Amazon's Big AI Move & Qualcomm's ARM Laptop Surge | Tech News of the Week

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Announcer: Welcome to Tech News of the Week with your host, Ned and Chris. Well, that's refreshing.

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Ned: Welcome to Tech News of the Week. This is our weekly Tech News podcast, where Chris and I get into four articles that caught our attention in the past week. Chris, why don't you kick us off? I hope it's not an AI thing.

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Chris: Amazon to invest in Anthropic AI.

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Ned: God damn it.

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Chris: To compete with Open AI. Caveats in Sioux. So okay, a few months, maybe years, decades, seconds ago, I don't even know anymore. Man, yesterday, what is time?

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Ned: The flat circle, Chris.

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Chris: At some point, somewhere on the time thing, Microsoft invested heavily, and some would argue stupidly, in OpenAI. This has led to a ton of integrations and projects and the AI-ification of basically everything Microsoft, a happening which everybody loves. And Amazon saw what was happening and said, We want to do that, too. Because that's what Amazon sounds like.

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Ned: Of course.

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Chris: So they invested in Anthropic. Their first investment was in 2023, and it allowed AWS to become an Anthropic Services Provider, as well as, of course, getting all kinds of first glances at Anthropic tech to work into their own AWS AI tools. Tools which everybody loves.

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Ned: Loves.

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Chris: Now, Amazon looks to double down on that investment with an as yet unknown level of investment, financially speaking, as it The goal is simple, though. They want to compete with ChatGPT. Funnily enough, the other goal might be just sell AWS shit As one rumored requirement of this funding round is that Anthropic must use Amazon chips instead of Nvidia chips. Interesting. Amazon does have a number of chips available, including ones that are specifically designed for AI training and AI inference workloads. Chips that Amazon named, and I swear to God, I'm not making this up, Trainium and Inferentia.

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Ned: Well done.

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Chris: So they're giving Anthropic money and then requiring Anthropic topic to give Amazon back money? I mean, it's a strategy.

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Ned: Yeah.

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Chris: I personally am against it just on the basis of those awful, awful chip names. But that just might be me being petty.

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Ned: You would never. Well, since we're talking about AI being crammed into everything, artificial intelligence in notepad is genuinely stupid. See what I did there? I'm good at this. Notepad is an unsung workhorse of windows. Although I do tend to use OneNote for actual note-taking, notepad is always there to launch quickly and capture some fleeting bit of information that I need to hang on to. It's also great for demos because you know it's going to be on every Windows machine. That end calculator should just be left alone, except for the tabs they added to notepad. That's actually really useful. Unlike the latest update rolling out with Windows 11 preview, which, and I know you're going to be shocked by this, now includes AI. It will allow you to rewrite sentences with a feature called Rewrite by highlighting the text and asking it for suggestions. Of course, to use it, you need to be logged into your Microsoft account and have enough AI credits to do it, and the features opt out. Just why? Why do you need to put your AI garbage into Notepad? We already have ChatGPT and Copilot and whatever other nonsense people are using to write SEO-optimized garbage.

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Ned: It's like taking a perfectly good hammer and attaching it to an industrial robot who only knows how to do the Macarena and insists on waving the hammer wildly during pelvic thrusts. Just let a hammer be a hammer and notepad be notepad.

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Chris: If you wanted notepad that sucked, you could just open wordpad. Mac OS application sandboxing works? Sort of doesn't. The idea behind app sandboxing is great. Define some real tight constraints wherein an app can run and deny that app access to anything else. Thus, an app can't run around on the file system or try to execute spurious programs that are outside its sandbox, et cetera, et cetera. Sounds like containerizing it, right?

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Ned: Mm-hmm.

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Chris: That is exactly the way that talks about it and even draws pretty pictures. In reality, though, the way that this is accomplished is less sophisticated. What actually happens because this feature was tacked on after the fact rather than baked into OSX, is that it is accomplished by a giant list of black lists. If you're thinking to yourself that a list of lists sounds Sounds like a bad idea, you'd be right. The restrictions are often and hilariously subverted, allowing applications to get more access than they are supposed to. One simple For example, say you have a process. The process runs within a sandbox and it is forked. It will then inherit the sandbox restrictions. Good.

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Ned: Yeah.

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Chris: That exact same process, though, executed from the launch service framework, however, no sandbox restrictions. This, as the kids say, is a problem. Many attacks against OSX that result in privileged escalations utilize this loophole. Other loopholes include the way that XPC services are run, which I would explain, but I don't want to. It's not that I don't know what, it does. All of these would be irrelevant, though, if the apps were more tightly, properly sandboxed. But as you're probably already imagining, the tighter the sandbox, the more difficult the interoperability. Security, versus convenience. The entire linked article talks about a bunch of examples of escalations, taking advantage of the way sandboxing works, doesn't. Included in there are at least seven CVEs. There's also, again, a lot of pretty pictures. Because this article is the result of a presentation that was done, so there are also slides.

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Ned: Nice.

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Chris: But, TLDR, real BSD does this best. Windows doesn't even pretend to do security at all. Mac OSX, honestly, it's not bad. These are edge cases, but they still got work to do. And don't fucking at me about Cubes. Yes, Cubes solves this problem. Cubes is also impossible to work with unless you are very dedicated and at least a tiny bit masochistic. You can tell that it is heavy-duty technology because Ned doesn't know what it is.

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Ned: Not at all. Qualcomm, speaking of cues, touts 58 models of Windows Arm laptops. During their Q4 2024 earnings call, Qualcomm discussed the expanded portfolio of laptops from major OEMs like Dell, HP, Samsung, and Acer, that all carry their X-Series Snap Dragon chip. These laptops are all meant to run the Arm version of Windows and promise improved battery life and possibly better performance, at least for Arm native applications. With 58 models coming to market in the next year, the real question becomes, they Am I going to buy them? Windows Arm adoption has always been stymied by subpar support from Microsoft and poor application compatibility. While it may sound amazing to have a laptop that lasts all day on a single charge, if you can't get any of your work done on that laptop, people are not going to buy it. That being said, I have a surface laptop with an ARM processor, and I can say that Microsoft is finally serious about embracing arm. I've had virtually No issues with application compatibility due to a much improved X86 adapter chim, and ARM native applications are very snappy. There's a reason that Apple ditched X86 with the M1 processor and never looked back.

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Ned: It was also much easier because Apple controls the entire hardware and software stack. To get people on board with a new Windows Arm laptop, it has to be cheaper, faster, and more efficient than the Intel or AMD processor-based laptops they know, and most importantly, it has to just work. This newest batch of Arm laptops with the Snapdragen X series paired with Windows 11 should meet that last condition of just working. Now, it's up to the OEMs to price and advertise accordingly.

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Chris: So $10,000 and no advertising.

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Ned: Correct. Kind of like when they offered Linux on Dell laptops. All right, that's it. We're done now. Go away. Bye.