Ken Garen, CPA, Co-Founder and President, UBCC

Forget lithium ion — world’s first silicon-carbon battery blows that tech away Story by Richard Priday • February 28, 2023 Phone maker Honor showed off a world-first battery that's made using silicon and carbon to give upcoming handsets a distinct capacity advantage over those using currently available battery tech. During the on-stage announcement at MWC 2023, Honor CEO George Zhao claimed the battery features a 12.8% higher energy density compared to regular graphite batteries. That means either the same capacity as a typical battery in a smaller space, or more capacity in the same space, depending on how you wish to take advantage of the new technology. Zhao put this announcement in context by saying that if the newly released Honor Magic5 Pro used this technology, its 5,100 mAh battery would instead have a capacity of 5,450 mAh. Honor drew attention to the "low voltage aggregation technology" that makes this capacity increase possible. Capacity at 3.5V is 240% b...

'I Worked on Google's AI. My Fears Are Coming True' by Blake Lemoine • February 27, 2023 I joined Google in 2015 as a software engineer. Part of my job involved working on LaMDA: an engine used to create different dialogue applications, including chatbots. The most recent technology built on top of LaMDA is an alternative of Google Search called Google Bard, which is not yet available to the public. Bard is not a chatbot; it's a completely different kind of system, but it's run by the same engine as chatbots. In my role, I tested LaMDA through a chatbot we created, to see if it contained bias with respect to sexual orientation, gender, religion, political stance, and ethnicity. But while testing for bias, I branched out and followed my own interests. During my conversations with the chatbot, some of which I published on my blog, I came to the conclusion that the AI could be sentient due to the emotions that it expressed reliably and in the right context. It wa...

How This Hydrogen-Powered America’s Cup Chase Cat Could Change the Future of Boating Dubbed Chase Zero, the foiling-power catamaran spans 10 meters in length and can carry up to 550 pounds. By MICHAEL VERDON The America’s Cup, yachting’s most storied race, is not where you’d expect to find the next source of emissions-free propulsion for “stinkpots,” sailor-speak for motorboats. Yet Emirates Team New Zealand, which won the regatta in 2021 for the fourth time, launched a foiling-power catamaran named Chase Zero last year that could change the future of boating. As Cup defenders, the Kiwis were in charge of creating the new protocol for the 2024 event, for which they sought out areas desperate for new technology. “We realized our chase boats were years behind our foiling race boats,” says Nick Burridge, ETNZ’s operations and reliability manager. “To keep up, the tenders needed big horsepower, so were burning huge amounts of fossil fuel.” ETNZ decided to bypass battery-powered boa...

7 things you didn’t know that ChatGPT can do By Malcolm McMillan February 15, 2023 From writing a novel to creating a logo, there’s a lot that ChatGPT can do (Image credit: Shutterstock) Make a brand logo Create a 3D animation   Compose music   Create content in multiple languages   Write a book — or at least a chapter   Work as a Linux virtual machine   Play a text-based role-playing game   ChatGPT  is a potentially revolutionary AI-based tool that it taking the tech world by storm. Microsoft has even  added ChatGPT to its Bing search engine . Despite what some people may tell you, ChatGPT can’t do everything, and what it can do ChatGPT doesn’t always get right. That’s not a problem unique to ChatGPT —  Google Bard  made a costly mistake during its debut.   But what ChatGPT can do is still very impressive. It can generate news articles, summarize documents and even code basic websites. However, the...