Hello, welcome to Monday. It’s sunny outside and it’s starting to smell like spring. This weekend we saw more chatter around former Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s secret appointments and the excitement around footy finals has started. But here’s what you should know this morning in tech news.
1. Creating artificial embryos from human DNA
An Israeli biotech firm created an artificial mouse embryo from stem cells, and now they want to do the same with human cells. As Insider reports, scientists at Weizmann’s Molecular Genetics Department grew “synthetic mouse embryos” in a jar without the use of sperm, eggs or a womb. The replica embryos could not develop into fully-formed mice and were therefore not “real”, but they had a beating heart, blood circulation, the start of a brain, a neural tube and an intestinal tract. Renewal Bio now wants to use the technology to make “humanity younger and healthier”.
2. Tesla to increase self-driving software
Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced a price increase to the car’s Full Self Driving software. The new price (a $US3,000 jump) will go into effect in North America (where it’s currently beta testing advanced autonomous driving capabilities) from September 5 but it won’t affect Aussie Tesla owners and wannabe owners. That technology isn’t available in Australia yet. It’s also not the first time in recent memory that Tesla has raised prices.
After wide release of FSD Beta 10.69.2, price of FSD will rise to $15k in North America on September 5th.
Current price will be honored for orders made before Sept 5th, but delivered later.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 21, 2022
3. Australian government spent $2 billion on $1 billion IBM deal
Back in July 2018, IBM scored itself a $1 billion deal with the federal government to be its ‘technology partner’ (this was after that 2016 Census debacle, too). The idea was to make government IT purchasing easier, more efficient and cost-effective and to help the government be not so archaic with its ‘innovation’. It was also the largest contract ever awarded by the Commonwealth. As iTnews reveals, this deal in 2022 has now tipped $2 billion and the Digital Transformation Agency is now going to scope the full extent “of the IBM commercial landscape within the Commonwealth, to inform future negotiations with IBM”.
4. Horizon Worlds is going to suck less, Zuck says
Last week, Mark Zuckerberg posted a screenshot of his digital avatar standing in front of the Eiffel Tower as a way of announcing that Horizon Worlds was launching in France and Spain. As expected, the internet responded. This thing is ugly. But the Meta chief responded over the weekend, saying “Major updates to Horizon and avatar graphics coming soon”. We sure hope so, Zuck.
5. NFTs won’t work in gaming
Speaking of Web3… NFT gaming re-entered the news cycle recently, with a Kickstarter for a game that leveraged crypto technology failing and collapsing (the developers ran out of money and have ceased development). It prompted us to take a long, hard think about the concept of NFTs and Web3 as a whole and whether or not it has legs in the gaming space. Here’s our analysis/opinion on why NFTs won’t work in gaming.
BONUS ITEM: Your bonus item today is not a meme, nor a comment on Australian politics, rather an explanation as to why a colleague or two might go missing at 11 am. Today is House of the Dragon day, but will the Game of Thrones prequel live up to expectations?
The reign of House Targaryen begins Monday. Clear your schedule for the #HouseoftheDragon premiere on BINGE. pic.twitter.com/rh6MaT7tAB
— BINGE (@binge) August 20, 2022
Happy Monday.