Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 07/07 – I’ve Never Seen Anything Like Threads

Episode Date: July 7, 2023

It’s been my job for over a decade now to analyze the competitive landscape of the tech industry, and I’ve simply never seen anything like what Threads has achieved in less than 48 hours. Though, Elon is threatening to sue. Uber, DoorDash and GrubHub are suing NYC. Volkswagen is rolling out its self-driving cars. And, of course, The Weekend Longreads Suggestions. Sponsors: Earnin App (type in Techmeme under PODCAST when you sign up) Links: Threads Becomes Most Rapidly Downloaded App, Raising Twitter’s Ire (NYTimes) Zuck's Threads halo (Axios) Twitter is threatening to sue Meta over Threads (Semafor) OpenAI makes GPT-4 generally available (TechCrunch) Food-Delivery Companies Sue New York City Over Minimum Pay Law (NYTimes) Volkswagen's Self-Driving Cars Begin Testing In Texas (Jalopnik) Weekend Longreads Suggestions: What Did People Do Before Smartphones? (The Atlantic) The Man Who Broke Bowling (GQ) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Tech meme right home for Friday, July 7th, 2023. I'm Brian McCullough today. It's been my job for over a decade to analyze the competitive landscape of the tech industry, and I've just never seen anything like what Threads has achieved in less than 48 hours, though Elon is threatening to sue. Uber, DoorDash, and Grubhub are suing. New York City. Volkswagen is rolling out at self-driving cars, and of course, the weekend long-rate suggestions. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. So as of right now, though, this is sort of unconfirmed. I believe Threads has passed 70 million user signups, which, given that we still aren't even 48 hours into this, means that Threads has

surpassed Chat GPT as the fastest growing product ever. Or maybe that's GPT just generally. Will Threads be at 100 million users by Monday, by tomorrow? Quoting the New York Times. In less than a day, Threads, which is aimed as a rival to Twitter, appears to have taken the crown as the most rapidly downloaded app ever. It easily outstrip ChatGPT, the chatbot, which was downloaded one million times within its first five days, according to OpenAI, ChatGPT's maker. And Threads is on pace to exceed 100 million users within two months, a feat achieved only by ChatGPT, according to the analytics firm Similar Web, and quote. I've simply never seen anything like this. I've never seen a product adopted this quickly,

but again, I did kind of call it. Someone go back to that episode last year where I said, if anyone did a straight Twitter clone, I'd invest in it, and clip that quote so I can replay it. I guess what I didn't realize is the way to capitalize on Twitter's misfortunes was actually to invest in meta, but unless something changes, they are basically now on track to add a Twitter-sized platform to their portfolio without having to actually acquire Twitter. I mean, caveat, caveat, we'll see if people stick around on threads, but for my purpose is like, 80% of the people I follow in order to do this show are already over there and already posting. There are simply so many ways to be amazed by what has transpired already. Think about how this

is potentially the greatest clone job of all time. I mean, the timing helped. Elon's seeming willingness to do everything you could possibly do to motivate his users to want to find an alternative helped. But also, this will be a Harvard Business School case study about the power of incumbency too, in a way. I was speaking to someone yesterday who had gone under the hood of the source code of threads, and they basically said, meta has all the pipes and infrastructure to do something like this in basically every vertical. They're just reusing the infrastructure of Instagram with some activity pub grafted on. They could do this again and again, like people are joking online being like, hey, Zuck, now do a Reddit clone. Except, you know, why not? They technically

could. What if? And this is wild. What if the growth. area for meta in the near future would be pivoting back to doubling down on its roots in social media. And think of this. If I had told you in 2019 that Zuck would launch a Twitter clone that people would rush to adopt because he seemed like a white knight saving us from chaos, who would have believed me? Quoting Axios, for the first time in years, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is writing a wave of good press for going after a competitor. The launch of threads has been met with open arms by a good chunk of the internet community following months of chaotic product and rule changes at Twitter, end quote. End quoting the times again. Threads was a surprise hit for Meta, which has been badly in need of a win

after being scrutinized for spreading misinformation and other toxic content across the internet. While Mark Zuckerberg's social network was celebrated in its early days, it has in recent years been criticized by regulators, activists, and users upset with how the company handles data and its products. Meta has also faced questions about its move into the still emerging immersive digital world of the so-called Metaverse. But this week was a reprieve, at least briefly, for Mr. Zuckerberg and his company. Inside Meta on Wednesday evening, employees rejoiced in the launch of threads, sharing inside jokes and memes with one another, according to screenshots of the conversations viewed by the New York Times. One employee noted that morale was soaring internally after a year

of layoffs and retrenching at the company. Another shared a meme of two characters from the 1999 film The Mummy telling each other that Twitter has been, quote, replaced by meta, according to a screenshot, end quote. But hey, Back in 2019, we all still sort of thought of Elon Musk as a stable genius, right? I think the real story here is almost like Elon tried over and over again to dare us to leave Twitter. It was almost like each time people didn't leave, he was like, okay, maybe this will make you leave. But the thing that maybe really broke people's back was last weekend with that whole rate limiting thing. Like a lot of us were still on Twitter, still willing to still.

step over the piles of poop increasingly piling up there because we were addicted to Twitter. But then last weekend, Elon did the thing you should never do as a drug dealer, threatened to cut off people's supply. Cutting off people's supply simply motivated all of us addicts to find a new dealer. Like, look, I will continue to use Twitter for the foreseeable future because, you know, maybe this thread's madness is temporary and lots of posts are still happening on Twitter that I need for the show. And there's no web client for threads yet, and Twitter still has tweet deck, except, oh yeah, Elon's going to start charging me for tweet deck. See what I mean? It's almost like he's made every decision you could have made if you wanted to screw this up on purpose. I have to use Twitter for

my job, and he's making it harder and harder at every turn. But Elon is not taking this sitting down. Twitter has threatened to sue meta over threads, saying meta engaged in, quote, systematic, willful and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter's trade secrets and other IP, Quoting semaphore. A lawyer for Twitter, Alex Spiro sent a letter to meta-CEO Mark Zuckerberg, saying that, quote, Twitter intends to strictly enforce its intellectual property rights and demands that meta take immediate steps to stop using any Twitter trade secrets or other highly confidential information, Spiro wrote in a letter obtained exclusively by Semaphore. Twitter reserves all rights, including but not limited to the right to seek both

civil remedies and injunctive relief without further notice to prevent any further retention, disclosure or use of its intellectual property by META, end quote. Spiro accused META of hiring dozens of former Twitter employees who, quote, had and continue to have access to Twitter's trade secrets and other highly confidential information, end quote. He also alleged that META assigned those employees to develop, quote, Meta's copycat threads app with the specific intent that they use Twitter's trade secrets and other intellectual property in order to accelerate the development of META's competing app in violation of both state and federal laws, as well as those employees' ongoing obligations to Twitter, end quote.

Andy Stone, Meta's communications director, told semaphore that Twitter's accusations are baseless. Quote, no one on the threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee. That's just not a thing, he said. In a tweet posted after this story was initially published on Thursday, Elon Musk wrote that, quote, competition is fine, cheating is not, end quote. Here's the thing, though, even assuming this threatened lawsuit is serious, like, don't you think meta is sitting on a ton more social networking patents and IP that it could throw back in Twitter's face if any lawsuit were to ever materialize.

OpenAI has released its GPT4 API in general availability, giving all paying developers access and planning to give new developers access by the end of July 2023, quoting TechCrunch. Starting this afternoon, all existing OpenAI API API developers, quote, with a history of successful payments, can access GPT4. The company plans to open up access to new developers by the end of this month, and then start raising availability limits after that, depending on, quote, compute availability. GPD4 can generate text including code and accept image and text inputs, an improvement over GPT3.5, its predecessor, which only accepted text, and performs at human level on various professional and academic benchmarks.

Like previous GPT models from OpenAI, GPT4 was trained using publicly available data, including from public web pages, as well as data that OpenAI licensed. The image understanding capability isn't available to all OpenAI customers just yet, OpenAI is testing it with a single partner, Be My Eyes to start with, but it hasn't indicated when it'll open it up to the wider customer base. In the future, OpenAI says that it'll allow developers to fine-tune GPT4 and GPT 3.5 Turbo, one of its other recent but less capable text-generating models, and one of the original models powering ChatGPT with their own data, as has long been possible with several of OpenAI's other text-generating models.

That capability should arrive later this year, according to OpenAI, end quote. Uber DoorDash and Grubhubhub are suing New York City seeking to block a new minimum pay standards law that increased the hourly wage for gig workers to around $18 and $20 by the year 2025. Quoting the New York Times, Uber DoorDash and Grubhub on Thursday each filed a request for a temporary restraining order in state Supreme Court in Manhattan to stop the wage changes from going into effect on July 12th. Relay, a smaller New York-based food delivery platform, did the same. The new pay standard, which was announced last month, would require gig platforms to pay food delivery workers about $18 per hour and to increase that amount to $20 per hour by 2025. Delivery workers currently make around $11 an hour, according to the city's estimate. But Uber and the other gig companies say they will be forced to pass on the cost of the higher wages to consumers by raising prices. They argue that the city's modeling does not correctly calculate the degree to which these higher prices will harm local restaurants.

and they say that the new system will work to deliver's disadvantage because the company to control costs will have to strictly monitor how much time they spend online on the apps, but not actually doing deliveries. The rule must be paused before damaging the restaurants, consumers, and couriers it claims to protect Josh Gold and Uber spokesman said in a statement. In a prepared statement, Vildevara Mayuga, the commissioner of New York City's Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, defended the new wage standard, quote, Delivery workers, like all workers, deserve fair pay for their labor, and we are disappointed that Uber DoorDash Grubhub and Relay disagree, she said. These workers brave thunderstorms, extreme heat events, and risk their lives to deliver for New Yorkers, and we remain committed to delivering for them, end quote.

Volkswagen plans to start its first U.S. testing of autonomous driving in Austin, Texas, beginning with a small fleet of ID BuzzEVs equipped with Volkswagen and Mobile iTech. Quoting Chalapnik, depending on the outcome of these tests, Volkswagen says it will use the fleet of AVs for ride hailing and delivery of goods in Austin within the next three years. The test fleet is made up of 10 Volkswagen ID buzz vans with an array of sensors, cameras, radar, and light are from Oboli, the company that Volkswagen partnered with to develop its self-driving vehicles. The self-driving vehicles are allegedly ready for SAE Level 4 operation, which is completely self-driving in limited conditions along specific routes or locations. That's all well and good, except that public roads are unpredictable. and public roads in Texas, certainly Austin, are subject to varying levels of heavy traffic and driver behavior. So it's a good thing that the Volkswagen ID Buzz EVs will have a human driver aboard at all times, at least during the initial testing starting in July.

Volkswagen's partnership with Mobile Eye is a strategic shift away from Ford's self-driving tech company Argo, according to Reuters, which had been working with Volkswagen prior to shutting down. Volkswagen subsumed Argo's Austin Hub, as well as nearly 100 employees from the defunct company, which had already been conducting AV tests in Austin. Those resources will form part of a new Volkswagen subsidiary that will handle the rollout of the carmaker's self-driving cars in the U.S. based out of Belmont, California, and Austin, Texas. As Reuters reports, part of the reason Austin is such an attractive location for AV trials is that it has some of the least restrictive regulations on self-driving cars. Once testing is underway, Volkswagen plans to expand to at least four more American cities, end quote. Not much in the Long Reeds file this week. I've only got two for you. First up, from the great

Ian Bogost in the Atlantic. What did we do before smartphones? Quote, I asked some middle-aged friends to think back to life in the old days when we still live together together, and then to tell me what they remember doing. What the heck did I do? One replied. Some fragments of childhood life could be recovered, shooting hoops in the driveway, or passing notes in class, or burning time, hunting for friends to burn time with. But the nature of our idle life as adults evaded memory, even surfing the early web, the precursor to today's scrolling, was made tedious by slow connections. Other things took longer, too, consulting a paper map before driving anywhere, finding and then conversing with a salesperson to select an appliance. Daily non-activities waiting at the

supermarket lines, sitting in traffic, walking the dog, took place under different circumstances. Worse ones. A spine-chilling revelation. We couldn't remember what we did because there was nothing to remember having done. We did nothing, and it was horrible. Filling the nothing this with activity of any sort became a constant exercise. Talking on the phone offered one approach, however poor. Telephones were the only way to connect with your friends synchronously from afar. They worked astoundingly well, and except for the costs of tying up the line or getting a crick in your neck, local calls were free. Advice, ideas, and tips weren't as accessible before the internet arrived and then matured, so you might phone a friend or a business for

information, not just for chatter. I cannot over-emphasize how little there was to do before we all had smartphones. A barren expanse of empty time would stretch out before you, waiting for the bus, or for someone to come home, or for the next scheduled event to start. Someone might be late or take longer than expected, but no notice of such delay would arrive, so you'd stare out the window, hoping to see some sign of activity down the block. You pace or salk or stew. The despair that accompanied this dead time implied and almost required an existentialist orientation to life itself. Absurd and pointless. A sea of doldrums that never washed up to shore. My generation's penchant for malaise must be a direct result of being alone with ourselves so much with so little reason.

We'd read an oral hygiene pamphlet or a shampoo bottle. We'd follow the smooth spinning hands of the clock. Yes, sure, other and better and more useful acts were possible, but only if we knew in advance exactly how much time we had to kill and where and under which circumstances, but we never did know until it was too late, end quote. One of the things that I think about a lot is, what did you do 150 years ago if you were a cowboy on the range for months at a time or a sailor on a ship or something? But especially if you were all alone out in the wilderness, what did you do to occupy your mind all day long for, again, weeks, months at a time?

And then the second one, this is not tech, but from GQ, a profile of the Tiger Woods of Bowling, the two-handed bowler who is breaking all the records and either breaking. or rejuvenating the sport itself. Quote, he's won 15 major titles, four more than anyone else in history, and seven Player of the Year awards tied for the most all time. Even as the rest of the tour has narrowed the gap, challenging his supremacy, he's found ways to maintain it. If you're not impressed, if you happen to think that because you can fire a 250

at your local Bolero, you can compete on the PBA tour, let's make one thing clear. Your local lanes are oiled in a way that helps turn misses into strikes, and when coupled with recent advances in bowling ball technology have produced an abundance of 300 games among amateurs. But the oil patterns on the tour, unlike those at your local house, are devilishly difficult. The comparison is akin to logging a hole in one at your local put-put course. The contours guiding the ball towards the hole versus sinking a downhill double breaker at Augusta. In other words, there is no comparison. His destiny was sealed shortly before his birth when his parents who knew almost nothing about the sport

opened a bowling center near their home in Orange Australia, some 160 miles northwest of Sydney. As a toddler, unable to manage the 10-pound house balls with one hand, young Jason rolled them down the lanes with two. At age seven, he tried bowling one-handed for all of 10 minutes. Just sucked, he once said, and never looked back. The criticism of his two-handed bowling was pervasive. It was, come on, you're a big boy now. It's time to bowl properly, Belmonte recalls. As a 10-year-old, when he was beating Buller's five and six years his senior, the accusations grew more hurtful in puning his character. Cheat. There was frustration on why I wouldn't convert, and that was where I felt a loneliness,

he says. Because when you're young, you want to feel part of the community, and I didn't. No one wanted to coach me. They all wanted to convert me. And so there was a point where it was like, I'm just going to do this myself. Nothing in the rulebook makes the two-hander illegal, but the delivery does confer at least one advantage. Because two-handers don't use their thumbs, it's easier to impart spin or revolutions, says Mark Baker, a renowned coach. And when coupled with the right velocity, those revs translate into power down lane, sending pins flying, messengers, as they're called. When one of them rolls or bounces and takes out a still standing pin to complete a strike or a spare. Belmonte's rev rate, which topped 600 per minute when he first joined the tour,

most players averaged somewhere around 350 to 400 at the time, was otherworldly. The trade-off, says Baker, is that it's harder to generate velocity with the two-hander to remain balanced and accurate in your delivery. Belmante's technique is technically a one-hander. His left hand leaves the ball a split second before he releases it with his right. Metaphorically, Baker says Belmante is still playing the same instrument just with different artistry. Jimmy Hendricks on the guitar instead of Chuck Berry, end quote. No bonus episodes for you this weekend. Just talk to you again on Monday. In the meantime, Follow me on threads. Brian MCC, B-R-I-A-N-M-C.