Welcome back to Lately, The Globe’s weekly tech newsletter. If you have feedback or just want to say hello to a real-life human, send me an e-mail.
In this week’s issue:
😵💫 OpenAI and a new endless scroll of slop
🪫 AWS outage and the vulnerabilities of hyperconnected technology
💪 The very buff man going viral at Blue Jays games
😎 Samsung’s new XR headset
SOCIAL MEDIA
Enter the Sora sloposphere
The Sora version of me.The Globe and Mail
As I wrote about a couple weeks ago in this newsletter, OpenAI launched Sora, a new text-to-video generator app. Since then, I joined the platform and saw, well, a lot of weird stuff. Dozens of cats in life-threatening predicaments, Martin Luther King Jr. parodies (before OpenAI banned these videos after a complaint from the King estate), monkeys firing machine guns.
I also made videos featuring a very realistic looking AI version of myself. I was a mad scientist preparing a flubber-like substance, a stressed journalist writing on deadline. In one video, I steal a cat from an old lady, then confess to the crime in the back of a police car.
Scrolling though the Sora sloposphere, I struggled to understand how the app was connected to OpenAI’s stated mission. How do videos of Mario talking about mushroom cartels on InfoWars align with the company’s goal of building ethical artificial general intelligence for the good of humanity? OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman has said that he sees Sora transforming human creativity. Will that prove true? Maybe. But it seems just as likely we’re on the precipice of a new era of the internet, where AI-generated content invades every social platform, forcing us to become skeptical of every single thing we see online. Read my full story here.
WORLD WIDE WEB
OpenAI launches new web browser to rival Chrome
Since ChatGPT launched in 2022, users have increasingly used the platform as a search engine, asking the chatbot queries once reserved for Google. Now OpenAI has launched a web browser, putting the company in direct competition with Google as it tries to pull in more traffic and revenue made from digital advertising. The new browser, called Atlas, launched Tuesday on Apple laptops and will later come to Microsoft’s Windows, iPhones and Google’s Android phones.
Atlas will face a daunting challenge against Chrome, which has amassed about three billion worldwide users and has been adding AI features. But then again, when Google released Chrome back in 2008, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer was so dominant, few observers believed a new browser could mount a formidable threat.
AMAZON
AWS outage a reminder just how much of the world is in Amazon’s grips
On Monday, a massive Amazon Web Services outage sparked global turmoil among thousands of sites, including some of the web’s most popular apps like Snapchat, Reddit, Roblox and Duolingo. The outage halted others from conducting routine tasks, such as paying hairdressers, changing airline tickets or even ringing a doorbell (at least, if it was an Amazon-owned Ring camera.) The outage, which lasted from around 3 a.m. ET to 6 p.m. ET, stemmed from the Domain Name System, or DNS, which prevented applications from finding the correct address for AWS’s DynamoDB API, a cloud database used to store user information and other critical data.
It was the largest internet disruption since last year’s CrowdStrike malfunction. The outage highlights the vulnerability of becoming reliant on only a small number of cloud providers, with one glitch wreaking havoc on business and day-to-day life.
BLUE JAYS
The internet’s obsession with the buff Jays’ fans
Dean Angelo, aka, the very jacked Blue Jays fan of TikTok fame.Jennifer Roberts/The Globe and Mail
While most Blue Jays fans have been dazzled by Vladimir Guerrero Jr.’s home runs, George Springer’s Game 7 winning three-run blast or rookie Trey Yesavage’s golden arm, a smaller, yet passionate, slice of the internet has been obsessed with someone else: A jacked man who sits behind home plate at the Jays’ home games.
The jacked man in question is Dean Angelo, a 28-year-old personal trainer and bodybuilder from Toronto who has been attending Jays’ games since he was a kid. But it’s his postseason appearances that has social media in a tizzy. During Game 1 of the Jays-Yankees series, an X user asked “Who’s this unit?”, along with a zoomed in video of Angelo. On TikTok, a grainy video simply captioned “Bro is huge” has more than five million views. Even the U.S. sports broadcasters covering the game have been dumbfounded: “What is going on in Toronto where there’s just jacked dudes behind home plate?” Read my full interview with Angelo here.
What else we’re reading this week:
Are we living in a golden age of stupidity? (The Guardian)
How Trump is using fake imagery to attack enemies and rouse supporters (The New York Times)
This ‘privacy browser’ has dangerous hidden features (WIRED)
Adult Money
HEADSET
Samsung’s Galaxy XR, US$1,800
This week, Samsung unveiled Galaxy XR, its new slick mixed-reality headset built on Google Android. The headset launched this week in the U.S. and South Korea for US$1,800, a significantly lower price than Apple’s Vision Pro, which rings in at US$3,499. Early reviews of the headset say it’s much lighter and comfier than the Vision Pro, with an interface that feels remarkably similar.
The headset features a micro-OLED screen that supports 4K resolution and up to 90Hz refresh rates for smooth streaming, scrolling and gaming. Samsung also boasts that sports fans “can watch multiple games at the same time,” which to me seems nausea-inducing, but perhaps would be appealing for hardcore sports fans.
Culture radar
HOLLYWOOD
Generative AI is coming to Hollywood
AI has arrived at a precarious time for Hollywood. Studios are producing fewer theatrical releases than before the pandemic, and box office receipts still haven’t recovered. There are frequent pronouncements that Hollywood is dead. Nobody knows whether AI will hasten or forestall that decline, but what’s not in dispute is that it carries the potential to radically upend how movies and TV are made.
Globe reporter Joe Castaldo recently dug into one Toronto-based company that believes its AI video model will be a blockbuster for the industry. The team at the Moonvalley is pitching its model – trained only on licensed content – as a revolutionary tool that will allow filmmakers to work faster and at a lower cost, and produce more films and TV shows, all while retaining human artistry. Read the full story here.