal for access to real-time content from Redditâs data API, which means it can surface discussions from the site within ChatGPT and other new products. Itâs an agreement similar to the one Reddit signed with Google earlier this year that was reportedly worth $60 million.
The deal will also âenable Reddit to bring new AI-powered features to Redditors and modsâ and use OpenAIâs large language models to build applications. OpenAI has also signed up to become an advertising partner on Reddit.Â
Redditors have been vocal about how Redditâs executives manage the platform before, and it remains to be seen how theyâll react to this announcement. More than 7,000 subreddits went dark in June 2023 after users protested Redditâs changes to its API pricing. Recently, following news of a partnership between OpenAI and the programming messaging board Stack Overflow, people were suspended after trying to delete their posts.
No financial terms were revealed in the blog post announcing the arrangement, and neither company mentioned training data, either. That last detail is different from the deal with Google, where Reddit explicitly stated it would give Google âmore efficient ways to train models.â There is, however, a disclosure mentioning that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is also a shareholder in Reddit but that âThis partnership was led by OpenAIâs COO and approved by its independent Board of Directors.â
âReddit has become one of the internetâs largest open archives of authentic, relevant, and always up-to-date human conversations about anything and everything. Including it in ChatGPT upholds our belief in a connected internet, helps people find more of what theyâre looking for, and helps new audiences find community on Reddit,â Reddit CEO Steve Huffman says.Â
The company has not always been friendly toward companies scraping its data to train AI models. It threatened to block Google web crawlers from accessing the site. OpenAI also reportedly told the moderators of the subreddit r/ChatGPT that they violated OpenAIâs copyright by using the ChatGPT logo as a display photo.Â
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