Tech Brew Ride Home - (BNS) Top 10 Tech Stories Of 2024 (On The Newsworthy Podcast)

Episode Date: December 14, 2024

Brian on The Newsworthy podcast with Erica Mandy. Find out more about the show here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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. Today is Saturday, December 14th. It's that time to reflect on the year that was and look ahead at what to expect next. And today, we're doing exactly that for tech. We're specifically going to talk about the 10 biggest technology-related stories of 2024. We've covered them all during our daily roundups right here on the Newsworthy, but not as in-depth as Brian McCola has. He's the host of the TechMeme Ride Home podcast, so I've asked him to help look back at the year and break it all down for us. His podcast covers all of Silicon Valley's news in a 15-minute daily roundup. He's also the co-founder of Ride Home Media and the author of how the internet happened from Netscape to the iPhone. He lays out 10 of the most influential headlines this year in no particular order.

And he shares at the end of today's episode, which he thinks is probably the most important tech story of 2024 and what to expect next in 2025. Welcome, welcome to the Newsworthy special edition Saturday when we sit down with a different expert or celebrity every Saturday to talk about something in the news. Don't forget to tune in every Monday through Friday for our regular episodes where we provide all the day's news in 10 minutes. I'm Erica Mandy. It's now time for today's special edition Saturday. Brian McCola, thank you so much for joining us here on the Newsworthy. Erica, thanks for having me back again. Okay, so let's dive into these top 10 most important tech stories of the year. Jump in with one of them.

Let's start with the Apple Vision Pro. Remember that at the beginning of the year? Not really. Right, well, but in January, February, February, that was all anyone was talking about, and then it sort of sunk like a stone. We believe they maybe sold less than 500,000 units. What's even more bizarre about the Apple Vision Pro is that Apple itself hasn't done very much to sort of juice interest in it. So it's not only that it was a hyped product that sort of did not hit the market well, but Apple itself seems to not really

know where to go with it, which actually leads me to story. number two, because if you think of what the Vision Pro is, or what Apple is trying to do is put a computer on your face. But the second big story that I want to point out is that there is a new product category coming that is just smart glasses. As opposed to Apple's strategy of put a computer on my face, what if you just had glasses that were maybe the size and weight of normal glasses but can do smart things? You have meta's ray bands that are selling way more like millions of units as opposed to less than a half a million for the Vision Pro. And you have startups almost every day now creating new smart glasses. What's the thing that's enabling this? AI, because you don't need,

you don't need to put a huge computer in it. You don't need to put a huge chip in it. You just need a camera and like a link to a phone and an AI system. And suddenly you can be out in the world and the AI can be giving you information about your world. I have a feeling that AI is going to weave itself in a lot of these different stories throughout 2024. Yes. The AI boom. continues a pace in terms of the amount of investments by venture capitalists, the spending by incumbents, the metas, the Amazon's, the Googles, the apples, they're all spending tens of billions of dollars a quarter to spin up new language models, to build new data centers and stuff, to serve these AI products. So the overarching story about AI this year is there's tons of

money flooding in here. There's tons of excitement and interest. Is there a business here yet? we haven't really, we've seen a lot of breakthrough products like ChatGPT, but there's not been five or six companies that all of a sudden, you know, are making tons of money, at least on the consumer side. And then the final part of that piece is Nvidia becoming the most valuable company in the world, because that is directly related to the AI boom. They're essentially the only game in town for the Silicon that allows AI to happen. And so it's like someone invented the internal combustion engine and only one company had access to oil. InVidia is the most valuable company in the world right now because they're essentially

the only game in town. Do you expect that to change? Well, item number four is also AI-related, and it's the potential that people have been talking about, especially the last six months of the year, that AI might be hitting a theoretical wall. The thinking has been, well, just make larger models and larger models and larger models, but there is a lot of talk in the industry now that this generation of the technology might be reaching its limits and either a, some new model has to come out, some new science around AI has to come out, or people will have to just build the biggest models possible. But at this point, we're talking about every time you build a new model, it's a billion dollars. And it could be $100 billion within a couple years.

And I'm curious if one of your stories is kind of the nuclear power that all of these tech companies are investing in now because you need more data centers. Yes, everybody is dusting off the blueprints for nuclear power plants. They just need energy. that's also the problem with this AI tech is that if there's not huge improvements in terms of productivity and profitability, it's so expensive not only to train the models, but then to continue to run them that at some point, you know, the math has to catch up, profitability has to catch up, and people are wondering if it's going to get there. So what are we on five? Yes, five. We might look back at 2024 as the inflection point for when self-driving started to scale up and started to hit a

flywheel. And I'm going to say that it's basically Waymo that's doing this. But early in the year, Waymo opened up its rides, it's completely self-drivingless rides to San Francisco, to larger and larger areas. Then they did it to huge areas in Los Angeles. And now they're going to Miami next year. And so the idea here is like the franchise model in restaurants, they've hit some sort of a looking glass moment where now that they've reached the scale, all they have to do is spin up a new territory, a new territory. And so we might look back five years from now as like, yeah, that 2024 was the year that self-driving, at least for Waymo, first started to really hit scale. Did it take longer than expected? Because it felt like that watching it from, you know, the outside.

100%. Everyone, I used to joke on the show all the time. It was a running gag about Brian's bet about we're going to have self-driving cars by 2020. And I used to say that on the show regularly, like, who's going to take me up on this $10,000 bet that I'm not going to be able to get a burrito delivered to me by a self-driving car by 2020, much less take one to work. That's another thing about AI. We were talking about how AI might be hitting a theoretical wall writ large. But think of what's happened with self-driving, where it got 97% of the way there, but then that last 3% has taken a decade or more. It's the edge cases that are the hardest ones to do.

Okay, so number six. There have been several breakthroughs in quantum computing this year. and maybe even quantum computing itself is a little complicated to explain, but as simply as I can make it, traditional computing is binary, ones and zeros. By the nature of quantum physics, instead of having one answer yes or no, you can have a multitude of answers, so you can do computing like infinitesimally faster than traditional computing. Just this month, researchers did a breakthrough where they solved a problem that the most powerful supercomputer in the world today would take something like 19 quintillion years to solve. And that's longer than the universe has been around. And they did it in

five minutes. Now, this is not something that's going to show up on your doorstep anytime soon, but you're going to want to know that it's coming because there's two things. It could do the things like computing always says, well, cure cancer, do this and that. But also, once you have computing that powerful, you can do things like, oh, I don't know, break encryption, all encryption, the things that keep your bank safe, the things that keep your messaging safe. So if these breakthroughs in quantum computing happen, they could radically transform how computing and society functions. Similar to AI, as we've discussed many times. Exactly. Hugely potential, positive, and native at the same time. Number seven. I wrote down chip wars, but actually,

it's, it's tech wars. It's technology wars in general, where there's, There's, you know, the U.S. has been trying to withhold actual chips and chip technology from China. China is retaliating by withholding materials, rare earth elements and things like that. And now they're doing things like opening antitrust suits against Nvidia. Well, by the way, the U.S. prevented Huawei from doing business in the United States. So this has been going on for several years, but it's really ramping up this year and into next year. And with the incoming administration, I kind of don't really know if it's going to get worse or better or completely flip in a different direction. I really don't know.

But that's really shaping a lot of things geopolitically. Similarly, we've got the upcoming TikTok ban that if they don't sell by January in the new year, they're banned. And what is that going to look like? And China does not want TikTok to sell. China feels this personally is not the word. but it hurts their pride that they have one of the most valuable tech companies in the world. And the U.S. is basically saying, if you don't hand it over to us, we're going to shut it down. So it's a point of pride.

And so it's going beyond mere dollars and cents and even politics. It's getting emotional. What do you think is going to happen with that, by the way? I think that it will get banned. The ban runs out on the 19th of January. The inauguration day is January 20th. So I think it might be banned for one day and the incoming administration might just choose not to enforce it. Okay, what are we on? Number eight?

It's related to what we were just talking about. The incoming administration has championed being more tech friendly, more business friendly. One of the things that has hurt the tech industry over recent years is company's ability to buy other startups has been severely curtailed because it wouldn't pass regulatory muster. And so a lot of people think that that's back on the table, that, you know, a Google or an Amazon could buy startups. It'll, you know, be allowed by the DOJ or the FTC. At the same time, the incoming administration has vendettas against specific companies. So, for example, Google is going through an antitrust trial right now, which they've been found guilty. Maybe they've got, they feel like breaking up Google is something that politically for them seems palatable. because Trump and others in the incoming administration feel like that Google is biased against conservatives and things like that.

So I think a big story right now is tech preparing for what is coming in 2025, which is a complete change in U.S. regulation vis-a-vis technology, but we don't know how that's going to play out. But to get to number nine, one thing I know for sure the new administration is definitely opening the gates up wide to, is crypto. Crypto is ascendant. As you've heard, I'm sure, Bitcoin passed $100,000 a coin for the first time ever. Trump campaigned on being crypto-friendly. He's naming prominent people as, you know, crypto czars and how we're going to do a regulatory framework for being friendlier to crypto projects. Quick question on that. It's, you know, obvious people who already owned Bitcoin and other crypto are potentially making money and are feeling good about that. But what does all of what you said mean for kind of maybe the average person that doesn't already have some sort of crypto.

It's not like all the sudden Bitcoin is going to replace the dollar. The only thing I can say for sure is that it's a store of value right now. But Wall Street has embraced it as a store of value, like gold, like anything else. It's an asset that you can trade, that goes up and down. I think it seems like, and this is not investment advice. It seems like line only goes up if the regulatory doors are thrown open. All right. I think we only have one more to be our final big tech story. This is sort of a downer to end with, but the gaming industry had its worst year in decades this year. And by that, I mean hundreds of thousands of layoffs, but also you had huge games fail. There's all sorts of mergers and acquisitions happening, and that's coming from a place of

weakness, not strength. If you worked in the gaming industry, this was a bloodbath year. But also, like, we're going into the holiday season right now, and all the talk is about how there are no big games out there for anybody to put under their Christmas trees. Part of this is COVID hangover, because again, the gaming industry surged during COVID and maybe hired too much. But also, it's the cyclical nature of gaming. We're in between console cycles and just the shape of of the industry has been so severe that it's been a really terrible year. But, you know, what's coming next year? The new Grand Theft Auto. And expect that to be the only thing anybody's talking about for a month or two. All right. Looking back at everything we talked about,

what would you say was the most important of 2024? I would have to say the biggest story of the year by far was AI because it touched almost every corner of tech. You know, we're going to, we're running an experiment right now. The entire tech industry is, is pouring something like a fourth of its resources into developing AI right now. We'll know in two years, three years, whether that was like a huge boondoggle or this, again, was the year that everybody planted the seeds that three years from now, five years from now, we'll look back on and be like, those were the investments that laid the groundwork for the tech industry that probably would be around by the end of the decade.

And last one I want to bring up is just Elon Musk. And I mean, there's so much to talk about when it comes to him, but what stands out to you from this year? In the same way that AI is touching everything, Elon has his thumb in almost every pie we've talked about self-driving with Tesla. He has XAI, his own AI startup. You know, the back and forth between himself and Open AI and his grudge against them because he was a co-founder and was pushed out, essentially. His impact on the election? Impact on the election. Look, I don't think anyone could say anything other than Elon Musk is the most powerful person in the tech industry, probably the most powerful person the tech industry has ever had, a single person. He has multiple SpaceX. We haven't even talked about how they're the biggest player in that huge technology. And then there's the question of, is he maybe the most powerful person full stop in the United States of America right now? So we've kind of incorporated our look ahead throughout this conversation, but just any big picture thing you want to say about what to watch for, what you're expecting in 2025.

I do expect 2025 to be a good year for tech. We need to see for this AI excitement not to sort of cool and be thought of as a fad. We need to see other winners than Open AI because then it's just sort of, yeah, they were the one person that was able to get the biggest. we need to see smaller players. We need to see somebody that's an AI player that does the AI for legal and somebody that does AI for accounting. And we need to see vertical players win in this space. One final thought as we wrap up here. I wonder if social media will cool down next year because all of the back and forth of politics, it's not that it's been settled, but it seems to have been set for a period of time. And so I wonder if that will take away some of the urgency that people felt to do battle with each other online. I wonder if, and I'm not necessarily talking about trolls and bots, those will still exist. But I wonder if normal users will be kinder to each other online because the need for vitriol might be on pause for a little bit. Well, thank you so much to Brian McCola. Be sure to check out his daily podcast, TechMeme Ride Home,

and add it to your playlist to stay in the know with all things tech. And join us again on Monday. We catch you up on all the different news to know every weekday. Our motto is fast, fair, fun, so we're giving you a variety of news in about 10 minutes a day. It's fair and unbiased. And we keep it fun and friendly, so it's not just the doom and gloom stuff. Thanks so much for being here and listening today. We will be back on Monday.

Until then, have a great weekend.