Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 01/19 – Vision Pro Pre-Order Begin With New Questions

Episode Date: January 19, 2024

Preorders for the Vision Pro begin, but huge new questions about partner support have arisen. Zuckerberg says he wants to open source AGI. You’re going to have to pay for those Galaxy AI features. Perplexity will power the rabbit r1. And, of course, the Weekend Longreads Suggestions. Sponsors: Nutrafol.com/men and promocode Ridehome Links: YouTube and Spotify Won’t Launch Apple Vision Pro Apps, Joining Netflix (Bloomberg) A Survey of Popular Apps Currently Compatible With Apple Vision Pro (MacStories) Mark Zuckerberg’s new goal is creating artificial general intelligence (The Verge) EU Commission Intends to Block Amazon’s iRobot Acquisition (WSJ) Samsung says Galaxy AI features will only be free ‘until the end of 2025’ (9to5Google) The rabbit r1 will use Perplexity AI’s tech to answer your queries (TechCrunch) Weekend Longreads Suggestions: How Twitch lost its way (Fast Company) Astronomers spotted something perplexing near the beginning of time (Vox) 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. Welcome to the Tech meme right home for Friday, January 19th, 2024. I'm Brian McCalla today. Pre-orders for the Vision Pro begin, but huge new questions about partner support have arisen. Zuckerberg says he wants to open-source AGI. You're going to have to pay for those Galaxy AI features. Perplexity will power the Rabbit R1,

and of course the weekend long-read suggestions. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. The Vision Pro went on sale for pre-order today. We learned now that there are 256 gigabyte, 512-gigabyte and 1-terabyte options and 16 gigabytes of unified memory. But I have to say the H-Ms keep on coming for this Vision Pro launch. Remember, I was asking, how come Apple couldn't get some developer to gin up something new, some new Whizbang app that wasn't possible before to give you a sort of,

this is what you can do that you couldn't do before to launch with? Fine, that didn't happen. Why didn't they get one of their partners like Disney to do something special, some new show or movie? fine, that didn't happen, and now it's turning out that they couldn't even cajole any of the usual suspects into creating native apps for this thing. Mark German and Ashley Carman are reporting that YouTube and Spotify are not planning to launch a native Apple Vision Pro app or even allow their iPad apps to run on the platform. Remember, all you have to do is tweak your existing iPad app and it will work in Vision OS. If you don't even do that, then all you're left with is people browsing to your service on a way.

website. Quoting Bloomberg. YouTube like Netflix is recommending that customers use a web browser if they want to see its content. Quote, YouTube users will be able to use YouTube and Safari on the Vision Pro at launch. Spotify also isn't currently planning a new app for VisionOS, the Vision Pro's operating system, and doesn't expect to enable its iPad app to run on the device when it launches either, according to a person familiar with the matter. But the music service will still likely work from a web browser. The Vision Pro will include access to Apple's apps for music and podcasts, which compete with Spotify's offerings, but getting snubbed by Netflix, Spotify, and YouTube, means that the most popular streaming apps won't be available when the headset launches on

February 2nd. Apple has largely marketed the device as a platform for video games and other entertainment, end quote. Yeah, that's sort of my point. If you have an iPad app in the App Store right now, it will appear in the Vision Pro Store automatically. You don't have to lift a finger. You have to go to the trouble to opt out in order to not appear. So it's interesting that all those companies are opting out. Something, something YouTube being on the first iPhone was key to showing people what mobile computing could do. And Netflix is a company who literally built itself by making sure they were available on every possible device in the world. When they want to be there, and if Apple is selling this device, at least at first, as a new way,

to immerse yourself in visual content. Shouldn't they have moved heaven and earth to get Netflix to be there? Over at Mac's stories, John Voorhees used App Store API endpoints to see what apps will have Vision Pro support at launch. And while Amazon Prime Video is there, Peacock, Disney Plus, Telegram, Reddit, Discord, and the NBA, Temu, Uber Eats are all there. None of them have native apps. That means all those apps elected just to have their iPad apps show up. Those that did not. And again, this means they proactively declined to participate, include YouTube and Spotify, as mentioned, but also Instagram, Facebook, The New York Times, NFL, Amazon for shopping, and Google's productivity stuff, like Gmail. So you cannot natively check your Gmail on the Vision

Pro at launch, unless I'm misunderstanding, you'll have to log in via the Safari web browser. On John's list there, there's not a single major partner that, at least at the time of this recording, has agreed to make a native app for the Vision Pro, not a one. What does this say either about everybody's expectations for this launch or maybe the current state of their relationship with Apple? Caviot being, anyone could flip a switch and move from compatibility mode to native app at any time. Apple has tried to make that easy. You'd expect Disney to do that with Disney Plus at least soon, right? Seriously asking what's going on here.

Yes, yes, they still swear they're serious about the Metaverse, but Meta also wants you to know they're just as serious about AI. Mark Zuckerberg says meta wants to build and open source artificial general intelligence. Meta will own more than 340,000 H100 GPUs by the end of 2024. So he wants you to know, Meta believes it can outrun OpenAI to AGI. We've come to this view that in order to build the products that we want to build, we need to build for general intelligence, Zuckerberg told Alex Heath in an exclusive interview. I think that's important to convey because a lot of the best researchers want to work on the more ambitious problems, end quote. Now quoting Alex Heath. Here Zuckerberg is saying the quiet part

out loud. The battle for AI talent has never been more fierce, with every company in the space vying for an extremely small pool of researchers and engineers. Those with the needed expertise can command eye-popping compensation packages to the tune of over $1 million a year. CEOs like Zuckerberg are routinely pulled in to try to win over a key recruit or keep a researcher from defecting to a competitor. Meta is training Lama 3 now. it will have code-generating capabilities, Zuckerberg says. Like Google's new Gemini model, another focus is on more advanced reasoning and planning abilities. Lama 2 wasn't an industry leading model, but it was the best open source model, Zuckerberg says. With Lama 3 and beyond,

our ambition is to build things that are at the state of the art and eventually the leading models in the industry. Without naming names, he contrasts met his approach to that of open AIs, which began with the intention of open sourcing its models, but has become increasingly less transparent. There were all these companies that used to be open, used to publish all their work, and used to talk about how they were going to open source all their work. I think you see the dynamic of people just realizing, hey, this is going to be a really valuable thing. Let's not share it, end quote. While Sam Altman and others espouse the safety benefits of a more closed approach to AI development, Zuckerberg sees a shrewd business play. Meanwhile, the models that have been deployed

so far have yet to cause catastrophic damage, he argues. The biggest companies that started off with the biggest leads are also in a lot of cases the ones calling the most for saying you need to put in place all these guardrails on how everyone else builds AI, he tells me. I'm sure some of them are legitimately concerned about safety, but it's a hell of a thing how much it lines up with the strategy, end quote. There's another wrinkle. If AGI is ever achieved at meta, the call to open source it or not is ultimately Zuckerberg's, and he's not ready to commit either way. Quote, for as long as it makes sense and is the safe and responsible thing to do, then I think we will generally want to leaned towards open source, he says. Obviously, you don't want to be locked into doing something

because you said you would, end quote. Sources are telling the journal that the European Union's competition watchdog intends to block Amazon's $1.7 billion bid to purchase iRobot. Irobot stock dropped around 40% after hours on this news, quoting the journal. Competition officials from the European Commission, the block's executive body met Thursday with representatives from Amazon to discuss the deal. One of those people said, Amazon was told during the meeting. that the deal was likely to be rejected, the person said. Amazon declined to comment. The plan to reject the deal would still need formal approval from the Commission's 27 top political leaders before a

final decision can be issued. Historically, that process is unlikely to overrule a recommendation from the Block's Competition Commissioner Margaret Vestager. The Commission has a February 14th deadline for its final decision. The European Commission formally raised concerns about the deal in November, saying it could restrict competition in the market for robot vacuum cleaners. Amazon might have the ability and incentive to foreclose iRobot's rivals by preventing them from selling their products on the company's marketplace or by limiting their access, the commission said. Amazon missed a deadline last week for submitting so-called remedies or commitments to the commission to try to address the competition watchdog's concerns. The deal was cleared by UK competition

regulators in June. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has been investigating the acquisition according to some of the people, end quote. Heads up those of you who watch the Galaxy S-24 event with me and are thinking of ordering one for all of the Galaxy AI goodness they showed off, because apparently in the footnotes of the Galaxy S-24, S-24 plus, and S-24 Ultra Online listings, Samsung says that Galaxy AI features will be free only until the end of 2025, which raises the question of what does not free mean exactly? Quoting 9 to 5 Google, There's no word on how much these features might cost or if all features would require a subscription.

Notably, most of Samsung's AI suite runs through the cloud. The translation features and some others work fully on device, but some of the more impressive demos like generative edit and transcription run through the cloud off of Google's Gemini models. This detail leaked prior to Samsung's announcement, and in a poll we ran, over 70% of 9 to 5 Google readers said they'd never pay extra for AI features on their phone. Samsung's lack of clarity around this, however, feels reminiscent. of a service that Google said would be paid as well, but still operates for free. When Google launched the Nest Hub second-generation sleep sensing feature, it said that it would require a subscription at a

later date, but years later, no such subscription exists, end quote. If you ordered a Rabbit R1, that AI hardware device from CES, I do have answers for you. The Rabbit R1 will use Perplexity AI's models under the hood. We're thrilled to announce our partnership with Rabbit Perplexity's official account tweeted, together we are introducing real-time precise answers to Rabbit R1, seamlessly powered by our cutting edge PPLX online LLM API, free from any knowledge cutoffs. Plus, for the first 100,000 Rabbit R1 purchases were including a free year of Perplexity Pro, end quote. Rabbit, of course, already sold out 50,000 devices and pre-orders, and yesterday it opened pre-orders for the next production batch of another 50,000 units. Rabbit said that if you live in the EU or UK,

you will receive your rabbit by the end of July if you order from this latest batch. Quoting TechCrunch on Perplexity. Perplexity uses a mix of its own AI model, as well as third-party models, Google's Gemini, Mistress 7B, Anthropics Claude 2.1, and OpenAIs GPD4, to get accurate information from the web. The tool has a chatbot interface on the web and mobile apps to let users ask questions in natural language. While Perplexity's solution is different than traditional search engines, it competes with Google's Bard and Microsoft's co-pilot along with U. in the Gen A.I. Search space. Earlier this month, Perplexity AI raised $73.6 million

in investment at a $520 million valuation, led by IVP with additional investments from NIA, Databricks Ventures, NVIDIA, former Twitter VP Elad Gill, Shopify CEO Toby Lutki, ex-Git Hub, CEO, Nat Friedman, Vursell founder, Guillermo Rauch, and Jeff Bezos. Time for the weekend long read suggestions. Time to start seriously worrying about Twitch, I guess, They laid off fully 35% of staff this month, you might recall, and there's been ongoing turmoil with creators and with the community itself. Then there were the stories about how live streaming is so expensive that even being under the Amazon and AWS umbrella, Twitch can't make it pay. Could Twitch fumble the lead in live streaming? Fast Company takes a look at how Twitch lost its way.

In trying to figure out where things went wrong, I spoke to Twitch employees past and present to find out. They painted a picture of a company that has never quite understood what its users wanted, caught in a constant cycle of trying to break into the mainstream, failing, and circling back to a core gamer demographic, a company that fumbled its biggest opportunities, alienated its top creators and allowed itself to be outpaced by its competitors. It was exactly what the world needed during COVID lockdowns, but as that unique period of time passed, so did the demand for it, a longtime employee says. There's a possibility this month's layoffs could help ease the platform's freefall, but there's a long road through the wilderness ahead. even for a company that essentially invented the entire industry it's now fighting to survive in, Twitch declined to comment on the record, end quote. And then from Vox, astronomers using the new James Webb Space Telescope have found something unusual at the edge of the universe, and thus, at the beginning of time. There are galaxies out there that shouldn't be there. This could upend science's entire model of cosmology, quoting from Vox.

Not long after the James Webb Space Telescope came online and 2022, astronomers' jaws hit the floor. I remember thinking, this just can't be right, says Mike Boylan Colchin, a University of Texas-Austin astronomer. The observations he's referring to would, to you and me, seem like little smudgy red blobs among a field of other smudges and blobs, but in his eyes, they represented a potential challenge to the story scientists have painstakingly constructed about the formative years of our universe. That is, sometime after the Big Bang around 12-plus billion years ago, when the universe went from a dark, diffuse place full of gas, and to a light-filled universe populated by stars and galaxies.

This is the era that laid the foundation for everything to come, including our solar system and you and me. Scientists had some theories about what happened during this crucial period, but the new telescope put them to the test by observing regions of space humans have never seen before. And if the observations were correct, Boilin-Kulchen thought, quote, everything we know about cosmology is wrong at some level. Cosmology is the study of how our universe evolved from the earliest times onward, so the potential to be wrong about it, quote,

was pretty unpalatable, he says. Boyland Colchin was a gog, but not alone in his thoughts. I cannot even get across how mind-boggling the past year has been of looking at JWST data, says Caitlin Casey, also an astronomer at UT Austin. We have been seeing all sorts of wild, wild things in the early universe. I've talked to several astronomers about these findings and not all agree that they will lead to a wholesale rewriting of the history of time, at least not until more observations are made and more follow-up work is done. But most agreed there's something big to be learned here. And it is, At these moments in science, when observations don't match predictions, that are the exciting ones. They often pave the way for fundamental new insights and the more unexplainable, the more exciting they are, end quote. No weekend bonus episodes for you this weekend, but as I've been saying, we've got some big interviews coming down the pike, and they'll start coming next weekend. Talk to you on Monday.