5 Biggest Breaking news from the world of AI & Tech in last 24 hours
1)
Snap launches Spectacles – its latest AR glass powered by a new OS
Snap on Tuesday launched its fifth generation AR glasses at Snap’s Annual Partner Summit at Los Angeles. Snap has promised that new version of its AR glasses ‘Snap spectacles,’ which was first launched in 2016, come with better features and offers more immersive experience. However, customers won’t be able to enjoy Snap spectacles’ fifth generation glasses yet. Currently, it will only be available to developers who will have to pay a hefty subscription of $1,000 to get their hands on it. After a year, the subscription will become $99 a month. One of the biggest features of this AR glass is that it is powered by a new OS, known as Snap OS, that has supposedly helped in greatly improving its hand tracking abilities.
2)
FDA grants ‘breakthrough tag’ to Neuralink’s device that promises to restore eyesight
Elon Musk’s brain chip company Neuralink on Tuesday got good news from FDA, after the latter granted a ‘breakthrough’ certification to its eyesight restoring device ‘Blindsight.’ This tag will help the company in speeding up its product development and also get future FDA reviews on priority basis for its device. Musk claimed in its X post that the device could help individuals who have lost eyesight for both eyes and their optics nerve to regain the sight; provided their visual cortex is intact. However, notably FDA has made it clear that ‘breakthrough’ tag does not mean that Neuralink’s ‘Blindsight’ device can cured blindness irrespective of what Musk claims.
3)
Mistral launches a free plan for developers to beta test its AI models
Mistral AI, the french based AI startup that is best known for its open-source AI models, on Tuesday launched many initiatives for developers. Firstly, it has launched a completely free plan that will allow developers to test its AI models. However, this free tier plan will certainly come with many limitations. Separately, it has brought down the prices of its existing plans, making its AI models more accessible to developers. In another news, the company has also added image processing abilities to its free chatbot, le Chat. This move will help Mistral to compete more effectively with OpenAI and Google, which also offers free plan to developers.
4)
Discord announces encryption feature for its voice calls & video chats
Discord, one of the most popular group chat platforms in the world, announced that starting from Tuesday all its voice calls and video chats will get an encryption security. This means that now making calls and doing video message on Discord will become lot more secured. By adding the encryption layer, even Discord will not come to know what its users are talking or chatting in their messages. Nearly a decade ago, encryption was an exceptional feature. However, over the years it has become a standard feature, with today all popular messaging apps like WhatsApp and Telegram offering encryption feature.
5)
Mozilla departs fediverse and will shut down its Mastodon server
Firefox’s parent company Mozilla is quitting fediverse, the decentralized network that interconnects social network services. Its mastodon server, Mozilla Social, will permanently shut down in December. Until December, Mozilla Social users can download their data or migrate their account to another mastodon server. Mozilla probably took this step due to low traction. At the time of announcing this news, Mozilla Social had only 270 active users. However, this isn’t really surprising move since earlier this year Mozilla’s CEO had announced that the company would be scaling down its investment in fediverse.