(NOTE: This article is part of an ongoing series documenting an experiment with using AI to fill the NCAA brackets and see how it fares against years of human experience. The original article is as follows.)
After the first two rounds, I am at the top of both my friends’ pool with sixty entries and my family pool with six. For a broader sample size, my brackets stand in the 98th percentile among the 27 million brackets entered into the ESPN challenge.
Were ChatGPT’s picks perfect? No. It didn’t see Florida getting dunked—and that will hurt me later on. But we got 13 out of the Sweet 16 picks correct. Which is almost certainly better than I could have done on my own.
Interestingly, all of my pools are still very competitive. There are no runaways. As I mentioned, I asked Chat GPT to construct a bracket that was optimized to win my pool and another that was designed to more correctly predict the outcome of the tournament. The difference was that the first took a few more chances to separate me from other folks picking favorites. Through the first two rounds, the bracket that was designed to win the pool is doing better—but only slightly.
I will be back next weekend to report on how we did in the Sweet Sixteen and Elite 8.
Apple is less than a day away from launching its highly anticipated OLED MacBook Pro with a touch-sensitive screen. But it appears that the upgrade is going to cost a pretty penny. According to a report by Bloomberg, Apple is reportedly eyeing a starting price of $2,899 for the 14-inch MacBook Pro, while the 16-inch version could start at $3,399 in the US.
"At $2,899, the 14-inch model would mark the highest starting price for a new MacBook Pro model, surpassing the $2,799 Apple charged for a 17-inch version introduced in 2006," says the report. The report claims that Apple is targeting a minimum price hike of $400 for its upcoming redesigned 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models.
I've spent a good amount of time digging into the spec sheet of the new M6 MacBook Pro (14-inch), and for all intents and purposes, this is a classic Apple "chip and connectivity" refresh. It's not a full redesign. The chassis, Liquid Retina XDR panel, speakers, ports, and battery, all of them carry over unchanged.
However, the M6 brings more cores, stronger on-device AI, higher memory bandwidth on the larger configs, and modern wireless. Here’s the practical rundown of what actually improved, and whether those gains are worth your money.
Two new highly requested iCloud plugins just got added to ChatGPT, giving people who rely on Apple’s Mail and Calendar services a way to search emails, check appointments, and manage their schedules directly through the chatbot.
The integration is rolling out to all ChatGPT plans, including the free tier. You can access it on the web, desktop, and iOS.