Tech News Weekly 333 Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.

0:00:00 - Mikah Sargent
Coming up on Tech News Weekly. Jennifer Pattison Tuohy of the Verge is here and she brings the creepy Atlas robot from Boston Dynamics to the table. We talk about its very bendable nature, but also about what we see as the future of the smart home. When it comes to robotics, then my story of the week is all about how Microsoft's AI co-pilot is rather popular, it seems, among developers. Both Jennifer and I discuss how it should be used as a tool, and used responsibly, and not as a means to take over the world. After that, my first interview is with Engadget's own Karissa Bell, who joins us to talk about a new app from TikTok that's set its sights on Instagram. Afterwards, lisa Edichico of CNET stops by to finally finally give me the answer I have been asking for a while what in the heck is a super app? All of that coming up on Tech News Weekly.

0:01:05 - VO
Podcasts you love. From people you trust. This. Is TWiT.

This is Tech News Weekly with Jennifer Pattison Tuohy and Mikah Sargent, Episode 333, recorded Thursday, april 18th 2024: Boston Dynamics' Bendy Robot. Hello and welcome to Tech News Weekly, the show where, every week, we talk to and about the people making and breaking the tech news. I am your host, Mikah Sargent and I am joined across the internet by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy of The Verge. Welcome back to the show, Jen.

0:01:45 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy
Hi, Mikah, happy to be back, happy to have you. It's been a while, yes, months, such a long time.

0:01:52 - Mikah Sargent
I love how this works. I can always count on getting to see you again, and that means that it's time for our stories of the week. Tell us what came across your line of sight this week. Tell us what came across your line of sight this week.

0:02:07 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy
Sure, yeah, so I was slightly terrified this week so I thought that might be worth talking about. This actually happened a few days ago, but the Boston Dynamics Robotics Company released its new Robotics company released its new humanoid robot and it was terrifying. I don't know.

0:02:31 - Mikah Sargent
Okay, watch this because it's like look, it looks like a dead human on the floor, there it's laying on the ground. Oh my God, what Its legs bend up toward its torso and then suddenly it's like you know, you thought I was laying one way. I'm actually laying the other way. Let me just turn my legs and arms around and my face, which is just a selfie ring light.

0:02:51 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy
Oh, that's what it looks like. Yes, no, and you know this is all jokes aside this is really quite an impressive machine and as a smart home reviewer, I actually have spent a lot of time with robots and robot type devices in my home and always really kind of keeping an eye on the robotic space. And this is a real step forward, kind of in the humanoid, robotic form that Boston Dynamics was retired its original Atlas robot, which is the one that you were just showing there, which was a much more robot-like humanoid robot. You know it doesn't look sort of like someone that you might want to hang out with, whereas the new and that was a hydraulic robot, whereas this Atlas is an all-new electric version of this humanoid robot and it really does have very sort of strong humanoid characteristics. The really amusingly, boston Dynamics tweeted no, it's not someone in a suit as a shade there to the other more recent humanoid robot that Tesla showed off, which was a person in a suit.

But this, this is a real kind of leap forward and it's interesting it's designed. Actually, the first partnership is with Hyundai, sorry, oh yeah.

Hyundai, which actually owns Boston Dynamics. But so the idea is eventually the robot and this will take many years can work on the factory floor doing sort of the more dangerous work, maybe the more repetitive work that humans can't do. But where I found this interesting slash scary is this is sort of the first time I've seen a robot that looks like the kind of Rosie the Robot of the Jetsons kind of dream I've always had of having a smart home assistant, and it's also made me realize that perhaps I don't want that after all.

0:04:51 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, look, there was something charming about Rosie and maybe it was the fact that we're looking at an animation and that helps keep it in this fake kind of realm. And I also just pictured almost like taking an auric vacuum cleaner and putting it, you know, putting a wheel on it and it, you know, talks very robotic. It just it feels separated enough from humanity. And then I think at the time maybe we didn't have as much scary instance, right, we didn't have as much scary horror about terminator.

0:05:23 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy
Haven't come out, terminator.

0:05:24 - Mikah Sargent
And I robot and some of the others were not there yet to make us go. Oh, I've got second thoughts about all of this because, I don't know, I, I. I think that there's definitely a part of me that loves the idea of not having to do my laundry anymore. I think that would be fantastic, even if it just folded my laundry. For me, that's really all I want, and you know we've had the promise of laundry robots in the past that never come true.

0:05:53 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy
The folding robot at the CES. I've seen three or four times, yeah, ces every single year and it never is real. Yeah, fold your clothes.

0:05:59 - Mikah Sargent
Is that also a person wearing a laundry folding robot? Yeah, so I love that idea, but do you think that look, depending on who you talk to, a true self-driving car the sort of fully autonomous, truly fully autonomous can drive anywhere? Self-driving car is so far in the future that we won't ever see it. Depending on who you talk to, that's the belief. When we talk about AI and where it's headed, maybe that's a little bit more graspable when we talk about AR and VR and how far we are from just being able to put on some glasses. That's pretty far in the future. How far away do you think it is for us to have a rosy robot in our homes? Is that closer rather than further away? Or is all of this still kind of military applications and bomb defusing applications and that kind of thing?

0:07:08 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy
Yeah, so I think we are actually closer than we have been in a long time. As I said, I've tested robots in my home that are similar in concept, like the Amazon Astro, although it doesn't have arms, and we already have a lot of robots in our homes. But I think where I'm kind of coming to is that we probably don't need a butler, we don't need this multipurpose humanoid robot walking around our house doing things for us unloading the dishwasher, for us folding our clothes. What we probably do need, and what's much more likely to come, and what we already have to some extent, are individual robots that help with tasks. So we already have robot vacuums and robot mops. I have two robot lawnmowers going around my garden right now that I'm testing.

0:07:55 - Mikah Sargent
I want to visit your place. I just really want to see everything because it's got to be like Willy Wonka there Sounds incredible. Anyway, go ahead. Sorry.

0:08:04 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy
Yeah, slightly dystopian, but yes, you know, and I think it's an interesting goal to have the Rose of the Robot, and I think there are a lot of manufacturers and researchers sort of trying to achieve this. And the big thing here, obviously, is the mobility, and this is what this Atlas robot does. That we really haven't seen before is that very fluid natural humanoid movements, and actually the news, you know, what Boston Dynamics was touting, is that it can do so much more movement than a human, hence the weird yogi poses.

0:08:39 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, I've never met a person who can do all that, and I've seen some really impressive moves on Instagram from different yogis, but nothing to that level.

0:08:48 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy
But you know whether we need that type of technology in our homes. I can see obviously great use cases in commercial and military space, I'm sure, having you know, especially rescue. I think robots are a really interesting space for sort of disaster relief and recovery. But in our homes I think the future probably is more robotics in more places in our home, rather than one single robot that will roam around and do everything for us. But I think it's a good goal, like it's a good sort of North Star to kind of help us innovate interesting areas.

I mean, we have a robot that washes our dishes already. Right, we have a robot that cleans our clothes already. We do need that next step of something to take the dishes out of the dishwasher and put them away, and you know. But maybe there doesn't need to be a six foot tall humanoid robot in our kitchen. Maybe we can. Someone can come up with a better solution.

0:09:43 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, let that it's not going to cost so much either. Let that robot go make some money breakdancing and we will keep doing our dishes. Yeah, overall, I think I agree with you. You know, I want to compare it to AI a little bit, because we've seen, for the most part, as generative AI has taken off. We have seen this general purpose generative AI kind of reaching this level of like. It's impressive what it can do. You can generate images with it, you can generate music. In some cases you can generate just text in conversations and asking questions.

But more and more, the terms that I keep hearing are agents, gen AI agents, gen AI agents. And it's this idea that, instead of having a single multi-purpose AI, that you have very specific, focused AI tasks and you kind of ask the question and it goes to the right thing. I think we kind of see that. You know you mentioned this is kind of a North Star, but, yeah, the idea that not every task that you're doing, it's much simpler, I think, and much more easy to grok. Yes, if we have robots that are specifically tuned for each individual task and can be trained on doing that. But I recently saw a video of a robotic arm that I think it was. It may have even been at San Francisco's, at the San Francisco airport, and it is a coffee shop and you go up and you place your order and the robot makes your coffee. The time that it takes the robot to make the coffee compared to the human being is so much longer that the line was very long.

They were in it for the novelty, but after that it's like I just need my coffee because my plane's about to board. So there are a couple of things where people then kind of ask questions what's the reason for this? Why do we need this? And I think one place that we, as tech people, sometimes something that we may kind of fail to see is one aspect of this is, of course, accessibility and, uh, just frankly, inclusivity in general. There are tasks that we, as able-bodied people, can perform that other people, uh, struggle to perform on their own, maybe, in some cases, need the help of others to be able to perform.

The idea that that they could live a more, you know, normal, so to speak life, independent, yeah, an independent and average existence is fantastic.

But I also think that, you know, there's been a study, or maybe even a couple of studies, about the productivity of human beings, and we kind of have this idealized.

Some of us have this idealized belief that people from years ago were far more hardworking and productive and this and that than we are because they went and worked in the fields and toiled away. But when you look at what a human of today is able to achieve in a day, and all of the different things that we're able to achieve, it is vastly more productive and vastly more impactful than the person who toiled in the fields. And so think about the person who, on top of everything that they have to get done in a day, is also going around and vacuuming their floors and mowing their lawn and doing this. And if they could delegate that task to someone else to get more of the stuff that they need to get done? I think that that's a positive, and I think the idea that a you know, a human being just wants to be lazy and push off tasks to someone else maybe that can apply to me, but I don't think that applies. No, but that's the whole argument for the smart home.

0:13:55 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy
There too, I think you're right. It's like it's giving us time, by taking mundane and boring tasks off our hands, to do the more interesting, innovative, fun spend. You know that. I think that's a real value and I think that's where robotics is really important and could, you know, eventually have a really important role in our homes.

I think there's also two sides to the robotics, and this kind of goes to my first comment about this being scary. There's a real push to try and make robots this kind of goes to my first comment about this being scary. There's a real push to try and make robots feel kind of warm and cuddly and like have personalities and I don't necessarily think that's a good thing either. And I kind of like this individual, as you mentioned, like the agents, individual robots, individual AI, because if it all comes together it's much more likely to raise up and take over the world, whereas if we keep it separate then it can't. But in all seriousness, I think it also becomes more productive and more useful for us, and when things go wrong, you only lose the function of one element, like my robot vacuum's broken doesn't mean that my dishwasher now doesn't work and that my washing machine now doesn't work, whereas if you have this single humanoid robot that does everything in your house and when it breaks down or a firmware update goes bad, nothing works anymore.

Yeah, that's a good point, so I just yeah, it's interesting in that the humanization, I think, is the real kind of conflict when it comes to robotics, like trying to make robots appeal to us on an emotional level as opposed to a practical and useful level. I find there's a bit of a fine line that I think too many companies maybe are going the opposite direction, although there's a huge amount of benefit in like. I know there's been a lot of evidence and studies done around loneliness and how AI, and there are some great. There's an interesting robot. Loneliness and how AI and there are some great. There's an interesting robot, um LEQ, which has been used as a study.

Um, there was a study in New York to combat loneliness in seniors living alone and they use this little AI robot and it's got a cute face and it talks to them and it has um. It's proactive, so it talks to them, as opposed to having with something like Amazon's Alexa. You need to talk to it, um. So there, you know that, but again, I think that's a different sector and I think it's an interesting sector, but from from what I'm interested in here is the practical side of robotics. Um, and I think I don't need a smiley face or a ring light on my six foot robot.

0:16:26 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, we can dispense with the kind of silly aspects of it. This is a great story of the week and I'm really glad that you brought to the table today so we can all have a chill and a thrill to get through that story. Let's take a quick break, though. Before we come back with more. I do want to tell you about our sponsor, new on the show this week. It's Yahoo Finance who's bringing you this episode of Tech News Weekly.

You know Yahoo and you may know about Yahoo Finance. When you think about it, perhaps you're someone who's being very, very careful about your financial future. You're trying to make sure yeah, I, you know I've got things figured out, I've saved money, I've done some research, I've worked with investments, but now's perhaps the time where you want to be more proactive and you want to kind of dig in. Well, that is where Yahoo Finance can come into play, because every financial great has used this tool for over 25 years. So if you are new to investing, if you've been investing for years, yahoo Finance, that's the tool that you need. And we're looking through the Yahoo Finance site right now, and what you'll find are loads of different stories about the different stocks that you may be investing in. You can see easily. You can look up ticker symbols and learn more about it. It's all right there on one page. I think that's what makes this such a great tool for people is being able to kind of quickly see and understand what's going on, know the news stories and also see the most important markets right at your disposal. You can easily, by the way, link your brokerage accounts securely so that you kind of have that unified view. That's why I was just kind of talking about this sort of one dashboard view of your wealth, including your 401k and other investments, and you get a comprehensive perspective that distinguishes great investors. Yahoo Finance ensures you have the insight to examine your wealth in its entirety. It's really nice going to the Yahoo Finance page and I can just type something in real quick and learn about it. It's not just the symbols. So if you don't know those ticker symbols, you can just type in the name of a company, so I'm able to do that and do a quick search and learn all the financial news about it. It's the one place to go for everything. With a community of more than 90 million users every month. The real strength is helping you on your way to financial success. So for comprehensive financial news and analysis, just visit the brand behind every great investor, that's yahoofinance.com. yahoofinance.com is the website where you can go to just have that full picture of your portfolio but also what's going on in the financial world yahoofinance.com.

All right, we are back from the break and that means it's time for my story of the week. I wanted to talk about would you believe it? Ai. So there's a recent story in Bloomberg all about how Microsoft's tool called Copilot is kind of you may know, you may not know, but it's taking its place in the coding and the developer in the computer technology industry. For software developers all around. People have been using Microsoft Copilot and the coding assistant that comes along with it to help with the creation of, and the update to, and the adjustments to, the code bases that they're working on Early in this piece from Bloomberg there is a developer who is quoted as saying instead of using 15 keystrokes, it took three.

It was a nice little speed boost. And it's interesting to me how much everything that we see in technology, everything that is announced in technology, when it comes to particularly Gen AI, it's all about performance, right, it's about how large the databases are how much has gone into training, how fast it works, how many processors are involved kind of in the server farm somewhere, and, in this case, how much time it saves. And that is the way of things. You know, productivity is kind of the big word when it comes to developers, but I do find it interesting that developers, I think, are some of the first to really narrow in on the true understanding of what Gen AI can be, which is a tool that a human uses to kind of augment whatever it is they're working on While other industries and other places may be going. It's going to take our jobs, it's going to ruin everything.

We're seeing developers who are going oh look, I can ask this thing and have it help. And when I've talked to developers in the past, the number of times a developer has told me that one of the main things that a developer does is Google a solution to a problem. This is kind of just speeding that process up. Right, you are seeing what developers from before have done to help figure out the bug that they keep running into. I keep having this, I don't know, memory error and they go and they look it up and there's a stack exchange message that explains what the person did with their code. This kind of just speeds that up and makes it a little bit easier, because, of course, this tool is trained on a bunch of instances of code that have existed.

Now Microsoft, of course, is using in a big way the tools from OpenAI and its GPT-4 technology as the kind of backbone and behind-the-scenes tool for GitHub Copilot, which, of course, is part of GitHub itself, but it is it is kind of purpose built. Again, we talked earlier about agents and this is a tool that is specific to the coding. A recent survey from Stack Overflow looked at what developers are using whenever it comes to using AI coding tools, and an overwhelming number of the people who are using AI coding tools are using GitHub Copilot as their tool. 54.8% of those who responded are using GitHub Copilot. It is very impressive, I think, the number of folks who are making use of this tool, but also just kind of how. Again, I think what I find most interesting is how quickly developers just kind of locked in and said look, this is something we can use to help us and we're good with that, you know.

0:24:15 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy
Yeah, well, I mean, it's interesting because it is. It's essentially a robot helping you do your work, which is the same conversation we just had, but it's interesting that perspective because really that is you know, that's what generative AI is doing is helping our daily lives easier. There are a fair number of large caveats that are outlined in this article, specifically the number of times they say we have to like double check the work, which you know, I think is a very well known issue right now with generative AI. You know the hallucinations and just claiming things are the way they are when in fact they're not, and one of the things that this is probably space cadet-y, but it's sort of always noodled me and I've heard a few people talk about this.

Generative AI is trained on things that have already been done. Right, that's like you were talking about the coding Code. Is Google to see how other people have solved problems? Once we all start relying on generative AI to solve these problems for us or to create art for us or to write articles for us, eventually we're setting up the future to not have anything to train the models on because, it will all have been its own work, but that's, you know, that's a problem for the future.

But there's just a lot of red flags, I think, here that are raised in the way that you need to use the tool responsibly. And I think when this tool is used responsibly, as many of these, uh, the people quoted in the article say you know, we use this and it helps save me time, which means I can then focus on more important things and ultimately we will end up hopefully producing better work. But when the tool becomes your main way of conducting your work, then that's where you're going to end up running into issues. And there was an interesting quote in there where one of them, one of the programmers, says well, that's not going to be a problem because we'll self-correct programmers says, well, that's not going to be a problem because we'll self-correct Like we self-monitor as a group, the group will say no, no, no, that's wrong. We, you know. But always, if you're relying on other people to make sure you're doing your work properly.

0:26:34 - Mikah Sargent
I feel like maybe running. Sorry, I was just going to say, isn't it Douglas Adams who in his wonderful work talks about it's sort of almost a field called the other person's problem field or something along those lines, where it's this idea that if everybody and everybody does, everybody thinks that, oh, that's somebody else's problem?

0:26:55 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy
Someone else's problem, yeah.

0:26:56 - Mikah Sargent
Then no one is actually in. You're absolutely right. And you're absolutely right. I want to give a little credit to developers, because that is, you know, especially among open source developers they do. The community can be really good about it.

Linux person who found the uh horrible backdoor in uh, what was ssh, I think? Um, anyway, it was a horrible backdoor that had been placed by a bad actor, as it were, and that was a self-correcting thing. So there's a little bit more hope that that's the case. But you're right that if everybody is constantly relying on that, that's not not necessarily. Well, no, it's not even a necessary thing, necessarily thing. It's absolutely the case that, yeah, that's going to get missed. And that is your point about using it as a tool and not as kind of just handing over a bunch of what you do, what you do over time. In my own use of of chat, gpt and the other tools, uh, claude, and whatnot, I have found myself shifting towards being very mindful of that, saying, yeah, okay, here's a problem that maybe before I would have asked chat GPT but I I don't trust it to be able to do what I need it to do, so I'm just going to do this, my this thing I'm going to do myself, or most of it, you know what?

I mean so yeah, it is interesting how we kind of are learning that Go ahead Sorry.

0:28:27 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy
Well, I think, of every group, of any group out there that's going to, that's using chat GPT generative AI to help with their work, coders and programmers are the ones who are going to be, you know, amongst the most responsible users you would, you know, because they they understand the space that they're working in so much more than many people you know who are beginning. Like my husband started using chat GPT to help him with spreadsheets, like he didn't even know how to use spreadsheets a couple of years ago. So it's like I'm worried. But, you know, one of the things I'm really the big takeaway that I had from this article actually was the quote at the end from NVIDIA, and I had actually just had a conversation with a quite well-known programmer two days ago about this.

You know, what's so interesting here is that AI is making it possible to code.

In plain English, it is so much easier to code and to create things than it ever was before.

You had to learn these languages, you had to learn how to do all of this, and now it's opening this fascinating world for everyone to enter into and just to bring it back around to the smart home, which I love to do.

It's really going to be hugely useful in the smart home for programming our homes to work the way we want to, without relying on big corporations and organizations to come up with good solutions for our homes we can. You know, generative AI, I think, is going to have a really interesting role in helping the smart home become a much easier place to live in and manage when you want to start doing complicated automations which right now do actually require some basic programming knowledge. I mean, google has its script, homescript, you can go use to sort of, and it has a generative AI tool to help you. Just type in what you want. But still, you're doing basic programming and I'm really excited, as someone who has not learned how to code, about how much easier AI is making it for everyone to kind of use this powerful tool and create some hopefully interesting things.

0:30:31 - Mikah Sargent
Ah yes, I love that idea. On Tuesdays, if it's raining outside and the chickens are hungry, please make sure to do this Would be super, super cool.

0:30:41 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy
So much easier to do it that way, absolutely.

0:30:44 - Mikah Sargent
Jennifer Patterson. Toohey, always a pleasure to have you join us here on the show. Thank you so much for your time. If folks want to keep up with what you're doing, where should they go to do?

0:30:52 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy
that, yeah, happy to be here. Always a pleasure chatting. Most of my work can be found at thevergecom. You can also follow me on the threads at smarthommama, also on TikTok and on X at.

0:31:08 - Mikah Sargent
JP2E Wonderful. Thank you so much and we'll see you again soon. All right, thanks, all righty folks, we're going to take a quick break before we come back with our first interview of this episode of Tech News Weekly. I do want to tell you about our sponsor. It's CacheFly who are bringing you this episode.

You certainly have heard about CacheFly. For more than 20 years now, cashfly has held a track record for high-performing, ultra-reliable content delivery serving more than 5,000 companies in more than 80 countries. And here at Twit we have been using CacheFly for more than a decade. We love the lag-free video loading, the hyper-fast downloads and the friction-free site interactions, and I'm sure all of you do too. Anytime you've interacted with what we do here and it gets to you as quick as it does, well, that's because of CacheFly. CacheFly is the only CDN built for throughput. Its ultra-low latency video streaming delivers video to more than a million concurrent users. It's got lightning-fast gaming that delivers downloads faster, with zero lag, glitches or outages. Mobile content optimization offers automatic and simple image optimization so your site loads faster on any device, and flexible month-to-month billing for as long as needed, with discounts for fixed terms, so that way you can design your contract when you switch to CacheFly. CacheFly delivers rich media content up to 158% faster than other major CDNs and allows you to shield your site content in their cloud, ensuring a 100% cash hit ratio. And with CacheFly's elite managed packages, you're going to get that VIP treatment. Your dedicated account manager will be with you from day one, ensuring a smooth implementation and reliable, 24-7 support when you need it. So learn how you can get your first month free at cachefly.com/twit.

That's C-A-C-H-E-F-L-Y.com/twit. And we thank CacheFly for sponsoring this week's episode of Tech News Weekly. All righty folks, we are back from the break and that means it's time for our first interview, this one about a little something, something that TikTok is working on. Just to talk about it is Engadget's own Karissa Bell. Welcome back to the show, Karissa. Hey, thanks for having me. Yeah, thank you for joining us. So let's talk about TikTok's latest experiment, called TikTok Notes. What is it and how does it work?

0:33:41 - Karissa Bell
So it's a brand new app from TikTok and it kind of looks a lot like Instagram. It's a photo sharing app, you know. You can share multiple photos at once in a feed. There's a algorithmic feed, a following feed. You know, it's a little bit of TikTok and maybe a lot like Instagram.

0:34:00 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, it does. It does seem a little bit like that. Now, you know, every company works on something for a period of time before it ends up being released. Do we have any idea if this is something that TikTok just came up with out of the blue? Is it something that the company's been working on for a long time? Any hints as to how long TikTok has been working on this?

0:34:23 - Karissa Bell
I mean the fact that it's an all new app and not just, you know, a set of features within TikTok. I think would suggest you know they've probably been working on this for a while. We know that earlier this month some users started to get notifications about this mysterious thing called TikTok notes and you know it wasn't really clear. You know exactly what it was when it was something about photo sharing. I know some reverse engineers started seeing you know little references to it inside the TikTok apps code. So you know we started seeing clues earlier this month.

0:34:57 - Mikah Sargent
Understood. Now the tech press does largely seem to see this app, tiktok Notes, as a potential Instagram competitor. I was curious to hear your thoughts on that comparison specifically.

0:35:12 - Karissa Bell
Yeah, I mean it's kind of funny, right, because we're so used to seeing Meta and Instagram kind of copy their competitors. You know they've spent a lot of the last few years competing with TikTok, you know reels, and they add a lot of effects and editing tools that are, you know, clearly trying to play on things that are popular on TikTok, you know. On the other hand, I think it kind of makes sense that TikTok might be interested in pursuing something like this. You know, there's certainly a lot of content on TikTok, but most users are kind of consuming that, not creating that. It takes, you know, a lot more work to create and edit video clips than it does to post photos. So you know, to me it makes sense why they would maybe want to see if they can have another app that's maybe a little bit easier to make content and share it.

0:36:01 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, and you and you actually mentioned in your piece a couple of reasons why TikTok could be looking to take on the likes of Instagram. That's where I think it's worth bringing up the potential ban of TikTok in the US and whether or not you've learned or believe that this does play some role in the introduction of TikTok notes. Would this still be able to exist in a world where TikTok, the video app, is banned?

0:36:35 - Karissa Bell
I mean, it's hard not to, you know, kind of have that at the front of your mind when you're looking at this. You know the bills looks like it's going to be, you know, moving ahead to the Senate pretty soon. You don't have to imagine that. You know TikTok's getting pretty nervous at this point about what's going to happen. In any case, it doesn't seem like you know TikTok's going to go away anytime soon. You know there'll be a legal fight and all that At the same time. You know, I think you could look at this sort of cynically and say, well, you know, maybe TikTok would have this legal fight. But if they have this kind of other TikTok branded service that links to your account and you can find your followers and, you know, still have some engagement, that you know, maybe that's. You know, I don't want to call it a backup plan, but maybe you know another path for them to still kind of keep an audience engaged in this country, if it came down to it.

0:37:31 - Mikah Sargent
Absolutely. And then, secondly, there's the kind of disenchantment that you talk about among Instagram users. Is that a potential opportunity for TikTok? Can you tell us about what Instagram users are upset about and how that could be good for TikTok in the end?

0:37:52 - Karissa Bell
Yeah, it's kind of interesting because and I think a lot of this goes back to how much resources Meta has put into competing with TikTok and making Instagram feel a lot more video centric in a lot of ways. But when you know, 10 years ago, when Instagram was new, everybody scrolled their feed and it was about sharing on your grid of photos. And Instagram's leadership has said you know, a lot of people don't don't share to their feed that much anymore. They're sharing reels, they're sharing in DMs, they're posting stories and so they've kind of the product experience sort of reflects that.

You know, and you know a lot of longtime creators have been pretty upset by this recently. You know this has been like a long, long time kind of frustration, I think, for them. But they say you know, hey, I posted my feed. I have thousands of followers. I've built up this audience over years and years and when I look at my statistics, you know only a small percentage of my followers are actually seeing my posts. You know their reach has gone down.

Even people like Chrissy Teigen you know who's, you know, one of the biggest celebrities on Instagram for a while posted recently that you know nobody sees her posts anymore, and so you know they're kind of, and you know Instagram's executives, adam Mosseri, he goes out there and he tries to explain, you know how the algorithm works and people just aren't spending as much time on their feed anymore and they're sharing in other ways, and you know all these explanations. But there's a lot of creators who are like pretty upset by this. They feel like, you know, they've kind of been betrayed. So that could be a potential opportunity for somebody like TikTok to come in and make a different experience. If it is, you know, going to be kind of feed and photo focused, you know, maybe there is an opportunity for them there.

0:39:40 - Mikah Sargent
Interesting. That is interesting. Now the app as it stands is currently only available for use in Australia and Canada. Is this common practice to release an app in certain markets and then any word on when or if the app makes its way to the US?

0:40:03 - Karissa Bell
Yeah, we see this a lot from companies. Again, meta will often take a similar approach. They'll release something first in Australia or New Zealand or Canada or something like that, and what I've heard over the years is that those are good places for them to test because they're English speaking markets but they're relatively small. They're a lot smaller than the US, so it's a good place to kind of work out some early bugs, see what the response is like. Also, not a lot of tech press based in those places, so potentially avoid scrutiny if there's any initial hiccups, bugs, things like that. But I think the fact that they are starting in those markets, especially North America and Canada, I think seems pretty likely. We would, you know, see it come to the US sooner or later.

0:40:55 - Mikah Sargent
Understood. Well, I want to thank you so much for taking the time to talk about TikTok notes. For folks who are longtime TikTok users, maybe they'll be excited that they can take a breather and stop all those TikTok dances they've been doing. They can just have some photos for a time at least. Of course, folks can head over to ngadgetcom to check out the work that you do. Is there anywhere else they can go to follow along with what you're doing and stay up to date?

0:41:26 - Karissa Bell
Yeah, I'm posting mostly on threads these days, Karissabe, but I'm still on X and also on Blue Sky, the same username.

0:41:34 - Mikah Sargent
Wonderful. Well, thank you for your time and I'm sure we'll be seeing you again soon. Thanks, all righty folks. Up next I've got another interview, but before that, I do want to take a quick break here to tell you about something that many of you know and love and that I hope many more of you will come to know and love. It's Club Twit at twit.tv/clubtwit. For $7 a month you can join the club Again. It's at twit.tv/clubtwit.

When you join the club, you're going to get access to some awesome, awesome benefits. First and foremost, you get access to every single Twitch show with no ads it's just the content, so you will be able to listen to the show all the way through without any interruptions, because you are supporting us directly. You also gain access to the TwitPlus bonus feed that has access to many a video or audio clip. This is bonus content that you won't find anywhere else Behind the scenes, before the show, after the show, special Club Twit events get published there. I still want to mention that we in the past did a, an escape room, and that was a lot of fun, and it's only available to those who have that twit plus bonus feed so to be able to watch us try to do an escape room. It was actually an escape room in a box, so we were able to do it here at the studio and many of us were dressed up in costume because it was around Halloween.

So when you join the club, you get access to this huge back catalog of great stuff that you can't get anywhere else. We also have access to the members only discord server, a fun place to go to chat with your fellow club members and also those of us here at Twit, along with sharing animated images and you know, just all around a great community for conversation. So you know, if you're feeling lonely, you might consider joining, to join that Discord and have some folks you can chat with and also tune into live streams that are only available to our Club Twit members. On top of that, if that wasn't enough for you, you also gain access to the video versions of our Club Twit shows. So the Untitled Linux Show, Hands on Mac, iOS Today, Hands on Windows, Home Theater Geeks all of those are released to the public as audio, but if you want the video versions of those shows which for many of them I feel are the best versions of them you should join the club twit.tv/clubtwit.

So please consider heading there today and signing up to be a member of Club Twit, and we appreciate each and every one of you for even considering doing that, and we appreciate you even more for when you do. I'm just kidding, but no, look for that at twit.tv/clubtwit. Thank you so much, and let us go to our last interview for today, this from Lisa Erechiko of CNET, who joins us to finally help me understand a question I've been asking what the heck are super apps? We'll get to that in just a moment.

0:44:50 - Lisa Eadicicco
Welcome to the show Lisa, Thanks so much for having me today.

0:44:53 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, it's so great to get you here. I was looking through the World Wide Web the other day and I came across your story and I said, oh, there's somebody who knows that I need this question answered, absolutely. There's been a lot of talk about super apps lately but you know, like I can do context clues and kind of maybe think about what they are, but I don't know, before we actually do answer the question of what super apps are, why the heck are people talking about super apps in the first place?

0:45:26 - Lisa Eadicicco
Yeah. So super apps have come up in the news lately for a couple of reasons. I think the biggest reason recently is the Justice Department's antitrust lawsuit against Apple. Super apps is one of the areas that they kind of targeted in that lawsuit and they've accused Apple of hampering the development of super apps in the US. So that's kind of what prompted me to write this story, because I imagined a lot of people had the question that you had, because super apps aren't really common in the US. So I think that's the big reason why people are talking about them now. But also over the past year there's been chatter about Elon Musk kind of having this vision for the future of X to also become a super app. He calls it an everything app. He's posted that publicly on X. But there's also a report from the Verge last year talking about the details of a meeting that happened at the company, kind of talking about that vision. So it has come up a few times recently.

0:46:17 - Mikah Sargent
Understood. So yeah, let's get into it. What are super apps? And then can you tell us about some of the kind of big examples of these feature-packed frankensteinian creations?

0:46:31 - Lisa Eadicicco
yeah, absolutely so. A super app is essentially exactly what it sounds like it's an app, an everything app, essentially. That has a lot of mini apps packed into it, so you can kind of think of it almost as its own little app ecosystem. It's one app that you open to do a bunch of different things like buying movie tickets, booking an Uber, messaging your friends, video chatting with your friends, sharing photos. So it kind of combines the elements of social messaging and chatting with financial services. So that's why you're able to buy things in these apps.

So one of the biggest examples in fact the biggest example of a successful super app is WeChat, which is really, really popular in China. There's a story that I link to in my story from Bloomberg Businessweek that kind of details how WeChat has been useful for everyday life in China, and I think that story really kind of illustrates how important that app has been in day to day life. But yes, it's basically an app that does everything, and WeChat might be the biggest example, but it's certainly not the only one. There's also Alipay, which is really big, and then other apps as well that are popular in other parts of Asia and India.

0:47:40 - Mikah Sargent
Understood. Now, I think this might be something that comes up for people, and so it may seem obvious on the front of it, but I thought it'd be worth broaching. When we look at super apps and it's this idea, that kind of it's an ecosystem that exists, that has access to a bunch of different features and, in some cases, apps it started to make me think of something else. How does this compare to that walled garden approach that we talk about when it comes to Apple, where the various services are touted for being designed and engineered to work seamlessly together? Is the iPhone itself kind of a super app, or is that a wrong way of thinking about it?

0:48:26 - Lisa Eadicicco
Yeah, no, it's a really interesting question because I do think with the iPhone, apple is trying to accomplish a really similar goal. As you know, these super apps like WeChat, like you mentioned yes, a super app is an app, so everything's kind of happening in that contained app. But the iPhone, you know, the underlying goal here is to use your phone for everything in your day-to-day life, whether it's something happening on your phone or outside of your phone. So if you look at the trajectory that Apple has taken with the iPhone, it really is moving in that direction. And I think one of the biggest examples of that came with the Apple Card when that was announced years ago.

I mean, what connects your iPhone more to the real world than turning it into your credit card right and what connects your iPhone more to the real world than turning it into your credit card right? And that's exactly what Apple did with the Apple card. And there's been other small developments along the way, that kind of move in that direction. For example, you know, having being able to use your iPhone for mass transit, as I do all the time now I use my iPhone as my MetroCard. But also Apple has made some steps to kind of make your iPhone function better as a key for your hotel room, your car, your front door. So I think, even though it's executed very differently, it's that same idea of using your phone to do everything in your daily life.

0:49:39 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, I I really kind of enamored of this idea of an app that does more than just one basic task, because bouncing between the different apps can get a little confusing. So super apps seem kind of cool but there maybe are some downsides and you bring up a few of those downsides or maybe just you know potential issues with an all-in-one app, particularly, it seems, in countries outside of the US. Can you talk a little bit about where critics of super apps kind of say maybe not a great idea?

0:50:14 - Lisa Eadicicco
Yeah, absolutely so. I think you know the specific points I mentioned in my article are kind of, I think, region specific. There's been reports that have come out in recent years about WeChat, in particular, being used as a surveillance tool. But beyond that, when you think about something that you rely on so much, I think one of the big downsides is just over reliance, right Like God forbid your account gets hacked or something like that, or if the service goes down and there's an outage for some reason, if you're relying on this one app to literally do everything, then you're going to be in a tough position. So I think that's probably one of the biggest downsides is, of course, over-reliance on a technology like this, but it also does make you think about you know, if you are relying on one app so much, it probably does become a bigger target for cyber attacks and things like that, I would imagine.

0:51:04 - Mikah Sargent
Absolutely like that? I would imagine Absolutely Now. Lastly, I guess I have to point out something that is very clear, which is that super apps don't seem to be super common in the US, if you'll forgive the pun. Why do we think that is, and do you think that we will eventually see super apps come to the US, including by way of X, apparently, if that sticks around long enough for it to become a super app?

0:51:30 - Lisa Eadicicco
Yeah. So I think a lot of it has to do just with the way technology is adopted in the US, and I think mobile payments are a really good point of comparison. Mobile payments took off much, much more quickly in Asia than they did and other parts of the world than they did in the US. I don't know about you guys, but anecdotally, I think I only really started using my iPhone as my primary means of paying for things like paying for the subway and such, probably in like maybe the last two to five years. And I think in other parts of the world adoption has been much, much more quick. And, like I mentioned earlier, financial services and digital payments are a big part of what makes a super app a super app. So I think I would imagine that growth kind of goes hand in hand. And as for whether I think they will take off in the US, I do think it's hard to say because we do have companies like Apple and, you know, alphabet's Google, that just have such a big mobile presence. So I think a lot of it depends on the direction that they take the market in.

But, that said, some of the reports that I saw when I was writing the story do indicate that super apps are going to grow. I think it was Deloitte that said, you know, super apps are going to start to kind of pick up in the US or in Western markets in 2025. So I do think it's a possibility and we have seen attempts to do that. I mentioned, you know, almost a decade ago now, meta. Then Facebook opened up Facebook Messenger to third party apps and that was definitely an attempt to kind of make a super app here. We also saw Apple open up iMessage to other apps, and then there's Uber, of course, which kind of operates on that same model of using one app to do multiple things. So I think it's certainly a possibility, but it'll likely take some time.

0:53:09 - Mikah Sargent
Understood. Well, I want to thank you again for taking the time to answer something that's been on my mind ever since I first saw the conversation surrounding super apps. Of course, folks can head to cnetcom to check out your work, but if they want to follow along with you, specifically, are there places they can go to do that?

0:53:29 - Lisa Eadicicco
Yeah, absolutely, I'm on X and Threads at Lisa Etichiko, so it's just at. And then my first name and last name.

0:53:36 - Mikah Sargent
Wonderful Well, thank you so much for joining us today, and hopefully we'll get to have you back on in the future.

0:53:41 - Lisa Eadicicco
Absolutely. Thanks again for having me.

0:53:44 - Mikah Sargent
All righty folks. With that, we have reached the end of this episode if you can believe it of Tech News Weekly. The show publishes every Thursday at twittv slash TNW. You just head there to subscribe to the show in audio and video formats. Tell your friends about Tech News Weekly, Tell your family about Tech News Weekly.

We have continued to shape and, you know, make the show into what it is today, and I think it deserves to be in front of more eyes and ears. So please head to twit.tv/tnw for those links. I won't go into super detail about Club Twit because I talked about it during the show, but twittv slash Club Twit is where you go $7 a month to sign up. And if you'd like to follow me online, I'm at Mikah Sargent on many a social media network where you can head to chihuahua.coffee. That's C-H-I-H-U-A, H-U-A.coffee. That is the website where I've got links to the places I'm most active online.

Thank you so much for tuning in today for Tech News Weekly. Tuning in today for Tech News Weekly, and I should mention that next week you all will be joined by a special guest host. It's Jason Howell, who will be with us next week. Who will be with you all next week as I will be out, so stay tuned for that. Very exciting that Jason has agreed to join the show as a guest co-host next week in my place, so stay tuned for that. Thank you all for tuning in and I will see you again in two weeks time.