May 17, 2024 • 44 mins
Both OpenAI and Google dominated the tech news this week with announcements relating to AI, and like it or not it seems like AI is bound to become deeply integrated into our tech in the near future. Plus, Elon Musk tussles with the SEC (again) and two brothers are accused of stealing around 25 million dollars in cryptocurrency.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
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 the
week ending on Friday May seventeenth, twenty twenty four. And
(00:26):
this was a pretty big week in tech news. There
were a couple of large companies that made major announcements,
and then there were tons of other things going on.
So we're going to start off with open ai, the
company that is behind the chat GPT chatbot, among many
other things. I mentioned last week that the rumor mill
(00:49):
said open ai was on the verge of announcing an
AI powered search tool, which would pretty much be akin
to putting Google dead in the center of open AI's crosshairs,
because Google was just about to have it's Google Io
Developers conference, which we'll talk about in a second. And
open ai did release an announcement for a new AI
(01:11):
model that's called GPT four O and I think that's
the letter oh, not a zero. Anyway, this model is
meant to allow for actual voice conversations between human and
AI eventually, and open Ai says it'll also work across
image and video related tasks. So this is what they
(01:32):
call a multi modal approach to AI. It's not just
text based, it's other stuff too, And the concept is
kind of like you could have an image of something
or a video of something. You could be looking at
things through say your camera app on your phone, and
then talk to the AI assistant and try to get
(01:56):
information about what it is you're seeing. So we've seen
stuff like this or related to this in the past,
like holding your phone up to look at a sign
that's written in another language and have real time translation
to translate that into whatever your native language is. We've
seen that in the past. This would be more advanced,
much more advanced than that, you know. The example I
(02:18):
would think of is I would imagine like, say you're
starting up your car and the engines making a weird noise,
and so you turn your car off, you pop the
hood of your engine, and you're turning the car on
and you're trying to take a look and see what
it is that's possibly going wrong. Well, if you're like me,
you may only have a passing familiarity with that particular engine.
(02:41):
So an app that could hear and see the same
things that you do, but have access to an entire
world of information would be really useful. It could tell you, hey,
this is something you don't need to worry about right now,
or maybe it would tell you you need to get
your vehicle checked right away, or maybe even give you
a quick fix, if such a thing as even possible now.
(03:05):
In some ways, you could argue open ai is doing
kind of similar stuff to what we're seeing with other
personal digital assistants like Google Assistant or Siri or Alexa,
but just turbocharged. Open Ai did a real time demonstration
of the model's capabilities, something that would loom over Google
(03:26):
a little bit for their io event, but we'll get
to them in a second. Anyway. Chat GPT four oh
is rolling out now, but not all features are available
rail of the gate, so for example, it is not
able to talk to you just yet, or at least
not to me. I actually check to see if I
have access to Chat GPT four oh. I have a
(03:46):
chat GPT account that I never use, and so I
think I logged onto it for the first time in
maybe a year and found out that sure enough, I've
got access to it. But it doesn't talk to me yet.
The rollout is also going to be happening in batches,
So if you don't have access to it yet, even
though you have a chat gpt account, it is coming.
(04:07):
You can actually sign in now by going to chatgpt
dot com. They created that URL, so that's where the
service lives now. I think that kind of is a
sly indicator that they are transitioning from something that is
largely talked about as kind of a test product into
something that's an actual product. Existing chat gpt account holders
(04:30):
will receive access to four O capabilities over the next
several days if they don't have it already. And I
want to echo a warning that I've seen a lot
of other people make, because I think it's wise to
remember be careful if in your interactions with chat gpt
it suggests links to stuff, because apparently at least some
(04:50):
malicious folks have found ways to get chat gpt to
suggest links that ultimately lead to malicious website it's and
malicious software. So don't trust everything Chad Gbt says, particularly
when it comes to links. I think it's a really
interesting interaction that you can have with this thing. I
(05:12):
don't fully like it. I have concerns, and we'll talk
more about that in just a second. But beyond the
announcement that open ai made, they also managed to close
a deal with Reddit, which will give open ai permission
to train AI models on Reddit and subreddit posts. That's
(05:33):
something that folks had suspected open ai was already doing,
just you know, without the part about having permission to
do so. Reddit will in return get some access to
AI powered tools that can then be incorporated into the
platform in various ways. So Reddit is saying, hey, don't worry,
you're gonna have enhanced ways to interact with Reddit. Though
(05:53):
what those will actually be haven't, you know, been fully disclosed,
if you recall. Open Ai similarly sign to deal with
stack overflow not too long ago, which caused a bit
of a tiff in that community because a lot of
folks said they preferred their work not be used for
training AI. But the terms of service for stack overflow
are such that essentially, once you post something to the platform,
(06:16):
it doesn't belong to you anymore. It's the platforms. So
while you might object to your work being used to
train AI, you don't have any authority to deny it
from happening. Some people tried to deface or delete old posts,
but that's exactly that's against the terms of service on
stack overflow. So many of those people subsequently found themselves banned,
(06:37):
at least temporarily from that site. It'll be interesting to
see if there will be a similar backlash in the
Reddit community. That community is already kind of predisposed to
not liking the corporate leadership of Reddit. There's already pretty
low opinion of the company's leaders, largely because of changes
that Reddit made to its API like a year ago,
(06:59):
and apparently that's not the case with investors. Investors on
the flip side are pretty darn happy. Reuters reported that
shares were trading fourteen percent higher today than they were
yesterday in the wake of this news. Not all the
news is good news for open ai. Between announcements and partnerships,
two prominent individuals in the organization resigned from the company
(07:22):
this week. That would be Ilia Sutzkiver, who is a
co founder of open ai, one of the original members
of the non profit version of open ai, and the
other one is Jan Leika, an executive who gave a
pretty straightforward announcement on x their announcement. Just read quote
I resigned end quote. Now the alarming thing is both
(07:45):
Laikah and Sutzkiver worked for a department within open ai
called super Alignment, and essentially they were assigned a task
that was the need to make sure AI evolves in
a way that is helpful but not harmful. This was
kind of the central premise, the reison deetre of open
ai when it was first founded as a nonprofit organization.
(08:07):
The founders wanted to make certain that AI would be
developed in a responsible and accountable and transparent way in
order to maximize its benefits to humanity and minimize or
eliminate any risks. But it turns out AI is really expensive.
Like it's expensive to develop, it's expensive to implement and
to run and to maintain, and without a near constant
(08:31):
cash injection, open ai just wouldn't be around for very long,
which is why the organization ultimately spun off a for
profit arm, which is the version of open ai most
of us talk about today, like, it's not the nonprofit version,
it's the very aggressive for profit version that makes the
news and that created conflict within the organization. It led
(08:55):
up to the brief period in which the board of
directors removed Sam Altman as CEO of Open Ai, before
being pressured to turn around and put him right back
in charge again, and then subsequently the board of directors
essentially dissolved and reformed with new people. Sutzkever was actually
part of the effort to remove Altman, although he subsequently
(09:16):
apologized for that, so I don't think it's really a
big surprise that he has now left the company. But
I think anyone who is concerned about ethical approaches to
AI should really be aware that a lot of red
flags are going up right now. Okay, with that fun note,
let's take a quick break to thank our sponsors. We're back,
(09:45):
and now let us shift to Google, which, as I
mentioned earlier, held its annual IO Developer conference this week, and,
to the surprise of literally no one, much of the
conference touched on artificial intelligence. Now there are do you
have great headlines out there like Google aio or even
Google aiaio, et cetera. So there's so many out there,
(10:09):
I'm kind of sad that none are left for me.
But enough about that. Google announced an update to its
AI model Gemini. The company revealed that both the basic version,
called Gemini one point five Flash and the pro version
are available for public preview now. The primary function of
these specific AI models is to help developers create stuff,
(10:31):
so if a developer is working on an app, they
can make use of these models to help boost those efforts,
whether it's encoding or whatever. Google also revealed an updated
version of its assistant called Project Astra. Google showed a
pre recorded demonstration of the assistant's ability, and a Googler
(10:51):
was taking her phone around an office and asking questions
and having the camera app activated on her phone so
she could point the camera at something and ask a
question about the thing that's on screen, and the an
Astra would answer. So one point, for example, she asks
the assistant to point out anything that makes sound, and
(11:12):
she scans a desk, and when she brings the camera
in view of a speaker, the assistant says, that's a speaker,
and then she actually uses a markup feature to circle
the tweeter on the speaker, and she asks a follow
up question saying what is this part of the speaker called,
and the assistant says, that's the tweeter. Then it explains
what the tweeter does, which is to playback you know,
(11:33):
higher pitched sounds, higher frequency sounds, so it was a
cool demonstration. She pointed out the window and asked, you know,
essentially like what's this neighborhood? And the assistant answered, and
she at one point even said that she had misplaced
her glasses and asked the assistant if it knew where
her glasses were, And because she had been walking through
the office with the camera on, the app was able
(11:56):
to reference that information and it was able to pick
out a moment where the camera saw some glasses on
a desk, and it directed her to those glasses, which,
from what I understand, that's what got the biggest reaction
from the crowd, which was kind of cool. I mean,
goodness knows, I misplaced things all the time, so it'd
be good to have, you know, an assistant that could
(12:19):
tell me, yeah, no, that's in your hand. You'd do
fas anyway. Later on, Googler Michael Chang somewhat cheekily shared
on X now known as you know X it used
to be known as Twitter that he had watched the
Open AI announcement on Monday with Astra, which is kind
of funny because you know, the whole thing was that
Open AI was doing this sort of to undermine Google
(12:41):
and that Michael Chang saying, yeah, I watched it along
with Project Astra, and Project Astra made a real time
transcript of that presentation, complete with attributions for each speaker,
so identifying who was speaking in the transcript as it
was going on. That's pretty impressive, and also giving some
commentary about the presentation as it went on. The demonstration
(13:04):
of the AI interpreting images and giving relevant responses was
really interesting, but again, it was pre recorded. It wasn't
like it was a live demo. Google also demonstrate an
updated image generation AI model called imagen three. On top
of images, Google showed off a music AI sandbox to
let folks use AI to put musicians and composers out
(13:25):
of a job. No, I'm sorry, that's not a messaging
they wanted. I mean to help artists elevate their creativity
through the use of AI. I looked at these I
just got to see demos. I don't have access to
the tools themselves because I'm not a notable musician. I'm
not really a musician at all, so I don't have
access to these things. But it's both fascinating and concerning.
(13:48):
Because I have a lot of respect for actual musical artists,
and I don't like the idea of people who are
really talented and creative potentially getting pushed aside for something
that is perhaps easier to access and maybe cheaper. That's
not great. I think people's talent and time is worth money,
(14:10):
like I think it's worth paying for and that you know,
you can't just expect something for free, and anything that
undercuts that really concerns me a lot. Google also announced
video FX, which you guessed it uses generative AI to
create video clips, which again raise lots of concerns, like
the more you're seeing of AI generated content, the more
(14:31):
you're worried about how reliable is the stuff you are seeing.
Whether it's you know, a listing for a real estate property,
like who's to say it wasn't a picture that was
then enhanced by AI to make the house look way
nicer than it really is, Or maybe it's something where
it's a it's a video clip that seems to put
(14:53):
a public figure in a bad light, and you start wondering, Okay,
well is this real or is this something that was
created by someone who just has an axe to grind
for whatever reason these are things that are getting more
and more relevant. Arguably they are incredibly relevant right now. Now.
The thing that is probably going to have the largest impact,
at least the earliest for most folks, is Google implementing
(15:15):
more AI into its search tool, which is of course
what Google is primarily known for, even though it's arguably
really an advertising company, it's known for search. The company
announced that AI overviews in search is going to be
rolling out nationwide in the United States this week, so
if you live in the United States, you probably have
this incorporated in your search right now. Google also said
(15:39):
that multi step reasoning capabilities are coming soon, which means
that you'll be able to ask more complex questions in
your search query and to get relevant answers. So, like,
here's an example I just made up, how do I
make a lasagna? And what cheese is a good substitute
if I don't have ricotta? Right, Because that's a two
part question. It's one asking what are the steps to
(16:01):
make a lasagna? And I know I already know I
don't have an ingredient that's in a lot of lasagna recipes,
So what is a good substitute? That's the sort of
thing that you can expect to be able to access
in the not too distant future. The various keynotes and
presentations stretched across multiple days, so there was so much
(16:22):
more brought up during the IO event. But I think
the real message for most of us, the people who
aren't like actively developers, that we should take home is
just that AI is going to be all up in
your business and soon. Google hasn't just been talking to developers, however,
the company has also been pushing out updates to its browser,
Google Chrome, and this is not part of its all AI,
(16:46):
all the time strategy. Instead, Google is addressing some zero
day vulnerabilities that have come to light over the last
couple of weeks, three of them in fact, recently. These
vulnerabilities are severe. Potentially hackers would be able to quote
perform an out of bounds memory right via a crafted
HTML page end quote that's from Google. That's not good.
(17:07):
It could mean that you could have a vulnerability activated
and then you visit a malicious website and then either
get malware downloaded to your computer or worse. So this
is a gentle reminder to all of y'all that it's
never a good idea to just push off installing updates
on stuff like web browsers and operating systems, because doing
(17:28):
that puts you at risk for malware or worse. I
know it's a hassle to have to update, especially if
you get to your machine and you've got like a
specific thing you need to do, and then the first
thing you see is a notification saying that you should
run an update. I know that's a hassle. It happens
to me too, and I hate it too, But it's
a good idea to go ahead and do the update
ninety nine times out of one hundred. One time out
(17:50):
of one hundred, it ends up being the wrong thing
to do, But when it's a ninety nine percent success, right,
you should probably do it. Also, hey, fun concept AI
can now help hackers discover and exploit vulnerabilities, So it's
just gonna get worse. Brave New World and all that
kind of stuff. Apple iOS beta testers say that iOS
build seventeen point five has a disturbing habit of bringing
(18:13):
the dead back to life. And so I'm not talking
about reanimated goules here. I'm talking about deleted material, like
deleted photos or deleted voicemails. According to a Reddit thread,
some users have reported iOS digging up old and sometimes
deleted photos and then showcasing them as if they are
recent images. So you pull up your app and say, huh,
(18:36):
according to this, this picture I took seven years ago
is a new one. Apparently in some cases this has
included images that people once took but long since deleted,
including nudes. Nude photos. That should be a massive concern
because Apple's stated practice is that once you delete a photo,
(18:59):
then you have thirty days in which you can recover
the deleted photo. But after thirty days, that photo is
supposed to be deleted for good. So if, as some
people have claimed, some of these photos have reappeared reportedly
years after they were first deleted, that raises serious privacy questions.
(19:20):
Right Like, if you took a nude photo seven years ago,
then like six and a half years ago, you deleted it.
You do not expect that seven year old photo to
come bouncing back today. That would be really shocking, and
it does again raise real questions about data retention and
privacy and security. At least one Reddit user claimed that
(19:40):
they had sold an old iPad to a friend of theirs,
but they had gone through Apple's process to wipe their
own personal data off of the iPad before selling it. So,
in other words, just making sure that you're reverting back
to like factory settings and deleting all personal information, but
that some of their old not safe for work photographs
(20:02):
have been popping back up on their friend's device. Now
surprise friend that you didn't expect to see your buddy
in their glory. This is not good news at all,
if in fact it is true. So I have to
keep on stressing if it is true, because I haven't
seen confirmation from anyone other than people commenting on Reddit.
(20:24):
I don't know if you know this, but sometimes people
on Reddit say things that are perhaps not one hundred
percent true. A lot of subreddits are almost exclusively made
up of fiction anyway. Wes Davis of The Verge extends
some grace to Apple and points out that this might
not be a case of Apple doing something insidious or
being really negligent. That deleted data is never really gone
(20:49):
until some other information gets overwritten on top of what
once was there. And that's true if you delete something
off your hard drive, but you don't overwrite information on
top of where that drive was, you know, storing stuff
it can be possible to recover the deleted information. So
maybe that's what's happened at Apple, just you know, on
(21:10):
a much much larger scale. Now, personally, I find that
a little hard to swallow because the trend has been
for more folks to use more Apple services over time.
So you would think if more people are using those services,
that stuff would be overwritten all the time, because otherwise
Apple would just have to keep on adding additional servers
(21:31):
to handle incoming images and voicemails and all the other stuff,
because you know the otherwise. The implication is that, well,
we haven't overwritten everything that you know has been freed
up since people have deleted things. I can't even be
sure that the claims that are being made are accurate.
So it's possible that some of these quote unquote deleted
files weren't really deleted at all. Maybe they were just
(21:52):
forgotten about, because goodness knows that happens too. But the
story about the wipe dipad in particular is trouble if
it is true, So just something to be aware of. Again,
that's for iOS seventeen point five, and it's in beta,
so if you're not beta testing, then this isn't likely
to affect you if you're an iOS user, but I'm
(22:15):
sure it's something that Apple is looking into to figure
out before iOS eighteen goes out. All right, we got
more stories to cover, but before we can get to
all of those, let's take another quick break. We're back,
(22:37):
and here's a story that hit like deja vus this
week at centers around the company game Stop, and it's
stock price. So you might remember that back in twenty
twenty one, a collection of folks decided to stick it
to some hedge funds by investing in game Stop because
word got out that some massive hedge funds were short
(22:58):
selling game Stop. By driving the price of the stock up,
the investors could do two things. One, they could see
a return on their own investment, right because if the
stock goes up, then you're making profit. And two, they
could cause serious financial hardship for these massive hedge funds
that typically hold a tremendous amount of power in the
(23:18):
stock market. Now, if you're not familiar with how short
selling goes, let me give you a very basic description,
and I'm glossing over a lot of details here. Let's
say that you believe a particular stock is going to
decline in value. So you decide, hey, I'm going to
make some money with stock going down. I'm going to
sell stock that I don't actually own, and i'm going
(23:41):
to sell it at what it is currently trading for.
So let's say that it's currently trading for ten dollars
per share. So you sell one hundred shares at ten
dollars per share, but you don't own those shares, So
you're literally selling stock you do not own, but you
have the promise of delivering that money, or rather the stock,
in a certain amount of time. Let's say it's one month. Now,
(24:02):
a month has gone by, and it's time for you
to deliver the stock that you've promised. At this point,
the stock has gone down to one dollar per share.
Now you previously sold it for ten dollars per share,
so you get to buy up the amount of stock
you agreed to handover in the transaction, and you get
to pocket the difference between the ten dollars that you
(24:24):
accepted for this sale and the one dollar that you
actually purchased everything for. So you make money by stock
going down. But if the stock price doesn't go down,
if it goes up, that's bad. News for you, because
now you're gonna have to pay out a pocket the
difference of that. So let's say that the stock actually
(24:44):
rose up to twenty dollars per share at the end
of the month, Well, then you're gonna have to pay
an extra ten dollars on every share of the stock
that you sold, So you're gonna lose that money instead
of gaining extra Well, these investors that ended up driving
up the price of game Stop were led by a
guy named Keith Gill, who's better known by his online handle,
(25:07):
which is Roaring Kitty, and they did a massive screw
you to major investment companies that are trying to short
sell game Stop. This is what we call a short squeeze.
This week, it happened again briefly because on Tuesday, game
Stop shares rose to a high of sixty four dollars
eighty three cents per share, and in fact, there were
(25:30):
companies that were putting on a short sale of game
Stop stock. However, in this case, the rally didn't last long.
It has subsequently dropped to around twenty seven dollars per share.
And this roller coaster followed some posts by the aforementioned
Roaring Kitty who seemed to be getting back into the
game after being quiet for a couple of years. But again,
(25:50):
unlike the first go round when this happened in twenty
twenty one, this particular boost appeared to just be a blip,
so we're not seeing a full repeat of the phenomenon.
So a lot of hedge funds have gotten wise to
this and have measures in place to limit their liability
so they're not caught out quite as badly as they
were the last time. Because boyotty, that was a doozy. Okay,
(26:15):
let's talk about Meta. They are ending the Workplace app
for external customers. At the very least, some elements of
Workplace may remain as internal Facebook systems. So Meta first
launched Workplace in twenty sixteen. It's a business collaboration tool. Essentially,
it lets companies make interconnecting page networks with their partners
(26:35):
and helps with collaborative projects that span different departments or
different companies entirely. They can have like dedicated message boards,
that kind of stuff. It's a business to business product.
Meta charged four dollars per user. That adds up pretty
quickly if you're talking about a really big company. But
now Meta is going to sunset the Workplace app and
(26:55):
shift assets to two other massive projects, which are AI
and of course the Metaverse. Because Meta is still determined
to make that happen. I think it's going to be
like Fetch. It's not gonna happen, but maybe it will.
I mean, maybe people will love it. I still am skeptical,
but I'm also not a genius and I'm not an entrepreneur.
I'm just a grouchy guy who talks into a microphone.
(27:16):
The company says it will work with current Workplace customers
to transition them over to work Vivo, which is a
product from Zoom and the one partner they work with
that makes something similar that they actually recommend. Okay, here's
an interesting story about suppressing tech. Seven hundred and fifty
miles to the east of Australia is New Caledonia. In
(27:38):
the mid nineteenth century, France claimed New Caledonia and has
remained the ruler of New Caledonia since it is a
French territory. But recently the government of New Caledonia enacted
changes to election laws that really sparked protests across the territory,
mostly in indigenous populations that have been fighting for independence.
(28:01):
For quite some time, these protests grew and became more chaotic.
Four deaths have resulted as the protests have grown more violent,
and since then the government has cracked down on the populace.
The government has banned public protests and demonstrations and also
blocked access to TikTok all in an effort to squash
(28:24):
protests online and off. The government says that people were
using TikTok in order to organize demonstrations, and since demonstrations
are now banned, so is TikTok, so people can't use
it to do that. That's really why I'm including the
story here, because it's a social and political event that
has spilled into suppressing access to online platforms. And as
(28:47):
to the heart of the matter, like what this is
all about again, it's largely about the question of independence
for New Caledonia and the recent election laws that were
changed now allow people who are more recent transplants to
New Caledonia to vote. Previously, in order to be eligible
to vote in matters of great import in New Caledonia,
(29:08):
you had to have a long and deep connection to
the territory. You couldn't just move there and then influence
the vote so a lot of people who support independence
say this is a blatant attempt to dilute their influence
in public matters, because the people who are moving to
New Caledonia are largely French citizens, who are of course
(29:31):
not voting in favor of independence. So that's what's really
the heart of the conflict. But yeah, like I said,
it's spilled out now with a ban on TikTok. And
while there is a twelve day state of emergency currently
in effect for New Caledonia, it is not yet clear
if the ban on TikTok will lift once that state
(29:52):
of emergency expires. A lawsuit targeting Tesla alleging that the
company made false claims regarding full self driving capability these
in its car may move forward. Tesla had attempted to
get the case thrown out. A California resident by the
name of Thomas Lesavio alleges the company engaged in fraud
by claiming that its vehicles would have full self driving
(30:14):
capability and that's why Lasavio purchased a Tesla vehicle, only
to subsequently find out that those claims were perhaps exaggerated
or false. The judge overseeing the matter has decided that
at least some of Lasavio's case has merit and can
go to trial, but some other parts have been dismissed
because of the way they were presented. Now, Lasavio originally
(30:36):
was going to be part of a class action lawsuit,
but the other plaintiffs of that lawsuit had to drop
out because they had signed an agreement which would require
them to go through arbitration with Tesla before they could
bring a case to court. Losavio did not sign such
an agreement, so was able to move forward with his
(30:56):
own lawsuit, and he has opened it up to be
a class action so other Tesla owners can join if
they so wish. Now, Lasauvio is going to have until
June fifth to amend his complaint in order to get
parts that were dismissed reincorporated into it. Tesla has until
June nineteenth to respond. So there's still no guarantee that
this is actually going to go to trial, but it
(31:16):
is a step closer. Reuters has a piece titled the
inside story of Elon Musk's mass firings of Tesla's supercharger staff. Obviously,
this relates to a story I talked about. A couple
of weeks ago in which the company laid off a
five hundred person department responsible for the development and deployment
of supercharger stations, which seemed more than a little weird
(31:37):
because Tesla has made great strides in establishing its supercharger
technology as a kind of de facto industry standard. You know,
other car manufacturers have bought into that, and they've made
their own vehicles compatible with it. The Reuter's piece tells
a pretty disturbing tale in my opinion, because the former
head of the supercharger department, a woman named Rebecca to Nucci,
(31:58):
had already gone through a round layoffs like she had
already held layoffs within her division at the direction of
Elon Musk, and Musk wanted to do more. But she
was meeting with Musk to present her vision that involved
the company expanding the supercharger network. Instead, Musk demanded more layoffs.
To Nucci reportedly said that if she were to lay
off anyone else in her department, that would be counterproductive,
(32:20):
it would hurt their business objectives. And that's when Musk
just went nuclear. He pulled the trigger and he fired
everyone or practically everyone in that department. And it's very
hard for me not to get the feeling that this
is a leader who, when he perceives a challenge to
his absolute authority, just goes with that nuclear option. And
(32:42):
now Tesla's having to deal with the consequences because people
from other departments, notably the Solar and battery divisions, have
been given the task to work with the various partners
and contractors who had been engaged in building out supercharging stations.
You know, these are folks who already had a lot
of work on their plate, and now they're to take
on the work of an entirely different department. It seems
(33:03):
like the general strategy right now for Tesla is to
stall for time, which isn't exactly welcome news if you
happen to be a contractor who's expecting to get paid.
Musk has said the plan is still to grow the
supercharger network, but that things are gonna have to happen
at a more methodical pace, which seems like that's a
given considering how many people were fired. There have also
(33:23):
been reports that Tesla has subsequently tried to hire back
at least some of the staff that were previously laid off.
I'm sure for some of those folks coming back is
a pretty hard decision. I mean, you do need to
make a living, so there is that element. But if
you've already been unceremoniously laid off for arguably irrational reasons,
it's not really great to think about coming back to
(33:45):
that company. It's also not a great development for electric
vehicles in general, because if Tesla fizzles out, then some
other entity or multiple entities will have to step forward
to provide the infrastructure necessary to support a migration from
internal combustion engine vehicles to evs. So that's one of
the big reasons why people say they're they're reluctant to
adopt evs is that they fear being stranded someplace because
(34:10):
they weren't able to find a charging station and recharge
at a reasonable limit and cost. So, yeah, this is
not great news for the EV industry as a whole. Now,
when he's not gutting his EV company, Elon Musk is
sparring with his old nemesis, the US Securities and Exchange Commission,
or SEC. He's had a few run ins with the SEC,
(34:30):
one stemming from his inability to not post stuff that
could be seen as market manipulation. When he intimated that
he was going to take Tesla private. Anyway, now the
SEC wants to chat with Musk about his purchase of Twitter,
of course, now known as X. The SEC did this
once before. Musk initially told him to pound sand and
(34:50):
that he wasn't going to listen to all their subpoenas
because they were just trying to bully him. After that,
some judges weighed in to say, no, no, no, that's
not how the law works, and Musk tried again get
the whole thing swept away because you know, it's such
a hassle to have to answer for your actions. It
turns out that's not a good enough reason for judges
to throw things out, even for billionaires. So it looks
(35:11):
like Musk is going to have to have a chat
with the SEC, which says that it came into possession
of new documents about the purchase of X and it
raises questions about Musk's involvement with Twitter in the months
leading up to his announced plans to acquire the company.
So we'll have to see where that goes. Considering the
decline of Twitter since Musk's announcement, this feels like it's
(35:34):
largely a lot of fuss over a rotting corpse. Honestly,
One story that I don't think I covered before is
that the first human recipient of a Neurlink implant, which
is the brain computer interface chip that's made by Neurlink,
another company owned by Elon Musk It has experienced some
issues as several of the very thin threads that connected
(35:54):
to the device have lost contact with the neurons that
they were previously attached to in this human subject, So
this affected the chip's ability to serve as a conduit
between the recipient's brain and the computer systems he was
interacting with. Engineers addressed the problem by making tweaks to
the algorithms that run along on the chip, and that
helped compensate for this issue. But now some unnamed sources
(36:18):
that are familiar with the testing say that this was
a known thing that the Neurlink had been observed to
have wires retracting in animal test subjects as well. Considering
the fact that this implant requires invasive and potentially dangerous surgery,
some are now questioning the ethical implications of moving forward
with a human test subject. While this retraction thing has
(36:41):
been a known issue, there's a concern that should more
wires retract, the neurolink will hit a wall with however
much adjustment you can do to the algorithms to deal
with it, and that in turn, that'll mean the chip
will gradually lose functionality and potentially become largely useless, which
could lead to an eividuality in which it becomes necessary
(37:03):
to remove the implant entirely. As for finding a way
to fix this problem in future procedures, that's pretty challenging.
You could create a system where you have more wires
or they're more firmly anchored, but that would mean they
would be harder to dislodge by definition, and if you
wanted to do something like an upgrade, or if you
needed to remove the implant, it could cause complications. So
(37:25):
this is not an easy fix one way or the other.
And in my mind, it's suggest to me that perhaps
this was a bit too aggressive for neuralink, but we
don't know that yet. Like it may turn out that
some wires retracting is just a normal course of action
and that the rest of it is fine. And there's
no denying that the technology does provide an incredible quality
(37:49):
of life boost to people who otherwise don't have use
of their limbs. That is something that is really important.
So if in fact we don't see further degradation of
the implant, I think that this issue, while it does
raise concerns and raises questions about why the FDA would
allow things to move forward, those are questions that I
(38:10):
think need to be answered. I think ultimately we could
say it's for the best if the device actually does
work and doesn't degrade to a point where it must
be removed. I mean, it's in arguably an improvement to
the life of the people who have it. Touching back
on AI for a moment, Sony Music Group has joined
countless artists, writers, and other creators and expressing concern over
(38:31):
AI using existing human created works as training material, and
Sony Music is saying, don't do that. We don't want
you to do that. So the company has reportedly sent
out several hundred letters to various AI startups and companies saying, hey,
don't you dare use our catalog of music without our
express permission, And at least for some of those recipients,
the company went on to say, you know, we know
(38:51):
that you're doing it now, so you've got to knock
it off Buster, except, of course, they worded it differently.
Sony specifically said, quote, due to the nature of your
operations and published information about your AI systems, we have
reason to believe that you and or your affiliates may
have already made unauthorized uses, including TDM, of SMG content,
(39:12):
in relation to the training, development, or commercialization of AI systems.
End quote. For the record, the initialism TDM stands for
Text and Data Mining. SMG is Sony Music Group. According
to jem Oswad of Variety, a recent EU law called
the AI Act prompted Sony to send these letters, as
the Act compels AI companies to reveal what their training
(39:35):
data was like where did they get their data to
train their AI models? So Sony, at least in part,
is saying, Hey, you used our information without our permission.
Don't do that now. I usually hold off on reading
recommendations to the very end of the episode, but I
want to mention Ashley Bellinger's incredible piece for Ours Technica
(39:56):
titled MIT Students stole twenty five million in second by
exploiting etch blockchain bug. DOJ says, now, as that title implies,
this is a heck of a story. It's about a
pair of brothers who learned how blockchains work at MIT.
They arguably learned a little too well how they work,
and they took this incredible education that they received at
(40:17):
MIT and they turned it into kind of an Ocean's
eleven style heist. Except this heist took less than fifteen seconds,
and it involved finding a way to access pending transactions
on the blockchain. So these were transactions that have not
yet actually been cemented in the Ethereum blockchain, and they
were able to divert cryptocurrency meant for these transactions to
(40:38):
go into their own accounts. So the way blockchains work
is that once a transaction gets added to a block
and the block is added onto the chain, it's secure
because going into the history of transactions and making a
change would cause a ripple effect for every block that follows,
and so any tampering immediately becomes clear and is reversed
(41:01):
because the entire network is able to see that someone
is messing around. The brothers, however, figured out how to
tap into transactions that had been initiated but not yet
assimilated into the blockchain, and they would have gotten away
with it too if it hadn't been for you know
the fact that their victims made a really big fuss
about this, and it prompted an investigation from the irs,
(41:23):
which then they said was incredibly easy to conduct because
the brothers were not particularly good at covering their tracks.
They tried to cover their tracks, but they didn't try
to cover their tracks in a smart way. Apparently the
brothers spent a lot of time searching for stuff that
was a little bit suss, like how to create shell companies,
how to launder money, and you know who's a good
(41:45):
crypto lawyer, which is all, I guess, arguably circumstantial, but
it's not a good look. As the kids used to say,
This is just a gentle reminder for all of y'all
out there. If you're going to commit a crime, and
I strongly urge you not to do so, maybe don't
search stuff while you're logged into a browser on a
personal device you know, or logged in at all to
(42:06):
a browser. You want as many layers of obfuscation between
what you're doing and you as you can manage, and
your browser history shouldn't be a treasure map that leads
authorities to your criminal behavior, because you just brought them there. Man. Now,
I just did some episodes about live service games this week,
and I mentioned the company rock Star in those shows.
(42:26):
Rockstar is the video game company behind the Grand Theft
Auto series. Jennifer Mos of Variety says that that Rockstar
had a two point nine billion dollar loss last quarter.
That is a heck of a princely sum to have
as a loss, and it's a here bit more money
than what was previously estimated because the original estimate shortfall
(42:49):
was going to be one hundred and seventy million dollars, So,
you know, just two point eight billion dollars off. Anyway,
about two billion of that was a quote unquote goodwill chart.
That seems like an oxymoron. It's kind of like the
convenience fees you see on services like Ticketmaster, and you're like,
who is this convenient for? But no goodwill charge just
(43:11):
refers to cases in which a company spends more money
acquiring some other entity than the value of that entity's
assets and whatnot. So it's like saying, this money represents
us paying more than what stuff was worth. But in
good news, gamers now know they can expect the long
awaited next game in the GTA franchise in the fall
of twenty twenty five. Okay, I got a couple of
(43:34):
recommended articles for y'all before I sign off. First up
is Jacob Stern's piece in The Atlantic. It's titled The
Dream of Streaming is Dead, and it goes into the
recent trend of bundling various streaming services together and how
this is essentially reverting to the older model of cable
television packages rather than the dream of freeing people from
that experience with the prospect of streaming. Next up is
(43:57):
Alex Heath's article in The Verge titled Goo and Open
AI are racing to rewire the Internet. It goes into
more detail about how the implementation of AI into search
can and will have a huge impact on the Web.
In particular, a lot of content sites out there are
wondering what the heck is going to happen because of
all that, So check those out. I hope you are
(44:19):
all well, and I'll talk to you again really soon.
Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, 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 the
week ending on Friday May seventeenth, twenty twenty four. And
(00:26):
this was a pretty big week in tech news. There
were a couple of large companies that made major announcements,
and then there were tons of other things going on.
So we're going to start off with open ai, the
company that is behind the chat GPT chatbot, among many
other things. I mentioned last week that the rumor mill
(00:49):
said open ai was on the verge of announcing an
AI powered search tool, which would pretty much be akin
to putting Google dead in the center of open AI's crosshairs,
because Google was just about to have it's Google Io
Developers conference, which we'll talk about in a second. And
open ai did release an announcement for a new AI
(01:11):
model that's called GPT four O and I think that's
the letter oh, not a zero. Anyway, this model is
meant to allow for actual voice conversations between human and
AI eventually, and open Ai says it'll also work across
image and video related tasks. So this is what they
(01:32):
call a multi modal approach to AI. It's not just
text based, it's other stuff too, And the concept is
kind of like you could have an image of something
or a video of something. You could be looking at
things through say your camera app on your phone, and
then talk to the AI assistant and try to get
(01:56):
information about what it is you're seeing. So we've seen
stuff like this or related to this in the past,
like holding your phone up to look at a sign
that's written in another language and have real time translation
to translate that into whatever your native language is. We've
seen that in the past. This would be more advanced,
much more advanced than that, you know. The example I
(02:18):
would think of is I would imagine like, say you're
starting up your car and the engines making a weird noise,
and so you turn your car off, you pop the
hood of your engine, and you're turning the car on
and you're trying to take a look and see what
it is that's possibly going wrong. Well, if you're like me,
you may only have a passing familiarity with that particular engine.
(02:41):
So an app that could hear and see the same
things that you do, but have access to an entire
world of information would be really useful. It could tell you, hey,
this is something you don't need to worry about right now,
or maybe it would tell you you need to get
your vehicle checked right away, or maybe even give you
a quick fix, if such a thing as even possible now.
(03:05):
In some ways, you could argue open ai is doing
kind of similar stuff to what we're seeing with other
personal digital assistants like Google Assistant or Siri or Alexa,
but just turbocharged. Open Ai did a real time demonstration
of the model's capabilities, something that would loom over Google
(03:26):
a little bit for their io event, but we'll get
to them in a second. Anyway. Chat GPT four oh
is rolling out now, but not all features are available
rail of the gate, so for example, it is not
able to talk to you just yet, or at least
not to me. I actually check to see if I
have access to Chat GPT four oh. I have a
(03:46):
chat GPT account that I never use, and so I
think I logged onto it for the first time in
maybe a year and found out that sure enough, I've
got access to it. But it doesn't talk to me yet.
The rollout is also going to be happening in batches,
So if you don't have access to it yet, even
though you have a chat gpt account, it is coming.
(04:07):
You can actually sign in now by going to chatgpt
dot com. They created that URL, so that's where the
service lives now. I think that kind of is a
sly indicator that they are transitioning from something that is
largely talked about as kind of a test product into
something that's an actual product. Existing chat gpt account holders
(04:30):
will receive access to four O capabilities over the next
several days if they don't have it already. And I
want to echo a warning that I've seen a lot
of other people make, because I think it's wise to
remember be careful if in your interactions with chat gpt
it suggests links to stuff, because apparently at least some
(04:50):
malicious folks have found ways to get chat gpt to
suggest links that ultimately lead to malicious website it's and
malicious software. So don't trust everything Chad Gbt says, particularly
when it comes to links. I think it's a really
interesting interaction that you can have with this thing. I
(05:12):
don't fully like it. I have concerns, and we'll talk
more about that in just a second. But beyond the
announcement that open ai made, they also managed to close
a deal with Reddit, which will give open ai permission
to train AI models on Reddit and subreddit posts. That's
(05:33):
something that folks had suspected open ai was already doing,
just you know, without the part about having permission to
do so. Reddit will in return get some access to
AI powered tools that can then be incorporated into the
platform in various ways. So Reddit is saying, hey, don't worry,
you're gonna have enhanced ways to interact with Reddit. Though
(05:53):
what those will actually be haven't, you know, been fully disclosed,
if you recall. Open Ai similarly sign to deal with
stack overflow not too long ago, which caused a bit
of a tiff in that community because a lot of
folks said they preferred their work not be used for
training AI. But the terms of service for stack overflow
are such that essentially, once you post something to the platform,
(06:16):
it doesn't belong to you anymore. It's the platforms. So
while you might object to your work being used to
train AI, you don't have any authority to deny it
from happening. Some people tried to deface or delete old posts,
but that's exactly that's against the terms of service on
stack overflow. So many of those people subsequently found themselves banned,
(06:37):
at least temporarily from that site. It'll be interesting to
see if there will be a similar backlash in the
Reddit community. That community is already kind of predisposed to
not liking the corporate leadership of Reddit. There's already pretty
low opinion of the company's leaders, largely because of changes
that Reddit made to its API like a year ago,
(06:59):
and apparently that's not the case with investors. Investors on
the flip side are pretty darn happy. Reuters reported that
shares were trading fourteen percent higher today than they were
yesterday in the wake of this news. Not all the
news is good news for open ai. Between announcements and partnerships,
two prominent individuals in the organization resigned from the company
(07:22):
this week. That would be Ilia Sutzkiver, who is a
co founder of open ai, one of the original members
of the non profit version of open ai, and the
other one is Jan Leika, an executive who gave a
pretty straightforward announcement on x their announcement. Just read quote
I resigned end quote. Now the alarming thing is both
(07:45):
Laikah and Sutzkiver worked for a department within open ai
called super Alignment, and essentially they were assigned a task
that was the need to make sure AI evolves in
a way that is helpful but not harmful. This was
kind of the central premise, the reison deetre of open
ai when it was first founded as a nonprofit organization.
(08:07):
The founders wanted to make certain that AI would be
developed in a responsible and accountable and transparent way in
order to maximize its benefits to humanity and minimize or
eliminate any risks. But it turns out AI is really expensive.
Like it's expensive to develop, it's expensive to implement and
to run and to maintain, and without a near constant
(08:31):
cash injection, open ai just wouldn't be around for very long,
which is why the organization ultimately spun off a for
profit arm, which is the version of open ai most
of us talk about today, like, it's not the nonprofit version,
it's the very aggressive for profit version that makes the
news and that created conflict within the organization. It led
(08:55):
up to the brief period in which the board of
directors removed Sam Altman as CEO of Open Ai, before
being pressured to turn around and put him right back
in charge again, and then subsequently the board of directors
essentially dissolved and reformed with new people. Sutzkever was actually
part of the effort to remove Altman, although he subsequently
(09:16):
apologized for that, so I don't think it's really a
big surprise that he has now left the company. But
I think anyone who is concerned about ethical approaches to
AI should really be aware that a lot of red
flags are going up right now. Okay, with that fun note,
let's take a quick break to thank our sponsors. We're back,
(09:45):
and now let us shift to Google, which, as I
mentioned earlier, held its annual IO Developer conference this week, and,
to the surprise of literally no one, much of the
conference touched on artificial intelligence. Now there are do you
have great headlines out there like Google aio or even
Google aiaio, et cetera. So there's so many out there,
(10:09):
I'm kind of sad that none are left for me.
But enough about that. Google announced an update to its
AI model Gemini. The company revealed that both the basic version,
called Gemini one point five Flash and the pro version
are available for public preview now. The primary function of
these specific AI models is to help developers create stuff,
(10:31):
so if a developer is working on an app, they
can make use of these models to help boost those efforts,
whether it's encoding or whatever. Google also revealed an updated
version of its assistant called Project Astra. Google showed a
pre recorded demonstration of the assistant's ability, and a Googler
(10:51):
was taking her phone around an office and asking questions
and having the camera app activated on her phone so
she could point the camera at something and ask a
question about the thing that's on screen, and the an
Astra would answer. So one point, for example, she asks
the assistant to point out anything that makes sound, and
(11:12):
she scans a desk, and when she brings the camera
in view of a speaker, the assistant says, that's a speaker,
and then she actually uses a markup feature to circle
the tweeter on the speaker, and she asks a follow
up question saying what is this part of the speaker called,
and the assistant says, that's the tweeter. Then it explains
what the tweeter does, which is to playback you know,
(11:33):
higher pitched sounds, higher frequency sounds, so it was a
cool demonstration. She pointed out the window and asked, you know,
essentially like what's this neighborhood? And the assistant answered, and
she at one point even said that she had misplaced
her glasses and asked the assistant if it knew where
her glasses were, And because she had been walking through
the office with the camera on, the app was able
(11:56):
to reference that information and it was able to pick
out a moment where the camera saw some glasses on
a desk, and it directed her to those glasses, which,
from what I understand, that's what got the biggest reaction
from the crowd, which was kind of cool. I mean,
goodness knows, I misplaced things all the time, so it'd
be good to have, you know, an assistant that could
(12:19):
tell me, yeah, no, that's in your hand. You'd do
fas anyway. Later on, Googler Michael Chang somewhat cheekily shared
on X now known as you know X it used
to be known as Twitter that he had watched the
Open AI announcement on Monday with Astra, which is kind
of funny because you know, the whole thing was that
Open AI was doing this sort of to undermine Google
(12:41):
and that Michael Chang saying, yeah, I watched it along
with Project Astra, and Project Astra made a real time
transcript of that presentation, complete with attributions for each speaker,
so identifying who was speaking in the transcript as it
was going on. That's pretty impressive, and also giving some
commentary about the presentation as it went on. The demonstration
(13:04):
of the AI interpreting images and giving relevant responses was
really interesting, but again, it was pre recorded. It wasn't
like it was a live demo. Google also demonstrate an
updated image generation AI model called imagen three. On top
of images, Google showed off a music AI sandbox to
let folks use AI to put musicians and composers out
(13:25):
of a job. No, I'm sorry, that's not a messaging
they wanted. I mean to help artists elevate their creativity
through the use of AI. I looked at these I
just got to see demos. I don't have access to
the tools themselves because I'm not a notable musician. I'm
not really a musician at all, so I don't have
access to these things. But it's both fascinating and concerning.
(13:48):
Because I have a lot of respect for actual musical artists,
and I don't like the idea of people who are
really talented and creative potentially getting pushed aside for something
that is perhaps easier to access and maybe cheaper. That's
not great. I think people's talent and time is worth money,
(14:10):
like I think it's worth paying for and that you know,
you can't just expect something for free, and anything that
undercuts that really concerns me a lot. Google also announced
video FX, which you guessed it uses generative AI to
create video clips, which again raise lots of concerns, like
the more you're seeing of AI generated content, the more
(14:31):
you're worried about how reliable is the stuff you are seeing.
Whether it's you know, a listing for a real estate property,
like who's to say it wasn't a picture that was
then enhanced by AI to make the house look way
nicer than it really is, Or maybe it's something where
it's a it's a video clip that seems to put
(14:53):
a public figure in a bad light, and you start wondering, Okay,
well is this real or is this something that was
created by someone who just has an axe to grind
for whatever reason these are things that are getting more
and more relevant. Arguably they are incredibly relevant right now. Now.
The thing that is probably going to have the largest impact,
at least the earliest for most folks, is Google implementing
(15:15):
more AI into its search tool, which is of course
what Google is primarily known for, even though it's arguably
really an advertising company, it's known for search. The company
announced that AI overviews in search is going to be
rolling out nationwide in the United States this week, so
if you live in the United States, you probably have
this incorporated in your search right now. Google also said
(15:39):
that multi step reasoning capabilities are coming soon, which means
that you'll be able to ask more complex questions in
your search query and to get relevant answers. So, like,
here's an example I just made up, how do I
make a lasagna? And what cheese is a good substitute
if I don't have ricotta? Right, Because that's a two
part question. It's one asking what are the steps to
(16:01):
make a lasagna? And I know I already know I
don't have an ingredient that's in a lot of lasagna recipes,
So what is a good substitute? That's the sort of
thing that you can expect to be able to access
in the not too distant future. The various keynotes and
presentations stretched across multiple days, so there was so much
(16:22):
more brought up during the IO event. But I think
the real message for most of us, the people who
aren't like actively developers, that we should take home is
just that AI is going to be all up in
your business and soon. Google hasn't just been talking to developers, however,
the company has also been pushing out updates to its browser,
Google Chrome, and this is not part of its all AI,
(16:46):
all the time strategy. Instead, Google is addressing some zero
day vulnerabilities that have come to light over the last
couple of weeks, three of them in fact, recently. These
vulnerabilities are severe. Potentially hackers would be able to quote
perform an out of bounds memory right via a crafted
HTML page end quote that's from Google. That's not good.
(17:07):
It could mean that you could have a vulnerability activated
and then you visit a malicious website and then either
get malware downloaded to your computer or worse. So this
is a gentle reminder to all of y'all that it's
never a good idea to just push off installing updates
on stuff like web browsers and operating systems, because doing
(17:28):
that puts you at risk for malware or worse. I
know it's a hassle to have to update, especially if
you get to your machine and you've got like a
specific thing you need to do, and then the first
thing you see is a notification saying that you should
run an update. I know that's a hassle. It happens
to me too, and I hate it too, But it's
a good idea to go ahead and do the update
ninety nine times out of one hundred. One time out
(17:50):
of one hundred, it ends up being the wrong thing
to do, But when it's a ninety nine percent success, right,
you should probably do it. Also, hey, fun concept AI
can now help hackers discover and exploit vulnerabilities, So it's
just gonna get worse. Brave New World and all that
kind of stuff. Apple iOS beta testers say that iOS
build seventeen point five has a disturbing habit of bringing
(18:13):
the dead back to life. And so I'm not talking
about reanimated goules here. I'm talking about deleted material, like
deleted photos or deleted voicemails. According to a Reddit thread,
some users have reported iOS digging up old and sometimes
deleted photos and then showcasing them as if they are
recent images. So you pull up your app and say, huh,
(18:36):
according to this, this picture I took seven years ago
is a new one. Apparently in some cases this has
included images that people once took but long since deleted,
including nudes. Nude photos. That should be a massive concern
because Apple's stated practice is that once you delete a photo,
(18:59):
then you have thirty days in which you can recover
the deleted photo. But after thirty days, that photo is
supposed to be deleted for good. So if, as some
people have claimed, some of these photos have reappeared reportedly
years after they were first deleted, that raises serious privacy questions.
(19:20):
Right Like, if you took a nude photo seven years ago,
then like six and a half years ago, you deleted it.
You do not expect that seven year old photo to
come bouncing back today. That would be really shocking, and
it does again raise real questions about data retention and
privacy and security. At least one Reddit user claimed that
(19:40):
they had sold an old iPad to a friend of theirs,
but they had gone through Apple's process to wipe their
own personal data off of the iPad before selling it. So,
in other words, just making sure that you're reverting back
to like factory settings and deleting all personal information, but
that some of their old not safe for work photographs
(20:02):
have been popping back up on their friend's device. Now
surprise friend that you didn't expect to see your buddy
in their glory. This is not good news at all,
if in fact it is true. So I have to
keep on stressing if it is true, because I haven't
seen confirmation from anyone other than people commenting on Reddit.
(20:24):
I don't know if you know this, but sometimes people
on Reddit say things that are perhaps not one hundred
percent true. A lot of subreddits are almost exclusively made
up of fiction anyway. Wes Davis of The Verge extends
some grace to Apple and points out that this might
not be a case of Apple doing something insidious or
being really negligent. That deleted data is never really gone
(20:49):
until some other information gets overwritten on top of what
once was there. And that's true if you delete something
off your hard drive, but you don't overwrite information on
top of where that drive was, you know, storing stuff
it can be possible to recover the deleted information. So
maybe that's what's happened at Apple, just you know, on
(21:10):
a much much larger scale. Now, personally, I find that
a little hard to swallow because the trend has been
for more folks to use more Apple services over time.
So you would think if more people are using those services,
that stuff would be overwritten all the time, because otherwise
Apple would just have to keep on adding additional servers
(21:31):
to handle incoming images and voicemails and all the other stuff,
because you know the otherwise. The implication is that, well,
we haven't overwritten everything that you know has been freed
up since people have deleted things. I can't even be
sure that the claims that are being made are accurate.
So it's possible that some of these quote unquote deleted
files weren't really deleted at all. Maybe they were just
(21:52):
forgotten about, because goodness knows that happens too. But the
story about the wipe dipad in particular is trouble if
it is true, So just something to be aware of. Again,
that's for iOS seventeen point five, and it's in beta,
so if you're not beta testing, then this isn't likely
to affect you if you're an iOS user, but I'm
(22:15):
sure it's something that Apple is looking into to figure
out before iOS eighteen goes out. All right, we got
more stories to cover, but before we can get to
all of those, let's take another quick break. We're back,
(22:37):
and here's a story that hit like deja vus this
week at centers around the company game Stop, and it's
stock price. So you might remember that back in twenty
twenty one, a collection of folks decided to stick it
to some hedge funds by investing in game Stop because
word got out that some massive hedge funds were short
(22:58):
selling game Stop. By driving the price of the stock up,
the investors could do two things. One, they could see
a return on their own investment, right because if the
stock goes up, then you're making profit. And two, they
could cause serious financial hardship for these massive hedge funds
that typically hold a tremendous amount of power in the
(23:18):
stock market. Now, if you're not familiar with how short
selling goes, let me give you a very basic description,
and I'm glossing over a lot of details here. Let's
say that you believe a particular stock is going to
decline in value. So you decide, hey, I'm going to
make some money with stock going down. I'm going to
sell stock that I don't actually own, and i'm going
(23:41):
to sell it at what it is currently trading for.
So let's say that it's currently trading for ten dollars
per share. So you sell one hundred shares at ten
dollars per share, but you don't own those shares, So
you're literally selling stock you do not own, but you
have the promise of delivering that money, or rather the stock,
in a certain amount of time. Let's say it's one month. Now,
(24:02):
a month has gone by, and it's time for you
to deliver the stock that you've promised. At this point,
the stock has gone down to one dollar per share.
Now you previously sold it for ten dollars per share,
so you get to buy up the amount of stock
you agreed to handover in the transaction, and you get
to pocket the difference between the ten dollars that you
(24:24):
accepted for this sale and the one dollar that you
actually purchased everything for. So you make money by stock
going down. But if the stock price doesn't go down,
if it goes up, that's bad. News for you, because
now you're gonna have to pay out a pocket the
difference of that. So let's say that the stock actually
(24:44):
rose up to twenty dollars per share at the end
of the month, Well, then you're gonna have to pay
an extra ten dollars on every share of the stock
that you sold, So you're gonna lose that money instead
of gaining extra Well, these investors that ended up driving
up the price of game Stop were led by a
guy named Keith Gill, who's better known by his online handle,
(25:07):
which is Roaring Kitty, and they did a massive screw
you to major investment companies that are trying to short
sell game Stop. This is what we call a short squeeze.
This week, it happened again briefly because on Tuesday, game
Stop shares rose to a high of sixty four dollars
eighty three cents per share, and in fact, there were
(25:30):
companies that were putting on a short sale of game
Stop stock. However, in this case, the rally didn't last long.
It has subsequently dropped to around twenty seven dollars per share.
And this roller coaster followed some posts by the aforementioned
Roaring Kitty who seemed to be getting back into the
game after being quiet for a couple of years. But again,
(25:50):
unlike the first go round when this happened in twenty
twenty one, this particular boost appeared to just be a blip,
so we're not seeing a full repeat of the phenomenon.
So a lot of hedge funds have gotten wise to
this and have measures in place to limit their liability
so they're not caught out quite as badly as they
were the last time. Because boyotty, that was a doozy. Okay,
(26:15):
let's talk about Meta. They are ending the Workplace app
for external customers. At the very least, some elements of
Workplace may remain as internal Facebook systems. So Meta first
launched Workplace in twenty sixteen. It's a business collaboration tool. Essentially,
it lets companies make interconnecting page networks with their partners
(26:35):
and helps with collaborative projects that span different departments or
different companies entirely. They can have like dedicated message boards,
that kind of stuff. It's a business to business product.
Meta charged four dollars per user. That adds up pretty
quickly if you're talking about a really big company. But
now Meta is going to sunset the Workplace app and
(26:55):
shift assets to two other massive projects, which are AI
and of course the Metaverse. Because Meta is still determined
to make that happen. I think it's going to be
like Fetch. It's not gonna happen, but maybe it will.
I mean, maybe people will love it. I still am skeptical,
but I'm also not a genius and I'm not an entrepreneur.
I'm just a grouchy guy who talks into a microphone.
(27:16):
The company says it will work with current Workplace customers
to transition them over to work Vivo, which is a
product from Zoom and the one partner they work with
that makes something similar that they actually recommend. Okay, here's
an interesting story about suppressing tech. Seven hundred and fifty
miles to the east of Australia is New Caledonia. In
(27:38):
the mid nineteenth century, France claimed New Caledonia and has
remained the ruler of New Caledonia since it is a
French territory. But recently the government of New Caledonia enacted
changes to election laws that really sparked protests across the territory,
mostly in indigenous populations that have been fighting for independence.
(28:01):
For quite some time, these protests grew and became more chaotic.
Four deaths have resulted as the protests have grown more violent,
and since then the government has cracked down on the populace.
The government has banned public protests and demonstrations and also
blocked access to TikTok all in an effort to squash
(28:24):
protests online and off. The government says that people were
using TikTok in order to organize demonstrations, and since demonstrations
are now banned, so is TikTok, so people can't use
it to do that. That's really why I'm including the
story here, because it's a social and political event that
has spilled into suppressing access to online platforms. And as
(28:47):
to the heart of the matter, like what this is
all about again, it's largely about the question of independence
for New Caledonia and the recent election laws that were
changed now allow people who are more recent transplants to
New Caledonia to vote. Previously, in order to be eligible
to vote in matters of great import in New Caledonia,
(29:08):
you had to have a long and deep connection to
the territory. You couldn't just move there and then influence
the vote so a lot of people who support independence
say this is a blatant attempt to dilute their influence
in public matters, because the people who are moving to
New Caledonia are largely French citizens, who are of course
(29:31):
not voting in favor of independence. So that's what's really
the heart of the conflict. But yeah, like I said,
it's spilled out now with a ban on TikTok. And
while there is a twelve day state of emergency currently
in effect for New Caledonia, it is not yet clear
if the ban on TikTok will lift once that state
(29:52):
of emergency expires. A lawsuit targeting Tesla alleging that the
company made false claims regarding full self driving capability these
in its car may move forward. Tesla had attempted to
get the case thrown out. A California resident by the
name of Thomas Lesavio alleges the company engaged in fraud
by claiming that its vehicles would have full self driving
(30:14):
capability and that's why Lasavio purchased a Tesla vehicle, only
to subsequently find out that those claims were perhaps exaggerated
or false. The judge overseeing the matter has decided that
at least some of Lasavio's case has merit and can
go to trial, but some other parts have been dismissed
because of the way they were presented. Now, Lasavio originally
(30:36):
was going to be part of a class action lawsuit,
but the other plaintiffs of that lawsuit had to drop
out because they had signed an agreement which would require
them to go through arbitration with Tesla before they could
bring a case to court. Losavio did not sign such
an agreement, so was able to move forward with his
(30:56):
own lawsuit, and he has opened it up to be
a class action so other Tesla owners can join if
they so wish. Now, Lasauvio is going to have until
June fifth to amend his complaint in order to get
parts that were dismissed reincorporated into it. Tesla has until
June nineteenth to respond. So there's still no guarantee that
this is actually going to go to trial, but it
(31:16):
is a step closer. Reuters has a piece titled the
inside story of Elon Musk's mass firings of Tesla's supercharger staff. Obviously,
this relates to a story I talked about. A couple
of weeks ago in which the company laid off a
five hundred person department responsible for the development and deployment
of supercharger stations, which seemed more than a little weird
(31:37):
because Tesla has made great strides in establishing its supercharger
technology as a kind of de facto industry standard. You know,
other car manufacturers have bought into that, and they've made
their own vehicles compatible with it. The Reuter's piece tells
a pretty disturbing tale in my opinion, because the former
head of the supercharger department, a woman named Rebecca to Nucci,
(31:58):
had already gone through a round layoffs like she had
already held layoffs within her division at the direction of
Elon Musk, and Musk wanted to do more. But she
was meeting with Musk to present her vision that involved
the company expanding the supercharger network. Instead, Musk demanded more layoffs.
To Nucci reportedly said that if she were to lay
off anyone else in her department, that would be counterproductive,
(32:20):
it would hurt their business objectives. And that's when Musk
just went nuclear. He pulled the trigger and he fired
everyone or practically everyone in that department. And it's very
hard for me not to get the feeling that this
is a leader who, when he perceives a challenge to
his absolute authority, just goes with that nuclear option. And
(32:42):
now Tesla's having to deal with the consequences because people
from other departments, notably the Solar and battery divisions, have
been given the task to work with the various partners
and contractors who had been engaged in building out supercharging stations.
You know, these are folks who already had a lot
of work on their plate, and now they're to take
on the work of an entirely different department. It seems
(33:03):
like the general strategy right now for Tesla is to
stall for time, which isn't exactly welcome news if you
happen to be a contractor who's expecting to get paid.
Musk has said the plan is still to grow the
supercharger network, but that things are gonna have to happen
at a more methodical pace, which seems like that's a
given considering how many people were fired. There have also
(33:23):
been reports that Tesla has subsequently tried to hire back
at least some of the staff that were previously laid off.
I'm sure for some of those folks coming back is
a pretty hard decision. I mean, you do need to
make a living, so there is that element. But if
you've already been unceremoniously laid off for arguably irrational reasons,
it's not really great to think about coming back to
(33:45):
that company. It's also not a great development for electric
vehicles in general, because if Tesla fizzles out, then some
other entity or multiple entities will have to step forward
to provide the infrastructure necessary to support a migration from
internal combustion engine vehicles to evs. So that's one of
the big reasons why people say they're they're reluctant to
adopt evs is that they fear being stranded someplace because
(34:10):
they weren't able to find a charging station and recharge
at a reasonable limit and cost. So, yeah, this is
not great news for the EV industry as a whole. Now,
when he's not gutting his EV company, Elon Musk is
sparring with his old nemesis, the US Securities and Exchange Commission,
or SEC. He's had a few run ins with the SEC,
(34:30):
one stemming from his inability to not post stuff that
could be seen as market manipulation. When he intimated that
he was going to take Tesla private. Anyway, now the
SEC wants to chat with Musk about his purchase of Twitter,
of course, now known as X. The SEC did this
once before. Musk initially told him to pound sand and
(34:50):
that he wasn't going to listen to all their subpoenas
because they were just trying to bully him. After that,
some judges weighed in to say, no, no, no, that's
not how the law works, and Musk tried again get
the whole thing swept away because you know, it's such
a hassle to have to answer for your actions. It
turns out that's not a good enough reason for judges
to throw things out, even for billionaires. So it looks
(35:11):
like Musk is going to have to have a chat
with the SEC, which says that it came into possession
of new documents about the purchase of X and it
raises questions about Musk's involvement with Twitter in the months
leading up to his announced plans to acquire the company.
So we'll have to see where that goes. Considering the
decline of Twitter since Musk's announcement, this feels like it's
(35:34):
largely a lot of fuss over a rotting corpse. Honestly,
One story that I don't think I covered before is
that the first human recipient of a Neurlink implant, which
is the brain computer interface chip that's made by Neurlink,
another company owned by Elon Musk It has experienced some
issues as several of the very thin threads that connected
(35:54):
to the device have lost contact with the neurons that
they were previously attached to in this human subject, So
this affected the chip's ability to serve as a conduit
between the recipient's brain and the computer systems he was
interacting with. Engineers addressed the problem by making tweaks to
the algorithms that run along on the chip, and that
helped compensate for this issue. But now some unnamed sources
(36:18):
that are familiar with the testing say that this was
a known thing that the Neurlink had been observed to
have wires retracting in animal test subjects as well. Considering
the fact that this implant requires invasive and potentially dangerous surgery,
some are now questioning the ethical implications of moving forward
with a human test subject. While this retraction thing has
(36:41):
been a known issue, there's a concern that should more
wires retract, the neurolink will hit a wall with however
much adjustment you can do to the algorithms to deal
with it, and that in turn, that'll mean the chip
will gradually lose functionality and potentially become largely useless, which
could lead to an eividuality in which it becomes necessary
(37:03):
to remove the implant entirely. As for finding a way
to fix this problem in future procedures, that's pretty challenging.
You could create a system where you have more wires
or they're more firmly anchored, but that would mean they
would be harder to dislodge by definition, and if you
wanted to do something like an upgrade, or if you
needed to remove the implant, it could cause complications. So
(37:25):
this is not an easy fix one way or the other.
And in my mind, it's suggest to me that perhaps
this was a bit too aggressive for neuralink, but we
don't know that yet. Like it may turn out that
some wires retracting is just a normal course of action
and that the rest of it is fine. And there's
no denying that the technology does provide an incredible quality
(37:49):
of life boost to people who otherwise don't have use
of their limbs. That is something that is really important.
So if in fact we don't see further degradation of
the implant, I think that this issue, while it does
raise concerns and raises questions about why the FDA would
allow things to move forward, those are questions that I
(38:10):
think need to be answered. I think ultimately we could
say it's for the best if the device actually does
work and doesn't degrade to a point where it must
be removed. I mean, it's in arguably an improvement to
the life of the people who have it. Touching back
on AI for a moment, Sony Music Group has joined
countless artists, writers, and other creators and expressing concern over
(38:31):
AI using existing human created works as training material, and
Sony Music is saying, don't do that. We don't want
you to do that. So the company has reportedly sent
out several hundred letters to various AI startups and companies saying, hey,
don't you dare use our catalog of music without our
express permission, And at least for some of those recipients,
the company went on to say, you know, we know
(38:51):
that you're doing it now, so you've got to knock
it off Buster, except, of course, they worded it differently.
Sony specifically said, quote, due to the nature of your
operations and published information about your AI systems, we have
reason to believe that you and or your affiliates may
have already made unauthorized uses, including TDM, of SMG content,
(39:12):
in relation to the training, development, or commercialization of AI systems.
End quote. For the record, the initialism TDM stands for
Text and Data Mining. SMG is Sony Music Group. According
to jem Oswad of Variety, a recent EU law called
the AI Act prompted Sony to send these letters, as
the Act compels AI companies to reveal what their training
(39:35):
data was like where did they get their data to
train their AI models? So Sony, at least in part,
is saying, Hey, you used our information without our permission.
Don't do that now. I usually hold off on reading
recommendations to the very end of the episode, but I
want to mention Ashley Bellinger's incredible piece for Ours Technica
(39:56):
titled MIT Students stole twenty five million in second by
exploiting etch blockchain bug. DOJ says, now, as that title implies,
this is a heck of a story. It's about a
pair of brothers who learned how blockchains work at MIT.
They arguably learned a little too well how they work,
and they took this incredible education that they received at
(40:17):
MIT and they turned it into kind of an Ocean's
eleven style heist. Except this heist took less than fifteen seconds,
and it involved finding a way to access pending transactions
on the blockchain. So these were transactions that have not
yet actually been cemented in the Ethereum blockchain, and they
were able to divert cryptocurrency meant for these transactions to
(40:38):
go into their own accounts. So the way blockchains work
is that once a transaction gets added to a block
and the block is added onto the chain, it's secure
because going into the history of transactions and making a
change would cause a ripple effect for every block that follows,
and so any tampering immediately becomes clear and is reversed
(41:01):
because the entire network is able to see that someone
is messing around. The brothers, however, figured out how to
tap into transactions that had been initiated but not yet
assimilated into the blockchain, and they would have gotten away
with it too if it hadn't been for you know
the fact that their victims made a really big fuss
about this, and it prompted an investigation from the irs,
(41:23):
which then they said was incredibly easy to conduct because
the brothers were not particularly good at covering their tracks.
They tried to cover their tracks, but they didn't try
to cover their tracks in a smart way. Apparently the
brothers spent a lot of time searching for stuff that
was a little bit suss, like how to create shell companies,
how to launder money, and you know who's a good
(41:45):
crypto lawyer, which is all, I guess, arguably circumstantial, but
it's not a good look. As the kids used to say,
This is just a gentle reminder for all of y'all
out there. If you're going to commit a crime, and
I strongly urge you not to do so, maybe don't
search stuff while you're logged into a browser on a
personal device you know, or logged in at all to
(42:06):
a browser. You want as many layers of obfuscation between
what you're doing and you as you can manage, and
your browser history shouldn't be a treasure map that leads
authorities to your criminal behavior, because you just brought them there. Man. Now,
I just did some episodes about live service games this week,
and I mentioned the company rock Star in those shows.
(42:26):
Rockstar is the video game company behind the Grand Theft
Auto series. Jennifer Mos of Variety says that that Rockstar
had a two point nine billion dollar loss last quarter.
That is a heck of a princely sum to have
as a loss, and it's a here bit more money
than what was previously estimated because the original estimate shortfall
(42:49):
was going to be one hundred and seventy million dollars, So,
you know, just two point eight billion dollars off. Anyway,
about two billion of that was a quote unquote goodwill chart.
That seems like an oxymoron. It's kind of like the
convenience fees you see on services like Ticketmaster, and you're like,
who is this convenient for? But no goodwill charge just
(43:11):
refers to cases in which a company spends more money
acquiring some other entity than the value of that entity's
assets and whatnot. So it's like saying, this money represents
us paying more than what stuff was worth. But in
good news, gamers now know they can expect the long
awaited next game in the GTA franchise in the fall
of twenty twenty five. Okay, I got a couple of
(43:34):
recommended articles for y'all before I sign off. First up
is Jacob Stern's piece in The Atlantic. It's titled The
Dream of Streaming is Dead, and it goes into the
recent trend of bundling various streaming services together and how
this is essentially reverting to the older model of cable
television packages rather than the dream of freeing people from
that experience with the prospect of streaming. Next up is
(43:57):
Alex Heath's article in The Verge titled Goo and Open
AI are racing to rewire the Internet. It goes into
more detail about how the implementation of AI into search
can and will have a huge impact on the Web.
In particular, a lot of content sites out there are
wondering what the heck is going to happen because of
all that, So check those out. I hope you are
(44:19):
all well, and I'll talk to you again really soon.
Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
TechStuff News
Hosts And Creators
Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
Popular Podcasts
United States of Kennedy
United States of Kennedy is a podcast about our cultural fascination with the Kennedy dynasty. Every week, hosts Lyra Smith and George Civeris go into one aspect of the Kennedy story.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com