Welcome to Between the Bytes where we’re not as smart as your average nerd. My name is Arash Baakhshandehpour and I’m Gary Arnold. This week we’re going to be giving you some AI updates, some news with some German startup companies and then some local news with Silicon Slopes as well. You forgot to mention that we are here at the brand new Executech training facility. Check it out!
Tech News
Stolen Data from UK Universities
We’ve got a lot of artificial intelligence news today. The very first bit that we have is about an artificial intelligence that was developed by the University of Chicago. This AI was trained to leave fake reviews so whatever language programming they did to it, it studied hundreds of thousands of reviews of real users and from it, learned how to leave a review on a restaurant. So what they did is they then had it create three different reviews and they had people come in and they would read the AI reviews and they would read the three genuine reviews and then they would rank the usefulness. Was it relevant? Did it help them understand more about the restaurant? The AI ranked 3.15 on usefulness compared to 3.28 for a genuine review. So very little difference between reviews. AI is gaining ground. Yeah I mean Arash, what do you think about this in general, about the future of reviews? We obviously know the value of reviews in local businesses, especially with Google and Facebook. The possibility that AI is even intruding into that part of our realm now scares me. But it’s it’s really interesting. It’ll be hard to tell what is real and fake when it comes to reviews.
Silicon Slopes + Women’s Tech Council
Next, the Woman’s Tech Council here in Utah has announced a partnership with Silicon Slopes and their goal in mind is to help women get into the tech industry and stay in the tech industry.
They have found that the average time for women to stay in the tech world is about seven years. Their goal is to change that and help women get on the forefront of the tech world. Use it as a stepping stone. There are some goals in place that they have put together. They’re once again trying to map things out to make sure that women have the same opportunity and continue to stay in the tech world.
Flying Cars!
A German startup called Lilium raised $90 million in funding to develop a sky taxi. This startup was started to create a flying taxi, it’s technically a jet but their goal is to create a five-passenger flying jet. It will be able to stay in the air for about an hour and can travel speeds up to 180 miles per hour which means that they could go from, for example, London to Paris in just about an hour. The future is coming!
Putin Weighs in on AI
This headline might scare you a little. Vladimir Putin is getting involved in AI. He’s been quoted saying that there are colossal opportunities but it is difficult to predict the threats. Gary and I have been telling you here on Between the Bytes for a while and warned you, We warned you. A direct quote from Putin, this one is the one that may scare you a little, “Whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become the ruler of the world”. Verbatim from Vladimir Putin. No big deal. Fortunately, he has come out and said that Russia will be sharing any AI knowledge that comes out to make sure that we can we can proceed in the AI world as one. Then, Elon Musk has even weighed in on the problem. It’s not fortunate news. Saying that “The competition for AI superiority is what will eventually lead to World War 3”. Could lead – you didn’t hear from us, but if the news breaks you will hear here first on Between the Bytes.
MWCN Utah 100 Announced
A little more positive news, the Mountain West Capital Networks Utah 100 has released their 2017 list. This is a list of a hundred companies that have the fastest revenue growth over the past three years. Executech was on the list again for the fifth time in a row, maybe more than that. There are some great companies such as Jane.com, Auric Solar, Instructure, Firetoss and many others are also on this list. We’ll have a link in the description where you can check out the full list of these award winners.
Executech Grand Opening
One last congratulatory headline for Executech, our grand opening for our new building is September 13th. As you can notice. Starting at 11:00 a.m. we will have guest speakers such as Thearl Bailey, a former player of the Utah Jazz and former NBA star. There will be food, prizes, games it’s gonna be an all-day event we hope to see you there. We will also have a special live event from Between the Bytes on our Facebook page so be sure to check back in.
Product Demo
Welcome, this week’s product demo. Double the fun with both of us here to demo. This week we are demoing and Nintendo Switch. This is Nintendo’s latest console. Pretty shiny, pretty cool. There are several different playing modes we won’t demonstrate them all right here I’m pretty sure you’ve probably seen this before. We did want to demonstrate a few features. It’s obviously a full touchscreen that you can use to play on. You can use these two side joysticks to play like this. It also comes with a detachable controller where these can detach and you can play on the controller. You can also mount this screen to this dock which charges it and will then project to your big-screen TV. We want to do a quick demo because it also comes with a kickstand and your friends can play together.
That’s the Nintendo Switch! Check it out in stores. It’s actually pretty hard to get right now, but if you preorder it or order it now it will come in several weeks. That’s what we had to do. We will have this featured at our grand opening so come check it out. If you want to win play me.
Frontline
Here’s Frontline on Between the Bytes where we bring you front line news of cyberattacks out there in the world to you between the bytes subscribers and Watchers. This week’s update we want to give you is regarding cyber attacks at UK universities including Oxford Warwick and the University and College of London they are averaging cyber attack attempts of over one thousand a month since 2016. Since 2016 there have been 1,100 successful cyber attacks. The schools are nervous because a lot of information they’ve gathered is data that has taken years to collect. These cyber attacks once gaining that information can sell it on the black markets for a lot of money. Keep your eyes on the news out there and that will do it for this week’s frontline news from Between the Bytes.
Tech Tip
This week’s tech tip comes directly from the source. Our technicians that are out on the front line of users and the issues that they face at companies told us what’s been their bane the last couple weeks. People will often open emails that they shouldn’t and his advice, his tech tip was to err on the side of skeptical. If something looks a little bit sketchy in an email, if you’ve never really seen it before, better just to be safe and to delete it. If it was something important, somebody’s going to resend it again it will resurface one way or another. Better to be safe and delete it. Don’t open any attachments that you get from unfamiliar emails. Don’t click on links from unfamiliar links at all. Just play it safe.
That’s it for this week’s episode. As we saw in our product demo, we have the Nintendo Switch make sure to come to our grand opening where you can challenge one of us to Mario Kart. The winner will get a special prize. We’ll also be going live next week for our grand opening so be excited for that. See you next week!
