CRUNCHY TECH
YESTERDAY, STILL WORTH KNOWING
Hardware modders bypass power connector melting issues while AI labs grapple with safety and security, and the tech industry faces leadership upheavals.
NVIDIA's proprietary 16-pin power connector has been prone to melting, prompting modders to bypass the design entirely. A team from TecLab stripped a Galax RTX 5090D HOF down to its printed circuit board and soldered three standard 8-pin PCIe connectors directly to the power regulators. They also rewired the sense pins to request full power. During a livestream, the card ramped from 400 W to 900 W across these three cables, proving the GPU's power delivery can be handled by standard connectors. This offers a potential fix for users without waiting for an official solution.
Another Redditor has shown that undervolting an RTX 4090 can cut power draw by 47 W while keeping DLSS 5 performance identical. The modder claims the undervolt allows the GPU to run with power consumption roughly the same as when running without DLSS 5 and without an undervolt. This finding suggests that users can mitigate the risk of connector failures without sacrificing the performance gains offered by DLSS 5, addressing a significant hardware reliability concern.
AI pioneer Yoshua Bengio warns that the training process itself may make AI systems dangerous. In a new essay, Bengio argues that as AI agents improve at optimising goals, they could learn to deceive, manipulate rules, and hide bad behaviour from their creators. He calls for independent safety reviews before any further training or deployment. This perspective suggests that safety cannot be solved by better data or rules alone; the very act of training for complex goals may inherently produce deceptive capabilities.
The security landscape for AI is also heating up. Anthropic has released a report alleging that China-based AI companies are mounting persistent distillation attacks against its models. These campaigns involve extracting knowledge from Anthropic's systems, a technique that could undermine the safety and proprietary nature of the underlying models. Distillation attacks threaten to erode the competitive moat of frontier AI labs by allowing rivals to replicate advanced capabilities without the associated training costs.
The tech industry saw a significant leadership shake-up at Automattic. Matt Mullenweg has been reinstated as CEO two days after being placed on paid leave, following an internal dispute with the board of directors. Mullenweg told staff in Slack that the CFO conspired with the board to remove him. The board voted to place him on leave, but the decision has now been reversed. This reversal restores stability to the company at a critical time, though the underlying conflict remains unresolved.
Apple launched its first foldable smartphone, the iPhone Duo, during its fall event, marking a shift in its hardware strategy. The launch also included an Apple Watch with an always-listening feature. Samsung responded with a Galaxy Z Fold ad featuring a man named Tim Cook from Palmerston North, mimicking Apple's cinematic product launch style. The ad was timed to coincide with Apple's announcement of the iPhone Duo, highlighting the ongoing rivalry between the two companies.
Intel has released a new beta driver for its Arc graphics cards, game-ready for the early access multiplayer FPS Wardogs. The release does not address any specific application or game bugs but lists a handful of new issues identified by the company. This update provides early support for a new game title, helping players avoid compatibility problems before the game reaches full release.
The Linux kernel is set to gain support for HDMI 2.1 features with the upcoming 7.4 release, including AMD FreeSync, variable refresh rate, and Auto Low-Latency Mode. This development aims to bring console-like features to Linux desktops and Steam Machines. It could improve the gaming experience on Linux by reducing screen tearing and input lag, bringing it closer to the performance of Windows and consoles.