As the week ends under a newly established National State of Disaster, we’re sitting down to record the weekly africast.
To begin we touch on the State of the Nation Address that was given on Thursday evening by President Cyril Ramaphosa. Government announced plans to fix the energy crisis, address unemployment, crime and corruption. South Africans will surely be watching the events that unfold in the next year with a keen eye.
Then we move on to Netflix spreading its password sharing crackdown to new territories including New Zealand, Canada and Spain, among others. The streaming service now allows for the purchase of extra members for about the fee of a Basic subscription in some regions but this may not be the case for all regions.
Finally, Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard might be over if the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority has anything to say about it. The authority is concerned that the acquisition would give Microsoft more power than it already has especially as regards cloud gaming. A final report from the authority is expected in April.
For the core of this week’s africast we discuss the announcement of several chatbots powered by large language models being made more widely available. This week alone saw Microsoft, Google, Baidu and Alibaba announce intelligent communication efforts by announcing the integration of these AI chatbots into their services. We discuss these ventures as well as some of the pitfalls that have started to show.
As always, links to the stories we discussed this week follow below:
- Ramaphosa declares National State of Disaster at last night’s SONA
- Business leaders react to State of Disaster declaration
- Netflix paid account sharing is for Standard & Premium members only
- UK authority could scupper Microsoft’s deal with Activision Blizzard
- The 4 tech giants going wild over ChatGPT
[Image – CC 0 Pixabay]
