Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 04/21 – Twitter Stuff

Episode Date: April 21, 2023

More… I dunno… Twitter things are happening. Google is consolidating its AI efforts. We now have a hint about what that startup Humane might be creating. The US wants to get a jump start on 6G technology. And pour one out for BuzzFeed News. Sponsors: Grammarly.com/techmeme Headspace.com/ride30day Links: Twitter seemingly now requires all advertisers to have a verified checkmark (TechCrunch) Google Looks to Turbocharge AI Efforts With Combined Brain, DeepMind Unit (WSJ) Google gives Bard the ability to generate and debug code (Engadget) Watch the first demo of buzzy startup Humane’s wearable AI assistant in leaked clips (The Verge) U.S. Begins Planning for 6G Wireless Communications (WSJ) The Internet of the 2010s Ended Today (The Atlantic) 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 21st, 2023. I'm Brian McCullough today. More, I don't know, Twitter things are happening. Google is consolidating its AI efforts. We now have a hint about what that startup humane might be creating. The U.S. wants to get a jumpstart on 6G technology and pour one out for poor BuzzFeed news. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Oh boy. Well, Twitter has been removing the blue check marks as promised, except for when the they don't. There's a whole list of celebrities like LeBron James, who apparently still have the check marks, though a lot of them say they're not paying for it. Twitter apparently offered LeBron and

others complementary subscriptions to keep the blue check. Elon has even tweeted that he's personally paying some subscriptions on behalf of people, but some folks, like the author Stephen King, say they don't want the blue check mark, don't want to pay for it, and are requesting that the check mark come down because they don't want to be associated with it. Other people, people are pointing out that their blue checkmarks have come down. But when they did, never once did Twitter email them and be like, hey, we're taking away your blue check mark. Would you maybe like to pay for it? Here's a link to sign up. Like there's apparently been no solicitation attempts on Twitter's behalf, which is weird if this is, in theory, an attempt to make a new revenue stream,

right? Also, the confusion this is causing is already beginning. There are dueling official accounts for the city of New York, I believe. And are you aware of the recent civil war that broke out last week in Sudan? Well, a fake Twitter account with a blue checkmark for Sudan's rapid support forces is apparently wrongly claiming RSF leader Hemeti died. RSF's real account lost its checkmark recently. And if all that wasn't enough, and you can hear the fatigue in my voice as I attempt to sum all that up for you, TechCrunch has seen a... email where Twitter has apparently told advertisers that they must have, quote, a verified checkmark or subscribe to either Twitter blue or verified organizations to keep running

ads. That's right. According to this, you have to pay them for the privilege to pay them to advertise. Quote, several Twitter users, including social media guru Matt Navarra, have posted screenshots of an email reportedly sent by Twitter, which states that starting from April 21st, which is today, of course, verified checkmarks are required to continue running ads on the platform. While Elon Musk has been pushing subscriptions as a core money driver, as advertisers fled the platform, it's clear that Twitter still wants and needs advertising dollars. The platform's top advertisers, those spending $1,000 each month, already receive an official gold checkmark gratis, indicating that they are an official business account.

There is nothing official yet on Twitter's ads account pages to indicate that only verified accounts will be able to advertise, but there is some sense in requiring very, for advertisers if it reduces spam or deters other bad actors from the platform. However, for this to be properly effective, it would surely need rigorous vetting beyond requiring a credit card and phone number, while the $8 monthly fee is not a major deterrent in itself. Moving forward, it seems that anyone wanting to post an ad or promote a tweet will have to cough up $8 a month for Twitter Blue or $1,000 a month to be recognized as a verified organization. One exception here will likely be accounts with a gray checkmark which are reserved for official government and related accounts,

such as agencies, embassies, parliaments, and so on. At any rate, it is difficult to see how this move will do anything other than dissuade advertising spend on Twitter. TechCrunch reached out to Twitter for comment, but at the time of writing, we have yet to receive a response, aside from the customary poop emoji, of course, end quote. Speaking of Civil Wars, if that's not too terrible, a segue, a civil war just ended in site of Google. Google has announced the formation of Google DeepMind, a unit which will combine Google's DeepMind team and Google Research's Brain Team to be led by DeepMind co-founder Demise Hasebis as its CEO, quoting the Wall Street Journal. Jeff Dean, the previous head

of Google Research overseeing, will move to a new role as chief scientist. Google said he would lead the company's quote, most critical and strategic technical projects related to AI, including a new series of powerful AI programs. Combining all this talent into one focused team, backed by the computational resources of Google, will significantly accelerate our progress in AI. Google's CEO, Sundar Pichai, said Thursday in a blog post. The merger will mark a dramatic shift

in the way Google's AI researchers work together, given the distinct cultures of brain and deep mind, said Christopher Manning, director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Strategically, merging seems sensible, Mr. Manning said. tactically, it will be hard to manage the organization and cultural change, end quote. In 2021, DeepMind told staff that Google had called off talks about giving the group more autonomy from its parent company, the journal reported. Alphabet said in February, it would

begin reporting DeepMind as part of its corporate costs rather than a separate group of companies called Other Betts. DeepMind brought in $1.7 billion of revenue from research and development work performed for Alphabet in 2021, according to corporate filings in the UK, where the team is based. the new AI group will be housed under Google rather than other bets, the company said. No layoffs were planned as part of the reorganization, end quote. As friend of the show, Noah Smith tweeted, Facing unprecedented tweets from non-Google entities, Google will ally with Google. Responding to the news in that last segment, the founder of Playground AI, tweeted,

ship product, not reorgs, which was snarky, because they are trying, right? Google just announced that it's given Bard the ability to generate, debug, and explain code in more than 20 languages, including C++, JavaScript, and Python, and then export that code to Google's co-lab, the company's cloud-based notebook environment for Python, coding and gadget. Aside from being able to generate code, Bard can now provide explanations for snippets of code. It could be especially useful if you've only just started learning programming, since it will show you why a particular block has the output that it has. and yes, Bard can now also help you debug code that isn't quite working like you want it to. Google admits that at this point, Bard might spit out code that, quote, doesn't produce the expected output or code that's incomplete. The Tech Giant advises double-checking and testing its responses first. In fact, Bard can debug its own output if you find that it's returning an error.

Just type in, this code didn't work, please fix it. Finally, if you're not a programming beginner but still need a bit of help, you can ask the chatbot to optimize your code by making it faster or more efficient. To note, chat GPT has the ability to write and improve existing code in several programming languages as well. So Google giving Bard the capability is perhaps inevitable. Google has also been constantly improving Bard in other ways and previously rolled out upgrades powered by a new language model called Palm. A few days ago, the company created an experiment updates page where you can see all the changes Bard has gone through as it adds even more features and performs bug fixes,

and quote. Well, it's never too early, I guess. The White House has apparently begun meeting with corporate government and academic experts to begin developing strategies for for 6G as the U.S. seeks to build an early lead over China, quoting the Wall Street Journal. The next generation of telecom is still years away from deployment, but it could pave the way for global internet access still unavailable with the current 5G standard, which makes smartphone downloads and wireless hotspot connections faster. Expanding access to the internet has been a priority for the Biden administration as part of its infrastructure initiatives. The 6G planning initiative also aims to reassert the leadership of the U.S. and its allies in telecommunications,

where China has made gains, thanks in part to careful nurturing of homegrown equipment manufacturing and increased participation in international standard setting. An administration official acknowledged that China used 5G effectively to advance its economic and national security goals, such as gaining global market share over the West for its telecom manufacturing companies, including Huawei technologies. China really prioritized its telecom sector, and I think we may not have, A senior administration official said in a press call Thursday. The administration also has focused on building and maintaining advantages in other high-tech areas where the U.S. faces new challenges from China.

Those include semiconductor manufacturing, quantum computing, and biotechnology, end quote. And speaking about hopefully seeing a product ship at some point, humane is a company I believe we've talked about before. It was founded by two former Apple product and design gurus, Bethany Bonjourno and Imran Chowdry. Their startup, Humane, has raised $230 million in total, $100 million as recently as I believe March, to create, well, something. We don't exactly know yet, but we've heard it's a consumer hardware product that does something with AI. Well, apparently, at the TED conference yesterday, Humane co-founder Chowdrie demoed an AI-powered

wearable with a projected display that does not need a nearby phone and uses voice and gestures for input. Quoting The Verge. Thanks to the presentation, we now have at least some idea of what the device might be able to do and how it might go about doing it without a traditional touchscreen interface. During the presentation, Chowdry wears the device in his breast pocket, tapping it in lieu of a wake word, and then issuing voice commands like you would with an Amazon Echo Smart Speaker. Axios notes that the device also supports gesture commands.

Imagine this. You've been in meetings all day and you just want a summary of what you've missed, Chowdry says, before tapping the device and asking him to be caught up. In response, the device offers a summary of emails, calendar invites, and messages. It's unclear exactly where the wearable is pulling this information from, given Chaudry's comments about not needing a paired smartphone, so presumably it's connected to cloud-based services. In addition to spoken responses, the device is also able to project a screen onto nearby surfaces. At one point in the presentation, Chaudry receives a phone call from Bethany Bonjourno, Humane's co-founder, CEO, and Chowdry's wife, which the device projects onto his hand. The camera angle obscures how Chowdri picks up the call and at no point does he seem to interact with the projected screen on his hand, despite the interface showing what look like buttons.

But he's able to hold the call as though using a phone on speakerphone. As well as being able to project a screen, the device also includes a camera that's shown identifying objects in the world around it. Similar to what we teased in a leaked investor pitch deck on stage, Chowdry uses the camera to identify a chocolate bar and advise him whether or not to eat it, based on his dietary requirements. Finally, there's a translation demonstration where Chaudhry holds down a button on the device, says a sentence, and then waits his humane's wearable, reads out the same sentence in French. In the clip, Chaudry never instructs the device to translate his words, so it's not clear how one

activates this functionality. We like to say that the experience is screenless, seamless, and sensing, allowing you to access the power of compute while remaining present in your surroundings, fixing a balance that's felt out of place for some time now, Chaudreys says, per inverse. Humane is far from the first company to have attempted to offer these kinds of features, but it's notable that it's attempting to do it all in a relatively compact screenless device that doesn't require a paired smartphone. But what's unclear to me is how usable the device will be when you're in public or in a hurry. For all their faults, smartphones are still great at getting you quick access to the details you need and showing them on a screen that only you can see,

and it's not clear whether Humane's combination of a projected screen and speakers is capable of matching it just yet, end quote. This is sort of along the lines of the rumors that I've heard about this device, a personal digital assistant with you always recording everything theoretically helpful about everything. Click through to the piece for some short videos of the demo. Finally today, no long reads for you this week, because catching up from travel last week, I just didn't have time to collect enough worth sharing. Plus, there was just too much news today. And also, I wanted to make sure to end by pouring one out for a venue we will no longer be able to quote from on this show. BuzzFeed announced yesterday it is shutting down its BuzzFeed News division and has cut around 180 jobs or around 15% of its workforce.

I cannot express to you how central BuzzFeed and BuzzFeed news was to digital media and really all of modern media over the last 15 years or so. I got to dip my toe into media waters when I worked at TED in 2016. And yes, there was a time when BuzzFeed seemed like the future, when people were advising what were thought of at the time as dinosaurs like the New York Times to learn a thing or two, to take a page from the BuzzFeeds of the world. That hasn't worked out the way Jonah Pready and others thought at the time. The New York Times is now thriving, and BuzzFeed is now a penny stock that is in danger of being delisted from the stock exchange. But BuzzFeed News was not the listicles BuzzFeed is famous for. It was a legit journalism powerhouse that, you know, you know, won Pulitzer's and such. Some of the best journalistic talent working today went through BuzzFeed News at one point or another. Think of our friend Alex Cantorwitz as one example. As Josh Marshall wrote overnight, quote,

BuzzFeed mastered the distribution element of social media very, very fast. But it had listicles and cat photos and other stuff like that. That's tons of traffic, but it's not the prestige play that brings you top shelf premium ad dollars. The journalism was really a loss leader in that calculus. GM or Bacardi isn't going to sign on to be the exclusive sponsor of your Grumpy Cat slideshow, even if millions see it, but put a Pulitzer in the mix, and it's a very different story. There was always a big mullet aspect to these plays, prestige up front, news and reporting, party in the back, listicles and memes, end quote. And then, as Charlie Wurzel writes in the Atlantic, the legacy of BuzzFeed News really has two parts,

brilliant stories and alumni, and also the tragedy of mismanagement and impossible ceaseless exponential growth expectations. Quote, BuzzFeed News was not, as Andreessen Horowitz's Chris Dixon once said, a full-stack startup. This should have been blindingly obvious. The business of news gathering, not content creation, is expensive, and it does not scale. BuzzFeed News's bread and butter telling the internet stories and leveraging its systems to promote them was only nominally a technology strategy and one that was yoked to

the success of other venture-funded social media companies, including Facebook. The fate of the entire digital media ecosystem was dependent on the line going up and to the right in perpetuity, or at least until the moneymen saw their returns. Just how infectious was this perpetual growth mindset? In the mid-2010s, BuzzFeed turned down a rumored $500 million acquisition from Disney, perhaps in part because it wanted to become Disney. Around the time I left in 2019, it became clear that browsing and attention habits were shifting, turning places like Facebook into ghost towns for politically radicalized boomers. This was the first time I heard internal rumblings of investor concern. I started hearing people whispering the word profitability, a term I had never occasion to hear

around the office and a lot more. It took less than four years to fully internalize the lesson that venture capitalism is just a form of gambling. You invest in 10 companies to make money off one, and employees are the chips. News, no matter how much technology you wrap around it, may be a public good, but if you're looking for Facebook-level exits, it's a bad bet. BuzzFeed News was oriented around the mission of finding, celebrating, and chronicling the indelible humanity pouring out of every nook and cranny of the internet, so it makes sense that any iteration that comes next will be more interested in employing machines to create content. The BuzzFeed era of media is now officially over. What comes next in the chat GPT era

is likely to be just as disruptive, but I doubt it'll be as joyous and chaotic, and I guarantee it'll feel less human, end quote. Speaking of my time at TED, some of you know I had a residency there when I was working on my book and the Internet History podcast. And this weekend, for bonus episodes, I'm going to share two interviews I did during that time

back in 2016. I'll tell you why. I was talking to somebody this week who was raving about the All-In podcast and they were like, where did these guys come from? How is it that they're suddenly the main characters in the tech world?

He vaguely knew David Sacks was a member of the PayPal Mafia, but he had no idea that Jason Kalkanis was huge going back to the dot-com days. Like Jason was Silicon Alley in the late 90s. And also one of the big reasons meta's apps are used by like half the population of the planet every month is thanks to the growth hacks that Chimath Palihabitia did there 15 years ago. So if you're a fan of the All In podcast, and you know those guys but didn't know their backstory. Here you go, two separate interviews that tell their entire story. Enjoy. Maybe we'll make up for the lack of long reads this week. Talk to you on Monday.