Year: 2024

This week, it’s all about cars and Lucy Liu in VR. Devindra chats with Senior Writer Sam Rutherford about his visit to the New York International Auto Show, where he saw the Polestar 4, a unique new EV without a rear window. Also, Cherlynn pops in to chat with Lucy Liu about her new VR game, The Pirate Queen. We also explore the issues around Florida’s bill banning young kids from social media sites, and Sam tells us why he likes Netflix’s Avatar: The Last Airbender adaptation.

Listen below or subscribe on your podcast app of choice. If you’ve got suggestions or topics you’d like covered on the show, be sure to email us or drop a note in the comments! And be sure to check out our other podcast, Engadget News!

Topics

• Sam Rutherford on what’s new in EVs and car tech from the New York Auto Show – 0:57

• Cherlynn Low interviews Lucy Liu about her new VR game The Pirate Queen – 34:39

• Florida Governor signs bill banning young children from social media – 54:55

• Intel confirms Copilot will eventually run locally – 58:33

• There’s finally a version of Chrome that runs well on ARM-based Windows machines – 1:02:43

• Canadian researchers have created a camera that takes 156.3 trillion frames per second – 1:05:06

• Working on – 1:07:08

• Pop culture picks – 1:12:44

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Credits 

Hosts: Devindra Hardawar and Sam Rutherford
Guest: Cherlynn Low and Lucy Liu
Producer: Ben Ellman
Music: Dale North and Terrence O’Brien

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/engadget-podcast-us-tiktok-ban-123047573.html?src=rss

Elon Musk’s answer to ChatGPT is getting an update to make it better at math, coding and more. Musk’s xAI has launched Grok-1.5 to early testers with “improved capabilities and reasoning” and the ability to process longer contexts. The company claims it now stacks up against GPT-4, Gemini Pro 1.5 and Claude 3 Opus in several areas. 

Going by xAI’s numbers, Grok-1.5 appears to be a large improvement over Grok-1. It shot up to 50.6 percent in the MATH benchmark, over double the previous score. It also climbed to 90 percent and 74.1 percent in GSM8K (math word problems) and HumanEval (coding), respectively, compared to 62.9 percent and 63.2 percent before. Those numbers are within shouting distance of Gemini Pro 1.5, GPT-4 and Claude 3 Opus — in fact, the HumanEval coding score beats all rivals except Claude 3 Opus.

xAI

It can also process long contexts of up to 128K tokens within its context window, meaning it can amalgamate data from more sources to understand a situation. “This allows Grok to have an increased memory capacity of up to 16 times the previous context length, enabling it to utilize information from substantially longer documents,” the company said.

xAI didn’t detail Grok’s progress in other areas, though, where it still may be lagging (academic scores, multimodal and others). And Grok-1.5 may not keep its position for long. ChatGPT 5 is set to arrive sometime this summer, promising a feature set that “makes it feel like you are communicating with a person rather than a machine,” according to OpenAI. 

Currently, Grok is only available for users of the Premium+ tier on X (formerly Twitter), though Elon Musk recently promised to open it up to X’s regular Premium users. The company also recently open sourced its Grok chatbot, after Musk sued OpenAI and Sam Altman for allegedly abandoning its non-profit mission. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/elon-musks-updated-grok-ai-claims-to-be-better-at-coding-and-math-120056776.html?src=rss