Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 06/03 – An AI To Game With

Episode Date: June 3, 2024

Computex brings a slew of announcements from AMD and Nvidia, including an AI bot to help you with your gaming. Another price hike from Spotify. Perplexity launches Pages. X is now officially NSFW. And a look at Sam Altman’s investment portfolio. Sponsors: WashingtonPost.com/ride MackWeldon.com code: BRIAN Links: Nvidia’s G-Assist is an AI chatbot that guides you through games and optimizes your PC (The Verge) Spotify is increasing US prices again (The Verge) Perplexity will research and write reports (The Verge) X tweaks rules to formally allow adult content (TechCrunch) The Opaque Investment Empire Making OpenAI’s Sam Altman Rich (WSJ) 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, June 3rd, 2024. I'm Brian McCullough today. Computex brings a slew of announcements from AMD and Nvidia, including an AI bot to help you with your gaming. Another price hike from Spotify. Perplexity launches pages. X is now officially NSFW and a look at Sam Altman's investment portfolio.

Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Computex is kicking off this week, so a whole bunch of announcements were made overnight into this morning. Let's hit AMD first. AMD unveiled four new Risen 9,000 series desktop CPUs set for a July 2024 release based on its new Zen 5 architecture, offering a claimed 16% more instructions per cycle. They also said their new 3-nanometer Epic Turin Data Center chips will launch in the second half of this year, based on Zen 5 architecture, and featuring up to 192 cores and 384 threads. They also announced a yearly data center GPU release cycle, starting with Instinct MI-325X, slated for later this year and meant to best Nvidia's H-200 in peak performance.

Finally, two new Risen A.I. 300 series mobile chips, the Risen A.I.9.365 and Risen A.I.9 H.X. 370, each with a 50 Tops NPU shipping in July. Then over to NVIDIA, who announced RTSX-370, each with a 50 Tops NPU shipping in July. Then over to Nvidia, who announced RTX AI PC laptops from ASIS and MSI, will have up to G-Force R-TX-4070 GPUs and systems on a chip with Windows 11 AI PC capabilities. Jensen Wong said that ASIS, Pegatron, Wistron, and others will deliver cloud on-prem embedded and edge AI systems using Nvidia Blackwell GPUs, and the company plans to upgrade its AI accelerators annually. Also a Blackwell Ultra Chip for 2025 and Blackwell's successor, Rubin, for 2026, that will use HBM4. But there was also a demo where NVIDIA showed its G-Assist AI chatbot that could guide users through PC games based on voice queries, configure optimal settings, and more. Quoting the Verge.

When NVIDIA first announced G-Assist, it was an April Fool's prank in 2017 that joked about an AI assistant, being able to help you play a game while. you ran to the door for your pizza delivery. Now seven years later, Gassist is back as a real demo of a powerful G-Force AI assistant that Nvidia might eventually bring to life for game developers and RtX GPU owners. Project G-assist is only a tech demonstration right now, but it's a brief look at how AI assistants could guide you through PC games and even configure optimal settings for you based on chat inputs in the future. In a demo, Nvidia showed G-assist responding to voice queries asking, what's the next early game weapon and where do I find the crafting materials for it inside Ark Survival Ascended? The Assistant can even understand what's happening on the screen as you

play so it can tailor itself to how many skill points you have in a game and help guide you through. Microsoft showed off a similar demo for its vision of how its co-pilot AI Assistant could guide Minecraft players through the game last month. InVVVinia's own AI Assistant can also optimize and tune PC settings, including providing charts of PC latency and frames per second over the past 60 seconds. It can scan your system and notice you're only playing at 60 hertz. When your monitor supports 240 hertz, you can also ask the assistant for recommendations to increase performance in a game, hit a 60 frames per second performance target, or even overclock your GPU, end quote. Heads up, everybody, another subscription price rise. Spotify. Plans to raise US prices premium is,

going from 1099 to 1199 per month, duo from 1499 to 1699, and the family plan from 1699 to 1999. The previous price rise was in July of just last year, quoting the verge. That means the price of a Spotify duo subscription has jumped by 30% in a year compared to prices before last year's hike. Spotify family has also increased by 25% over the course of a year, with Spotify premium up by 20%. So that we can continue to invest in and innovate on our product features and bring users the best experience, we occasionally update our prices, says Spotify in a blog post announcing the price changes. Over the next month, subscribers in the U.S. will receive an email explaining what this update means for their subscription, end quote. Spotify announced price hikes for its international

subscribers last month, so these price increases aren't just affecting U.S. subscribers. Bloomberg reported last month that Spotify also reportedly still plans to launch its soon. Super Premium plan with lossless streaming and other features. Some Spotify users have even noticed a Dolby Atmos logo on the app's now playing screen in recent months, suggesting that this could be part of the Super Premium feature set, and quote, a bit of a hint. As to why Spotify thinks it can do this now, according to Antenna, Spotify listeners are the least likely to cancel among the major video or audio streaming services in the U.S. with a monthly churn rate on Spotify of only around 2%.

AI search engine perplexity has launched pages, which will research and create a customizable web page based on user prompts aimed at educators, researchers, and others. Quoting the verge, users type out what their report is about or what they want to know in the prompt box. They can gear the writing more toward beginners, expert readers, or a more general audience. Perplexity searches for information then begins writing the page by breaking down the information into sections, citing some sources, and then adding visuals. Users can make the page as detailed or concise as they want, and they can also change the images perplexity uses. However, you can't edit the text it generates. You have to write another prompt to fix any mistakes.

I tried out pages ahead of time to see how it works. Pages is not geared toward people like me who already have an avenue to share our knowledge, but it doesn't seem geared toward researchers or teachers either. I wanted to see how it can break down complex topics and if it can help with the difficult task of presenting dense information to different audiences. Among other topics, I asked perplexities pages to generate a page on the convergence of quantum computing and artificial intelligence and its impact on society across the three audience types. The main difference between audiences seems to be the jargon in the written text and the kind of website it takes data from. Each generated report pulls from different sources, including introductory blog posts like this one

from IBM. It also cited Wikipedia, which drove the student report vibe home. The perplexity-generated page did a passable job of explaining the basics of quantum computing and how AI fits into the technology, but the research didn't go as deep as I could have if I were writing the presentation myself. The more advanced version didn't even really talk about the convergence of quantum computing and AI at all. It found blog posts talking about quantum inflection points, which is when quantum technologies become more commercially viable and is not at all related to what I asked it to write about. Then I asked pages to write a report about myself, mainly because the information there is easily verifiable. But it only took information from my personal website and an article about me on my

high school's website, not from other public easily accessible sources like my author page on the verge. It also sometimes elaborated on things that had nothing to do with me. For example, I began my journalism career during the 2008 financial crisis, instead of talking about the pieces I wrote about mass layoffs, perplexity explained the beginnings of the financial crisis. Pages does the surface level Googling and writing for you, but it isn't research. Perplexity claims that pages will help educators develop comprehensive study guides for students and researchers to create detailed reports on their findings. I could not upload a research paper for it to summarize, and I couldn't edit the text

it generated. Two things I believe users who want to make the most of pages would appreciate. I do see one potential user for pages, and it isn't one perplexity called out. students rushing to put out an assignment. Pages may improve in the future, but right now it's a way to get easy, possibly correct surface-level information into a presentation that doesn't really teach anything, end quote. X has officially changed its adult content policies, formally letting users post consensual, not safe for work, and AI content, provided it is properly labeled and, quote, not prominently

displayed. Quoting TechCrunch. The company's reasoning for a allowing graphic content is to let people participate in conversations about what is happening around them and include images and videos. The social network allows users to mark their posts as containing sensitive media and doesn't allow users under 18 or those who haven't entered their birth dates on their profile to see such posts. X has never really banned porn, but these clauses could let it build services around adult content, think creating an only fan's competitor to bolster its revenues. About 13% of posts on the platform in 2022 contained adult content, according to a Reuters report in 2022 that cited internal company documents. Adult content on X has seemingly gone up since then,

especially as porn bots have proliferated on the platform, end quote. Finally today, over the weekend, the Welshie Journal had a piece up that pulled from source quotes and filings to detail Sam Altman's investment portfolio. Altman and his venture funds have invested. invested in over 400 companies, and his holdings are worth more than $2.8 billion, according to this piece. And here's the thing. There is a reason that executives at major companies typically don't do things like this. Quote, a growing number of Altman's startups do business with OpenAI itself, either as customers or major business partners. The arrangement puts Altman on both sides of deals, creating a mounting list of potential conflicts in which he could personally benefit

from OpenAI's work. For example, Open AI is in talks. for a deal with Helion, a nuclear energy startup that is chaired by Altman in which it would buy vast quantities of electricity to provide power for data centers. The 11-year-old company is planning to build nuclear fusion power plants, a technology that doesn't exist yet in usable form. Altman invested $375 million in Helion in 2021, his largest startup check ever written. The startup signed on Microsoft, its first customer, and Open AI's largest investor last year. Altman has recused himself from the deal talks between OpenAI and Helion, which haven't been previously reported. Last month, OpenAI announced a partnership with Reddit in which it would pay to bring the messaging

site's content to ChatGPT and other AI products. Altman and entities he controls own 7.6% of Reddit, making him the third largest outside shareholder, and he briefly served as its CEO in 2014. Reddit stock shot up 10% after the announcement, boosting Altman's stake by $69,000 to $754 million. Altman didn't lead the partnership talks, OpenAI said in a blog post. Altman's more recent investments have focused on companies that aim to capitalize on the artificial intelligence boom being driven by OpenAI. Apex Security in which Altman invested in undisclosed amount last summer aims to sell cybersecurity software to companies using AI products such as ChatGPT.

He also invested in undisclosed amount in ExoWAT, a startup tackling the clean energy needs of big data centers used by AI companies. Public company boards typically bar executives from taking large stakes and outside ventures. The worry is that executives will follow incentives and strike deals or favor partnerships that help the companies they own. Even if a CEO recuses him or herself, staff is put in the awkward position of negotiating against their boss's personal financial interests. Altman began startup investing while running looped the social networking startup he founded shortly before dropping out of Stanford University in 2005. While Altman didn't have deep sources of cash, he got access to up-and-coming startups thanks to his mentor, Paul Graham, the co-founder of the influential venture firm Y Combinator, which had invested in Looped.

Altman had luck with his second ever startup investment. In 2009, Graham introduced him to John and Patrick Collison, two young Irish entrepreneurs who were dreaming up a new payments processing startup called Stripe. Altman invested $15,000 for 2% of the company. Stripe is now the third most valuable U.S. startup outside-season. SpaceX and OpenAI with a valuation of $65 billion. Altman's stake, which is now smaller than 2%, marks his most successful investment to date. Last year, Stripe also announced a deal to help commercialize OpenAI's technology. In 2012, Altman sold Loop and used the small profits to help raise his first venture fund

named Hydrazine after the chemical used for rocket fuel. Hydrazine's largest outside investor was the billionaire PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, another early mentor of Altman's. In 2014, Altman became president of Wycombinator. By then, he had already invested in 40 companies, he wrote in a blog post, adding that five of them increased in value by a hundred times or more. Altman continued to run Hydrazine, even while running Wycombinator, an unconventional setup in Silicon Valley, where venture fund leaders are typically barred from managing their own venture funds in order to stay focused on making money for their firms. Hydrazine bought out a portion of startup shares owned by Graham, a transaction that gave Altman stakes in some of the hottest companies backed by Y Combinator. The sale hasn't previously been reported. In September 2014, Hydrazine also made a $28 million investment into Reddit.

The messaging board site Altman had grown obsessed with ever since meeting the company's founders in 2005 through Wycombinator. Altman assembled the rest of the funding round, bringing in investors ranging from Teal and the rapper Snoop Dog to the venture firm, Andreson Horowitz. Altman joined Reddit's board of directors and helped appoint its current chief executive Steve Huffman the following year. Altman built his position over the years through various funds and holding companies, giving him a stake worth. $413 million when the startup went public in March. Reddit announced in January 22 that Altman had recently stepped down from the board. Altman's arrangement, where much of his wealth is tied up in outside ventures but not OpenAI, pushes the boundaries of traditional corporate governance, according to tech lawyers and venture capitalists. Most startup founders have their wealth tied into

their companies, fueling motivation to make their companies succeed. Few are ever in a position where they stand to make more money by benefiting the business on the other side of the table. Beyond Helion, Altman has steered OpenAI's business to at least one other startup he backed. In 2019, OpenAI signed a letter of intent to buy $51 million worth of AI chips from Rain AI, a startup he backed the prior year. Wired earlier reported on the deal. Is he going to have OpenAIA acquire these companies at big prices? Is he going to leverage OpenAI resources to help his other companies? That's what you kind of really worry about, especially if he owns zero of Open AI, said

Louis LeHott, a partner at the law firm Folli Ann Lardner, where he advises startups on corporate governance. While not publicly addressing questions about his own outside interests, Altman discussed the issue of conflicts in a November post on X shortly after he was restored as CEO as it related to Adam DeAngelo and his efforts developing Poe. We expect that if OpenAI is as successful as we hope, it will touch many parts of the economy and have complex relationships with many other entities in the world, resulting in various potential conflicts of interest, Altman said. The way we plan to deal with this is with full disclosure and leaving decisions about how to manage situations like these up to the board, end quote. So I had long suspected that Archie, the podcast Beagle, was messing with my computer, but now I have proof.

Archie is usually up here in the office with me all day, and this morning, when I went downstairs to get coffee, when I got back, music was playing. Confirmation that Archie has gotten up on my desk and had mashed some keys. on the keyboard, while trying to get some pens so that he could chew them up, probably. Somehow, he hit the play button, the F-8 key on my Mac keyboard, which started up Apple Music. My wife is like, you're assuming he did that incidentally, but how do you know he didn't just feel like listening to some tunes, which, okay, fair enough. If that is the case, then this was the message that I guess Archie wanted me to relay to you. Quote,

L-0-909-0-0-0-0-0-Equal sign. Talk to you tomorrow.