Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 05/06 – AI Generated Books, Music Videos And… Fighter Pilots?

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 right home for Monday, May 6th, 2024. I'm Brian McCullough today. Jack Dorsey abandoned Twitter and now he's abandoned Blue Sky as well. YouTube rolls out jump ahead. Threads rolls out post-quote controls. More than 40,000 books on Audible are now voiced by AI. The Air Force is planning more than 1,000 AI fighter jets by the end of the end. And if you're listening to this on Apple Podcasts, please listen to the end for an important announcement. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. has confirmed Jack Dorsey's departure from its board of directors and says it is currently searching for a new board member, quoting TechCrunch. On Saturday, Jack Dorsey posted on X about grants for

Starting point is 00:01:18 open protocols from his philanthropic Start Small initiative. This prompted someone to ask Dorsey if he was still on the Blue Sky board, and he responded with a terse no. Dorsey did not answer any of the follow-up posts asking him to explain his departure. It's not clear when Dorsey left the board. As of Sunday morning, Blue Sky's corporate FAQ still identified him as a board member. Later that afternoon, the company published the following statement. We sincerely thank Jack for his help funding and initiating the Blue Sky Project. Today, Blue Sky is thriving as an open-source social network running on AT Proto, the decentralized protocol we have built. With Jack's departure, we are searching for a new board member for the Blue Sky Public Benefit Company who shares our commitment to building a social network that puts people

Starting point is 00:02:01 in control of their experience. More to come. Dorsey, first announced Blue Sky in 2019 back when he was still CEO of Twitter. He wrote that Twitter, now X, was, quote, funding a small independent team of up to five open source architects, engineers, and designers to develop an open and decentralized standard for social media. Since then, Blue Sky has become an independent public benefit corporation led by CEO Jay Graber, with VC backing, and it opened to the general public in February. Dorsey appears to have deleted his Blue Sky account at some point last year, though his departure was only acknowledged at the time by a smattering of social media posts. He also deleted his Instagram account. Despite this,

Starting point is 00:02:39 he remained the biggest name associated with the project, end quote. YouTube has rolled out something called Jump Ahead, which uses AI to let users jump to parts of a video where most viewers skip ahead. It's been opened up to all U.S. premium members using its Android app, quoting Android Authority. Jump Ahead lets you skip to the best parts of a video by combining user data and AI to predict what you'd like to watch. The feature was previously only a to select premium users in the U.S., but all YouTube premium members can now try it out through YouTube.com slash new. For now, the feature only works on the YouTube Android app in the U.S. and is available only for English language videos. Since it's an experimental feature,

Starting point is 00:03:25 YouTube has stated that it's only available to try out until June 1st. Following the deadline, the platform may roll it out officially as part of its premium subscription or it could extend the experiment further. After opting into the experiment, you will see a jump ahead. button when you double-tap to skip forward on any eligible video. Clicking the button will take you to where most viewers typically skip ahead. YouTube notes that all videos won't support the feature just yet, end quote. Meta has launched quote post controls for all threads users, letting them allow quotes from everyone on threads, only the people they follow, or disable quote posts entirely.

Starting point is 00:04:08 Quoting TechCrunch. This builds on a feature that already allows threads users to limit who can reply to their posts competing services like X and Blue Sky offer similar reply controls. Threads outlined its plans for quote controls last month, and last night Adam Moseeri, who leads both Threads and Instagram for parent company Meta, announced that the feature is available to all users. I hope this will help keep Threads a more positive place and give people more control over their experience, Moseeri wrote.

Starting point is 00:04:34 As of Sunday morning, the ability to limit quotes isn't showing up when I log into threads on my desktop web browser, but it is available in the Threads mobile app. Quote and reply controls appear to be bundled together in a single drop-down menu where users can open the conversation to anyone or limit it to profiles you follow or mentioned only. These controls should make it harder to dunk on others where users quote someone else's post in order to make them look dumb. But dunking is good, you say. I need to be able to tell my followers when someone on X threads Blue Sky Massadon has posted something dumb, offensive or stupid. Fair enough. When I'm not the one being destroyed, I enjoy a good dunk as much. as anyone. Luckily, the ability to screenshot and share someone's post while explaining why it's dumb, offensive, otherwise objectionable, still exists. This just makes it less likely that a

Starting point is 00:05:23 succession of dunks will make the original posts go viral. And it means that in theory, the original poster can scroll on, blissfully unaware that someone on the internet might be saying mean things about them, end quote. Over 40,000 audible books are now marked as having been made with AI virtual voices, saving authors hundreds or thousands of per title on narration costs. Quoting Bloomberg. Last year, Amazon announced that self-published authors in the U.S. who make their books available on the Kindle store would soon be able to access a new tool in beta testing. Many of them, likely prohibited by cost and time, hadn't yet turned their e-books into audiobooks, but with the help of an artificial intelligence-generated virtual voice,

Starting point is 00:06:09 they could easily do so. In the months since the free tool launched in beta, authors have embraced it. Over 40,000 books in Audible are now marked as having been created. with it and in posts online, authors praise the fact that they save hundreds or thousands of dollars per title on narration costs. One author, Hassan Osman of the writer on the side blog, said turning one of his books into an audiobook took only 52 minutes. But while authors might appreciate unlocking a potential revenue stream, audiobook listeners have separately complained online about the influx of new material. Books voiced with the AI are marked clearly as such, but listeners' primary complaint is that they can't filter these voices out.

Starting point is 00:06:48 During the beta, we are learning more about what our customers want as we continue to innovate on their behalf, said an audible spokesperson over email. These AI voice titles have an average overall rating of 4 plus, the spokesperson said. Still, some consumers worry this development pretends a tough future for narrators who will lose work while listeners suffer from lagging quality. So depressing to discover virtual voice narration of audiobooks on Audible posted one X user. Yes, they are good enough, alas. And while author's counterparts in the music business have actively fought against the introduction of AI into their industry and sought safeguards against it, audiobook narrators appear to be facing the threat of the technology without much recourse. One narrator, Ramon de Ocampo, responded to someone on X about the test saying virtual voices had not taken all the jobs, but it's trying to.

Starting point is 00:07:35 Harper Collins already announced its partnership with 11 labs to voice books in different languages, end quote. When my book came out, I had the publisher just go ahead and hire someone to do the audiobook because I was afraid I might ruin my voice for the show if I was going in to record the book every day. It didn't cost me anything, but I did forego a payment I could have gotten if I had recorded it myself. I can't remember what the payment was, but it was at least in the four figures and might have been low five figures. I honestly don't remember. The U.S. Air Force apparently plans a fleet of more than 1,000 AI-controlled fighter jets, the first of them operating by two. 28. Some AI versions, as we've discussed, have already beaten human pilots in air-to-air combat. Quoting the AP, with the midday sun blazing and experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet

Starting point is 00:08:29 launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of U.S. air power, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other. This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence, not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning for an AI-enabled fleet of more than a thousand unmanned warplanes, the first of them operating by 2028. It's a security risk not to have it at this point. We have to have it, Kendall said in an interview with the Associated Press after he landed. The AP, along with NBC,

Starting point is 00:09:11 was granted permission to witness the secret flight on the condition that it would not. not be reported until it was complete because of operational security concerns. The AI-controlled F-16 called Vista flew Kendall in lightning-fast maneuvers at more than 550 miles per hour that put pressure on his body at five times the force of gravity. It went nearly nose-to-nose with a second human-pilated F-16 as both aircrafts raced within a thousand feet of each other, twisting and looping to try to force their opponent into vulnerable positions. At the end of the hour-long flight, Kendall climbed out of the cockpit, grinning. He said he'd seen enough during his flight that he'd trust this still learning AI with the ability to decide whether or not to launch weapons in war.

Starting point is 00:09:50 There's a lot of opposition to that idea. Arms control experts and humanitarian groups are deeply concerned that AI one day might be able to autonomously drop bombs that kill people without further human consultation, and they are seeking greater restrictions on its use. Kendall said there will always be human oversight in the system when weapons are used. The military's shift to AI-enabled planes is driven by security, cost, and strategic. strategic capability. If the U.S. and China should end up in conflict, for example, today's Air Force fleet of expensive manned fighters will be vulnerable because of games on both sides in electronic warfare, space, and air defense systems. China's Air Force is on pace to outnumber the

Starting point is 00:10:27 U.S., and it is also amassing a fleet of flying unmanned weapons. Future war scenarios envisions swarms of American unmanned aircraft providing an advance attack on enemy defenses to give the U.S. the ability to penetrate an airspace without high risk to pilot lives. But the shift is also driven by money. The Air Force is still hampered by production delays and cost overruns in the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, which will cost an estimated $1.7 trillion, end quote. Hugging Face has launched Le Robot in open-source robotics code library after hiring former Tesla scientist Remy Kedene to lead its open-source robotics project, quoting Venture Beat. The news was notable not only because Tesla is such an established name in tech and robotics,

Starting point is 00:11:17 It's recently been pursuing the development of a humanoid robot called Optimus, but because in general, the entire field of robotics has been supercharged and radically advanced in recent months by the addition of transformer-based large language models and generative AI more broadly to subjects HuggingFace already specializes in. Now, today, we are getting our first taste of what HuggingFace's open-source robot vision looks like. The company has announced its new initiative, Le Robot, an open-source toolkit designed to democratize AI robotics and inspire a new generation. of Roboticists, available now on GitHub. The next step of AI development in its application to our physical world, posted Cadenne in a long thread of messages from his personal account on X.

Starting point is 00:11:57 Thus, we are building a community-driven effort around AI for robotics, and it's open to everyone. LaRobot serves as a robust framework akin to the Transformers for robotics. This toolkit is not just a software package, but a comprehensive platform that includes a versatile library for sharing, visualizing data, and training state-of-the-art models. Users can also access a plethora of pre-trained models to jumpstart their projects. Additionally, lay robot integrates seamlessly with physics simulators, which allows enthusiasts and developers without physical robotics hardware to simulate and test their AI models in a virtual environment. The toolkit's capabilities extend beyond just software.

Starting point is 00:12:33 It is designed to handle a range of robotics hardware from simple robotics arms utilized in education and research to the more sophisticated humanoid seen in advanced AI research facilities. The goal is to provide an AI system that can adapt and control. any form of robot, enabling both versatility and scalability in robotics applications. Kedenei posted some examples of the kind of robotic capabilities offered by the code now available in the Lab Robot Library on GitHub, including training robots to navigate unmap spaces and grasp things from video, end quote. Over the weekend, you might have seen the new music video from the artist washed out.

Starting point is 00:13:14 It's the first video created entirely using OpenAI Sora, at least by a major record label. quoting the LA Times. With Thursday's release of the hardest part, Macon Georgia-based washed out, whose real name is Ernest Green, has the first collaboration between a major music artist and filmmaker on a music video using OpenAI's SORA text-to-video technology, according to the singer-songwriter's record label sub-pop. The roughly four-minute video, directed by Paul Trillo, speedily zooms the viewer through key elements of a couple's life. The audience sees the characters, a red-haired woman and a dark-haired man, go from making out and smoking it,

Starting point is 00:13:51 in a 1980s high school to getting married and having a child. Don't you cry, it's all right now, Green croons. The hardest part is that you can't go back. The couple aren't played by real actors. They're created entirely digitally through SORA's AI. The video could mark the beginning of a potentially groundbreaking trend of using AI in video production. I think where we are now, that's about to explode. And so I look forward to being able to incorporate some of this brand new technology and seeing how that informs what I can come up with, Green said in an interview. So if that's pioneering, I would love to be part of that. The hardest part, the lead signal from Green's new self-produced album Notes from A Quiet Life, set for release on June 28, is the longest music video

Starting point is 00:14:31 made through SORA technology so far. The program creates short clips based on written text prompts. This enabled Trillo to build scenes in a way that would have been many times more expensive with actual actors, sets, and locations. Not having the limitations of budget and having to travel to different locations, I was able to explore all these different alternative outcomes of this couple's life, Trillo said, end quote. So as I said, if you're listening to me right now on the Apple Podcasts app, open up the app, look in the top right hand corner. Do you see a little pause button next to a down arrow, a pause button, you know, two parallel lines? If so, tap that to make the pause button go away. What's happened is Apple made changes to how they do auto downloads last

Starting point is 00:15:23 year and it's been terrible for daily podcasts because of the way they pause downloading new episodes after a very short period of time. If you are a podcast that only does one episode a week or a couple of month, it doesn't hurt you so much. But if you do a daily like I do and you just miss a few episodes, Apple thinks you've moved on and they stop downloading. So if you don't want to miss a single episode of the show, if you want to make sure all the episodes are waiting for you whenever you're ready to listen, make sure that pause button in the upper right-hand corner has gone away. If you don't see a pause button, you're fine. Ignore what I just said. But Apple podcast listeners make the pause button go away. Top right-hand corner will help this show

Starting point is 00:16:05 out a whole lot thanks in advance. Talk to you tomorrow for the Apple event.

Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 05/06 – AI Generated Books, Music Videos And… Fighter Pilots?

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