Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 02/02 – Facebook’s Golden Age Is Now

Episode Date: February 2, 2024

A run down of some interesting details from Tech’s big earnings day yesterday. Rufus is Amazon’s AI-powered shopping assistant. The Browser Company continues to be the catalyst for me thinking about how AI is going to change the web. And, of course, the Weekend Longreads Suggestions. Sponsors: Nutrafol.com/men code: RIDEHOME Links: Amazon debuts ‘Rufus,’ an AI shopping assistant in its mobile app (TechCrunch) Cloudflare hacked using auth tokens stolen in Okta attack (BleepingComputer) The Browser Company Announces Act II for Arc: ‘The Browser That Browses For You’ (MacStories) The Arc browser is getting better bookmarks and search results, all thanks to AI (The Verge) Weekend Longreads Suggestions: AI Can Speed Drug Discovery. But Is It Really Better Than a Human? (Bloomberg) The scariest sound on TikTok (The Verge) The 150 Greatest Science Fiction Movies of All Time (Rolling Stone) LATE BLOOMER (Vanity Fair) 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, February 2nd, 2024. I'm Brian McCullough today. A rundown of some interesting details from tech's big earnings day yesterday. Rufus is Amazon's AI powered shopping assistant. The browser company

continues to be the catalyst for me thinking about how AI is going to change the web. And of course, the weekend long read suggestions. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Yesterday was a huge earnings day for tech companies, but not for any, wow, something really bad or something really good was reported reasons. Meta did good, but more on that in a second. No, this is all just a bunch of bits and pieces that the earnings revealed. For example, on Apple's earnings call, CFO Luca Mestry, revealed that the EU represents 7% of global app store revenue for Apple. So that gives you some context about their motivations to or to what degree to not comply with various EU regulations. Tim Cook said Apple does not intend to

license Massimo's blood oxygen detection patents to end the Apple Watch import ban. So they're digging their heels in there. But Cook also said that Apple is spending, quote, a tremendous amount of time and effort on AI features that the company plans to announce, quote, later this year. So start the hype engines for the WWDC of the AI era. We'll note that Amazon also reported earnings yesterday, but, you know, whatever. Stock up 5%, so they did good. But on to Meta, as I said, they did double plus good. Their stock is up more than 15% with the market cap back above $1 trillion for the first time in a while. Q4 revenue for Meta was up 25%. Net income was up 201% to $14 billion, and the daily active people number among their

family of apps was up 8% to $3.19 billion. Here's a crazy thing. They're still growing usage of their apps, even in North America, even now. Heck, more people are using Facebook every quarter, even in North America than they ever have. And people are becoming more active than they ever have on Facebook. Daily active users on Facebook are, I believe, at an all-time high. So if you like me, tend to think of Facebook as sort of a zombie legacy app long past its prime, I am here to tell you that in terms of pure raw numbers, this is Facebook's prime right now. More tidbits in Meadows' earnings call Zuckerberg said Apple's changes to comply with the EU's DMA are, quote, so onerous that he doubts any developer, including META, would adopt them. He also said that Threads is now bigger than

it was, even in its first wave of excitement and interest peak earlier in the summer, 130 million monthly active users, according to Zuck. And it is, in his words, quote, growing steadily. Meta will also begin paying a 50 cent per share dividend for the first time and authorized a $50 billion share buyback. Also, remember what I said about meta being uniquely positioned for this AI moment, perhaps? Also on the earnings call, Zuck said meta estimates its public user data available for it to train AI on is greater than the internet's common crawl data set, which is over six petabytes. And finally, the Metaverse, it's still a thing, still quite a thing, if you look at raw numbers. Meta's reality labs unit had revenue of $1 billion

in Q4, but had a record operating loss of 4.65 billion as well. That means that historically, the Metaverse Division has now lost over $42 billion just since the end of 2020. 42 billion. Quoting the great Peter Kafka, meta in 2022, we are going to spend so much money on the Metaverse. Wall Street in 2022, boo! Meta now? We just lost $16 billion on the Metaverse and we're going to lose more money next year. Wall Street now? Amazon has launched Rufus, an AI-powered shopping assistant trained on its product catalog and information from around the web.

It's launched it into beta for some U.S. customers, quoting TechCrunch. The company tells TechCrunch it built a new internal LLM specialized for shopping to power this experience and then trained it on its data and quote publicly available data from across the web. It did not say if that data included other publicly available retail websites, however. For example, Amazon suggests a customer in the market for running shoes could ask Rufus questions like what to consider when buying a running shoe. What are the differences between trail and road running shoes? Or are these durable? Customers researching other products could also ask things like what to consider when buying headphones, what to consider when detailing my car at home.

What are clean beauty products? What do I need for cold weather golf and more? Or you can simply tell Rufus something you want to do like, I want to start an indoor garden. The AI can also help with product comparisons or make recommendations if you ask things like what are good gifts for Valentine's Day or what are the best dinosaur toys for a five-year-old. After Rufus answers, the customer can continue to browse through more refined results. In other words, you can chat with the AI assistant, much as you do with other consumer-facing AI chatbots like OpenAIs chat GPT or Google's Bard, the latter of which also includes shopping integrations. Rufus will initially be available in beta to select customers in the U.S. within the Amazon mobile app,

where it's launched by tapping on a new button in the bottom navigation bar. Customers can both type or speak their questions into the AI's chat dialogue box that appears at the bottom of the screen. When finished, customers can return to the Amazon app by swiping down on their screen to dismiss the chat dialogue box back to the bottom of the screen, end quote. Cloudflare says it was hacked in November of 2023 by a suspected nation. state attacker who used auth tokens stolen in Octa's breach from October of 2023. Quoting bleeping computer.

The threat actor first gained access to Cloudflare's self-hosted Atlassian server on November 14th and then access to the company's confluence and Jira systems following a reconnaissance stage. To access its systems, the attackers used one access token and three service account credentials stolen during a previous compromise

link to Octus Breach from October. That Cloudflare failed to rotate out of thousands were leaked during the Octa compromise. Cloudflare detected the malicious activity on November 23rd, severed the hackers' access in the morning of November 24th, and its cybersecurity forensic specialist began investigating the incident three days later on November 26. While addressing the incident, Cloudflare's staff rotated all production credentials over 5,000 unique ones, physically segmented test and staging systems, performed forensic triage on 4,893 systems, re-imaged and rebooted all systems on the company's global.

network, including all Atlassian servers, Jira, Confluence, and Bitbucket, and machines accessed by the attacker. Remediation efforts ended almost one month ago on January 5th, but the company says that its staff is still working on software hardening, as well as credential and vulnerability management. The company says that this breach did not impact Cloudflare, customer data, or systems. Its services, global network systems, or configuration, were also unaffected, end quote. If you know what Cloudflare does, then you know why it's a big deal that a nation-state actor was trying to get into them. The browser company continues to be one of the most interesting startups we cover, I think,

and no, again, I am not an investor, full disclosure. But the startup behind the ARC web browser and more recently ARC search announced what they called Act 2 of their company today. In fact, what they're calling a new category of software. They did a bit of Steve Jobs announcing the iPhone callback. It's a web browser, a search engine, and even web pages themselves, all in one. Basically, they continue to do this mission of, you tell Arc what to do, and it will go out on the internet and do it for you. The interesting new features they announced included what they're

calling instant links for when you know exactly what you want, quoting the verge. The new Instant Links feature is a way to use AI to skip a search engine. If you're looking for something specific like that epic blank space performance from Taylor Swift's Sydney stop on the 1989 World Tour, you can just ask Arc's AI bot. for it, and it'll dump that link in an open tab into your sidebar. The browser company also suggests grabbing a bunch of product reviews for your comparison or some good-sounding recipes. Anytime you might go to Google and click the first eight links, Arc can just dump those links into your tabbar, end quote, and quoting Mac Stories. This feature uses large language

models as Arc goes out and browses for you to return the results. But a critical point here is that at no point does a search engine appear on screen, effectively cutting someone like Google out of the picture. How accurate this feature can be remains to be seen, but if it does what it promises, it should make finding things you want much quicker, end quote. That's available today on the arc browser. The next new thing isn't coming until the 15th, but it's something they called live folders. With this, it's almost like they're bringing back RSS feeds and Google Reader and everything from 2008. Essentially, these are live data streams that live in the sidebar of your browser.

So if I want to get updated every time there's news on, say, the browser company, there's a Google Alert style section you can go to to catch up. These can even be actual pings. In the video, they mentioned that if you get tagged in GitHub or linear, you can have a tab pop-up that gets your attention, almost like bringing Slack into the browser where you're working. They put the call out for other companies and developers to work with them to build out this feature too. The third thing was something they called Arc Explorer that seems to build off that

Browse For Me button in their Arc Search iOS app, quoting MacStories again. Arc Explorer is the same as Browse For Me, but taken to its logical next step. After the personalized web page of results is generated, you will be able to ask follow-up questions or query parts of the summary that you want to learn more about. This works conversationally, which is very different from how we currently search for something. You scan the results, tap for more, or search again, rinse and repeat. The demo of this is impressive, but Miller did note that this isn't the finished form, and no date has been set for this feature. Even the name isn't final, end quote.

Again, the analogy I would make here is, what if you could go to chat GPT and collaboratively work with the bot to browse the web? Like a personal web browsing butler? Anyone remember Asked Jeeves? web browser, web pages, search engine, they're putting it all behind their web browser app. That ceases to be a web browser in a way and almost is closer to what we're imagining these AI agents to be like someday eventually. Replacing Google with a perplexity-style AI search engine that lives inside of their cross-platform Chrome Killer, as our friend Chris Messina put it.

The browser company went hard at Google in their announced video. They mentioned SEO stuffed spam pages. They mentioned how the web is breaking up into pieces, just like we've been talking about on the show. They specifically name-checked the LLM and AI moment as the reason why the web can be remade right now. But again, is the web going to be remade by essentially obviating away the constituent parts of the web? Is that what we want? Time for the weekend long-range suggestions. First up, as the pharmaceutical industry adopts AI to speed up drug development, Bloomberg has a look

at the challenges facing the industry to prove the effectiveness of AI-aided drugs. At a panel during the JP Morgan Conference, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told a standing room-only crowd that within the next decade, drugs could be designed almost entirely in simulation via computing platforms like the ones his company supplies. We are determined to work with you to advance this field, he said. That would make a seismic shift in the world of drug development. It typically takes 12 to 15 years to bring a drug to market,

to BCG, the consulting firm says AI-driven R&D could help cut 25 to 50% of the time and cost of bringing drug candidates to the point of human testing, but it will still require study to prove whether AI-aided drugs have a higher probability of clinical success. Will we in five years see full-blown drug discovery based on AI? I think that's the multi-billion dollar sort of question, says Anders Romare, chief digital and information officer at Novo Nordisk AS, the Danish maker of diabetes drug, OZempic, and weight loss shot Wigovie. Novo has already deployed AI throughout the company using it for everything from speeding up regulatory submissions to overseeing production quality.

Workers use chat GPT inside the company's firewall more than 50,000 times a month, Romare says, but while AI can speed up the work, quote, ultimately putting a drug in the hand of a patient has got to be a human decision based on human knowledge and understanding, he says, end quote. The Verge has the story of the scariest song on TikTok. If you've been on TikTok at all, you've probably heard the clip I speak of. You are the... Quoting The Verge.

More than a year later, North Sea TikTok took off. There had been a few North Sea as scary videos before. Some even with similar crashing wave footage, but things really got rolling around the time of that at-Uk destinations video in early November. according to TikTok's data, videos with hashtag North Sea have been viewed a total of 2.9 billion times, 2.2 billion of them from the beginning of November to the beginning of January. That's a 315% increase in views during that time over on hashtag North Sea TikTok. TikTok has seen 109.5 million total views, 98.9 million of them in that same time period.

North Sea TikTok happened big, and it happened all at once. On TikTok, more than 197,000 videos have been made with the same 60-second clip from Hoist the Colors. It's the North Sea, it's the scariest doll in the world, it's NASA has a Megalodon, it's occasionally videos that have nothing to do with any of this, but are just trying to catch the viral wave. The song is number 5 on TikTok's viral 50 list and number 26 on its overall top 50 chart. Anecdotally, North Sea TikTok is slowing down a bit, at least on my 4-U feed, but Hoist the Colors is still absolutely everywhere. It's so big that popular creators like Chris Olson can get mad at the song in their own videos,

and people know exactly what they're talking about. There are now even parodies of the cover, which is how you know you've really made it, end quote. Then I want to point you to Rolling Stone's list of the 150 most influential science fiction movies of all time. And I know the point of these lists oftentimes is to be a bit controversial, but not putting Star Wars number two is straight up trolling. And finally, from Vanity Fair, an oral history of 30 years ago when Conan O'Brien first took over the late-night show from David Letterman, quoting producer Jeff Ross, Lauren Michaels brings up Conan's name and says, well, Conan maybe could host it. And the NBC guys were going, You think? I remember Lauren turned to me, not knowing that I had never met Conan and goes,

You think? And I go, maybe. Then NBC said, can we test him? Lorne turns to me and says, Jeff, can we test him? And I was like, sure. Conan O'Brien. Ryan. There isn't another person in show business who could have said, I have an idea. He's a writer on The Simpsons, but he's got a good look. And I bet in time he'd be a good host. No other person in show business could have said that, end quote. Conan, 30 years ago, that splits two other recent anniversaries neatly. The Mac just turned 40 about a week ago. Facebook turns 20 on Sunday. So there you go. Mac, Conan, Facebook, baby boomers into Gen X, into millennials. This weekend, by the way, the bonus episode is my interview with Chris Dixon about his

new book on Web 3. Enjoy that. If you haven't already watched the YouTube video, talk to you on Monday.