Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 12/03 – Acquisition Deathwatch: Nvidia/Arm

Starting point is 00:00:00 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 Mean Bright Home for Friday, December 3rd, 2021. I'm Brian McCullough today. Another tech deal goes on the Death Watch, but this time it's Nvidia and Arm, and this time

Starting point is 00:00:44 I think it's for reals. Google is probably working on its own smartwatch. D.D. is the first Chinese stock to D-List in the West. Instagram is encouraging you to create a Finsta account, and, of course, the weekend long-read suggestions. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission is suing to block NVIDIA's proposed acquisition of arm, arguing the chip deal is anti-competitive, quoting the Wall Street Journal. The lawsuit marks the beginning of what is likely to be an aggressive antitrust campaign by the FTC under the leadership of chairwoman Lena Khan, a progressive tapped by President Biden in June to lead the agency.

Starting point is 00:01:26 It also represents the latest action by regulators to stop a blockbuster chip deal. The FTC's lawsuit filed in its own administrative court alleges the acquisition would give invidia unlawful control over computing technology and designs that rivals need to develop their own competing chips. If the deal were allowed, the combined firm could stifle next generation technologies, including ones used to run data centers and driver assistance systems in cars, the FTC alleges. Arm, owned by Tokyo-based SoftBank Group, referred questions to Nvidia. The commission currently composed of two Democrats and two Republicans voted four to nothing to file the lawsuit, adding a new layer of trouble for a deal that has been met with widespread regulatory skepticism. This isn't the first time regulators have

Starting point is 00:02:11 stepped in to stop a massive chip deal. The U.S. in 2018 scuttled Broadcoms attempted $117 billion takeover of another chip giant Qualcomm on national security grounds. Qualcomm's $44 billion purchase of Dutch chipmaker NXP semiconductors fell apart in 2018 when China failed to use. give its regulatory approval. From its early days, the Nvidia Arm deal raised eyebrows with regulators and chip-making rivals. Arm based in Cambridge, England, is one of the world's most important behind-the-scenes semiconductor companies. SoftBank, which bought Arm five years ago for $32 billion, had struggled to jumpstart growth in the business, end quote. Yeah, the behind-the-scenes stuff here is really kind of interesting. It's unclear how successful Arm could be standing on its own if it was

Starting point is 00:02:59 forced to stand alone again. And if someone else stepped in to buy arm, well, actually, who could do that? Because basically, anyone who could afford to would face similar strategic scrutiny, if not downright condemnation. And if someone else did buy arm, I feel like they wouldn't be as, I don't know, palatable to most neutral observers as invidia seemingly would be. And one more interesting thing in the background is this. When the deal was announced, it was a deal valued at $40 billion, but in the intervening time period, NVIDIA stock has gone up so much, the deal is now around $75 billion, quoting Bloomberg. That leaves Seller SoftBank in a quandary. Other suitors are unlikely to match such an offer and might spark their own regulatory concerns. So SoftBank's best alternative may well be

Starting point is 00:03:52 an initial public offering for the armed business, but that is likely to value the company at far less, then Nvidia's current offer. SoftBank and Arm are entitled to keep $2 billion $2 billion paid at signing, including a $1.25 billion breakup fee whether the deal goes through or not, end quote. Insider is reporting that Google's Pixel Hardware Group is working on the company's first smartwatch, internally codenamed Rohan, which it plans to launch sometime next year. To date, Google has opted to create software for smartwatches built by partners such as Samsung, but has not made a device of its own. A Google-branded smartwatch would see the company go toe-to-to-to-with Apple whose watch has proven a runaway success and captured control of the

Starting point is 00:04:41 smartwatch market. Unlike the Apple Watch, Google's smartwatch is round and has no physical bezel, according to artistic renders viewed by insider and employees who have seen it. Like Apple's device, it will capture health and fitness metrics. Work on Rohan has accelerated this year. Google has let employees outside of the smartwatch team test the device and provide feedback, a common practice known as dog fooding, according to employees and feedback documents viewed by Insider. One of those feedback sessions took place as recently as November, according to some of the documents viewed by Insider. The watch has sometimes been referred to internally as the Pixel Watch or Android watch, but executives have used a variety of names to refer to the project, and it is unclear

Starting point is 00:05:21 what branding Google will land on if and when it launches the device. The existence of a smartwatch coden named Rohan was previously reported by YouTuber John Prosser, end quote. Well, it begins, I guess. Dede Global says it will begin the process of delisting from the New York Stock Exchange and listing its stock instead on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in an attempt to appease Chinese regulators, quoting Reuters. D.D. did not explain its reasons for the plan, but said in a separate statement, it would organize a shareholder vote at an appropriate time to ensure its New York

Starting point is 00:06:01 listed stock would be convertible into, quote, freely tradable shares, end quote, on another internationally recognized stock exchange. Sources told Reuters last month that Chinese regulators had pressed Didi's top executives to devise a plan to delist from the New York Stock Exchange due to concerns about data security. DD pushed ahead with a $4.4 billion U.S. initial public offering in June, despite being asked to put it on hold while a review of its data practices was conducted. The powerful cyberspace administration of China then quickly ordered app stores to remove 25 of DD's mobile apps and told the company to stop registering new users, citing national security and public interest. DD., whose apps, in addition to ride-hailing, offer products such as delivery and financial services, remains under investigation, end quote.

Starting point is 00:06:53 This is an interesting sign of, actually I'm not sure, but it doesn't seem like this is good news for meta. apparently Instagram has quietly been rolling out a pop-up over the past year, encouraging users to, quote, try a new account to help them, quote, keep up with a smaller group of friends, end quote. In other words, if your Insta is no longer as fun as it used to be, Instagram may be wants you to start over from scratch, quoting the Wall Street Journal. The pop-up confronts single account users when they long press the profile icon at the bottom of their feed or tap their profile username. From there, with a few taps, they can make a second account without logging out of the existing one.

Starting point is 00:07:33 Users have a choice of whether to link accounts, treating the second account as an extension of their first, like a new viewer profile in Netflix, or as a totally separate account with its own login, a spokeswoman for Instagram confirmed. That determines whether Instagram considers this to be one active user or multiple. If the two accounts aren't linked, a user can delete one with no impact on the other. An Instagram spokeswoman wouldn't say when the company rolled out the two, tool or how many people have created new accounts using it, social media observers say the move is a reaction to users changing how they choose to interact online, from public-facing, like-hungry

Starting point is 00:08:08 posts, to more private discussions among closer-knit groups. And they say Instagram and parent meta-platforms, formerly Facebook, benefit by increasing engagement and ad revenue among people who might have become apathetic. The app positions itself to get an advertising boost from users who engage more with content in a fresh account with fewer friends and interests than they might have in an older bloated account, said Dan Ives and analysts at Wedbush Securities, a Los Angeles-based investment firm. While users can set their Instagram accounts to private or share posts with close friends only within the app, many already do create a second account, often referred to as a Finsta derived from fake Insta. Unlike the Facebook social network, which insists on one account

Starting point is 00:08:52 for each user, Instagram has always been open to multiple accounts for a single user, end quote. Now, you know, they wouldn't be doing any of this unless the data told them that they can get a net plus in terms of engagement from, shall we call them rehabilitated users. But it also might suggest, quoting bash42.eath on Twitter, quote, Instagram has been in a subtle decline phase for nearly five years now. Context collapse is rotting the network from the inside out. and quote. Time for the weekend long read suggestions. First up, you've heard me be salty recently about the visions of the metaverse from folks like Mark Zuckerberg that feature ooh, business meetings, but in virtual reality. But if we're being honest, even the standard

Starting point is 00:09:47 metaverse that most people seem to be thinking of, one with headsets and VR, is also kind of a bit of weak sauce, the true maximalist version of the Metaverse from the cyberpunk novels that birthed this idea in the first place would be to fully jack in, by which I mean to, you know, insert the metaverse right into your brain. So from Wired, a look at the state of brain computer interfaces, including Elon Musk's NeuroLink, quote, you perceive or think you perceive, things that aren't really there all the time, that aren't anywhere except inside your head. That's what dreams are. That's what psychedelic drugs do. That's what happens when you imagine the face of your aunt, the smell of your first car, the taste of a strawberry. From this

Starting point is 00:10:35 perspective, it's not actually hard to intercept a sensory experience or percept into someone's head. I did it for you the first few paragraphs of this story. I described how the cyborg was dressed, gave you a hint of what the room looked like, told you the soccer ball was orange. You saw it in your mind, or at least some version of it. You heard, in your mind's ear, the research subject talking to the scientists, although in real life they were speaking Japanese. That's all fine and literary, but it'd be nice to have a more direct route. The brain is salty glop that turns sensory information into mind. You ought to be able to harness that ability to build an entire world in there, a simulation indistinguishable from reality, end quote. Along similar lines,

Starting point is 00:11:17 again, if you buy into the snow crash vision of the Metaverse idea, then buying digital art or even your digital avatar is one thing, but virtual real estate might be an order of magnitude different thing. I didn't do it as a segment today, but there is word this week that of the four leading virtual worlds, especially the sandbox and DeCentraland, these worlds recorded records this week. over $100 million in NFT land sales, with the sandbox alone seeing trading volumes of over $86 million. So from the Wall Street Journal, a look at virtual land speculation. On Tuesday, Republic Realm, a firm that develops real estate in the Metaverse, said it paid $4.3 million for land in the world sandbox, the biggest virtual real estate sale publicized to date,

Starting point is 00:12:09 according to the company and to data from the website non-fundgible.com, which tracks digital land sales. Republic Realm bought the digital land from video game company Atari SA, and the two firms said they plan to partner on the development of some of the properties. That acquisition broke a record set just last week by a subsidiary of Canadian investment firm Tokens.com, which said it paid around $2.5 million for land in the world DeCentralands Fashion District. This is like buying land in Manhattan 250 years ago as the city is being built, said Andrew Kigot, chief executive of Tokens.com. Next, this is not the metaverse exactly, but let's keep going with our cyberpunk theme this week. From CNN, word that the world's first living robots can now reproduce, quote, The U.S. scientists who created the first living robots say the life forms known as xenobots can now reproduce and in a way not seen in plants and animals.

Starting point is 00:13:06 Formed from the stem cells of the African clawed frog, from which it takes its name, Xenobots are less than a millimeter wide. The tiny blobs were first unveiled in 2020 after experiments showed that they could move, work together in groups, and self-heal. Now the scientists that developed them at the University of Vermont, Tufts University and Harvard University's Weiss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, said they have discovered an entirely new form of biological reproduction different from any animal or plant known to science. The xenobots use kinetic replication, a process that is known to occur at the molecular level but has never been observed before at the scale of whole cells or organisms, the scientists said. The xenobots are very early technology, think of a 1940s computer, and don't yet have any practical applications. However, this combination of molecular biology and artificial intelligence could potentially be used in a host of tasks in the body and in the environment, according to researchers. This may include things like collecting microplastics in the oceans, inspecting root systems, and regenerative medicine, end quote.

Starting point is 00:14:13 In other words, this is nanobots. We're talking about nanobots, which I believe was the subject of another Neil Stevenson book, The Diamond Age, I believe that one was. And then rounding off our sci-fi stuff this week, it's a sci-fi heavy long-reads batch, I guess. From Ars Technica, we've got a look at why planetary scientists are increasingly excited about space, X's Starship Rockets, quote, For scientists, there are always more questions than answers, and there are always many more missions they want to fly than funds available to fly them. The ubiquity of water has only heightened scientists' desire to get robots out into

Starting point is 00:14:53 the solar system to definitively find ice deposits and subservice oceans and to characterize them, just as we're learning that the solar system holds far more secrets than we might have imagined, which makes our inability to fly out there and unlock them, especially frustrating. But what if we could? Some planetary scientists have started warming to the idea that SpaceX's new starship rocket, with its unprecedented lift capabilities and potentially paradigm shattering low costs, could open up the solar system to a new era of exploration. Imagine sending a lander to Europa, which harbors a vast, warm subsurface ocean. During recent NASA planning meetings, scientists contemplated sending a complex spacecraft costing billions of dollars to conduct

Starting point is 00:15:35 science on Europa. At best, they were hoping to land a payload of science instruments about the size and mass of a mini refrigerator there. With Starship, by contrast, NASA might land a cache of scientific payloads the size of a single-story, unfurnished house. You can really take advantage of the Starship architecture and get to the outer solar system in ways we hadn't thought about before. One scientist said it could provide a revolutionary new way of exploring those worlds, end quote. Next, our dose of history this week on the occasion of its 20th anniversary, a look at the game Oregon Trail, that basically every Gen Xer I know remembers fondly as the first computer game to penetrate classrooms in the 70s and 80s, quote, I wanted to make it so that it was fun,

Starting point is 00:16:21 and I wanted to make it so that it was worth playing again. Heinemann, one of the original designers of the game recalled, so he had the game generate enough random things along the trails such that playing even a dozen times brought something new and unexpected each time. He programmed the game to randomly hand players in assortment of snake bites, wild animal attacks, and broken wagon wheels. They'd occasionally get lost in the fog, and of course, they'd sometimes succumb to disease. Over the decades, you have died of dysentery, added in a subsequent version, became the game's defining meme, end quote. And finally, this is not tech, but look, that Beatles' documentary, It's amazing. And it's a funny thing. Everyone online that I see raving about this are all Gen Xers like me,

Starting point is 00:17:07 who weren't even alive when the Beatles were still a band, but were brought up with the Beatles being played in all of our houses by all of our parents' ad nauseum. Anyway, the point that I want to make is I personally will never not be fascinated by watching brilliant people create things. It's fascinating. That's why I love biographies. That's why I love business histories. That moment. in the documentary where Paul Noodle's around for three minutes and has nothing at first, but just keeps poking and poking, and then literally pulls the classic song Get Back just out of the ether. All of that stuff, that's amazing, but also the mundane stuff, like the, ooh, I'm hungry, want to go eat, all the bickering, the back and forth, the Yoko always hanging around in the background saying nothing. The documentary has this rare combination of showing you

Starting point is 00:17:59 literal gods, creating genius that will live on forever, the moment of creation itself, that wild mercury sound, metallic and bright gold, as Bob Dylan famously put it, but it combines that with, you know, these are just people showing up for work on a Tuesday, hung over sometimes, needing coffee, literally throwing crap against the wall to see what sticks. They could give me a hundred more hours of this and I would probably watch it all. So finally today, from Variety, A piece that looks at why this might not only be the greatest rock documentary of all time, but maybe one of the greatest examinations of the creative endeavor ever made full stop. Okay, super fun bonus episode coming at you this weekend.

Starting point is 00:18:51 Chris and I discuss the whole Jack, Twitter, Square, Block thing, and then we have deep dives into the weird controversies in gaming going on right now, including that whole Halo Infinite thing, and also a discussion of foldable phones. Are they maybe finally becoming a thing? We do this all with the great Vlad Savov, who I had never actually formally spoken to before doing this episode, but who has quickly become my new favorite guest for the podcast.

Starting point is 00:19:23 As you'll hear, Vlad jumped right on and mixed it up with Chris and I like we were all old friends. Great episode, great discussion. Talk to you on Monday.

Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 12/03 – Acquisition Deathwatch: Nvidia/Arm

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