Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 03/31 – Is E3 Dead?

Episode Date: March 31, 2023

I can tell you E3 is officially cancelled this year, but I’m kinda thinking it might be dead for good. Bunch of stuff about Twitter and checkmarks. Italy has temporarily banned ChatGPT. Some of the signatories of that AI letter are having second thoughts. And, of course, the weekend longreads suggestions. Sponsors: Miro.com/podcast LInks: E3 Has Been Canceled (IGN) Elon Musk Tried to Meet With F.T.C. Chair About Twitter but Was Rebuffed (NYTimes) Japan restricts chipmaking equipment exports as it aligns with US China curbs (Reuters) Italian privacy regulator bans ChatGPT (Politico) The Open Letter to Stop 'Dangerous' AI Race Is a Huge Mess (Motherboard) Weekend Longreads Suggestions: Fitbit’s attempt to disappear the button proved why they matter (The Verge) The influencers getting rich by teaching you how to get rich (Vox) “I’LL WALK AWAY FROM ANYTHING”: KARA SWISHER CALLS THE SHOTS (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 Memerite Home for Friday, March 31st, 2021, 23. I'm Brian McCullough today. I can tell you E3 is officially canceled this year, but I'm kind of thinking it might be dead for good. A bunch of stuff about Twitter and checkmarks. Italy has temporarily banned chat GPT. Some of the signatories on that AI letter are having second thoughts. And of course, the weekend long read suggestions. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. The Entertainment Software Association has canceled E3, 2023 after Microsoft. Nintendo, Sony, and Ubisoft, all announced that they would not attend the event, originally scheduled for June 13th to June 16th.

Quoting IGN. Two sources have confirmed IGN that the organization announced the cancellation via an email sent out to its members today. The email said that while E3, quote, remains a beloved event and brand that the 2023 version simply did not garner the sustained interest necessary to execute it in a way that would showcase the size, strength, and impact of our industry, end quote. The ESA concludes the email by reiterating its commitment to advocacy work. It does not mention undertaking the show again in future years.

Following IGN's report, the ESA issued the following public statement from Kyle Marsden Kish, Global VP of Gaming, quote, this was a difficult decision because of all of the effort we and our partners put toward making this event happen, but we had to do what's right for the industry and what's right for E3. We appreciate and understand that interested companies wouldn't have playable demos ready and that resourcing challenges made being at E3 this summer, an obstacle they couldn't overcome. For those who did commit to E3 2023, we're sorry we can't put on the showcase you deserve and that you've come to expect from Reid Pop's event experiences.

The press release adds that Reid Pop and the ESA will continue to work together on, quote, future E3 events, end quote. The event was supposed to be held from June 13th through June 16. at the Los Angeles Convention Center and would have been the first in-person E3 event since 2019. The event was canceled in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. And while a digital version was held in 2021, the event was canceled again in 2022 in an effort to focus on a, quote, revitalized showcase that would set a new standard for hybrid industry events, end quote. Lots of Twitter news to round up for you.

Twitter officially launched its verified organizations program, which allows companies to get a verified checkmark for a third. thousand dollars a month in their affiliates for $50 a month each. But right away, lots of organizations said thanks but no thanks, including the New York Times and Los Angeles Times and those organizations as well as BuzzFeed said they won't reimburse reporters if they choose to pay for Blue. The New York Times also says Elon Musk tried to meet with FTC Chair Lena Khan to discuss all things Twitter but was rebuffed. Quote, Mr. Musk made the attempt late last year, a person with knowledge of the matter said. In a January 27th letter declining the meeting, Ms. Khan told a Twitter

lawyer to focus on complying with investigators' demands for information before she would consider meeting with Mr. Musk. Mr. Musk's outreach to the FTC points to the gravity of the agency's inquiry into Twitter. The investigation is focused on whether the social media company has adequate resources to protect its user's privacy after Mr. Musk bought it last year and then laid off thousands of employees. The agency has separately sought to interview Mr. Musk for the investigation. The interview has not occurred a person with knowledge of the matter said. It is rare for chief executives at companies to try to meet with the FTC's chair and commissioners while an inquiry is underway. But such meetings sometimes occur when the executives hope to convince

the agency's top officials that they are committed to abiding by their promises to the FTC, end quote. Back to the verified checkmarks thing, though. The Times was also reporting in that piece that it has seen a document that suggests Twitter plans to exempt its top 500 advertisers and 10,000 most followed previously verified organizations from paying that new $1,000 per month for a checkmark thing. So again, where's the value here? Once it's pay to play, what does the checkmark even mean? What else? Pathmatics says Twitter's top 10 advertisers spent just $7.6 million on ads on Twitter in the past two months, down 89% from the 71 million, those same advertiser spent from September to October 2022. And finally, a reminder that Legacy Blue checkmarks begin coming down

tomorrow, April 1st. And so quick note that Twitter alternative T2 plans to let Twitter users who are about to lose their checkmarks carry over the verification to its service. There's a form you can fill out to get automatically verified on their service. Obviously, huge blaring disclosure that Ride Home Fund is an investor in T2, but if you're looking to preserve your verification status, note that that can be done over there. Japan has announced plans to restrict exports of 23 types of chip manufacturing equipment, starting in July amid a U.S. push-to-curb China's ability to make advanced chips, quoting Reuters. Japan, home to major chip equipment makers such as Nikon and Tokyo Electron, did not specify China as the target of the restrictions,

saying manufacturers would need to seek export permission for all regions. We are fulfilling our responsibility as a technological nation to contribute to international peace and stability. Minister for economy, trade, and industry, Yasutoshi Nishimura, told a news conference. Japan wants to stop its advanced technology from being used for military purposes and does not have a specific country in mind, he said. But the decision, coming ahead of a weekend visit to Beijing by Japanese Minister for Foreign Affairs, Yoshimasa Hayashi will be seen as a major win for the U.S., which in October announced sweeping restrictions on access to chipmaking technology to slow China's technological and military advances, end quote.

Italy's privacy regulator has temporarily banned ChatchipT and will open a probe into OpenAI itself, claiming that the company lacks a basis for what it is calling mass collection and storage of personal data. Quoting Politico. The National Data Protection Authority said it will immediately block and investigate OpenAI, the U.S. company behind the popular artificial intelligence tool, from processing the data of Italian users. The order is temporary until the company respects the EU's landmark privacy law, the general data protection regulation or GDPR. The authority said the company lacks a legal basis justifying, quote, the mass collection and storage of personal data to train the algorithms of chat GPT. The company also processes

data inaccurately, it added. ChatsyPT also suffered a data breach and exposed users' conversations and payment information of its users last week, the Italian Authority said. It added, OpenAI does not verify the age of users and exposes, quote, minors to absolutely unsuitable answers compared to their degree of development and self-awareness, end quote. OpenAI doesn't have an office in the EU, but its representative in the European economic area has 20 days to communicate how it plans on bringing Chatsypity. into compliance with EU privacy rules or face a penalty of up to 4% of its global revenue.

Open AI did not immediately respond to a request for comment, end quote. Meanwhile, following up on what we discussed yesterday, some signatories of that open letter asking for a pause on AI training have been walking back their positions. Others, as we mentioned yesterday, turned out to be fake, and many experts are vocally disagreeing with the entire entire proposal. Quoting motherboard. All 30,000 signatories were confirmed to motherboard by the Future of Life Institute to be, quote, independently verified through direct communication. No one from OpenAI, which develops and commercializes the GPT series of AI models, has signed the letter.

Despite this verification process, the letter started out with a number of false signatories, including people impersonating OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Chinese president Xi Jinping, and chief AI scientist at Meta, Jan Lecun, before the Institute cleaned the list up and paused the appearance of signatures on the letter as they verified each one. The letter has been scrutinized by many AI researchers and even its own signatories since it was published on Tuesday. Gary Marcus, a professor of psychology and neural science at New York University, told Reuters, quote, the letter isn't perfect, but the spirit is right. Similarly, Amad Mostaki, the CEO of Stability AI, who has pitted his firm against Open AI as a truly open AI company tweeted, quote,

So yeah, I don't think a six-month pause is the best idea or agree with everything, but there are some interesting things in that letter, end quote. AI experts criticize the letter as furthering the AI hype cycle rather than listing or calling for concrete actions on harms that exist today. Some argued that it promotes a long-termist perspective, which is a worldview that has been criticized as harmful and anti-democratic because it valorizes the Uber wealthy and allows for morally dubious actions under certain justifications. Emily M. Bender, a professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Washington and the co-author of the first paper the letter

cites, tweeted that this open letter is, quote, dripping with AI hype and that the letter misuses her research. The letter says, quote, AI systems with human competitive intelligence can pose profound risk to society and humanity as shown by extensive research. But Bender counters that her research specifically points to current large language models and their use within oppressive systems, which is more concrete and pressing than hypothetical future AI. Quote, we wrote a whole paper in late 2020, pointing out that this headlong rush to ever larger language models without considering risk was a bad thing. But the risks and harms have never been about too powerful AI, she tweeted. Instead, they're about concentration of power in the hands of people, about reproducing systems

of oppression, about damage to the information ecosystem, and about damage to, the natural ecosystem through prolificate uses of energy resources. It's essentially misdirection, bringing everyone's attention to hypothetical powers and harms of LLMs and proposing a very vague and ineffective way of addressing them instead of looking at the harms here and now and addressing those. For instance, requiring more transparency when it comes to the training data and capabilities of LLMs, or legislation regarding where and when they can be used. Sasha Lucioni, a research scientist and climate lead at Hugging Face told motherboard, Arvind Narayanan, an associate professor of computer science at Princeton,

echoed that the open letter was full of AI hype that, quote, makes it harder to tackle real occurring AI harms. Should we automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones? Should we develop non-human minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete, and replace us? Should we risk loss of control of our civilization? The open letter asks. Narayanian says these questions are, quote, nonsense and quote, ridiculous. The very far out questions of whether computers will replace humans and take over human civilization are part of a long-termist mindset that

distracts us from current issues. After all, AI is already being integrated into people's jobs and reducing the need for certain occupations without being made a, quote, non-human mind that will make us, quote, obsolete, end quote. Finally today, shorter long reads than usual this week. Nothing really caught my eye. What can I say? First up, though, this piece. from the verge is about the saga of how Fitbit tried to get rid of a physical button on its Fitbit Charge 3, replacing it with an inductive button and how that ended up being a disaster for users. Might sound like a small issue, but it goes to something philosophical about design that I think needs repeating over and over again, especially with dashboards and cars, i.e., just because you can

replace physical buttons doesn't mean you should, not in all cases. Quote, the tragedy is that no one really asked for the inductive button. Fitbit's physical buttons on older devices would occasionally get stuck, but by and large, all this could have been solved by making better buttons, as other wearable makers did. Instead, Fitbit over-engineered a solution that created new problems and then doubled down on it for future trackers and smartwatches. It popped up on the charge four and the Versa 3 and cents, where the inductive buttons flaws were even more apparent because Fitbit added a double press. theoretically that meant you could program another shortcut, provided you were able to figure out the difference between a single press and a double press and a long press. Personally, I could not.

While I generally had a positive experience with the Sense and Versa 3, the button wasn't part of it. Simply bending my wrist ended up triggering half a dozen unintentional shortcuts. Bending my wrist while typing, that would start a run. Stretching out my calves before bed with a downward dog, that was also a run. In the course of testing, I ended up starting 15 Phantom runs that I'd, then had to go back and delete. For the most part, other smartwatch makers have settled on a mix of physical buttons and touch screens. The Apple Watch Ultra, for instance, has a huge honking screen, but it also added a third physical button, the active button to the mix. Even Apple, a company that

likes to do away with buttons whenever the opportunity arises, understands how important physical buttons are on its smart watches, end quote. Then Vox has an interesting look at the whole influencers teaching you how to get rich industry and how recursive it is. Quote, take YouTuber and motivational speaker Brendan Bouchard, who for $997 a year can teach you how to be a millionaire. Specifically, he will teach you to become an influencer using, quote, seven-figure marketing strategies to market well yourself. The idea is that if you sign up to a course by Bouchard, you could someday become a Bouchard, someone who tweets about ownership mindset and high-performance habits and produces YouTube videos about the power of encouragement.

Evangelical Christian influencer Bethany Beals, $1,900. She Works Smart Course, is more explicit. The end goal is for you to start your own online course business, quote, so that you can make money on autopilot, end quote. And boy, are people trying to make money on autopilot. Online courses can run the gamut from Shady, professional misogynist and alleged sex trafficker Andrew Tate's $50 per month Hustlers University, where students learn in crypto trading and drop shipping to explicitly criminal. There is at least one six-week course in which $945 will get you an in-depth lesson on how to steal credit cards and use them to pay for fancy vacations. They've earned the online course industry a bit of a bad rap on the wider

internet. In YouTube videos, medium posts, Reddit threads, and tweets, people vent their frustrations about being endlessly marketed to in this specific way. All of these influencers peddling this S contributes to people putting less and less value into tex. teaching and more indigenous marketing themselves as products. Describes one Reddit commenter. It's an MLM, but in human form, end quote. And then finally, Vanity Fair has a profile of none other than Kara Swisher, quote.

Swisher, who is five foot two, but writes tall, as she likes to say, has carved a considerable niche for herself, cutting across television, the web, podcasts, and social media, becoming the queen of all media, as veteran tech journalist Walt Mossberg puts it, A former Vox media colleague is less charitable, quote, She's always been searching for a way to make her platform even bigger, and she's done that. But it begins and ends with her. There's no legacy beyond that, end quote.

Leaving legacy aside for the moment, Swisher has plowed a path through the media landscape, alongside industry shifts, from reporting at a newspaper to blogging, to co-founding successful websites and conferences, to becoming a brand unto herself. Part of a trend of elite journalists walking away from legacy outlets in pursuit of more freedom and potentially profits. Last year, she gave up a podcast and a column at the New York Times, largely because she says, quote, I don't need mama telling me what to do. And she stepped back from Code, the iconic tech conference she'd organized and hosted for the past two decades, quote, it was like painting the same painting over and over again, she tells me, and I just wanted

to make something else, end quote. There are very few people left in tech or media these days who would intimidate me if they interviewed me or even worse if I had to interview them. But believe me, Kara is one of them. She briefly lived in my neighborhood and I would see her now and then when I would be walking the kids to school and I would say to them in hush tones, there goes one of the greatest, scariest people in Papa's job. And they would be like, what? But it is true. Kara is the goat.

No bonus episodes for you this weekend, but Chris and I are going to try to squeeze one in. next week. Talk to you on Monday.