The newsletter

#96 - 🧐CES 2023, restore old photos, Microsoft ❤️ OpenAI

Greg Taieb · · 6 min read

Hello

First of all welcome to all the people who registered following last week's edition.
This week we return with a very complete program:

  • 🧐 What I remember from CES 2023
  • 👨‍🎨 The service that will give a facelift to your old ones photos
  • ❤️ Microsoft and OpenAI see the future together
  • 🎙️What if Gafam disappeared?
  • 🛩️ The golden age of airlines in pictures

🧐What I remember from CES 2023

Last week, the 2023 edition of CES opened, the biggest tech show in the world in Las Vegas and like in the heyday (pre-Covid) it is a mix of human mass and innovations that are all the crazier each other.

It's a full-time job to summarize all the announcements so I'm going to tell you what I remembered.

The RTX Video Super Resolution

Behind this barbaric name lies a pretty cool innovation. Nvidia announced RTX Video Super Resolution, an AI-powered technology that can increase the resolution of video watched through Chrome or Edge browsers on a PC up to the equivalent of 4K. It supports any video with a resolution ranging from 360p to 1440p, up to a frame rate of 144Hz and is available for Nvidia 30 and 40 series graphics cards.

Why is it interesting?
Even if this technology will remain niche for a while, I find it interesting for 2 reasons:

  1. It will improve the quality of many old Youtube videos published at a time or 4K was not common
  2. It can limit the bandwidth and consumption of servers by “simply” sending lower resolutions which will be “upgraded” locally on the readers’ computers (it’s always that for the planet).

🚽Finally a good app for connected toilets

Withings presented U-Scan, a sensor that takes the form of a toilet disinfectant and which actually acts as a connected analysis laboratory by carrying out urine tests.

With more than 3000 metabolites, urine reflects our state of health particularly well. It gives an immediate overview of the body's balance, and can help detect and monitor a wide variety of health data.

We can integrate cartridges to monitor and optimize our diet or even monitor our cycles. It can also be a very good way to detect anomalies even if Withings clearly states that it is not a medical device.

Always count €499 for the whole device with cartridges for release planned for the 2nd quarter of 2023.

I find the idea great and super well thought out even if a little too expensive at this stage and not sure I want to change the batteries of a device that spends its time in urine 😅.

The innovations of l'Oreal

The cosmetics giant was also present with two very original products:

Tech has a bad image because of gadgets that evolve and are replaced more and more quickly, the use of heavy metals... and yet this year each player has integrated announcements about the environment into their products.

The “car experience” is full of promises

We are witnessing a double offensive with on one side the historic automobile players (BMW and its car that changes color like Hot Wheels) and the tech players (Samsung and Sony which even announced its concept car).

Single objective: to redefine the standards of the in-car experience with the help of sensors and giant screens.

It's a change from my old twingo!

👨‍🎨The service that will give a facelift to your old photos

If you were born more than 25 years ago you You certainly have to have photos of yourself from film cameras and perhaps not as good quality as you would like.

The good news is that AI has become very good at processing and restoring images, allowing a poor quality image to be considerably improved.

This is precisely the promise of this new free service called Restore Photos whose concept is as simple as it is brilliant: you upload an old photo of yourself and a few seconds later you get an HD version.

The result with a photo of a baby and the least we can say is that it's rather successful (although not perfect).

Test Restore Photos

❤️ Microsoft and OpenAI see the future together

OpenAI struck a big blow in December with the release of ChatGPT and the less than we can say that anyone who has spent a little time on this tool says that this is the future of internet search.

ChatGPT is in fact what we dreamed of seeing Google Assistant, Alexa or Siri do, namely a conversational interface that gives you immediate and relevant answers.

Microsoft, which has invested $1 billion in OpenAI, is starting to say that a good way to amortize this sum would be to integrate GPT into its tools to start its Bing engine and why not tomorrow its Office suite.

We can imagine the time that such a tool would save you in Outlook to write and summarize emails, in Excel to analyze and transform data or in PowerPoint to give you a presentation.

🚀A real carnage in terms of productivity!

That doesn't sound very good for the Google search engine! And that's good, it's precisely the program for this week's podcast.

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🎙️And if the Gafam disappeared?

We tend to think they are indestructible but we also said that of Nokia or Enron🫢. The Gafam (which we should definitely call “Amam”) are not all as unbeatable as one might believe.

“Too big to fail” is a saying that no longer has any credibility so we might as well ask the right questions to find out what the concrete impacts of the disappearance of a Google, a Facebook or a Microsoft would be.

This is precisely the subject of the 1st episode of season 3 of Encore Un Podcast Tech.

What comes out of it? We would be less bothered by the disappearance of a Facebook or Google than an Amazon and especially for certain actors the scenario becomes more plausible every day.

🛩️ The golden age of airlines in images

If like me you are not a regular customer of business class flights you know that the travel experience and the comfort of the seats is generally rather "basic".

Lack of space, disgusting food, promiscuity, the least we can say is that there are nicer and more comfortable experiences.

And yet it hasn't always been like this and if you want to convince yourself of that just take a take a look at these photos taken in the 60s and 70s which show to what extent we knew how to travel at the time!

So yes of course we were far from the current democratization and as a result there were much fewer passengers but we must admit that it makes you dream:

  • Real beds
  • Charcuterie tasting
  • Bar
  • Meal for two
  • …

And that's it for this week!
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