Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 04/12 – OpenAI Is The Biggest Drama Startup Since Twitter

Episode Date: April 12, 2024

Now a big business intelligence company has been breached. Do you get the sense that people are laying the groundwork for something? Google discontinues a product, but this time, its probably our fault. M4 chips are coming from Apple. OpenAI continues to be the drama queen of Silicon Valley. And, of course, the Weekend Longreads Suggestions. Links: US government urges Sisense customers to reset credentials after hack (TechCrunch) Google One VPN will be discontinued, Pixel VPN remains with upgrade coming (9to5Google) X’s Premium users can no longer hide their blue checks (The Verge) Apple Plans to Overhaul Entire Mac Line With AI-Focused M4 Chips (Bloomberg) OpenAI Researchers, Including Ally of Sutskever, Fired for Alleged Leaking (The Information) Is Google's AI Actually Discovering 'Millions of New Materials?' (404 Media) Weekend Longreads Suggestions: AI-Music Arms Race: Meet Udio, the Other ChatGPT for Music (RollingStone) How Bluey Became a $2 Billion Smash Hit—With an Uncertain Future (Bloomberg) 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, April 12th, 2024. I'm Brian McCullough today. Now a big business intelligence company has been breached. Do you get the sense that people are laying the groundwork for something?

Google discontinues a product, but this time it's probably our fault. M4 chips are coming soon from Apple. Open AI continues to be the drama queen of Silicon Valley, and of course the weekend long read suggestions. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. The United States cybersecurity and infrastructure security agency or CISA is investigating a breach at business intelligence company Cicentz. Sources say the attackers copied several terabytes of customer data including credentials, quoting TechCrunch. In a brief statement on Thursday, CISA said it was responding to a recent compromise at Cicent's,

which provides business intelligence and data analytics to companies around the world. CISA urged Cicent's customers to, quote, reset credentials and secrets potentially exposed to or use to access Sysense services and report to the agency any suspicious activity involving the use of compromised credentials. The exact nature of the cybersecurity incident is not clear yet. Founded in 2004, Sysense develops business intelligence and data analytics software for big companies, including telcos, airlines, and tech giants. Sysense's technology allows organizations to collect, analyze, and visualize large amounts of their corporate data by tapping directly into their existing technologies and cloud systems. Companies like Sysense rely on using credentials such as a

as passwords and private keys to access a customer's various stores of data for analysis. With access to these credentials, an attacker could potentially also access a customer's data. SESA said it is, quote, taking an active role in collaborating with private industry partners to respond to this incident, especially as it relates to impacted critical infrastructure sector organizations. Sysense counts Air Canada, PagerDuty, Phillips Healthcare, Skull Candy, and Verizon as its customers, as well as thousands of other organizations globally. News of the incident first emerged on Wednesday after cybersecurity journalist Brian Krebs published a note sent by Sysense chief information security officer Sandgram Dash urging customers to, quote, rotate any credentials that you use within your Sysense application, end quote. Google suns setting another product, but this time it looks like it's your fault, or our fault, collectively, I guess.

Google says it is discontinuing its Google One VPN due to lack of use. Google's free pixel VPN that debuted in 2022 with the Pixel 7 will remain unchanged. However, quoting 9 to 5 Google. Back in October of 2020, Google 1 introduced a VPN that later became available on all plans and platforms. Google announced today that the VPN by Google 1 is shutting down in the coming months. At the moment, this VPN is available in the Google 1 apps for Android and iOS, while Mac and Windows clients are also available. It originally required a $9.99 per month premium plan, but was brought down to the $1.99 per month offering in March of 2023. Google is now, quote, discontinuing the VPN feature as they found people simply

weren't using it. The company tells 9 to 5 Google that the deprecation will let the team refocus and support more in-demand features with Google One. Earlier this year, Google One hit 100 million subscribers and CEO Sundar Pichai, teased it as a future growth area driven by AI. Today's change follows this week's news about AI editing tools in Google Photos going free in the coming months and no longer requiring a subscription, save for unlimited magic editor usage. VPN by Google One is going away in the next few months with no specific timeline provided today. Existing users will be directed to third-party VPN alternatives. Meanwhile, there are no changes to the free Pixel VPN introduced with the Pixel 7 series in 2022. At the time, availability was guaranteed for five years.

In fact, the big VPN upgrade introduced with the Pixel 8 is coming to the Pixel 7, 7 Pro 7A, and Fold in June. Those older pixel phones will stop using the Google 1 app and switch to a built-in service. That means there's no persistent notification. The VPN available with Google Fi will also remain available, end quote. I continue to not know what to tell you about this because I can barely even keep up with it. X is now apparently telling users the hide-your-checkmark feature of X premium is going away, quote, soon. Quoting the verge. The platform is eliminating the ability for premium users to hide their blue check marks according to a notification received by multiple users on Thursday.

X made displaying the blue check optional last summer, and it's unclear exactly why the platform plans to remove the feature or when. Once a status symbol, the blue check lost some of its luster after X shifted to a paid verification system under Elon Musk's ownership. A blue check then just became an indicator that the account holder paid for a premium subscription. The feature was also abused by scammers and online impersonators, and some blue checks became the target of online harassment or mass blocking. X eventually rolled out the blue check to accounts with more than a million followers, covering most living celebrities and some dead as well as public figures. But just last week, the platform doled out free blue checks to accounts with high numbers of verified followers, whether the owners wanted them or not,

end quote. Mark German's sources say Apple is nearing production of M4 chips with AI upgrades and memory improvements coming to do MacBook pros, Mac minis, and IMAX starting later this year, quoting Bloomberg. The new chip will come in at least three main varieties, and Apple is looking to update every Mac model with it, said the people who asked not to be identified because the plans haven't been announced. The new Macs are underway at a critical time. After peaking in 2022, Macs sales fell 27% in the last fiscal year, which ended in September. In the holiday period, revenue from the computer line was flat. Apple attempted to breathe new life into the Mac business with an M3-focused launch event last October, but those chips didn't bring major performance improvements over the M2

from the prior year. Apple is aiming to release the updated computers beginning late this year and extending into early next year. There will be new IMAX, a low-end 14-inch-inch-Macbook Pro, high-end 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros and Mac minis, all with M4 chips. But the company's plans could change, and Apple spokesperson declined to comment. Apple is then planning to follow-up with more M4 Macs throughout 2025. That includes updates to the 13-and-15-inch MacBook Air by the spring, the Mac Studio around the middle of the year, and the MacPro later in 2025. The MacBook Air received the M3 chip last month,

while the Mac Studio and Mac Pro were updated with M-2 processors last year. The M4 chip line includes an entry-level version dubbed Donan, more powerful models named Brava and a top-end processor coden named Hydra. The company is planning to highlight the AI processing capabilities of the components and how they'll integrate with the next version of MacOS, which will be announced in June at Apple's annual developer conference. The Donan chip is coming to the entry-level MacBook Pro, the new MacBook Airs, and a low-end version of the Mac Mini, while the Brava chips will run the high-end MacBook Pros

and a priser version of the Mac Mini. For the Mac Studio, Apple is testing versions with both a still unreleased M3-era chip and a variation of the M4-Bra processor. The highest-end Apple desktop, the Mac Pro, is set to get the new Hydra chip, end quote. I'm just going to say this. The only tech startup that I can remember having this much drama was Twitter early on in its life. The information is reporting that OpenAI has fired two researchers on its AI safety team for allegedly leaking information including Leopold Aschenbrenner, an ally of Ilya Susekever, who, remember, initially backed Sam Altman's ouster as CEO before and about face. So Ilya's position at

OpenAI remains, who knows? Quote, it's not clear when information the two fired staffers leaked. The other staffer, Pavel is Maylov, a researcher who worked on reasoning, had also spent time on the safety team. The ouster of the two men is among the first. staffing changes that have surfaced publicly since OpenAI CEO Sam Altman resumed his board seat in March. Internally, Aschen Brenner was one of the faces of what OpenAI calls its superalignment team. Suscever formed the team last summer to develop techniques for controlling and steering advanced AI, known as superintelligence, that might solve nuclear fusion problems or colonize other planets. Leading up to the ouster, OpenAI staffers had disagreed on whether the company was developing AI safely enough.

Aschen Brenner had ties to the effective altruism movement, which prioritizes addressing the dangers of AI over short-term profit or productivity benefits. Suskever, a co-founder responsible for OpenAI's biggest technical breakthroughs, was part of the board that fired Altman for what it called a lack of candor. Suskever departed the board after Altman returned as CEO. He has largely been absent from OpenAI since then. Ashen Brenner, who graduated from Columbia University when he was 19, had previously worked at the Future Fund, a philanthropic fund, started by former FTX chief Sam Bankman-Fried that aimed to finance projects to, quote, improve humanities long-term prospects. Ash and Brenner joined OpenAIA a year ago.

Several of the board members who fired Altman also had ties to effective altruism. Tasha McCauley, for instance, is a board member of Effective Ventures, parent organization of the Center for Effective Altruism. Helen Toner previously worked at the Effective Altruism-focused Open Philanthropy project. Both left the board when Altman returned as CEO in late November, end quote. This is a bit of a bummer for AI hype. Researchers say they have not found, quote, strikingly novel compounds after analyzing a subset of the 2.2 million new crystals DeepMind claimed its AI tool, Nome, discovered, quoting 404 media. In November, Google's AI outfit DeepMind published a press release titled millions of new materials discovered with deep learning.

But now researchers who have analyzed a subset of what DeepMind discovered say, quote, We have yet to find any strikingly novel compounds in that subset. A.I. Tool Nome finds 2.2 million new crystals, including 380,000 stable materials that could power future technologies. Google wrote of the finding, adding that this was, quote, equivalent to nearly 800 years worth of knowledge that many of the discoveries, quote, escaped previous human chemical intuition, and that it was, quote, an order of magnitude expansion in stable materials known to humanity. The paper was published in nature and was picked up very widely in the press as an example of the incredible promise of AI in science. But in the last month, two external groups of researchers that

analyze the Deep Mind and Berkeley Papers and publish their own analyses that at the very least suggests this specific research is being oversold. Everyone in the material science world that I spoke to stress that AI holds great promise for discovering new types of materials, but they say Google and its deep learning techniques have not suddenly made an incredible breakthrough in the materials science world. In a prospective paper published in chemical materials this week, Anthony Chitem and Ram Cheshredi of the University of California, Santa Barbara, selected a random sample of the 380,000 proposed structures released by DeepMind and say that none of them meet a three-part test of whether the proposed material is credible, useful, or novel.

They believe that what DeepMind found are crystalline inorganic compounds and should be described as such rather than using the more generic label material, which they say is a term that should be reserved for things that demonstrate some utility. In the analysis, they wrote, we have yet to find any strikingly novel compounds in the gnome and stable structure listings, although we anticipate that there must be some among the 384,870 compositions. We also note that while many of the new compositions are trivial applications of known materials, the computational approach delivers credible overall compositions, which gives us confidence that the underlying approach is sound. In a phone interview, Cheatham told me, the Google paper falls way short in terms of it being a useful practical contribution to the experimental materials scientists.

Sashardi said, quote, we actually think that Google has missed the mark here. If I was looking for a new material to do a particular function, I wouldn't comb through more than 2 million new compositions as proposed by Google, Cheatham said. I don't think that's the best way of going forward. I think the general methodology probably works quite well, but it needs to be a lot more focused around specific needs, so none of us have enough time in our lives to go through 2.2 million possibilities and decide how useful that might be. We spent quite a lot of time on this going through a very small subset of the things that they propose, and we realize not only was there no functionality, but most of them might be credible, but they're not very novel because they're simple derivatives of things that are already known, end quote.

Google DeepMind told me in a statement, we stand by all claims made in the Google DeepMind Nome paper, end quote. Long reads time. Rolling Stone has a profile of Udeo, the other GPD but for music service, Suno being the other other one. Quote, UDio's product came together remarkably quickly after its founding last December by four former employees of Google's AI research wing, Deep Mind, David Ding, Connor Durkin, Charlie Nash, Yoroslav Gannon, and Andrew Sanchez.

They're backed by a range of tech heavyweights, including. including A16Z and Instagram co-founder and CTO Mike Krieger. We were very well supported from the day we took investments, says Sanchez, so the technical co-founders were sort of able to hit the ground running because we could get all that going pretty quickly. There are some notable music names on UDio's list of early investors as well, including Common, producer Tay Keith, industry vet, Steve Stout's United Masters, and Will I Am.

In a press release, Will I Am, who's long been an evangelist for AI's musical possibilities was effusive about the company's product. This is a brand new renaissance, and Udio is the tool for this era's creativity, said the artist, who was consulted during the development of the product. With Udio, you are able to pull songs into existence via AI and your imagination, end quote. Though neither company will directly confirm or deny it, there is substantial reason to believe that both Udio and Suno were trained on copyrighted music without permission, a practice recently described in an open letter from the Artist Rights Alliance,

signed by artists from Stevie Wonder to Billy Elish. The group reiterated its stance in a new statement to Rolling Stone. Using artists' work without consent, credit, and compensation is not only unethical and irresponsible and destructive of cultural gifts, but also illegal, said Jen Jacobson, executive director of the Artist Rights Alliance. The question of whether copyrighted material can legally be used to train AI is currently being decided in various court cases. The Artist Rights Alliance urges AI platforms to turn back from this reckless path, and if they fail to do so, we urge rightsholders to take prompt legal action to stop them, end quote. And finally, not tech, but I can't help but share the big business week cover story from last week about the phenomenon that is Bluey.

Quote, that turned out to be a phenomenally lucrative deal for BBC Studios. Last July, BBC Studios boasted that it surpassed $2 billion, actually $2 billion, $2.5 billion in annual revenue for the first time in its fiscal 2023 year, thanks in part to the sale of Bluey consumer products. Now it's banking on the show's growth to deliver on its ambitious plan to double its overall business in 2008. Disney chief executive officer Bob Eiger says it will mop up the red ink at his company later this year, but having more Bluey episodes to release and perhaps even acquiring the show outright would certainly help his company. Bluey accounted for 29% of all TV views on Disney Plus in the fourth quarter of 2023, excluding movies, according to market research firm Circana. Someone familiar with the company who didn't want to be identified because this person wasn't authorized to speak, says Disney has repeatedly explored the possibility of snapping up the show, end quote. Yeah. Try taking a four-year-old to Disney World and explaining that the reason Bluey's not there is because of legal rights and IP issues.

No bonus episodes this weekend. Quick question for you, though. On social media, people keep complaining about being in tech. threads with people who suddenly insert voice notes into the threads. Voice notes? Really? Is that a thing? Is it an age thing? Maybe. Please do not do that to me.

I happily moved over to text messaging 20 years ago because I hated voicemail. Let's not bring voicemail back. Is this a new phenomenon? Just stop it. If it's too much info for a text, then call me. Talk to you on Monday.