Tech News Weekly 319 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. I am Mikah Sargent and I am joined by special guest co-host Amanda Silberling of TechCrunch. We kick off the show with our stories of the week. Amanda talks about a really weird trend going on in Tik Tok, as there is a nine month world cruise underway and Tik Tok has basically made a reality show about it. Then I talk about rabbits are one. It's a pocket AI Companion that lets you connect to and control apps using AI. After that, dan more and of six colors, calm, joins us to talk about the Apple Vision Pro Launch and what we can expect. Before we round things out with Reed Albergotti of semaphore to talk about predictions for generative AI in 2024. All of that is coming up on Tech News Weekly. I Podcasts you love from people you trust.

This is this is Tech News Weekly, with Mikah Sargent and this week, Amanda Silberling. Episode 319, recorded Thursday, january 11th, 2024 Generative AI Predictions for 2024. This episode of Tech News Weekly is brought to you by Lookout. Your data is always on the move, whether on a device in the cloud, across networks or at the local coffee shop. While that's great for your workforce, it's a challenge for IT security. Lookout helps you control your data and free your workforce. With Lookout, you'll gain complete visibility into all your data, so you can minimize risk from external and internal threats, plus ensure compliance.

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0:02:43 - Amanda Silberling
Hello, it is great to be here on this little monitor next to you. Thank you. You know it's very tech, it's very robot, forward, or, you know, bridging the gap between physical space and liminal space.

0:02:56 - Mikah Sargent
I guess no, no, I have very much looking forward to this. So I have this vision of having guest co-hosts on the show that are able to join us once a month, and so you graciously offered to join me for the second Thursday of Of every month, and so this is us kicking it off, and that is so that we can do a back and forth of our stories of the week, and so, Amanda, I invited you to bring us a story of the week, so if you would like to introduce that story and we can chat about it, I'm looking forward to this conversation.

0:03:38 - Amanda Silberling
Yeah, so at Tech Crunch I write about internet culture, among other things, but we're going to kick off this guest host situation with some very unhinged things on the internet. Have you heard of the TikTok?

0:03:52 - Mikah Sargent
world cruise, the TikTok world cruise. So for the sake of the show, I'm going to say no, because the truth is I had not heard about it until Amanda told me about it. Let's pretend like I have not heard about it at all. No, what is the TikTok world cruise?

0:04:10 - Amanda Silberling
So, to be clear, this is not a TikTok sponsored thing. It's just a thing that is happening on TikTok a lot, so we're calling it the TikTok cruise, but Royal Caribbean is doing a nine month cruise around the world. Nine months is a long time for people to be on a boat together and we're all expecting that a bunch of drama is going to happen, but the reason why we even care about people on a cruise is because there are so many travel influencers on this ship and they are all making a bunch of content about it and it is like extremely weird and funny because generally the people that go on cruises are like independently wealthy young people and then like retirees who are living their best lives. So like you have these retired, like old people becoming influencers because they're on the cruise, and it's like this reality show unfolding on the internet in real time.

I think if you're familiar with Bama Rush, which was a similar kind of phenomenon on TikTok a couple years ago, where people that were doing sorority rush at the University of Alabama became, like weirdly, very popular on the platform and it was designated by like the extreme, like very, very extreme sorority culture at the University of Alabama and what these girls had to do to rush these sororities and all of the just I don't know. Greek life is wild, but this is sort of the next iteration of that, where, instead of obsessing over, like, the weird wealth of Southern sororities, now we're obsessing over the weird wealth of these travel influencers who are like making content together. But to make another college comparison, I'm thinking like imagine the first week of college where everybody that you're on your hall with you're like these are my new best friends, and then by the end of the first semester, you're like I hate all these people.

So we're one month into the nine months and we've had a little bit of drama, but I feel like we got to stay tuned in and hit the fan. I don't know if I can curse on this show.

0:06:36 - Mikah Sargent
Oh yeah, so that is something you wouldn't know. No, we don't do curses, but that's okay, we'll bleep that out. Things are going to hit the fan. Things will hit the fan. The fan, no.

So let's talk about this a little bit, I think from a tech perspective, because you know, I think about you mentioned the group that tends to go on these cruises used to be that it was retirees who would spend their retired years because they still live in an economy where they can retire and it's feasible, and be able to take that time and go on a ship and whatever, and I imagine you know people with iPads holding them up and taking cute little photos of animals they see swimming or flying in the air or their meals, and then they wait till they get to a location where they can post it on their Facebook.

This is going from a place that seemed relatively low tech to suddenly being kind of a. This is high tech, right? Regular postings, regular, regular content that's being displayed, and I do you think that is there something unique about this situation, or are we going to start seeing these sorts of reality shows popping up everywhere, particularly as we start to move into a time when we're starting to wear these, these devices that are constantly able to capture things, even more so than you know, us pulling our phones out of our pockets like, should I be prepared that the next time I'm at the grocery store I'm suddenly on a Tick Tock reality show about shopping at Sprouts Farmers Market.

0:08:23 - Amanda Silberling
I hope not, because I don't want to be on a Tick Tock show about grocery shopping unless if they're paying for my groceries then that's cool.

But I guess I'm thinking about Rebecca Jennings, who's a reporter at Vox, posted on Twitter X, whatever we're calling it like. It was kind of off like this point is something that we all know, but it was like distilled very cleverly of we're like. The issue with media literacy right now is that we're used to consuming content by trained professionals and now we're getting such large amounts of content from just like ordinary people. So like and it's it's given the same weight in social media, and sometimes that can be good because it lets us hear from people that we wouldn't traditionally hear from if we're only being mediated through traditional press, but now, like, anyone can just say things and that's a misinformation issue as well. In in terms of the crews, I mean, I think the reason the crews is fun is because nothing really is at stake here. Like I'm just here, like oh man, mike and Nancy, these empty nesters they told us that they're running out of wine on the ship so that's an issue.

0:09:54 - Mikah Sargent
Oh, no, see, and this is the other thing too. I'm thinking about the possible impact this has on the safety of the crews. What if you mentioned in your piece about this that there's an influencer who is joining it and saying you know, somebody sponsored me to go on this. I will cause chaos to do? Pretty sure it's illegal to cause chaos in the sense of, oh, there's a hole, there's a hole in the hole of the ship and everybody needs to panic right. And if there's one thing I've learned about influencers, it's that very few of them have boundaries, and so I wonder what you know, royal? There's a balance right that these brands have to strike where Royal Caribbean is probably going. Okay, it would be great if we have people paying attention to our nine month cruises, but at the same time, we've got these, these influencers who know not a boundary, who would come on and do stuff that's kind of dangerous. That that part kind of concerns me, because there's a lot of, as we call it, clout chasing going on.

0:11:01 - Amanda Silberling
Yes, yeah, no, it's yeah. You bring up. A really interesting dynamic of this is that you aren't just like on the cruise with people that are there for the full nine months. I think Royal Caribbean didn't sell enough nine month tickets. Now they're also selling like a couple week long legs of the cruise. So right now you could still buy a ticket to go on this cruise. Wow.

I mean, that's what this this influencer, mark Sebastian, did, where he posted a video being like send me on the cruise, I'm going to cause chaos. Someone sponsored me and a book company did sponsor him Wow, so like he's getting paid to go on the cruise. He's been on the cruise for three days so far. So far. He's like being pretty chill about the whole thing, like he's being funny, but not like disruptive.

0:11:54 - Mikah Sargent
Okay, good, see, I wonder if it depends on this. If he had been sponsored by sour patch kids, then maybe it would have been a lot more ridiculous instead of being sponsored by a book company. Oof, yeah, like a rock star energy drink. I wonder how many club twits signups it would take to get me onto that cruise. That would be an interesting thing, but no, I yeah.

Overall, I find this fascinating from so many perspectives, but it is kind of wild that because, even though it's rarer for these longer cruises to happen in fact you talked about the cruise that was a little bit like Fire Festival, where people had signed up for it and then it got canceled and they didn't even have a boat it's kind of wild.

How algorithmic, what impact algorithmic presentation has on what is getting attention? Right that suddenly we're talking about TikTok World Cruise because enough people early on started paying attention to these videos and then from there it grew, it grew, it grew and more people are learning about it. And I mean we're talking about it on this very show and you, I just I don't know that we are far off from that sort of organic sponsoring that takes place where it's like, oh, royal Caribbean has a deal with. This is not the case, but I'm imagining a future where Royal Caribbean has a deal with TikTok, where more people are seeing these videos and then more people are getting interested in going on these cruises and they're marketing to a younger generation because, as you pointed out, for the most part it's retirees that go on this thing. So, yeah, there's a lot of potential here, but I think a lot of what leads me back to a little bit of cynicism about our tech future.

0:13:57 - Amanda Silberling
Yeah, and I think a good example of this is so when you do something for the first time on social media, even if it might be a little gimmicky, it can still be fun. So I think that the world cruise is fun to follow because, to my knowledge, royal Caribbean had nothing to do with this. This was just organic. And then so you have this influencer who was like all right, well, I'm gonna go on the ship now. It's funny because he's the first one to do it. But I wouldn't be surprised if in six months there's like a whole crew of influencers that are like going on for short legs and then it's gonna be like all right, cool, we see what you're doing. But it is just kind of fascinating that in a normal reality show you can't really cast yourself, and this influencer essentially casted himself in the show and the people that are on the cruise are talking about themselves like characters. Like I opened my article talking about Mike and Nancy, who are my personal favorite people on the cruise.

And yeah, they're just like retirees who made a TikTok because they saw people on the cruise were doing TikToks and then they introduced themselves as new characters unlocked or retirees.

0:15:18 - Mikah Sargent
That's so cute. Everyone should head over to TechCrunch to read the whole article, and I think it's a great way to find those TikTok posts to kind of kick off your understanding of what's going on on this world cruise. And, as you point out, this is just the first month. There are eight more months of who knows what could happen, and they're about to go through a passage you said that could lead to some tumult.

0:15:43 - Amanda Silberling
Yes, yeah, they're about to go through the Drake passage, which is on the way to Antarctica, and it's apparently very dangerous. I do have one more tech related point to bring it home.

0:15:54 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah.

0:15:56 - Amanda Silberling
So other reasons why this might be happening right now. In the last few months, tiktok changed its payment program from the Creator Fund to what are they calling it? They're yeah, they're all called very similar things, but they're switching from dividing one big pot of money among everyone to paying people for specifically longer videos, which they're doing something like not out of a static pool of money. So people are able to earn more money, but it has to be on videos that are a minute long and don't use music that's copyrighted. So we are seeing some more changes in how people use TikTok, because people are now very, very incentivized to make videos longer than one minute and these cruise videos generally are that long and they're not using original music because they're not using copyrighted music, because they're not really doing trends related to the songs. They're just sort of like hey, I'm at the cafe on the cruise ship and here's what I ate today.

0:17:12 - Mikah Sargent
Okay, interesting. So we might start to see the YouTube-ification of TikTok, what with this encouragement to produce content that's longer than a minute. That is, that's actually really fascinating, because I think about the attention span that one has to deal with when it comes to this. So that should be interesting Wow. And the taste of culture is just interesting these days. And you said you had another point.

0:17:41 - Amanda Silberling
The other sinister part of this is that to monetize these videos on TikTok they have to be longer than one minute, so minimum one minute and one second. You know how long a YouTube short is. The maximum is one minute, so you cannot monetize the same content on both platforms.

0:17:58 - Mikah Sargent
Oh, very clever. Okay, that's interesting Things are heating up.

Things are heating up and the gloves are on, not off, this time. All right, well, we will definitely keep an eye on where that's going and also just the changes in TikTok in general. And up next is going to be my story of the week, but I do want to remind everybody that's listening out there it is time for the annual Twitch audience survey. This annual survey helps us understand our audience, so of course, we can make your listening experience even better. It's at twittv slash survey 24. It'll only take you a few minutes. You go to twittv slash survey 24 to take it, and please don't wait. The last day to take the survey is January 31st, so we'd love to hear from you. Twittv slash survey 24. Thanks so much. Alrighty, we are back from the break and it's time for me to talk about my story of the week. Joining us, of course, here on the show this week is Amanda Silverling of TechCrunch, who will be discussing my story of the week as well.

I wanted to talk about a new product that was announced at CES. It's from a company called Rabbit, and Rabbit is selling a device called the R1. The R1 is this little square device that has a little screen on it. It has a SIM card slot, it has a USB-C port for charging, it has a scroll and click wheel and it has a camera, and its purpose is to serve as an interface with many an app. And what's interesting about this device is, instead of going the way of kind of the other AI hardware that we've seen early on, which aims to kind of connect you to some sort of AI chatbot those generative AI chatbots this device is meant to serve as a way to control applications, and so the device runs a technology called Rabbit OS, and the company is calling what it does a large action model, and so you can think of it like this you would pull out your Rabbit or your R1, excuse me and you would say order me a pizza, and then it might ask you some questions about the pizza that you want, and then it goes in and it does everything that's necessary to actually order the pizza that you want. Or maybe you want to get an Uber, and so you say I need a ride to the Empire State Building. Then it will do all of the process of making that happen. You can have it play music, pause music, do everything like that, but what's unique about this device is that it is trainable, and so the creator of the company and the device explains one instance, and I'm kind of curious to hear your thoughts on this in particular, Amanda.

The example that was given to the Verge is a little bit nefarious, because they said maybe something that you regularly do is you open up Photoshop and you select a watermark on a photo and then you use Photoshop's tools to remove the watermark and then you have a photo that has no watermark. They said you could train the R1 to do that same process of opening Photoshop, clicking on the lasso tool, highlighting this portion that has a watermark on it and then hitting the content fill or whatever it needs to be to remove the watermark, and then you could do it on as many photos as you wanted to. Should we be advocating for the removal of watermarks on photos in the first place? That doesn't seem like a great example of how this tech can be used.

0:22:03 - Amanda Silberling
Yeah, seems like. Another similar question is should we be advocating for generative AI to be able to take that artist's made and use it to make art that is similar to the art that artists made without their knowledge? Like it's kind of in a similar vein because you are taking copyrighted material and avoiding buying it from the people that made it when you take a watermark off. But also it's just a weird example. I'm more just like marketing wise, like I feel like that's not a compelling example of what this device is supposed to do.

0:22:38 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, I don't think that they had that. The CEO had somebody nearby going. Don't mention that. You should probably mention this. So let's talk a little bit more about it.

It was available in pre-order for $199 and the reason that I wanted to talk about it on the show is because it was just debuted on Tuesday at CES and they have now sold the 10,000 kind of first run models that they plan on shipping in March. So a device that debuted at CES that there was only one working model of the device, which was being held by the CEO of the company at CES is now sold out because 10,000, at least 10,000 people you can even pre-order if you're now, if you want to, you just won't get that first run. Sight unseen people have just purchased this $199 device without having anything outside of the presentation of the device and maybe the couple of reviews that have been online. That is wild to me. That is farther down the line than even ordering from Kickstarter and Indiegogo, because at least there you have these slick graphics a lot of times and these videos that are showing the product, and this is exactly what we plan to do, and you also have these steps along the way where you see that the device is being made. This seems a little bit like it seems risky, in my opinion, but I do want to talk a little bit more about the interactions and then we'll get your thoughts.

Amanda, before I say goodbye, the way that the device is supposed to work in early days is, along with being able to interact with the different kind of apps that you would want to, or the different modals or whatever the modals that you would want to, it has a website that you visit, a portal called the Rabbit Hole, and you go there to kind of connect it with common services, so you know your Amazon shopping cart or your Google mail or whatever it happens to be, and then, in order to train it because I saw somebody asking questions about how you train it for something like Photoshop you will actually, on your computer, spin up a virtual machine from Rabbit that will be used to train it on how to interact with Photoshop itself. It's unclear to me if what it will do is connect with your PC locally and launch Photoshop on your computer and then do that. I don't know how that all works. In particular, or does Rabbit just offer, as part of what it does, access to the Creative Cloud Suite. There are lots of questions there.

It's unclear, and that's why it's wild to me that so many people pre-order this device. I'm curious, so whenever people first kind of started talking about it, they almost placed it as this little hardware device that would be a replacement for some of the apps that you would use on your iPhone or your smartphone, excuse me, and I think that the company sees it as more than that. It is the one app, the universal app, that can do everything else, and that, I think, is it's compelling, but I'm just not so sure about its capabilities in doing that. In any case, Amanda, would you like? Does this interest you at all? Does technology like this interest you at all? And I guess if someone called you and said you absolutely have to own one of these things and you have to use it, what would you use it with? How would you actually see yourself using it? I know that's a tough question to just throw at you.

0:26:45 - Amanda Silberling
Well, to put it in context, I'm someone who doesn't own a smartwatch and this feels like in the same vein of a smartwatch, where it's like a smaller version of your phone that is functional like a phone. So I don't know, I mean, I would probably use it like a Pokemon Go Plus, which is a weird little piece of tech that connects to Pokemon Go and catches Pokemon for you, but I don't think I'm a typical consumer that way. I don't know. I just I'm very fascinated by this because I don't know if this is a product for people who want fewer like uses of tech in their life or more, because it seems like the argument is like, if you can use this tiny little device to order a pizza, then you don't need to use your phone, and we want to use our phones less because we're addicted to them. But is it really solving that problem?

But then the other audience is like the kind of people that go to CES and are like really into tech and are like, oh cool, a new gadget, I want to try it out because I like gadgets and people like gadgets. That's fine, but like, but, like. Yeah, I don't know who the primary consumer of this is. Yeah, I.

0:28:00 - Mikah Sargent
So it is compelling when I think about some of the different interactions that I might do on my device that take six, seven, eight, nine, ten steps, that there are apps that I maybe use in the same way each time or round about the same way each time, and being able to have that kind of all be automated is pretty cool.

But I also don't like the idea of handing over my information to a company that has no history and has no history of proving itself to be secure, and so the idea that I need to go on to the rabbit hole and put in my credentials for Amazon or whatever it happens to be, and even I mean you know pizza, the pizza place that I use. It's just, I don't know how I feel about it, so I'm very skeptical, but I wouldn't be surprised if, when March rolls around, someone in my vicinity will have one and I'll get to hear more about it when it comes out. Amanda Silverling, I want to thank you so much for taking the time to join us, join me today for the first half of this show. Of course, folks can head over to TechCrunch to check out your work, but where do they go online to just follow with what you're doing?

0:29:17 - Amanda Silberling
I am unfortunately still on Twitter, and my Twitter is at asilbwrites in my little lower third thing I also have a podcast called Wow, If True, which is about internet culture, and if you are fascinated by the TikTok world cruise, then boy, do I have a podcast for you, awesome.

0:29:39 - Mikah Sargent
Awesome. Thank you, Amanda, and I'll see you in the next video. Thank you, Amanda, and we'll see you again next month. Bye, bye, bye, all right Up next got details on the Apple Vision Pro in just a moment. Alrighty folks, it is time to get into our interviews for the day and to kick things off. We are joined by six colors. East Coast Bureau Chief. It's Dan Moran. Welcome back to the show, dan.

0:30:09 - Dan Moren
Hey, mike, good to be here, as always.

0:30:11 - Mikah Sargent
Good to have you on the show and thank you for being here to talk about Apple and its new Apple Vision Pro. So let's kick things off by telling us what Apple announced in terms of the Apple Vision Pro. Will we gain access to this device soon? Are we expecting? What are the dates and times for pre-orders and all that jazz?

0:30:37 - Dan Moren
The dates and times. The dates are coming soon and the times are coming fast. Well it's. The Vision Pro is scheduled to be available in Apple stores on February 2nd. Now if you want a pre-order before that, you can, starting January 19th, which is a week from Friday. This Friday at 5 am Pacific and 8 am Eastern. So if you're like me on the good coast, you get to have a nice leisurely cup of coffee. Order your Vision Pro, not have to set an alarm. If you're on the West Coast, I'm sorry you're going to have to probably get up a little bit early in order to snag one here.

0:31:13 - Mikah Sargent
Okay, so you're planning on ordering one then?

0:31:18 - Dan Moren
Yeah, let me just rifle through my wallet right here, looking a little bit short right now, to remind everybody this is going to run $34.99. That's $3,499, not $34.99. So it's going to be a good chunk of change if you want to get yourself one of these on day one. But there's also some question of exactly how many units are going to be available and how much. Apple is actually sort of pushing this. So I think certainly, if you're interested, you probably want to move fast, but it will be interesting to see exactly how it's received.

0:31:53 - Mikah Sargent
To put that into context, that's like two and a quarter iPhones, right? Something like that.

0:32:00 - Dan Moren
Depends on which iPhone you buy.

0:32:00 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, that's true If you're buying one of the new iPhone 15 Pros outright. That's somewhere between like 14, I think, and 1600.

0:32:12 - Dan Moren
You could probably still buy two iPhone 15 Pros and then put one over each eye and get the same effect probably.

0:32:20 - Mikah Sargent
So let's talk about the device itself. It's very expensive and it'll be interesting to see kind of how many people end up getting this. I want to, before we get into what Apple is planning to have available on launch day, I want to get your take on a take that I'm seeing a lot around the web, and that is a take that suggests that this is a developer device, in other words, a device built for developers to create for the Apple Vision platform that Apple is sort of subsidizing by selling the device to the public in the hopes that people will snap it up and will kind of help to recoup the cost of all of the work that's been put into making it. Do you think that it is a fully realized, a fully ready to rock product from Apple, or are you kind of in that same vein of believing that this is just Apple kind of iterating in public?

0:33:35 - Dan Moren
Yeah, I've seen that. Take two, probably from some of the same sources as you, but I don't think I entirely agree with that. Yes, it's a 1.0 product, but the key is it's a 1.0 product, not a 0.5 product or something like that. It's not going to be what the Apple Vision Pro is probably going to be two or three years from now. But then again, if you go back in time and look at the original iPhone and the original Apple Watch, this is not at all unprecedented for Apple. Certainly those devices were a lot cheaper, but you know the original iPhone didn't run third party apps. That was Steve Jobs had said. The web apps were a perfectly good solution, a sweet solution. The original Apple Watch was kind of underpowered and was running a lot of apps that were essentially projected from an iPhone and it was very slow and it had a bunch of features that were emphasized that turned out people didn't really want at all.

I think Apple gets overplayed some times for having this idea that it delivers this perfect, finished, you know widget to the public, when in truth these things do evolve over time, and I think Apple is certainly doing some degree of its development in public here.

But I think that's a necessity with a device that is a brand new category like this. Nobody, including Apple, has any idea of exactly what people are going to use this for or exactly what might turn out to be the killer app for this at present. So, to my mind, they are saying, hey, this is a device certainly for early adopters, but I don't think it's necessarily aimed squarely at developers. I think there are a lot of people and I've certainly seen, anecdotally, people that I know or people that I've heard from who are like very excited about this and going out on day one to buy one who aren't necessarily app developers. Yeah, they tend to be a little bit more techie in terms of their audience or whatever, but it's not necessarily just for, hey, I want to build apps for this thing it's. I want to be on the cutting edge and see this new device that, like, I really don't know what it's going to be good for, but I am intrigued and I want to try it out.

0:35:22 - Mikah Sargent
So let's talk about what Apple is making available on on day one, because obviously this device in and of itself is a whole new experience and you'll be able to view stuff in. Apple doesn't even like to use the term virtual reality or augmented reality or mixed reality, but you need content to be able to do that. Do we know how many movies are going to be able to people are going to be able to view? What apps from Apple itself will be available? What is Apple doing? Any sort of preparing people for what they'll be able to do on day one with this device or much like, I would argue, apps sell iPhones and iPads. I should say third party apps sell iPhones and iPads. Is Apple really relying on the developer base to put out stuff that's compelling to get people to purchase the Apple Vision Pro?

0:36:25 - Dan Moren
Yeah, a little a column, A little column B. I think Apple has not detailed everything to date that is available, but certainly, if you look at the screenshots and the stuff that will showed off previously, a lot of those standard first party apps that you're used to from your iPhone, your iPad, your Mac are going to be there, including music and Safari and email and the I work suite like keynote and pages, as well as, certainly, media stuff like Apple TV. They have talked about access to basically like things on Apple Arcade, which is their gaming service, as well as providing some ability to watch high resolution movies via the Apple TV Plus store or Apple TV Plus service, as well as partners like Disney Plus and Max. They haven't talked a lot about like additional specific content for this other than their sort of immersive environments that they've showed off.

People have pointed out that, like there are examples of 3D movies available in the iTunes store, and so there are chances there that you may be able to check those out, apple says, I think, there'll be 150 3D titles available at launch, and so that's part of what they're talking about as well, but let's also not forget that they have said basically there'll be an app store that launches day one along with this. So third-party apps are certainly part of the story. I think we just don't necessarily have a great idea of what those third-party apps are and which are gonna be the ones that people really are excited about.

0:37:50 - Mikah Sargent
Now let's go into a kind of reminder of this device in terms of what features and functionality it provides and also what people can expect if they were to purchase this, what's in the box and how it compares to when the product was originally announced. So, first and foremost, just tell us about the Vision Pro, what it does, and then again what can be expected as cause. When we first saw it, you know, there was an announcement of kind of these very showy videos that sort of flashed by, and now we know what hardware to expect in the box.

0:38:31 - Dan Moren
Yeah absolutely so we do know. You know, essentially this is an immersive spatial computer, as Apple describes it, which has these tiny little micro OLED screens that basically sit really close to your eyes and provide this immersive environment, as well as providing some degree of pass through via like cameras that are mounted on the outside, so you can sort of toggle that how immersive your environment is, going from an environment that's entirely synthetic to one where you can kind of see the real world, to one where you can basically see, pass right through and see the real world around you, talk to people, et cetera. It also includes M2 chip, which is the same chip that powers Apple's not most recent but second most recent line of Macs, as well as some audio and a bunch of different sensors that are built in to provide all these sort of immersive experiences. In terms of what we know comes with it, apple has detailed a few things that come in the box, including two different bands to wear around your head a solo knit band and a dual loop band, I believe, which gives a like over the head strap as well.

That also includes a light seal and then two light seal cushions. So these are basically the thing that goes in between the headset and your face to sort of cushion it and keep it on there. There's also a cover for the fun of the device a battery. This is Heathered via an external battery pack, a USB-C charging cable and a USB-C power adapter. And, of course, most importantly, a polishing cloth for when you invariably get some gross stuff on your Vision Pro, we need to wipe it down.

0:40:06 - Mikah Sargent
Nice, nice, and that's included, so you don't have to pay extra for that.

0:40:10 - Dan Moren
Yeah, you don't have to pay extra for that, that's right. Hey, they even included the power adapter. Let me tell you, it's not a given with Apple, it's true, but if you're paying $3,500, the least they can do is throw in a brick.

0:40:20 - Mikah Sargent
So what do we know about the process of actually purchasing the device, when you know whether you're because there are demos that are gonna be available, it seems and then also, if I were to make this purchase, is it just gonna be shipped to me? How much do we know about that? What details have been provided there?

0:40:44 - Dan Moren
Not as much as, frankly, I would like to. We know a few things. One, we do know that you'll be able to order it online. We also know that you will be able to buy lens inserts for it. So if you're somebody who needs corrective vision, they're making available these optical inserts from Zeiss, which start at $99 for just reader style adjustments, as well as $149 for prescription adjustments. We don't know how you convey that information to Apple or exactly which prescriptions they'll make available. Obviously, there's a huge range of those, and Apple may choose to only emphasize the ones that they find sort of the most common.

Beyond that, we are kind of in the dark. We know that you'll be able to go in and try this out in the Apple Store starting February 2nd. I believe it'll require reservations in order to do so, but we don't really know what the full process is in terms of whether or not this is getting shipped to you, whether this is getting shipped to a store. What's the process of having it tried on? We have seen some reports that there are, for example, different styles of cushions for those light seals. So if you have a different like, your face is a different size, you need something to be more comfortable. There will be a couple of different options, but currently that's from third party reports, not even from Apple directly itself. I expect we'll hear more about this, certainly by the time the pre-orders go up next week though I would hope in advance of that so people can sort of get prepared and know what they're gonna have to do when they start actually going through this whole process.

0:42:06 - Mikah Sargent
All right. Well, I guess any last things we should know about the Vision Pro launch and making sure that if somebody out there is after one, what they need to do to be prepared for those pre-orders. I imagine there's not, as you said, probably not a lot in stock, perhaps in comparison to the demand Right well, certainly what we don't know outweighs what we do know.

0:42:33 - Dan Moren
Still, at this point, a week out from pre-orders.

Obviously, if you are really feeling like you gotta get one of these day one with Apple products, it's never a bad idea to get up and be ready to hit that Apple Store as soon as the clock ticks over.

So 5 am Pacific on Friday the 19th for the West Coasters, and 8 am Eastern, you can try your luck at a store if you wanna try it on first. But just be aware that, yeah, quantities may be limited and that might mean there's not a lot of demand and that there will be plenty of these to go around, or it might mean they get snapped up as fast as Apple can make them. But I think certainly something to keep in mind if you are on the fence but aren't really compelled or don't feel like dropping $3,500,. This is unlikely to be the last version of these that Apple makes. We're almost certainly going to see this improve and iterate over the next several years, as Apple always does with its products. So if you're feeling that FOMO for missing out on version one, don't sweat it too much and realize version two will be coming down the pike soon enough. Wonderful.

0:43:36 - Mikah Sargent
Well, of course folks can head to sixcolorscom to check out your work there, but if they wanna follow you online and keep up to date with what you are up to, where should they go to do so?

0:43:47 - Dan Moren
Mostly active on Mastodon. These days I'm D Moran at Zeppelin Flight over there, but I'm also on Threads and Blue Sky. Generally, search for some version of D Moran. You can find me. You can find all about me, including my novels. My latest novel also is lost at dmorancom and if you really enjoy hearing me and Mike could talk about tech, you should tune into the Clockwise podcast every Wednesday over at relayfm slash clockwise and we definitely appreciate it.

0:44:11 - Mikah Sargent
Yes, we do, and, Dan, I appreciate you joining me today and I'm sure we'll see you again soon.

0:44:17 - Dan Moren
Bye, bye. Buzzers always hope to be doing a virtual FaceTime vision pro call with you next time.

0:44:22 - Mikah Sargent
Absolutely Alrighty folks up. Next, what to expect from Generative AI in 2024? That will be the next conversation. All right, it is time to talk about AI. Yes, we couldn't get through a full episode of Tech News Weekly without talking about Generative AI. I guess we kind of did with the R1, but really they set that apart by saying this is not the AI we typically talk about. But this is going to be a big year for AI, and joining us to share his thoughts on what we can expect in 2024 is Simaphore's own Reed Albert Gotti. Welcome back to the show, Reed.

0:45:08 - Dan Moren
Thank you, thanks for having me. Good to be here.

0:45:10 - Mikah Sargent
Always a pleasure to have you on to talk about well, in this case, generative AI. So I think 2023, obviously a big year for us paying more and more attention to Generative AI, and right before the year ended, you put out a piece, along with Louis Mazzakis, about Generative AI and kind of what you expected going forward. So I thought you know what, as we're kicking off this year, let's get into it, let's talk about it. First and foremost, though, I think it's worth examining kind of the premise of this, because the headline is Generative AI will move from hype to actually being helpful, and I think that in and of itself, deserves some examination, because it suggests that 2023 was a year of hype and not helpfulness. And so can you explain that? Like, what led that to be the headline? What led that to be the conversation in terms of us looking at it as this hype train?

0:46:17 - Dan Moren
Yeah and I don't actually see that as a negative, I'm not saying that in a bad way Like well, this was just a useless technology this year.

I think any technology starts off as kind of a novelty, interesting thing that people experiment with, and it's not until later that we really start to see the use cases become apparent.

And that was true with mobile, right, that was true with the World Wide Web before mobile, so I think that's just only natural. The other thing that sort of has held back Generative AI, and I think a lot of people don't fully appreciate it is just the ability to run these huge, large language models efficiently as much as we want. There are real limitations to the biggest, most powerful models, just from a cost perspective. And so I think those are things, those are the kind of more nerdy, some might say boring things that are happening below the surface, but people are working really hard. There are companies being created just to deal with this problem, everywhere, from the software stack to the chip stack. So I think that stuff, as it begins to work out and I'm not saying that's going to happen next year entirely, but it will get better that will sort of allow people, that will allow the creative minds of the tech industry to really use this technology.

0:47:51 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, so let's dive into some of these categories that you discussed, Because I think that sometimes when we talk about Generative AI in fact just last year I showed the I think it was Microsoft's co-pilot that could do songs, and so we generated a funny little song for Tech News Weekly and we see these sort of Fisher Price toy style things that Generative AI can do, but there's so much more to it that often gets buried because it's not as flashy and maybe a little bit boring on the face of it, right, or we kind of see it that way. But this could have a huge impact, and the first one that you talk about is drug discovery. Talk about how AI can make a dent in drug discovery.

0:48:44 - Dan Moren
Yeah, I mean it really already is. We had an article yesterday in the newsletter about this company called InSilico, which I believe is the first company to have an AI-generated drug make it to phase two of clinical trials. So we haven't really seen this stuff end up in the drug story yet or end up being prescribed yet, but it's happening. And what's really going on is big pharma and startups alike. Oftentimes they're partnering with each other. They are setting up ways to essentially ask a computer, sometimes even in natural language hey, here's this disease. Can you come up with molecules that will attack this particular disease and nothing else in the human body? And they're able to do that. And it's generating hundreds, maybe thousands of possibilities and the vast majority of those will not work, but some of them do.

And the way drug discoveries worked in the past, this stuff is just trial and error after trial and error and it's just people doing it in the lab, and now we have computers to speed up that process to just such a huge degree. I mean, even if we could get to, like, say, a 20% effectiveness rate with this technology, it would just be a sea change in how drugs are created in the world and it kind of takes us on this road and this is far off into the future, not next year but on this road toward personalized medicine where you know you have, you know you get sick and basically there are drugs created for you specifically. You're the only customer, and that sort of you know gets rid of all the side effects, all the problems that we that we have with drugs today, which is that they are these blunt instruments that aren't really tailored toward any, any one individual, and they affect affect everybody differently. So I think that's a really just exciting way to go for, you know, direction for humanity.

0:50:44 - Mikah Sargent
Absolutely, absolutely. I think about you know anecdotally, personal experiences of family members who have dealt with mental health stuff and having to try so many different types of medication before they find the one that actually works well with their brain and the idea that you could have a medication that is specifically designed for you and you're not having to titrate and do all of that extra stuff that makes that process that's already so difficult. If you are in the middle of depression, that is just. I mean that that can make all the difference. I think it's potentially miraculous. What could be done there, and it still kind of boggles the mind that there's not as much attention on that as there is on me being able to generate a weird photo anytime I want to, but I understand it on the face of it, but at the same time, it's like man, there's such cool stuff that could happen there.

Along with that, I think it's important to talk about 2024 as an opportunity, as a time for paying more attention to the safety concerns and the safety aspect of AI, because we saw at the end of 2023, more and more opportunities and situations where the law is not being in those situations where the law needed to catch up with AI, where regulation needed to catch up with AI, and there was a story, an unfortunate story, about a school where some of the young men were using AI to generate false photos of some of the female, and these were nude photographs, and I can't remember what state it was, but in whatever state it was, there kind of wasn't any legal precedent there because of the difference between the face, which was of an actual person, and the generated body, which was not of that actual person. So can you talk about AI safety, not just in terms of looking out for AGI and what that entails, but just having an understanding of how we humans might use this technology and make sure that we're using it in a way that is safe and productive?

0:53:13 - Dan Moren
Yeah, I think that's a great example of the one you brought up, because it's really that's one where existing laws are just a little bit gray right on how to deal with this stuff. I don't think that scenario has ever really come up before. Obviously, there are laws against revenge, porn and things like that, but this is a whole new category. So there clearly should be new laws if there aren't already in every state, if not federally and around the world that ban that sort of just obviously bad moral behavior. Right, and I think we'll see some of that.

The other area that I think is really interesting is copyright law, where the New York Times has now sued OpenAI and Microsoft, claiming that they've used their material to essentially copy the New York Times. They found a way to prompt chatGPT and have it regurgitate almost verbatim New York Times articles. Now I don't think that's really a problem, because I don't think anybody is going to chatGPT as a replacement for the New York Times. I just don't see it to try to get around the New York Times paywall or something like that. But I do think there's this really interesting philosophical question that has to be decided by the courts, which is if you train an AI model with data that's available on the internet that has copyright protection? Are you using that in a way that is sort of like a person might learn, a person might read a book and now has that knowledge and can create new works of their own that are sort of informed by that knowledge, or is it something more akin to piracy?

I think the New York Times and others are arguing that it's more like piracy and I think that's a really interesting question. But I think there's also a lot of stuff around AI and safety today. That, I think, is existing laws can already deal with it. You talk about bias with AI and using AI to discriminate against people. Well, we already have existing laws against discrimination just using AI to hire the job candidates based on race or discriminating against protected groups. You can't hide behind the technology there, and I think some of the problems there are just with the lack of funding for regulators already, the lack of enforcement of existing laws. So I think there's sort of a mixture in my mind.

0:55:58 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, absolutely Thinking about the lack of funding and how, again, so much of this seems to be that everything is moving so quickly that there's just so much catching up that needs to do to even put that money in place and to, in the cases where it's necessary, convince the general public that it is of the importance that it is in order to get that funding put where it needs to be. There's just so much of that going on and I guess, if we kind of look at 2024, this wasn't necessarily in the piece, but I'm curious how do you feel 2024 will look in terms of a more general understanding of generative AI? Do you think this is the year where the big tech companies really start to show off generative AI technology in their apps and their hardware, which then leads to more of the general public gaining access to this generative AI, such that more people understand what it is and will be using it more regularly? Or do you think it's still kind of these tools that some people are using? And I want to a little thing that stuck out to me from the end of last year.

I went to a show in San Francisco and we sat down in the theater and it was like a live performance and behind us a group of people sort of shuffled in and started sitting down and one of the people started talking about how they had an essay that they had do and they were so thankful for chatGPT because chatGPT helped them write their essay and how in the past they just would have asked for an extension.

I mean, they were just going on and sort of shamelessly talking about how they used AI to write their paper for them. But it was a moment for me because I still had it in my head that and I understand it's San Francisco that kind of self-selects a little bit. But just to hear about a college student saying you know, regularly using this and then looking at some of the, there was a recent study done for elementary middle and actually I think it was high school aged kids where a lot of them had not heard of generative AI just in general, and those who had had not used it very often. Do you think that this is a year of more general understanding or is that still farther out?

0:58:39 - Dan Moren
Well, I do think that it's an interesting anecdote there too. But yeah, I mean I think you're seeing Google, microsoft, other companies. I think we can expect that Apple will start implementing this stuff, meta Meta starting to, you know, create their chatbots and put it inside the Ray-Ban glasses that they're selling, and I think people are definitely going to encounter this technology more next year. There's no question about that. I mean, microsoft has basically incorporated it. They basically totally redesigned Windows around this technology, but it hasn't been rolled out to the general public yet. So I mean, I fully expect that to happen next year, unless there's some huge setback that they face, or not next year, but this year, I should say it's already 2024. You know, but Windows is just, you think about how ubiquitous. That is right, like most of the world uses Windows for their work computer. So when that starts happening, I think you'll see just everyone using this. You know, my wife is an attorney. She has, you know, a small law firm and she's just trying out AI products now, you know, and some of them I've actually written about in my newsletter. These legal AI products are really a big deal. So I think it'll be both, like on the personal level and professional level that you see this stuff roll out On your anecdote.

I was just going to comment that I think it's really interesting like the bad students are going to use this for sure in a way that is very clumsy, and I wonder if professors will be able to start to tell like they'll have a, they'll get a sense for what papers were written by chatGPT and like not edited at all, and it's one thing to you know, use it to help you a little bit, but like to write the whole essay is just.

I think it's going to be so obvious and I don't see a huge problem with that because I think the world has always had like the vast majority of people are not great students. Right, it's that top 1% of students who end up being the ones who they're the scientists and the I don't know. I shouldn't say that because I'm sure there are plenty of C students who started like huge companies as well, but there's always a dichotomy of people who are ambitious and wanna learn and smart and other people who kinda just wanna skate by and put the resources elsewhere, and I don't think that's a huge issue really.

1:01:17 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, all right. Lastly, I guess I would just love to hear, overall, anything else that you're kind of on the lookout for when it comes to 2024 and AI, what should we also be keeping our eye out for, outside of the standard of more iterations and updates to the technology that we're seeing that's at the forefront, will we see some other companies reaching the levels of open AI? What can we expect?

1:01:51 - Dan Moren
Yeah, the corporate competition is certainly interesting. I'm speaking of open AI. I'm really interested to see what happens with the store which was just launched I think it was yesterday. You know, that to me really unleashes the creativity of their customer base. And you're already seeing companies like Wolfram Alpha, which does math. They basically incorporated math capabilities into their GPT that they built. You could already do that, but it was sort of more difficult and it's lowering the barriers. So I think that's just gonna be fascinating to watch.

And then I think agents is the other big thing that I'm looking out for right now, these large language models. They're a little bit too finicky and they hallucinate a little bit too much to really use them as. Trust them with taking actions for you on your behalf autonomously. So, for instance, I have a, let's say, I have a chat bot and I say, listen, I need a new pair of shoes, here's what I'm looking for. Can you just go out and find me some and buy them for me? That kind of thing.

Just that autonomy is not really. You're not seeing that rolled out yet. As soon as that happens, I think that's like a big that will mark a big breakthrough in the technology and will really kind of like, I think, hasten the use of this stuff, cause that's when it really becomes like just a huge time saver for everyone and, I think, probably totally changes the way the internet works right, which is funded by it's still funded by these search ads, where you Google something and a bunch of ads come up for what you're trying to buy. Once you have that agent experience, that I think all goes away and that'll be really interesting. I don't know if that will happen this year or if that's a couple of years off, but it's definitely something I'm looking for.

1:03:51 - Mikah Sargent
Absolutely. Me too. Frankly, I'm very much looking forward to that. Well, reed Albert Gotti, thank you so much for joining me today on the show. Of course folks can head to semaphorecom that's S-E-M-A-F-O-R dot com but if they wanna keep up to date with what you're doing, follow along. Is there a place they should go to do that?

1:04:11 - Dan Moren
Yeah, well, the main thing is our newsletter. The technology newsletter is free, so go put your email address in, get the newsletter. I think it comes out twice a week. I think you'll really like it. I'm still on X, I try to go on threads too, and all the other platforms, but you could find me anywhere. My name's pretty unique, so just do a search.

1:04:36 - Mikah Sargent
Awesome, thank you so much, we appreciate it, thank you.

1:04:39 - Dan Moren
It's great to be here.

1:04:41 - Mikah Sargent
Alrighty folks. That brings us to the end of this episode of Tech News Weekly. The show publishes every Thursday at twittv slash TNW, so you just head there. If you're somehow watching and you're not subscribed, that's where you go to subscribe to the show in audio and video formats. Subscribing to the show is incredibly important, even if you tune in and Discord to watch it live and you never listen to the show in your podcast player. Please subscribe to the show. That's just a way to help out there.

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1:07:29 - Scott Wilkinson
Hey there, scott Wilkinson here. In case you hadn't heard, Home Theater Geeks is back. Each week I bring you the latest audio video news, tips and tricks to get the most out of your AV system, product reviews and more. You can enjoy Home Theater Geeks only if you're a member of Club TWiT, which costs seven bucks a month, or you can subscribe to Home Theater Geeks by itself for only $2.99 a month. I hope you'll join me for a weekly dose of Home Theater Geek-A-Tude.