Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 05/31 – Why Not Just Kill Siri?

Episode Date: May 31, 2024

OpenAI has a new “affordable” version of ChatGPT for universities and schools. They also are planning to get back into robotics in a big way. Behind the scenes, TikTok is forking its algorithm just in case. Why doesn’t Apple just euthanize the Siri brand? And, of course, the Weekend Longreads Suggestions. Links: OpenAI has a has a new version of ChatGPT just for universities (Engadget) OpenAI Is Rebooting Its Robotics Team (Forbes) OpenAI finds Russian and Chinese groups used its tech for propaganda campaigns (Washington Post) Apple Plans AI-Based Siri Overhaul to Control Individual App Functions (Bloomberg) Exclusive: TikTok preparing a US copy of the app’s core algorithm, sources say (Reuters) Spotify offers Car Thing refunds as it faces lawsuit over bricking the streaming device (TechCrunch) Weekend Longreads Suggestions: Disney Is Banking On Sequels to Help Get Pixar Back on Track (Bloomberg Businessweek) They Built a $100 Million Watch Empire. Then the Market Tanked. (WSJ) The Creator Of ‘Magic: The Gathering’ Knows Exactly Where It All Went Wrong (Defector) 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 the final day of May, 2024. I'm Brian McCullough today. OpenAI has a new affordable, in quotes, version of chat GPT for universities and schools. They also are planning to get back into robotics in a big way. Behind the scenes, TikTok is forking its algorithm just in case. Why doesn't Apple just euthanize the Siri brand? And of course, the weekend long-range suggestions. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. A bunch of OpenAI stories for you today. First up, OpenAI has unveiled chat GPT EDU, an affordable, in quotes, version for universities, including GPT4O access, custom GPT creation, and higher message limits than the free tier, quoting in gadget. ChatGPT EDU is designed for schools that want to deploy AI more broadly to students and their campus communities, the company said in a blog post.

Chat GTPETEDU includes access to GPT-4-O, OpenAI's latest large language model that the company revealed earlier this month. OpenAI claims that the model is much better than its previous versions at interpreting text, coding, and mathematics, analyzing datasets, and being able to access the web. ChatGPTEDU will also have significantly higher message limits than the free version of chat GPT and allow universities to build custom versions of chat GPT trained on their own data, confusingly called GPTs, and share them within university workspaces. OpenAI claims that conversations and data from chat GPT EDU won't be used to train OpenAI's models.

Although the introduction of chat GPT in late 2020 initially raised concerns about academic integrity and potential misuse in educational environments, universities have increasingly been experimenting with using generative AI for both teaching as well as research. OpenAI said that it built chat GPT EDU after it saw Wharton, Arizona State University and Columbia, among others, using ChatGPT Enterprise. MBA undergrads at Wharton, for instance, completed their final reflection assignments by training a GPT, trained on course materials and having discussions with the chatbot, while Arizona State University is experimenting with its own GPs that engage German conversations with students

learning the language, end quote. Also, Open AI is reportedly hiring research engineers to rebuild its robotics team. Sources say the company plans to develop tech that robot makers will integrate into their systems, quoting Forbes. With investment into AI-powered robotics heating up, OpenAI is formally relaunching its previously abandoned robotics team Forbes has learned. The company is currently hiring research engineers to rebuild the team, which it had shuttered in 2020, according to three sources. OpenAI has yet to publicly announce the details of its homegrown robotics efforts, but in a recent job listing explained that new hires would be, quote, one of the first members of the team. A source in a position to know told Forbes the group has only existed for about two months.

After publication, the company confirmed that it had begun hiring for the team. Over the past year, Open AI's in-house startup fund has invested in several well-capitalized companies trying to develop humanoid robots, including figure AI, 1X technologies, and physical intelligence. It hinted at a possible robotics reboot in a favorite. February press release for Figure's latest fundraise. And one month later, figure debuted a video of its robot demonstrating rudimentary speech and reasoning skills supported by a large multimodal model trained by OpenAI. We've always planned to come back to robotics and we see a path with figure to explore what humanoid robots can achieve when powered by highly capable multimodal models.

Vice President Peter Wheelender, previously a member of OpenAI's robotics team said. Two sources told Forbes that OpenAI intends to coexist rather than compete against such companies. building technology that the robot makers will integrate into their own systems. And the listing notes that engineers hired for the position would be tasked with collaborating with, quote, external partners as well as training AI models. Sources said it's unclear whether OpenAI plans to develop robotics hardware, which it struggled to do several years ago. Robotics was a pillar of OpenAI's mission from its early days.

Co-founder Vojek Zaremba oversaw a team that originally sought to build a general-purpose robot. In 2019, more than a dozen OpenAI researchers published a paper describing how they had trained a pair of neural networks to solve a Rubik's cube using a single robotic hand. The authors claimed that this was a foundational step toward training robotic systems to perform a variety of everyday tasks. But in October 2020, the company abandoned its efforts, a move that Zaremba blamed on a lack of training data. The decision to disband the team was quite hard for me, Zaremba said in a 2021 interview, but I got the realization some time ago that actually that's for the best from the perspective of the company, end quote. And the final one, Open AI disrupted five influence operations in the past three months that it said accessed its products to covertly manipulate public opinion or shape

political outcomes. Quoting the Washington Post, Open AI removed accounts associated with well-known propaganda operations in Russia, China, and Iran, an Israeli political campaign firm, and a previously the unknown group originating in Russia that the company's researchers dubbed bad grammar. The groups used OpenAI tech to write posts, translate them into various languages, and build software that helped them automatically post to social media. None of these groups managed to get much traction. The social media accounts associated with them reached few users and had just a handful of followers, said Ben Nemo, principal investigator on OpenAI's intelligence and investigations team. Still, OpenAI's report shows that propagandists who've been active for years on social media are

using AI tech to boost their campaigns. We've seen them targeting text at a higher volume and with fewer errors than these operations have traditionally managed Nemo, who previously worked at meta, tracking influence operations said in a briefing with reporters. Nemo said, It's possible that other groups may still be using OpenAI's tools without the company's knowledge. This is not the time for complacency. History shows that influence operations that spent years failing to get anywhere can suddenly break out if nobody's looking for them, he said, end quote. confirm that Apple plans to overhaul Siri with more advanced AI, a move that will allow Siri to take command of all of the features within apps for the first time. In other words, a move toward

the hotness of the moment in the AI space, autonomous agents. Quote, this change required a revamp of Siri's underlying software using large language models, a core technology behind generative AI, and will be one of the highlights of Apple's renewed push into AI, they said. Siri will be a key focus of the WWDC unveiling. The new system will allow the assistant to control and navigate an iPhone or iPad with more precision. That includes being able to open individual documents, moving a note to another folder, sending or deleting an email, opening a particular publication in Apple News, emailing a web link, or even asking the device for a summary of an article.

In 2018, Apple launched Siri shortcuts as well, letting users manually create commands for app features. The new feature will go further using AIA. analyze what people are doing on their devices and automatically enable Siri-controlled features. It will be limited to Apple's own apps at the beginning with the company planning to support hundreds of different commands. At the start, the new Siri will handle one command at a time, but Apple has plans to allow users to chain commands together. For example, they could ask Siri to summarize a recorded meeting and then text it to a colleague in one request. Or an iPhone could theoretically be asked to crop a picture and then email it to a friend, end quote.

quick question here, though, why is Apple persisting with the Siri brand? Hasn't it been sort of discredited in the public's mind at this point? So this would be potentially a good time to make a clean break with the brand. Most people have tried Siri and largely abandoned it as being not really useful. So if you really want to introduce a next generation, a more capable version of this tech, why not say, I don't know, Siri had a kid? This is literally the next generation. new name. Makes sense to me. Sources say TikTok is working on a clone of its recommendation algorithm for its U.S. users that may result in a version that can operate independently of ByteDance. Quoting Reuters, the work on splitting the source code ordered by TikTok's Chinese parent bite dance late last year predated a bill to force a sale of TikTok's U.S. operations that began gaining steam in Congress this year. The bill was signed into law in April. The sources, who were granted anonymity because they are not authorized to speak publicly about

the short-form video sharing app, said that once the code is split, it could lay the groundwork for a divestager of the U.S. assets, although there are no current plans to do so. In the past few months, hundreds of BightDance and TikTok engineers in both the U.S. and China were ordered to begin separating millions of lines of code, sifting through the company's algorithm that pairs users with videos to their liking. The engineer's mission is to create a separate code base that is independent of systems used by BytDance's Chinese version of TikTok, Doyen, while eliminating any information linking to Chinese users to sources with direct knowledge of the project told Reuters. Reuters previously reported that a sale of the app with algorithms is highly unlikely. The Chinese government in 2020 added content recommendation algorithms to its export control list, requiring a divestager or sale of TikTok's algorithm to go through its administrative licensing procedures.

The source code for TikTok's recommendation engine was originally developed by BytDance engineers in China and customized for operations in TikTok's various global markets, including the U.S., according to a legal filing. BytDance has attributed TikTok's popularity to the effectiveness of its recommendation engine, which bases each user's content feeds on how they interact with the content they watch, end quote. Oopsie! Spotify has indeed initiated a refund process for its discontinued carthing dashboard device, as consumers filed a lawsuit claiming Spotify misled them, quoting TechCrunch. Spotify is facing continued backlash over its decision to discontinue support for car thing. The device will no longer work starting on December 9th, 2024, the company said,

on TikTok, Gen Z users are posting videos to express their discontent with Spotify's move and its recommended actions like switching to Android Auto or CarPlay. Often they didn't have access to built-in infatement systems in their car in the first place, making them a target market for a dedicated player like Carthing, the user's note. While a refund may satisfy some portion of that user base that's upset over Carthing, many are still pleading with the company via TikTok videos and in the comments on Spotify's TikTok posts to please not brick their device. In fact, complaints about the Carthing are now so common on Spotify's videos

that the algorithmically recommended search TikTok suggests on some videos is, What is the Spotify Car Thing? End quote. Time for the week. weekend long read suggestions. First up, a look at Pixar's missteps since COVID-19. Movies were released on Disney Plus and key executives departed, leading to a focus on sequels in order to get the company back on track. Quoting Bloomberg, when Pixar finally returned to theaters in 2022 with Lightyear, a toy story spinoff, the film's dower tone failed to impress critics and moviegoers,

while a scene with a same-sex kiss resulted in its being banned in most countries with predominantly Muslim populations. In June 2023, Pixar's Elemental, a film in which characters embodying fire and water fall in love, opened in cinemas to the worst box office numbers in the company's history. We were all kind of gut-punched. It was tough on morale, says Jim Morris, Pixar's president. I thought it was a good film with a Pixar feel. So when it didn't work, that was like, whoa, I was thinking, do people just not want to see the kind of film we make anymore? Is that done? Morris's strategy to turn things around involves balancing original movie ideas, with sequels and spin-offs, the better to remind audiences what they once loved about Pixar.

Every hit of yesteryear is being considered for a reboot, with Finding Nemo and The Incredibles regarded as particularly strong candidates for new titles. Morris aims to make three movies every two years, historically it's been closer to one a year, with every other title, a sequel or spinoff, and the rest standalone concepts or potential seeds for new franchises. On May 21st, Morris also announced Pixar's largest restructuring, cutting 175 jobs as the studio refocuses on big-screen films instead of Disney Plus projects. The move comes at a pivotal time for Disney's movie studio, which hasn't turned a profit in the division that includes theatrical film releases since April 2022, in part because of the

lacklester performances of Lightyear and Elemental, end quote. Speaking of COVID-Times, one site that rode the wave of lockdowns to great success, only to come back down to Earth, once COVID times were over, was the website, Houdinky, which did the whole exclusive sneaker release thing, but for the luxury watch market. Quoting the Wall Street Journal. When online luxury shopping boomed amid the pandemic, Houdinke rode the wave, pocketing $40 million from investors, including Meyer, LVMH, luxury ventures, and the Cherin Group and Tom Brady. At that point, Clymer said the company was turning a profit and the investors valued it at more than $100 million. In February 2021, it acquired

Atlanta watch resale company Crown and Calibur as prices on the secondary market began steadily climbing to record heights. Houdinke was looking for a way in. I don't want to say we were chasing it, said Clymer during an interview in Houdinke's Manhattan office last month. But again, we're looking out the window and I see it sunny. I'm not going to put on a raincoat. It was no different than that. We saw what was happening in the market and we went for it. In December 2021, the company set a goal of $141 million in revenue according to a board presentation. then in early 2022, the rains came. Prices of pre-owned watches started declining.

After hitting a peak in March 2022, they fell nearly 30% by the end of that year, according to the watch charts overall market index, which tracks resale prices over 60 high-end timepieces. It has since only dipped further. Resale prices of some high-end watches are about half of what they were just two years ago. The decline in interest has crashed into the broader industry. shares of certain luxury watch businesses have plummeted this year shedding as much as half of their value. Now Houdinke is an example of how precarious luxury investments often are at a time when trends whips off faster than ever.

It also shows how the pandemic made many investors overconfident about the promise of online retail and how, years later, they are dealing with the resulting hangover, end quote. Finally, from Defector, well, actually, I'll just read you the summary of this Defector piece from the Long Reeds website, No matter how little you know about magic, the gathering, you know of it. It's huge, and it's been huge for 30 years. Pokemon wouldn't exist without magic. It single-handedly invented an entire genre of tabletop games in which players build decks of cards for battle, with each card having a different effect. But this is much more than the story of a man named Richard Garfield and his era-defining creation, though that story is fascinating in its own right.

It's also the story of how Magic, or more precisely, Magic's publisher, strayed from Garfield's intentions almost immediately. See, Magic decks aren't fixed. New cards are released all the time. Garfield didn't want this to be a game that rewarded those who spent money to get more powerful cards, but over time, that's exactly what happened. By one count, there are more than 27,000 unique cards that can be played in the game. Meanwhile, the game's publisher continuously tries to push players to use an online platform that prioritizes micro-transactions and robs the game of its human element. Inshittification is all too common these days, but we're accustomed to it happening online, with solid reporting and an accessible tone. This piece winds up as a stunning

indictment of how Magic's publisher managed to do the same IRL, end quote. So we will have a bonus episode for you this weekend, I assume, at about the time this is hitting your ears. I'll be recording an episode of the big technology podcast with our friend Alex Cantrowitz because it will give me the opportunity to talk in greater depth about some of the things we've been touching on on this show in recent weeks. Assuming the recording goes well and assuming Alex gets me the audio by tomorrow afternoon, I'll have that bonus episode for you up by tomorrow afternoon. Assuming all goes well, as I said. Talk to you on Monday.