Before we get on to the more pressing matters from the world of tech this week, this gets priority. All of you, using a Windows 11 PC and relying on Notepad for jotting down quick pointers, saving links or simply using it as a rough sheet, there is finally a spellcheck feature that’s being rolled out. You read that right. Microsoft Notepad is getting spellcheck in 2024. Not to be confused with the Microsoft OneNote. The basic notepad app. Better late than never, I suppose. Almost 40 years after the Word document editor first got spellcheck (that was in 1985). The way it works is on the same lines as spellcheck in the Word and Edge web browser, which means, any spelling errors will be underlined in red. An old dog can learn new tricks.
PERCEPTION
Very few people these days seem to agree with Mira Murati, every time she says something these days. I am one of those few folks. There’s a reason for that. To get what she’s saying, you must take a broader view of the artificial space as it unfolds around you, and the trends that further dictate how our interactions with technology and life in general are changing as a result. When Murati a few days ago, addressing the audience at Dartmouth’s Thayer School of Engineering said some creative jobs will go away in the coming years, there was of course the inevitable outrage on social media (mostly X, that tends to the town square of armchair experts). You may not agree with OpenAI’s CTO’s predictions, but are they really predictions?
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McKinsey Global Institute, this May, suggested in a report that by the year 2030, as many as 12 million workers in just the US, will need to find new jobs because generative AI would’ve taken their previous ones. Just the US. The global number will be much higher. This takes me back to AI platform Canva’s latest edition of their annual Visual Economy Report released in June. They suggest that 9 out of 10 surveyed businesses and enterprises in India, are beginning to take first steps towards the use AI for content creation and visual communication tasks. The change is very much under way. Even on a global canvas, of the 3,707 businesses that are part of the survey (within this, 257 are Indian companies), 73% indicate using visual communication platforms or tools have already helped in an uptick in overall business performance, while 70% will further increase investment in such tools for employees to work with. That’s pretty much every generative AI tool, being relevant.
OpenAI’s own Sora generative video tool has been giving us the jitters with the level of realism and context that’s on show, ever since it was first unveiled earlier this year. So much so, you and I cannot use it yet, because OpenAI is correctly worried about the potential for misuse. Quite how that’ll be tackled, because potential and risk doesn’t change when it does get released for everyone later this year, remains to be seen. Sora isn’t the only one. Runway’s unleashed the Gen-3 Alpha, with advanced functionality at your novice fingertips – think of Text to Video, Image to Video, Advanced Camera Control and something called the Multi Motion Brush, all there. Web browser only for now, the iOS app arrives sometime in the coming weeks.
As I said, too early to say whether in the long run, AI will take away the jobs of the “Creative Directors” or the “Art Director” or the “Chief Creative Officer”, or someone lower down in the hierarchy. But a change is coming for sure. It wouldn’t be out of place to believe Murati’s predictions are open hints at what awaits, because she is working closely with the AI capabilities as they are being built. When she says the next GPT model will have ‘PhD level intelligence’, believe her. I’m not saying that don’t question AI companies on ethics, data handling, how models are trained and the million other contextual questions that are very relevant. But she has vision of what’s being created and how far along it is with development. That’s important.
When Ilya Sutskever says his start-up, Safe Superintelligence aims to create a super-intelligent machine which surpasses anything we’ve seen thus far (the important caveat being is shouldn’t be dangerous as a result of its capabilities), believe him. Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 model, released a few days ago, is often matching and mostly superseding OpenAI’s greatest thus far GPT-4o, Google’s Gemini 1.5 Pro and Meta’s Llama 3 (specifically, the 400B) in benchmarks – believe them too. They can see where this is headed. Because these are the folks, whether right or wrong, building the tools for that future.
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CREATIVE
In case you are looking for a rival to Adobe’s suite of professional apps, Serif’s Canva owned Affinity Photo, Affinity Designer, and Affinity Publisher now have a six-month free trial now available. These three apps, as I’ve pointed out earlier as well, play an important role for Canva’s AI pitch for consumers, creators and businesses. This can be accessed on an Apple Mac, a Windows PC, and an Apple iPad. Post that, you’ll be able to make use of Affinity’s one-time purchase option to buy an individual app license or the entire suite. Over the summer, Affinity apps added support for ARM64 chips, which means it is already optimized for the new line of Windows PCs running Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite chips.
CRINGEWORTHY?
Many of you folks may have noticed, I try to bring you the reviews and analysis of important new tech, including smartphones. Often, conspicuous by their absence are the ones which can be classified as “hot air”. There’s enough on both sides of that fine line, and life goes on. Which brings me to a phone you’d have probably noticed on social media in recent days. Nothing’s CMF Phone 1, to name it, which costs ₹15,999 and ₹17,999. Alongside, a lot of misinformation that is percolating the messaging. I’m not saying the brand is responsible for it, and neither am I saying they aren’t (they haven’t said anything, at the time of writing this). I’ll talk about that for a moment, before illustrating perhaps Nothing has got absolutely the wrong idea about what a mid-range Android phone should be, to deliver value.
There is one social media advertisement by their ecommerce partners Flipkart, that’s sneaked through and reads – “It’s like buying Four Crop Tops but paying for one” and then proceeding to call it “World’s first 4-in-1 Interchangeable Back Covers in a smartphone”. Hyperbole is perhaps the name of the marketing game defining the latter (it’s incorrect, as I will just illustrate), but the former sentence is simply cringeworthy. I’d dearly like to know who from Nothing, Nothing India and Flipkart sat in a meeting and decided yes, let’s go with this pitch. If you still don’t see anything wrong with it, there’s very little to explain further, is it?
Now on to the facts as borne by the passage of time. Many, many years ago (the year was 2014; much further back than modern day attention spans allow for), Motorola (the cool kids call it Moto, and wouldn’t hear anything else) made the Moto E. This was the definitive affordable Android phone to buy, that is before Xiaomi came along and rewrote the rules. That was a phone with many, many colour options for the swappable back covers. Didn’t need a screwdriver either. Green, blue, red and pink, some options I distinctly remember. A bit later, came the Mi 4 from Xiaomi – different finish options for swappable back covers.
Now on to the perception of what a mid-range Android phone buyer would want. Not necessarily the most powerful processor, but it’s a mix of things – smooth software, a good display, promise of software updates and of course, don’t make a list of accessories that need to be purchased separately. First (and this is a brand call, I’m simply putting forward a perspective) is the processor choice, the MediaTek Dimensity 7300, which Nothing is comparing with the Dimensity 7050, the Qualcomm Snapdragon 782G and the Snapdragon 6 Gen1. Their call, but you must notice how comparisons with the direct predecessor, the Dimensity 7200 have been avoided – the 7200 has higher clock speeds and returns better scores in the same Antutu benchmark tests that Nothing is referring to.
Nevertheless, in my opinion, core specs play a limited role because the overall experience is defined by a broader collective, which is why I’ve recommended (and the folks who have listened, are happy with the purchase) the OnePlus Nord CE4 Lite too. That is a phone which hasn’t impressed folks on X, because it runs a mere Snapdragon 695G chip. By that argument, the CMF Phone 1 too leaves nothing to complain about.
Last but not least is the list of options Nothing has curated for the CMF Phone 1. There is the proposition of swappable back covers (nice colours, mind you), each of which costs ₹1,499. Then there’s the kickstand accessory, which costs another ₹799. You see the trend? The costs continue to add up. Because wallets built into phone cases is cool since Apple’s efforts perhaps, that card case is another ₹799. A lanyard, perhaps? Another ₹799. Avoid all of these somehow, but likely you cannot miss the 33-watt charger, which bundled with the phone, is ₹799 (there is no charger in the CMF Phone 1’s box). Otherwise, that’s ₹1,299. This looks like a fun phone and full marks for trying something out of the ordinary, but isn’t exactly a mid-range phone now, is it?
QUOTE
Last week, we had covered some views and expectations from the tech industry, from the Union Budget 2024 that’ll be presented on July 23. We’ve some more voices from the industry, with what they believe should be focus areas.
Make in India: “A reduction in the GST rate for LED TVs larger than 32 inches, from the current 28% to 18% in Budget 2024, is expected. This adjustment will encourage consumer spending in the electronics sector. Additionally, expanding Production-Linked Incentive (PLI) schemes to include smart TVs, refrigerators, and washing machines is essential to foster broader market growth and enhance manufacturing capabilities,” says Avneet Singh Marwah, who is CEO at Super Plastronics Pvt Ltd, a leading consumer durables manufacturer in India.
Fintech: “As the Union Budget 2024-25 approaches, our optimism is fueled by the anticipation of transformative policies to enhance the digital ecosystem and further accelerate UPI adoption. Visionary initiatives will drive seamless customer experiences, enable efficient cross-border transactions and broaden access to essential financial tools, including DigiLocker enhancements like passport integration for NRIs,” says Rohit Taneja, Co-founder of Decentro, a digital payments aggregator.
