Tech Digest daily roundup: Snapchat launches custom ‘My AI’ chatbot
Popular social media app Snapchat on Monday launched its own chatbot called “My AI,” using the latest version of OpenAI’s rapidly growing generative text tool, ChatGPT. My AI is a custom chatbot that for now is only available to Snapchat+ users, who pay $3.99 per month to access “exclusive, experimental, and pre-release features.” Snapchat bills the new pseudo companion as a “fun and experimental sidekick.” “Chat about your day or write a haiku about your bestie,” Snapchat said in a demo of My AI. My AI can also recommend birthday presents for friends, help users plan weekend trips, and suggest dinner recipes, Snapchat said in a press release. CBS News
Apple is reportedly once again working on a next-generation iPhone SE, according to analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, despite his previous reports that it had canceled work on the phone. In a Twitter thread, Kuo says the company has “restarted” the project and that the iPhone SE 4 will feature an OLED display — a first for the company’s budget line — as well as a 5G modem designed by Apple instead of longtime supplier Qualcomm. He predicts that the phone will more or less be “a minor modification of the 6.1-inch iPhone 14” and that it’ll go into production at the beginning of 2024, presumably coinciding with a release later that year. The Verge
An Elon Musk loyalist pictured sleeping inside Twitter’s office floor to show she was “doing hard things” amid widespread layoffs last year, has been fired from the company. Esther Crawford, the head of Twitter payments, was among roughly 10 per cent of the staff fired from Twitter in yet another round of job cuts since the billionaire’s takeover of the social media platform. Twitter Inc has laid off around 200 employees, including product managers, data scientists and engineers who worked on machine learning and site reliability, reported The New York Times, citing people familiar with the matter. Independent
When your team is pushing round the clock to make deadlines sometimes you #SleepWhereYouWork https://t.co/UBGKYPilbD
— Esther Crawford ✨ (@esthercrawford) November 2, 2022
BMW ’s hydrogen babysteps keep fuel-cell cars in slow lane says Bloomberg. BMW AG is showing off its first hydrogen-powered iX5 sport utility vehicles this year but still has some way to go to make the technology a viable alternative to battery-electric cars. The German manufacturer plans to ship around 80 of the SUVs to Europe, Asia, the US and the Middle East for use in test drives and car shows, part of a drive to offer customers options outside of pure battery cars in the electric shift. Hydrogen vehicles are struggling to take off because of high costs and fledgling fueling infrastructure. Hydrogen Central
Already smarting from a breach that put partially encrypted login data into a threat actor’s hands, LastPass on Monday said that the same attacker hacked an employee’s home computer and obtained a decrypted vault available to only a handful of company developers. Although an initial intrusion into LastPass ended on August 12, officials with the leading password manager said the threat actor “was actively engaged in a new series of reconnaissance, enumeration, and exfiltration activity” from August 12 to August 26. In the process, the unknown threat actor was able to steal valid credentials from a senior DevOps engineer and access the contents of a LastPass data vault. Ars Technica
