August 2, 2024 • 37 mins
Some folks are getting impatient while waiting on AI to transform the world (or at the very least their investment portfolio). Plus, we learn about how a controversial online safety bill has been left to fizzle out in the US House of Representatives. And much, much more!
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland.
I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the
tech are you. It's time for the tech news for
the week ending August second, twenty twenty four. Now, I'm
(00:25):
sure you all remember the CrowdStrike outage that happened back
on July nineteenth and subsequently caused chaos around the world
as various Windows based machines got caught in a reboot loop. Well,
we're still seeing the fallout of this classic goofum up,
because it turns out the problem was CrowdStrike had pushed
out an update that included ultimately a relatively simple but
(00:49):
catastrophic error in it a bug. Now, CrowdStrike shareholders are
angrily filing a massive class action lawsuit against the company,
claiming that it failed to disclose its testing process, and
the shareholders say that process was by all means inadequate.
The lawsuit says that CrowdStrike purposefully concealed the fact that
(01:11):
it had not put proper safety measures in place, and
as a result, this outage followed and then the company's
stock price tumbled by nearly a third over the course
of two weeks. That represented around twenty five billion with
a B dollars of market value. Yaoza and shareholders are
(01:32):
not the only ones considering a lawsuit against the company.
Delta Airlines is also apparently doing that, claiming that the
crowd strike outage led to Delta incurring an expense of
around half a billion dollars. Another Yaoza, Delta, like some
other airlines, had to postpone and cancel thousands of flights
(01:52):
and put travelers up in hotels and such in the
wake of this tech disaster. And in the interest of
full disclosure, my partner works for Delta. She was asked
to volunteer to work at the airport, a position she
had not held for more than twenty years, and she
did it because she's a rock star. But according to
Delta CEO ed Bastion, it workers had to manually reset
(02:16):
around forty thousand servers to get things back to normal
for the company, and they expect to receive some form
of compensation for the damages that they incurred as a
result of this outage. Metta has some good news for
its shareholders. The company posted impressive revenue growth thanks to
(02:36):
its advertising business. That revenue growth was enough to mollify
shareholders who continued to be skeptical over Meta's spending in
the metaverse and AI spaces. Zuckerberg told shareholders that the
company's spending in those areas had increased by seven percent
in the second quarter of twenty twenty four, but that
this was more than covered by the rise of the
(02:59):
company's operation rating margin, which hit thirty eight percent. Now
I have no magic ball where I can see what
shareholders are actually thinking, but I imagine more than a few
of them are still in the golly. I wish they'd
stop throwing money away, but I am thankful that the
digital ad business is going well again. They're in that camp.
(03:20):
I'm sure some shareholders remain excited about this metaverse concept
and where AI may be going. But more and more
I'm hearing folks get a little uncertain about the viability
of AI, or at least how far off we are
from AI making a real difference in in a revenue perspective.
I think a lot of people are starting to wake
(03:41):
up to the fact that AI does have enormous potential,
but that potential is going to take time to be realized,
and it isn't just a magic button where you press
it and money comes out. Speaking of AI disillusionment, Bloomberg's
Julia Love has an article titled big Tech fail to
convince Wall Street that AI is paying off And I
(04:03):
think that illustrates my point pretty darn well. She argues
that big companies like Amazon, Alphabet, and Microsoft have all
failed to prove the massive amount of money that they
have collectively poured into AI research and development has any
real chance of paying off in the near term. At
least they failed in the eyes of shareholders. Like it
(04:24):
might turn out that this isn't true, that it is
going to pay off, but shareholders are skeptical. These companies
saw their stock prices decline recently, so essentially, the upfront
costs of AIRE and D are enormous. The ongoing maintenance
costs to operate AI are also skyrocketing, particularly if you're
(04:45):
doing so at scale the way these big companies are
doing it, and the opportunities to actually generate revenue off
of that work are somewhat limited right now. But again,
that's not to say that's always going to be the case.
It may be that down the road this will look
absolutely critical. People will say, Wow, if you had gotten
in at that time, think of how much money you
(05:06):
would make. That's a possibility. However, for now, the attitude
appears to be more like, Ah, this is taking longer
than I thought it would, so I'm less excited now.
It's the good old hype cycle trend. Folks get super
excited about an emerging technology, but then that excitement starts
to drain away as they realize that the actual capabilities
(05:27):
of the tech aren't nearly as wild and impressive as
they had imagined. This does not mean that AI is
just going to fizzle out like some other stuff kind
of has. Arguably, NFTs have largely fizzled out. And yes,
I know NFTs are technically there's still a thing, but
they are a shadow of what they once were thanks
(05:47):
to the enormous collapse NFTs had a couple of years ago.
This might mean that companies will need to find some
creative ways to talk about AI investments in the future
if they do not want their shareholders getting antsy about
the whole thing. So, yeah, it's not just the tech,
it's always the money. Microsoft filed an annual report with
the SEC all publicly traded companies in the United States
(06:10):
have to do this. And in that report, Microsoft named
open Ai as a competitor. Now that's got a sting
for open Ai. It's kind of like hearing an ex
partner describe you as being okay. After all, Microsoft famously
pumped a thirteen billion dollar investment into open Ai. That's
(06:32):
a heck of a present, right, I mean, technically it's
not a president it's a business investment. But you know,
in one section of Microsoft's report, it reads, quote, our
AI offerings compete with AI products from hyperscalers such as
Amazon and Google, as well as products from other emerging competitors,
including Anthropic, open Ai, Meta and other open source offerings,
(06:57):
many of which are also current or putdential partners end quote.
I love that they put OpenAI second in that list.
I guess that's, you know, trying to couch things a
little bit. But obviously Microsoft is not saying that it
has declared war on open Ai. It's not that kind
of competitor. In fact, some suspect that this might be
the people at Microsoft trying to get ahead of any
(07:19):
regulatory issues that could follow in the future. Microsoft wouldn't
be considered anti competitive in the AI space, because look,
open ai is a competitor for Microsoft, not like a
best friend forever. Sure, for a while there, Microsoft had
secured a seat on open AI's board of directors. But
what does that mean? They don't have it anymore. They
(07:40):
dropped that seat. It's nothing you need to worry about, regulators, gerl.
We're all just you know, we're just er. We're competing
like crazy. Down here. Hey, look there's a three headed monkey.
On a semi related note, Windows Central reported late last
week that open ai could be facing a pretty grim
future unless it holds another round of massive funding. That
(08:02):
the company has a projected five billion dollar loss as
possibly in the books this year. The company reportedly spends
about eight point five billion dollars a year in operation
and staffing costs, but it only posts revenue of three
point five billion. So yeah, if you do the math,
that means the company is spending five billion dollars more
(08:25):
in twenty twenty four, then it's bringing in and without
an influx of more cash, the company could go bankrupt.
Open Ai has released updated large language models and tools
this year that in turn has led to increased revenue
for the company. But then running these updated models and
tools is really expensive, so some of that kind of
(08:47):
washes out. Could Open AI potentially innovate its way out
of business, or would its competitor Microsoft swoop in to
keep the ship afloat. I don't know. I guess I'm
gonna have I have to ask chat GPT what it thinks.
Sticking with Microsoft and AI for just a bit longer,
Four of four Media has a piece titled Microsoft and
(09:10):
Reddit are fighting about why Bing's crawler is blocked on Reddit?
All right, So Bing is Microsoft's search engine. It's one
that's most associated with the Edge web browser from Microsoft.
And search engines use web crawlers to index the web
so that the search engine can list pages in response
(09:30):
to queries. This is a fundamental function of search engines. However,
web builders they can actually put instructions inside a web
page that tell these crawlers to scram. Essentially, it's saying, hey,
don't index this web page for your search results. Why
would you do that? Well, you might want to do
it if you want a more controlled access to the
(09:51):
page in question. So essentially Reddit has done this across
its entire site. Because of how companies like Google and
Microsoft are now crawling websites not just for search purposes,
but also to train artificial intelligence large language models, and
Reddit doesn't want any company using content from its site
(10:13):
to train AI without first ponying up cash to do so.
Reddit doesn't object to AI learning from the stuff that
its users create and post to the site, but it
does not give that stuff away for free. Oh, it
also doesn't share any money with the users who actually
made the content in the first place. Reddit is like, no,
(10:34):
once you post it here, it belongs to us. It's
no longer yours, it's ours. But anyway, Reddit is essentially saying,
if you want to train your AI on our stuff,
you got to fork over the cash. And Microsoft is
essentially saying, bro, we're not training AI, We just want
to index Reddit for the purposes of search, so chill out.
(10:55):
Complicating matters is the fact that Google did pay Reddit
a cool sixty million dollars, and so Google, unlike other
search engines, is allowed to crawl an index and even
train AI on Reddit site. So some people are saying, huh,
this is starting to look a bit anti competitive. In fact,
Bing's head of search tweeted out quote Reddit has blocked
(11:20):
being from crawling their site for search, favoring another search engine,
and impacting competition from being and being powered engines. End quote.
Reddit reps told four h four Media that nah, nah,
that's not what's going on. This is totally because Microsoft
refuses to play by our rules, and that's all there
is to it. So this, I think is an illustration
(11:44):
of how AI, specifically generative AI, has started to really
impact the way that the Internet works. Typically, you wouldn't
see sites like Reddit put up a block on indexing
the page. Like indexing me that more people will go
to Reddit when they're searching for certain topics and there's
(12:04):
a Reddit thread all about that thing, so you want
more traffic to come in. But if it also means
that you know, people are exploiting that content and they're
profiting off of that, and Reddit's not getting a piece
of the action, that's where the problems come up. And
I think we're going to see more stuff like this
all the way across the Internet in various incarnations. Well,
(12:29):
speaking about ads and money, it's about that time for
us to take a quick break to thank our sponsors,
but we'll be back with more news right after this.
So we're back, and just this past Tuesday, Microsoft was
(12:51):
the target of a massive d DOS attack that hampered
Microsoft three sixty five and Azure services around the Globe
I measure if you aren't familiar, that's Microsoft's cloud based offerings.
And as a quick reminder, d DOOS stands for distributed
denial of service and typically this kind of attack involves
(13:12):
sending a gargantuan amount of Internet requests from an army
of compromised computers, often compromised through malware and hacking, and
directing all of that traffic to a specific target on
the web, and the target becomes overwhelmed trying to answer
all these requests and ultimately it can shut down as
(13:34):
a result. Now, there are actually a lot of mitigation
strategies that can help decrease the impact of these sorts
of attacks, like to have an early detection system to say, hey,
something's up. We need to raise defenses essentially raise shields
in star trek terms. But sometimes it can take a
little bit before these mitigation strategies can be employed, and
(13:56):
in the meantime you've got a crisis on your hands.
Microsoft has not yet identified the threat actor responsible for
this attack, but the company did admit that a mistake
in the mitigation deployment delayed a security response, which in
turn meant the attack had a greater effect than it
otherwise might have had. So this is, you know, not
to blame the victim. The hackers ultimately are the ones
(14:18):
responsible for the outages, but the error on Microsoft's part
did mean that it took a little longer to respond
to that than it otherwise would have. Most companies have
mitigation strategies or they work with a security company that
provides mitigation strategies for this kind of stuff, and a
lot of companies have seen pretty massive upticks in attack
(14:41):
attempts over more recent years. It's always been a bit
of an issue ever since d DOS attacks became kind
of a possibility, but they are becoming far more frequent
these days, as is pretty much every kind of hacker attack.
Israeli hackers claim responsibility for an attack that may have
disrupted massive amounts of Internet traffic in Iran. So this
(15:04):
happened in conjunction with military strikes that Israel reportedly was
carrying out against a Hamas target who was in Iran.
These strikes were originally reported as missile based attacks, but
The New York Times says, actually that local sources claim
it was an explosive device that was smuggled into where
the target was staying in Iran. But the hacker group,
(15:27):
which calls itself WE Read Evils or we Read Devils
if you prefer, that's not how the capitalization goes. But
they claimed to had taken down much of Iran's internet infrastructure,
like leading to a massive Wi Fi outage. However, Forbes
was unable to confirm the extent to which these attacks
disrupted communications within Iran. As journalist Zach Doffman points out,
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the lines of communication in Iran aren't exactly dependable even
on a good day, so it's hard to say, like,
was this a devastating attack or did anyone even notice.
It's possible that people just figured it was another typical
day in Iran. Hard to say, but yeah, not surprising
to hear about hackers aligning with military operations. I don't
(16:17):
know if there's any evidence to show that We Read
Evils is state backed, Like if they receive support from
the Israeli government, that is possible they could be a
state backed hacker group. It's also possible they're acting independently
and have priorities that are in alignment with Israel's government.
(16:38):
It's hard to say. Net neutrality sure is having a
rough go of it in the United States. All right,
let's do a quick rundown on what this is. So.
Net neutrality essentially says you should be able to have
the same access to all the stuff on the Internet,
no matter where that stuff comes from, no matter what
isp you use, no matter what device you are using
(17:02):
to access it. And companies that provide Internet infrastructure should
not favor traffic from certain parts of the Internet, while
throttling traffic from other parts, nor should they deny service
to anyone just because that person isn't using that company's
own services or products. It should be neutral. During Barack
(17:23):
Obama's presidency, the FCC succeeded in passing some new rules
that would force service providers to play fair. Essentially, they
declared that the rules of common carriage would apply to
Internet traffic. During Trump's presidency, that version of the FCC
overturned those rules from the Obama administration, and now under
(17:45):
Joe Biden, the FCC reinstated those rules again, slightly different
versions but same idea. However, the Sixth Circuit US Court
of Appeals has now blocked those rules from going into effect,
saying that the FCC has failed to meet the high
standards of a legal argument justifying the rules in the
first place, and that those rules are not likely to
(18:07):
hold up to a legal challenge. So instead, the Court
has said that beginning either in late October or early November,
it will hear oral arguments on the matter before it
goes any further. Now, considering that US elections happen in
early November, and that net neutrality was one of those
tent pole achievements of the Biden administration, this is a
(18:27):
pretty tough political blow to Democrats. The safe assumption is
that Kamala Harris, who is on track to becoming the
official nominee of the Democrat Party, will also support net neutrality.
And we've already seen what a Trump administration thinks of
the matter, so largely the outcome of the election, I
think will determine the direction that this takes outside of
(18:49):
the courts, Like the court will ultimately get to decide
whether the matter meets legal standards. But you know, we've
already seen that with each administration. The FCC's makeup can
change dramatically, and that in turn changes the policy. Reuter's
reports that the US Department of Justice is investigating Nvidia
(19:10):
for anti competitive practices. Specifically, the DOJ is interested in
how Nvidia's AI chip business has kind of taken shape,
with concerns that the company has abused its position to
suppress competition in the space. It's not a crime to
be a successful business, but the DOJ is looking into
reports that Invidia wasn't just super good at selling chips
(19:33):
meant to power AI implementations, but also that the company
was pressuring customers to buy into packages of products. Further,
there were accusations that Nvidia would charge a lower price
if a customer opted to buy networking gear from Nvidia
while also electing to have Nvidia's own AI chips integrated
(19:54):
into that gear, but they would have to pay a
higher price if they wanted the gear from Nvidia, but
they wanted to use AI chips from one of Nvidia's competitors.
So this is just in the investigation phase at the moment.
There's no lawsuit or anything like that yet. It's possible
that nothing more will come of this, But with Nvidia
holding such a strong market position like they have like
(20:17):
eighty percent of the market share for AI powered chips.
I suspect that investigation is going to end up being
pretty darn thorough more in tech and politics, Yeah, I
love it too. This week, the US Senate passed a
bill called the Kids Online Safety Act or KOZA KOSA.
Many people had concerns about this legislation. They argued that
(20:40):
while it poses as a set of rules that are
meant to protect children from harmful content and practices online,
it was so vague in defining those quote unquote harmful
practices that it could be used to persecute folks like
those in say, the LGBTQ community. So understandably, there was
(21:02):
a lot of concern over the fact that it passed
in the Senate. However, the US House of Representatives is
not following suit. Yesterday, the GOP controlled House announced it
would not be bringing up COSA for a vote, citing
quote concerns across our conference end quote. So a bill
(21:22):
has to pass both the Senate and the House before
it could be signed into law, So KOSA is effectively
dead in the water. Now, this is actually great news,
which I'm sure some of y'all will be surprised to
hear me say, because I think it's pretty clear that
I do not often align with the GOP. But bills
like KOSA, which often use the pretense of protecting vulnerable
(21:45):
populations such as children, often end up serving as a
means to attack other vulnerable populations while restricting freedoms online.
These bills might originally be framed with the best of intentions,
or maybe they're fraimed from the get go as a
potential weapon, but in either case, they tend to be
bad news when they're implemented. So it is good news
(22:08):
that this particular bill is fizzling out. Senator Ran Paul
spoke out against this bill in a letter that laid
out his logic opposing the legislation, and it appears that
that went a long way in the House of Representatives.
Intel is facing a really tough future, and a lot
of folks at the company won't be there to be
a part of that future. Intel told The Verge that
(22:30):
it will downsize by around fifteen percent, which means more
than fifteen thousand people, perhaps as many as nineteen thousand
could be laid off from the company. This is all
part of an effort to cut ten billion dollars from costs.
Intel is also cutting back on the amount it's going
to spend on R and D, and it plans to
(22:50):
quote stop non essential work end quote. So I imagine
that means a lot of departments are going to be
scrambling to figure out if they can present their work
in a way that makes it seem as though it's essential.
WEO that's going to be rough. Pad Gelsinger, who is
Intel's CEO, revealed that the one point six billion dollar
(23:11):
loss Intel experienced in the second quarter of twenty twenty
four was quote unquote disappointing. I think that's putting it lightly.
He also stated that Intel has quote yet to fully
benefit from powerful trends like AI end quote. That seems
to align what I've covered already in today's episode talking
about the disillusionment that's growing around artificial intelligence. But another
(23:34):
issue is that Intel has been investing heavily in semiconductor manufacturing.
This is an incredibly expensive business to get into. You
have to build all the facilities to be able to
make these semiconductor chips. Typically, Intel would design the chips,
but then would partner with other companies overseas to fabricate
(23:56):
those chips. However, out of concerns of national security and
support life chain challenges, there's been a shift to invest
heavily in domestic chip fabrication here in the United States.
So part of Intel's challenges relate to the fact that
the company has been investing billions into that effort and
it's going to take time to realize the benefits. It's
a long term solution in a world that typically focuses
(24:19):
on short term results. Intel also faces increased competition from
companies ranging from Qualcom, AMD, Google, and Apple. I just
want to say to anyone out there who ends up
being affected by these layoffs, I wish you the absolute best.
I can't imagine how stressful that is, and it really stinks. Okay,
(24:39):
I have several more stories to get through. This was
a pretty heavy week as far as tech news goes.
So let's take another quick break and we'll be right
back with more news. We're back the watchdog group Global Witness.
(25:02):
I've talked about them many times before. They have kind
of raked Twitter slash X over the coals multiple times. Well,
they're ready to do it again. They report that there
are forty five accounts on X, the platform formally known
as Twitter that both appear to be bots and are
also responsible for promoting content that contains disinformation, racist and
(25:25):
sexist attacks, and tons of conspiracy. Theories that these posts
from these forty five bot controlled accounts have accumulated more
than four billion views. Between May twenty second and July
twenty second this year. The accounts posted in I watering
six hundred ten thousand times in that span. Now that's collectively,
(25:49):
but if even if we were to just average it out,
that would mean that each account on average posted more
than thirteen thousand, five hundred times in three months. That's
more prolific than I ever was back when I was
still on Twitter. The bots were particularly active leading up
to elections in the UK, in which the Labor Party
(26:09):
ultimately won more seats than the Conservative Party, though Global
Witness says it found no evidence linking either political party
to the bots themselves. So is it possible that one
or both of those parties, or an organization working on
behalf of one of those parties, hired bots to flood
x with messages supporting their side. Yeah, that is possible.
(26:32):
It's also possible this was all being controlled by some
outside source with no direct interest in either party, but
a direct interest in outcomes. We just don't know. But
those accounts did go on to spread conspiracy theories and
misinformation about everything from the attempted assassination of Donald Trump
to disinformation about climate change, so it has gone well
(26:54):
beyond UK elections since then. Global Witness says it has
reached out to x for comment on why the platform
is allowing this sort of activity and has, to the
surprise of no one, received no response so far. I
seem to recall something about Elon Musk saying he was
going to get rid of bots on Twitter before he
(27:14):
acquired It seems like that that just kind of slipped
through the cracks. Huh, because forty five, just forty five
accounts posting six hundred and ten thousand times in three
months and spreading this kind of stuff to widespread view
seems like it's something that you would pick up on
and it wouldn't just be flying under the radar. But
(27:35):
what do I know. Here's another AI related news item,
but this one involves motion capture performers and voice actors
in the video game industry. So these actors and performers
belong to the union sag AFTRA. That's an actor's and
performers union mostly known for folks who are in the
(27:56):
film and television industries, but it also applies to people
who work in video games. So this branch of sag
AFTRA authorized a strike earlier this month, and now they're
actually on strike. They are refusing to work while demanding
that video game companies create solid policies that protect actor
(28:17):
and performer jobs from generative AI, among other demands. But
this is a big part of the conversation. So actors
have said that video game companies are using AI to
train on actor voices, potentially so that the companies can
recreate those actor voices without actually having to hire the
actors themselves, which does seem pretty darn underhanded and it's
(28:40):
certainly not outside the realm of possibility. Sag AFTRA is
demanding that companies pledge to not make use of AI
in a way that would put real performers out of
a job, particularly without first negotiating a comprehensive agreement with
the performers themselves. I mean, if you're gonna use my
voice or likeness, you really should get my permission first
(29:02):
and pay me. Gosh, darn it. Kyle Orland at Ours
Technica has an article titled Xbox console sales continue to
crater with massive forty two percent revenue drop. Yikes. That's
that's year over year sales figures for Q two. By
the way, that Q two twenty twenty four shows a
forty two percent revenue drop from Q two twenty twenty three.
(29:25):
The company doesn't share detailed breakdowns of how many units
were produced or sold, but industry analysts estimate that Microsoft
sold fewer than one million units in the first quarter
of this year, whereas Sony posted four and a half
million BS five sales at that same time. However, Microsoft
is raking in the dough through its Game Pass subscription service.
(29:47):
So while hardware sales are tanking, I mean, there's no
other word for it, the ongoing subscription services are generating
bukous of buckos, particularly since Microsoft recently hiked up the
monthly price. Orland hypothesizes that Microsoft might get out of
the hardware game entirely in the future and focus solely
(30:08):
on the software side. That honestly wouldn't surprise me. In fact,
I expect that I figured that Microsoft was looking for
an off ramp from hardware hoping to launch a quote
unquote final console that would rely upon ongoing subscription content
to keep it going. So it is possible that the
last Xbox hardware update is the last Xbox hardware update.
(30:32):
That would not surprise me if that were the case.
It also wouldn't surprise me if we got one more
generation before that happened. Either one I think is entirely possible. Heck,
it's even possible that Microsoft doesn't get out entirely and
we just keep getting generations. But the improvements we see
from generation to generation, those performance improvements, I think you
(30:53):
can make an argument that we're starting to get to
a point of diminishing returns. Now, I'm never gonna say
that consoles are as good as they'll ever be, and
they'll never be able to make a better one with
you know, better graphic fidelity and all that kind of stuff,
because goodness knows, every generation of consoles brings surprises and
improvements with it. But it might be that consoles are
(31:15):
as good as they need to be, right Like, you
don't need to go harder than that that even if
you could, there's no market demand for it, So why
not back off of that? Part of the business entirely
and focus on the software side. Rob thubrun over at
tech Spot has a whammy of a piece titled Bungee
(31:36):
ceo faces backlash after announcing two hundred and twenty employees
will be laid off. So Bungi is the video game
developer behind titles like Halo, although that is now developed
under Microsoft, as well as the Destiny series. And yeah,
Bunge recently said it will lay off more than two
hundred employees and that stinks. But we're already seeing layoffs
(32:00):
across the video game industry, so you could argue that
this isn't that shocking. So why are people up in
arms against CEO Pete Parsons. Well, that might be because
of his spending habits. As Thuberan points out, Parsons has
dropped more than two million dollars on collecting classic cars
since Sony acquired Bungee back in the summer of twenty
(32:22):
twenty two. So if you're a Bungee employee who is
in danger of losing your job, you might also harbor
some pretty strong opinions regarding the fact that your boss
is dropping mountains of cash on cars that he might
not actually ever, drive, particularly when Parsons says the reason
for the layoffs is due to quote unquote financial challenges.
(32:44):
So maybe that financial challenges. He needs a bit extra
to buy that toyota urcell. He's had his ion. By
the way, that was a That was a sardonic joke.
That was not an actual accusation. When Butch Wilmore and
Sunny Williams first boarded the International Space Station, the plan
at that time was for them to return to Earth
as early as eight days later. Now that would have
(33:06):
been on June fourteenth. But now it's August and the
astronauts are still aboard the ISS. Why well, the spacecraft
that brought them to the ISS was the Boeing star Liner,
and that spacecraft experienced some technical issues on its way
to space. Now, initially, the thought was that these problems,
while needing to be solved, would not pose a significant
(33:30):
risk to the mission. However, upon further investigation, concerns have
been growing that some of the thruster systems are not
operating properly, and that they would be needed in order
to orient and guide the spacecraft so that it could
re enter Earth's atmosphere safely, which is a pretty darn
significant risk to the mission. There is, however, a huge
(33:52):
amount of pressure to use the star Liner as the
return vehicle for the mission. NASA has wanted to diversify
the companies that it works with in order to launch
vehicles and spacecraft and astronauts into space and not be
beholden to a single entity like SpaceX. So the story
out of NASA was that, yes, the star Liner has problems,
(34:15):
but they have their top scientists and engineers working on
fixing those problems. However, according to Eric Berger over at
Ours Technica, the discussion could be shifting toward relying on
SpaceX's Crew Dragon spacecraft as a potential return vehicle for
the astronauts instead of the star Liner. Now, I say
(34:36):
maybe shifting because NASA is being really quiet about all this.
It would look really bad for Boeing, which I don't
know if you know this, it's already facing issues in
another part of its aerospace business. But it would look
really bad for Boeing if the astronauts had to abandon
plans to return in the star Liner and instead rely
on a competing company's spacecraft in order to get back
(34:56):
home safely. But then again, it would look really really
really bad if those astronauts lives were put in danger
just to preserve the optics of the star Liner. I
recommend reading Berger's entire article for the full story. It's
an excellent piece. Again, it's titled NASA says it is
evaluating all options for the safe return of Starliner crew.
(35:19):
And that is on ours Tetnika. Okay. I've got a
couple of recommended articles for y'all to check out. One
is by Ben Quinn and Dan Milmo of The Guardian.
It is titled how TikTok bots and AI have powered
a resurgence in UK far right violence. It's one of
those stories that seems to confirm many fears that some
(35:41):
folks have about the rise of AI and how AI
can pour gasoline on a fire. So, just to be clear,
the underlying social issues are already there. AI is not
creating these social issues. They exist already and those issues
need to be addressed. This isn't just an AI problem. However,
the use of AI to make things worse is also
(36:04):
a problem. It's an additional problem. Then there's another piece
that's by Anthony Grayling and Brian Ball and it's on
the Conversation It is titled Philosophy is Crucial in the
Age of AI. Now, y'all, I tend to be a
pretty pragmatic person. I have the sort of brain that
finds a lot of philosophy tedious and ultimately questionably useful. However,
(36:28):
I admit this is a bias I have. I do
not pretend like my view is the correct one, or
even partly correct. Maybe I'm just dense. Not maybe I
am just dense, but maybe that's the problem. Anyway, this
particular piece traces how philosophy has been a part of
(36:49):
AI's evolution and development for decades, and how some deep
questions in AI are absolutely grounded in philosophy. It is
well worth a read, even if, like me, you often
find philosophy to be a little on the impractical side.
And that's it for today's tech News episode. It was
a long one, but like I said, a lot happened.
(37:10):
I even cut some stories from this because goodness gracious,
it was running along. I hope all of you out
there are doing well, and I will talk to you
again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For
more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts,
(37:34):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland.
I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the
tech are you. It's time for the tech news for
the week ending August second, twenty twenty four. Now, I'm
(00:25):
sure you all remember the CrowdStrike outage that happened back
on July nineteenth and subsequently caused chaos around the world
as various Windows based machines got caught in a reboot loop. Well,
we're still seeing the fallout of this classic goofum up,
because it turns out the problem was CrowdStrike had pushed
out an update that included ultimately a relatively simple but
(00:49):
catastrophic error in it a bug. Now, CrowdStrike shareholders are
angrily filing a massive class action lawsuit against the company,
claiming that it failed to disclose its testing process, and
the shareholders say that process was by all means inadequate.
The lawsuit says that CrowdStrike purposefully concealed the fact that
(01:11):
it had not put proper safety measures in place, and
as a result, this outage followed and then the company's
stock price tumbled by nearly a third over the course
of two weeks. That represented around twenty five billion with
a B dollars of market value. Yaoza and shareholders are
(01:32):
not the only ones considering a lawsuit against the company.
Delta Airlines is also apparently doing that, claiming that the
crowd strike outage led to Delta incurring an expense of
around half a billion dollars. Another Yaoza, Delta, like some
other airlines, had to postpone and cancel thousands of flights
(01:52):
and put travelers up in hotels and such in the
wake of this tech disaster. And in the interest of
full disclosure, my partner works for Delta. She was asked
to volunteer to work at the airport, a position she
had not held for more than twenty years, and she
did it because she's a rock star. But according to
Delta CEO ed Bastion, it workers had to manually reset
(02:16):
around forty thousand servers to get things back to normal
for the company, and they expect to receive some form
of compensation for the damages that they incurred as a
result of this outage. Metta has some good news for
its shareholders. The company posted impressive revenue growth thanks to
(02:36):
its advertising business. That revenue growth was enough to mollify
shareholders who continued to be skeptical over Meta's spending in
the metaverse and AI spaces. Zuckerberg told shareholders that the
company's spending in those areas had increased by seven percent
in the second quarter of twenty twenty four, but that
this was more than covered by the rise of the
(02:59):
company's operation rating margin, which hit thirty eight percent. Now
I have no magic ball where I can see what
shareholders are actually thinking, but I imagine more than a few
of them are still in the golly. I wish they'd
stop throwing money away, but I am thankful that the
digital ad business is going well again. They're in that camp.
(03:20):
I'm sure some shareholders remain excited about this metaverse concept
and where AI may be going. But more and more
I'm hearing folks get a little uncertain about the viability
of AI, or at least how far off we are
from AI making a real difference in in a revenue perspective.
I think a lot of people are starting to wake
(03:41):
up to the fact that AI does have enormous potential,
but that potential is going to take time to be realized,
and it isn't just a magic button where you press
it and money comes out. Speaking of AI disillusionment, Bloomberg's
Julia Love has an article titled big Tech fail to
convince Wall Street that AI is paying off And I
(04:03):
think that illustrates my point pretty darn well. She argues
that big companies like Amazon, Alphabet, and Microsoft have all
failed to prove the massive amount of money that they
have collectively poured into AI research and development has any
real chance of paying off in the near term. At
least they failed in the eyes of shareholders. Like it
(04:24):
might turn out that this isn't true, that it is
going to pay off, but shareholders are skeptical. These companies
saw their stock prices decline recently, so essentially, the upfront
costs of AIRE and D are enormous. The ongoing maintenance
costs to operate AI are also skyrocketing, particularly if you're
(04:45):
doing so at scale the way these big companies are
doing it, and the opportunities to actually generate revenue off
of that work are somewhat limited right now. But again,
that's not to say that's always going to be the case.
It may be that down the road this will look
absolutely critical. People will say, Wow, if you had gotten
in at that time, think of how much money you
(05:06):
would make. That's a possibility. However, for now, the attitude
appears to be more like, Ah, this is taking longer
than I thought it would, so I'm less excited now.
It's the good old hype cycle trend. Folks get super
excited about an emerging technology, but then that excitement starts
to drain away as they realize that the actual capabilities
(05:27):
of the tech aren't nearly as wild and impressive as
they had imagined. This does not mean that AI is
just going to fizzle out like some other stuff kind
of has. Arguably, NFTs have largely fizzled out. And yes,
I know NFTs are technically there's still a thing, but
they are a shadow of what they once were thanks
(05:47):
to the enormous collapse NFTs had a couple of years ago.
This might mean that companies will need to find some
creative ways to talk about AI investments in the future
if they do not want their shareholders getting antsy about
the whole thing. So, yeah, it's not just the tech,
it's always the money. Microsoft filed an annual report with
the SEC all publicly traded companies in the United States
(06:10):
have to do this. And in that report, Microsoft named
open Ai as a competitor. Now that's got a sting
for open Ai. It's kind of like hearing an ex
partner describe you as being okay. After all, Microsoft famously
pumped a thirteen billion dollar investment into open Ai. That's
(06:32):
a heck of a present, right, I mean, technically it's
not a president it's a business investment. But you know,
in one section of Microsoft's report, it reads, quote, our
AI offerings compete with AI products from hyperscalers such as
Amazon and Google, as well as products from other emerging competitors,
including Anthropic, open Ai, Meta and other open source offerings,
(06:57):
many of which are also current or putdential partners end quote.
I love that they put OpenAI second in that list.
I guess that's, you know, trying to couch things a
little bit. But obviously Microsoft is not saying that it
has declared war on open Ai. It's not that kind
of competitor. In fact, some suspect that this might be
the people at Microsoft trying to get ahead of any
(07:19):
regulatory issues that could follow in the future. Microsoft wouldn't
be considered anti competitive in the AI space, because look,
open ai is a competitor for Microsoft, not like a
best friend forever. Sure, for a while there, Microsoft had
secured a seat on open AI's board of directors. But
what does that mean? They don't have it anymore. They
(07:40):
dropped that seat. It's nothing you need to worry about, regulators, gerl.
We're all just you know, we're just er. We're competing
like crazy. Down here. Hey, look there's a three headed monkey.
On a semi related note, Windows Central reported late last
week that open ai could be facing a pretty grim
future unless it holds another round of massive funding. That
(08:02):
the company has a projected five billion dollar loss as
possibly in the books this year. The company reportedly spends
about eight point five billion dollars a year in operation
and staffing costs, but it only posts revenue of three
point five billion. So yeah, if you do the math,
that means the company is spending five billion dollars more
(08:25):
in twenty twenty four, then it's bringing in and without
an influx of more cash, the company could go bankrupt.
Open Ai has released updated large language models and tools
this year that in turn has led to increased revenue
for the company. But then running these updated models and
tools is really expensive, so some of that kind of
(08:47):
washes out. Could Open AI potentially innovate its way out
of business, or would its competitor Microsoft swoop in to
keep the ship afloat. I don't know. I guess I'm
gonna have I have to ask chat GPT what it thinks.
Sticking with Microsoft and AI for just a bit longer,
Four of four Media has a piece titled Microsoft and
(09:10):
Reddit are fighting about why Bing's crawler is blocked on Reddit?
All right, So Bing is Microsoft's search engine. It's one
that's most associated with the Edge web browser from Microsoft.
And search engines use web crawlers to index the web
so that the search engine can list pages in response
(09:30):
to queries. This is a fundamental function of search engines. However,
web builders they can actually put instructions inside a web
page that tell these crawlers to scram. Essentially, it's saying, hey,
don't index this web page for your search results. Why
would you do that? Well, you might want to do
it if you want a more controlled access to the
(09:51):
page in question. So essentially Reddit has done this across
its entire site. Because of how companies like Google and
Microsoft are now crawling websites not just for search purposes,
but also to train artificial intelligence large language models, and
Reddit doesn't want any company using content from its site
(10:13):
to train AI without first ponying up cash to do so.
Reddit doesn't object to AI learning from the stuff that
its users create and post to the site, but it
does not give that stuff away for free. Oh, it
also doesn't share any money with the users who actually
made the content in the first place. Reddit is like, no,
(10:34):
once you post it here, it belongs to us. It's
no longer yours, it's ours. But anyway, Reddit is essentially saying,
if you want to train your AI on our stuff,
you got to fork over the cash. And Microsoft is
essentially saying, bro, we're not training AI, We just want
to index Reddit for the purposes of search, so chill out.
(10:55):
Complicating matters is the fact that Google did pay Reddit
a cool sixty million dollars, and so Google, unlike other
search engines, is allowed to crawl an index and even
train AI on Reddit site. So some people are saying, huh,
this is starting to look a bit anti competitive. In fact,
Bing's head of search tweeted out quote Reddit has blocked
(11:20):
being from crawling their site for search, favoring another search engine,
and impacting competition from being and being powered engines. End quote.
Reddit reps told four h four Media that nah, nah,
that's not what's going on. This is totally because Microsoft
refuses to play by our rules, and that's all there
is to it. So this, I think is an illustration
(11:44):
of how AI, specifically generative AI, has started to really
impact the way that the Internet works. Typically, you wouldn't
see sites like Reddit put up a block on indexing
the page. Like indexing me that more people will go
to Reddit when they're searching for certain topics and there's
(12:04):
a Reddit thread all about that thing, so you want
more traffic to come in. But if it also means
that you know, people are exploiting that content and they're
profiting off of that, and Reddit's not getting a piece
of the action, that's where the problems come up. And
I think we're going to see more stuff like this
all the way across the Internet in various incarnations. Well,
(12:29):
speaking about ads and money, it's about that time for
us to take a quick break to thank our sponsors,
but we'll be back with more news right after this.
So we're back, and just this past Tuesday, Microsoft was
(12:51):
the target of a massive d DOS attack that hampered
Microsoft three sixty five and Azure services around the Globe
I measure if you aren't familiar, that's Microsoft's cloud based offerings.
And as a quick reminder, d DOOS stands for distributed
denial of service and typically this kind of attack involves
(13:12):
sending a gargantuan amount of Internet requests from an army
of compromised computers, often compromised through malware and hacking, and
directing all of that traffic to a specific target on
the web, and the target becomes overwhelmed trying to answer
all these requests and ultimately it can shut down as
(13:34):
a result. Now, there are actually a lot of mitigation
strategies that can help decrease the impact of these sorts
of attacks, like to have an early detection system to say, hey,
something's up. We need to raise defenses essentially raise shields
in star trek terms. But sometimes it can take a
little bit before these mitigation strategies can be employed, and
(13:56):
in the meantime you've got a crisis on your hands.
Microsoft has not yet identified the threat actor responsible for
this attack, but the company did admit that a mistake
in the mitigation deployment delayed a security response, which in
turn meant the attack had a greater effect than it
otherwise might have had. So this is, you know, not
to blame the victim. The hackers ultimately are the ones
(14:18):
responsible for the outages, but the error on Microsoft's part
did mean that it took a little longer to respond
to that than it otherwise would have. Most companies have
mitigation strategies or they work with a security company that
provides mitigation strategies for this kind of stuff, and a
lot of companies have seen pretty massive upticks in attack
(14:41):
attempts over more recent years. It's always been a bit
of an issue ever since d DOS attacks became kind
of a possibility, but they are becoming far more frequent
these days, as is pretty much every kind of hacker attack.
Israeli hackers claim responsibility for an attack that may have
disrupted massive amounts of Internet traffic in Iran. So this
(15:04):
happened in conjunction with military strikes that Israel reportedly was
carrying out against a Hamas target who was in Iran.
These strikes were originally reported as missile based attacks, but
The New York Times says, actually that local sources claim
it was an explosive device that was smuggled into where
the target was staying in Iran. But the hacker group,
(15:27):
which calls itself WE Read Evils or we Read Devils
if you prefer, that's not how the capitalization goes. But
they claimed to had taken down much of Iran's internet infrastructure,
like leading to a massive Wi Fi outage. However, Forbes
was unable to confirm the extent to which these attacks
disrupted communications within Iran. As journalist Zach Doffman points out,
(15:52):
the lines of communication in Iran aren't exactly dependable even
on a good day, so it's hard to say, like,
was this a devastating attack or did anyone even notice.
It's possible that people just figured it was another typical
day in Iran. Hard to say, but yeah, not surprising
to hear about hackers aligning with military operations. I don't
(16:17):
know if there's any evidence to show that We Read
Evils is state backed, Like if they receive support from
the Israeli government, that is possible they could be a
state backed hacker group. It's also possible they're acting independently
and have priorities that are in alignment with Israel's government.
(16:38):
It's hard to say. Net neutrality sure is having a
rough go of it in the United States. All right,
let's do a quick rundown on what this is. So.
Net neutrality essentially says you should be able to have
the same access to all the stuff on the Internet,
no matter where that stuff comes from, no matter what
isp you use, no matter what device you are using
(17:02):
to access it. And companies that provide Internet infrastructure should
not favor traffic from certain parts of the Internet, while
throttling traffic from other parts, nor should they deny service
to anyone just because that person isn't using that company's
own services or products. It should be neutral. During Barack
(17:23):
Obama's presidency, the FCC succeeded in passing some new rules
that would force service providers to play fair. Essentially, they
declared that the rules of common carriage would apply to
Internet traffic. During Trump's presidency, that version of the FCC
overturned those rules from the Obama administration, and now under
(17:45):
Joe Biden, the FCC reinstated those rules again, slightly different
versions but same idea. However, the Sixth Circuit US Court
of Appeals has now blocked those rules from going into effect,
saying that the FCC has failed to meet the high
standards of a legal argument justifying the rules in the
first place, and that those rules are not likely to
(18:07):
hold up to a legal challenge. So instead, the Court
has said that beginning either in late October or early November,
it will hear oral arguments on the matter before it
goes any further. Now, considering that US elections happen in
early November, and that net neutrality was one of those
tent pole achievements of the Biden administration, this is a
(18:27):
pretty tough political blow to Democrats. The safe assumption is
that Kamala Harris, who is on track to becoming the
official nominee of the Democrat Party, will also support net neutrality.
And we've already seen what a Trump administration thinks of
the matter, so largely the outcome of the election, I
think will determine the direction that this takes outside of
(18:49):
the courts, Like the court will ultimately get to decide
whether the matter meets legal standards. But you know, we've
already seen that with each administration. The FCC's makeup can
change dramatically, and that in turn changes the policy. Reuter's
reports that the US Department of Justice is investigating Nvidia
(19:10):
for anti competitive practices. Specifically, the DOJ is interested in
how Nvidia's AI chip business has kind of taken shape,
with concerns that the company has abused its position to
suppress competition in the space. It's not a crime to
be a successful business, but the DOJ is looking into
reports that Invidia wasn't just super good at selling chips
(19:33):
meant to power AI implementations, but also that the company
was pressuring customers to buy into packages of products. Further,
there were accusations that Nvidia would charge a lower price
if a customer opted to buy networking gear from Nvidia
while also electing to have Nvidia's own AI chips integrated
(19:54):
into that gear, but they would have to pay a
higher price if they wanted the gear from Nvidia, but
they wanted to use AI chips from one of Nvidia's competitors.
So this is just in the investigation phase at the moment.
There's no lawsuit or anything like that yet. It's possible
that nothing more will come of this, But with Nvidia
holding such a strong market position like they have like
(20:17):
eighty percent of the market share for AI powered chips.
I suspect that investigation is going to end up being
pretty darn thorough more in tech and politics, Yeah, I
love it too. This week, the US Senate passed a
bill called the Kids Online Safety Act or KOZA KOSA.
Many people had concerns about this legislation. They argued that
(20:40):
while it poses as a set of rules that are
meant to protect children from harmful content and practices online,
it was so vague in defining those quote unquote harmful
practices that it could be used to persecute folks like
those in say, the LGBTQ community. So understandably, there was
(21:02):
a lot of concern over the fact that it passed
in the Senate. However, the US House of Representatives is
not following suit. Yesterday, the GOP controlled House announced it
would not be bringing up COSA for a vote, citing
quote concerns across our conference end quote. So a bill
(21:22):
has to pass both the Senate and the House before
it could be signed into law, So KOSA is effectively
dead in the water. Now, this is actually great news,
which I'm sure some of y'all will be surprised to
hear me say, because I think it's pretty clear that
I do not often align with the GOP. But bills
like KOSA, which often use the pretense of protecting vulnerable
(21:45):
populations such as children, often end up serving as a
means to attack other vulnerable populations while restricting freedoms online.
These bills might originally be framed with the best of intentions,
or maybe they're fraimed from the get go as a
potential weapon, but in either case, they tend to be
bad news when they're implemented. So it is good news
(22:08):
that this particular bill is fizzling out. Senator Ran Paul
spoke out against this bill in a letter that laid
out his logic opposing the legislation, and it appears that
that went a long way in the House of Representatives.
Intel is facing a really tough future, and a lot
of folks at the company won't be there to be
a part of that future. Intel told The Verge that
(22:30):
it will downsize by around fifteen percent, which means more
than fifteen thousand people, perhaps as many as nineteen thousand
could be laid off from the company. This is all
part of an effort to cut ten billion dollars from costs.
Intel is also cutting back on the amount it's going
to spend on R and D, and it plans to
(22:50):
quote stop non essential work end quote. So I imagine
that means a lot of departments are going to be
scrambling to figure out if they can present their work
in a way that makes it seem as though it's essential.
WEO that's going to be rough. Pad Gelsinger, who is
Intel's CEO, revealed that the one point six billion dollar
(23:11):
loss Intel experienced in the second quarter of twenty twenty
four was quote unquote disappointing. I think that's putting it lightly.
He also stated that Intel has quote yet to fully
benefit from powerful trends like AI end quote. That seems
to align what I've covered already in today's episode talking
about the disillusionment that's growing around artificial intelligence. But another
(23:34):
issue is that Intel has been investing heavily in semiconductor manufacturing.
This is an incredibly expensive business to get into. You
have to build all the facilities to be able to
make these semiconductor chips. Typically, Intel would design the chips,
but then would partner with other companies overseas to fabricate
(23:56):
those chips. However, out of concerns of national security and
support life chain challenges, there's been a shift to invest
heavily in domestic chip fabrication here in the United States.
So part of Intel's challenges relate to the fact that
the company has been investing billions into that effort and
it's going to take time to realize the benefits. It's
a long term solution in a world that typically focuses
(24:19):
on short term results. Intel also faces increased competition from
companies ranging from Qualcom, AMD, Google, and Apple. I just
want to say to anyone out there who ends up
being affected by these layoffs, I wish you the absolute best.
I can't imagine how stressful that is, and it really stinks. Okay,
(24:39):
I have several more stories to get through. This was
a pretty heavy week as far as tech news goes.
So let's take another quick break and we'll be right
back with more news. We're back the watchdog group Global Witness.
(25:02):
I've talked about them many times before. They have kind
of raked Twitter slash X over the coals multiple times. Well,
they're ready to do it again. They report that there
are forty five accounts on X, the platform formally known
as Twitter that both appear to be bots and are
also responsible for promoting content that contains disinformation, racist and
(25:25):
sexist attacks, and tons of conspiracy. Theories that these posts
from these forty five bot controlled accounts have accumulated more
than four billion views. Between May twenty second and July
twenty second this year. The accounts posted in I watering
six hundred ten thousand times in that span. Now that's collectively,
(25:49):
but if even if we were to just average it out,
that would mean that each account on average posted more
than thirteen thousand, five hundred times in three months. That's
more prolific than I ever was back when I was
still on Twitter. The bots were particularly active leading up
to elections in the UK, in which the Labor Party
(26:09):
ultimately won more seats than the Conservative Party, though Global
Witness says it found no evidence linking either political party
to the bots themselves. So is it possible that one
or both of those parties, or an organization working on
behalf of one of those parties, hired bots to flood
x with messages supporting their side. Yeah, that is possible.
(26:32):
It's also possible this was all being controlled by some
outside source with no direct interest in either party, but
a direct interest in outcomes. We just don't know. But
those accounts did go on to spread conspiracy theories and
misinformation about everything from the attempted assassination of Donald Trump
to disinformation about climate change, so it has gone well
(26:54):
beyond UK elections since then. Global Witness says it has
reached out to x for comment on why the platform
is allowing this sort of activity and has, to the
surprise of no one, received no response so far. I
seem to recall something about Elon Musk saying he was
going to get rid of bots on Twitter before he
(27:14):
acquired It seems like that that just kind of slipped
through the cracks. Huh, because forty five, just forty five
accounts posting six hundred and ten thousand times in three
months and spreading this kind of stuff to widespread view
seems like it's something that you would pick up on
and it wouldn't just be flying under the radar. But
(27:35):
what do I know. Here's another AI related news item,
but this one involves motion capture performers and voice actors
in the video game industry. So these actors and performers
belong to the union sag AFTRA. That's an actor's and
performers union mostly known for folks who are in the
(27:56):
film and television industries, but it also applies to people
who work in video games. So this branch of sag
AFTRA authorized a strike earlier this month, and now they're
actually on strike. They are refusing to work while demanding
that video game companies create solid policies that protect actor
(28:17):
and performer jobs from generative AI, among other demands. But
this is a big part of the conversation. So actors
have said that video game companies are using AI to
train on actor voices, potentially so that the companies can
recreate those actor voices without actually having to hire the
actors themselves, which does seem pretty darn underhanded and it's
(28:40):
certainly not outside the realm of possibility. Sag AFTRA is
demanding that companies pledge to not make use of AI
in a way that would put real performers out of
a job, particularly without first negotiating a comprehensive agreement with
the performers themselves. I mean, if you're gonna use my
voice or likeness, you really should get my permission first
(29:02):
and pay me. Gosh, darn it. Kyle Orland at Ours
Technica has an article titled Xbox console sales continue to
crater with massive forty two percent revenue drop. Yikes. That's
that's year over year sales figures for Q two. By
the way, that Q two twenty twenty four shows a
forty two percent revenue drop from Q two twenty twenty three.
(29:25):
The company doesn't share detailed breakdowns of how many units
were produced or sold, but industry analysts estimate that Microsoft
sold fewer than one million units in the first quarter
of this year, whereas Sony posted four and a half
million BS five sales at that same time. However, Microsoft
is raking in the dough through its Game Pass subscription service.
(29:47):
So while hardware sales are tanking, I mean, there's no
other word for it, the ongoing subscription services are generating
bukous of buckos, particularly since Microsoft recently hiked up the
monthly price. Orland hypothesizes that Microsoft might get out of
the hardware game entirely in the future and focus solely
(30:08):
on the software side. That honestly wouldn't surprise me. In fact,
I expect that I figured that Microsoft was looking for
an off ramp from hardware hoping to launch a quote
unquote final console that would rely upon ongoing subscription content
to keep it going. So it is possible that the
last Xbox hardware update is the last Xbox hardware update.
(30:32):
That would not surprise me if that were the case.
It also wouldn't surprise me if we got one more
generation before that happened. Either one I think is entirely possible. Heck,
it's even possible that Microsoft doesn't get out entirely and
we just keep getting generations. But the improvements we see
from generation to generation, those performance improvements, I think you
(30:53):
can make an argument that we're starting to get to
a point of diminishing returns. Now, I'm never gonna say
that consoles are as good as they'll ever be, and
they'll never be able to make a better one with
you know, better graphic fidelity and all that kind of stuff,
because goodness knows, every generation of consoles brings surprises and
improvements with it. But it might be that consoles are
(31:15):
as good as they need to be, right Like, you
don't need to go harder than that that even if
you could, there's no market demand for it, So why
not back off of that? Part of the business entirely
and focus on the software side. Rob thubrun over at
tech Spot has a whammy of a piece titled Bungee
(31:36):
ceo faces backlash after announcing two hundred and twenty employees
will be laid off. So Bungi is the video game
developer behind titles like Halo, although that is now developed
under Microsoft, as well as the Destiny series. And yeah,
Bunge recently said it will lay off more than two
hundred employees and that stinks. But we're already seeing layoffs
(32:00):
across the video game industry, so you could argue that
this isn't that shocking. So why are people up in
arms against CEO Pete Parsons. Well, that might be because
of his spending habits. As Thuberan points out, Parsons has
dropped more than two million dollars on collecting classic cars
since Sony acquired Bungee back in the summer of twenty
(32:22):
twenty two. So if you're a Bungee employee who is
in danger of losing your job, you might also harbor
some pretty strong opinions regarding the fact that your boss
is dropping mountains of cash on cars that he might
not actually ever, drive, particularly when Parsons says the reason
for the layoffs is due to quote unquote financial challenges.
(32:44):
So maybe that financial challenges. He needs a bit extra
to buy that toyota urcell. He's had his ion. By
the way, that was a That was a sardonic joke.
That was not an actual accusation. When Butch Wilmore and
Sunny Williams first boarded the International Space Station, the plan
at that time was for them to return to Earth
as early as eight days later. Now that would have
(33:06):
been on June fourteenth. But now it's August and the
astronauts are still aboard the ISS. Why well, the spacecraft
that brought them to the ISS was the Boeing star Liner,
and that spacecraft experienced some technical issues on its way
to space. Now, initially, the thought was that these problems,
while needing to be solved, would not pose a significant
(33:30):
risk to the mission. However, upon further investigation, concerns have
been growing that some of the thruster systems are not
operating properly, and that they would be needed in order
to orient and guide the spacecraft so that it could
re enter Earth's atmosphere safely, which is a pretty darn
significant risk to the mission. There is, however, a huge
(33:52):
amount of pressure to use the star Liner as the
return vehicle for the mission. NASA has wanted to diversify
the companies that it works with in order to launch
vehicles and spacecraft and astronauts into space and not be
beholden to a single entity like SpaceX. So the story
out of NASA was that, yes, the star Liner has problems,
(34:15):
but they have their top scientists and engineers working on
fixing those problems. However, according to Eric Berger over at
Ours Technica, the discussion could be shifting toward relying on
SpaceX's Crew Dragon spacecraft as a potential return vehicle for
the astronauts instead of the star Liner. Now, I say
(34:36):
maybe shifting because NASA is being really quiet about all this.
It would look really bad for Boeing, which I don't
know if you know this, it's already facing issues in
another part of its aerospace business. But it would look
really bad for Boeing if the astronauts had to abandon
plans to return in the star Liner and instead rely
on a competing company's spacecraft in order to get back
(34:56):
home safely. But then again, it would look really really
really bad if those astronauts lives were put in danger
just to preserve the optics of the star Liner. I
recommend reading Berger's entire article for the full story. It's
an excellent piece. Again, it's titled NASA says it is
evaluating all options for the safe return of Starliner crew.
(35:19):
And that is on ours Tetnika. Okay. I've got a
couple of recommended articles for y'all to check out. One
is by Ben Quinn and Dan Milmo of The Guardian.
It is titled how TikTok bots and AI have powered
a resurgence in UK far right violence. It's one of
those stories that seems to confirm many fears that some
(35:41):
folks have about the rise of AI and how AI
can pour gasoline on a fire. So, just to be clear,
the underlying social issues are already there. AI is not
creating these social issues. They exist already and those issues
need to be addressed. This isn't just an AI problem. However,
the use of AI to make things worse is also
(36:04):
a problem. It's an additional problem. Then there's another piece
that's by Anthony Grayling and Brian Ball and it's on
the Conversation It is titled Philosophy is Crucial in the
Age of AI. Now, y'all, I tend to be a
pretty pragmatic person. I have the sort of brain that
finds a lot of philosophy tedious and ultimately questionably useful. However,
(36:28):
I admit this is a bias I have. I do
not pretend like my view is the correct one, or
even partly correct. Maybe I'm just dense. Not maybe I
am just dense, but maybe that's the problem. Anyway, this
particular piece traces how philosophy has been a part of
(36:49):
AI's evolution and development for decades, and how some deep
questions in AI are absolutely grounded in philosophy. It is
well worth a read, even if, like me, you often
find philosophy to be a little on the impractical side.
And that's it for today's tech News episode. It was
a long one, but like I said, a lot happened.
(37:10):
I even cut some stories from this because goodness gracious,
it was running along. I hope all of you out
there are doing well, and I will talk to you
again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For
more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts,
(37:34):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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