Tech Brew Ride Home - 06/01 – Meta Front-Runs The Quest 3

Starting point is 00:00:00 On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to the Tech meme right home for Thursday, June 1st, 23. I'm Brian McCullough today. Zuck tried to front run the Apple headset announcement this morning. Amazon paid some fines. Apple is testing two new high-end Macs.

Starting point is 00:00:46 Microsoft actually seems to be struggling when it comes to game development. And what happens to your crypto project if you can't get in touch with the one person in the project who has control of the keys? Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. So it seems like old Zuck thought it was important to be sort of like those post-ex. on message boards that only want to be first, right? First in the comments. After a countdown on his Instagram account overnight, Zuckerberg posted a tease of the $499 Quest 3XR headset, the one Mark Grumman got the hands-on with recently. More details about the headset are coming September 27th at a special event. This was just a tease, but the point is, Zuck got the headlines before

Starting point is 00:01:32 Apple's own special event next week. Quoting the entirety of the Instagram post. Introducing MetaQuest 3, the first mainstream headset with high-res, color-mixed reality. 40% thinner and more comfortable, better displays and resolution, next-gen Qualcomm chipset with 2X, the graphics performance, our most powerful headset yet coming this fall. Starting at $499, Quest 3 will be the best way to experience mixed and virtual reality in a standalone device. It'll be compatible with Quest 2's entire library, with more titles coming.

Starting point is 00:02:04 more details at our Connect conference on September 27th, end quote. Amazon agreed to pay $25 million to settle FTC and DOJ charges over the company keeping Alexa voice recordings and geolocation data collected from children over the years. They also agreed to pay $5.8 million to settle FTC allegations that the Ring home security system gave employees and third-party contractors full access to every customer video until 2017, quoting the New York Times. In a legal complaint filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington, regulators said the tech giant had kept young people's Alexa voice recordings indefinitely and used the data for business purposes like training its algorithm to understand children,

Starting point is 00:02:56 violating the Federal Children's Online Privacy Protection Act. That law known as COPA requires online services aimed at people younger than 13 to obtain parental consent before collecting a child's personal details and to allow parents to have their children's data deleted. But even after parents sought to delete their children's voice recordings, Amazon failed to delete transcripts of the children's conversations with Alexa from all its databases, regulators said, and quote, and quoting from Bloomberg. In a statement, Amazon said it disagreed with the FTC's claims and denies violating the law in either case. Quote, Ring promptly addressed these issues on its own years ago, well before the FTC began its inquiry, the company said on Alexa, the company consulted with the FTC to ensure its

Starting point is 00:03:40 program complied with children's privacy laws, but agreed to a change that will delete kids' profiles if they have been inactive for 18 months. The settlements mark the FTC's first actions against Amazon since Chair Elena Khan took over the agency in 2021. Khan has long had Amazon intercites writing a seminal paper as a law student about how to rethink the antitrust laws in connection with the online commerce platform. The FTC, which has been investigating Amazon, since 2019 is finalizing an antitrust lawsuit against Amazon over the company's control over its online marketplace. The agency opened a separate investigation into Amazon Prime in 2021, focused on whether the service violates consumer protection laws by making it difficult for customers to cancel.

Starting point is 00:04:21 The FTC said in its complaint that until 2017, quote, Ring gave every employee, as well as hundreds of Ukraine-based third-party contractors, full access to every customer video regardless of whether the employee or contractor actually needed that access to perform his or her job function, end quote. Mark German's sources are saying that Apple is currently testing two new high-end Macs, one with an M2 Max chip and the other with an unannounced M2 Ultra, offering 60 graphics cores and up to 192 gigabytes of RAM, quoting Bloomberg. The first desktop computer in testing is running an M2 Max processor with eight high-performance cores, components for the most demanding tasks, as well as four efficiency cores and 30 graphics cores. Those are the same

Starting point is 00:05:09 specifications featured in the MacBook Pro with the M2 Max. This particular machine also includes 96 gigabytes of memory and is running macOS 13.4, the version of the Mac operating system that was just released earlier this month. The second machine in testing has what is labeled as an M2 Ultra chip, which the company hasn't yet announced. That component, which sports 24 processing cores, doubles the performance of the M2 Max model. The chip, including includes 16 high-performance cores and eight efficiency cores, as well as 60 graphics cores. The company is testing it in configurations with 64 gigabytes, 128 gigabytes, and 192 gigabytes of memory. The M2 Ultra Chip will also include a more powerful option with as many as 76 graphics cores doubling

Starting point is 00:05:53 the 38-core maximum found in the current M2 Max chip, Bloomberg has reported. The M2 Ultra Chip was initially designed for a future version of the high-end Mac Pro desktop. that machine currently still runs Intel's chips, a holdout in Apple's three-year effort to use homegrown processors and its computers. Apple has been vague about when a new Mac Pro is coming. It said more than a year ago that an updated model would arrive another day. Inside Apple, the future Mac Pro with in-house chips has been labeled Mac 148. That suggests that the latest desktops in testing are different machines, such as new versions of the Mac Studio, which is currently offered in M1 Max and M1 Ultra configurations.

Starting point is 00:06:34 Bloomberg reported in April that two new Mac Studio updates are in the works. Apple has also been developing a 15-inch version of the MacBook Air, along with future iterations of the 13-inch MacBook Air and 15-inch model with a 3-nometer M3 processor. And it's planning a low-end 13-inch MacBook Pro and an iMac with the next-generation chip. Next week's Developer Expo kicks off Monday with the debut of Apple's much-anticipated mixed reality headset. the company also will unveil updates to the software that runs on the iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and Mac.

Starting point is 00:07:04 The presentation will include multiple new Mac models as well, end quote. Instagram has detailed in greater detail how they rank content in feed, stories, reels, and more, and also is testing more user controls, including an interested button for recommended posts, coding tech crunch. The new features were announced in a new blog post published by Instagram head Adam Mosseri regarding transparency around the app's algorithms and ranking processes. In the post, Mouseri addresses shadow banning, which is a term used to imply that a user's content is being hidden without a clear explanation.

Starting point is 00:07:44 Maseri says that users' concerns about shadow banning indicate that Instagram needs to do more work when it comes to helping people understand what's going on with their account. Last December, the company expanded its account status hub to make it easier for businesses and creators to understand if their content is eligible to be recommended to non-followers in places like explore reels and feed recommendations, or if their content violates the company's recommendations guidelines. Maseri says Instagram plans to add more transparency tools to account status in the future. The new blog post goes into detail about how content is ranked in different parts of the app. The app ranks your feed based on your activities, such as the posts you have liked, shared,

Starting point is 00:08:21 saved, or commented on. Ranking is also impacted based on how popular a post is and how interesting the person who posted it might be to you. Stories are ranked based on how often you view an account's stories and how often you engage with that account's stories, such as sending a like or a DM. In addition, the app looks at your relationship with the account overall and how likely you are to be connected as friends or family. The Explore page is ranked based on things like how popular a post seems to be, the types of posts you have interacted with, and your interactions with the person who posted the content. Reels are ranked based on factors like the reels you have liked and saved, the popularity of the reel, and if you have interacted with the

Starting point is 00:09:03 account, end quote. You know, one of the arguments surrounding this whole Microsoft Activision thing is buying size doesn't necessarily mean you buy success. For example, Microsoft paid $7.5 billion for the game studio Xenamax in 2020. And what did it get them? Got them Redfall, one of the worst reviewed games of 2023. And apparently the Xbox platform's latest misfire. Quoting Bloomberg. Red Fall, a multiplayer shooter set on a fictional Massachusetts island full of vampires, debuted on May 2nd and was promptly panned. Fans and critics slammed the games bugs and shortcomings. On the review aggregation website Metacritic, Redfall has earned a paltry 54 out of 100, ranking it among the year's worst-reviewed games. It seems there is an issue with every element.

Starting point is 00:09:57 Reviewer Tarik Musa wrote, in the end. Redfall feels unpolished, underdone, underwhelming, and uncomfortable, end quote. the high-profile dud extends the pain this year for Microsoft's Xbox Division, which has struggled to produce hits and watched as its planned $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard has gotten tripped up by US and UK regulators. Juist Van derrinen, a video game analyst and professor said Red Falls failures highlight the significant gap between Microsoft's lofty aspirations and its actual products, which also calls, quote, into question Microsoft's ability to establish long-term franchises

Starting point is 00:10:32 based on its own strength rather than buying them outright, end quote. But to the makers of Redfall, the mediocre reception was no big surprise. The project suffered from unclear direction, frequent attrition, and a perennial lack of staff, according to more than a dozen people who worked on the game speaking anonymously because they were not authorized to discuss it publicly. According to people familiar with the process, XanaMax was strongly urging developers at its subsidiaries to implement microtransactions, that is, recurring opportunities within games for players to spend real money, say, outfitting their character,

Starting point is 00:11:02 Although this wasn't an absolute mandate, several Xenamax franchises, such as Fallout, Doom, and Wolfenstein, would soon release new versions incorporating online multiplayer and monetization options. Arcane was also perpetually understaffed, said people familiar with its production. The studio's Austin office employed less than 100 people sufficient for a relatively small single-player game like Prey, but not enough to compete with multiplayer behemists like Fortnite and Destiny, which are developed by teams of hundreds. even additional support from Zenamax's Wisconsin-based Roundhouse studios and other outsourcing houses couldn't fill the gaps, they say. Morale at Arcane suffered. Veteran workers who weren't interested

Starting point is 00:11:40 in developing a multiplayer game left in droves. By the end of Red Falls development, roughly 70% of the Austin staff who had worked on Prey would no longer be at the company, according to people familiar, as well as a Bloomberg analysis of LinkedIn and Prey's credits, end quote. Crypto-bridging protocol multi-chain has suspended its services for multiple chains after being unable to contact its CEO to get server access during ongoing tech issues. Quoting the block, in the past two days, the multi-chain protocol has experienced multiple issues due to unforeseeable circumstances.

Starting point is 00:12:19 The team wrote in a message on its official Twitter account. The team has done everything possible to maintain the protocol running, but we are currently unable to contact CEO Zhao Jun and obtain the necessary server access for maintenance, end quote. As the block has previously reported, the protocol has been played by technology issues and dogged by rumors around the whereabouts of its team, namely that they had been arrested in China. The protocol's problems relate to its so-called routers, which enable the connections between chains. Two of the routers, router two and now router five, are impacted affecting the connection between chains like Kava, ZK Sync, and Polygon ZK-EVM. The latest issue disclosed today affects a series of

Starting point is 00:13:00 chains, the team said, which explained that, quote, this problem is beyond the team's current permissions and ability. In order to protect the interests of our users, we have decided to suspend the corresponding cross-chain service for the affected chain on the UI. Last week, the same issue happened on Router 2, the team wrote. As the blocks, Tim Copeland wrote this week, an admin in multi-chains Chinese telegram channel had said that users needed to wait for Zhao Jun to come back, end quote. Huh. Jason Lau asked on Twitter, what happened to being permissionless and decentralized. And quoting Parker Thompson on Twitter, to be fair, this is a problem for any company with immature access control for their servers.

Starting point is 00:13:39 These companies are just amateur hour. Though every crypto self-custody extremist who dies unexpectedly is going to orphan their stash too. Not your kid's keys, not your kid's coin, end quote. According to a study by evident, at some banks right now, about 40% of all open job roles appear to be AI-related. J.P. Morgan, for example, advertised 3,651 AI-related roles between February 2023 and April, quoting Bloomberg. Deutsche Bank is deploying so-called deep learning to analyze whether international private banking clients are too heavily invested in a particular asset and match individual customers with suitable funds, bonds, or shares, subject to regulatory compliance. Human advisors then pass on AI-generated recommendations. I'm a big fan of combining

Starting point is 00:14:32 artificial intelligence with human intelligence, said Kristen Ann Bremke, global lead on data solutions at Deutsche's International Private Bank. J.P. Morgan has similar plans. It filed a patent application in May for a chat GPT-like service to help investors select particular equities, according to a person familiar with the matter, who isn't authorized to speak publicly. The project is in its early stages. Morgan Stanley says it's allowing businesses from around the firm to run tests, quote, from the bottom up, using open source large language models, large AI networks trained using massive amounts of texts from all over the internet. In April, the bank said it had patented a model using AI and deep learning to interpret whether communications

Starting point is 00:15:10 from the Federal Reserve are hawkish or dovish. The goal is to detect the direction of monetary policy. Every business, trading desk, and investment group tries to understand it deeply. Yuri Nevemka, head of the bank's machine learning research group, said in an interview, it's in a safe and contained environment, and it's all within our walls, end quote. Finally today, ahead of WWDC next week, Apple is touting an analysis group study saying its App Store ecosystem generated $1.1 trillion last year, up 29% year over year. Apparently, $910 billion of that came from the sale of physical goods and services. Quoting TechCrunch, this $1.1 trillion breaks down as $910 billion in total billings and

Starting point is 00:15:58 sales from the sale of physical goods and services, $109 billion from in-app advertising, and 104 billion for digital goods and services. The figures are a sizable increase from 2019 data when Apple said the App Store had facilitated $519 billion in commerce, with then just $61 billion coming from digital goods and services. Apple also said iOS app developers have earned more than $320 billion on the App Store from 2008 to 2022, a jump from the $260 billion reported in 2021. While the broad totals by category are the main draw in today's report, Apple shared other figures related to the app stores growth as well. This included a slight uptick in the growth of developer billings and sales between 2021 and 2022 at 29% when the prior two years saw 27% growth.

Starting point is 00:16:45 Small developers' earnings growth, in particular, grew 71% between 2020 and 2022, outpacing large app developers, Apple noted. However, that figure is much more of a vanity metric as smaller developers are often pulling in smaller revenues, which are much easier to double or triple compared with larger developers' revenues. The company further broke down billings and sales by geography, noting U.S. developers' billings and sales increased by more than 80% since 2019, while in Europe, that figure was 116%. End quote. Nothing for you today. Talk to you tomorrow.

Tech Brew Ride Home - 06/01 – Meta Front-Runs The Quest 3

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