Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 07/14 – Twitter Starts Showing People The Money

Episode Date: July 14, 2023

Elon has made good on his promise to share ad revenue with some big Tweeters. The fact that you can’t use Threads in Europe continues to be weird. Meta unveils a new AI image generator that they say is significantly smaller and better. Why AI is at the center of the Hollywood strike part eleven. And one choice Weekend Longreads Suggestion. Links: Twitter starts sharing ad revenue with verified creators (TechCrunch) Musk's Twitter sues four Texas entities for data scraping, seeks damages (Reuters) Meta confirms it is blocking EU-based users from accessing Threads via VPN (TechCrunch) Meta claims its new art-generating model is best-in-class (TechCrunch) Exclusive: AP strikes news-sharing and tech deal with OpenAI (Axios) Actors say Hollywood studios want their AI replicas — for free, forever (The Verge) Here’s the new default font for Microsoft Outlook and Word: Aptos (CNBC) Weekend Longreads Suggestions: Apple, Lionel Messi and the $2.5bn question: What’s next? (The Athletic) 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, June 14th, 2023. I'm Brian McCullough today. Elon has made good on his promise to share ad revenue with some big tweeters. The fact that you can't use threads in Europe continues to be weird. Meta unveils a new AI image generator that they say is significantly smaller and better. Why AI is at the center of the Hollywood Strike Part 11 and one choice weekend long read suggestion for you. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Everyone's been waiting for a counter move, and here it is, I guess. Twitter has begun paying Twitter Blue Creators who earned more than 5 million impressions per month

for the last three months, a revenue cut from the ads that ran beside the replies to their tweets. This is one of those things Elon said Twitter was going to do that they seemingly never got around to doing, quoting TechCrunch. According to owner Elon Musk, the first round of creator payouts, will total $5 million and will be cumulative from the month of February onward. These payouts will be delivered via stripe. From what some large creators are sharing on Twitter, these payouts are substantial.

Writer Brian Cresdenstein, who has about 750,000 followers, claims that Twitter paid him $24,305. S.K., a creator with about $230,000, claims to have earned $2,236 from Twitter. Political commentator Benny Johnson, with 1.7 million followers, said he earned $9,546. $7. Twitter's payouts are determined by tweet impressions. Babylon B. Writer Ashley St. Clair, 710,000 followers, said that she earned $7,153, and according to her napkin math, she had around 840 million impressions from February through July. That would make her rate about 0.0085 in terms of a CPM cost per miller or $8 and 52 cents per million impressions. It's not clear whether or not individual CPMs change from user to user? Twitter is monetizing the ads served in tweet replies, as it would be

difficult to determine which creators to pay for ads served in the feed. This is the same problem. Short-form video platforms like TikTok are running into with revenue sharing. Of course, this means that creators will want to incentivize users to reply to their tweets. In the best case, this would inspire conversation, but as we know from platforms like Facebook, extreme emotions drive the most engagement. As Farzad Mesbahi tweeted, quote, the more haters you have in your replies, the more money you'll make on Twitter. Musk replied, quote, poetic justice. There are limits to what types of creators can earn money through this program. According to Twitter's content monetization standards, sexual content cannot be monetized. This is a blow to Twitter's community of sex workers,

as Twitter is one of the only mainstream social platforms where adult content is permitted. Twitter also won't allow creators to monetize content about pyramid schemes or get rich quick schemes, violence, criminal behaviors, gambling, or drugs, and alcohol. If a creator tries to monetize copyrighted content that they do not own, that's also a red flag, end quote. Meanwhile, I'm in for some claim chowder personally. Remember when Twitter started rate limiting how many tweets you could view in a day? At the time, Elon blamed scrapers, and on this very pot, I suggested that maybe we'd never find out, who these scrapers were because maybe they weren't real. So, Eating Crow now, because Twitter has filed a lawsuit against four unnamed entities in Texas for, quote, unlawfully scraping data and is seeking more than $1 million in relief, quoting Reuters. The complaint by Musk's ExCorp, which owns

Twitter, alleged that the entities indulged in unlawfully scraping data and sought monetary relief of more than $1 million of the lawsuit said. The daily limits imposed in July by Twitter sparked widespread criticism and have helped threads, the recently launched rival service by Meta, that crossed 100 million signups in a record five days. Musk, meanwhile, reiterated the reason for data limits in a reply to a tweet that referenced the data scraping lawsuit. Quote, several entities tried to scrape every tweet ever made in a short period of time. That's why we had to put rate limits in place, Musk tweeted. The volume of automated sign-up requests from the four defendant's IP addresses far exceeded what any single person could send to a person which severely taxed Twitter's servers,

the lawsuit claimed. The case in question is X-Corp versus John Does 1 through 4 in the District Court of Dallas County, Texas, end quote. In the whole Threads saga so far, which again is only a week old, one of the things that I haven't really emphasized too much yet is that if you're in Europe, you can't use threads because of GDPR, I think. In fact, Meta says it has taken, quote, further measures to prevent EU-based users from accessing Instagram's threads, including blocking access through VPNs, quoting TechCrunch. The company launched threads last week, but given privacy concerns around the app, it is not available in the EU. The company said in a statement that it has applied further measures to stop users from accessing

the new social app. Threads is not currently available in most countries in Europe, and we've taken additional steps to prevent people based there from accessing it at this time. Europe continues to be an incredibly important market for META, and we hope to make threads available here in the future, it said in a statement provided to TechCrunch. The Threads app extensively tracks users per META's privacy policy and the app's iOS listing, which discloses the app may collect a range of personal data including highly sensitive information such as health and financial data, precise location, browsing history, contacts, and search history. This approach creates legal and regulatory challenges for META in the EU. Under EU data protection law, META requires a valid legal basis

to process such personal data legally for ad targeting, an area where the company is facing increasing uncertainty following a recent Court of Justice ruling. That's not all either. The Block's Shiningu ex ante antitrust regime, the Digital Markets Act, also places limits on how applicable gatekeeping giants can combine data for ads. And meta has reportedly cited uncertainty over how the DMA will apply to its business use of data as being behind the delay in threads launching in the EU. Despite not being officially rolled out in most of Europe, meta's Twitter rival has been off to a good start as the app crossed 100 million signups in just a few days.

However, according to analytics monitoring firm censor tower, daily active users were down 20% this week as compared to Saturday, and time spent on the app has also reduced. So it remains to be seen whether the threads buzz will fade to more of a background hum as the novelty of a meta version of Twitter wears off, end quote. Meta has unveiled Camelian, a transformer model for image generation, requiring 5x less compute and a smaller training dataset than past transformer-based models, quoting TechCrunch. Camelion is also distinguished by being one of the first image generators capable of generating captions for images,

laying the groundwork for more capable image understanding models going forward, meta says. Most modern image generators, including OpenAI's Dolly 2, Google's Imogen, and stable diffusion rely on a process called diffusion to create art. In diffusion, a model learns how to gradually subtract noise from a starting image made entirely of noise, moving it closer step by step to the target prompt. The results are impressive, but diffusion is computationally intensive, making it expensive to operate and slow enough that most real-time applications are impractical. Camelion is a transformer model by contrast, leveraging a mechanism called attention to weigh the relevance of input data such as text or images.

Attention and the other architectural quirks of transformers can boost model training speed and make models more easily parallelizable, which I didn't know was a word. Larger and larger transformers can be trained with significant but not unattainable increases in compute, in other words, and Camelion is even more efficient than most transformers, meta claims, requiring five times less compute and a smaller training data set than previous transformer-based models.

Interestingly, Open AI explored Transformers as a means of image generation several years ago with a model called ImageGPT, but it ultimately abandoned the idea in favor of diffusion and might soon move on to consistency. To train Chameleon, Meta used a data set of millions of licensed images from Shutterstock, the most capable of several versions of Camillion that Meta Built has 7 billion parameters over twice as many as Dolly 2, parameters are the parts of the model, learned from training data and essentially define the skill of the model on a problem like generating text or, in this case, images. One key to chameleon's stronger performance is a technique called supervised fine-tuning or SFT for short.

SFT has been used to train text generation models like OpenAI's chat GPT to great effect, but meta-theorized that it could be useful when applied to the image domain as well. Indeed, instruction tuning improved chameleon's performance not only on image generation but on image caption writing, enabling it to answer questions about images and edit images by following text instructions. For example, change the color of the sky to bright blue, end quote. Expect this to be the start of a trend going forward. The Associated Press and OpenAI have signed a two-year deal. The Associated Press gets access to OpenAI's tech in return for licensing some of its

text archive, dating back to 1985, for OpenAI to train its AI on. Quoting Axios. The deal marks one of the first official news sharing agreements made between a major U.S. news company and an artificial intelligence firm. As part of the deal, OpenAI will license some of the AP's text archive dating back to 1985 to help train its artificial intelligence algorithms. The AP will get access to OpenAI's technology and product expertise. The two firms are still working through the technical details of how the sharing will work on the back end, a spokesperson said. Brad Lightcap, OpenAI's chief operating officer said AP, feedback, along with access to their high-quality factual text archive, will help to improve the capabilities and usefulness of OpenAI systems, end quote.

The AP was one of the first major news organizations to use automation technology in its news reports. About a decade ago, it began automating corporate earnings reports before later using automation for its coverage of local sporting events. It has since expanded its use of automation in other parts of the news gathering and production processes, including helping partner newsrooms adopt automation for coverage of local public safety incidents and translating weather alerts into Spanish. The company does not yet use generative AI in its news stories, end quote. He probably heard that the actors have joined the writers on the picket line in that big Hollywood strike. We've said before that AI is a big reason why the strike is

happening now. And apparently, it's a big reason why the actors chose to join the strike now. According to SAG-AFRA, the studios have an AI proposal that would allow them to scan a background actor to create a digital likeness for a day's pay initially, but then for perpetual use going forward without consent or pay, quoting the verge. During today's press conference in which Hollywood actors confirmed that they were going on strike, Duncan Crabtree Ireland, SAG after's chief negotiator, revealed a proposal from Hollywood studios that sounds ripped right out of a black mirror episode. In a statement about the strike, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television producers, AMPTP, said that its proposal included, quote, a groundbreaking AI proposal that protects

actors' digital likenesses for SAG after members, end quote. When asked about that proposal during the press conference, Crabtree Ireland said that, quote, this groundbreaking AI proposal that they gave us yesterday, they proposed that our background performers should be able to be scanned, get one day's pay, and their companies should own that scan, their image, their likeness, and should be able to use it for the rest of eternity on any project they want with no consent and no compensation. So if you think that's a groundbreaking proposal, I suggest you think again, end quote. Big news for font nerds. Microsoft has named APDOS as the next default font for its Microsoft 365 productivity apps replacing the font Calibri, quoting CNBC. Microsoft has named the next default font for its productivity applications such as Word and

Outlook after testing five candidates it introduced in 2021. Since then, it's been called BeerStat. Now it's getting a new name. Appdos. The move amounts to a subtle refinement for some of the most popular software in the world. Microsoft doesn't take such steps lightly because its office products fetch almost 24% of its revenue. They're growing faster than other parts of the business, such as video game content and search advertising as Microsoft seeks to line up more end users and get existing clients to spend more. Appdos will remain available in the font list. under the old Bierstadt name for people who are accustomed to it, users can also choose to set any other font as the default. That includes older standards such as Times New Roman,

Ariel, or even Calibri, which has been the default since 2007 before the launch of Office 365 and 2011. Many people perceive Microsoft as a friendlier place since Satcha Nadella replaced Steve Balmer as its CEO in 2014, but that updated identity isn't necessarily reflected when someone starts writing an email and outlook with a font that predates Nadella. In 2019, Microsoft asked font designer Steve Madison to develop a font in the grotesque sans-serif style that includes the classic Helvetica. The company didn't let on that it was considering it as a possible successor for Calibri. Madison said in an interview with CNBC this week, at the time, Madison was still working

for the font company monotype, and he and his colleagues gave Microsoft four or five proposals to look at without including the names of the contributors. That's important because the designers didn't want his connection to Microsoft to influence the software maker's decision, he said. Madison's work with Microsoft goes back to the 90s. He helped with Microsoft's true type fonts for Windows 3.1 and created the Sego font Microsoft uses for its current logo and marketing materials. He also contributed to the aptly named font Curles.

That was not his proudest moment, he said, end quote. Finally today, only one long read for you this weekend. It's from the athletic, and it's largely about how Apple has expanded into the sports space. since 2022, starting with Major League Baseball, but also recently leading to an unusual deal to bring Lionel Messi to Major League Soccer and share new subscriber revenue with him, which again, that hits on stuff we've talked about in the past, how sports has become central to the streaming wars. But also, if you've been hearing about all of the money Saudi Arabia has been pouring into the sports world, you know what they really wanted, what they were aiming for,

was to create a soccer league, which would have Ronaldo versus Messi as the perpetual legendary duel showdown. But the fact that that didn't happen, that Messi went to MLS instead, was eyebrow raising, and it turns out Apple was one of the main reasons why. I guess the only entity that has more money than Saudi Arabia is Apple. No bonus episodes for you this weekend. Y'all are going to that double feature of Barbie and Oppenna. Anyway, right? No time for podcast listening when you have to fit six hours of movie going into a single small weekend. Myself, I've got a date with my kids to watch those new episodes of Bluey that just dropped. If you've got kids of a certain age, you know Bluey and you know how insanely great it is,

but I've had a hard time convincing my childless friends or friends with older kids to check it out, which I get it. How good can an animated kid show really be? but I finally thought of a way, or actually an analogy, that should work on certain people in terms of getting them to give it a shot. You know how good Calvin and Hobbs was? Real heads know that Bill Waterson deserves the goddamn Nobel Prize in Literature for that comic strip. Well, look, this is not hyperbole. Bluey is the spiritual successor to Calvin and Hobbs.

It's that good. So even if you don't have kids, pick three random bluey episodes on Disney Plus and see what I'm talking about. I say three, because the episodes are only 10 minutes long, but I'm telling you that Bluey is brilliant in the same life-affirming, almost spiritual way that Calvin and Hobbs was. Sample three episodes and show me the lie. Talk to you on Monday.