Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 02/17 - Susan Wojcicki Rides Off Into The Sunset

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 TechMeme right home for Friday, February 17th, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough today. The U.S. is suing Terraform Labs and Doe Kwan. The UK is investigating rumors that Google paid Apple not to spin up its own search engine. Susan Wojicki is stepping down as YouTube CEO, marking a major end of an era. And of course, the weekend long read suggestions. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. The SEC is officially suing Terraform Labs and its founder, Doequan. for allegedly selling unregistered securities, specifically the Terra-USD stablecoin, and perpetrating a fraudulent scheme that lost more than $40 billion in market value,

Starting point is 00:01:20 according to the agency. Quoting Bloomberg. The agency also accused the company and Kwan of misleading investors, including by making false statements about a relationship with a popular South Korean mobile payment app called Chai, and about the stability of the stable coin, which was marketed as maintaining a one-to-one pay. to the U.S. dollar. Terraform and Kwan didn't immediately respond to requests for comment. Separately, federal prosecutors in Manhattan are investigating Terraform labs, people familiar with

Starting point is 00:01:48 the criminal probe said. That inquiry also involves looking into the actions of Kwan, they said, and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission has been probing the events surrounding the Terra USDA collapse, according to one of the people familiar. Representatives for the prosecutor's office and CFTC declined to comment. TerraUSD or UST, was supposed to to maintain its peg to the dollar through an algorithm and trading in a sister token called Luna. The arrangement failed spectacularly when the stable coin crashed last May. The token's implosion kicked off a domino effect that directly or indirectly fueled bankruptcies in high-profile companies, including hedge fund, Three Arrow's Capital, Voyager, Digital, and most prominently

Starting point is 00:02:28 Sam Bankman-Fried's Alameda Research and FTX, end quote. Not only that, headlines this morning are coming in that the SEC believes Kwan and Terraform Labs have have withdrawn more than $100 million in fiat currency from a Swiss bank since June 2022, after moving more than 10,000 Bitcoin out of a cold wallet. The Register is reporting that the UK's CMA is investigating an alleged deal in which Google might have paid Apple a portion of search revenue generated by people using the Chrome web browser on iOS, quoting the Register. Though everyone knows Google pays Apple, Samsung.

Starting point is 00:03:12 and other manufacturers billions of dollars to make its web search engine the default on devices. It has not been reported until now that the CMA has been looking into Chrome on iOS and its role in a search revenue sharing deal Google has with Apple. The British Competition Watchdog is worried that Google's payments to Apple discourage the iPhone maker from competing with Google. Substantial payments for doing nothing incentivize more of the same, it's argued. This perhaps explains why Apple, though, hugely profitable, has not launched a rival search engine or invested in the development of its Safari browser to the point that it could become a credible challenger to Chrome. Incidentally, that now appears to be changing as a result of regulatory

Starting point is 00:03:52 pressure. Beyond increasing the size of its Safari WebKit team over the past two years and signaling that it may relax some of its rules this year, Apple on Thursday issued a WebKit update for the first beta of Safari 16.4 that delivers many of the features developers complained have been missing from Apple's browser. Having Google pay Apple a, quote, significant share of revenue, from Google search traffic, end quote, passing through its own Chrome browser on iOS is difficult to explain. Apple does not provide any obvious value to people seeking to use Google Search within Google Chrome. One attempt to explain the arrangement can be found in an antitrust lawsuit filed on December 27, 2021, and subsequently amended on March 29, 2022. The complaint filed by the Aliotto

Starting point is 00:04:36 law firm of San Francisco claims Apple has been paid for the profits it would have made if it had with Google without the cost and challenge of doing so. Quote, because more than half of Google's search business was conducted through Apple devices, Apple was a major potential threat to Google, and that threat was designated by Google as Code Red. The complaint reads, Google paid billions of dollars to Apple and agreed to share its profits with Apple to eliminate the threat and fear of Apple as a competitor, end quote. TikTok has announced TikTok trivia, a live-streamed trivia quiz with a $500,000 prize pool,

Starting point is 00:05:16 hosted daily between February 22nd and February 26, open to U.S. users age 18 and older. Yes, this should remind you of that old trivia game, HQ. Quoting the Verge. Categories include lifestyle, beauty, sports, and music, according to TikTok, along with John Wick questions. The event is sponsored by Lionsgate and its upcoming film John Wick Chapter 4. Like HQ, TikTok has enlisted a live host for trivia, presumably to make the quizzes more of an event. James Henry, a popular TikTok creator whose skits regularly go viral on the platform, will host the trivia rounds and players will be able to interact with him, TikTok says. Though the trivia series is a step out of TikTok's usual offerings,

Starting point is 00:06:00 the company has been testing and working on different ways it might use the TikTok live feature to generate engagement. The company encourages businesses and creators to go live on the app to, quote, engage with their communities and markets live streams as a way to drive sales. It's also introduced more advanced settings for targeting, such as giving streamers the ability to limit live videos to adults only. And the company has been trying to make live stream shopping happen in the U.S. after finding success with the format in China and other parts of Asia, end quote. Word came late yesterday that YouTube CEO, Susan Wojiki, plans to step down after nine years heading that service to be replaced by Neil Mohan as senior vice president and head of YouTube.

Starting point is 00:06:48 Wajiki was Google's 16th employee, for those of you that didn't know, quoting Vox. In a letter sent to YouTube's employees, Wichiki said she was leaving in order to, quote, start a new chapter focused on my family, health, and personal projects I'm passionate about, end quote. During her tenure, YouTube became increasingly important to the business for Google, which bought the site in 2006, and Alphabet, the holding company that houses both of them. In 2022, YouTube generated $29.2 billion in ads. sales more than 10% of Alphabet's total revenue. Wachiki's departure also has meaningful symbolism for

Starting point is 00:07:23 Google and tech in general. For years, she has been one of the very few women to operate a huge tech business, and she was an integral part of Google's founding. She famously rented out her Silicon Valley garage to co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1998 and join the company as its 16th employee a year later. Susan has a unique place in Google history and has made the most incredible contribution to products used by people everywhere, Page and Bryn said in a statement, we're so grateful for all she's done over the last 25 years, end quote. Wajiki started at Google running marketing, helped build its online ad business, and at one point ran the company's video service that was trying to compete with YouTube. She ended up arguing that Google should buy the site instead. During her tenure as YouTube's

Starting point is 00:08:07 leader, she made a point of increasing its accessibility to advertisers while simultaneously trying to wrangle an enormous and unruly group of video creators that powered the site. That periodically led to criticism from video makers who said YouTube's rule changes and moderation decisions made it hard for them to make a living, and outsiders who said the company wasn't taking a firm enough hand to discourage hate speech and other unpleasant content. We managed to upset everybody, Wajiki told me in an interview in 2019. Wajiki has spent years working closely with Mohan, her successor. The two of them first worked together building Google's display, advertising business, and Mohan has been Wajiki's number two at YouTube since 2015, end quote.

Starting point is 00:08:45 Time for the weekend long read suggestions. First up, you know, this chatbot AI tech, it's not exactly new. I mean, the latest iterations of it are new. The leaps made and the technology are new, but it's not like chatbots are a new thing entirely. Think Siri, think Alexa. So how are people in this existing industry thinking about how things have changed now that generative AI has changed the game? Well, Wired checks in at a generative AI conference.

Starting point is 00:09:20 Quoting Wired. A charismatic short-form video creator, Zach King, told his life story through photoslides generated by AI. A famous freestyle rapper, Harry Mack, spun up a four-minute rap based off of 10 words generated by Jasper's software. Elia Bradshaw, a slam poet and teacher at Youth Speaks, told the button-down crowd in a powerful soliloquy that art is proof of humanness. How much taking and leaving makes something human, Bradshaw asks. What's the balance of input and output a machine must do to make itself alive? It's the question of the era. A more direct version of the question, Is generative AI good enough to replace me at my job?

Starting point is 00:09:58 This was the subtext of Jasper's Gen AI event. Software businesses sell software to other businesses to make business more efficient, a point that Rogan Moser underscored when the artsy part of the morning had concluded, quote, at companies, demands are up and resources are down, he declared. Mungoose Media, quote, turned to Jasper to help their already amazing team of writers, Rogan Moser said. Morningstar is thriving using Jasper to churn out SEO content for the company's digital channels and experiencing a 40% increase in content downloads, end quote. Next, as I poke around to see if and how real businesses can be built on this stuff,

Starting point is 00:10:36 look at this example I found. It's the music app BandLab and listen to how they've been using AI to basically onboard people. This is sort of a mental framework placeholder for how this stuff might play out. Quoting Forbes. The company reached 60 million registered users in January, an increase of 20 million from the year prior. Song Starter, Ban Lab's AI tool, generates royalty-free instrumental ideas that users can use as the starting point for their own songs. To customize the output, Ban Lab's users can type lyrics or emojis into Song Starter, which then uses Google's

Starting point is 00:11:12 TensorFlow machine learning system to produce three possible vibes. BandLab says, this is just the start of its expansion into AI-powered music-making tools, but declined to list new features. To date, AI-powered tools are able to replicate performances and separate the components of backing tracks. Open-source voice generator UberDuck can mimic the sound of popular rappers like Kendrick Lamar and Drake, while streaming giant Spotify's basic pitch tool can translate audio input into editable MIDI files, end quote. To squeeze this in here next, because I couldn't find room for it elsewhere this week, I give you Gene Park's review of the new PlayStation VR2 headset. I actually cancelled my pre-order of the headset for various reasons.

Starting point is 00:11:56 Maybe I'll buy it when more games come out. But, quote, As good as PSVR2 is for a VR headset, it's still bound by the limitations of its medium. It is always going to be more tiring to climb a mountain by pawing the air, mimicking the movement in your living room, than it is to simply hold a joystick up. Setting up the PSVR2 is a breeze,

Starting point is 00:12:17 thankfully, but it's still a whole ritual to place the headset on your face, making sure it's screwed tightly enough, adjusting the lenses so depth perception is correct, clearing the area around you of debris so you don't actually knock something over, and then play an interactive experience that requires you to move your arms and head around for hours. Thankfully, the PSVR2 innovates in its eye tracking feature. Once your eyes are paired with the headset, yes, I realize that sounds quite dystopian, the PSVR2 will allow you to navigate menus, adjust your view, so anything you look at offers highlighted detail, and even allow you to aim with just a glance. The PSVR2 isn't the first headset to use this technology, but it'll likely be the mainstream

Starting point is 00:12:54 audience's first encounter with it. The gameplay possibilities are enticing. One horror game, the Dark Pictures Switchback, has a sequence that asks the player not to blink, lest they see the room change around them, similar to the nightmarish weeping angels of Doctor Who fame, end quote. From the MIT technology review, a brief history of Rust, a programming language that emerged from a side project and has been instrumental in driving the shift toward memory-safe programming. Quote, 17 years later, Rust has become one of the hottest new languages on the planet, maybe the hottest. There are 2.8 million coders writing in Rust, and companies from Microsoft to Amazon regard it as key to their future. The chat platform Discord used Rust to speed up its system. Dropbox uses it to sync files to your computer and Cloudflare uses it to process more than 20% of all internet traffic.

Starting point is 00:13:45 When the coder discussion board Stack Overflow conducts its annual poll of developers around the world, Rust has been rated the most loved programming language for seven years running. Even the U.S. government is habitably promoting software in Rust as a way to make its processes more secure. The language has become, like many successful open source projects, a barn raising. There are now hundreds of diehard contributors, many of them volunteers. Hore himself stepped aside from the project in 2013, happy to turn it over to those other engineers, including a core team at Mozilla, end quote. And finally today, back to the AI.

Starting point is 00:14:20 I feel like we always pepper allusions to the way AI could go wrong when we talk about AI, catastrophically, apocalyptic wrong, even. But if there's one thing I learned from writing my book, it's that given enough time, references you assume everyone is familiar with slowly fade out of cultural consciousness. So let me give you two key references that maybe you're not aware of. For example, are you familiar with the science fiction short story, I have no mouth, but I must scream. It was written by Harlan Ellison back in 1967. Either seek out that story itself, if you're interested, but I also have a link to the Wikipedia entry if you just want to get a plot synopsis. I've also got the Wikipedia entry for a more recent entry along the same lines. It's called Rokos Basilisk. quoting from the entry. Roco's Basilisk is a thought experiment which states that an otherwise benevolent artificial superintelligence in the future would be incentivized to create a virtual reality simulation to torture anyone who knew of its potential existence but did not directly contribute

Starting point is 00:15:24 to its advancement or development. It originated in a 2010 post at discussion board Less Wrong, a technical forum focused on analytical rational inquiry. The thought experiment's name derives from the poster of the article, Rocco, and the Basilisk, a mythical creature capable of destroying enemies with its stare. While the theory was initially dismissed as nothing but conjecture or speculation by many less wrong users, Lesnarcoffern co-founder Elizer Yudkowski reported users who described symptoms such as nightmares and mental breakdowns upon reading the theory due to its stipulation that knowing about the theory and its basilisk made one vulnerable to the basilisk itself. This led to discussion of the Basilisk on the site to be banned for

Starting point is 00:16:05 five years. However, these reports were later dismissed as being exaggerations or inconsequential, and the theory itself was dismissed as nonsense, including by Udkowski himself. Even after the post-discreditation, it is still used as an example of principles such as Bayesian probability and implicit religion. It is also regarded as a modern version of Pascal's wager. In the field of artificial intelligence, Rokos Basilisk has become notable as an example that raises the question of how to create an AI which is simultaneously moral and intelligent, end quote. No bonus episode again this weekend, though I've got good news. We've got bonus episodes coming for the next few weeks for several weeks in a row, starting next weekend.

Starting point is 00:16:54 But I'm going to take this Monday off because it's a bank holiday here in the U.S. We have family in town this weekend for a visit. My kids will be off school on Monday, and they're at the age where any free days I can get with them I want to take. Plus, since next week is back to being a week where we have zero ads sold, it's hard to justify working on a day when everyone else in this house is off. It will probably be a slow news day anyway. So enjoy your weekend. Talk to you again on Tuesday.

Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 02/17 - Susan Wojcicki Rides Off Into The Sunset

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.