Humans have automated tasks for centuries. Now, AI companies see a path to profit in harnessing our love of efficiency, and they’ve got a name for their solution: agents.
Technology
Vivo X200 Pro series unboxing, benchmark, new videos & more
A ton of new VIvo X200 Pro series information appeared online, including a benchmark, teaser videos, an official unboxing, and so on. The focus is on the Vivo X200 Pro and Vivo X200 Pro Mini here, by the way. So let’s take it one step at a time.
The Vivo X200 Pro series videos surface, along with benchmark, an unboxing & more
First and foremost, Vivo confirmed that the Vivo X200 series will be fueled by the all-new MediaTek Dimensity 9400 processor. That chip was announced very recently, and it’s the most powerful processor from MediaTek to date.
Two new official videos have appeared. The first one is showing us the unboxing of the Vivo X200 Pro. In this video, which is embedded below, you can see both colors of the Vivo X200 Pro, blue and white.
Unboxing #vivoX200Pro
I don’t know why but that background music remind me of our airline Finnair’s old cabin music. pic.twitter.com/50yw0TRdDq
— Teme (特米)𝕏|🇫🇮🇨🇳 (@RODENT950) October 8, 2024
One of the videos gives us a good look at Vivo’s design language
The second video is more design-focused. It also gives us a good look at the devices in different colors options. The entire Vivo X200 series will have flat sides, along with a micro-curved display and backplate. They’ll also include a camera oreo on the back. The second video is shown below.
Vivo X200 teaser trailers continue, this time with design pic.twitter.com/3EduzGFo4f
— Teme (特米)𝕏|🇫🇮🇨🇳 (@RODENT950) October 9, 2024
The Vivo X200 Pro also got benchmarked by Geekbench. That listing revealed that the device will ship with Android 15, and that goes for the other two models too. Vivo’s Funtouch OS 15 will run on top of it.
The phone managed to score 2,755 points in the single-core test, and 8,519 points in the multi-core test. This model has 16GB of RAM, and the MediaTek Dimensity 9400 fuels it, of course.
A bunch of pictures appeared too
To top it all off, some additional images appeared too. You’ll find two galleries below. In the first gallery, all three phones are shown off, in several colors. The second gallery contains only real-life images of the Vivo X200 Pro Mini… in all of its colors.
Vivo X200 series images:
Vivo X200 Pro Mini real-life images:
All three Vivo X200 series smartphones will become official on October 14, by the way. That much has been confirmed by the company. They’re coming to China first, but we’re expecting a global launch to follow.
Servers computers
MDC Assembly Guide 42U Server Cabinet – SRRCS62107
MDC Assembly Guide 42U Server Cabinet – SRRCS62107. Short guide, easy assembly. Call for more info. .
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Technology
Agents are the future AI companies promise — and desperately need
AI agents are autonomous programs that perform tasks, make decisions, and interact with environments with little human input, and they’re the focus of every major company working on AI today. Microsoft has “Copilots” designed to help businesses automate things like customer service and administrative tasks. Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian recently outlined a pitch for six different AI productivity agents, and Google DeepMind just poached OpenAI’s co-lead on its AI video product, Sora, to work on developing a simulation for training AI agents. Anthropic released a feature for its AI chatbot, Claude, that will let anyone create their own “AI assistant.” OpenAI includes agents as level 2 in its 5-level approach to reach AGI, or human-level artificial intelligence.
Obviously, computing is full of autonomous systems. Many people have visited a website with a pop-up customer service bot, used an automated voice assistant feature like Alexa Skills, or written a humble IFTTT script. But AI companies argue “agents” — you’d better not call them bots — are different. Instead of following a simple, rote set of instructions, they believe agents will be able to interact with environments, learn from feedback, and make decisions without constant human input. They could dynamically manage tasks like making purchases, booking travel, or scheduling meetings, adapting to unforeseen circumstances and interacting with systems that could include humans and other AI tools.
Artificial intelligence companies hope that agents will provide a way to monetize powerful, expensive AI models. Venture capital is pouring into AI agent startups that promise to revolutionize how we interact with technology. Businesses envision a leap in efficiency, with agents handling everything from customer service to data analysis. For individuals, AI companies are pitching a new era of productivity where routine tasks are automated, freeing up time for creative and strategic work. The endgame for true believers is to create AI that is a true partner, not just a tool.
“What you really want,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told MIT Technology Review earlier this year, “is just this thing that is off helping you.” Altman described the killer app for AI as a “super-competent colleague that knows absolutely everything about my whole life, every email, every conversation I’ve ever had, but doesn’t feel like an extension.” It can tackle simple tasks instantly, Altman added, and for more complex ones, it will attempt them but return with questions if needed. Tech companies have been trying to automate the personal assistant since at least the 1970s, and now, they promise they’re finally getting close.
At an OpenAI press event ahead of the company’s annual Dev Day, head of developer experience Romain Huet demonstrated the company’s new Realtime API with an assistant agent. Huet gave the agent a budget and some constraints for buying 400 chocolate-covered strawberries and asked it to place an order via a phone call to a fictitious shop.
The service is similar to a Google reservation-making bot called Duplex from 2018. But that bot could only handle the simplest scenarios — it turned out a quarter of its calls were actually made by humans.
While that order was placed in English, Huet told me he gave a more complex demo in Tokyo: he prompted an agent to book a hotel room for him in Japanese where it would handle the conversation in Japanese and then call him back in English to confirm it’s done. “Of course, I wouldn’t understand the Japanese part — it just handles it,” Huet said.
But Huet’s demo immediately sparked concerns in the room full of journalists. Couldn’t the AI assistant be used for spam calls? Why didn’t it identify itself as an AI system? (Huet updated the demo for the official Dev Day, an attendee says, making the agent identify itself as “Romain’s AI Assistant.”) The unease was palpable, and it wasn’t surprising — even without agents, AI tools are already being used for deception.
There was another, arguably more immediate problem: the demo didn’t work. The agent lacked enough information and incorrectly recorded dessert flavors, causing it to auto-populate flavors like vanilla and strawberry in a column, rather than saying it didn’t have that information. Agents frequently run into issues with multi-step workflows or unexpected scenarios. And they burn more energy than a conventional bot or voice assistant. Their need for significant computational power, especially when reasoning or interacting with multiple systems, makes them costly to run at scale.
AI agents offer a leap in potential, but for everyday tasks, they aren’t yet significantly better than bots, assistants, or scripts. OpenAI and other labs aim to enhance their reasoning through reinforcement learning, all while hoping Moore’s Law continues to deliver cheaper, more powerful computing.
So, if AI agents aren’t yet very useful, why is the idea so popular? In short: market pressures. These companies are sitting on powerful but expensive technology and are desperate to find practical use cases that they can also charge users for. The gap between promise and reality also creates a compelling hype cycle that fuels funding, and it just so happens that OpenAI raised $6.6 billion right as it started hyping agents.
AI agent startups have secured $8.2 billion in investor funding over the last 12 months
Big tech companies have been rushing to integrate all kinds of “AI” into their products, but they hope AI assistants in particular could be the key to unlocking revenue. Huet’s AI calling demo outpaces what models can currently do at scale, but he told me he expects features like it to appear more commonly as soon as next year, as OpenAI refines its “reasoning” o1 model.
For now, the concept seems to be mostly siloed in enterprise software stacks, not products for consumers. Salesforce, which provides customer relationship management (CRM) software, spun up an “agent” feature to great fanfare a few weeks ahead of its annual Dreamforce conference. The feature lets customers use natural language to essentially build a customer service chatbot in a few minutes through Slack, instead of spending a lot of time coding one. The chatbots have access to a company’s CRM data and can process natural language easier than a bot not based on large language models, potentially making them better at limited tasks like asking questions about orders and returns.
AI agent startups (still an admittedly nebulous term) are already becoming quite a buzzy investment. They’ve secured $8.2 billion in investor funding over the last 12 months, spread over 156 deals, an increase of 81.4 percent year over year, according to PitchBook data. One of the better-known projects is Sierra, a customer service agent similar to Salesforce’s latest project and launched by former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor. There’s also Harvey, which offers AI agents for lawyers, and TaxGPT, an AI agent to handle your taxes.
Despite all the enthusiasm for agents, these high-stakes uses raise a clear question: can they actually be trusted with something as serious as law or taxes? AI hallucinations, which have frequently tripped up users of ChatGPT, currently have no remedy in sight. More fundamentally, as IBM presciently stated in 1979, “a computer can never be held accountable” — and as a corollary, “a computer must never make a management decision.” Rather than autonomous decision-makers, AI assistants are best viewed as what they truly are: powerful but imperfect tools for low-stakes tasks. Is that worth the big bucks AI companies hope people will pay?
For now, market pressures prevail, and AI companies are racing to monetize. “I think 2025 is going to be the year that agentic systems finally hit the mainstream,” OpenAI’s new chief product officer, Kevin Weil, said at the press event. “And if we do it right, it takes us to a world where we actually get to spend more time on the human things that matter, and a little less time staring at our phones.”
Technology
Nintendo to hold playtest for a new, unannounced Switch Online feature
Nintendo has announced that it will perform a playtest this month for a mysterious, new Nintendo Switch Online feature.
The Nintendo Switch Online: Playtest Program is scheduled to begin on October 24 and will run through November 6.
According to Nintendo, the playtest is related to “a new feature for the Nintendo Switch Online service”, but hasn’t divulged any details on what it could be just yet.
The company is also looking to recruit people to participate in the playtest, but they must have Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack memberships to qualify.
Customers will also be required to download “exclusive software” to their own Nintendo Switch system in order to participate, Nintendo explained.
To apply to the Nintendo Switch Online: Playtest Program, users will need to head to the Application Page from this blog post.
You also need to be 18 or over and have a Nintendo Account registered to either Japan, the United States of America, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, or Spain.
Nintendo adds that the playtest is “expected to accept as many as 10,000 participants” and that it will close applications early if the number of accepted participants has reached the required limit.
Elsewhere, Nintendo Switch 2 rumors are ramping up as the most recent leak allegedly revealed the design for the unannounced system.
Around 12 images were shared online and began making their rounds in September and supposedly showed the final design for the Nintendo Switch successor, which looks to be a bigger version of the base model with a bigger screen.
Nintendo hasn’t formally revealed the console at this time, but an announcement has been confirmed for before the end of this year. This could mean the Switch 2 could launch sometime in 2025.
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A quick look at Supermicro’s X13 generation of GPU servers
Get a quick look at Supermicro’s X13 generation GPU system. Supermicro’s X13 portfolio features more than 15 system families optimized for tomorrow’s data center workloads. Join ServeTheHome’s Patrick Kennedy as he takes a deep dive into the X13 range to find out how Supermicro is able to deliver the highest-performing, most energy-efficient rack-scale server solutions available today!
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Technology
Do the 2024 Nobel prizes show that AI is the future of science?
It is a common refrain that artificial intelligence is coming to take all our jobs, and now it seems that Nobel prizewinners are no exception. Two of the awards this year, for physics and chemistry, have been claimed by people working in the field of AI – much to the chagrin of some researchers in areas more traditionally recognised by these categories. What does the rise of the AI Nobel mean for the future of science?
“These prizes reflect two different ways of reckoning with the relationship between AI and science:…
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