Show Notes
It was explosive news week – if you're the price of a popular-but-aging piece of consumer gaming hardware or a Jeff Bezos rocket.
This week on The Kettle, Brandon Vigliarolo is joined by Reg reporters Richard Speed and Dan Robinson to talk about the Steam Deck's 40+ percent price hike and what it means for the ongoing memory-and-storage shortage. Sure, it's just consumer hardware, but it's the latest in a line of price hikes justified in the name of AI and geopolitics – and it could spell the beginning of a new normal for hardware prices.
We couldn't ignore the standout story of late last week, though, as a Blue Origin rocket blew up spectacularly in what may be the largest space industry explosion in more than 50 years. The Blue Origin blowup is likely to delay the Artemis mission for months, if not a year or more.
More from The Register Kettle
It's been nearly half a century since the Voyager probes launched from Earth on a mission to explore the outer solar system, and they're still kicking. You're probably familiar with some of Voyager's iconic images, like the Pale Blue Dot and other images of our outer planets - most of which Voyager is the only spacecraft humans have ever sent to those planets. Those photos and observations wouldn't have been possible without Voyager's imaging team, eight members of which were selected from scientists from around the world. The UK's sole representative, Dr. Garry Hunt, joins us on this episode of The Register to talk about his role in the Voyager program, the future of the mission, and the state of science in the UK, US, and beyond.
The FBI has announced what appears to be a third arrest in its campaign to root out the ShinyHunters after they busted into Bureau systems - but just because they're a highly-capable hacking crew it doesn't mean they won't be outdone by AI. A second vulnerability discovered by Anthropic's Mythos model has been exploited in the wild, and it's not one that humans probably would have discovered, begging the question just how important we are in the future of cybercrime. Join host Brandon Vigliarolo, cybersecurity editor Jessica Lyons, and senior reporter Tom Claburn to discuss those stories, and what they mean for the future of cybersecurity, on this week's episode.
Anthropic's IPO prospectus leaked this week, and boy was it filled with interesting details. For starters there's the fact a third of it is all about existential AI risks, then there's the fact that, despite some impressive revenue growth the company still has yet to turn a profit. Combine that with massive capex predictions, and you have an IPO with massive valuation, yet a long, hard road toward anything resembling earnings. Join host Brandon Vigliarolo, El Reg editor in chief Matt Rosoff, and enterprise IT reporter Lindsay Clark on this week's episode of The Kettle where they discuss the revelations, what they mean for the state of the AI industry, and just how much distraction from its actual problems Anthropic can eke out by keeping that doomsday narrative front and center.
As AI has reshaped the tech world, so it in turn waits for something greater to come along and reshape it, and that unstoppable force might just be TypeSafe AI's new model, Jev. Jev's not chatty, it doesn't want to tell you a story, and it won't really do much besides answering multiple choice, ranking, and binary yes/no questions to a degree of probability, but in lots of cases that's probably all you need from an AI. Jev is also dirt cheap to run and ultra fast, and has proven to have a lot of use cases in just a week on the scene. This week on The Kettle, join host Brandon Vigliarolo, senior reporter Tom Claburn, and contributor Joab Jackson to chat about how Jev is reshaping the AI landscape and what it might do to the future of the AI industry.
Just when you thought concerns over datacenter power generation in the US couldn't get any worse, the Trump administration goes ahead and gets rid of emissions restrictions on power plants.