Tech News Weekly 365 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. Amanda Silberling is here and we kick things off by talking about how OpenAI may may have trained its video generation tool, where things stand on the WordPress versus WP Engine drama. After that, Jason Howell stops by to give us a whole bunch of interesting information about the brand new, just announced Android XR and his time with the system. Very, very cool, as he was one of very few people to get to try this out before Google announced it. Then I round things out by showing you where things stand with Apple Intelligence's latest features Image Playground and Genmoji. All of that coming up on Tech News Weekly.

This is Tech News Weekly episode 365, with Amanda Silberling and me, Mikah Sargent, recorded Thursday, december 12th 2024. Android XR is Google's spatial computing OS 2024. Android XR is Google's spatial computing OS. 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 festive host, Mikah Sargent, and I am pleased to say that today, on this Thursday December 12th, I am joined by the wonderful, the inimitable Amanda Silberling. Welcome back to the show, Amanda.

0:01:50 - Amanda Silberling
Hello, I wish I had a fun hat, but you'll just have to imagine that there's like a. My hat is so cool that it's invisible. It is.

0:01:58 - Mikah Sargent
It's the coolest hat that you've ever seen, and unless you have the special contact lenses that Amanda sent me in the mail, you can't see it. So I'm sorry to all of you, but it was magnificent. I should have sent it to everyone. It was really selfish of me. Well, we will forgive you for your selfishness if you make up for it by telling us about your story of the week.

0:02:23 - Amanda Silberling
Yeah, so my story of the week is a story from my colleague, Kyle Wiggers, who is an amazing ai writer uh, writer about ai, not an an ai writer, if you will uh, we have to, we have to specify, yeah yeah and since sora, which is OpenAI's video generator, came out recently, he was looking into what we can glean about the training data for Sora based on what it's outputting, as though Sora is training on video games and Twitch streams and things in the video game orbit, which we can't say for sure because we don't know what the training data is. But you can type in things like Italian Plumber Game and get Super Mario.

Wow, that sure looks like Mario yeah, that that's Mario, all right, um, there's, uh, you can reproduce games that look like first person shooters. Um, we got the ninja turtles here. Um, great gifts in this article, great gift work, um. And then I think one of the examples in here that's particularly troubling to me is, uh, you see, this twitch streamer who this seems to be like based off of a real streamer, like this guy has those tattoos and even, honestly, the detail is kind of wild. Like, if you zoom in, it's like twitch, but with the Youtube logo which is like close enough. Um, you can see in the url it's a little bit like it looks like twibble.com/com, which, um, ai doesn't know how to spell. I've like written about that kind of extensively because I find it fascinating what AI knows and doesn't know how to do, based on how the architecture exists behind them. I'm just reading the picture here, but if you go to the article and look at the details, it's kind of crazy.

Yeah, so of course, this brings up what are the legal implications of this? How can we prove this for sure? Obviously, this is all IP and copyright law has not caught up to AI. Copyright law hasn't caught up to AI, like copyright law hasn't caught up to like the internet really, so to expect it to catch up to AI is like wild. But for all intents and purposes you would think that it is illegal to use copyrighted material to augment your own product. But don't know, we could get into a whole fair use article about a fair use argument about this. I'm sure someone will at some point and that'll be a uh, quite the time.

But um, another interesting thing that kyle pointed out in this article is that the former CTO, in a Wall Street Journal interview, didn't deny that there were video games in the training data, which is a little concerning, and I think this is sort of just part of the ongoing issue of these new generative AI products that we don't know what is in the training data, and it could very well be training on people's artwork and whether that is like a mass market game like Call of Duty, or if it's like somebody on etsy who is making some crocheted sweaters and I don't know like we are continuously seeing over and over that, in order for these platforms to get good and have big enough training data sets, they sort of do the thing of well, if it's on the internet, then it's free.

0:06:50 - Mikah Sargent
And that's not really how copyright works. Yeah, I guess that is the question and what it always boils down to. Anyone who watches this Week in Google, that show is very rarely about Google and is often about AI and also about, in particular, the conversation of AI, fair use and the right onto Twitch and watch a bunch of videos and then learn how to be a streamer myself from watching a bunch of videos and then go to a different platform, say, and start let's say, I go to Twitch and I learn. Okay, this is how people do it and this is what the popular streamers do. And I decided to go to YouTube and start streaming there and start making money there. No one's batting an eye at me profiting off of me taking the time to learn.

And so if an AI system watches a bunch of videos and then uses that to learn how to recreate video, what's the true ruling about that? And you're so right that the law is still struggling to catch up with the internet in general and we are using outdated precedent in many ways for a lot of the stuff that exists right now, a lot of the laws that exist right now, and every time there comes an opportunity to update those laws or clarify those laws, people seem to really kind of back away and say, oh, we'll just leave it alone, we'll just leave it alone. And I think that every it used to be. You know, every couple of years it came time to start really thinking about it, and then it was every year, and now it seems like it's getting down to every, you know, six months. There's new stuff happening in this space that makes us have to pay close attention to this.

I think that's what is fascinating and kind of terrifying to watch, because it just moves so fast and the possible outcomes for how this will work are, you know, left, right, center, just coming at you money, not itself, but the company that is using it makes money. You know arguing that, well, the internet is a free thing and people can go to it and you and I can all just profit off of it by learning. But is that the case? Is that how it should be? I don't know.

0:10:06 - Amanda Silberling
I honestly don't know. I have excellent news for you. Okay, you are not a product created by a tech company.

0:10:17 - Mikah Sargent
Oh, thank goodness. Can you prove that?

0:10:23 - Amanda Silberling
I don't know. I mean, I haven't met you in real life, so you could just be an AI.

0:10:27 - Jason Howell
Like a really really really sophisticated AI.

0:10:32 - Mikah Sargent
I must be from some secret company that no one has heard of. No, you're right, though I am not required to answer that question myself. Just ponder that question right and see where this goes. So yeah, I mean, I guess, before we move on from this story, has there been any kind of early reaction about Sora? That is like this, outside of what TechCrunch has, I guess, because we've seen lots of conversations about how it does a pretty crummy job at most stuff and you can tell it to show somebody drinking a glass of orange juice and the person, like, never even touches the glass of orange juice, it just sits on the table. But, um, has there been more conversation, I guess, and reaction about the training set and you know AI's role in gobbling up the internet?

0:11:32 - Amanda Silberling
I believe right now there's been like bandwidth issues with how many people actually have access to Sora, so it's like kind of hard to go on and test it yourself right now. But I think as it becomes more accessible to the public like what is a better red team than the public, Like true, I'm sure people will find some crazy stuff in the training data or that they could assume is in the trading data based on the outputs. And yeah, I mean it's kind of the same problem we're having with ChatGPT, another OpenAI product, where we don't know what they're training on. They've essentially just trained on the entire internet and not everything on the internet is free.

0:12:24 - Mikah Sargent
That's the truth. Speaking of not everything on the internet being free, we need to take a quick break to pay for this episode of Tech News Weekly, this episode of Tech News Weekly brought to you by our dear friends at ACI Learning, the provider of IT Pro, which provides binge-worthy video-on-demand IT and cybersecurity training and cybersecurity training. I was just talking to a friend of mine the other day new friend and had learned that they were working in tech support and found out that they got most of their knowledge from ITPro. With ITPro, you will get certification ready with access to the full video library of more than 7,250 hours of training. Premium training plans also include practice tests to ensure you're ready before you pay for exams and virtual labs to facilitate hands-on learning. It Pro from ACI Learning makes training fun. All training videos are produced in an engaging talk show format that is truly edutaining. You can take your IT or cyber career to the next level. Be bold and train smart with ACI Learning. Be bold and train smart with ACI Learning. Visit info.acilearning.com/twit and use the code TWIT100 at checkout to save 30% on your first year of ITPro annual training plans. That's info.acilearning.com/twit with the code TWIT100. And, of course, we thank ACI Learning for sponsoring this week's episode of Tech News Weekly.

All right back from the break, and that means it's time for my topic. I want to provide an update to an earlier story of the week that I had about WordPress and the ongoing drama. The ongoing drama, automatic, of course, being behind the sort of commercial side of WordPress and WP Engine, a third party that makes a tool that integrates with WordPress and lets you kind of manage your WordPress instance, etc. So WP Engine is a hosting provider that was founded in 2010 and uses WordPress software, which is open source, to offer these managed hosting services, which means that you can go to the website, you can pay a subscription, they will give you a website that you can use that uses WordPress on the backend and so that way you can have, you know, www.sweatersthatlooklikepajamas.com, and then it handles all of that in the background. In 2018, there was a company called, or a private equity firm called, silver Lake that acquired WP Engine, and then Automatic is the company behind WordPresscom and they have long held that. Wp Engine profits from WordPress but doesn't do enough to help kind of the ongoing development of the platform, because the idea with open source is that the community. Making use of these tools will provide some level of development and ongoing updates to the code, and Automatic, and more accurately, matt Mullenweg says. Here's the problem with that the amount of money that they make is vastly more than the contributions that they make.

In September of this year, at a WordPress WordCamp conference, matt Mullenweg attacked WP Engine, called it a cancer in the WordPress community. Afterward followed up with a blog post even more criticizing the company. Wp Engine a couple of days later said hey, we are issuing a cease and desist on this blasphemy, saying that Mullenweg essentially had harassed, and then the kind of arguments and everything went on from there all the way up to where there was this revelation that Automatic had said WP Engine, we either want you to pay an 8% royalty fee on all of your revenue or we want you to allocate 8% of your workforce to work on WordPress development, meaning you need to commit to doing more for the WordPress community. Wp Engine rejected the offer and it kind of went on from there.

Well, at one point, wordpress did something really interesting. There is a plugin from WP Engine that's called Advanced Custom Fields. Acf. Wordpressorg took over this plugin that was created by WP Engine and did it in such a way that they claim it was to quote, remove commercial upsells and fix a security problem. So they took it and they turned it into secure custom fields. It's akin to, let's say, a state like one state, uh the state of of I don't know Colorado um, like going to Missouri and, um, taking over. There's a, there's a candy company in Missouri, uh, that makes the famous cherry mash bar, and going to that plant and saying, okay, now it's called Cherry Smash and we control this. Now that's probably a terrible metaphor, but the point is it's really wild and unprecedented for them to do this. So they did this after all of this kind of back and forth, and WP Engine said this is not okay, that there was no consent doing that.

And then afterward WP Engine said, hey, we're taking this to court. So they went to court and on Tuesday, as we record this episode, on Thursday December 12th, a California district court judge said Automatic, the company behind WordPressorg, you have to stop blocking WP Engine's access to WordPressorg resources and interfering with its plugins. So not only do they have to stop with the ACF plugin, but there was also a checkbox that Automatic had put as part of its site, where you clicked the checkbox to say I'm not affiliated with WP Engine in order to be able to log in, and the judge said no, that's not going to happen. You need to stop doing that. Well, the judge said no, that's not going to happen. You need to stop doing that. Well, automatic spokesperson Megan Fox and I cannot confirm or deny if that's that Megan Fox that you know of, because I don't know told the Verge that look, here's the thing that injunction came without the period of discovery that is involved in court cases, meaning that all of the details have not been laid out. So when all of the details are laid out, we're very confident that we're going to win this.

So now I want to talk to you, Amanda, about this whole thing, because it's really these are WordPress is huge and you know we think about like.

A lot of people outside of tech don't realize how much Amazon and its AWS is the backbone of a lot of the internet, that a lot of websites and a lot of online services and a lot of apps and I mean so much of what's out there uses AWS, amazon Web Services in some way, but what and that's one thing that they don't realize.

I think a lot of people also don't realize just how many websites online are actually WordPress in the background. So WordPress is a huge part of the web and, given that that's the case, it's arguably dangerous, or a slippery slope, I guess, to have someone have this much control over a platform. And I hate to say it, but it smacks of a certain person who purchased a social media company and, sort of you know, made decisions that were very Um, and I find myself being of two minds, in the sense that there is a certain level that when someone's in control of something that they made, they should have control over it, but at some point when it becomes whenever you say I'm open source, therefore I'm giving it away you got to know what you signed up for, and that, arguably, is where I stand with this. How do you, how do you? What's your take on all of this?

0:22:02 - Amanda Silberling
To use the Internet parlance. It feels very like the girls are fighting.

0:22:09 - Mikah Sargent
The girls are fighting.

0:22:10 - Amanda Silberling
Yes, are fighting. Yes, um, I don't know. I mean, I think something that gets overlooked here is that this conflict, more so than anything, is impacting people that build websites using these tools, which is a lot of people, and the sort of like tech squabbles that then make normal people have to like, reckon with this is a little uh, it's a little off putting.

0:22:40 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, yeah, I agree. I just um, I think, when it comes to, when it comes to these individual tools, it makes me wonder, not even wonder, it makes me feel for the other kind of larger companies out there that have not necessarily equal stake as WP Engine. But who is Automatic, aka Matt Mullenweg, going to go after next? And we can't forget too that over time Automatic has become kind of a big company.

0:23:13 - Amanda Silberling
Yeah.

0:23:14 - Mikah Sargent
Not only are they WordPress, they're also Day One, the journal. They're Long Reads. They're Beeper, which is the messaging platform. They're WooCommerce, which is a commerce platform. They're Pocket Casts, the podcasts app. They're NewsPack, which is a commerce platform. Their Pocket Casts, the podcasts app. Their News Pack, which is a tool for publishing stuff. Their Tumblr, which, of course, is the social media site that has all but died but still is out there. They are Akismet, which is a spam filter. They are and they are Gravatar, which is a tool that some websites use to help kind of create a global avatar. And these tools.

I especially think of something like Akismet, where, if you've got a spam filter tool and you suddenly don't like a service that's out there that could otherwise reach people, what happens when you start filtering out things that you don't want to have attention? Or if, on Tumblr, a company comes along and wants to advertise on that platform and you don't want that company there? You know you can start to make these different changes. Or in a podcasts app, what if you started to get rid or not let be displayed podcasts that are about using WP Engine, for example, to create your next website? Now, I want to be clear that those are. None of that is the case. These are just examples of what it means when you have that much control and that you're not this like small company that is.

You know, woe is me. These places are taking advantage, etc. Etc. Etc. These places are taking advantage, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. That is the part that I'm more on WP Engine's side, so to speak, because it feels like you just don't want to be on the side of the group or the person who is making these wide sweeping rules over a large part of the internet. And that's where I find it interesting that you know the automatic is saying you got to wait for discovery, because once discovery comes about, we've got this. And I know they can't be like, oh, we're going to lose, they've got to be positive about it, but it's just. I am curious to see where this is going to go, is what it boils down to. I think that it's going to be fascinating watching what precedent potentially gets set here and what that does when it comes to this not small portion of the internet, particularly in the US.

0:26:13 - Amanda Silberling
Yeah, I think it's a little hard to pit Automatic as this small open source warrior, given I mean how you pointed out that this is a really big company now, and also not to do ad hominem. But Matt Mullenweg came to disrupt and he was wearing a $240,000 watch.

0:26:43 - Mikah Sargent
Holy Okay.

0:26:43 - Amanda Silberling
So that's what I have to contribute to this.

0:26:45 - Mikah Sargent
Thank you for contributing that to this.

0:26:48 - Amanda Silberling
Yeah.

0:26:48 - Mikah Sargent
You know, take that for what you will. Listeners Take that for what you will. And if you hold up your wrist and that watch is on your wrist, Amanda, then I will applaud. That would be amazing. No, so thank you, Amanda Silberling, for being here with us today. If people would like to stay up to date with the stuff you are doing, where should they go to do that?

0:27:15 - Amanda Silberling
Normally when I do these outros I'm like unfortunately I'm still on X, but I think I finally have broken the habit. I'm pretty much only posting on Blue Sky now, which is Amandaomglol. Why you made that? You may ask why, and it's because I just have that URL for some reason, and I think it's fun.

0:27:38 - Mikah Sargent
It's fun, it is fun. Well, thank you so much, Amanda, and, uh, we'll see you next year.

0:27:45 - Amanda Silberling
Yeah, and we'll be a little less festive.

0:27:48 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, and we'll be a little less festive. Indeed, indeed. This is not glued to my head, so it will come off. All righty, everybody, it is time to take another break before we come back with a familiar face who had an exclusive time to talk about a new product slash project, slash service. Look, you'll see in a minute.

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And now we're back from the break and we are joined by a familiar face. It's Jason Howell. Hello Jason, hey. It's Jason Howell, hello Jason hey how's it going?

0:31:12 - Jason Howell
Just you know, wearing very dated face computer architecture on my head right now. Don't worry about this thing, it's Google Glass, you know.

0:31:20 - Mikah Sargent
I feel like it could be coming back into style. I think if I saw one of those today and I never heard about Google Glass, I would feel a little bit more like oh, that's probably just.

0:31:29 - Jason Howell
You know, some headset, that people wear these days, it doesn't seem as out of place as maybe it once did. Yeah, and I think that's one of the things that I kind of one of the many things that I came away from this whole Android XR experience which we're going to talk about with, which is how far we've come from Google Glass, you know, more than a decade ago, when it was really I think history has shown this was ahead of its time, and now it's paved the way for things that are a lot more normalized now and still very cool.

0:32:01 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah absolutely so. This is the part where you get a moment to brag because you got to be a part of a pretty exclusive experience. Can you tell us about what that is?

0:32:15 - Jason Howell
Yeah, well, google unveiled just this morning Android XR, which is its new platform, built around Android and with Gemini AI at the core. They said it's their first OS built with Gemini, kind of from the ground level, and they're launching that to essentially do or hopefully, but from their perspective do for extended reality devices like VR and wearable glasses and that sort of stuff, what they did for smartphones with Android more than a decade and a half ago. And Google reached out to me last week and said hey, we'd love to invite you down to Mountain View to try out our prototypes. You can't shoot any video or take any pictures of your experience, but you can hang out with the execs that made this stuff and check it out, and I spent like an hour and 15 minutes going through all of their hardware and I felt very special. Mike, let me just say that.

0:33:16 - Mikah Sargent
That is very cool. Yeah, so with Android XR. I think it represents Google's renewed commitment to XR. After you know, we've got Google Glass, we've got Daydream VR. How does this approach differ from those earlier efforts? I think without getting too much into the Gemini AI just yet.

0:33:31 - Jason Howell
Yeah, I mean, that is really a big key part of it is this moment that we're in in AI and this being a really wonderful kind of conduit to kind of bring that into the experience. But you know, I think a lot of people are going to have the knee-jerk reaction of oh great, google's launching this next thing. You know, start the timer until it's gone.

But I kind of feel like this is a little different Daydream. Yes was a VR platform that Google really worked on for maybe three years. It was also very early into this VR resurgence when we saw Oculus kind of excel and become the MetaQuest and everything. The landscape has kind of proven itself a little bit more at this point and I think what Google has done here is they've recognized that there is yet another kind of field of technology that they can potentially get a lot of support a lot of manufacturers who are thinking about creating these different headsets and we're not just talking VR, we're talking, you know, wearable glasses and other form factors that we haven't even really seen yet.

Why not give them an OS that is tailor made for that specific thing? We've already got Android and I think really they're very motivated around this right now because more and more it seems like the benefits of artificial intelligence and the benefits and experience of virtual reality in my mind it's kind of like a chocolate and peanut butter thing. It's kind of like they complement each other so well. So it makes sense that Google would want to have its Gemini at the core of it.

0:35:06 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, in fact, just this morning I was Actually. No, we don't have a lot of time so I will not tell the story, but let's just say I used a little AI XR moment this morning and I thought, wow, this is one of those things. I took a photo of something and I asked AI for some help with this thing and it worked really well. But let's talk about Now we can talk about the integration of Gemini AI into Android XR. That's central to the functionality. So tell people what are the unique features that Gemini brings to the platform when it comes to interaction and that term that Apple definitely likes spatial computing, spatial face computer, spatial computing, spatial face computer.

0:35:54 - Jason Howell
I think what's different here is that Google has done a lot of work on the mobile phone, with Gemini, on creating this experience where, if I have a phone and I'm running Gemini, I can point it at a sign that's in a foreign language, I can say, hey, translate that for me and it'll do it on my phone. Now we're kind of and we can have that conversation in order to get there. Right Now. We're at this point to where wearables aren't always going to be like the Samsung Project Muhon device that is this large, you know, gargantuan VR headset. They can be, but they can also be the glasses that we just wear on a daily basis and that are have the ability, through that Gemini AI, to view the landscape, view our lives the way we do, and then create context and actionable items around that. So, for example, it creates memory. This is one one really interesting thing about project Astra, which are the glasses um approach that we saw at Google IO earlier this year.

I got to play around with. That is this idea of the fact that at one point, I was at a table with a bunch of bottles of liquor and I asked Gemini what could I make with this? And it gave me a couple of ideas and I had some follow-ups and then I went on my demo and then a little bit later I was like, hey, remember, back at the bottles of liquor. And then a little bit later I was like, hey, you know, remember back at the bottles of liquor, there was a book sitting next to that. What was the name of that book? And I hadn't mentioned anything about the book when I was over there.

But because it has that multimodality, because it's kind of seeing the life that I'm living while I'm using it, it knew the name of the book and it could tell me all about it. And it has that memory and once you start to think about that and how it can instruct you. The example that Google gave was hanging shelves, but in the demo it was this coffee maker how do I use this coffee maker? Are these the right coffee pods for this coffee maker? And it knows how to do all that and instruct you through it. And then you take that and instruct you through it and it just you know. And then you take that and put it into the glasses paradigm, where I think something like that is incredibly useful, and it just opens up a whole field of possibilities.

0:38:00 - Mikah Sargent
Definitely Now your demo included. As you mentioned here, the project MuHan, I guess, vr headset from Samsung. How did this hardware showcase the capabilities of Android XR, especially in terms of that visual fidelity and pass-through technology which of course makes it into XR versus AR VR?

0:38:23 - Jason Howell
Yeah, the whole fidelity aspect of things has been a hill that I've been willing to die on for many years at this point when it comes to VR, and I've encountered people that are like, no, that's not the most important and I'm not saying it's the most important, but I am saying it's pretty darn important. And when I put on the Project Muon goggles again remember, this is a prototype, it's not available. Probably the release version is going to be different. I was very struck by a few things by the context in which the pass-through camera was representing the real world in a way that my eyes didn't have to do any gymnastics to make or account for any distance differences between what I expect to see versus what I am. I never felt tenuous or unsafe when I was walking through it. It really felt like the representation of the world that I was seeing through the pass-through was the representation that I would see. It was maybe res down slightly, but hardly noticeable to my eyes at that moment. And then the fidelity of the virtual objects that interplay with it.

There was a moment where I had a window and I could move it behind a couch. I could actually move my hands forward and shift that window and it had a spatialized understanding of the room to know that that window is now behind the couch and how that window looks next to the couch. You know the sharpness, the quality. I saw this ARCore bird from a webpage and said you know, throw this into the room at real size. And it popped it up there and I was just kind of blown away by the level of detail and the sharpness. I really felt like I was looking at a high resolution monitor with my eyes and I didn't see that screen door effect. I didn't see the spacing of the pixels or anything like that, it just looked sharp and it and it was a sharpness that matched pretty closely to the sharpness of the room and I think that's a really big deal when you're talking about true virtualized uh experiences.

0:40:18 - Mikah Sargent
Absolutely. Yeah, that's um that, that that sharpness is so important, um, and I think makes all the difference there. Now you had features like multimodal controls, eye tracking, which of course is important, and circle to search for Android XR's versatility. Which of these features or maybe there's one that I haven't mentioned do you think sets it apart most from something like the Apple Vision Pro, that very, very expensive headset, or the MetaQuest?

0:40:49 - Jason Howell
I wish that I have had have had at this point by this point, and experience with Apple Vision Pro, because I'm sure that there's some real good kind of analogs to be drawn between what I've witnessed and the Apple Vision Pro. So put that on my list. If anyone wants to get that for me for Christmas, that would be great. But I mean, the eye tracking was really impressive. I will say that it was a short kind of IPD setup process, interpupillary distance it's a new phrase that I learned this week, you know, where it understands the distance between my two eyes. And then I had to do what felt like almost like an optometrist test, to kind of follow the dots, keeping my face in one place and following the dots with my eyes, in order to set up the eye tracking. And then from there, you know, I always thought that eye tracking would be kind of inconvenient because it's like not everything that I look at do I want to, you know, place an action on. But the way it worked is if there was an actionable item that I was looking at, it kind of would highlight that item slightly. It might grow a little bit or change a slight color, and then my hands were just resting in my lap and if I wanted to actually click that, I just pinched my pointer to my thumb. I didn't have to raise my hand to do it, it was just in my lap and I just pinched it and it accepted the click.

And again, this goes back to the multimodality of controls, which in this case, what that really tells me is again AI seems to be really good at bridging the gap. From a conversational standpoint of I don't know the proper syntax, but I know I want to ask a question and have you do something or look something up. In the case of controls it's very similar because you can kind of jump between these control mechanisms pretty easily. At one point I could you know, there was like a desk situation, a standing desk with a Bluetooth keyboard and a Bluetooth mouse. I could wiggle the mouse and it knows right away oh, you're in mouse mode now and it switches over. And then the second I hold my hand up, it's right back to hand control and it can bounce between these things, and so it just becomes very versatile from a user perspective. I don't have to think very much about it. It just kind of knows how to follow along with what I want and I thought that was pretty impressive.

0:42:59 - Mikah Sargent
That is nice, and it also feels to me like a really good extension of what Android is, where, if you have that familiarity of Android, then there are going to be some things that you kind of can latch onto and go oh right, this is the design language, I guess there, yeah, there.

Now the Android XR does adapt its UI and its processing workloads based on hardware, from VR headsets to smart glasses, which is, I think, really cool that it can be all those things. How does this flexibility impact its potential adoption across those different use cases?

0:43:41 - Jason Howell
Well, I mean, I think that flexibility is incredibly important, you know, because I definitely had questions about this If someone, if a developer, is developing for Android XR. You know, I saw two very different use cases. I saw the Project Wuhan, which is the fully immersive, you know, big goggle, a lot more space to fill with that information. And then I saw the Project Astra, which was the glasses with a small display in the center of my eye, which is actually very neat, which we'll talk about, and how, as a developer, do I gracefully scale between these and the way they put it, which I think makes a heck of a lot of sense, is they've done Google has done a lot of work making it so that developers who create apps for smartphones don't have to create an entirely new app for the tablet when they download an app from the Play Store, it knows what device you're using and therefore it can scale appropriately and in this case, it kind of does the same thing.

They were only really showing two different kind of physical use cases of this, the two different formats of wearable face computers, but there are inevitably going to be others that come along and, based on this kind of flexibility and how they scale it. I think it's going to make it a little bit easier, not knowing what a developer actually has to go through, but the way they put it, just a couple of lines of code. I always love that phrase.

0:45:05 - Mikah Sargent
Is it really just a couple of?

0:45:07 - Jason Howell
lines of code, but that's what they said. You know, just to be able to scale this and I'm sure there's a little bit of tweaking on how it looks when you're working with this many pixels versus that many pixels, but it should be pretty dynamic.

0:45:27 - Mikah Sargent
Nice, and then Google's use of technologies like Raxiom's micro-LED displays and split compute configuration. These wild words seem intriguing. How do these innovations contribute to the overall experience and feasibility of Android XR devices?

0:45:42 - Jason Howell
Well, Raxiom's micro-LED cold critical to what we saw with Project Astra, that is, the wearable glasses with a small display in the front. You know, I saw one with a monocular display and a binocular display, so a single and then a double one in both eyes. And I mean they were bright, they were clear, they were sharp and basically these Raxiom micro LEDs are just this tiny, incredibly bright, incredibly high-res displays that are embedded into the frame. And then they have this they're essentially projected into a wave guide down into the lens, into the actual lens receiving area that then reflects it into your eye and so you end up going from this tiny, tiny little dot to a full image, and I don't know how. I'm sure there are other ways to skin that cat, but I was really impressed.

This was an acquisition by Google a couple of years ago and there's been little news about it, how they were going to use that technology in augmented reality devices going forward. Here you go when you're talking about split compute configurations. This is really just the sense that that Project Astra isn't doing all of this processing in the glasses form factor itself. It's really meant to kind of connect to your phone and share the workload. So if I take a picture with those glasses, it's sending the picture through to my phone and it's immediately putting it onto Google Photos, or it's streaming my directions from my phone to my glasses. That's what kind of all that is, and ultimately, what does it make room for? It just allows for those glasses to be far more capable at that size because they can't get too big. People aren't going to want them if they're big and hulking and fat and all that kind of stuff, so offload it with the thing you already have in your pocket.

0:47:32 - Mikah Sargent
Absolutely Well. We are just about out of time, so I guess I'll ask you quickly if there's any last thing that you'd want to say about them in your time with them, and then, of course, give us the rundown on how people can find the work that you're doing.

0:47:45 - Jason Howell
Yeah, my last thing was another thing that really stood out for me, and I know that Apple Vision Pro does this, so I'd love to see how they do it. But Google's spatialization of flat 2D footage was really impressive, and even in Google Photos, essentially you're going to be able to go through all of your google photos library and see all of your pictures, all of your videos, fully spatialized thanks to ai, and I saw examples of it and I was blown away, like I would not have known that it wasn't created for 3d if if they hadn't told me so. It was really impressive, cool way to relive your memories and all that kind of stuff. As for the work that I've done, it's been a very busy day.

Um, I am now a contributor to Digital Trends, so consider me a writer, I guess, at this point also, so you can find my article on this at Digital Trends. You can also find a full video on my YouTube channel. It's youtubecom slash at Jason Howell, where I dive into the entire experience and basically describe it, because I don't have video to show you, but I walk through the entire experience and basically describe it, because I don't have video to show you, but I walk through the entire experience and tell you everything I did.

0:48:49 - Mikah Sargent
Awesome. Jason Howell, thank you so much for taking the time to join us today. Break a leg on your show today and congratulations on this exclusive. Very cool, very, very cool.

0:49:01 - Jason Howell
Thank you. Always so much fun to rejoin you guys again. Thank you, Mikah, Good to see you. Bye everybody. Good to see you too.

0:49:08 - Mikah Sargent
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All right back from the break, and I wanted to talk about now that it's actually officially and truly here and available to people who have the latest phones and some of the latest Macs and some of the latest iPads, etc. Apple intelligence has hit the masses. The only really big thing that's still not out there is the improved Siri, which is its own thing. That's coming later down the line. But what is here now is the set of graphic generation tools, so image playground, genmoji and some other tools like enhancements to the writing tools that we've already talked about using chat, gpt within the app and something called visual intelligence, which is a way to use the view that you have to kind of interact with an AI. So I want to talk about Genmoji and Image Playground and I thought I'd do that by showing you a little demo. So here I am in iMessage and I'm currently talking with a very real person called Mikah TWiT, which many of you who followed along for a long time know. That is my account that I use for when I am showing examples with iOS and stuff at TWiT message section.

Here at the bottom down in the bottom left-hand corner, I have my emoji button that lets me type an emoji. So if I tap on it, I can see the basic emoji that already exists smiley faces and faces and clouds and cowboys and whatnot and I'm going to go ahead and prompt the chat to give me an idea for an emoji that I should create, and while somebody is coming up with an idea, an appropriate idea, I'm going to go ahead and do one. So in the top right-hand corner there's a little button that lets you create emoji. But here's the thing you can also type into the describe an emoji section, which will let you do your basic search but will also let you do even more. And just in time, I'm going to type this in a rabbit waving, and so you'll notice that if I just typed in the word rabbit, it would have shown me a rabbit. That is already an emoji, but because this has detected that it is not currently an emoji, I have seen a prompt that pops up that says create new emoji. So I'm going to tap on that and up will pop this Genmoji section that is specifically trained on how Apple's emoji already look. Because it knows how Apple's emoji already look, it can use that to inform what its emoji look like.

Now this first one not going to lie, a little creepy, a little bit too anthropomorphic Looks like it might work out. It's just a little too swole. But the next one's a little cuter. There's one with a carrot and it presents four options. These Genmoji are generated on device and when you scroll through the four options, when you get to the final option, it will start to generate more for you. So let's say you get to the end and you're like okay, I'm still not loving these.

This one's an emoji that has overalls. If I scroll over again, then another one has been generated and it will start to generate another one. So I'm going to choose the one with the bow tie. So I tap on that and now I can send my emoji and as long as you and the person on the other end are both running the latest version of iOS, then they will appear as emoji to the other person. You can use them in the exact same way that you would other emoji and it will pop up. Now I can also type in down in this section if it wants to allow.

It Looks like it's kind of freezing up here. We'll have to force restart that. But I can type in another emoji that John suggested, which was a very happy chihuahua. So I can tap into this and we'll tap into the iMessage, we'll choose the emoji again and we'll go a very happy Chihuahua and create new emoji. So up will pop probably a very toothy Chihuahua. I wouldn't be surprised. Oh, actually that's not bad. So we've got a Chihuahua wrapped in a blanket, which is so cute. So I'm already choosing that one. I don't need to wait for one and we can send that off. Now.

This is one way of doing it. If we tap on the emoji and we do something like Mikah, then it will see that I've chosen a name. So I will choose me and make sure that that is the appearance that I want, and then we'll do Mikah holding a Chihuahua. Then it's going to start to generate that, so it knows that I want the person, Mikah, to be part of this emoji. And now it shows me holding a Chihuahua, and honestly, believably in my hand, because that is how I I hold Chihuahua. And there's a couple of options that pop up just as usual. And again, these are all on my device locally, so I can choose that one and then it saves these Genmoji after the fact. So there we go, up pops my little Chihuahua friend. Now that is one example of using the new features, but the other one that I want to show you is an app called Image Playground, and within Image Playground you can create images using any number of things. So I can have just a sort of specific prompt, or I can have a person kind of inform what the image is going to look like, or I can use an image that already exists, and we will take a look at that in just a moment. But I have one more break to take before we come back to take a look at Image Playground.

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All right back from the break and we're rounding things out with a look at Image Playground. So Image Playground is its own separate app and, as you can see, I have generated a number of images here, one of a certain individual who is wearing a party hat. It was recently Leo's birthday, and so I sent him an image of us both celebrating his birthday as per Apple's image playground, and I also generated some photos of my dogs using photos of my dogs. So here's one of Mizzy, photos of my dogs. So here's one of Mizzy and she this was using a photo from my photos library to make it. And then my dog, henry, and again using a photo from my photo library, so I can tap on the bottom on this plus button and I can describe an image.

So, let's say, a cup of coffee sitting on top of a laptop. Just freak people out so that prompt will pop up and it will try to generate this. So, as you can see, oh no, there's a cup of coffee that is sitting on top of a laptop. Again, these are generated locally on device. And so here we have a cup of coffee that is sitting on top of a laptop. Again, these are generated locally on device. And so here we have that cup of coffee.

This is actually a full-on, like cappuccino or latte or some sort, and then I can add some different themes or adjustments to it by tapping on show more to see some suggestions. So we could give it a theme, we could give costumes, especially if you're working with a person, accessories if you're working with a person, but we're working with places. So I'm going to put this in space. So it's a cup of coffee sitting on top of a laptop in space, and here you can see that that's going on in space. Now I'm going to go ahead and remove both of those prompts here and we're going to start fresh. But we're going to tap on the little icon in the bottom right that shows people, and I'm going to choose myself, and then I'm going to strictly use the tools at the bottom. So we'll give it a theme first, which is winter holidays, and then we will give it an accessory where, of course, I would be wearing a scarf, and we'll see what it comes up with.

So here's what Apple intelligence thinks. I look like wearing a gray scarf. Not bad, not terrible, I have to say. Got to give it props because the teeth used to be terrible and they have made some improvements to the teeth, so I think that looks a little bit better. Oh, there you go. Now you get some bad teeth. There's one that's like what in the world? So with this one, we'll choose, done and stick with it. So you can see it. It's, I like that. The snow is on the hair, which is pretty cool, but at any time you can go in and edit each of these photos and make changes there, and so we can go back to this and choose, edit and then go from here, using the prompts that we already created of Mikah Scarf and Winter Holidays, to see what else it comes up with. And we like this one where the teeth aren't quite as strange and it feels like the ears are more accurate. Now we can save that one to our home screen. So that is Image Playground and also Genmoji, which are just two of the tools.

As I mentioned, some of these tools already existed, like those writing tools. They just have been enhanced a little bit, and now they've opened up access to the chat GPT integration where, when you are writing something, a prompt, and you're asking for help, if it doesn't seem to know what it's supposed to say, it will ask you hey, do you want to use chat GPT to inform what's going on? You can log in with your chat GPT account if you have one. You don't have to. That will keep it more private, because it kind of creates an individual instance for that. So that's entirely up to you. Apple also says that some new capabilities are going to be available in the months to come. Like Siri, it's also going to gain what they call on-screen awareness, which, in doing so, will mean that there's going to be a bunch of new actions that Siri will be able to take on your behalf, so you can imagine being able to have it kind of open an app and interact with the app. It'll be even more that you can do like you could with shortcuts, and I think that that's really going to push things forward in a way that we haven't seen before. So I'm really excited to see how that all shapes up, and iOS today is going to be the great place to go to watch all of that, as well as, of course, hands on Mac to give you kind of a brief glimpse at what's possible right now with Image Playground and Genmoji. Of course, check out MacBreak Weekly, where they talked about these new tools as well and, I'm sure, provided some kind of look into things like private cloud compute and the other stuff that works in the background. With that, we've reached the end of this episode of Tech News Weekly.

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Be sure to check in this Sunday, as I host Hands on Tech every Sunday at 11 am Pacific time. Also, you can follow me online at Mikah Sargent on many social media network, or head to chihuahua.coffee that's C-H-I-H-U-A-H-U-A.coffee, where I've got links to the places I'm most active online. Tune in next week at 9am, because at 9am next Thursday I am hosting an early Crafting Corner, so those of you who live outside of the US, but basically anybody who wants to tune in at that earlier time, can do so. So 9am Pacific time, as opposed to our typical Wednesday night for Crafting Corner this month. So just a reminder about that for you club members. And once again, I thank you for listening to the show and telling your friends about the show, and I will catch you again next week for another episode of Tech News Weekly, before it will be on our little holiday break and back again on January 2nd. So one more episode, then a break, and then back on January 2nd. All right, everybody, it's time to say goodbye.