Tech News Weekly 362

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. It's me, Mikah Sargent, and this week we kick off the show by talking to Mark Gurman of Bloomberg about Apple's rumored Home Hub what is the company working on and can we expect more of it when it comes to HomeKit devices? Then we talk about Apple exploring smart glasses and the company hedging its bets in small platforms as opposed to just one area the iPhone. After that, a little bit about Blue Sky what in the world it is, how you can join and why everybody seems to be making their move to the platform. And we round things out with AI agents the next step for the generative AI craze. All of that coming up on this week's episode of Tech News Weekly.

This is Tech News Weekly episode 362, with me, Mikah Sargent, recorded Thursday November 14th 2024. What is Bluesky? Hello and welcome to Tech News Weekly, the show where, every week, we talk to and about the people making and breaking that tech news. I am your host, Mikah Sargent, and we are typically joined by Amanda Silberling on this the second Thursday of the month. Amanda is not with us today, but we'll see her again next month. I am excited, though, to kick things off with a conversation with a guy who knows a whole lot about Apple. It's Mark Gurman of Bloomberg. Welcome back to the show, Mark.

0:01:48 - Mark Gurman
Thanks for having me.

0:01:49 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, pleasure to have you on. So you actually published a piece that had me pretty, pretty excited, because I certainly spent many years writing about the smart home and particularly Apple's dalliance into the smart home with HomeKit, and you just released a piece talking about Apple working on something called a Home Hub.

0:02:15 - Mark Gurman
Let's hear about that. It's interesting. So they launched HomeKit, actually about 10 and a half years ago, back in 2014, as part of iOS 18. And then, a year later, they released the Home app as part of iOS 19. And the idea was to make it so you can use your iPhone to control your home appliances, whether that's things like locks, lights, sprinklers. I mean, you know it well, you've written about it for years, but they never really had a coherent strategy for first-party devices in the home. They've had the Apple TV, which the home. They've had the Apple TV, which is fine. They've had the HomePods, which have mostly been duds compared to the other speakers in the market, but now they want to release a device for people who are all in on HomeKit right Now.

There's an ecosystem of third-party devices. Now there's Matter. It's built up over the last nine or 10 years or so, right. So now they believe, despite, despite, being super late, it's time right. How can you get more people to buy home good device as well by having a home hub? Now the interesting thing is that it's not terribly different from an iPad. There's people who pin iPads onto the wall now with a uh, the home app right, thinks that that is the default app, but now they've created an operating system and a user interface built entirely around the Home app. Right, you still will have the Home app, but you'll have a customizable home screen built around widgets, built around pinning different home controls. So they're all in on this, as this being a device for Apple Intelligence and HomeKit Pro users.

0:03:41 - Mikah Sargent
Now can we talk a little bit about the Apple Intelligence aspect of it, because this has long been the promise right of the smart home, that the smart home was going to be truly smart, and particularly from the sort of builder's perspective we have seen that be the case, where you have a home that you walk in the door and lights turn on and you move to the next room and those lights turn off. But from the consumer side of things it's still a really complicated process where you have to set up a lot of it yourself and companies have tried to provide that middle ground of a you know something in the house that's making assumptions. Is Apple intelligence going to serve as that sort of assumption engine that's going to help actually make the smart home a little smarter?

0:04:27 - Mark Gurman
At least initially. I don't think it's going to be a computerized brain using the dream of AI to make decisions on your behalf. I think the AI play. There is this upgraded version of Siri that's launching in the coming months with a revamped version of App Intense. Right now, siri is good at if you ask for a single control, something like turn on the lights, turn off the lights, play the song, stop playing music, turn off my alarm but it's not good at finite control of the user interface or the operating system or handling multiple controls at once, and so App Intense is going to allow you to navigate the user interface with your voice. Of course Intense is going to allow you to navigate the user interface with your voice. Of course it's going to be a touchscreen, but now you'll have finite control of the different applications across that system using this revamped version of Apple Intelligence.

So I don't think this is going to be particularly sci-fi, but I think this is going to be interesting for people who want a standard, singular place to control their home appliances. Right, you have a decade's worth of HomeKit devices out there. Now you have more people using these AI services. You have more people using these Apple applications, so it makes sense to have a centralized hub for this. But again, this is a company that is soul-searching for new ideas and this is not a new idea. This is an Appleized version of the Nest Hub, an Appleized version of the Amazon Echo Show and the Echo Hub with a little bit of an Apple flavor Apple ecosystem, apple price point. So it's another product to really sustain that fort right, to better harden that Apple ecosystem, to make it more difficult to leave. But I don't really think this is anything particularly innovative or groundbreaking.

0:06:03 - Mikah Sargent
Okay, that's interesting. I mean, from what you understand about it, are we looking at a? Is this its own? Oh so let me rewind a little bit. You look at the different devices that Apple has released and, depending on the device, is it an iPad? It runs iPadOS. Is it an iPhone, iphone or iOS? Excuse me, if it's a TV, tvos, is this a version of tvOS that this device is going to run? Is this a whole new take on things, where it's separate from VisionOS, it's separate from watchOS and you might see future products down this line or is this just a kind of strange supplement to what exists already and maybe Apple's first foray into making its own HomeKit product?

0:06:51 - Mark Gurman
This is a new operating system. It's a fork of tvOS. From a user interface standpoint, it's essentially a blend of watchOS and the standby mode on iOS that they introduced last year as part of iOS 17. My belief is that this is going to be a new OS called HomeOS that's going to replace tvOS and run across the Apple TV, run across HomePods, run across devices like this.

0:07:21 - Mikah Sargent
Okay, that makes sense. That makes sense. And when we think about this device right, you talk about it kind of being this wall tablet. Is that the extent of it? Like, from what you understand, is this a device that sticks to the wall and stays there? Is this something where somebody can use it as a tablet, or is it really supposed to be this kind of on-wall home control? And in that sense I'm curious can you compare it to any other Apple product that Apple has made, going into the sort of install level that's required with something that you put on the wall? It just feels a little bit different from what the company has made thus far.

0:08:06 - Mark Gurman
in that sense, so there'll be a magnetic wall attachment and then they're also going to have speaker bases. That basically looks like a HomePod mini, cut in half and slightly tilted. You're going to be able to. It's like the base is similar to the base of the old iMac G3s or G4s from way back in the day, right when the disc slot pops up, but obviously this won't have a disc slot.

So the idea is you may have magnetic wall mounts in multiple places in your home and you may have these bases in multiple places in your home and you would basically move it from the wall to the base or carry it around, so you would use it in these different parts of your day in different places in your home. You may want to have several of them. You may want to have one that you're moving between the different magnetic attachments on the walls and the magnetic bases. It's going to have a rechargeable battery. I'm not sure how you would charge it on the wall, right. Maybe there's like an ultra low power mode where you can keep it on the wall for several days, but you'll need to put it on that base to charge it properly.

0:09:01 - Mikah Sargent
Understood, then I guess. One other question I have is regarding how it Well, now I've forgotten my train of thought, this device again being this kind of on-wall device that is going to work to control the smart home. Oh, you have talked before about robotics and Apple, yes, and I was curious is this the first glimpse?

0:09:29 - Mark Gurman
Sort of Okay. So there's two devices in development. This is the first one, right? This is sort of a testbed to see if people are interested in this technology, and then they're already working on a follow-up version. They've actually been working on the follow-up version for far longer than the initial version, right, this is just a stepping stone to the main I would say the main event, right, the main entree uh, the follow-up version. The device is very similar, it has very similar capabilities, but it's even next level.

On ai, the idea is this device turning into a computerized companion in your workspace, in your home, so an ai companion that helps you get stuff done throughout your day, can do tasks on your behalf, and that version has that higher level of AI, improved speakers, probably, a higher quality, bigger display. This is something closer to $1,000, probably, but the main thing is that it's going to have a robotic limb and so it can move around in your environment while being stationary on the table, uh, to follow you around, to point towards you, to, like, look at certain people, uh. It can tilt and move, uh, as necessary for maybe security functions If you're trying to take a view of of what's going on in your home from remote places, uh, but also on a FaceTime call. Like it can mimic the head movements of a person on the other end of the call. So if I'm nodding my head, the device would not. Uh, if you have one on your desk.

So that's actually that's the more exciting product, I would say.

0:10:53 - Mikah Sargent
Absolutely. The last thing I'll ask you is we did see a rumor from Ming-Chi Kuo about Apple making a camera, an IP camera, for HomeKit. Do you think that this Home Hub is a hint at Apple potentially creating more of its own HomeKit-enabled products later on down the line?

0:11:20 - Mark Gurman
I believe that they want to wait and see the demand for this product and see if people are demanding first-party appliances in the HomeKit realm from Apple. They've been working on a privacy-centric camera that doubles as a baby monitor. They've been working on that for some time. They have not made a final decision on whether or not to release that. As they have with this display, and depending on how this display goes, I would anticipate them releasing the camera based on if there's success there and then over time you can see them getting into even more types of appliances things like lights, things like locks and really owning more of that experience offering a first-party ecosystem of smart home accessories.

0:11:58 - Mikah Sargent
but also a third-party ecosystem of home kit accessories. Absolutely Well, Mark. I want to thank you so much for taking some time to join us today.

0:12:03 - Mark Gurman
It's my pleasure.

0:12:04 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, it's been great to have you Real quick for the people who want to keep up with what you're doing. How do they get a hold of your newsletter?

0:12:11 - Mark Gurman
Yeah, so you can find me on X Threads Blue Sky, mastodon.

0:12:17 - Mikah Sargent
you name it at Mark Gurman, so please follow me there and Bloombergcom slash Power On subscribe to the newsletter.

0:12:25 - Mark Gurman
Awesome, Thank you so much. We appreciate it.

0:12:26 - Mikah Sargent
Thanks, mike, really thanks again. All righty, we're going to take a quick break Before we come back with even more.

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All right, we had to say goodbye to Mark Gurman of Bloomberg, but there were a couple of other stories that Mark put out that I want to talk about here on the show today, and one of those was about what the company is working on outside of this AI wall tablet. The company is also kind of taking a look at the future of VisionOS and the future of the Apple Vision Pro and whether headsets make sense for the company In order to determine whether because this is the thing with Apple and with any company, frankly that makes hardware, that makes software, that is thinking about kind of branching out into a new category you have to figure out if something like this is going to be viable, and so Gurman reports that Apple is conducting an internal study that it calls Atlas, where it's exploring smart glasses, and so, as we have heard rumored before, apple may be entering the smart glasses market. You know, you've got the Apple Vision Pro right now and it's this very powerful, very expensive headset that provides an AR and VR experience, but smart glasses are specifically on the AR side of things. Apple's study is internal. Apple's study is internal, atlas is internal and it involves Apple employees. They're using the smart glasses that are kind of on the market to figure out what actually makes sense for features, what works, what doesn't work. So, if you can imagine, it's a little bit like what Leo's doing. Leo has purchased or acquired many a pair of smart glasses and has tried them and in trying each of them, can figure out what actually works, what is helpful, what is not helpful and what might be something that other people would want. So these Apple employees are able to try out these different headsets and say, okay, this is a great feature, but it doesn't work well in this way and oh, that's a feature that we definitely don't need. Or oh, here's what's missing, and bring all of that together to figure out what makes the most sense for what Apple plans to release in the future. So there are additional focus groups that the company plans to work on as well that could then reach out outside of the company. The product systems quality team is the company that's in charge of this project, and so this is, of course, part of the hardware engineering division, and the idea is to look at a model that is more cost-friendly than the Apple Vision Pro and perhaps more comfortable.

If you all had the opportunity to check out my review of the Apple Vision Pro, you will remember my thoughts on the device, which is that I described it as going to the moon, but wearing a space suit to the moon. It was incredibly uncomfortable. But I'm on the moon, I get to see the moon, so it's very cool. But I'm on the moon, I get to see the moon, so it's very cool, but I'm in this uncomfortable spacesuit and I can't stay in it for very long before I need to go back in and kind of rest. I found the experience to be uncomfortable, to be nausea-inducing, and this is the interesting thing it wasn't from a motion sickness perspective, it was from a heft and pressure and heat perspective. The device was uncomfortably heavy on my head. It pushed on all the wrong parts of my head, almost inducing it was almost like I don't know, like a Vulcan nerve pinch for the head. So it just did really not. It did not work for me, it was not comfortable and I actually ended up dreading having to do a review of the device because it meant having to wear it for a long period of time. I suffered to watch a movie, a two-hour movie for you all to hear about my review of it. So Apple is working on something that is more comfortable for more people, because I'm not the only one who has mentioned that it is not a comfortable experience.

On top of maybe making a more affordable device and something that can be worn on the face without causing discomfort, it is an opportunity for the company to, as Mark Gurman pointed out in the conversation that we just had, an opportunity for the company to expand beyond the iPhone right. This has been the big issue with Apple going forward is that for the longest time, the company has relied on the iPhone as its means of making money and as the iPhone saturates the market and more people get more iPhones, and we continue to focus on device repairability and device longevity. You have an issue of people not buying the latest iPhone and and therefore Apple not making as much money as they once did. So what's the big word Starts with a D, rhymes with nevermind. It's diversify. Diversify is the word and the company has been diversifying by getting into services but also making smaller bets, as Gurman calls it, like the Apple Watch market. If you have several smaller markets an Apple Watch, a TV, the Vision OS experience, or rather the services experience, a little hardware division that's for the Mac, a mid-sized market that's for the smartphone, a small market that's for the tablet you got to kind of spread it out.

So there are all these different bets that the company's working on and Gurman says that you know this is hopefully the opportunity to jump on the back of the AirPods success, because AirPods are very, very popular. If you can have a device that is a seamless accessory like the AirPods, meaning that you know I take my AirPods and I put them in my ears and it connects to my phone automatically and I'm able to listen to what I want to and it just works. I mean, when I don't, when I'm not wearing these headphones, you you can ask my significant other. Regularly I'm having to take one out to hear what he's asking me or what he's saying to me. I'm always wearing my AirPods, um, and so you know anecdotally, uh, they are a huge success. The people who buy them really like them and they are a popular product. The same thing is what they hope to gain from the eventual headset that they work on through this Atlas project.

Now, of course, we've already seen companies like Meta, which has its Oculus line but also is working on and has, you know, released the meta Ray-Ban option, and Snap, which has the spectacles. They're already working in this AR glasses marketplace and, yes, they are out there, but there's a hope that you know they'll continue to work on even more, more. They don't want to stay focused on what they have right now alone. They also want to branch out even more and make these sort of more powerful AR glasses, and so that is an opportunity for those companies to do so and Apple to do so along with it. Now, on top of that, the company is also working on a less expensive Vision Pro headset. So, even though right now there's the more expensive, very high-powered version, that's not the extent of what Apple hopes to bring to market, according again to Gurman, but is also working on something that is a little bit more simplified, in the same way that we saw that from Meta. Right, you've got the more powerful VR headset and a more cost-friendly, cost-effective model that is slimmed down and may even use the iPhone as its means of processing to get the power out of the device that you wear on your face and into something else, which could make it more comfortable, easier to wear, but bigger than that, make it a little bit more cost-friendly, which I think is one of the big issues, because I think, for me, if the Apple Vision Pro was just a little bit less pricey maybe no, I shouldn't say a little bit less pricey, quite a bit less pricey and things like the new Belkin headset strap that just came out were available, then the Vision Pro suddenly makes a little bit more sense and so a more cost-friendly model that uses my iPhone as the means of powering it, you know, as an extension of the iPhone, the same way that the Apple Watch started out. That makes more sense and we've seen excuse me that success from Apple in the past. So that's something to keep an eye on as the company continues to work toward this future, where it has diversified its lineup and provided kind of different small markets that will make it money. All right, that is going to do it for the Mark Gurman part of the show. Let's take a quick break before we come back with another story of the week.

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All righty, we are back from the break and that means it's time for the next story. I wanted to talk about a little service out there that many of you may have heard of and may be going. Okay, what is this? It's called Bluesky, not Bluesky. B-l-u-e-s-k-y is Bluesky, and it is a social media platform that has been getting a lot of attention lately. So Bluesky is a social media service that people have been moving to, migrating to using ever since it was introduced shortly after Elon Musk acquired Twitter, now X, and it has been getting attention because it has quickly climbed the charts of usership both in the US and outside of the US. According to CNET, on Tuesday it was listed at number three on the free app section of the US App Store, which puts it above Google and TikTok those two apps and you know it used to be way further down the list. According to TechCrunch, it was at number 181. So more people are jumping on board and that means that you probably will have heard of it, and, in fact, I kind of noticed something was going on because I had been using or I mean I've been, you know, just looking at my phone and seeing all these Bluesky notifications flying in. What in the world, where's that coming from? So, and there was, you know, new people following me on the service or mentioning whatever it happened to be interactions. So let's talk about Bluesky.

Blue sky is a project that actually has heavy ties to Twitter, now known as X. I'm being very specific there because this kind of predates the X factor of it all. In fact, the CEO, the one-time CEO of Twitter, jack Dorsey, was on the board for Blue Sky and is not currently, but was at one point on the board for Blue Sky, and Blue Sky itself was kind of created as this idea that if an app is independent of, if a social media service is independent, then it is able to let that Twitter bird fly free. Right? It's this big blue, open sky and it's built on a protocol that is open. So what exactly is it?

Well, if you've used X, formerly known as Twitter, then you will be pretty familiar with Blue Sky, formerly known as Twitter, then you will be pretty familiar with Blue Sky. It looks and feels a lot like the service that you have been used to. Again, if you've used X, you are able to mention people, you are able to quote messages from people, you are able to to post images. The feed is algorithmic, so you're going to get you know posts that are popular. But there's something that's a little bit different from Twitter in that you use domains, web domains, as your handle, as your username. So where on X my handle is? At Micah Sargent.

On Blue Sky, my handle is I don't even remember what it is right now I think it's at, yeah, at MicahSargentcom. So in order to get that username, that handle, I had to put a little bit of code into my domain, micasargentcom, to prove that I owned that, and then Blue Sky allowed me to create that as my handle for the service. The idea is that it's a little bit of confirmation that you are who you say you are. I'm the only one who has access to that domain and can add some text to my domain record for MicahSargentcom. Therefore, I must be the same person who has created the handle at MicahSargentcom. Now, if I didn't own MicahSargentcom and someone came along and bought that, then of course it's a different story, but the idea is that it does give you a little bit of a hint that you are who you say you are, does give you a little bit of a hint that you are who you say you are. What's more is that if a publication came along maybe you know, twittv, for example, came along and created you know at twittv as the handle, then it's individual people who work at Twit. So, for example, the technical director, john Ashley, producer, could be John at Twittv or John A at Twittv and that could be his handle on Blue Sky. So this is, you know, one sort of built-in, baked-in way of helping to verify that a person is who they say they are. That's one way that it's a little bit different.

As the CNET article points out, x recently changed its block feature on the platform, making it so that when you block someone, making it so that when you block someone, it does not actually block them in the sense that they can still see what you have written, whereas in the past the way the block worked was, if you block that person, they can't see what you have written, they can't see your account, they can't see anything to do with it. That's on X, on Bluesky when you block someone, they are fully blocked. You can't interact with their things or see their things. They can't interact with your things or see your things. It's the classic block, the original flavor block, and I think that for people who are looking for a place where that is in place, that makes sense as well. It's a safety tool, and it makes sense.

Now you may be asking about moderation. You know that is a big complaint that X has had and the way that moderation has changed over time. Not just the block, but in general. There's built-in. There's built-in automated moderation that Bluesky has, but also, as you report a user or mute a user or uh, you know, choose to not see notifications from a user, that will help inform the basic algorithm, and then you can go from there. On top of that, though, I think one of the things that Blue Sky users really enjoy is the introduction of custom feeds. So custom feeds are a way to kind of set up a custom algorithm for your Blue Sky experience. Say, I want to have, you know, this set of users and I want to have content related to this and this and this and not that, and so you can kind of perfectly tailor your own special feed that will let you create the experience that you want to have on BlueSky.

If you are interested in checking out BlueSky, if you want to try out BlueSky yourself, it's actually very easy to do. You don't need to use a special domain. If you're not familiar with going in and changing your domain records, all you have to do is go to bskyapp that's BlueSkyapp, but just bskyapp, but just bskyapp and then create an account. There is a Blue Sky app for iOS and for Android. You can also use Blue Sky on your desktop. You know via that website, and it's going to say what's your email address, what's your phone number. The reason why it asks you for your phone number is so that it can send an activation code that you'll use to kind of confirm your you. And then you go from there, you create your username, you create your password. From that point on you're in. So it doesn't require a whole lot of work on your part. If you don't want to do a whole lot of work, it's very easy to do. And that's at bskyapp and that's at bskyapp.

People who've come from X are finding a nice, familiar home there, and I also want to point out that I believe Patrick correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe Patrick actually set this up. If not, somebody at Twit did. But there's a twit.tv starter pack and so we'll include a link in the show notes to the starter pack. And basically, yeah, patrick did set it up. If you go to that, you will see the different people from Twit who have joined the service and so you can follow those people on the service as well. And there's an easy like follow all button that you can press and then it will follow Leo Lisa, it'll follow Richard Campbell looks like Andy and not goes there. I mean, several different users who have joined Bluesky over time are all there, and there's some that I'm realizing. Oh wow, I was not following, so I'm able to do that as well. Was not following, so I'm able to do that as well. And that is one thing the little starter pack experience that you'll see as you join Blue Sky.

When it comes to the last thing I want to say about this is sort of different social media services that have come X went the way that it went have different cultural milieu, different rules that are both spoken and unspoken, and I would argue that X or, excuse me, not X, but Blue Sky has the least amount of um gatekeeping that I've seen. Uh, different people might have different experiences, but it's been my experience that Bluesky is just kind of like, uh, hey, post things If you want to, don't post things if you don't want to, and it's chill, um, so, if you felt kind of weird on Mastodon for doing things a certain way, or weird on threads for doing things a certain way, like on threads, for example, there's a lot of complaints about people trying to game the algorithm and you see a lot of threads that are like, hey, do this, do that, and that is, you know, something that makes people a little bit nervous to post. I haven't really seen that on Bluesky. So the gatekeeping that you might experience on other platforms, not so much on Bluesky Um, so, yeah, it's worth checking out again. Bluesky App: join us. There are many of us, uh, there who would love to have you and, and you know, make sure you give us a shout when you join.

All right, with that, it is time to take another break, so I can tell you about ACI Learning, who are bringing you this episode of Tech News Weekly ACI Learning are the provider of ITPro. You know ITPro binge-worthy video-on-demand IT and cybersecurity training. With ITPro, you are going to get certification ready with access to the full video library of more than 7,250 hours of training. Premium training plans also include practical tests to ensure you're ready before you pay for exams in virtual labs to facilitate hands-on learning. It Pro from ACI Learning makes training fun. All the training videos are produced in an engaging talk show format that is truly, as they call it, edutaining. You can take your IT or cyber career to the next level. Be bold and train smart with ACI Learning. Visit info.acilearning.com/twit and use code TWIT100 at checkout to save 30% on your first year of ITPro annual training plans. That's info.acilearning.com/twit and use code TWIT100. Twit100. And we thank ACI Learning for sponsoring this week's episode of Tech News Weekly.

All right, we are back from the break and, believe it or not, I've got one more story of the week for you, and so I want to talk about where we're seeing generative AI platforms going. There's long been this conversation about generative AI coming to a sort of inflection point that these huge systems that are able to give us answers that may or may not be accurate, are not the future, but instead AI agents are the future. You may have heard about agents being the experience that we need, that we need to have an opportunity to break out of this sort of I chat with you and you give me a response system, and instead we put these little AI bots, so to speak, into different areas of our lives and let them do the things that we need them to do. So you would have an agent that helps you with scheduling calls and you'd have an agent that helps you with debugging your software, and you'd have an agent that helps you with debugging your software and you'd have an agent that helps you with photo editing. Right, and in order to get there, we have to have our AI systems be able to interpret what we're doing sort of view, so to speak, what we're doing and interact with it. Apple is currently working on doing that with Siri, has promised that a future version of Siri will be able to interpret what you have on screen and interact with that content in a way that is helpful. So you could say you know, I'm trying to get this app to do this. Can you help me with that? Or here I am in the settings app and I'm not sure where to find blank, and it can actually look at the screen maybe take a screenshot, read the text on the screen, read your current position on the screen and then provide a response based on that. Or, even better, take a photo of a poster for an event and say hey, can you add this to my calendar? It would need to read that event from the photo and then interpret what you're saying and what the event says and then use that to pop it into your calendar.

Well, openai has taken the first step toward offering an agent experience on your personal computer. Chatgpt can now actually work with some of your Mac's desktop apps, with more coming soon. Yesterday, no today, as we record this episode on Thursday November 14th, maxwell Zeff over at TechCrunch posted an article and titled ChatGPT can now read some of your Mac's desktop apps. Openai's ChatGPT just announced this new feature where it can read the code that you're working with in some developer-focused apps. So VS Code, xcode, textedit which I think is a fantastic Terminal and iTerm2 are all applications that can work with code. Again, I laugh at text editor because it's just a basic text editor, but certainly Terminal and Xcode are some that you might be familiar with iTerm2, for those of you who are nerds might also be familiar with that and it is able to look at what you are writing in these coding platforms, these coding applications, and provide input to help you with whatever it is that you happen to be doing Now.

It's important to understand that this is a first step. This is a first look at these experiences In the future of this is that I would be able to say to my whatever you know platform I happen to be, whatever system I happen to be using for generative AI, and I'd be able to say help me out with this. And literally that is the sentence. I would have to say help me out with this. And in that instance I would be working in, say, numbers, for example, which is Apple's spreadsheet platform, spreadsheet app. I keep using platform, and I was trying to create a formula that would take the sum of a column and get an average, while bearing in mind data from two different sheets, for example, and the system would be able to look at what I was doing, maybe kind of look back at what I was trying to do. So a little bit of what Microsoft is trying to do on Windows with recall, combine all that information together and then, based on me just saying, help me out with this, interpret exactly what I was asking and provide an answer. Hey, here's a formula that would help you get the value that you're looking for, but it has to start somewhere, and that is where this comes into play.

With the ChatGPT update for the desktop app, you are able to use the ChatGPT app to say help me out with this problem that I'm working on, this coding problem that I'm working on. And the example that they give in the TechCrunch article is that somebody is in Xcode and they are working on a project that shows the different planets within the solar system, and so they have all the necessary code for the different planets in the solar system, but the planet Earth is missing in the solar system. So they go over to ChatGPT, the desktop app, and they say add the missing planet. And ChatGPT looks at Xcode, is able to actually see what's written in Xcode, interpret your query, which is that there's a planet missing and I need you to add that planet. Look at the code that you've popped in and then take that all together and provide a response that matches the formatting, that matches the language that matches everything else and then give that to you, but it stops there. It is not yet a system that can automatically paste into Xcode the code that's missing. Instead, it's inside of the ChatGPT app itself. So that's where I say it's definitely a first week. It's not yet a full-on system that is fully integrated, and I think that that's what a lot of people are looking for certainly something that I'm looking for but this is only the first step of a multi-step process that we see OpenAI working on that work on your computer or work on your mobile device that you can kind of set them at tasks and that they would be able to help you out with whatever thing you need to do while you're also using another agent to do another task, and so that is something that's supposed to be coming from OpenAI down the line, and I think this is just the first hint at that. We're going to take one quick break before we come back with our final aspect of this, as OpenAI continues to work on this agent system.

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All right, back from the break, and it's sort of the second half of this conversation about agents and OpenAI. According to Bloomberg not Mark Gurman of Bloomberg, but Bloomberg the company is OpenAI is working on an AI agent that may be the next step past what we're seeing with that OpenAI desktop service called Operator and Operator is expected to arrive in January, this upcoming January 2025. Its goal is to be this agent system that we've been talking about, the thing that sets generative AI apart. The next step for generative AI that you would be able to use auto operator, excuse me to automate different tasks so you could have it write code for you, you could have it book travel for you. It can actually just act on your behalf on your computer. So it needs to learn how a person uses the computer, which is where I think it makes sense that the company has this first step of being able to look at code and provide a response.

Can you imagine being able to tell the system? For example, I'm about to go to my internet service provider's website and I want to negotiate a price reduction for my service. There's going to be a chat box that pops up where you'll be talking with someone, help me negotiate a price, and then you just set operator at it and it takes care of the rest. It, you know properly, clicks into the necessary part of the chat box. It reads what the person is saying to you and you say back to it and it just goes on from there. Wouldn't that be neat. That's just one aspect of what I'd be able to do. I certainly would love to use it to help me cancel services that I no longer want to use.

Um, if we don't get that, uh, that that system in place that we talked about in the past from the FCC, um, it is also supposed to be able to, whenever it's acting on user's behalf on a computer, uh, to provide an API to do so as well, so developers who are taking advantage of OpenAI's systems in their own apps would be able to access this functionality through their apps and services via the API. According to Bloomberg, it's going to be a research preview, which we've seen from the different tools that OpenAI has offered in the past, so that's no surprise there. You got to give it a shot, see if it's going to work before you roll it out to the rest of the users, and we may see more of this from other companies as well. In fact, I believe it was just today. Yeah, google announced and thank you, scooter X, for posting this in the chat.

I saw this this morning and kind of found it interesting that, up to this point, in order to use Gemini, you would download the Google app In order to use Gemini on your iPhone. You would download the Google app and use it from there. Now there is a purpose built Gemini app for the iPhone, so you're able to use Gemini through the system that way. So we're seeing first of all, these sort of purpose-built apps that access the chatbot, right. But it's taking things one step further with an actual agent that could kind of do things in the background where you don't necessarily have to interact. And let me crystal ball for a moment currently in iOS, when you go to iOS, and in the new version that's in beta that has the latest version of Apple intelligence features, you can integrate with chat GPT's open AI so that if you ask Siri a question that Siri is not able to answer, it will ask you if you want to send the question to chat GPT and have chat GPT answer it. Well, part of that involves a page where you log into your open AI account, and on that page there's also a little area that shows the app that is OpenAI.

Seeing Google release a dedicated Gemini app on iPhone suggests to me perhaps that Apple and Google may perhaps be nearing, perhaps, a deal where Google's Gemini will also be an option for users to use Gemini instead of OpenAI, openai's ChatGPT as the kind of background system for those queries that are too difficult for Siri to handle on its own. Openai's CEO according to the Bloomberg piece, of course, as Sam Altman says, that this would be the kind of next step in OpenAI systems, that it's fine right now that you know you can go and you can talk to a chatbot, but for a lot of users, that's just not the way that they would want to interact with these systems. You have to have a conversation, that you have to pop in so much information, you know. That's where I find these systems to be a little bit not perplexing, but cumbersome would be the word that I would use. I don't know how, just how much information I need to provide to the system in order to get it to provide the response that I want. Do I need to be incredibly detailed? Or by being incredibly detailed, am I limiting its creativity, so to speak, where I would get a better answer if I didn't narrow in so specifically on a topic you don't quite know? And so having agent systems that are just a little bit more specific to what you are trying to accomplish makes it so that it's much more focused, much more efficient and much more accurate, and you don't have as much of a concern that you're going to get an outright inaccuracy from the platform.

These companies have reported losing quite a bit of money from these generative AI systems. They are not very efficient and in order to be more powerful, in order to be more accurate, they need more and more information. In order to be more accurate, they need more and more information. In order to become more capable, they need more and more information, more information, more processing, more, more, more, more, more, and that all costs more money. It is more of an impact on the environment. It is all around a sink, and so that kind of seems to be. The next step is trying to figure out how you can make a more powerful, or at least a. It doesn't necessarily have to be more powerful, it has to be more useful, and to make something more useful without requiring as much cost, without requiring as much performance, is difficult. So we will have to watch into the coming year to see where things stand as far as OpenAI's operator goes. In the meantime, it'll be interesting to see how the desktop app for OpenAI's ChatGPT continues to evolve, as the company probably takes in more training data to work on that computer vision aspect of the platform and better understand how users are operating with their devices. We'll see what's next and I'm sure at that point we'll hopefully have somebody on the show to talk about how AI agents are the next step.

I want to thank you all for tuning in this week to Tech News Weekly. That does bring us to the end of this episode. Thank you for tuning in If you would like to. You're probably subscribed to the show, right? You've gone to twit.tv/tnw and subscribed. You tune in every Thursday, but tell your friends tune in every Thursday. Head to twit.tv/tnw that you tune in every Thursday, but tell your friends tune in every Thursday. Head to twit.tv/tnw. That's where you can get the show in audio and video formats. Typically, you've got a lot of great guests on the show. This was one of those rare occasions where people were just not available. So I appreciate you hanging out with me today.

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