Nvidia is the one company making a fortune in the AI bubble and will be just fine when it pops. They make top-quality graphics processors that physically exist, not money-burning AI models.

But CES demands a consumer announcement. So here’s the next-generation RTX 5000 series of video cards for gamers!

The $2,000 flagship RTX 5090 uses the same GPU chip as the 4000 series, but twice as many of them, with a higher power limit and more RAM. [press release]

Nvidia’s press release shows ridiculously higher frame rates for the 5090 than its predecessor, the RTX 4090 — with Cyberpunk 2077 going from 28 FPS to 242 FPS! [press release]

But this is counting interstitial frames synthesized with AI (“DLSS 4” and “multi-frame generation”) — not the card’s actual graphics rendering performance. [press release]

Per the graph above, you’ll see more modest improvements in non-DLSS games like Far Cry 6 — 1.25× to 1.4× the 4090’s performance. [Club 386]

Gamers are not so impressed with DLSS. “The frame generation tech does indeed make the games look smooth, but the problem is that it does not make them feel smooth, and the visuals end up having noticeable visual artifacts as well,” one told us. So maybe switch that off. [Bluesky]

The cards will also do AI-”enhanced” resolution upscaling from 1080p to 4K.

If you want to run AI models at home, the 5090 will do very well — or you could get an Nvidia Project Digits AI PC with a Blackwell chip for $3,000. [press release]

Once again, this season's writers are a bit on the nose.

She said they stopped and sat on Madison Street, north of Ogden Avenue, with the eagle for about a half hour after putting out the call for help. The raptor twice found enough energy to briefly fly, the second time into a wooded area where it was later found and captured by handlers from Midwest Bird Collision Monitors.

"It definitely was having trouble flying, and I knew it was something neurological, which is a sign of bird flu," Meyers said. "I wasn't surprised to find out that was what it was."

The following day, the eagle was euthanized at the Forest Preserve District of DuPage County's DuPage Wildlife Conservation Center after it was suspected of being infected with bird flu, according to Beth Schirott, a spokeswoman for the Forest Preserve District.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

A top-secret US military project and the toxic waste it conceals, thought to have been buried forever beneath the Greenland icecap, are likely to be uncovered by rising temperatures within decades:

The US army engineering corps excavated Camp Century in 1959 around 200km from the coast of Greenland, which was then a county of Denmark. [...]

Project Iceworm, presented to the US chiefs of staff in 1960, aimed to use Camp Century's frozen tunnels to test the feasibility of a huge launch site under the ice, close enough to fire nuclear missiles directly at the Soviet Union. [...] A system of about 4,000 kilometres of icy underground tunnels and chambers extending over an area around three times the size of Denmark were to have housed 600 ballistic missiles in clusters six kilometres apart, trained on Moscow and its satellites.

Eventually the engineers realised Iceworm would not work. The constantly moving ice was too unstable and would have deformed and perhaps even collapsed the tunnels.

From 1964 Camp Century was used only intermittently, and three years later it was abandoned altogether, the departing soldiers taking the reaction chamber of the nuclear generator with them.

They left the rest of the camp's infrastructure -- and its biological, chemical and radioactive waste -- where it was, on the assumption it would be "preserved for eternity" by the perpetually accumulating snow and ice. [...]

The researchers studied US army documents and drawings to work out how deep the camp and its waste -- estimated to include 200,000 litres of diesel fuel, similar quantities of waste water and unknown amounts of radioactive coolant and toxic organic pollutants such as PCBs -- were buried.

Ignore the recent breathless reporting about NASA having "discovered" the "secret" base, that's all bullshit. However, in 2017 there was a research expedition to the site to see how bad it is. And campcentury.org seems to be a repository of people still doing new science on the ice samples retrieved in the 1960s!

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

We hosted our first bar mitzvah here last weekend (Rent DNA Lounge Today!) It was very cute: a bunch of 13-year-olds dancing and their parents getting shitfaced. The kids were so hopped up on sugar that we actually ran out of grenadine for Shirley Temples. Then at one point, one of the parents notices that the kids are all gone. "That can't be good!" They wander back to the Dazzle Room, which was not open, and it is so full of fog that you can't see your hand in front of your face. All the kids are in there blindly bouncing off the walls.

So one of these kids was poking around where they shouldn't, figured out how to turn on the fog machine, and then kept their shit together enough to quietly and discretely tell all the other kids, "Come check this out."

I need to find out who this hacker was, because in five years I'm hiring them and in ten years they'll be running this joint.

It’s that time of year again, when Las Vegas fills with tech companies presenting mockups of vague promises at CES in the hope of a stock pump! This year’s theme is artificial intelligence — gratuitously bolted on the side.

If you didn’t already want to put a boot through your smart TV, LG unveils “affectionate intelligence” to “better understand and empathize with customers” across devices and “harmonize to create entirely new customer value.” LG is partnering with Microsoft on this, which means it’ll be ChatGPT. [Press release]

Samsung will also be putting ChatGPT in your television, “with the focus of making AI an ‘Everyday, Everywhere’ experience,” in case you didn’t feel like you were getting enough of that already. [Press release]

Google is keeping it in-house and adding a Gemini chatbot to Google TV. This will add far-field microphones that hear everything in the room for your comfort and convenience as they feed every word you say back to Google’s profile of you. [Engadget]

Holoconnects and Mews presents AI avatars for hotel front desks. This is a chatbot with a fancy avatar where complex queries get bounced to a human in Oslo. “We are dedicated to building the right solutions that provide remarkable experiences for guests,” said Mews CEO Matt Welle. We bet they’ll be remarkable. [Press release]

Natura Umana brings us Humanpods earbuds, which feature a chatbot voice with helpful live commentary on everything it hears you doing. Natura Umana calls this “the closest experience to a telepathic connection with your technology,” though most of us call that intrusive thoughts. [Hypebeast]

Halliday’s Wayfarer smart glasses don’t feature an outward-facing camera, which lessens the danger of other people punching you for invading their privacy. The glasses are another gadget that listens in on your conversations and offers helpful live advice. They generate a transcript afterwards, so you can invade others’ privacy in comfort. [Engadget]

It’s not all chatbots. The Dreo ChefMaker was a renowned premium air fryer. The ChefMaker 2 adds AI! A chatbot promises to convert recipes into cooking instructions. Because modern life is cursed, your oven now runs off an app. [TechRadar]

AI may be a pile of poop, but AI solves that too. Petkit has sold AI-powered cat litterboxes for a few years now. This year, they present the Petkit Puro Bot Ultra — an “AI-equipped litter box” with a “180-degree rotating camera that’ll look inside of the litter box.” We could use this to write Pivot to AI! [Press release; 8 News Now]

CES is running until January 11. Expect so much more of this.

OpenAI is a blast furnace fueled by investor cash. But Sam Altman is totally going to replace all your employees this time, honest — with agents: [OpenAI]

We are now confident we know how to build AGI as we have traditionally understood it. We believe that, in 2025, we may see the first AI agents “join the workforce” and materially change the output of companies.

How’s it going? The Wall Street Journal looked at five “agents” that are totally in real production use, guys. Three of the “agents” generate plans under close human supervision. Two of the “agents” are chatbots — showing how the real future of agents is simply to rebrand existing systems as “agents.” Or they’ll be “AGI” — A Guy Instead. [WSJ]

Why was ChatGPT $20/month? It sounded like a good price point — even though OpenAI loses money on each use. Sam tells all in a mind-numbing Bloomberg puff piece interview. [Bloomberg, archive]

Sam admits that ChatGPT Pro XP Elite+ Ultimate Edition is losing money even at $200/month: “insane thing: we are currently losing money on OpenAI pro subscriptions!” [Twitter; Twitter]

But Sam can build the AGI! Sort of — OpenAI and Microsoft recently redefined “artificial general intelligence” as OpenAI making $100 billion profit. Yes, really. [The Information, paywalled; Verge]

We can usefully define “intelligence” as whatever gets Sam Altman yet more funding. Useful to Sam, anyway.