Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 01/22 – How Many Vision Pros Did Apple Sell This Weekend?

Episode Date: January 22, 2024

Just what the title says. How many Vision Pros do we think Apple sold this weekend? And Mark Gurman has some ideas for why developers are so lukewarm on the product. Eleven Labs is an interesting raise. Sam Altman seems serious about making his own AI chips. And the breakthrough in VR from Disney Imagineers that would allow you to literally walk through the Metaverse. Sponsors: FactorMeals.com/ride50 and code ride50 for 50% off MindBloom.com/techmeme and code techmeme for $100 off Links: Vision Pro sales estimated at 160k to 180k over first three days (9to5Mac) Apple’s Testy Developer Relationships Threaten to Hamper Vision Pro (Bloomberg) Meta will let EU users unlink their Instagram, Facebook, and Messenger info ahead of DMA (The Verge) Voice cloning startup ElevenLabs lands $80M, achieves unicorn status (TechCrunch) Altman Seeks to Raise Billions for Network of AI Chip Factories (Bloomberg) Nightshade, the free tool that ‘poisons’ AI models, is now available for artists to use (VentureBeat) YouTube Video Of The Holotiles From Disney Imagineering 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 Monday, January 22nd, 2024. I'm Brian McCullough today. Just what the title says. How many Vision Pros do we think Apple sold this weekend? And Mark German has some ideas for why developers are so lukewarm on the product.

11 Labs is an interesting raise. Sam Altman seems serious about making his own AI chips and the breakthrough in VR from Disney Imagineers that would allow you to literally walk through the Metaverse. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. How many Vision Pros do we think Apple took pre-orders for? this weekend, an estimated 160 to 180,000 units during this first pre-order weekend. So maybe more than they made, as we'll discuss in a second. But unchanged shipping times after the first 48 hours suggests demand tapered off considerably. All this comes from analyst Ming Chi Kuo, quoting 9 to 5 Mac. He compares this to iPhone pre-orders where shipping times quickly slip and then continue slipping as

demand continues to outstrip supply. Vision Pro, in contrast, has not seen shipping times continue to increase. This suggests that Apple didn't have enough stock on hand to meet initial demand, but demand and supply are now balanced, end quote. So as Quo and Mark German are both claiming that Apple had around 80,000 units on hand, then this suggests Apple now needs to fill in the neighborhood of 100,000 further units. As we'll discuss in the next segment, this suggests that in the first weekend, Apple sold as much as half of the units they're expecting to sell all of this year. These are all estimates on top of estimates, of course, but that suggests either more sales momentum than Apple thought or not, because, as 9 to 5 Mac points out, this is the very definition of an early

adopter product. If you're someone who's willing to spend $3,500 and up on a first-generation product like this, it's highly likely you also want it on day one. How many people, realistic, are sitting on the fence, but then like a month from now would be like, oh, all right. Mark German has answered the questions I had last week or made a stab at doing so in his newsletter this weekend. He says there are four main reasons for the less than expected developer enthusiasm for Apple's Vision Pro, including an uncertain return on investment and anger at Apple for its app store policies. Quoting Mark, building a software can be expensive, and developers want a return on their investment.

So some software makers are probably waiting to see how big the Vision Pro market gets before committing to a new application. This, however, doesn't explain the developers who actively chose not to support their iPad app on the device. Number two, there are some developers that are angry at Apple for their App Store review policies, fees, and other practices, something that's caught the eye of regulators. These developers know the Vision Pro hinges on cool new apps and may not want to help Apple market its device. Number three, some developers feel that their applications don't translate well to the Vision Pro's mixed reality environment, which relies on eye movement and hand gestures. Certain games are best

played with VR hand controllers, something the Vision Pro doesn't offer yet. Also, developers don't have full access to the eye tracking and motion sensing features, making it harder to take advantage of the headset. Four, developers saw the poor performance of Apple's last three new app stores, ones for TV watches and IMessage and don't want to participate until they know if the Vision Pro version will be successful, end quote. Mark reiterated that Apple's initial inventory order for this past launch weekend was 80,000 units, and it still only expects to be able to ship 300 to 400,000 units this year. So not the biggest addressable market for developers, and as folks will tell you,

the TVOS App Store, despite the push Apple made to make it a platform for gaming, hasn't exactly taken off, The Apple Watch for as successful as it is as a product is basically a ghost town when it comes to apps, Twitter, Uber, Facebook, and Slack all abandoned their watch apps. Though Mark is reporting that Slack is rolling the dice by making an app finally, along with Microsoft's Office 365 products and Zoom. So again, why not market this as a laptop replacement? People spend $3,000 on souped up laptops all the time. meta plans to let European Union users unlink their Instagram and Facebook accounts as well as other

meta services ahead of the EU's DMA taking effect in March of this year, quoting the Verge. The changes mean that EU users will be able to use many of meta's services without their information being shared between them. People will be able to use Facebook Messenger as a standalone service without a Facebook account, for example. And if they've previously linked their Facebook and Instagram accounts, they'll be able to unlink them. Meta's help page notes that linking accounts like this is used for features like targeting ads, personalizing content recommendations, and sharing posts. Meta's news follows a similar announcement from Google, which said earlier this month that it would let users stop the sharing

of data between services like search, YouTube, Google Maps, and Chrome. In both cases, the changes are the result of the DMA, which fully takes effect on March 6th. Meta and Google's holding company alphabet were among the list of companies designated as gatekeepers under the DMA last September, end quote. Now, Facebook Marketplace and Facebook gaming users do note that you can unlink your accounts from data sharing as well. However, meta warns that this may result in limited features. For instance, if you access Marketplace without linking your Facebook data, interactions with buyers and sellers must be conducted via email instead of Facebook Messenger. Similarly, Facebook gaming participants who choose to disconnect their Facebook details will be restricted to single-player games only.

11 Labs, which uses AI tools to create and edit synthetic voices, and which you've heard me experiment with on this show, has raised an $80 million Series B co-led by A16Z, Nat Friedman, and Daniel Gross at a $1 billion-plus valuation. This is up from a $100 million or so valuation last June, quoting TechCrunch. Today, 11 Labs is perhaps best known for its browser-based speech generation app that can create lifelike voices with adjustable toggles for intonation, emotion, cadence, and other key vocal characteristics.

For free, users can enter text and get a recording of that text read aloud by one of several default voices. Paying customers can upload voice samples to craft new styles using 11 Labs' voice cloning. Increasingly, 11 Labs is investing in versions of its speech-generating tech, aimed at creating audiobooks and dubbing films and TV shows as well as generating character voices for games and marketing activities. Last year, the company released a speech-to-speech tool that attempts to preserve a speaker's voice, prosody, and intonation while automatically removing background noise and, in the case of movies and TV shows, translates and synchronizes speech with the source

material. On the roadmap for the coming weeks is a new dubbing studio workflow with tools to generate and edit transcripts and translations, and a subscription-based mobile app that narrates webpages and text using 11 Labs' voices, end quote. Eleven Labs has apparently seen uptake in the gaming industry, for example, Paradox Interactive, the developer of my beloved city's Skylines too is using them, but apparently so is the Washington Post. And the company claims 41% of the Fortune 500 have been experimenting with their wares. Competition in this space includes the likes of Paper Cup, Deep Dub, Acape, Acape Hella, re-speecher, and voice.aI, as well as the similar products from the likes of Microsoft and Google.

Sam Altman seems to really be serious about getting into the chip business. Sources are telling Bloomberg that the OpenAI CEO has held talks to raise billions, including $8 to $10 billion from Abu-Dabby-based G-42, to set up a network of factories to manufacture chips. Quote, Altman had been hard at work on the chips project until he was temporarily ousted as OpenA CEO in November. Upon his return, he rekindled the efforts. Altman has also sounded out Microsoft on the plan, and the software giant is interested, according to two people. Altman believes the industry needs to act now to ensure their sufficient supply near the end of the decade, according to people

familiar with his thinking, end quote. Altman's fundraising effort is driven by concerns about a chip shortage due to increasing AI use. Unlike peers like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, who outsource chip manufacturing, Altman's approach seems to require costly fabrication, plants. Discussions with G-42 aim to raise $8 to $10 billion for this, but the current progress is uncertain. A single chip fab can cost tens of billions of dollars to get off the ground, and the process can take the better part of a decade. It's unclear to what degree Altman would try to partner with leaders in the chip fabrication space, which includes Intel, TSM, and Samsung. Nightshade is a free tool that lets artists poison AI models that attempt to train on their

artwork without permission. It is now a very important. It is now a very important. to download on Mac and PC, quoting Venture Beat. Developed by computer scientists on the Glaze Project at the University of Chicago under Professor Ben Zhao, the tool essentially works by turning AI against AI. It makes use of the popular open source machine learning framework pie torch to identify what's in a given image, then applies a tag that subtly alters the image at the pixel level so other AI programs see something totally different than what's actually there. It's the second such tool from the team. Nearly one year ago, the team unveiled Glaze, a separate program designed to alter digital artwork at a user's behest to confuse AI

training algorithms into thinking the image has a different style than what is actually present, such as different colors and brushstrokes than are really there. But whereas the Chicago team designed Glaze to be a defensive tool and still recommends artists use it in addition to Nightshade to prevent an artist style from being imitated by AI models, Nightshade is designed to be, quote, an offensive tool, end quote. Nightshade version one, quote, transforms images into poison samples so that AI models training on them without consent will see their models learn unpredictable behaviors that deviate from expected norms, e.g. A prompt that asks for an image of a cow flying in space might instead get an image of a handbag floating in space, states a blog post from the development team on its

website. But they claim they don't want to be malicious, quote, Nightshade's goal is not to break models, but to increase the cost of training on unlicensed data, such that licensing images from the creators becomes a viable alternative, end quote. But it certainly sounds like this would break things. Apparently, if an AI model is trained extensively, again, on images modified or tinted with nightshade, it might incorrectly classify objects in the future for all its users, even in pictures that haven't been tinted with nightshade. Quote, for example, human eyes might see a shaded image of a cow in a green field,

largely unchanged, but an AI model might see a large leather purse lying in the grass, the team explained. After being shaded, if a user asked a model who ingested this shading to make a picture of a cow, it would instead make a picture of a purse. And yet to humanize, the original artwork looks somehow unchanged. Human eyes would see the artwork exactly as the artist intended, and you can modify or edit things, and it's still been muddied for AIIs, quoting the team again. You can crop it, resample it, compress it, smooth out pixels or add noise, and the effects of the poison will remain. You can take screenshots or even photos of an image displayed on a monitor, and the shade effects remain. Again, this is because it is not a watermark or hidden message, steganography, and it is not brittle, end quote.

If you're an artist and you want to start using this right now, you need a Mac with Apple Silicon chips inside or a PC running Windows 10 or 11. If you're on a PC, you need to be able to have an Nvidia GPU from a specified list of supported chips. What do I always say about the tech industry's never-ending obsessions with bringing Star Trek tech to life? Well, you might think even if the ultimate endpoint of the Metaverse would be something like Next Generation's Holo Deck, that seems like it would be the furthest away from reality, right? The idea is instead of sitting in one place with some sort of eye gear strapped to your head, a literal virtual reality is made that you can walk around in and interact.

physically with objects. I say this is likely the farthest away because things like transporter technology and replicator technology seem like they aren't coming around anytime soon. You'd need that sort of tech to make physical objects. But what if I told you that the ability to walk around or at least simulate moving through space in VR is already here? The hollow tile is an invention of Disney Imagineering, and it is described as an omnidirectional floor. It's made up of dozens of individual rotating tiles that, using some sort of computation to sense direction helps simulate walking through space while in actuality moving in place. What's more wild is more than one person can be on the floor at the same time and be moving in different directions.

You can imagine this easily as something you could use while having a VR headset on your face so that you could feel completely like you're moving. I mean, there are other applications like this could be used on stage to give dancers the ability to do all sorts of moves like the moonwalk on steroids, but also since it can move any objects, I don't know, you can imagine some sort of next generation moving walkway or conveyor belts on steroids to sort packages in a warehouse or luggage in an airport. But again, the obvious and most obviously exciting use case here would be to experience running or walking in place while being confined to a small space in the real world, but moving in VR. Imagine being able to run the length and breadth of

a virtual world like high rule while never leaving your living room. By the way, the guys showing off this technology is Disney Imagineer Lanny Smoot, a bit of a leg of a legioner, legend with over 100 patented inventions. You might know him for inventing that retractable lightsaber that got a ton of attention a few years ago, and he just got inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, only the second Disney employee to be so honored. The first was Walt Disney himself for his work on the multi-plane camera. No word on what Disney plans to use this technology for, but what was I saying recently about why didn't Apple get Disney to make something special for the Vision Pro launch? Maybe someday. Obviously, you're going to want to see the video

of that last segment to see this tech in action. So final link in the show notes today is to a YouTube video of that last segment that I put together, slightly cropped to get you to the good stuff. Video of the hollow tiles in action. Click through to see what I'm talking about. Talk to you tomorrow.