Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 03/29 – SBF To The Hoosegow

Episode Date: March 29, 2024

SBF gets 25 years. X is maybe about to NSFW. Apple’s new OLED iPads should be coming in May. I can’t cram another acronym in here to tell you about Apple suing an employee for leaking. And, of course, the WLS… Weekend Longreads Suggestions. Links: Bankman-Fried sentenced to 25 years for multi-billion dollar FTX fraud (Reuters) Elon Musk’s X Is Testing ‘Adult Content’ Groups for Users (Bloomberg) Apple Sues Former Employee for Leaking iPhone's Journal App and More (MacRumors) Apple Plans New iPad Pro for May as Production Ramps Up Overseas (Bloomberg) Reddit shares plunge almost 25% in two days, finish the week below first day close (CNBC) Weekend Longreads Suggestions: How We’ll Reach a 1 Trillion Transistor GPU (IEEE Spectrum) How Jesse Plemons Came to Star in, Well, Pretty Much Everything (Texas Monthly) 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 29th, 2024. I'm Brian McCullough today. SBF gets 25 years.

X is maybe about to go NSFW. Apple's new OLED iPads should be coming in May. I can't cram another acronym in here to tell you about Apple suing an employee for leaking. And of course, the WLS weekend long-read suggestions. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Well, this saga is over. Sam Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years in prison. for stealing from users of his now bankrupt FTX crypto exchange, and the judge ordered him to forfeit

more than $11 billion. Quoting Reuters, U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan handed down the sentence at a Manhattan court hearing after rejecting Bankman Freed's claim that FTCS customers did not actually lose money and finding that he lied during his trial testimony. A jury found Bankman Freed 32 guilty on November 2nd on seven fraud and conspiracy counts stemming from FTC's 22 collapse in what prosecutors have called one of the biggest financial frauds in U.S. history. Kaplan said Bankman Fried has shown no remorse. He knew it was wrong, Kaplan said. He knew it was criminal. He regrets that he made a very bad bet about the likelihood of getting caught, but he is not going to admit a thing, as is his right, end quote.

Bankman Fried wearing a beige short-sleeve jail t-shirt acknowledged during 20 minutes of remarks to the judge that FTX customers had suffered, and he offered an apology to his former FTX colleagues, but did not admit criminal wrongdoing. He has vowed to appeal his conviction and sentence. Bankman Freed stood with his hands classed before him as Kaplan read the sentence. He then spoke with his defense lawyer, Mark Mukasey, briefly before being led out of the courtroom by members of the U.S. Marshal's Service. The sentence marked the combination of Bankman Freed's plunge from an ultra-wealthy entrepreneur and major political donor to the biggest trophy to date in a crackdown by U.S. authorities on malfeasance in cryptocurrency markets.

There are serious consequences for defrauding customers and investors, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement. Anyone who believes they can hide their financial crimes behind wealth and power or behind a shiny new thing they claim no one else is smart enough to understand, should think twice, end quote. Kaplan found that FTCS customers lost $8 billion. FTX's equity investors lost $1.7 billion, and that lenders to the Alameda Research Hedge Fund

Bankman Fried founded lost $1.3 billion. He imposed an $11 billion forfeiture order and authorized the government to repay victims with seized assets. Federal prosecutors had sought a sentence of 40 to 50 years. Mukasey had argued for a sentence of less than five and a quarter years. Addressing the judge, Bankman Fried said, quote, customers have been suffering. I didn't at all mean to minimize that. I also think that's something that was missing from what I've said over the course of this process, and I'm sorry for that. end quote. Okay, I've been racking my brain for some sort of a dad joke or pun, maybe relating to X suddenly becoming triple X, but that was basically the best I could come up with, so I've let you all down. A researcher has discovered that X, formerly known as Twitter, is testing a feature that lets users create or join communities focused on adult content or other not safe for work material. Quoting Bloomberg, users who create a community within the app can specify in the settings that their group, quote, contains adult-sensitive content, according to screenshots uncovered by Daniel Buchuk, an analyst at Watchful, which tracks apps development testing. The X groups will then

feature an adult content label. Users who fail to label their community could see some of the content being filtered out or removed, according to the screenshots of the rules. Communities on X can be private, and it appears that the social media network will ultimately require age verification for groups that feature adult content. X's policies currently restrict, quote, graphic media, adult nudity, and sexual behavior for viewers who are under 18, or viewers who do not include a birth date on their profile. A senior software engineer at X, Dong Wuk Chung, posted Thursday that the purpose of the new label is, quote, about making communities safer for everyone, and that, quote, only users who have specified their age will be able to search communities with NSFW content, end quote. openly offering NSFW groups may be another way for X to try to differentiate itself from other

mainstream social networking services. Adult material lived on Twitter long before owner Elon Musk took over and changed the company name, and Twitter's former executives even considered building an only fan-style subscription offering for adult content creators. Twitter scrapped the project after deciding the company wasn't prepared to police, quote, harmful sexual content, including child porn according to The Verge. Musk has been open about his belief that X should carry almost all content that isn't illegal. X allows posts about topics such as sexual behavior if users label it as sensitive, but its policies forbid adult content in live videos and profile images. It's also against the

rules to promote those subjects as part of an advertisement, end quote. This is weird. Apple is suing an ex-employee for allegedly leaking details about the recently released journal app to journalists. Also to quote, kill products and features with which he took issue. What? Quoting Mac rumors. Apple this month sued its former employee Andrew Aud in California State Court, alleging that he breached the company's confidentiality agreement and violated labor laws by leaking sensitive information to the media and employees at other tech companies. Apple has demanded a jury trial and is seeking damages in excess of $25,000. Aud joined Apple as an iOS software engineer in 2016 shortly after graduating college.

He worked on optimizing battery performance, making him, quote, privy to information regarding dozens of Apple's most sensitive projects, according to the complaint. The lawsuit alleges that over a five-year period, Aud used his Apple issued work iPhone to leak information about more than a half-dozen Apple products and policies, including its then-unannounced journal app and Vision Pro headset, product development policy, strategies for regulatory compliance, employee headcounts, and more. In April 2023, for example, Apple alleges that Odd leaked a list of finalized features for the iPhone's journal app to a journalist at the Wall Street Journal on a phone call. That same month, the Wall Street Journal's

Aaron Tilly published a report titled Apple Plans iPhone journaling app in expansion of health initiatives. Using the encrypted messaging app signal, Odd is said to have sent over 1,400 messages to the same journalist who Odd referred to as Homeboy. He is also accused of sending over 10,000 text messages to another journalist at the website The Information, and he allegedly traveled across the continent to meet with her. Apple believes that Odd's actions were, quote, extensive and purposeful, with Odd allegedly admitting that he leaked information so he could, quote, kill products and features with which he took issue. The company alleges that his wrongful disclosures resulted in at least five news articles discussing the company's confidential and proprietary

information. Apple says these public revelations impeded its ability to surprise and delight with its latest products. Apple said it learned of Odds wrongful disclosures in late 2023, and the company fired him for his alleged misconduct in December of that year. In a November In December 2020 interview, Apple alleges that Odd denied leaking confidential information to anyone. However, during that interview, Apple alleges that Odd went to the bathroom and deleted, quote, significant amounts of evidence from his work iPhone, including the signal app that he used to communicate with, quote, Homeboy. During a follow-up interview in December 2020, Apple alleges that Odd admitted to some of his wrongful disclosures, but claims he only provided, quote, narrow admissions limited to the information he had not

been able to destroy, end quote. Speaking of sources, Mark German's sources say, Apple plans to launch a new iPad Pro and iPad Air model in early May. iPad Pros will get OLED displays, while the iPad Air will get a 12.9 inch screen option. Quote, the move marks an end to the longest stretch without new models in the history of the iPad, which was first introduced by Apple co-founder Steve Jobs in 2010. It's been about 18 months since the last updates, a drought that's contributed to the to already sluggish demand for tablets. Apple is betting that the new models with faster chips and revamped

accessories can help spur a renaissance for the category. After a run-up during the pandemic, iPad sales have fallen in each of Apple's last two fiscal years, which run through September. They suffered an additional 25% year-over-year decline during the latest holiday period when the devices have typically been popular gifts. The iPad Pro models, codenamed J-717, J-718, J-720, and J-721 will run the new M3 chip and work with redesigned versions of the Magic keyboard and Apple Pencil. The update represents the first overhaul to that lineup since 2018. The iPad Air, meanwhile, was last updated in 2022 with the M1 chip. It will get a new processor and the 12.9 inch screen size means consumers can get a large iPad for less money than the more upscale Pro. The current iPad Air starts at $599, while the pro

line costs $200 more. Apple had planned to release the new iPads by the end of March or early April, company has been working to finish software for the devices. The screens in the latest models also require complex new manufacturing techniques, which have contributed to the delay, end quote. I told you about it on the way up, so it's only fair that I mentioned the way down as well. Reddit's shares plunged almost 25% in the last two days of trading. That came after soaring 30% on Monday, which I told you about. So, Reddit shares finished the week at $49.30, which would be below its first day trading close of $50.44. Quoting CNBC. Earlier this week, Reddit disclosed in a corporate filing that CEO Steve Huffman sold 500,000 shares. Ben Silverman, Vice President of Research

at Verity, told CNBC the move was expected and represents just a portion of his holdings. Meanwhile, Reddit chief operating officer Jennifer Wong disclosed that she sold 514,000 shares and now holds 1.4 million of the company's shares. There's always a bit of a disconnect because the purpose of bringing the company public is twofold. Silverman said it's not just to generate liquidity for the company itself so that it can expand and grow. In these situations, it often allows insiders to cash out to generate liquidity, and that's something executives have to consider here. If the prospects are so bright, why are insiders selling? Silverman added, end quote. Not saying that there's anything wrong with any of that, but I am saying the inverse of what I said earlier this week.

If a company IPOs and then investors run the stock up way beyond even the IPO price, that suggests public market hunger for tech IPOs and encourages more companies to test the waters. But if the inverse happens, time for the weekend long read suggestions. First up, I found this piece in I-Triple-E spectrum pretty wild. AI really is transforming silicon. The piece outlines how the semiconductor industry can reach one trillion transistor GPUs, which the piece makes the case will be needed within a decade if the AI revolution continues at its current pace.

Quote, all those marvelous AI applications have been due to three factors, innovations in efficient machine learning algorithms, the availability of massive amounts of data on which to train neural networks, and progress in energy-efficient computing through the advancement of semiconductor technology. This last contribution to the generative AI revolution has received less than its fair share of credit, despite its ubiquity. Over the last three decades, the major milestones in AI were all enabled by the leading-edge semiconductor technology of the time, and would have been impossible without it. Deep Blue was implemented with a mix of 0.6 and 0.35 micrometer node chip manufacturing technology.

The deep neural network that won the ImageNet competition kicking off the current era of machine learning was implemented with a 40 nanometer technology. AlphaGo conquered the game of Go using 28 nanometer technology, and the initial version of ChatGBTBT was trained on computers built with 5 nanometer technology. The most recent incarnation of ChatGPT is powered by servers using even. and more advanced for nanometer technology. Each layer of the computer systems involved, from software and algorithms down to the architecture, circuit design, and device technology acts as a multiplier for the performance of AI. But it's fair to say that the foundational

transistor device technology is what has enabled the advancement of the layers above. If the AI revolution is to continue at its current pace, it's going to need even more from the semiconductor industry. Within a decade, it will need a one trillion transistor GPU, that is, a GPU with 10 times as many devices as is typical today. The computation and memory access required for AI training have increased by orders of magnitude in the past five years. Training GPT3, for example, requires the equivalent of more than 5 billion billion operations per second of computation for an entire day. That's 5,000 petaflop days and 3 trillion bytes or 3 terabytes of memory capacity. Both the computing power and the memory access needed for new generative AI

applications continue to grow rapidly. We now need to answer a pressing question. How can semiconductor technology keep pace? End quote. It's a super detailed piece, super technical, so click through to read if that's your style. And finally, this is not tech, but from Texas Monthly, a profile of the actor Jesse Plemons, with the appropriate title, How Jesse Plemons came to star in, well, pretty much everything. And to be amazing, and pretty much everything, I would add, quote, director Scott Cooper, who cast Plymonds in three of his movies, placed him in a pantheon of supporting players, including Wilford Brimley, John Cazale, Gene Hackman, and Plemmons's personal hero, Robert DeVall. Guys who just stand up and tell the truth, Cooper said, and they never push the emotion. His ability to be natural no matter the scene has endeared Clemens to filmmakers. To Berg, he forever proved his medal during Friday Night Lights' infamous second season plot when Landry kills somebody, a sensationalistic twist that by rights should also have

killed the show. Jesse was able to bring enough artfulness that we survived it, Berg said. He was probably the only actor in our stable that could have pulled that off. His skills are subtle, bordering on imperceptible. Plemens' face can be open, guileless and sweet, but then close like a fist, his lips curling in menacing resolve, his eyes going glassy as a shark's. He's uniquely adept at this kind of reveal, specializing in characters who are never purely good or bad, whose actions may be despicable. Even Ed, his genial Midwestern butcher in Fargo feeds a guy into a meat grinder, but whose motivations are understandable. He lets you in, said Glatner, who directs him again in Zero Day. Plymins plays a slick government insider, as Glatter puts it,

to Robert De Niro's ex-president with the same grounded humanity we've come to expect. We empathize with Plemons even when we shouldn't, and we never see him coming. He does it again in April's Civil War, a thriller that's set in an America torn apart by its political rancor. Plemons is in just one scene with Dunst, the film star. Wearing candy red sunglasses and brandishing a carbine, he delivers the big mic drop of the trailer. Okay, he says, well, what kind of American are you? There is the pause again, aloof, terrifying, just another of his many little moments, end quote. No normal show on Monday. I'm taking Monday off.

The kids have off of school, so I need to take advantage of that sort of thing while I still can. but I will post on Monday the interview we did with Nat Friedman on how he sees the AI moment and how he's investing in it. It was really one of the most in-depth talks I've ever seen him do on a podcast. So enjoy that. Talk to you on Tuesday.