Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 02/11 - Trump Wants US To Get Serious About AI

Episode Date: February 11, 2019

The Trump Administration wants America to get serious about AI, Patch is actually profitable, Reddit raises a round, Apple Health for vets and hands on with AR navigation on Google Maps. Sponsors: Tiny.website DataDogHQ.com/ridehome Links: Trump to lay out an AI plan (Axios) US military equipped with tiny spy drones (ZDNet) It’s the Real World—With Google Maps Layered on Top (WSJ) The alternative to your dying local paper is written by one person, a robot, and you (Recode) Reddit raised $300 million at a $3 billion valuation — now it's ready to take on Facebook and Google (CNBC) Driverless delivery startup Nuro gets $940 million SoftBank investment (Reuters) Apple teaming up with US Department of Veterans Affairs to bring digital health records to iPhone (9to5Mac) When Amazon Went From Big to Unbelievably Big (The Atlantic) 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 ride home for Monday, February 11th, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, the Trump administration wants America to get serious about AI.

Patch is actually profitable. Reddit raises around Apple Health for Vets and hands-on with AR navigation for Google Maps. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. At some point between me writing these words and you hearing them spoken, President Trump is today expected to sign an executive order called the American AI Initiative to prioritize federal funding for AI, create resources for AI researchers, establish AI standards, and much more. By all accounts, this is a direct response to China's 2017 plan, which I've told you about recently, to create a homegrown AI industry in that country by 2030, which would make it the world leader in artificial intelligence technology.

If you'll recall when AI's first defeated humans at the ancient game of Go in May of 2017, it really shook Chinese society where Go is exceptionally popular. Some have described it as China's Sputnik moment. The moment when in the 1950s the Soviet Union beat the United States to become the first to launch a satellite into orbit. That shock here led to a flood of federal funding for science and research. That resulted in putting men on the moon, and the development of the internet, among many other knock-on effects.

However, this executive order might not actually lead to anything similar. As Axios puts it in their adorable house style, quote, but, but, it's not clear yet how much muscle the administration intends to put behind its words. The new initiative appears to do little more than send a strong signal to the federal government that AI is a prime concern. For example, the administration said it would, quote, prioritize AI research funding, but did not announce any new resources for AI development, an area in which the U.S. lags significantly behind China. Quote, if there's no implementation behind the executive order with details, deadlines, and funding,

then it may be worse than no E.O. at all, said Wendy R. Anderson, General Manager for Defense and National Security at Spark Cognition, an AI company, and who was previously chief of staff to Defense Secretary Ash Carter, end quote. But I mean, first steps, right? Remember, I've told you before how geopolitical thinkers are increasingly word that AI is a zero-sum technology game. Whoever is first to truly master AI would immediately leap to such a technological lead, the strategist's fear, that that country could effectively suppress the development of any competing technologies and effectively have a hegemonic advantage for a generation or more.

So at least getting people in the U.S. to start thinking about that might be important. The U.S. Army has enjoyed global hegemony for several decades because of technology that the U.S. has led the way in, not the least of which, was in things like microprocessors and all the other stuff that we talk about on this show when we talk about modern tech. In that regard, drones have, however, controversially, been heavily deployed by the U.S. military. for about 20 years now. So it's no surprise that the U.S. Army is also aggressively rolling out microdrones. Flurs Black Hornet nanodrones measure 6.6 inches, way less than 33 grams, have a range of 1.24 miles at speeds of up to 13.35 miles per hour, and are able to fly up to 25 minutes on a single charge.

The idea is that the Army wants to give at least one of these Black Hornet drones to nearly every ground combat unit to allow them to provide HD photo and video surveillance in the field. The drones could be operated using operators on the ground with handheld control units, which communicate with the drones via AES-256 encryption. Quoting from ZDNet, Fleur says the first batch of drones en route to forces now is part of the Soldier-Born Sensor Program, which involves investment in both unmanned aerial vehicles, and ground control systems.

Quote, with a camera in the air vehicle, soldiers will be able to see further and around obstacles that they previously wouldn't be able to see in near real time, the U.S. Army says, end quote. You might remember at I.O. last May that Google announced AR navigation was coming to Google Maps. In essence, you'd be able to walk down a city street,

pull out your phone, point your camera to get a live video of whatever's in front of you, and Google will overlay directions, points of interest, and other information features from Google Maps. Well, David Pierce and the Wall Street Journal got to try out an early version of the new features, and he described it working this way. The app instructed me to move my phone around and point its camera at things across the street while it tried to figure out my location.

After a few seconds, the camera seemed to recognize some landmarks and realize where it was with remarkable precision, end quote. Google Maps still used GPS. to find Pierce's location ultimately, but then match that with all of the street view data that it's been collecting for years. Quoting again, a moment after the app found me, a set of bold, can't miss them, 3D arrows appeared on my phone screen,

hovering in the middle of the street. The arrows pointed right, so I headed right. That's when a rectangular blue sign appeared floating above the sidewalk, 249 feet until my next turn. At the corner, the arrows again pointed right and down the street, a phone booth-sized red pin marked my destination. It was as if maps had drawn my directions onto the real world, though nobody else could see them, end quote.

Now, Google does not want you to use this when driving, of course, and it doesn't even want you to walk around like a zombie with your phone in front of your face the whole time either. If you lower the phone, you see a standard Google Maps view. The AR stuff only pops back up when you pop your phone back up. so the idea would be you would just check to make sure of your progress periodically. Pierce's ultimate verdict of the experience, quote, I found the AR feature most useful at the beginning of a journey.

Usually when I'm heading somewhere new, I pick a direction, start walking, then check the blue dot halfway down the block to see if I'm going the right way. Often I am not. With Google's AR view, I could fire up the camera, check my surroundings, and set off with much more confidence, end quote. Don't expect to see this anytime soon, You can only use this new feature now if you're one of Google Maps' local guides, the service's most dedicated users. And there is no word on when this will be rolling out to the general public, but it doesn't sound like it will be happening this year.

Notable raise today from what I tend to think of as the never-ending startup. Reddit has announced that it has raised $300 million in a Series D round at a $3 billion valuation with a murderer's row of investors. participating including Tencent, Sequoia, Andrescent Horowitz, and Fidelity. With the news, Reddit also announced that it has reached 330 million monthly active users, and the company says it will use this money to really build out its advertising efforts to tap into that massive user base, which, you'll note, is definitely in Twitter and Snapchat territory. Quote, when we are talking about competing for ad dollars, of course we are talking about

Facebook and Google, who take up the vast majority of ad spend. Reddit CEO Steve Huffman told CNBC in an interview this morning. He said that when it comes to competition for consumers, quote, we are competing with anybody or anywhere people spend their free time. CNBC's Steve Kovach tweeted about the news. How many companies have said they'd take digital ad money away from Facebook and Google and actually did it? Oath, Imger, now Reddit, end quote. One more quick check-in on digital media since we've been.

discussing it so much recently. Local News Network Patch is now profitable, according to Peter Kafka, with $20 million in ad revenue this year. If you're not familiar with Patch, it was one of Tim Armstrong's biggest initiatives when he was head of AOL. He launched Patch in 2007, and it ran into the early 2000s under AOL's direction. Armstrong convinced AOL to invest upwards of $50 million in Patch, although I've heard it was significantly more than that over time, and the idea was to create thousands of local news sites staffed by hundreds of paid journalists. Patch did indeed hire many of those journalists, but the service ended up gaining the reputation as being something of a costly money pit. AOL sold Patch to hail global in 2012, and Armstrong went on to convince Verizon to buy AOL,

bundle it with Yahoo, and create oath. If you've been listening to the podcast for the last several months, you know how that turned out. Well, apparently, though, Path has lived on under the auspices of Hale Global and quoting Kafka. Here is the glass half-full news about Patch. Charles Hale, the investor, that has owned the company for the past five years, says his network of 1,200 hyper-local sites are turning a profit, generating more than $20 million in annual ad revenue without a paywall. The company, led by former New York Times reporter Warren St. John, now employs about 110 journalists who make an average base salary that ranges from $45,000 to $60,000 a year and a total of 150 employees. At its AOL-owned peak, Patchhead close to 1,000 employees.

On the other hand, if your idea of a local news operation involves a team of reporters and editors that can exhaustively cover your hometown, you will be disappointed with Patch, which usually assigns a single journalist to cover. multiple towns. Those reporters then generate five to ten stories a day, which means those stories are almost always generated quickly, end quote. And if you have been listening a lot recently, you'll know that the latest narrative that I'm super keen to follow is the idea of self-driving groceries. Well, this has combined with my longstanding habit of tracking Masasan's investments, because today Autonomous Vehicle Startup Nuro says it is raised $940 million from SoftBanks Vision Fund, valuing the company at $2.7 billion. Nero was founded by two former engineers on Alphabet's self-driving projects.

Neuro produces a little self-driving buggy the size of a golf cart. No room for passengers inside this tiny vehicle, though. Just two simple wing doors that flip open Tesla or Delorean style to reveal. Just enough room to contain a family's typical order of groceries from a grocery store. Neuro largely operates in the San Francisco Bay Area right now, but it recently announced a partnership with U.S. grocery giant Kroger. And of course, Chrissy Farr put health tech on our radar in a big way for this year. Go listen to that episode if you haven't already.

Apple continues to look to be serious about moving into health in a big way, as Chrissy talked to us about. Apple today announced it has partnered with the U.S. Department of Veterans to soon let veterans access their digital health records via the iPhone's health app. With health records on iPhone, veterans across the U.S. will be able to see medical information from participating institutions, including the VA, organized into one view, all in the health app, Apple said. This marks the first time the VA has partnered with an outside party for digital health records sharing

with apparently 9 million veterans eligible for using this new program on their iPhones. quote, we have great admiration for veterans, and we're proud to bring a solution like health records on iPhone to the veteran community, said Tim Cook, Apple's CEO. Quote, it's truly an honor to contribute to the improved health care of America's heroes. We know Amazon is really, really big, right? Sometimes the biggest company in the world by MarketCat, but something that we can forget, unless we really look at the numbers, is the timescale in achieving that bigness. I mean, you can see it by looking at annual reports. Amazon had almost $100 billion more in revenue in 2018 when it did $233 billion in sales than it did just two years earlier when in 2016 it did $136 billion in sales. So while you might be aware of how big Amazon has gotten, you might not be aware of how recently it did so.

Over the weekend, I saw this piece in the Atlantic by Alexis Madrigal, and it's worth looking at to get a sense of how recently Get Big Fast actually happened to Amazon. It's in just the last couple of years. According to its latest annual report, Amazon now has 288 million square feet of warehouses, offices, retail stores, and data centers. In 2017, the biggest growth year for the company's properties, alone, it added more square feet of building, 74.6 million than the company had in total in 2012 when it had 73.1 million, when it was already the largest online retailer in the world. Amazon has added more building space from 2016 to 2018 than it did in all the rest of its history. Go back a little further in time, and the growth is even more astounding.

Amazon has 48 times the square footage it did in 2004, end quote. Madrigal notes that this is not from, AWS growth, the whole of AWS only occupies 10 million square feet of real estate. And it's not from the Whole Foods acquisition. All of Amazon's retail real estate only accounts for 20 million square feet. No, the remaining 250 million or so square feet that Amazon has at this point comes from warehouses and logistics. In other words, just from simply getting stuff to your door.

Again, though, the point here is that Amazon is operating at the law of law. large numbers at such a scale now that when, I don't know, you hear sales go up 20% or head count went up X percent or square footage or whatever went up at whatever percent, at the scale Amazon is operating at, even minute changes can account for just massive, massive numbers. And even if those numbers happen over just a couple of years, it's at the scale now where it can dwarf even numbers that were unimaginable for Amazon only a few years previously. That's all for today. I've been your host, as always, Brian McCullough.

Follow me on Twitter at Brian MCC. And follow the TechMeme editors on Twitter at TechMeme. Talk to you tomorrow.