Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 10/14 – Adobe Unleashes Firefly

Episode Date: October 14, 2024

Adobe unleashes its Firefly AI video model broadly. Mark Gurman lays out Apple’s headset strategy going forward. What’s been going on with the Internet Archive. What the heck IS going on with WordPress? VC deals are dropping precipitously. And a review of the Meta Quest 3S. Sponsors: WashingtonPost.com/ride Shopify.com/ride Links: Adobe’s AI video model is here, and it’s already inside Premiere Pro (The Verge) Apple Has a New Smart Home Strategy: Screens Everywhere (Bloomberg) The Internet Archive is back as a read-only service after cyberattacks (The Verge) In latest move against WP Engine, WordPress takes control of ACF plugin (TechCrunch) Venture capital deal activity is slowing down (Axios) Meta Quest 3S review: Impressive VR for $300 (Engadget) 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 TechMe, right home for Monday, October 14th, 2024. I'm Brian McCullough today. Adobe

unleashes its Firefly AI video model broadly. Mark German lays out Apple's headset strategy going forward. What's been going on with the Internet Archive? What the heck is going on with WordPress? VC deals are dropping precipitously and a review of the MetaQuest 3S. Here's a Jim S today in the world of tech. Apparently, Adobe is holding its Adobe Max event right now

because they just announced they're launching their AI video model Firefly video into public beta inside of Premiere Pro, including letting users extend footage and generate video from prompts, quoting the verge. Generative extend is launching in beta for Premiere Pro. It can be used to extend the end or beginning of footage that's slightly too short, or make adjustments mid-shot, such as to correct shifting eyelines or unexpected movement. Clips can only be extended by two seconds, so generative extend is really only suitable for small tweaks, but that could replace the need to retake footage to correct tiny issues. Extended clips can be generated at either 720p or 1080p at 24 frames per second.

It can also be used on audio to help smooth out edits, albeit with limitations. It'll extend sound effects and ambient room tone by up to 10 seconds, for example, but not spoken dialogue or music. Two other video generation tools are launching on the web. Adobe's text-to-video and image-to-video tools, first announced in September, are now rolling out as a limited public beta in the Firefly web app. Text to video functions similarly to other video generators like Runway and OpenAIsora. Users just need to plug in a text description for what they want to generate.

It can emulate a variety of styles like regular real film, 3D animation, and stop motion, and the generated clips can be further refined using a selection of camera controls that simulate things like camera angles, motion, and shooting distance. Image to video goes a step further. letting users add a reference image alongside a text prompt to provide more control over the results. Adobe suggests this could be used to make B-roll from images and photographs or help visualize reshoots by uploading a still from an existing video. The before-and-after example below shows this isn't really capable of replacing reshoots directly, however, as several errors like wobbling

cables and shifting backgrounds are visible in the results. You won't be making entire movies with this tech anytime soon either. The maximum length of text to video and image-to-video clips is currently five seconds, and the quality tops out at 720p and 24 frames per second. By comparison, Open AI says that SORA can generate videos up to a minute long, quote, while maintaining visual quality and adherence to the user's prompt, but that's not available to the public yet, despite being announced months before Adobe's tools. Text to video, image to video, and generative extend all take about 90 seconds to generate, but Adobe says it's working on a turbo mode to cut that down. And restricted as it may be, Adobe says its tools powered by its AI video model are

commercially safe because they're trained on content that the creative software giant was permitted to use. Given models from other providers like Runway are being scrutinized for allegedly being trained on thousands of scraped YouTube videos, or in Metis case, maybe even your personal videos, commercial viability could be a deal clincher for some users, end quote. By the way, they've also added AI tools to Photoshop like distraction removal and may generative fill, generative expand, and more generally available. Mark German Monday this week is all about trying to to divine what the next steps are for Apple's headset lineup. Mark says this will entail a $2,000-ish headset next year, a Vision Pro 2 in 2026, and Rayban meta-like glasses and AirPods with cameras

in 2027. I kind of think they should push those last two up as far forward in the timeline as possible, but that's just me. Quote, executives within the Vision Products Group, the team behind the $3,500 Vision Pro headset, are racing to develop. up devices with greater appeal. The Vision Pro is too heavy, too expensive, and too hot to the touch, and it seems destined to remain a niche product. Meta, meanwhile, has had success with Rayban smart classes that are less ambitious, but lighter and cheaper. That company also just unveiled a prototype for augmented reality spectacles that just might be the future of computing. As I've reported, the Vision Products Group is working on at least four new devices. I expect a lower-end vision

headset to arrive as early as next year, with a second-generation Vision Pro sporting a faster chip following in 2026. The lower-end model would cost around $2,000 and probably use an inferior processor and cheaper materials. It also would lack eyesight, a G-Wiz feature that shows a user's eyes on the outside of the headset. With the lower price, Apple is expecting unit sales of the device to be at least double the level of the Vision Pro, but that's not saying much. Into 2027, the team is considering launching smart glasses on par with the meta-ray bands, as well as AirPods with cameras. The idea is to salvage the billions of dollars spent on the Vision Pro's visual intelligence technology, which can scan the environment around a user and supply useful data. We'll get a taste of this

with an upcoming visual intelligence feature on the iPhone 16, but the plan is to bring the Vision Pro's ability to understand its surroundings to more products. The bigger problem for Apple right now is that it's not getting new technology out the door quickly enough. It's chasing a meta product with something that may not be released for several years, and it's still playing catch-up in artificial intelligence, end quote. I don't think we've talked about this much, but the Internet Archive has been having some serious issues. Internet Archive founder Brewster Kale says the service is now back online in a, quote, provisional read-only manner after a D-D-DAS attack and a data breach on October 9th.

The Verge. While you can access the Wayback Machine to search 916 billion web pages that have been archived over time, you can't currently capture an existing web page into the archive. Kale and his team have gradually been restoring archive.org services in recent days, including bringing back the team's email accounts and its crawlers for national libraries. Services have been offline so that Internet Archive staff can examine and strengthen them against future attacks. A pop-up from a purported hacker claimed the archive had suffered a catastrophic security breach last week before I have been poned, confirmed data was stolen. The theft included email addresses, screen names, hash passwords, and other internal data for

31 million unique email accounts. The Internet Archive Outage came just weeks after Google started adding links to archived websites in the Wayback Machine. Google removed its own cached pages links earlier this year, so having the Wayback Machine linked in Google search results is a useful way to access older versions of websites or archived pages, end quote. I continue not to know what to make of what is happening over in WordPress world. Matt Mullenweg now says WordPress is forking advanced custom fields, a plugin developed by WP Engine. ACF's team says the plugin was taken away without consent, quoting TechCrunch.

Malinweg wrote that this step was necessary, quote, to remove commercial upsells and fix a security problem. The Advanced Custom Fields team responded on X, describing this as a situation where a plugin under active development has been, quote, unilaterally and forcibly taken away from its creator without consent, which it said has never happened, quote, in the 21-year history of WordPress. This essential community promise has been violated, and we ask everyone to consider the ethics of such an action and the new precedent that has been set, the ACF team wrote. Both Mullenweg's blog posts and a reply from WordPress claim that similar situations have in fact happened before, Though Mullenweg added, quote, this is a rare and unusual situation brought on by WP Engine's legal attacks. We do not anticipate this happening for other plugins. They also pointed to WordPress's plugin guidelines which give WordPress the right to disable or remove any plugin,

remove developer access, or change a plugin, quote, without developer consent in the name of public safety. After recent legal back and forths, WordPress banned WP Engine from accessing WordPress.org briefly lifted the ban and then imposed it again. This essentially prevents WP Engine from updating the plugin through WordPress.org, so it can't offer automatic updates to address security issues. WP Engine has, however, published a workaround for users who want to update the plugin and continue using ACF. It says the workaround is only necessary for ACF's free users, as pro users will continue to receive updates through the ACF website. Moving forward, Mullenweg wrote that secure custom fields will be available as a non-commercial plugin, quote, If any developers want to get involved in maintaining and improving it, please get in touch, end quote.

Startup founders, I've got something for you to be aware of. VC investments were suddenly down 32% quarter over quarter last quarter. Why? Quoting Axios. Venture Capital's lack of exits is restricting new deal activity according to the latest pitchbook and VCA, a venture monitor. Distributions to limited partners in VC funds haven't been this low since the great financial crisis. crisis, sparking what pitchbook refers to as a stalemate. LPs are hesitant or unable to back new funds until the liquidity spigot loosens, thus causing venture capitalists to slow their investment pace or stop investing altogether. U.S. venture capitalists invested $37.5 billion via $2,7994 deals during Q3 20204. The deal number is 34% lower than the prior quarter and 17% below the year earlier period, and it looks even worse beneath the hood, given the plethora of Insider and Bridge rounds.

The dollar number is down 32% from Q2 despite a handful of massive AI rounds and 11.7% lower than the average dollar volume over the prior eight quarters, i.e. the post-pandemic era. The number of active investors has fallen by more than 25% year over year, and 2024 is set to be the second straight year in which VC fundraising is less than half of 2021 or 2022, end quote. Finally today, a MetaQuest 3S review. I'm going to go with Engadget this time, which lods the fast performance of the MetaQuest 3S, says it's comfortable to use, has excellent controllers, and a large app library, but the Fresno lenses lead to artifacting and the mixed reality cameras are what they call average. quote, you can think of the $300 meta Quest 3S as a basic Honda Accord of VR headsets. It doesn't have the same high-quality optics as the $500 Quest 3, which is more like a touring-grade Honda for enthusiasts, but they get you to the same place, truly immersive virtual reality. After testing the Quest 3S for the past week, I see it less as a step down and more like an upgrade over the Quest 2. Meta has a $300 VR entry that's powered by a much more powerful processor, offers better hand in

controller tracking and lets you dip your toes into mixed reality, overlaying digital objects atop a camera feed of real life. While the Quest 3S might just appear to be a less capable Quest 3, it has the potential to be one of the most significant VR products meta has made yet. As I mentioned in my initial hands-on, the Quest 3 doesn't look very different compared to the Quest 3 aside from its triangular sensor array. It still has a sturdy plastic case, a healthy dose of cushioning around your eyes, and an adjustable Y-shaped strap. You'll have a genuinely hard time telling the headsets apart while they're facing each other. I found myself peeking at their front sensors often while testing them on the same workbench. Look a bit closer, though, and you'll notice some

key differences. For one, you can see the telltale concentric circles of Fresno lenses on the Quest 3S. Meta also used them on the Quest 2, and they've historically been common among cheaper VR headsets. The Quest 3, on the other hand, uses pancake lenses, which have a smooth surface. One way Meta was able to drive down the cost of the Quest 3S was by reusing the 1830 by 1920 pixel per eye screen from the Quest 2. The Quest 3 screen offers 30% more pixels, 2264 by 2208 pixels per eye, to deliver a sharper and more realistic image. Meta added an action button for quickly swapping between mixed reality mode, which shows a camera feed of your room and a completely immersive VR view. This is something the Quest 3 doesn't have it all. Instead,

you have to tap its right front corner to jump into mixed reality. Having a dedicated button, is simply better for usability, especially for new VR users, so I don't mind that it slightly disrupts the curves of the Quest 3S's design. The first thing I noticed after dawning the Quest 3S, wow, it sure feels fast. Stepping through the headset onboarding process, downloading a few apps, and navigating around the meta-home environment was simply snappy and responsive. That's something I remembered from the Quest 3, but it feels like even more of a revelation on a $300 headset. There was none of the lag or occasional slowdowns I grew used to on the Quest 2. The actual VR experience looked detailed and immersive as well. I didn't notice the resolution

lost from the Quest 3 much, but it was easily apparent that the cheaper Fresnel lenses led to more artifacts. Edges looked a bit fuzzier. I'd occasionally see haloing around objects, and god rays from extra bright objects often appeared in games like Pistol Whip. There's no doubt the Quest 3's pancake lenses, which aren't as susceptible to the same visual issues, look far sharper. But here's the thing. I don't think the Fresno lenses will make much. much of a difference for VR newcomers. I enjoyed VR headsets for years while living with those same artifacts, and if going with cheaper lenses helped meta drive the cost of the Quest 3S down to $300, it was worth it. The biggest barrier to the world of VR isn't fidelity, it's cost.

The MetaQuest 3S is the best $300 standalone VR headset we've ever seen. It's comfortable to wear, and it delivers a snappy VR experience. It's so good you likely won't notice that it's not as sharp as the Quest 3, or that it also has more visual artifacts. When you're truly immersed in VR, those problems will fade away. The Quest 3S starts at $300 with $128 gigabytes of storage, but you can double that to 256 gigabytes with the $400 model. If you need 512 gigabytes of space, then the $500 Quest 3 is your only option. Given the optics advantage of the more expensive headset, though, the $400 Quest 3S doesn't exactly seem like a smart buy. If you need more than 128 gigabytes of storage, you're better off saving up until you can snag a

Quest 3. Meta still doesn't have much competition in the world. of inexpensive standalone VR headsets. HTC's Vive Focus3 lineup, which now includes the new Focus 3 Vision, starts at $1,000 and is geared more towards enterprises and business customers. HTC Vives' storefront also has far fewer games and apps than Metas, so their platform doesn't make much sense for average users. Alongside the company's Rayban Smart Frames, it's Orion augmented reality glasses, and the billions it's already spent on VR, meta clearly believes the future of computing rests on your face. But even light smart glasses are still glasses, something that many people avoid wearing by shoving contact lenses into their

eyeballs instead. We don't know how exactly the public will respond to true AR glasses, but really, that's a problem for the future. For now, we can just enjoy the Quest 3S for what it is, great VR at a relatively inexpensive price, end quote. Nothing more for you today. Talk to you tomorrow.