Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 06/17 – Thinner And Lighter It Is

Episode Date: June 17, 2024

Mark Gurman says Apple is going to go all in on making the thinnest and lightest devices in the industry. Though the Apple Watch is probably going to get a bigger screen. McDonalds pumps the breaks on AI in the drive through. And two contradictory anecdotal stories about what happens when AI comes for your job. Sponsors: ArcticWolf.com/techmeme Miro.com Links: Apple’s Slow Rollout of Intelligence Features Will Stretch Into 2025 (Bloomberg) Kuo: Apple Watch Series 10 to Get Larger Screen and Thinner Design (MacRumors) Privacy app maker Proton transitions to non-profit foundation structure (TechCrunch) McDonald's is ending its drive-thru AI test (Restaurant Business Online) AI took their jobs. Now they get paid to make it sound human (BBC) AI in finance is like ‘moving from typewriters to word processors’ (Financial Times) 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 from Monday, June 17th, 2024. I'm Brian McCullough today. Mark German says Apple is going to go all in on making the thinest and lightest devices in the industry, though the Apple Watch is probably going to get a bigger screen. McDonald's pumps the brakes on AI in the

drive-thru and two contradictory anecdotal stories about what happens when AI comes for your job. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Well, I guess Tim Apple didn't listen to my rant recently about making devices thicker in order to make their batteries last longer. This is quoting Mark German in his newsletter from this weekend. Over the past several years, Apple appeared to be shifting away from making devices as thin and light as possible. The MacBook Pro got thicker to accommodate bigger batteries, more powerful processors, and more ports. The Apple Watch got a heftier option as well, an ultra-model with more features and a longer life. And the iPhone was fattened up a bit too, making room for better cameras

and more battery power. When Apple unveiled the new iPad Pro in May, it marked a return to form. The company rolled out a super-thin tablet with the same battery life as prior models, an impressive screen, and an M-4 chip that made it as powerful as a desktop computer. In other words, Apple has figured out how to make its devices thinner again while still adding major new features. And I expect this approach to filter down to other devices over the next couple of years. I'm told that Apple is now focused on developing a significantly skinnier phone in time for the iPhone 17 line in 2025. It's also working to make the MacBook Pro and Apple Watch thinner. The plan is for the latest iPad Pro to be the beginning of a new class of Apple devices

that should be the thinnest and lightest products in their categories across the whole tech industry, end quote. On that Apple Watch point, what if they do go thinner but also bigger? According to Ming Chi Quo, the Apple Watch series 10 will be thinner, but at the same time, its screen will grow from 41 millimeters to 45 and 45 millimeters to 49. Apple will also use 3D printing to make more components. Quoting Mac Rumors. In his latest industry note shared on Medium Quo said, the screen size options on the next generation Apple Watch will increase from 41 to 45 millimeters

and from 45 to 49 millimeters, while being encased in a thinner design. For reference, the Apple Watch Ultra has a 49-millimeter case. As for Apple Watch Ultra, Quo says, it will remain, quote, roughly the same this year, although if production yields meet expectations, a new dark-black case option could be made available. Apple will also start using 3D printing technology to manufacture Apple Watch components later this year

following extensive testing, which has significantly improved the production efficiency. Quo said, BLT will be able to be. be the supplier of 3D printed components. Bloomberg previously reported that the 2024 Apple Watch could be labeled the Apple Watch 10 to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Apple Watch, but Quo made no mention of this possibility in his latest note. Bloomberg also said that Apple is considering a magnetic band attachment system that will allow the design to be made thinner, but it is unclear whether the system will be ready or present on the 2024 Apple Watch, end quote. Swiss privacy-focused app developer Proton has established

the Proton Foundation to transition to a nonprofit foundation model, similar to how Signal and Mozilla do it. Quoting TechCrunch. This, according to CEO Andy Yen, is designed to make the organization self-sustainable without having to rely on donations, grants, or commercial tie-ups with corporations. Indeed, while the likes of Signal has relied on the backing of billionaires, such as WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton and Mozilla leans heavily on search revenue from Google, Yen says that the Proton Foundation wants to set itself apart by retaining a profitable and healthy business at its core. So basically, it wants to operate as though it's a bona fide profit-making business, without having to convince the world that its privacy promise plays second fiddle to external realities.

This change in governments does not signal a shift in how our core businesses are run. Yen wrote in a blog post announcing the change today, Proton is not profit-driven, but we still must retain profitability as a core objective because a cornerstone of safeguarding Proton's mission is independence through self-sustainability, end quote. Proton's move signals the inherent challenges of building a business around privacy, particularly where external funding has been raised and investors seek a return. Proton, for its part, has always positioned itself as independent, both from an ownership perspective with no VC investors and from a technological perspective, as it sidesteps the usual public cloud providers to operate its own servers and network equipment. By shifting to a model where it operates as a for-profit under a not-for-profit foundation, the company is trying to forge a path that keeps privacy as a central tenant,

while retaining some of the advantages proffered by private companies. This includes being able to offer stock options to, quote, attract and incentivize the best talent in tech, according to Yan, who added that the setup would still allow the company to go public in the future if it needed to do so. Founded out of Geneva, Switzerland in 2014, Proton is best known for its encrypted email service proton mail, but the company has expanded into all manner of privacy-focused products, including a VPN, password manager, calendar, and cloud storage. While most of these services have free versions available, the company offers subscriptions to unlock additional features,

including bundles that make all the products available for a monthly fee. Shortly after launch in 2014, the company set up a crowdfunding campaign, which went on to raise around $500,000, before going on to raise an additional $2 million from Silicon Valley VC firm Charles River Ventures, and the Swiss not-for-profit body Foundation Genovese for La Innovation Technologic. Today, Proton says it no longer has any venture capital investors as shareholders with CRV selling its stake to Fognit in 2021. Yen, fellow co-founder Jason Stockman and the company's director of engineering and first employee, Jing Chao Liu, have donated some shares to the foundation, thus making it the primary shareholder.

However, it's not clear how much of a stake it owns or who, who else retains a shareholding in the company. TechCrunch has reached out to Proton for clarification here. Both Yan and Liu will serve on the Foundation's board of trustees alongside the inventor of the web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Professor Carissa Valleys, Professor of Ethics at the Institute for Ethics in AI at the University of Oxford, and Antonio Gambardella, director at Fognit. As the primary shareholder, the Proton Foundation, has the greatest voting clout with the Board of Trustees obligated to protect the Foundation's founding mission. end quote. From my new file of AI stuff not quite working out how people thought, or at least as quickly as people thought, one of the first things people thought about after chat GPT came out

was imagine the transformation of customer service with tech like this. Who needs call centers when you can have conversational bots? And even easier than that, who needs workers wearing headsets at the drive-thru window in fast food? Because after all, people at a fast food window are ordering from a menu. There's a constrained number of interactions that you can have there. Should be perfect for a chatbot. Well, McDonald's has ended its two-year IBM partnership to test automated drive-thru order-taking and plans to remove the tech from more than 100 restaurants by July 26, quoting Restaurant Business Online. The Chicago-based fast food giant is ending this test without any sort of expansion, according to an email sent to franchisees on

Thursday. Restaurant business has obtained a copy of that email. But the company did not dismiss the prospect of Drive-Thru AI, suggesting that McDonald's plans to find a new partner for its automated order-taking efforts. While there have been successes to date, we feel there is an opportunity to explore voice-ordering solutions more broadly. Mason Smoot, Chief Restaurant Officer for McDonald's USA, said in the system message. After a thoughtful review, McDonald's has decided to end our current partnership with IBM on AOT, and the technology will be shut off in all restaurants currently testing it no later than July 26, 2024, end quote. Smooth said the company will continue to evaluate its plans to make, quote, an informed

decision on a future voice ordering solution by the end of the year. McDonald's has been testing drive-thru voice AI since 2021. That test followed the company's sale of its McDie tech labs to IBM that year. In a statement to restaurant business, McDonald's said the goal of the test was to determine if automated voice ordering could speed service and simplify operations. The company emphasized both in its statement and in the message to operators that IBM remains, quote, a trusted partner, and we will still utilize many of their products across our global system.

McDonald's has taken a deliberative approach on drive-through AI, even as many other restaurant chains have jumped fully on board. Checkers and rallies, Hardys, Carl's Jr., Crystal, Wendy's, Duncan, and Taco Johns Johns are either testing or have implemented the technology in its drive-thru, True's. Still, McDonald's comments on the future of voice-activated AI suggests that the company saw enough in its prospects to move forward, albeit with another vendor. IBM has given us confidence that a voice-ordering solution for drive-thru will be part of our restaurant's future, and we want to sincerely thank IBM and the restaurant teams that have been part of this crucial test,

Smoot said in the message, end quote. Actually, let's do two pieces now that are coming at the AI question from slightly different angles and possibly with somewhat contradictory conclusions and anecdotes. First up from the BBC copywriting professionals have detailed how AI is changing their jobs already, with some seeing a new line of work to make AI-generated texts sound more human, but, which they at least are seeing so far as a job that pays a lot less. Quote, writer Benjamin Miller, not his real name, was thriving in early 2023. He led a team of more than 60 writers and editors publishing blog posts and articles to promote a tech company that packages and resells data on everything from real estate to use cars.

It was really engaging work, Miller says, a chance to flexes creativity and collaborate with experts on a variety of subjects. But one day, Miller's manager told him about a new project. They wanted to use AI to cut down on costs, he says. Miller signed a non-disclosure agreement and asked the BBC to withhold his and the company's name. A month later, the business introduced an automated system. Miller's manager would plug a headline for an article into an online form,

an AI model would generate an outline based on that title, and Miller would, would get an alert on his computer. Instead of coming up with their own ideas, his writers would create articles around those outlines, and Miller would do a final edit before the stories were published. Miller only had a few months to adapt before he got news of a second layer of automation. Going forward, ChatGPT would write the articles in their entirety, and most of his team was fired. The few people remaining were left with an even less creative task editing ChatGPT's subpar text to make it sound more human. By 2024, the company laid off the rest of Miller's team and he was alone. All of the sudden, I was just doing everyone's job, Miller says. Every day he'd open the AI written documents to fix the robots

formulate mistakes, churning out the work that used to employ dozens of people. We're adding the human touch, but that often requires a deep developmental edit on a piece of writing, says Katrina Coart, a copywriter based in Lexington, Kentucky, who's done work editing AI text. The grammar and word choice just sound weird. You're always cutting out flower. words like therefore and nevertheless that don't fit in casual writing. Plus, you have to fact-check the whole thing because AI just makes things up, which takes forever because it's not just big ideas. AI hallucinates these flippant little things in throwaway lines that you'd never notice, end quote. Coort says the AI humanizing often takes longer than writing a piece from scratch,

but the pay is worse. On the job platforms where you find this work, it usually maxes out at around 10 cents a word, but that's when you're writing. This is considered an editing job, so typically you're only getting one to five cents a word, she says. It's tedious, horrible work, and they pay you next to nothing for it, Covert says. The American Writers and Artists Institute, AWA, an organization that offers training and resources for freelance writers, hosts a variety of courses own artificial intelligence for its members. AWAI President Rebecca Matter says AI classes are now the Institute's most popular offering by far. It's an incredible tool, Matter says. For people who make copywriting a career, the risk isn't AI taking their jobs. It's that they have to adapt. That can be

uncomfortable, but I think it's a huge opportunity, end quote. Matter says the transition to the AI world has been smooth for most of the writers she knows. In fact, it's become such an inherent part of the copywriting process that many writers now add personal AI policies to their professional websites to explain how they use the technology. Rebecca Dugas, a copywriter, with nine years of experience, says AI has been a godsend that lets her turn out the same high-quality work in a fraction of the time. I use AI whenever my clients are comfortable with it, she says, whether it's brainstorming, market research, reworking paragraphs when I'm banging my head against the wall, it's been an incredible co-creative partner, end quote.

Meanwhile, experts say generative AI is set to make certain skills and finance and accounting redundant in order to free up time for workers to focus on more value-added tasks. Quoting the FT. Simon Stevens, AI lead for audit and assurance at Deloitte UK, says one way it will help is by automating large portions of manual data entry, saving time while allowing people to focus on more value added and often more interesting tasks. He suggests junior staff could engage in more complex discerning work earlier in their careers. In response to these changes, financial training programs are evolving to place a much sharper emphasis on AI. David Schreier, professor of practice in AI. and innovation at London's Imperial College Business School, observes, quote, We absolutely need finance education to produce students who are fit for purpose in this new world. HEC Paris, for instance, already trained students to use generative AI for financial data analysis. Soon it will be used for decision-making, too. It is about readying them for the possibility that Gen.

I will replace spreadsheets, notes Everin Orr's academic director of HEC's Master in International Finance Program. Similarly, Cambridge Judge Business School in the UK, has introduced technical courses and recruited specialists, practitioners for its Master of Finance degree aimed at professionals with work experience. Marwa Hammond, a co-director of the program, notes that all students now cover the foundational concepts of machine learning and its practical applications in trading, asset management, accounting, and auditing. Beyond technical capabilities, such as data analysis, however, soft skills such as critical thinking, leadership, and networking

are increasingly important for finance professionals, experts say. director of the banking and international finance MSC at Bayes Business School in London, stresses the enduring relevance of interpersonal skills in a more automated sector. While automation has improved efficiency, it has sometimes sacrificed client relationships, she says, AI could restore the importance of those relationships, end quote. I did want to make note of the fact that the information was reporting over the weekend that Sam Altman has told some investors that he wants to move Open AI to a for-profit entity, But that was only one brief paragraph of a story that sort of regurgitated a lot of things we already know.

So I decided to wait for this to actually happen to do a segment on it, but I'm telling you about it now, so you'll have been forewarned if it does come to pass. Talk to you tomorrow.