Hashtag Trending

Jim Love

A daily news program covering the top stories in technology with a weekend in depth interview.

  1. -1 j

    Project Synapse - August 28th 2026 Robots!

    AI Hardware Arms Race & Humanoid Robot Olympics: Apple Chips, OpenAI 'Jalapeno,' Meta Models, and Robot Prices Plummet Jim Love, Marcel Gagné, and retired John Pinard cover tech news and a deep dive on robots. They note Linux's 35th anniversary and how the name changed from "Freax" to Linux. They discuss Apple's AI-focused hardware advances (integrated CPU/GPU/neural processing and shared memory) enabling large local model inference, and OpenAI's "Jalapeno" inference chip built with Broadcom, developed in about nine months, delivering 1.5–1.9x more AI work per watt, raising questions for NVIDIA's CUDA moat. They touch on Meta's strong new Muse Glimmer/Spark models despite Reuters reporting failed internal AI rollout, morale issues, and metrics like 220% more AI-assisted coding with 40% reaching production alongside slower issue resolution. Bill Gates warns AI's growing capability could drive permanent job loss and dual-use security/bio risks. They then review China's World Humanoid Robot Competitions, rapid performance gains, autonomous team sports, and one-shot robot learning, plus falling robot price points—from $8K household task bots to Unitree's ~$5,900 humanoid and a ~$1,300 wheeled home helper—arguing autonomy is advancing fast. 00:00 Welcome and Introductions 00:48 Linux Turns 35 02:29 Apple Goes All In 06:18 OpenAI Builds Chips 10:41 Meta Models and Missteps 17:25 Why AI Rollouts Fail 20:33 Bill Gates Sounds Alarm 24:59 AGI and Persistent Agents 33:03 Humanoid Robot Olympics 34:56 Robot Sprint Breakdown 35:49 Humanoid Games Highlights 37:04 Soccer Bots And Teamwork 39:19 From Sports To Warfare 41:04 One Shot Robot Learning 46:33 Robots Making Robots 49:11 Home Robots Price Drop 52:14 MicroDuck And Cheap Bots 53:46 Unitree R1 Under 6K 58:55 Nori Budget House Helper 01:04:18 Autonomy And Price Point 01:05:55 Optimus 2027 Outlook 01:07:42 Weekly Wrap And Signoff

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    OpenAI's Jalapeño Chip Challenges Nvidia as Meta's AI Plan Backfires

    OpenAI has unveiled Jalapeño, its first custom AI inference chip, and the early results could challenge one of Nvidia's biggest advantages. OpenAI says Jalapeño delivers between 1.5 and 1.9 times more AI work per watt than the systems it tested against. SemiAnalysis watched benchmark runs inside OpenAI's lab and reported strong performance-per-watt results against Nvidia Blackwell. But the bigger story may be software: OpenAI is using Codex to write optimized kernels, potentially weakening the nearly 20-year CUDA software moat that has helped protect Nvidia from competitors. Also on this episode of Hashtag Trending: A Reuters investigation reveals how Meta's ambitious AI-driven restructuring plan fell apart. AI-assisted code increased dramatically, but gains in actual product features were far smaller, while technical incidents increased and employee morale deteriorated. Canada is investing more than $500 million in 64 new research chairs as it tries to turn decades of brain drain into brain gain. The real test will be whether Canada can keep the intellectual property, companies and economic benefits created by those researchers. And Twitter is back. Sort of. Operation Bluebird has launched a new social network using the Twitter name and the familiar language of tweets and retweets. Elon Musk's X says it still owns the trademarks and is suing. Hashtag Trending is hosted by Jim Love. 00:00 Headlines 00:27 OpenAI unveils the Jalapeño AI chip 01:39 Can OpenAI challenge Nvidia's CUDA moat 03:02 Meta's AI restructuring plan backfires 04:50 Canada makes a major brain-gain push 06:33 Can Canada turn research into Canadian industry 07:38 X battles a new company called Twitter 09:18 Wrap-up

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    Meta Pays Up to $17.1B as Altman Says OpenAI Could Reach AGI This Year

    Meta will pay at least $12.1 billion—and potentially as much as $17.1 billion over ten years—to settle claims that Facebook and Instagram harmed young users. Jim Love examines why the record settlement may still be a smart move for Meta. The company admits no wrongdoing, limits its legal exposure and avoids a verdict that thousands of other plaintiffs might have used in their own lawsuits. TIME also reports that Sam Altman expects OpenAI to have an internal system he would call artificial general intelligence by the end of 2026. What would qualify as AGI, and why would it matter more than passing the Turing Test? We separate confirmed reporting about OpenAI's delayed Astra models and cybersecurity concerns from unconfirmed rumours involving persistent memory and continual learning. Also in this episode: The Justice Department and FBI disable QScan and QTRouter, two hacking platforms allegedly used by Chinese state-sponsored attackers against NASA, the Federal Reserve, the U.S. Senate and hundreds of other organizations. The Environmental Protection Agency proposes removing federal minimum public-participation requirements for minor-source air permits, potentially allowing some data centre generator permits to be approved without public notice or comment. 00:00 Today's tech headlines 01:22 Meta's record teen-safety settlement 04:22 Altman says AGI could arrive this year 08:06 FBI disrupts China-linked hacking platforms 10:44 EPA proposes permit-notice changes 14:11 Wrap-up and where to listen Hashtag Trending for Thursday, August 27, 2026, hosted by Jim Love.

  4. -4 j

    Apple M6 Goes All-In on Local AI, U.S. Grid Blackout Risk & Linux Turns 35

    Apple is making a much bigger bet on local AI. Jim Love looks at the new M6 Mac mini, Apple's first 2nm processor, with Neural Accelerators built into every GPU core, dual 16-core Neural Engines and significantly faster processing. At the high end, the new M5 Ultra Mac Studio can offer up to 80 GPU cores and 512GB of unified memory, potentially allowing enormous AI models to run entirely on the Mac. The performance comes with a price. The new M6 Mac mini starts at $899 U.S., compared with the original $599 starting price of the M4 model. But Apple did announce one major price cut: its famous polishing cloth drops from $19 to $9. Also on Hashtag Trending: A new investigation warns that a catastrophic failure of the aging U.S. electrical grid could leave parts of the country without power for 18 months or more. Large transformers are often custom built, difficult to replace and increasingly hard to source. An earlier FERC analysis identified roughly 30 particularly critical substations and concluded that losing the right nine simultaneously could potentially trigger a nationwide blackout. Then, nearly 6,000 senior executives were asked what AI has actually done for their companies. More than 90 percent reported no impact on employment and 89 percent reported no improvement in labour productivity. Yet executives still expect AI to reduce employment. Separate research finds that AI-related layoffs can make employees less receptive to the very technology companies hope will increase productivity. And Linux turns 35. Linus Torvalds introduced his new operating system in 1991 by calling it "just a hobby" that wouldn't become big or professional. Today Linux powers servers, cloud infrastructure, Android and every one of the world's Top500 supercomputers. Hosted by Jim Love. 00:00 Headlines and intro 00:33 Apple M6 and the local AI push 03:45 Apple's $9 polishing cloth 04:24 America's aging power grid 06:06 AI productivity reality check 08:07 Linux turns 35 10:07 Wrap-up and where to listen

  5. -5 j

    Sam Altman Warns of AI Power Concentration as China Pushes Open Models

    Sam Altman is warning that artificial intelligence could become concentrated in the hands of a few companies, models or individuals. But there's an uncomfortable tension in that warning: OpenAI and Anthropic both rely heavily on proprietary models, while Chinese companies are aggressively releasing increasingly capable open-weight alternatives. Jim Love also looks at billionaire Mark Cuban's proposal for tackling wealth inequality by giving workers equity in the companies they help build, with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang offering a similar philosophy on employee compensation. Then, a developer discovers that AliExpress was silently using Web Audio and a range of hardware and software signals to create a fingerprint of visitors' devices and send encrypted results back to Alibaba servers. Brave blocked the technique, while Chrome allowed it in the researcher's testing. And Apple is cutting more than 200 jobs in Siri and Vision Pro-related teams just days before the company's CEO transition, despite recently reporting its strongest June quarter ever.

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À propos

A daily news program covering the top stories in technology with a weekend in depth interview.

Informations

  • Création
    Jim Love
  • Années d’activité
    2017 - 2026
  • Épisodes
    923
  • Classification
    Tous publics
  • Site web de l’émission
    Hashtag Trending

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