Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 07/10 – Evernote Deadpool?

Episode Date: July 10, 2023

Time to get worried about your Evernote files. Looks like Meta won’t have to leave the EU. OpenAI has a new product that people are raving about. More analysis of if AI can be useful to doctors. And I’ll tell you the one simple reason Threads has hit 100 million users so fast. The answer is right in front of us. Sponsors: startups.tech/techmeme ZocDoc.com/techmeme Links: Bay Area tech company Evernote lays off most staff, relocating to Europe (SFGate) EU Seals New Transatlantic Data-Transfer Pact With US in Third Attempt (Bloomberg) Code Interpreter comes to all ChatGPT Plus users — ‘anyone can be a data analyst now’ (VentureBeat) Sarah Silverman is suing OpenAI and Meta for copyright infringement (The Verge) In Battle With Microsoft, Google Bets on Medical AI Program to Crack Healthcare Industry (WSJ) Snap’s Push to Tempt Creators Seems to Be Working (WSJ) Instagram’s Threads app reaches 100 million users within just five days (TechCrunch) 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 Techmeme right home for Monday, July 10th, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, time to get worried about your Evernote files. Looks like meta won't have to leave the EU after all.

Open AI has a new product that people are raving about, more analysis of if AI can be useful to doctors. And I'll tell you the one simple reason threads has hit 100 million users so fast. The answer's right in front of us. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. been a while since we dipped into the Deadpool file, but sadly, it's time today. Evernote has laid off most of its remaining staff in the U.S. and Chile, and plans to relocate nearly all of its operations to Europe. Bending spoons acquired Evernote back in 2023 earlier this year, but if I were you,

I'd consider exporting any files I had on Evernote Tute Suite, quoting SFGate. The layoffs come less than six months after the company eliminated 120, workers, a decision that came as a result of the company's unprofitability, making it, quote, unsustainable in the long term, a spokesperson told TechCrunch at the time. A former darling of the productivity world, Evernote, was hit by rounds of mass layoffs in 2015 and 2018, as the company attempted to expand rapidly outside of its note-taking niche. The latter layoff round came shortly after an executive exodus, and as it floundered, buzzy upstarts like San Francisco-based Notion came into the fold while Apple and Microsoft beefed up

their in-house note-taking apps. Bending spoons announced last year, it surpassed $100 million in annual revenue. It also snagged a $340 million funding round backed by Italian banking giants and maximum effort, Ryan Reynolds's company. There are no mentions of Evernotes profit or unprofitability in the company's latest statement. A spokesperson also did not respond when asked how many workers specifically were affected by the layoffs. According to LinkedIn posts from affected workers, employees in engineering and IT were affected, end quote. Follow up to note something we spoke about that might not happen now. The EU and the U.S. have agreed to a new deal on data transfers after EU judges throughout two

previous PACs over privacy concerns, META had threatened to leave the EU due to uncertainty over this arrangement, quoting Bloomberg. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on Monday announced a deal that will allow thousands of firms to safely ship data to the U.S. without fear of violating EU privacy law, at least until it, too, is subjected to an almost inevitable challenge in the Block's top court. Monday's breakthrough is the latest round in a long-running saga that eventually saw meta-platforms and thousands of other companies plunged into a legal vacuum. In 2020, the EU's top court annulled the so-called privacy shield, the previous pact regulating

transatlantic data flows. Businesses large and small move around vast amounts of information needed for everything from sales and marketing to paywork. processing, meaning that legal barriers risk disrupting commerce between the EU and U.S. The latest EU decision follows months of negotiations with the U.S., which last year yielded an executive order by President Joe Biden and U.S. pledges to ensure that EU citizens' data is safe once it's shipped across the Atlantic. On July 3, U.S. Secretary of Commerce, Gina Riemondo, said the U.S. had now, quote, fulfilled its commitments toward the EU. The uncertainty at one point led meta, Facebook's parent company, to threaten a total withdrawal from the 27-nation

EU. In May, it was hit by a record 1.2 billion euro EU policy fine and given a deadline to stop shipping users data to the U.S. via a separate tool over the same fears that EU data wasn't safe on the U.S. side, end quote. OpenAI has released an in-house chat GPT plugin called Code Interpreter to all plus subscribers, helping them analyze data, create charts, and it files and more, quoting Venture Beat. Code interpreter, quote, let's chat GPT run code, optionally with access to files you've uploaded. An open AI spokesperson wrote on the company's continuously updated chat GPT release notes blog. You can ask chat GPT to analyze data, create charts, edit files, perform math, etc. With a wide-ranging toolbox and a large memory, the AI can write code in

Python and manipulate files up to 100 megabytes in size. Code interpreter allows chat GPT plus users to generate charts, maps, data visualizations, and graphics, analyze music playlist, create interactive HTML files, clean data sets, and extract color palettes from images. The interpreter unlocks a myriad of capabilities, making it a powerful tool for data visualization, analysis, and manipulation. Linus Bell Yunus, Europe country manager and Lithuania GM of Flutterwave, wrote a review on his LinkedIn, quote, Open AI is unlocking their most powerful features since GPT4 to everyone. Anyone can be a data analyst now.

Belli Lunas helpfully included a slideshow on his post, showing 10,000, 10 examples of new data visualization and analysis tasks he was able to produce with chat GPT using Code Interpreter, including creating an interactive HTML heatmap of UFO sightings from around the U.S. using only an unpolished dataset. Ethan Mollick, an associate professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and prominent AI influencer, wrote on his substack newsletter, one useful thing, that chat GPT with Code Interpreter is, quote, the single most useful, interesting mode of AI I have used. Mollick wrote that code interpreter, quote, makes the AI much more versatile and can provide structured data to back-up points a user might wish

to make. For example, I asked it to prove to a doubter that the Earth is round with code, and it provided multiple arguments integrating the text with code and images, he wrote, and quote. The comedian Sarah Silverman and two other authors are suing Open AI and meta, claiming Lama and ChatGPT, were trained on copyright infringing material. Quoting The Verge. comedian and author Sarah Silverman, as well as authors Christopher Golden and Richard Cadry, are suing OpenAI and Meta each in a U.S. District Court over dual claims of copyright infringement. The suits allege, among other things, that OpenAIs ChatGBT and Metazalaama were trained on illegally acquired datasets containing their works, which they say were acquired from shadow library websites

like Bibliothec, Library, Library, and others noting the books are, quote, available in bulk via torrent systems. In the OpenAI suit, the trio offers exhibits showing that when prompted, ChatGPT will summarize their books infringing on their copyrights. Silverman's Bedwetter is the first book shown being summarized by ChatGPT in the exhibits, while Golden's book Errorat is also used as an example, as is Cadre's book, Sandman Slim. The claim says the chatbot never bothered to, quote, reproduce any of the copyright management information plaintiffs included with their published works, and quote.

As for the separate lawsuits against Metup, it alleges, the author's books were accessible in datasets meta used to train its llama models, a quartet of open-source AI models the company introduced in February. The complaint lays out in steps why the plaintiffs believe the data sets have illicit origins. In a meta paper detailing Lama, the company points to sources for its training sets, one of which is called the Pile, which was assembled by a company called Eluther AI. The Pile, the complaint points out, was described in an Eluther AI paper as being put together from, quote, a copy of the contents of the Bibliotic Private Tracker. Bibliotik and other shadow libraries

listed say the lawsuits are flagrantly illegal, end quote. In both claims, the authors say that they, quote, did not consent to the use of their copyrighted books as training material for the company's AI models. Their lawsuits each contain six counts of various types of copyright violations, negligence, unjust enrichment, and unfair competition. The authors are looking for statutory damages, restitution of profits, and more, end quote. Stinging with the AI beat for a bit longer, the journal had an interesting look at Google's Med Palm 2, an AI chatbot for answering medical questions. Sources say testing of the bot began in April 2023 with the Mayo Clinic. Quote, AI algorithms are already used in hospitals for specialized tasks, such as predicting heart trouble from patient electrocardiograms.

Generative AI tools present a new set of risks because they can be used to produce authoritative sounding responses to medical questions, potentially influencing patients in ways that doctors might not endorse. Google executives said customers testing MedPalm 2 would retain control of their data in encrypted settings inaccessible to the tech company. The program wouldn't ingest any of that data. A Google spokeswoman declined to say when the program would be made more widely available to customers or the general public. Both Google and Microsoft also have expressed interests in a big ambition, building a virtual assistant that answers medical questions from patients around the world, particularly in areas with limited resources, according to company documents.

Google told employees in April that an AI model trusted as a medical assistant could, quote, be of tremendous value in countries that have more limited access to doctors, according to an internal email reviewed by the Wall Street Journal that quotes a researcher working on the project. Microsoft and OpenAI said in a paper released in March that algorithms such as GPT4, the program behind chat GPT, quote, could be harnessed to provide information, communication, screening, and decision support in underserved regions, end quote. Greg Carrado, a senior research director at Google who worked on Med Palm 2, said the company was still in the early stages of developing products using the technology and working with customers

to understand their needs. I don't feel that this kind of technology is yet at a place where I would want it in my family's health care journey, Carrotto said. However, MedPalm 2, quote, takes the places in health care where AI can be beneficial and expands them by 10fold, he said. hospitals are beginning to test OpenAIs GPT algorithms through Microsoft's cloud service in tasks such as summarizing doctors' notes or generating reminders. Microsoft hosts and controls the AI systems in those cases, a spokeswoman said. Google's MedPalm 2 and OpenAI's GPT4 each scored similarly on medical exam questions, according to independent research released by the companies. Physicians who reviewed answers provided by MedPom 2 to more than 1,000 consumer medical questions preferred the system's responses to those produced by doctors. along eight out of nine categories for evaluation defined by Google, according to research the

company made public in May. However, the doctors found Med Palm 2 included more inaccurate or irrelevant content in its responses than those of their peers, suggesting the program shares similar issues with other chatbots that have a tendency to confidently generate off-topic or false statements, end quote. Also from the journal, Signs of Progress from a Pivot, Snap's new revenue-sharing incentive, the SnapStar creator program, is apparently showing early signs of traction as part of a broader effort to reverse SNAP's declining revenue. The company behind the social media app Snapchat, which previously lost creators after

cutting a big payout program, started testing a new program last year that allows participants to earn a portion of revenue from the ads shown between their posts. The new revenue-sharing incentive in which creators who reach certain requirements are considered for SnapStar status, opened up to all eligible users in April and has several thousand creators in it. The program is part of a broader effort to reverse SNAP's declining sales. The company, led by Chief Executive Evan Spiegel, has been hurt by declining user engagement and a weakened advertising business caused in part by Apple privacy policy changes that have made it harder to track the performance of some ad campaigns. Snap's stock has fallen almost 23%

over the past year. A SNAP spokesman declined to say how much money has been doled out to creators in the program or how much of the ad revenue goes to the creator, except that it is competitive with other platforms. Similar short-form video revenue sharing programs for YouTube shorts give certain creators 45% of the revenue from ads placed between their posts. At TikTok, the share is up to 50%. Creators prefer getting a cut of ad revenue because it tends to amount to more than what they receive from programs where the platforms pay out flat fees of creator funds. The Snapstar creator program has drawn big names, including David Dobrick. who has almost 18 million subscribers on YouTube.

While creators in the program aren't prohibited from posting on other platforms, Dobrick hasn't posted a video to YouTube in more than a year. Adam Waheed, a creator with 12 million subscribers on YouTube, joined the program in February and said he now earns six figures a month posting on the platform. In the first quarter of 2023, the time users spent watching Snapchat stories from creators in the revenue share program in the U.S. More than doubled year over year, the SNAP spokeswoman said, SNAP is poised to report earnings this month, the first quarter since the incentives rolled out to all creators.

Some analysts think SNAP's moves could entice creators to post more on the platform, but are skeptical that the company's financials will fully recover in the second quarter, end quote. Finally today, Mark Zuckerberg hasn't officially confirmed it yet, at least at the time of this writing, but all signs point to Instagram threads having passed 100 million users. Took them just five days to do it. There are also signs from Cloudflare that usage numbers at Twitter are in decline all of a sudden. Look, if you had told me a week ago that this was going to happen, I wouldn't have believed you. But basically, everybody I follow to do this show is over on Threads now.

And I can definitely tell you the level of tweets I'm seeing on Twitter is down noticeably. Everyone is either cross-posting or posting exclusively to Threads right now, which is a problem for my workflow because Threads isn't on desktop yet. that. Do you want me to tell you about the tweets that Elon has been tweeting about Mark Zuckerberg over the weekend? I actually just don't feel like doing that. But look, there are three things that I think are obvious about modern life that maybe people can't see or admit to themselves because the basic facts are obscured by a lot of other complicating factors, despite the fact that these three basic facts are obvious when you think about it. Number one, all of mass media is an exercise in serving nostalgia for whatever the generation is that is at that moment in the 25 to 45-year-old age group

range always has been. Marvel movies are dominant now because kids coming up in the 90s loved comics. If you go to Disneyland, Main Street USA looks like the Meet Me in St. Louis' turn-of-the-century-town Walt Disney grew up in because he was serving nostalgia for his generation in the 1950s. In the 80s, we all got served 50s nostalgia because the baby boomers were aging. We had a period of 80s nostalgia when my generation started to age. Then we got 90s. Get ready early aughts. Your time is nigh. Because once you see this pattern, you can't unsee it. Number two, 80% of the energy and crypto has always been because of one simple thing. For 30 years, we've seen people get rich from bubble after bubble after bubble, the internet, the housing bubble,

you name it. A ton of energy in crypto is and always was people simply saying to themselves, This is my time. This is my bubble. I don't care. I'm going to get rich this time. And now, number three, if Twitter dies, it's because of Elon. I mean, that sounds obvious to say, but if he had bought Twitter and just done nothing, I don't think any of this would be happening right now. It's not just because of the dumb business moves he made. It's also because basically he's revealed himself to be such a child. The tweets at Zuck that I refuse to read to are just the latest instance of that. If Twitter dies, it's because people are tired of Elon being so frigging annoying.

I know there's lots of other factors, but that's the bottom line. You know how there are some people in your life, no matter how great they are or how brilliant, you just can't stand to be around them. People just can't stand to be around Elon's petty messes anymore. There are a bunch of other reasons for threads maybe killing Twitter, but it all boils down to, in the end, people are leaving because they're tired of Elon, pure and simple. To paraphrase Al Pacino's Ricky Roma in Glengarry, Glenn Ross, you want to learn the first rule you'd know if you ever spend a day in your life.

You never open your mouth until you know what the shot is, you child.