Irish Startup Unveils World’s First Silicon-Based Quantum Computer; Apple to Add Live Translation to AirPods; AI Search Engines-Alarming Rate of Wrong Answers; Bluesky Proposes Letting Users Allow AI Training or Not on Posts

We’ve had a couple of big quantum computing stories lately, including the one about Microsoft’s ground-breaking new quantum chip. Now, and Irish startup called Equal1 has showed off the world’s first quantum computer that runs on a hybrid quantum-classical silicon chip. Thenextweb.com reports that the chip is called the Bell-1, after quantum physicist John Stewart Bell. The computer weighs a hefty 441 pounds, but it does plug into a regular electrical outlet. It is designed to simply slot into high-performance data centers right beside standard servers! The machine marries classical transistors for normal computing tasks with quantum transistors for qubits…all on a single silicon-based chip. The computer is much smaller than most quantum computers, due in large part to its closed-cycle cryocooler that keeps the machine at -272 Celsius without massive external refrigeration. It only does 6 qubits…unlike Google’s Willow Chip that can do 105…but it is available to buy right now…on St. Patrick’s Day…no word on how much ‘green’ you will need to bring one home!

In yet another bid to get you to never take your AirPods out except to recharge, Apple is apparently going to add live translation to them in a software update later this year. According to engadget.com, a Bloomberg story says the feature would work similarly to the translation feature on Pixel Buds, but with the Apple translation, you wouldn’t have to ask Siri first as you do with Google Assistant. The AirPods will automatically detect something besides your native language and start converting it to the language you speak and understand. This would be the 2nd big feature drop since last year when Apple added Hearing Health features to AirPods Pro. It is still being rumored that they will add heart rate tracking too…which the Beats Powerbeats Pro 2 buds already have. 

A study by the Columbia Journalism Review’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism has found that AI search engines give incorrect answers a shocking 60% of the time! Arstechnica.com notes that ChatGPT Search incorrectly identified 67% of articles queried. Perplexity was much better giving wrong answers 37% of the time. Grok 3, Elon Musk’s generative AI was wrong an astonishing 94% of the time. The researchers fed direct excepts from actual news articles to the AI models for the test, and ran 1600 queries with 8 different generative search tools. 

An interesting idea dropped by Bluesky CEO Jay Graber at South by Southwest. Techcrunch.com reports that he mentioned that Bluesky is looking at letting users have the option of having their posts and data scraped for generative AI training and public archiving…or they can opt not to do so. This did get a bit of an uproar from users who think one of the best features of Bluesky is not sharing of info, but as Graber pointed out…everything on the website is public…just like a website is public.  Under the proposal, users of the Bluesky app, or other apps that use the underlying AT Protocol, could go into their settings and allow or disallow the usage of their Bluesky data across four categories: generative AI, protocol bridging (i.e., connecting different social ecosystems), bulk datasets, and web archiving (such as the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine).

I’m Clark Reid and you’re ‘Technified’ for now.