Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 12/07 - Microsoft Calls for Regulation of AI

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 Meme Ride Home for Friday, December 7th, 2018. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, Microsoft calls for regulation of facial recognition AI.

Starting point is 00:00:45 The crypto market crash is starting to claim casualties. Reddit is quietly doing very well. Thank you very much. And, of course, the weekend long read suggestions. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Google recently joined this movement, but Microsoft has been banging the drum on this for a while. Banging the drum about the need to regulate some forms of AI development and research. In a speech at the Brookings Institution yesterday, Microsoft President Brad Smith specifically called

Starting point is 00:01:20 out facial recognition tech as being problematic. Smith said that all tech companies have to balance social responsibility and profit all the time, but facial recognition has the potential to fundamentally upend the balance of the relationship between citizens and the state, quote, we believe that the only way to protect against this race to the bottom is to build a floor of responsibility that supports healthy market competition, Smith said. We must ensure that the year 2024 doesn't look like a page from the novel 1984. As a society, we need legislation that will put impartial testing groups like consumer reports and their counterparts in a position where they can test facial recognition services for accuracy and unfair bias in an accurate and even-handed manner, end quote. Then citing a June decision by the U.S. Supreme Court requiring search warrants before police can get a cell phone's location records, quote, Do our faces deserve the same protection as our phones? Smith asked.

Starting point is 00:02:21 From our perspective, the answer is a resounding yes, end quote. Quoting from Wired, to address bias, Smith said legislation should require companies to provide documentation about what their technology can and can't do in terms of customers and consumers can understand. stand. He also said laws should require meaningful human review of facial recognition results prior to making final decisions for consequential uses, end quote, such as decisions that could cause bodily or emotional harm or impinge on privacy or fundamental rights. As another measure to protect privacy, Smith said that if facial recognition is used to identify consumers, the law should mandate, quote, conspicuous notice that clearly conveys that these services are being. being used." Speaking of AI, Deep Mind, the British AI subsidiary of Alphabet has a new AI program called Alpha Zero that has taught itself to play and beat the world's best AI in three different board games, chess, shogi, and go. Okay, Brian, there's nothing new about that.

Starting point is 00:03:35 We basically know computers are better at chess and go than we are at this point. But the new thing here is that Alpha Zero gained its current proficiency all by itself with no human handholding. So all those other AIs that mastered these games, they did so by being taught what to do by humans. But now Alpha Zero has bested those programs and it didn't even need any help. Apparently Alpha Zero was trained by being given the basic rules of each game. Then it played millions of games against itself, starting with random strategies. Quoting CNET, the training and learning process took nine hours for chess, 12 hours for show

Starting point is 00:04:12 and 13 days for Go involving 5,000 tensor processing units. For reference, just a single TPU can process over 100 million photos a day in Google Photos, so Alpha Zero is a pretty heft piece of processing hardware. Once learning was complete, Alpha Zero was unleashed on the AI competition, and it crushed them. What's unique about the study is the fact that the learning algorithm was combined with a searching method called Monte Carlo Tree Search MCTS. This is a way that Go AI programs identify which move to make next. The deep mind team use this same system for chess and shogi,

Starting point is 00:04:52 showing for the first time that it could be adapted to other complex tested games, end quote. You know, one key tenet of the singularity is the idea that once AI can learn on its own, the pace of accelerating improvement would not be linear but excellent. Peninsula. Go pick up a book by Ray Kurzweil, if you don't believe me, or maybe one by Nick Bostrom. I recommend either superintelligence or global catastrophic risks. That this would be happening is probably pretty obvious, but again, on the premise that if you covered it on the way up, you cover it on the way down. Bloomberg is reporting on the crypto startups that are beginning to struggle in the midst of the current crypto crash.

Starting point is 00:05:41 quote, ECT Dev, the startup that led development on Ethereum Classic, which is among the top 20 coins with a market capitalization of about $400 million, announced this week that its shuttering operations due to a funding crunch. Joseph Lubin's consensus, one of the largest crypto-related software startups based in New York, said Thursday that its workforce will be reduced by 13% as part of a reorganization. Many of the companies are suffering because they kept a portion of their funds in digital assets, whether in tokens they sold through initial coin offerings or in Bitcoin and Ether, which served as the preferred means of exchange in the crypto world. As prices collapsed this year by more than 90% in some cases, and their so-called digital wallets thinned out, many developers found they couldn't raise additional funding, end quote.

Starting point is 00:06:31 There are other stories as well, Steam It, another company that developed a journalism-focused, coin laid off 70% of its employees, adult entertainment site, spank chain laid off more than half of its workers. I'm not pointing this out to say that this is for sure a bust, because obviously things could turn around tomorrow, but this is starting to feel like that part of the dot-com bubble bursting when the weaker members of the herd are the ones that are the first to fall, the ones with the most precarious positions that could only hold water as long as things kept going up. Quote, I'd be comfortable saying that the pricing pressure on digital assets in 2018 is

Starting point is 00:07:14 likely to lead to 20 to 50% shutdowns and layoffs for current projects based on historical comparisons, said Lex Soklin, Global Director of FinTech Strategy at Autonomous Research. Speaking to Bloomberg, he also said, quote, however, the pace of new entrance and capital could counterbalance this contraction and still grow the sector overall. quote. Bloomberg also notes that VCs funded around 1,180 crypto startups since 2012 to the tune of $5.6 billion. But hundreds of other companies raised about $22.5 billion by issuing tokens and running ICOs. So unless they converted all those tokens into Fiat, you can see why their balance sheets are suddenly looking a bit threadbare. Let's check in with a company that

Starting point is 00:08:12 don't often check in with these days. In this year of seemingly unending tech scandals, one company that used to make scandalous headlines seemingly all the time was Reddit. But aside from a few issues with foreign influence campaigns and one taincy comparatively light security breach earlier this year, Reddit has been pretty much humming along, staying under the radar, not generating any scary headlines. and in the midst of this keeping their heads down and just plugging away,

Starting point is 00:08:43 Reddit has also quietly been doing very well, apparently. Reddit's user engagement has grown 22% in year-over-year gross interactions, which lumps in comments, posts, and votes. And there was a 30% increase in page views, now 14 billion views a month. No word on daily actives, no Dow or Mao reports, but the big push this year for Reddit was video. You know how it used to be that pictures and videos posted on Reddit tended to link out to somewhere else, where the picture of video was actually hosted.

Starting point is 00:09:16 But Reddit started hosting images itself in 2016 and did the same with video last year into this year. Reddit now says that videos hosted on its site got 1.4 billion views last month alone, a 40% increase month over month. And 400,000 hours of video is being watched on a daily basis. This information came from Reddit's Year in Review blog post, which I've linked to in the show notes. The most popular AMA of the year,

Starting point is 00:09:44 according to the post, the one titled, I'm Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Ask Me Anything. Now it's time for the weekend long reads brought to you by Betterment. Some settle for average investing,

Starting point is 00:10:02 but other people like ride home listeners demand better. Check out Betterment to see what the new modern way to invest is all about. So for this week's podcast recommendation, I am going to recommend a show that I actually listen to.

Starting point is 00:10:17 It's called The Comics Canon. The two hosts, Kurt Holman and Kevin Moreau, just go through the history of comics and break down some of the best-known stories and story arcs of all time. Story arcs like the Dark Night Returns, Black Panther, Civil War, Fun Home, the Dark Phoenix saga.

Starting point is 00:10:37 They basically render judgment on these apocal stories. See how they hold up. Look at the impact they've had on present comics and movies and such. Do these stories belong in that Hall of Fame of Comic Stories? Thus the name of the podcast, Comics Canon. Canon C-A-N-O-N-N. The most recent episode looked at the cultural relevance or lack thereof of Aquaman,

Starting point is 00:11:02 just in time for the upcoming movie. Anyway, it's a great pod if you've been immersed in comics your whole life or if like me you're filling gaps in your knowledge to understand the current comics landscape. So search your podcast app for the Comics Canon. Episodes come out every two weeks on Wednesday, which, as you know, is New Comic Book Day. First Long Read, it's another massive medium post with a bunch of great charts and graphics. Venture capitalist Ali Tamaseb spent 300 hours crunching data to answer the question, what did billion-dollar startups look like right when they were getting started?

Starting point is 00:11:39 What key features do they share? What key advantages help them stand out and take off? So in this piece, he quantified 65 factors on all 195 startups founded from 2015 until today in the U.S. that at one point passed a billion dollars in valuation. Trust me, there is tons of valuable insight here. And as I said, almost every section has an easy-to-grac chart to accompany it. So well worth a read for the entrepreneurial among you out there. Next, have you ever heard of Defy Media?

Starting point is 00:12:15 It was a major YouTube creators network that had a lot of YouTube stars signed to it. Think of Defy as a sort of collective talent agency for YouTube stars, landing sponsorship, aggregating ad placement. At peak, the company had 400 employees, but on November 6th, it laid off its entire workforce. and suddenly YouTube creators are claiming they've stopped getting their checks. What went on here? Why is the whole YouTube Star Agency ecosystem seemingly so prone to scams and flim-flam artists? Julia Alexander at the verge investigates. Speaking of, and we've heard stories like this before,

Starting point is 00:12:56 but the link right after that one is to the story of, quote, a family-run YouTube channel, Ryan Toys Review, that generated about $22 million in pre-tax income from June 1st, 2017 through June 1st, 2018, according to Forbes, up from $11 million the year before. The raw estimate of $22 million put Ryan Toys Review just ahead of controversial star Jake Paul, who banked $21.5 million, end quote. The Ryan of Ryan Toys review is seven years old. He started reviewing toys at four years old. again, if you don't have toddlers yourself, trust me, kids love toy reviews on YouTube. When we talked about Uber possibly in acquisition talks with the scooter companies,

Starting point is 00:13:46 we talked about the speculation that a possible motivating factor was the fact that the supply chain for scooters is super constrained right now. Well, timely, Bloomberg has a piece up about the Beijing-based company NineBot, quote, Ninebot has quietly become the single biggest source of scooters deployed in U.S. cities. The little-known manufacturer is an essential provider for just about everyone trying to ride the rise of micromobility, a movement that aims to transform urban transportation through the proliferation of cheap alternatives to cars and mass transit, end quote. Ninebot also makes powered unicycles, and all sorts of other things, but funny enough, according to the story, Ninebot, didn't see the scooter boom, coming. But that accidental serendipity has now led the six-year-old nine-bot to get its own

Starting point is 00:14:38 $1.5 billion valuation. Let me squeeze this one in here because we mentioned consensus earlier in the crypto in crisis segment. So if you want more detail on that, and especially about consensus, which has been such a player all year in the ICO boom and funding crypto startups in general, and if you don't know about Joe Lubin, the guy behind it, Quoting Forbes, Lubin created consensus, a holding company he grandiosely describes as a global organism to build the applications and infrastructure for a decentralized world. In actuality, it is the first crypto conglomerate, comprising a network of for-profit companies supporting Bitcoin's biggest blockchain rival, Ethereum. More than 50 businesses were quickly spawned out of its Brooklyn

Starting point is 00:15:23 headquarters, ranging from a poker site and a supply chain company to a prediction market, a health care records firm and a cybersecurity consultancy, end quote. I point you to the Forbes piece titled Cryptopia in Crisis. Joe Lubin's Ethereum experiment is a mess. How long will he prop it up? Speaking of times of crisis, the next piece from the information is summed up by the title How Robotics Maker Rethink crashed and burned and by the lead. A few years ago, rethink robotics was hailed as a revolutionary company.

Starting point is 00:15:59 that would change the course of industrial robots. Featured on the cover of Time magazine in 2015, the company raised $150 million in financing for backers such as Jeff Bezos and Goldman Sachs at a valuation that reached $291 million. Its relatively low-cost machines were designed to work closely with people, unlike heavy industrial robots, opening the market to small businesses. Mr. Bezos once used the robots to serve drinks at an Amazon event, he organized to showcase robotics, according to a former rethink

Starting point is 00:16:29 employee. Rethinks Abrupt Closure early last month demonstrates how technologically challenging the robotics business is, end quote. And finally, Geekwire has a look at what it's calling the new word processor wars, the new

Starting point is 00:16:45 slew of productivity apps that are popping up everywhere all of the sudden. Quote, nearly 30 years after Microsoft Office came on the scene, it's in the DNA of just about every productivity app. Even if you use Google's G Suite or Apple's Eye you're still following the Microsoft model.

Starting point is 00:17:02 But that way of thinking about work has gotten a little dusty, and new apps offering a different approach to getting things done are popping up by the day. There's a new war on over the way we work, and the old office suite is being reinvented around rapid-fire discussion threads, quick sharing and light, simple interfaces,

Starting point is 00:17:20 where all the work happens inside a single window. In recent years, the buzzwords and tech have been AI and mobile. Today, you can add collaboration to that list. These days, everybody wants to build a Slack-like communication into their apps, end quote. And that's been the weekend long reads suggestions brought to you by Betterment. Investing involves risk, but TechMeme Ride Home listeners can sign up today and get one year of your money managed free. For more information, visit Betterment.com slash ride. That's betterment.com slash R-I-D-E. Betterment,

Starting point is 00:17:56 outsmart average. That's all for today. Episode dropping a little early because I got to jump on a plane to Miami in just a couple hours. My niece's baptism is tomorrow. Congrats Bianca. So whilst most of you

Starting point is 00:18:15 are settling into the chill of December, we'll be enjoying the Florida sunshine for about 48 hours anyway. Talk to you on Monday unless the Miami lifestyle agrees with us and we never come back. But Brian, you can always do the podcast from Miami.

Starting point is 00:18:32 Well, yes, but I said Miami lifestyle. You know, I assume that's just sitting on the beach all the time and never working again. Enjoy your weekend.

Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 12/07 - Microsoft Calls for Regulation of AI

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