Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 02/12 – Luddite Riots?

Episode Date: February 12, 2024

Is actual neo-ludditeism going to become a thing, as some people have predicted? Google reveals the strength of its subscription businesses. A review of Google’s Gemini. Bluesky is open and doing some interesting things. And what about the strategic position Snap suddenly finds itself in? Sponsors: ArcticWolf.com/techmeme Links: A crowd destroyed a driverless Waymo car in San Francisco (The Verge) Google One hits 100 million subscribers (The Verge) Google’s Gemini assistant is a fantastic and frustrating glimpse of the AI future (The Verge) ASML's next chip challenge: rollout of its new $350 mln 'High NA EUV' machine (Reuters) Meta turns its back on politics again, angering some news creators (Washington Post) Bluesky Opens Up (TechDirt) It’s Snap versus the world (The Verge) 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, February 12th, 2024. I'm Brian McCullough. Today is actual Neo-Ludditism going to become a thing, as some people have predicted. Google reveals the strength of its subscription businesses. A review of Google's Gemini. Blue Sky is open and doing some interesting things. And what about the strategic position Snap suddenly finds itself in?

Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Over the weekend, a crowd in San Francisco destroyed a Waymo car, amidstri. tensions over automated vehicles in that city. Weimo says the car, quote, was not transporting any riders at the time. Quoting the verge. A person jumped on the hood of a Waymo driverless taxi and smashed its windshield in San Francisco's Chinatown last night around 9 p.m. Local time, February 10th, generating applause before a crowd formed around the car and covered it in spray paint, breaking its windows and ultimately set it on fire. The fire department arrived minutes later, according to a report in the Atopian, but by then, flames had already fully engulfed the car. At the moment, no outlets seem to have reported a motive for the attack.

Waymo representative Sandy Carp told the verge via email that the fully autonomous car, quote, was not transporting any riders when it was attacked, and fireworks were tossed inside the car sparking the flames. Public information officer Roberta Ruka of San Francisco's police department confirmed in an email to the verge that police responded at approximately 8.50 p.m. Pacific time to find the car already on fire. adding that there were, quote, no reports of injuries. The fire takes place against the backdrop of simmering tensions between San Francisco residents

and automated vehicle operators. The California DMV suspended Waymo rival cruises Robotaxi operations after one of its cars struck and dragged a pedestrian last year. And prior to that, automated taxis had caused chaos in the city blocking traffic or crashing into a fire truck. Just last week, a Waymo car struck a cyclist who had reportedly been following behind a truck turning across its path. City officials and residents opposed the car.

cars being given a license for 24-7 operation last year, with some residents rendering them immobile by putting orange cones on the car's hoods in protest, end quote. Google One has officially crossed 100 million subscribers, highlighting Google's efforts to move users away from its free plans. YouTube Premium also hit 100 million subscribers in February. Something, something search as a legacy product. I'm mostly jking, but I'm not cherry-picking these stories to fit that thesis. They just keep coming up. up. Quoting the verge. Hitting the milestone highlights the company's efforts to move people away from its free plans, such as discontinuing unlimited Google Drive storage for photos. Google's YouTube

premium service took nine years to get there, but it too recently hit 100 million subscribers thanks to ad removal and extra features like music or high-quality streaming, and at the same time as YouTube made changes to crack down on ad blockers. The company had said it was close to the 100 million mark when it released its fourth quarter earnings last month and revealed the billions it spent on layoffs and noted that again last week while launching an AI premium plan tier. The new AI plan is similar to the company's existing $100 per year Google One premium plan that comes with two terabytes of storage and other features like VPN and dark web monitoring, except it's twice as expensive. It gives users access to a beefed up version of Gemini,

the new name for its barred chatbot, and it will soon add access to those generative AI features inside services like Gmail and docs, end quote. You know, we usually reserve review segments for new gadgetry, but what this segment presupposes is we could do review segments for new AI products as well. After all, Allison Johnson does a lot of the smartphone reviews for The Verge, and she just posted a review piece about Google's new Gemini AI assistant. Is it a Google Assistant killer? Allison says it's useful, but it's also thoroughly Google.

quote, Gemini is Google's AI chatbot, formerly known as Bard. It's an app you download from the Google Play Store, but really, it's a piece of the Google app that's probably already on your phone if it runs Android. Once it's up and running, you can replace the standard Google Assistant with Gemini and invoke it in all the same as you would the old assistant. But instead of just setting timers and telling you the weather, it can do all the stuff Bard did, answer complex questions, make suggestions, and read your email if you let it. That last part is important. Gemini isn't nearly as good of a conversationalist as chat cheptie, but its ability to hook into Gmail, Google Maps, and Google Docs is what makes it really interesting. I asked it to summarize the details of that Airbnb reservation,

and it did, grabbing info from two different emails and putting it together in a neat little bullet point list. Then I asked it to draft an email to my friends with all of the details. Most of the time when I ask AI to write an email or text, the results are too embarrassing to actually send to anyone. To my great surprise, this one was fine. It really doesn't sound like much, but it's the first time I've been really impressed with AI as a tool to help me get things done. Maybe I lack imagination, but I get bored with chat GPT pretty quickly. There's only so many times I can brainstorm business plans for a retro arcade or ideas for vacations.

What I actually want is help with the pile of digital crap I'm constantly waiting through just to live my life. I also appreciate that when Gemini comes up with something for me like a recipe or a packing list, I have somewhere to put it. Gemini can export answers directly to Google Docs or Gmail. When I get the same kind of things from chat GBT, they just feel like they're floating around in space until I copy and paste them somewhere. They're saved to your history, but you know what I mean. Talking to Gemini feels like talking to a page of Google search results. If you say, hey, Google and ask it a question, it'll speak the response to you.

Otherwise, you're just reading text. And it's often a lot of text. This assistant could use an editor. I'm also surprised that Gemini can't access my calendar, but there's currently no extension for it like there is for Gmail and docs. If I want to add something to my calendar, I have to switch back to the regular assistant. At that point, I'll just make a damn calendar event myself. Right now, Gemini is an entirely optional assistant, but it's also easy to see how it might eventually replace Google Assistant as the default, especially since Google has been

scaling back assistant features in recent history. Maybe we just reached the limits of what non-AI-voice assistants can do reliably, end quote. ASML is gearing up to ship its new $350 million high-n-a-eU-V machine, which is the size of a double-decker bus, and they expect to ship a number of them in 2024. This is why it's a big deal, quoting Reuters. ASML is the only maker of a key technology, extreme ultra-violent or EUV photolithography needed to manufacture the most advanced chips. High NA, EUV is the next generation of that technology, but analysts said it was an open question,

how many customers are ready to switch over to the high-cost devices. While some chipmakers may introduce it earlier in an attempt to gain technology leadership, the majority will not adopt it until it makes some sense economically. Jeff Koch of semi-analysis said, Intel has already taken delivery of one pilot device and said it plans to start production next year without giving details on the scale of the operation. TSMC and Samsung have said they intend to use the tool but have not specified when. ASML says it is taken between 10 and 20 orders to date,

including pilot devices for memory specialists S.K. Heynix, micron and is building capacity to be able to deliver 20 annually by 2028. None of them will go to China, ASML's second largest market last year, as the United States seeks to curb exports of cutting-edge technology there and stymie Beijing's semiconductor ambitions. A quick take-up of the tool would boost ASML's sales and margins and could extend its dominant position in the market for lithography systems, machines that use light to help trace out patterns on silicon wafers that will eventually become the circuitry of computer chips. It says the high NA tool, will let chipmakers shrink the size of the smallest features on their chips by up to 40%

allowing density of transistors to nearly triple, end quote. I wanted to check in with something we haven't mentioned in a while, the whole scrum of Twitter competitors. Over at one of them, Threads, meta announced plans to not, quote, proactively recommend political content from accounts you don't follow on threads, matching their policy on Facebook and Instagram. This has led to some news creators and journalists who moved from X to threads criticizing Meta, quoting the Washington Post. Sorry, Beth Rosenberg, a podcaster in New York said that after feeling like she couldn't connect with her audience on Twitter, after Musk took over, she moved to threads. As much as I was hesitant

about meta now controlling threads, I was giving it a chance. But what they're doing is penalizing and restricting very crucial conversations around politics at the most crucial election of our time, end quote. Anna Da, a content creator in Brooklyn, said that meta's policy was extremely vague, and the phrasing around social issues concerns her, quote, some people's entire existence and their perspectives are going to be deemed political, she said, like me as a black woman. This is going to silence a lot of marginalized people, end quote. Isaiah's Hernandez, a Gen Z content creator who posts on environmentalism, said that the change could lead to voters being less educated during a major election. Climate policy is a huge

factor for a lot of young people voting, he said. I think we're going to lose a large chunk of voters if we're not able to put climate information out there, end quote. Meanwhile, over at Blue Sky, they've finally opened up. The wait list is no more. Blue Sky says they have more than 3 million users, has plans to add developer tools, and I did not know this, but they're doing some pretty innovative stuff like you can manage your own feed over there. Quoting TechDirt, with Blue Sky's algorithmic choice, anyone can make or share their own algorithms and users can choose what algorithms they want to use. In my Blue Sky, for example, I have a few different algorithms that I can choose to recommend interesting stuff to me. One of them developed by an outside developer,

i.e. not Blue Skygay's, Skygays is a for-you feed that is actually good. Unlike centralized social media, Skygays' goal with its feed is not to improve engagement numbers for Blue Sky. I also have feeds showing me quiet posters, calling attention to post from users who don't post all that often, or posts that are popular with friends. I have a few different topic-focused algorithms as well, including one highlighting breaking stories from journalists and others highlighting posts from folks interested in tech, law, and policy. In other words, rather than letting Blue Sky curate my experience or leaving it up to the whims of a chronological feed, I get to curate the experience myself with help for anyone who is creating

and releasing their own feed algorithms. And all of that is about to get even better because Blue Sky also announced that they're opening up their moderation system as well to enable a similar sort of feature for moderation. Quote, in the coming weeks, we're excited to release the labeling services, which will allow users to stack more options on top of their existing moderation preferences. This will allow other organizations and people to run their own moderation services that can account for industry-specific knowledge or specific cultural norms, among other preferences, end quote. They're also rolling out federation features. Blue Sky is, after all, built on the AT protocol, of course. Finally, today, I don't know if we've covered this,

but Snap recently announced plans to layoff around 10% of its workforce. This follows cutting 20% of staff back in August of 2022, but this is not just another story of tech layoffs. In his newsletter, Alex Heath says increasingly, Snap is in real strategic danger. Quote, as I wrote in an October issue, the question of what happens to Snap remains a big one that many inside and around the company are wrestling with.

On one hand, Snapchat has achieved a reach 414 million daily users last quarter. that is rivaled only by a handful of other companies in the world. On the other, as the team at the investing research firm Moffat Nathanson put it this week, quote, It's hard to see how Snap's competitive position and financial profile gets materially better, end quote. Evan Spiegel is still spending hundreds of millions of dollars per year on the hardware division making spectacles, I'm told. The plan is to release another pair of the AR glasses either later this year or in 2025. Meanwhile, the much bigger players in this space, namely Apple and Meta, don't see true AR glasses really hitting until the end of this decade. Google just decided to kill its first-party

AR hardware because the technology was too far out from being commercially viable. Even still, Spiegel sees building AR glasses as being existential. We need our business to be strong enough and profitable enough to deliver the future of computing in augmented reality, he told employees last month. He's not alone in thinking AR will be the next platform shift. He just looks increasingly outgunned. On the business side, Spiegel seems set on the idea that increasing revenue growth will appease investors and lift his stock price, though he has yet to prove it. The tech companies performing the best right now are focusing on the bottom line, and Snap is nowhere near being close to actual profitability. Even if the ads business gets turned around and starts growing again,

more revenue by itself is a hard pitch when meta is growing revenue faster at a much larger scale and also producing a lot of profit. A wild stat, Snap's stock-based compensation last year was 29% of its revenue. Metas was 10%. back when interest rates were low and he was the de facto head of product for Mark Zuckerberg, Spiegel could get away with Snap being the underdog, money-losing operation. Now he's playing catch-up on generative AI and is late to flattening his org chart. Who is copying whom exactly? Morale inside public companies tends to trend with the stock price and snap has certainly been a rollercoaster since it went public.

But after the events of this week, the question is whether Spiegel can convince others to stay on the ride with him, end quote. Nothing for you today. Talk to you tomorrow.