Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 03/17 – Midjourney 5 Is Amazing

Episode Date: March 17, 2023

Amazon Kindle gets out of the magazine business. An ironically named PE firm is buying Porn Hub. Midjourney v5 is really mind blowing. And, of course, the Weekend Longreads Suggestions. Sponsors: RelationshipHero.com/techmeme Links: Amazon will discontinue newspaper and magazine subscriptions in September (GoodEReader) SVB Financial files for Ch. 11 bankruptcy protection, says it has $2.2B in liquidity (TechCrunch) Pornhub owner sold to Canadian private equity firm Ethical Capital (Financial Times) AI-imager Midjourney v5 stuns with photorealistic images—and 5-fingered hands (ArsTechnica) Weekend Longreads Suggestions: The Guardians (Meteor) The Future Smartphone: More Folds, Less Phone, a Whole Lot of AI (Wired) LinkedIn turns 20: An oral history of an unlikely champion (Fast Company) ‘It changed the world’: 50 years on, the story of Pong's Bay Area origins (SFGate) 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, March 17th, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough today. Amazon Kindle gets out of the magazine business.

An ironically named PE firm is buying Pornhub. Mid Journey version 5 is really pretty mind-blowing. And of course, the weekend long read suggestions. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Amazon has stopped selling newspaper and magazine subscriptions for Kindle and print and plans to shut down Kindle. newsstand in September. It's an old story now, but how tablets and e-readers did not become the standard way people consume magazines and newspapers is something that still puzzles me. Like, what do people

do with their iPads? Just web stuff, I guess? Anyway, quoting good e-reader. Amazon is trying to convince publishers to submit their newspapers and magazines to prime reading or Kindle Unlimited, but it remains to be seen if this will happen. One of the significant advantages of magazines and newspapers on the Kindle is that they were optimized for the Kindle. They read like e-books, where you can increase the text size or change the font type. Some pictures were in black and white to separate all of the text. This was the significant advantage of a Kindle. The closure of the Amazon newsstand will hit hard all genre magazines like Clark's World, Uncanny Valley, Asimovs, or Fantasy and Science Fiction. They have many subscribers on Kindle and is the only viable option for many international subscribers.

Kindle Unlimited is not available worldwide and only in select countries. Some magazines and newspapers will decide it is not worth including their content in Amazon's Unlimited program. Users will have to subscribe to each digital magazine separately and either read it in the web browser or install apps on their smartphone or tablet instead of an eye-friendly Kindle e-reader that is easy on the eyes. Major news publications like The New York Times, Economist, or Wired, do not have Send to Kindle functionality. This will result in users manually registering account. for everything and attaching their credit cards. Kindle Newsstand was a great way to keep all subscriptions in the same place, end quote. Since it was the big story of the week, I do want to note super

quickly that Silicon Valley Bank Financial has officially filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the Southern District of New York bankruptcy court and, quote, believes it has approximately $2.2 billion of liquidity. I assume that filing for bankruptcy will make it easier for various assets to find new owners, quoting TechCrunch. SVB Financial Group intends to use the court-supervised process to evaluate strategic alternatives for SVB capital, SVB securities, and the company's other assets and investments. It noted in a statement, that effort is being run by a five-member restructuring committee with Centerview Partners LLC assisting.

Any sale process will be conducted through the Chapter 11 proceeding and be subject to court approval, it added. It also provided an update on the sale of assets that, formerly sat within the group. While there have been a lot of hiccups in the search for a buyer for the banking division of SVB, a process that is being overseen by regulators, in contrast, the group is seeing significant interest for SVB securities and SVB capital. These two are technically different legal entities and are not therefore included in the Chapter 11 filing. They are continuing to operate while also being shopped around separately to potential buyers, a process that started earlier this week.

As we've previously reported, SVB Capital has about $9.5 billion in assets under management, with investments both in a number of major VCs and funds, as well as startups directly. SVB Securities has been around in one form or another since 1999, based out of Boston, it's brokered and provided services to startups across nearly 700 deals, end quote. Private equity firm Ethical Capital Partners has acquired Pornhub owner, Mindgeek. Again, yes, the name of the firm acquiring the Pornhub Empire is Ethical Capital Partners, quoting the Financial Times. Luxembourg-registered Mind Geek has towered over the adult industry since the advent of video streaming. Its most recently published figures show revenues in

2018 reached 460 million, while profit margins have at times neared 50%, according to people familiar with the matter. The identity of parent company Mind Geek's former majority owner, Bergen-Bergamere, an ex-Goldman-Sax banker who also uses the name Bernard Bergamar, was first revealed by a Financial Times investigation. Mind Geek has since suffered a string of criticism over its business model, causing the departure of its top management team and partial loss of access to the Visa and MasterCard payment networks. The company was brought to the brink of collapse in late 2020, after its flagship site Pornhub was cut off by the payments networks following investigations that identified unlawful content on the platform. The company has denied allegations of wrongdoing.

Solomon Friedman, a lawyer and co-founding partner of ethical capital partners, told the Financial Times he believed the lawsuits, as well as criticism of Mindgeek, stem from a misunderstanding of how the company is now safeguarding its content, which had been spurred in part by the secrecy surrounding the previous owners. I want to engage regularly with stakeholders, including the media, he said, adding that the new ownership wanted to exercise transparency. ECP would not disclose how much it had paid for Mind Geek, nor where it had raised the funds that allowed the six buyout co-founders to acquire a company that claims to have more than 115 million daily visitors to porn sites such as U-Porn and browsers. Friedman said the management team of ECP, which includes lawyers and former cannabis investors, have, quote, complete control, of the acquisition and the assets, adding that, quote, no previous shareholders retain any ownership,

right, or control of the company in any way, end quote. The firm said Mind Geeks remaining executives would continue running the company, but would not disclose who they are, end quote. You've probably seen this news in the form of photos posted all over social media already, but Mid Journey released version five of its AI image creation tool, and it's simply nothing short of stunning, if you ask me. Click the links to this Ars Technica piece I'm about to quote from because there are visual examples of how this tool has evolved between versions. Like if version three was sort of vaguely, yeah, that looks like a blurry version of what I asked for. And then version four achieved kind of modern Pixar levels of representation. Version five is just,

I don't know, complete photorealism. Quote, Mid-Journey version five currently feels to me like finally getting glasses after ignoring bad eyesight for a little bit too long, said Julie Weeland, a graphic designer who often shares her mid-jorney creations on Twitter, suddenly you see everything in 4K. It feels weirdly overwhelming, but also amazing, end quote. After experimenting with V5 for a day, Weelan noted improvements that include incredibly realistic skin textures and facial features, more realistic or cinematic lighting, better reflections, glars and shadows, more expressive angles or overviews of a scene, and, quote, eyes that are almost perfect and not wonky anymore, end quote. And of course, the hands. Over the past year, the idea

that AI art generators can't render hands correctly has become something of a cultural trope. So notably, Mid Journey version 5 can generate realistic human hands fairly well. Hands are correct most of the time with five fingers instead of seven to 10 on one hand, said Weeland. In the services Discord release notes, Mid Journey also noted that version 5 now responds with a, quote, much wider stylistic range than version 4, while also being more sensitive to prompting, generating less unwanted text, and offering a 2x increase in image resolution. If there's a visual downside to the Mid Journey upgrade for AI art fans, it perhaps comes from images that can be so realistic and perfect that the model's precision takes away some of the thrill of repeatedly generating AI imagery. to find a suitable result, what one might call a slot machine effect. Although as one Twitter username Philip Lenson noted, quote, if you have a specific image subject in mind, it's still a bit like lottery,

but with higher winning chances than version four, end quote. Time for the weekend long read suggestions. And since I mentioned this week, people suddenly sort of backlashing on OpenAI, I thought I'd start by sharing this piece from Meteor, that gives you a quick sort of summary of what everybody's angry about. I'm not taking a side here. I want to be clear. I'm just sharing what the beef is. Quote, it was then that OpenAI started acting like a VC-funded portfolio company, granting equity to employees, selling a stake to the friendly neighboring kingdom of Microsoft for $1 billion, and taking on additional investors. The economics of AI

research was used to justify at all. They would need to raise again and soon. Sam predict, at the time. It was also around this time the band of White Knights began to be drawn to more obviously commercial applications, especially applications that might be built on a new and innovative large language model it had just invented GPT. Once the capabilities started to come into focus, what had begun as cutting edge and collaborative open research into the use of neural networks to mimic language switched. Holy shit, this works. Creating a beneficent artificial general intelligence that won't destruct the world is really hard and probably won't happen for a really long time, so we're kind of wasting our effort here.

How about we monetize this other thing right now and own it? Minimum viable product, don't overbuild is excellent startup advice with the Rubicon crossed. Openness was the next principle to fall. Now the guardians first sworn in to protect us against unknown dragons from the future are selling us day passes to rides inside the castle. So far, it's been a gas, and it's nice to know they don't want us to fall out of our seats and hurt ourselves, end quote. Then, speaking of AI, this wired piece this week asked a bunch of folks about the future of the smartphone and got a bunch of answers. But one of the nuggets in the quote from Tony Fidel reminded me of something Fred Wilson said recently,

i.e., now that we have AI everywhere, we're going to have to start signing everything digitally to, to prove it's real, to prove it's you, to prove to your mom that that text message reply that you just sent her that was suspiciously longer and more thoughtful than the one word replies you usually sent her, was actually written by you and not that new Microsoft co-pilot feature. I'll quote the entire Fidel quote, but note his suggestion in the middle here that your smartphone might become key to providing proof of non-generative life. Quote, foldables will be a niche. They're very expensive and they're going to continue to be bulkier because of the nature of mechanical systems. So I think there will be a specific place or specific needs for those. More specifically, though, I think the connection between the pixel that you see and the CPU and the graphics cores will be fully encrypted. So right now, when we say something's encrypted, it's from the device to the server.

It's encrypted in transit or in storage. In the future, things will be encrypted between chips and between input output. And this is because you're going to want to know something was real. So when you capture a voice or a photo or a video, it's being processed through a specific core and it's being stamped. It's verifying that it was not a deep fake. It was not doctored in some way or photoshopped or filtered. I also think we'll see more compute power embedded in headsets. Here's something I was working on three or four years ago. Fidel pulls out a thin gray behind the ear pair of headphones. You just put them behind your ear. That's it. No cell phone needed. I can't tell you where I was building these, but the issue was it was just a standard voice interface before, not a chat interface. But in the future, your phone can be tucked away and you can talk into these and actually have a natural conversation, as opposed to always having to use your phone and keyboard and everything.

And I've been very clear on this. Fuck the Metaverse. I've said it many times. I think VR is incredibly great for certain things. I think AR is even better for certain things, but the future's not wear headsets all the time. Finally today, two history pieces for you. First from Harry McCracken at Fast Company on the occasion of its 20th birthday, an oral history of LinkedIn. Quote, early on, LinkedIn allowed new members to invite all their contacts to join the network with a few clicks, greatly boosting its vitality, but leaving some people with a spammy impression of the service. Russell Glass, LinkedIn VP of Product. When LinkedIn figured out that you can incentivize people to bring their contacts in, and help them join the network, that was kind of a game changer in the growth curve.

Keith Rebois, LinkedIn VP of Business and Corporate Development. Reed was the one who made the decision to invest a team in enabling uploads from Microsoft Outlook address books. At the time, almost everybody, certainly in Silicon Valley, ran on Outlook email. That's the way we did business. Lori Thornton, founder, Radiate PR, LinkedIn's first public relations firm. In the early months, pushback came in the form of, I don't want to take my outlook contacts and expose myself and those in my network online. Why would I want to do that? End quote. And then on the 50th anniversary of Pong from SFGate, a history of that game, the game that literally started the entire video game industry, again, this is one of those stories I assume everyone

knows, but if you don't, this is a great little explainer for you. But the quote I'm going to read to you right now is not about Pong itself, because Pong wasn't actually the first computer game. Pong is what made gaming into an industry, but it was not actually the first. Quote, in many ways, Pong was the Big Bang moment that occurred after early gameplay pixels had begun to form together for years prior. A key pioneering moment in that regard occurred at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1961. Shortly after Digital Equipment Corporation gifted the school its latest state-of-the-art computer,

the programmable data processor won, weighing over 1,500 pounds and taking a up the space of a small automobile, the PDP1 boasted a whopping nine kilobytes of memory. Yet its most notable characteristic was that it operated through a monitor, a new and innovative feature that made for a uniquely user-friendly interface. A few of the bookish read-as-nerdy members of MIT's Tech Model Railroad Club immediately began experimenting with the PDP1. Underclassman Steve Russell, an avid science fiction reader, suggested that they design a game that could play. out on the monitor. By January 1962, Russell had finished his prototype of Space War, a two-player game in which a pair of rocket ships battled in a cosmic landscape. His classmates improved on the

gameplay with their own design upgrades, and before long, Space War was so popular that the faculty had to limit the hours that students were allowed to play it. More than just creating one of the first video games, Russell and his classmates had developed a template for video game systems. Beyond the game itself, they had designed an external handheld control pads so they'd longer had to bang endlessly on a keyboard. Better yet, they realized that the code for Space War could be copied and played on other computers, so it soon spread to other elite computer science programs around the country. If you were going to play Space War in the 60s, Bushnell explains, there were four places in the world you could do it. MIT, Champaign

Urbana, Stanford, and the University of Utah, end quote. No bonus episodes for you this weekend, so I don't know, go out and take a walk without listening to a podcast for once. I know I never do. Talk to you on Monday.