November 21, 2023 • 29 mins
We've got a few updates on what's going on after OpenAI's board of directors fired CEO Sam Altman (and then asked if he wouldn't mind coming back, please). Plus, X is looking at a pretty rough holiday season as advertisers flee the platform. And SpaceX deals with another exploding spacecraft. Plus more!
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey therein
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 Tuesday,
November twenty first, twenty twenty three. And first up, of course,
(00:28):
we have some updates to the open ai situation. Now.
If you want to hear what led to open AI's
board of directors to fire CEO Sam Altman last Friday,
check out yesterday's Tech Stuff episode. I did a full
episode kind of about what led to that event and
(00:48):
what is happening in the aftermath. But I do have
a couple of new bits to add to that. First up,
According to The Verge, Sam Altman is still seeking reinstatement
as open ai CEO. Yesterday I talked about how Altman
claimed he would never wear a guest badge to open
AI's headquarters again. He did it once in order to
(01:09):
return to negotiate for his potential return to the company.
Once the board of directors said whoop, see those negotiations
went nowhere. So then he reportedly joined Microsoft and he
will be named CEO of an advanced AI division within Microsoft,
or maybe a spinoff company, But apparently that's just one
likely scenario, and the ink has not yet been put
(01:31):
to paper on that deal, so it's not a certainty
that he will be part of Microsoft. There is another
possibility that should the board members who voted Altman out
step down, Alman would return to the company as CEO,
but that was the main sticking point in the negotiations
over the weekend. However, since then, one board member, Elia Sutzkiver,
(01:54):
has come forward to express his regret for taking part
in the whole thing and said it was a mistake
and that he now sides with Altman, which means there
are just two members left on the open AI board
of Directors who would have to change their opinion, and
there's tremendous pressure on them to do it and to
(02:15):
step down. Not only do you have the pr nightmare
of going through perhaps what has been the worst CEO
firing in recent history, but you've also got an angry
corporate partner in the form of Microsoft, and you've got
the threat of perhaps hundreds of employees leaving the company
in solidarity with the ousted CEO. So refusing to step
(02:39):
down could mean open ai would be set back years
because of this. But then the reported reason that this
board fired Altman in the first place was that they
were concerned he was pushing hard to develop and deploy
AI tools without really giving proper regard to safety, and
that's the whole reason open aa Eye exists in the
(03:01):
first place. So this could be a case where those
board members decide they have to go down with the
ship that what does it mean to have an organization
ostensibly dedicated to developing AI in an ethical and safe
way if you don't do that? Or perhaps the threat
to open ai has actually been overstated, Maybe it's not
(03:23):
really in such a precarious position. Maybe the organization will
be fine after passing through, you know, a period of
turmoil that's unavoidable. Meanwhile, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has said
in an interview on CNBC and also with Bloomberg that
its clear open ai quote has to change around the
(03:45):
governance end quote, perhaps hinting someone from Microsoft should also
sit on the board of directors for open Ai. After all,
Microsoft has committed to investing ten billion dollars into open
ai and already has sent a few billion of those
to the company. The chaos at open Ai has had
some odd rippling effects as well. For example, when word
(04:08):
got out that Microsoft was apparently hiring both Sam Altman
and former open Ai president Greg Brockman, the company sought
stock price increase. In fact, Microsoft's stock value rose to
three hundred and seventy seven dollars forty four cents per
share yesterday. That is the highest closing stock price in
(04:29):
Microsoft history. It's pretty wild to me that a couple
of executives coming over from another company could be enough
to boost stock prices like that. Also, in a similar move,
when word Firse got out that open ai had fired
Altman last Friday, Microsoft sought stock price dip by one
point seven percent. I think this really shows how people
(04:52):
feel AI is a critically important technology. I'm still not
convinced that very many of them actually understand artificial intelligence,
but then I'm not getting rich off the stock market,
so what do I know. Then you have the various
companies that are champion at the bit to get their
hands on the talent at open Ai. Hundreds of open
ai staff, some of the most knowledgeable people in the
(05:15):
discipline of artificial intelligence, have indicated a willingness to leave
the company if Altman doesn't return as CEO. And one
company that has expressed interest in hiring that talent that
may feel like a change of scenery is merited is Salesforce.
CEO Marc Benioff posted on x the platform formerly known
(05:36):
as Twitter and a company that we'll be talking a
lot about later in this episode, said that quote, Salesforce
will match any open Ai researcher who has tendered their
resignation full cash and equity, ote to immediately join our
salesforce Einstein Trusted Ai research team under Silvio Sevres. So
(05:56):
that's end quote, by the way. So that's another big
threat that's facing open Ai. There are other companies that
recognize the value of the knowledge held by their staff, right,
That's one of the big things that open ai has.
Before they came out with chat GPT, you could argue
that the most valued asset of open ai was its talent.
(06:19):
There were people who were taking jobs at open Ai.
They could have made more money somewhere else, but they
took it at open ai because it meant working with
the best people and on a very challenging goal. So
obviously there are a lot of companies that would really
love to be able to bring those folks on board
to their own teams, and they're already coming forward with
offers should those people decide to leave open AI. So again,
(06:41):
immense pressure on the board of directors over at Open AI.
According to an article by Rob Thubrunn of tech Spot
or Thubron, I'm not certain how to say your last name, Rob,
don't know you, but I like your work anyway. According
to this article, more than half of tech workers view
AI as being overrated and overhyped now. This in turn,
(07:02):
comes from a survey that a company called Retool conducted.
So Retool puts out this survey and asks various tech
workers to evaluate how AI is treated how it's viewed
in the tech sphere. Now, the simple size is not
particularly large. Retool surveyed around fifteen hundred tech professionals across
(07:26):
the industry. Everyone from programmers to designers to executives, like
pretty much every kind of role that's in tech was
represented in this survey. According to the survey, only twenty
three percent of the respondents felt as though AI is
more or less fairly assessed in the industry as a whole.
That the attitude and hype, or maybe hype is the
(07:50):
wrong word because that has a negative connotation, but the
treatment of AI is appropriate, that it's the right level. However,
fifty one point six percent of them feel that AI
is overrated and perhaps overhyped. This also means, by the way,
that about twenty five percent of the respondents actually feel
that AI is underrated. So keep that in mind, and
(08:12):
it seems like the type of job you have in
tech has a big influence on how you view artificial intelligence.
Executives seem more inclined to say AI was either rated
fairly or was actually underrated. And as Rob points out, well, yeah,
of course executives think that because they're looking at artificial
intelligence largely as a cost benefit analysis, and they're salivating
(08:37):
over the thought of replacing all those expensive human drones
with more economical AI powered algorithms, So of course they
think that it's as important, if not more important, than
the way the industry treats it. Meanwhile, the folks who
actually have to interact with AI on a daily basis
in order to do their work. Now, the people who
(08:59):
are using AI to do stuff like write code, for example,
they were far more likely to call AI overrated. Presumably
that's because so much of their time has to be
spent checking for errors and correcting them and that sort
of thing. So with the sample size of fifteen hundred people,
I'm not sure we can actually draw any sweeping conclusions
(09:20):
from this survey. And again, it's a survey that's talking
about people's opinions toward AI. It's not like it's a
metric that actually measures AI itself, but rather our perception
of artificial intelligence. I would say that the survey indicates
it's probably a good idea to pay attention to the
people who are working directly with the artificial intelligence powered tools,
(09:43):
because if your staff is indicating that the AI is
actually making their jobs more frustrating or inefficient, that is
worth paying attention to. Otherwise, the leaders might find that
they have committed to a solution that is actually a problem.
And I don't think we're careening toward a world of
automation and that we'll never be able to turn back
(10:05):
and once we turn that corner, it's all downhill from there.
I don't think that's the case. I do think that
a lot of companies need to be careful in how
they implement AI if they don't want to rush into
an expensive and complicated mess I think that there are
ways to incorporate AI that can have a direct benefit
to both the overall company and to the employees who
(10:28):
are making use of the AI. I think there are legitimate,
good uses for this technology, but I also think it's
very easy to implement it willy nilly, and to do
so in a way that ends up being counterproductive. And
that's what companies really need to be careful about. All Right,
we're going to take a quick break. When we come back,
I got a whole lot of news about everybody's favorite
(10:50):
social network platform, X, But first let's thank our sponsors. Okay,
we're back. And I mentioned before the break that we
would be talking about X today, So here goes. First up,
the company has filed a lawsuit against a media watchdog
(11:13):
group called Media Matters. The group had previously published a
report indicating that ads could appear next to objectionable material
such as extremist and racist messaging, including antisemitic messaging. That
obviously is something that does not go over well with
advertisers as they are trying to promote and protect their brands,
(11:36):
and last week, several major advertisers left X after Elon
Musk indicated support for a conspiracy theory promoted by anti
Semitic groups and white supremacists. So clearly it must have
been Media Matters that was the real problem, not the
fact that the owner of the company was elevating this messaging.
(11:56):
You know. Anyway, some big names in in companies had
halted all advertising on X. They include media companies like Paramount, Disney, NBC, Universal,
Warner Brothers, Discovery. They include telecommunications companies like Comcast and
tech companies like Apple, among many many other companies. And
(12:18):
the thought is that their departure is probably going to
prompt other companies to follow suit. Now, x's complaint against
Media Matters is that Media Matters supposedly manufactured the images
it showed in its report by creating a test account
on X and then just refreshing the view over and over,
like following some specific accounts that were posting problematic stuff
(12:43):
and then just hitting refresh until they started to get
ads to appear next to some of these entries. And
so what X is saying is that this is not
representative of the typical experience on X. Most people on
X would never see this thing at all. Media Matters
had to game the system in order to get these
(13:05):
sorts of results. That's what X is arguing personally. I mean,
that might be a legitimate argument that Media Matters perhaps
kind of orchestrated this so it would appear this way. However,
you still have the issue of the owner of the
company promoting these messages, which whether whether Media Matters orchestrated
(13:30):
anything is still an issue. Media Matters, by the way,
says that they disagree with X's accusations and that they
are willing to go to court and to prove that
their methodology was legitimate. So so far there's no one
backing down from this fight. Musk continues to behave in
a way that is really alarming to advertisers, and that
(13:51):
means that X is going to have a problem no
matter what any watch dog group says. You don't even
need watchdog groups to bring these matters to attend if
you've got the owner of the company doing these sorts
of things, because that is so newsworthy that you know
that's going to be brought to attention and be put
in the spotlight, whether whether there's a watchdog group dedicated
(14:12):
to it or not. On a semi related note, I
deactivated my own account on X. I had not been
checking it regularly for weeks, so I decided it was
just time to walk away. Part of it is that
I don't want to be on a platform where a
fundamentally important person on there is promoting things that can
cause direct harm to others. So my apologies to anyone
(14:34):
who's trying to use X to get in touch with me.
It no longer will work. But let's talk about X
some more, because of course we're not done yet. Tech
Crunch reports that the mass exodus of advertisers, which really
happened last week, is likely to have a pretty darn
hefty impact to x's bottom line. You got to remember,
ninety percent of X's revenue came from advertising, and when
(15:00):
a bunch of advertisers leave, it means the company is
going to have a lot of trouble bringing in revenue.
They had already seen some drastic drops in revenue in
the wake of Elon Musk purchasing the company last year,
so this was already an issue before last week. In fact,
analysts from Insider Intelligence estimated that X was going to
(15:21):
see a fifty four point four percent decline in ad
business year over year, but now that's likely to be
an even more dramatic decline. Linda Yakarino, the CEO of X,
has said that data will show X is actually dedicated
toward fighting misinformation and racism, including anti Semitism, and that
(15:43):
they will prove that in fact, the company has been
working hard on this, despite the fact that Elon Musk
famously dismissed almost the entirety of the content moderation departments
within Twitter when he purchased the company. Reportedly, several advertisers
have actually urged Yakarinos to step down as CEO, going
(16:05):
so far as to suggest that she is potentially causing
irreparable damage to her own reputation by serving as CEO
of X, Like they're essentially saying, you're better than this.
You need to get away from this company. It is
toxic and it is bringing you down with it. Yakarino
so far has rejected these calls. I think she's going
to continue to find it challenging to champion X's policies
(16:27):
while the owner continues to promote content that appears to
contradict her. So that's a mess anyway. That's the update
on x let's now switch over to YouTube for a moment.
Amir Siddicky of Android Authority posted an article titled YouTube
is reportedly slowing down videos for Firefox users. So essentially
(16:50):
the story says that folks who are using non Chrome browsers,
primarily Firefox and Microsoft Edge, have reported that when they
try to launch a video on YouTube, they're encountering a
delay in playback, and it's a delay that lasts several seconds,
like five seconds. But if they close out that browser
and open up Chrome and go to YouTube, they can
(17:13):
try and load that same video and there's no delay.
Now that is troubling. It could indicate that Google is
purposefully throttling performance on non Chrome browsers in an effort
to coax folks to use Chrome instead. Now, this is
preferential treatment that could be seen as anti competitive. In fact,
(17:33):
I think, especially in the current climate in the United States,
it would automatically be listed as being anti competitive behavior.
And considering that Google is currently in the hot seat
for that sort of thing, that's not good. It definitely
is not in line with the concept of net neutrality.
But YouTube has responded to this report and has claimed
(17:55):
that it really doesn't have anything to do with which
browser someone's using. That is immaterial according to Google. Instead,
what's happening, YouTube says is that it is putting in
delays for people who are using browsers that have ad
blocker extensions activated on them. So it's a way to
(18:15):
fight ad blocking. The statement says, quote users who have
ad blockers installed may experience suboptimal viewing, regardless of the
browser they are using. End quote. I don't doubt that
Google is using this approach to discourage ad blockers, as
the company has taken a pretty hardline stance against ad
blockers this year in particular. But I'm curious to see
(18:38):
if that's as far as this goes, because the stories
that were being shared seem to suggest that Chrome users
were getting a better experience. Now, maybe it was that
they had ad blockers installed on their non Chrome browsers,
but for whatever reason, they had not installed ad blockers
on Chrome. Maybe it's that Google has been rolling out
(19:01):
this feature to affect non Chrome browsers first, like they
are designing YouTube so that it can detect the presence
of ad blockers on each browser, and Chrome just hasn't
been rolled out yet And that eventually, no matter what
browser you're using, you're going to have this issue. That
(19:22):
might be true, but it still kind of smacks of
being anti competitive to me to because again, Chrome gets
preferential treatment. If your perception is that, oh well, as
long as I'm on Chrome it's better, I might as
well just use Chrome, that's an issue. If it's not
just legit a natural advance of Chrome. If the system
(19:42):
is being gamed on the back end, that's bad. So
we'll have to wait and see if more developments happen
in this story, because again, Google is currently in the
hot seat with the US government when it comes to
anti competitive behaviors, and there's a real threat that the
(20:05):
government will demand Google break apart into different pieces as
a result of this. Whether it actually gets to that point,
I don't know. I personally kind of doubt it, simply
because the last time we saw something this big happen,
the US government ultimately reversed its decision to break apart
a big tech company. In that case, it was Microsoft.
(20:27):
So not that it's impossible, but it hasn't happened in
a very long time, so I would be surprised if
it went that far. But we'll have to see. All right,
We're going to take another quick break. When we come back,
I've got a couple more stories I want to talk about. Okay, now,
(20:54):
let's have a quick story about Nothing. This is not
a Seinfeld reference. It's nothing like that. We're talking about
the Nothing Company, the makers of the Nothing Phone. That's
a smartphone. It runs on Android. It had a lot
of hype when it was first launching. There were all
these kind of hopes that the Nothing Phone was going
(21:15):
to be a really awesome flagship Android phone with really
cool features like these glyphs that light up on the
back of the phone indicating whether you got a text
message versus an incoming call or whatever. But so far,
the Nothing Phone has fallen. I think it's fair to
say it's fallen short of expectations since the original announcement
(21:35):
for the project. But this story specifically has to do
with an app that Nothing put its name on. Nothing
launched an app called Nothing Chats, and this app claimed
it could, among other things, let Android users get a
taste of the promised land. That is, if the promised
(21:55):
land is made up of blue chat bubbles in Apple's
I message. All right, so I've talked about this a
little bit recently, mostly because I find it all really exasperating.
But there's this perception among certain iPhone owners, particularly here
in the United States, that people who use other types
(22:16):
of phones, you know, non iPhones, are the dirty, unwashed
masses who lack sophistication and intelligence, and they should be
ostracized and ridiculed and shunned. And the dead giveaway if
it's not just looking at what the phone is when
they're holding it, is that when you are messaging with
(22:37):
them and you're using an iPhone, so you're an eye message,
their messages show up in little green bubbles rather than
little blue bubbles. So iPhone users all get blue bubbles,
but an Android user, they are completely restricted to green,
and they should be shunned. I guess I don't know.
(22:57):
I'm an Android user who doesn't really I don't care
about any of this stuff. I don't care if anyone
makes fun of me for the type of phone I use,
because if that's the kind of person they are, then
they're not worthy of me being worried about them. They're
beneath my concern, is what I'm saying. So yes, I
have my own issues of superiority. But I do understand
(23:20):
that other people care a lot about this stuff, and
they care about it so much that they will go
out of their way to make folks feel inferior about
not having an iPhone. And that is just lame. I mean,
you know, I get that, Like, especially like school kids
and stuff, they'll always find ways where they define a
group and they define outsiders to the group. Like that's
(23:42):
just kind of how it goes. But it's lame, y'all. Anyway.
Nothing claimed that the nothing chats app would let Android
users appear to be iPhone users in I Message conversations,
that their texts would appear in little blue bubbles. It
turned out that nothing Chats was actually a reskin of
(24:04):
a different app called the Sunbird app, and installing the
app would prompt Android users to submit their Apple username
and password, and then the app would reportedly log into
I Message on the behalf of the Android user and
kind of act like a middleman. And supposedly it was
(24:24):
going to include end to end encryption, except folks discovered
that Sunbird was not protecting this information at all. This
is a huge, huge security and privacy problem. So again,
the app claimed that it was incorporating into enn encryption.
It wasn't. Sunbird was logging and storing messages in plane
(24:46):
text in multiple places, not just in one location, which
makes it doubly vulnerable, right because that means hackers have
multiple targets they could look at in order to get
access to Lane text messaging. Researchers show it was possible
for a hacker to infiltrate a message server and to
(25:06):
read the messages sent via this app, which is actually
the opposite of what end to end encryption is supposed
to do. And the apps are no longer in the store.
They disappeared after just a day. But the whole thing
indicates that both Sunbird and Nothing have not taken proper
steps to actually be serious about security and privacy, not
(25:26):
even a little bit. Now. If you want to learn
more about this, I recommend Ron Amadeo's article in Ours Tetnica.
It is titled Nothing's I Message app was a security
catastrophe taken down in twenty four hours. Now. Our last
story is that the test launch of the SpaceX Starship
vehicle once again ended in an explosion. So back in April,
(25:52):
SpaceX first held a test launch of the next generation spacecraft,
which includes the Starship spacecraft and the super Heavy the
launch vehicle, and a few minutes after takeoff, like four
minutes after the first test mission took off, there was
a big explosion and then SpaceX chose to self destruct
(26:13):
the vehicle as a result of this, so four minutes
after lift off, everything went boom. This time this past weekend,
the vehicle made it further than it had in April,
but it's still encountered issues. So after the super Heavy
first stage booster separated from the rest of the vehicle,
(26:33):
the booster exploded over the Gulf of Mexico. Now, the
Starship stage continued in its trajectory initially anyway, but then
SpaceX mission control lost contact with the vehicle. The best
estimation was that the Starship stage initiated an automatic flight termination,
(26:54):
which is another way of saying it self destructed. Mission
control was unsure why the vehicle had actually initiated that.
The failure happened at around eight minutes into the test,
so four minutes longer than what happened back in April,
and it had also reached an altitude of ninety one miles,
which means by every definition, it reached space the US,
(27:15):
by the way, defines the edge of space as an
altitude of fifty miles, whereas the international standard is the
Karman line, which is at sixty two miles of altitude.
Either way, the starship got all the way up to
space because it was up ninety one miles in altitude.
The test is not a total failure. It is easy
(27:36):
to call things that when stuff blows up, but even
when things go wrong, that means there's an opportunity to
learn more and to learn what you need to do
differently and how to design things so that they're more reliable.
It does mean that there's going to have to be
more tests, obviously, to reach a point where the technology
can be demonstrated to be reliable and safe and consistently
(27:59):
working in good order. So that's an issue. It is
kind of a setback. It's not a failure, but I'm
sure it's something that SpaceX was not super pleased to
see because you know, they had already seen one of
these explode back in April. So we'll have to see
what happens moving forward. At In the meantime, you know,
(28:20):
you've got NASA. It's really kind of keeping an eye
on what's going on with SpaceX, while NASA is readying
up for the Artemis program to continue, which ultimately is
going to send astronauts back to the Moon. Clearly, for
that to happen, there need to be access to reliable
launch vehicles capable of sending a spacecraft as far out
(28:42):
as the Moon. So we'll see how things continue from here.
But that's it. That's the news for November twenty first,
twenty twenty three. Just a heads up for all of y'all.
This week in the United States, it's Thanksgiving, which means
we'll be off for the second half of the week.
I'll have some a rerun to play in place of
(29:03):
Thursday's episode, so I just want to give you a
heads up for that, but we should be back the
following week. Coming up, I'm going to be going on
a vacation in early December, so we'll probably have some
reruns then as well, And then of course we have
the Christmas holidays at the end that'll also have an
impact on the show, but then everything will be back
to what passes for normal on this wacky, zany show
(29:26):
called tech Stuff. I hope you are all well. I
hope those of you in the US who are about
to celebrate Thanksgiving, have a wonderful holiday, and I will
talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an
iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
(29:50):
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey therein
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 Tuesday,
November twenty first, twenty twenty three. And first up, of course,
(00:28):
we have some updates to the open ai situation. Now.
If you want to hear what led to open AI's
board of directors to fire CEO Sam Altman last Friday,
check out yesterday's Tech Stuff episode. I did a full
episode kind of about what led to that event and
(00:48):
what is happening in the aftermath. But I do have
a couple of new bits to add to that. First up,
According to The Verge, Sam Altman is still seeking reinstatement
as open ai CEO. Yesterday I talked about how Altman
claimed he would never wear a guest badge to open
AI's headquarters again. He did it once in order to
(01:09):
return to negotiate for his potential return to the company.
Once the board of directors said whoop, see those negotiations
went nowhere. So then he reportedly joined Microsoft and he
will be named CEO of an advanced AI division within Microsoft,
or maybe a spinoff company, But apparently that's just one
likely scenario, and the ink has not yet been put
(01:31):
to paper on that deal, so it's not a certainty
that he will be part of Microsoft. There is another
possibility that should the board members who voted Altman out
step down, Alman would return to the company as CEO,
but that was the main sticking point in the negotiations
over the weekend. However, since then, one board member, Elia Sutzkiver,
(01:54):
has come forward to express his regret for taking part
in the whole thing and said it was a mistake
and that he now sides with Altman, which means there
are just two members left on the open AI board
of Directors who would have to change their opinion, and
there's tremendous pressure on them to do it and to
(02:15):
step down. Not only do you have the pr nightmare
of going through perhaps what has been the worst CEO
firing in recent history, but you've also got an angry
corporate partner in the form of Microsoft, and you've got
the threat of perhaps hundreds of employees leaving the company
in solidarity with the ousted CEO. So refusing to step
(02:39):
down could mean open ai would be set back years
because of this. But then the reported reason that this
board fired Altman in the first place was that they
were concerned he was pushing hard to develop and deploy
AI tools without really giving proper regard to safety, and
that's the whole reason open aa Eye exists in the
(03:01):
first place. So this could be a case where those
board members decide they have to go down with the
ship that what does it mean to have an organization
ostensibly dedicated to developing AI in an ethical and safe
way if you don't do that? Or perhaps the threat
to open ai has actually been overstated, Maybe it's not
(03:23):
really in such a precarious position. Maybe the organization will
be fine after passing through, you know, a period of
turmoil that's unavoidable. Meanwhile, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has said
in an interview on CNBC and also with Bloomberg that
its clear open ai quote has to change around the
(03:45):
governance end quote, perhaps hinting someone from Microsoft should also
sit on the board of directors for open Ai. After all,
Microsoft has committed to investing ten billion dollars into open
ai and already has sent a few billion of those
to the company. The chaos at open Ai has had
some odd rippling effects as well. For example, when word
(04:08):
got out that Microsoft was apparently hiring both Sam Altman
and former open Ai president Greg Brockman, the company sought
stock price increase. In fact, Microsoft's stock value rose to
three hundred and seventy seven dollars forty four cents per
share yesterday. That is the highest closing stock price in
(04:29):
Microsoft history. It's pretty wild to me that a couple
of executives coming over from another company could be enough
to boost stock prices like that. Also, in a similar move,
when word Firse got out that open ai had fired
Altman last Friday, Microsoft sought stock price dip by one
point seven percent. I think this really shows how people
(04:52):
feel AI is a critically important technology. I'm still not
convinced that very many of them actually understand artificial intelligence,
but then I'm not getting rich off the stock market,
so what do I know. Then you have the various
companies that are champion at the bit to get their
hands on the talent at open Ai. Hundreds of open
ai staff, some of the most knowledgeable people in the
(05:15):
discipline of artificial intelligence, have indicated a willingness to leave
the company if Altman doesn't return as CEO. And one
company that has expressed interest in hiring that talent that
may feel like a change of scenery is merited is Salesforce.
CEO Marc Benioff posted on x the platform formerly known
(05:36):
as Twitter and a company that we'll be talking a
lot about later in this episode, said that quote, Salesforce
will match any open Ai researcher who has tendered their
resignation full cash and equity, ote to immediately join our
salesforce Einstein Trusted Ai research team under Silvio Sevres. So
(05:56):
that's end quote, by the way. So that's another big
threat that's facing open Ai. There are other companies that
recognize the value of the knowledge held by their staff, right,
That's one of the big things that open ai has.
Before they came out with chat GPT, you could argue
that the most valued asset of open ai was its talent.
(06:19):
There were people who were taking jobs at open Ai.
They could have made more money somewhere else, but they
took it at open ai because it meant working with
the best people and on a very challenging goal. So
obviously there are a lot of companies that would really
love to be able to bring those folks on board
to their own teams, and they're already coming forward with
offers should those people decide to leave open AI. So again,
(06:41):
immense pressure on the board of directors over at Open AI.
According to an article by Rob Thubrunn of tech Spot
or Thubron, I'm not certain how to say your last name, Rob,
don't know you, but I like your work anyway. According
to this article, more than half of tech workers view
AI as being overrated and overhyped now. This in turn,
(07:02):
comes from a survey that a company called Retool conducted.
So Retool puts out this survey and asks various tech
workers to evaluate how AI is treated how it's viewed
in the tech sphere. Now, the simple size is not
particularly large. Retool surveyed around fifteen hundred tech professionals across
(07:26):
the industry. Everyone from programmers to designers to executives, like
pretty much every kind of role that's in tech was
represented in this survey. According to the survey, only twenty
three percent of the respondents felt as though AI is
more or less fairly assessed in the industry as a whole.
That the attitude and hype, or maybe hype is the
(07:50):
wrong word because that has a negative connotation, but the
treatment of AI is appropriate, that it's the right level. However,
fifty one point six percent of them feel that AI
is overrated and perhaps overhyped. This also means, by the way,
that about twenty five percent of the respondents actually feel
that AI is underrated. So keep that in mind, and
(08:12):
it seems like the type of job you have in
tech has a big influence on how you view artificial intelligence.
Executives seem more inclined to say AI was either rated
fairly or was actually underrated. And as Rob points out, well, yeah,
of course executives think that because they're looking at artificial
intelligence largely as a cost benefit analysis, and they're salivating
(08:37):
over the thought of replacing all those expensive human drones
with more economical AI powered algorithms, So of course they
think that it's as important, if not more important, than
the way the industry treats it. Meanwhile, the folks who
actually have to interact with AI on a daily basis
in order to do their work. Now, the people who
(08:59):
are using AI to do stuff like write code, for example,
they were far more likely to call AI overrated. Presumably
that's because so much of their time has to be
spent checking for errors and correcting them and that sort
of thing. So with the sample size of fifteen hundred people,
I'm not sure we can actually draw any sweeping conclusions
(09:20):
from this survey. And again, it's a survey that's talking
about people's opinions toward AI. It's not like it's a
metric that actually measures AI itself, but rather our perception
of artificial intelligence. I would say that the survey indicates
it's probably a good idea to pay attention to the
people who are working directly with the artificial intelligence powered tools,
(09:43):
because if your staff is indicating that the AI is
actually making their jobs more frustrating or inefficient, that is
worth paying attention to. Otherwise, the leaders might find that
they have committed to a solution that is actually a problem.
And I don't think we're careening toward a world of
automation and that we'll never be able to turn back
(10:05):
and once we turn that corner, it's all downhill from there.
I don't think that's the case. I do think that
a lot of companies need to be careful in how
they implement AI if they don't want to rush into
an expensive and complicated mess I think that there are
ways to incorporate AI that can have a direct benefit
to both the overall company and to the employees who
(10:28):
are making use of the AI. I think there are legitimate,
good uses for this technology, but I also think it's
very easy to implement it willy nilly, and to do
so in a way that ends up being counterproductive. And
that's what companies really need to be careful about. All Right,
we're going to take a quick break. When we come back,
I got a whole lot of news about everybody's favorite
(10:50):
social network platform, X, But first let's thank our sponsors. Okay,
we're back. And I mentioned before the break that we
would be talking about X today, So here goes. First up,
the company has filed a lawsuit against a media watchdog
(11:13):
group called Media Matters. The group had previously published a
report indicating that ads could appear next to objectionable material
such as extremist and racist messaging, including antisemitic messaging. That
obviously is something that does not go over well with
advertisers as they are trying to promote and protect their brands,
(11:36):
and last week, several major advertisers left X after Elon
Musk indicated support for a conspiracy theory promoted by anti
Semitic groups and white supremacists. So clearly it must have
been Media Matters that was the real problem, not the
fact that the owner of the company was elevating this messaging.
(11:56):
You know. Anyway, some big names in in companies had
halted all advertising on X. They include media companies like Paramount, Disney, NBC, Universal,
Warner Brothers, Discovery. They include telecommunications companies like Comcast and
tech companies like Apple, among many many other companies. And
(12:18):
the thought is that their departure is probably going to
prompt other companies to follow suit. Now, x's complaint against
Media Matters is that Media Matters supposedly manufactured the images
it showed in its report by creating a test account
on X and then just refreshing the view over and over,
like following some specific accounts that were posting problematic stuff
(12:43):
and then just hitting refresh until they started to get
ads to appear next to some of these entries. And
so what X is saying is that this is not
representative of the typical experience on X. Most people on
X would never see this thing at all. Media Matters
had to game the system in order to get these
(13:05):
sorts of results. That's what X is arguing personally. I mean,
that might be a legitimate argument that Media Matters perhaps
kind of orchestrated this so it would appear this way. However,
you still have the issue of the owner of the
company promoting these messages, which whether whether Media Matters orchestrated
(13:30):
anything is still an issue. Media Matters, by the way,
says that they disagree with X's accusations and that they
are willing to go to court and to prove that
their methodology was legitimate. So so far there's no one
backing down from this fight. Musk continues to behave in
a way that is really alarming to advertisers, and that
(13:51):
means that X is going to have a problem no
matter what any watch dog group says. You don't even
need watchdog groups to bring these matters to attend if
you've got the owner of the company doing these sorts
of things, because that is so newsworthy that you know
that's going to be brought to attention and be put
in the spotlight, whether whether there's a watchdog group dedicated
(14:12):
to it or not. On a semi related note, I
deactivated my own account on X. I had not been
checking it regularly for weeks, so I decided it was
just time to walk away. Part of it is that
I don't want to be on a platform where a
fundamentally important person on there is promoting things that can
cause direct harm to others. So my apologies to anyone
(14:34):
who's trying to use X to get in touch with me.
It no longer will work. But let's talk about X
some more, because of course we're not done yet. Tech
Crunch reports that the mass exodus of advertisers, which really
happened last week, is likely to have a pretty darn
hefty impact to x's bottom line. You got to remember,
ninety percent of X's revenue came from advertising, and when
(15:00):
a bunch of advertisers leave, it means the company is
going to have a lot of trouble bringing in revenue.
They had already seen some drastic drops in revenue in
the wake of Elon Musk purchasing the company last year,
so this was already an issue before last week. In fact,
analysts from Insider Intelligence estimated that X was going to
(15:21):
see a fifty four point four percent decline in ad
business year over year, but now that's likely to be
an even more dramatic decline. Linda Yakarino, the CEO of X,
has said that data will show X is actually dedicated
toward fighting misinformation and racism, including anti Semitism, and that
(15:43):
they will prove that in fact, the company has been
working hard on this, despite the fact that Elon Musk
famously dismissed almost the entirety of the content moderation departments
within Twitter when he purchased the company. Reportedly, several advertisers
have actually urged Yakarinos to step down as CEO, going
(16:05):
so far as to suggest that she is potentially causing
irreparable damage to her own reputation by serving as CEO
of X, Like they're essentially saying, you're better than this.
You need to get away from this company. It is
toxic and it is bringing you down with it. Yakarino
so far has rejected these calls. I think she's going
to continue to find it challenging to champion X's policies
(16:27):
while the owner continues to promote content that appears to
contradict her. So that's a mess anyway. That's the update
on x let's now switch over to YouTube for a moment.
Amir Siddicky of Android Authority posted an article titled YouTube
is reportedly slowing down videos for Firefox users. So essentially
(16:50):
the story says that folks who are using non Chrome browsers,
primarily Firefox and Microsoft Edge, have reported that when they
try to launch a video on YouTube, they're encountering a
delay in playback, and it's a delay that lasts several seconds,
like five seconds. But if they close out that browser
and open up Chrome and go to YouTube, they can
(17:13):
try and load that same video and there's no delay.
Now that is troubling. It could indicate that Google is
purposefully throttling performance on non Chrome browsers in an effort
to coax folks to use Chrome instead. Now, this is
preferential treatment that could be seen as anti competitive. In fact,
(17:33):
I think, especially in the current climate in the United States,
it would automatically be listed as being anti competitive behavior.
And considering that Google is currently in the hot seat
for that sort of thing, that's not good. It definitely
is not in line with the concept of net neutrality.
But YouTube has responded to this report and has claimed
(17:55):
that it really doesn't have anything to do with which
browser someone's using. That is immaterial according to Google. Instead,
what's happening, YouTube says is that it is putting in
delays for people who are using browsers that have ad
blocker extensions activated on them. So it's a way to
(18:15):
fight ad blocking. The statement says, quote users who have
ad blockers installed may experience suboptimal viewing, regardless of the
browser they are using. End quote. I don't doubt that
Google is using this approach to discourage ad blockers, as
the company has taken a pretty hardline stance against ad
blockers this year in particular. But I'm curious to see
(18:38):
if that's as far as this goes, because the stories
that were being shared seem to suggest that Chrome users
were getting a better experience. Now, maybe it was that
they had ad blockers installed on their non Chrome browsers,
but for whatever reason, they had not installed ad blockers
on Chrome. Maybe it's that Google has been rolling out
(19:01):
this feature to affect non Chrome browsers first, like they
are designing YouTube so that it can detect the presence
of ad blockers on each browser, and Chrome just hasn't
been rolled out yet And that eventually, no matter what
browser you're using, you're going to have this issue. That
(19:22):
might be true, but it still kind of smacks of
being anti competitive to me to because again, Chrome gets
preferential treatment. If your perception is that, oh well, as
long as I'm on Chrome it's better, I might as
well just use Chrome, that's an issue. If it's not
just legit a natural advance of Chrome. If the system
(19:42):
is being gamed on the back end, that's bad. So
we'll have to wait and see if more developments happen
in this story, because again, Google is currently in the
hot seat with the US government when it comes to
anti competitive behaviors, and there's a real threat that the
(20:05):
government will demand Google break apart into different pieces as
a result of this. Whether it actually gets to that point,
I don't know. I personally kind of doubt it, simply
because the last time we saw something this big happen,
the US government ultimately reversed its decision to break apart
a big tech company. In that case, it was Microsoft.
(20:27):
So not that it's impossible, but it hasn't happened in
a very long time, so I would be surprised if
it went that far. But we'll have to see. All right,
We're going to take another quick break. When we come back,
I've got a couple more stories I want to talk about. Okay, now,
(20:54):
let's have a quick story about Nothing. This is not
a Seinfeld reference. It's nothing like that. We're talking about
the Nothing Company, the makers of the Nothing Phone. That's
a smartphone. It runs on Android. It had a lot
of hype when it was first launching. There were all
these kind of hopes that the Nothing Phone was going
(21:15):
to be a really awesome flagship Android phone with really
cool features like these glyphs that light up on the
back of the phone indicating whether you got a text
message versus an incoming call or whatever. But so far,
the Nothing Phone has fallen. I think it's fair to
say it's fallen short of expectations since the original announcement
(21:35):
for the project. But this story specifically has to do
with an app that Nothing put its name on. Nothing
launched an app called Nothing Chats, and this app claimed
it could, among other things, let Android users get a
taste of the promised land. That is, if the promised
(21:55):
land is made up of blue chat bubbles in Apple's
I message. All right, so I've talked about this a
little bit recently, mostly because I find it all really exasperating.
But there's this perception among certain iPhone owners, particularly here
in the United States, that people who use other types
(22:16):
of phones, you know, non iPhones, are the dirty, unwashed
masses who lack sophistication and intelligence, and they should be
ostracized and ridiculed and shunned. And the dead giveaway if
it's not just looking at what the phone is when
they're holding it, is that when you are messaging with
(22:37):
them and you're using an iPhone, so you're an eye message,
their messages show up in little green bubbles rather than
little blue bubbles. So iPhone users all get blue bubbles,
but an Android user, they are completely restricted to green,
and they should be shunned. I guess I don't know.
(22:57):
I'm an Android user who doesn't really I don't care
about any of this stuff. I don't care if anyone
makes fun of me for the type of phone I use,
because if that's the kind of person they are, then
they're not worthy of me being worried about them. They're
beneath my concern, is what I'm saying. So yes, I
have my own issues of superiority. But I do understand
(23:20):
that other people care a lot about this stuff, and
they care about it so much that they will go
out of their way to make folks feel inferior about
not having an iPhone. And that is just lame. I mean,
you know, I get that, Like, especially like school kids
and stuff, they'll always find ways where they define a
group and they define outsiders to the group. Like that's
(23:42):
just kind of how it goes. But it's lame, y'all. Anyway.
Nothing claimed that the nothing chats app would let Android
users appear to be iPhone users in I Message conversations,
that their texts would appear in little blue bubbles. It
turned out that nothing Chats was actually a reskin of
(24:04):
a different app called the Sunbird app, and installing the
app would prompt Android users to submit their Apple username
and password, and then the app would reportedly log into
I Message on the behalf of the Android user and
kind of act like a middleman. And supposedly it was
(24:24):
going to include end to end encryption, except folks discovered
that Sunbird was not protecting this information at all. This
is a huge, huge security and privacy problem. So again,
the app claimed that it was incorporating into enn encryption.
It wasn't. Sunbird was logging and storing messages in plane
(24:46):
text in multiple places, not just in one location, which
makes it doubly vulnerable, right because that means hackers have
multiple targets they could look at in order to get
access to Lane text messaging. Researchers show it was possible
for a hacker to infiltrate a message server and to
(25:06):
read the messages sent via this app, which is actually
the opposite of what end to end encryption is supposed
to do. And the apps are no longer in the store.
They disappeared after just a day. But the whole thing
indicates that both Sunbird and Nothing have not taken proper
steps to actually be serious about security and privacy, not
(25:26):
even a little bit. Now. If you want to learn
more about this, I recommend Ron Amadeo's article in Ours Tetnica.
It is titled Nothing's I Message app was a security
catastrophe taken down in twenty four hours. Now. Our last
story is that the test launch of the SpaceX Starship
vehicle once again ended in an explosion. So back in April,
(25:52):
SpaceX first held a test launch of the next generation spacecraft,
which includes the Starship spacecraft and the super Heavy the
launch vehicle, and a few minutes after takeoff, like four
minutes after the first test mission took off, there was
a big explosion and then SpaceX chose to self destruct
(26:13):
the vehicle as a result of this, so four minutes
after lift off, everything went boom. This time this past weekend,
the vehicle made it further than it had in April,
but it's still encountered issues. So after the super Heavy
first stage booster separated from the rest of the vehicle,
(26:33):
the booster exploded over the Gulf of Mexico. Now, the
Starship stage continued in its trajectory initially anyway, but then
SpaceX mission control lost contact with the vehicle. The best
estimation was that the Starship stage initiated an automatic flight termination,
(26:54):
which is another way of saying it self destructed. Mission
control was unsure why the vehicle had actually initiated that.
The failure happened at around eight minutes into the test,
so four minutes longer than what happened back in April,
and it had also reached an altitude of ninety one miles,
which means by every definition, it reached space the US,
(27:15):
by the way, defines the edge of space as an
altitude of fifty miles, whereas the international standard is the
Karman line, which is at sixty two miles of altitude.
Either way, the starship got all the way up to
space because it was up ninety one miles in altitude.
The test is not a total failure. It is easy
(27:36):
to call things that when stuff blows up, but even
when things go wrong, that means there's an opportunity to
learn more and to learn what you need to do
differently and how to design things so that they're more reliable.
It does mean that there's going to have to be
more tests, obviously, to reach a point where the technology
can be demonstrated to be reliable and safe and consistently
(27:59):
working in good order. So that's an issue. It is
kind of a setback. It's not a failure, but I'm
sure it's something that SpaceX was not super pleased to
see because you know, they had already seen one of
these explode back in April. So we'll have to see
what happens moving forward. At In the meantime, you know,
(28:20):
you've got NASA. It's really kind of keeping an eye
on what's going on with SpaceX, while NASA is readying
up for the Artemis program to continue, which ultimately is
going to send astronauts back to the Moon. Clearly, for
that to happen, there need to be access to reliable
launch vehicles capable of sending a spacecraft as far out
(28:42):
as the Moon. So we'll see how things continue from here.
But that's it. That's the news for November twenty first,
twenty twenty three. Just a heads up for all of y'all.
This week in the United States, it's Thanksgiving, which means
we'll be off for the second half of the week.
I'll have some a rerun to play in place of
(29:03):
Thursday's episode, so I just want to give you a
heads up for that, but we should be back the
following week. Coming up, I'm going to be going on
a vacation in early December, so we'll probably have some
reruns then as well, And then of course we have
the Christmas holidays at the end that'll also have an
impact on the show, but then everything will be back
to what passes for normal on this wacky, zany show
(29:26):
called tech Stuff. I hope you are all well. I
hope those of you in the US who are about
to celebrate Thanksgiving, have a wonderful holiday, and I will
talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an
iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
(29:50):
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
TechStuff News
Hosts And Creators
Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
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