You might need this

February 13, 2025

You might need this: OpenAI’s fancy ChatGPT deep research agent pulls info from multiple sources but takes 30 minutes per search. It’s coming to Free and Plus tiers pretty soon, not just the $200-per-month option. The catch? Plus users get 10 prompts a month and Free users get two. I’ve mentioned before this is great to use with medical issues, business ideas and just about anything that needs a ton of research.

Tags: issues, OpenAI, research, Search, users

Printer friendly

Elon Musk and Sam Altman are fighting like kids on the playground

By The Royal Society, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=152333860; By TechCrunch - TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco 2019 - Day 2, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=127902290

It feels like forever ago. The first time I tried ChatGPT, I knew it would change everything. Back in 2022, images of people had seven fingers and every other thing a chatbot spit out was nonsense. I asked Google’s Gemini for a Bible verse and it told me no because the Bible was a copyrighted work. Yikes.

Continue reading →

'Forever chemicals' are everywhere in our tech and almost impossible to avoid

The term “forever chemicals” is floating around more than ever. If you’re wondering why folks are so worried about them, the clue’s in the name.

These substances stick around for a long, long time, and it’s not clear how safe they are. They’re also everywhere, from your phone and smartwatch tech to carpets to nail polish.

Continue reading →

3.7 cents

Cost to mint a penny. President Trump just told the Treasury to call it quits. The government lost $85 million producing pennies over the last fiscal year at almost four times their face value (paywall link). This makes cents.

32 minutes

For what scientists call the perfect hard-boiled egg. Periodic cooking alternates between hot and cold water every two minutes to achieve cooked whites and creamy yolks. If I had 32 minutes, I wouldn’t be eating a hard-boiled egg. I ordered a chicken and an egg from Amazon today. I’ll let you know.

81.7TB

Of pirated books used to train Meta’s AI, Llama. The dirty details came out in court docs. Writers are suing Meta for feeding their (stolen) work into the AI. I’m no lawyer, but it sure sounds shady to me.

12 times

As massive as Jupiter. That’s the size of an exoplanet spotted by the European Space Agency’s Gaia spacecraft. Some context: Jupiter is equal to about 318 Earths, so this thing is huge. The exoplanet, Gaia 4b, is 244 light-years away and 64% as big as the sun. A year there? About 570 Earth days.

$50,000

Cost to remove saggy skin. People who lose a ton of weight on GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic, Mounjaro and Wegovy are booking “360-degree” body lifts (paywall link). Lower-body procedures are up by 28% and upper-body surgeries have spiked by 86%. Most new patients are in their 20s and 30s. I just have no appetite for this.

819 million

Hours wasted on reCAPTCHA. Choosing images (like which ones have a bike or a bridge) stopped bots years ago, but now they’re useless. So, why do they still exist? When you interact with the boxes, Google gets access to your browsing data to sell to advertisers. They’ve collected $6.1 billion just by making you click. Sneaky dogs.

$97.4 billion

What Elon Musk offered to buy OpenAI yesterday. He’s in a battle with Sam Altman, who wants OpenAI to turn a profit. Altman responded to Musk on X, writing, “no thank you but we will buy twitter for $9.74 billion if you want.” Ouch.

180 years old

The Jevons paradox principle, which now applies to AI. Basically, it says that as efficiency increases, so does usage. With AI models becoming more efficient and cheaper (like DeepSeek), more people will start using them every day. This is probably good news if your Nvidia stock earnings are in the toilet like mine.