Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 11/18 – More Smartglasses On The Horizon

Episode Date: November 18, 2024

We have the nomination for the next FCC chair. More hype around smartglasses. About that Jake Paul/Mike Tyson fight on Netflix. Is YouTube now the king of the podcast ecosystem? And a deeper dive on how AI is giving Wall Street a brand new window into the startup ecosystem. Sponsors: ArcticWolf.com/techmeme Ramp.com/techmeme Links: Trump Designates FCC Veteran Brendan Carr as Chair of Agency (Bloomberg) Report: Samsung XR glasses have Ray-Ban Meta specs with more features, seemingly no display (9to5Google) Netflix’s Tyson-Paul Boxing Bout Gets 65 Million Viewers at Peak (Bloomberg) Why Everyone Is Now Watching Podcasts on YouTube (WSJ) Nvidia Customers Worry About Snag With New AI Chip Servers (The Information) Wall Street's Elites Are Piling Into a Massive AI Gamble (Bloomberg) 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, November 18th, 2024. I'm Brian McCullough today. We have the nomination for the next FCC chair. More hype around smart glasses. About that Jake Paul Mike Tyson fight on Netflix,

is YouTube now the king of the podcast ecosystem and a deeper dive on how AI is giving Wall Street a brand new window into the startup ecosystem. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. President-elect Donald Trump is nominating FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr as FCC. chair, quoting Bloomberg. Carr has served at the agency since 2012, including as an advisor to a later chair, Ajit Pai, and has worked as its general counsel. Trump, during his first presidency, nominated Carr to serve as a commissioner in 2017. Commissioner Carr is a warrior for free speech and has fought against the regulatory lawfare that has stifled Americans' freedoms and held back our economy, Trump said in a statement. In a statement after Trump's election victory, Harrow highlighted his

priorities saying that the agency should have, and quote, important role to play reigning in big tech, ensuring that broadcasters operate in the public interest and unleashing economic growth, end quote. He reiterated those points in a chapter for the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 manifesto seeking to influence policy in the second Trump administration. Carr recommended that the FCC limit the scope of Section 230 of the Communications Act to crack down on what conservatives perceive as big tech content moderation abuses. Carr has aligned himself publicly with Elon Musk, traveling to Texas to attend a rocket launch for SpaceX, the billionaire space exploration company. Since joining the FCC, he has also advocated for it to be,

quote, technology neutral when it allocates broadband subsidy funding, making more room for satellite providers to compete alongside wired internet providers for federal broadband dollars. In a December 2020-23 interview with the podcast this week in startups, Carr suggested that a way to get internet to areas that lack access is to subsidize the cost of Musk's satellite internet provider. You just cut everybody a coupon for $600, which is effectively the price of a Starlink dish, mail that coupon to everybody and call it a day, Carr said. Carr has also said video sharing platform TikTok owned by Chinese company ByteDance should be banned in the U.S. Trump tried to ban TikTok through an executive order during his last presidency, but has now suggested he opposes a ban, end

quote. I continue to bang the drum on this idea that smart glasses are a product category not several years out from now, but a category of right now, or next year at least, Samsung apparently plans to release its smart glasses in Q3, 2025. The glasses will be powered by Qualcomm's AR-1 chip set and use Google's Gemini to handle AI tasks, quoting 9 to 5 Google. Research coming out of China from Wellson XR reveals a few new details regarding Samsung's upcoming XR glasses. The report highlighted by at Juken-Losrev and My while business newspaper reveals that Samsung is planning an initial production run of these smart glasses that would include 500,000 units and that they'd be released in Q3 2025. That's later than

expected, but in line with what Samsung teased in October. The glasses will apparently be powered by Qualcomm's AR1 chip set, the same chip that's used in Ray Ban meta smart glasses. The generation being used is not mentioned, but Qualcomm had already released AR2 in 2022. That's not the only spec the two devices share, as the report also claims Samsung's glasses will have a 12-mixel camera and a 155-m-hour battery the same, give or take, one millanp hour, as Rayban's glasses. In terms of weight, the glasses would weigh five grams ever so slightly more than Rayban meta. One of the big questions around Samsung's XR glasses has been whether or not they'd have a display, and it seems this won't be the case based on this report to match the weight and battery size of Rayban

meta, while adding a display would be impressive to say the least. With this report revealing harbor specs, skipping all mention of a display strongly suggests this product simply won't be including one. However, we do get some indication of what these glasses will be capable of. Gemini would handle AI tasks alongside support for payment, QR code recognition, gesture recognition, and human recognition functions. It's not entirely clear what all of these features will do, but it suggests a product that's a bit more capable than meta's offerings. Meta uses AI on its glasses to leverage the camera for multimodal analysis and answers and scan QR codes, set reminders, and meta has teased translation features, end quote.

The expectation is that we could at least get another tease of these before any full launch, much like Samsung did with the Galaxy Ring. Mark your calendars, there's a Galaxy S25 launch event expected in January. Netflix says 60 million households watched the, Jake Paul versus Mike Tyson boxing bout live around the world, peaking at 65 million concurrent streams, thereby making it in all likelihood the single most watched television event of the year. Maybe the Super Bowl was technically bigger, at least domestically, and I guess it depends on how you count viewership of the Olympics.

Though maybe we should also say how many people tried to watch, as many people experienced extreme buffering and loss of audio, as Troy Coverdale joked on Blue Sky. I mean, that many people watching a spinning wheel is pretty big, end quote. Quoting Bloomberg, we crashed the site, said Paul 27, after claiming victory over the 58-year-old Tyson. This is the biggest event, end quote. Some of those viewers took to social media to vent their frustration over glitches in streaming the highly anticipated showdown. More than 100,000 users reported network issues on the down-detector website throughout the live streaming, commenting on slow buffering and network issues. Even boxer Evander Holleyfield was struggling to hear the host of the show when he was asked about his infamous fight with Tyson.

The company's biggest live-streaming event is part of its ambition to boost its fledgling advertising business. Netflix has been investing in its live-event capabilities for mega-specticals like the boxing match after earlier live-streaming missteps, such as the Love is Blind reunion debacle. The platform ran a teaser for upcoming NFL games on Christmas Day during Friday's bout, end quote. This exchange on X was interesting. This is Peter Yared, quote, I used to run tech for CBS, which included streaming the Super Bowl. Core issue for Netflix is that they operate their own CDN, content delivery network, which is not built for live. They don't have the operating capacity and vendor relationships to do large-scale live streaming. To which, Sreeny Rajah Gopal responded,

quote, There is a different take I heard from inside but cannot share. It's a forecasting issue. I'm sure they can handle bigger loads if they knew the magnitude of the traffic. To which Yared responded, well, exactly. Since they run their own CDN, that was initially built for edge caching, they have to make sure it can handle peak live load for upstream and downstream and for transcoding. They will get there, end quote. Well, I guess they have six weeks to figure that out. Don't want to piss off NFL fans for an event that is actually meaningful in a sporting sense. This isn't reflected in my audience numbers, but I can see how this is probably true nonetheless.

In a new survey, 31% of U.S. weekly podcast listeners said YouTube is their most used platform to listen to podcasts, surpassing Spotify at 27% and Apple Podcasts at 15%. Quoting the journal, because these days we don't just listen to podcasts. Now we watch podcasts. It's a profound shift that suddenly has the world's audio giants battling for supremacy in the increasingly valuable world. of video podcasts. It's becoming all about video, Daniel X, Spotify's chief executive, told my colleague Anne Steele this week. The most improbable thing about how YouTube made the podcast market all about video is how swiftly it happened. Only four years ago, when it was less popular for podcasts than both Spotify and Apple, YouTube becoming a podcasting colossus sounded about as realistic as Martin Scorsese

releasing his next movie on TikTok. With billions of users around the world, YouTube has the kind of scale that other platforms can only dream about. In fact, it recently passed. Netflix as the streamer with the most TV viewership in America, according to Nielsen Data. And the company says 150 million people in the U.S. now watch YouTube on their TVs every month, which means it has conquered the living rooms of nearly half the country. As it happens, five years ago is when YouTube began to detect that video podcasts were catching on. They really took off during the pandemic when podcasters started recording their Zoom conversations, and there was so much demand for human interaction that listeners actually watched them.

Once it had several years of data about the stickiness of video podcasts, the company owned by Google decided to pour resources into this peculiar new format. We saw this trend organically emerging, said Tim Katz, YouTube's vice president of partnerships, and then we wanted to invest in it. For users, that meant making podcasts more prominent and much easier to discover on the platform, for creators that meant rolling out podcast-specific tools and showing how they could make real money, turning their audio podcasts into videos, since YouTube pays them a share of the advertising revenue from their content, end quote.

Sources say that in recent months, Nvidia has asked its suppliers to change the design of server racks for Blackwell GPUs several times to overcome overheating problems. If Nvidia chips have some sort of capacity issues, that would be very concerning for the AI boom. Quoting the information, Nvidia already had to delay the production and delivery of the Blackwell GPUs by at least a quarter after running into design flaws in the chips. Both episodes highlight the

difficulties in its quest to meet high customer demand for its AI hardware. What makes the new server racks significant is that they combine 72 of Nvidia's AI chips an extraordinarily high number. AI developers are hoping that would allow them to train larger AI models much faster. Major customers, including Microsoft, Meta Platforms, and Elon Musk's XAI enthusiastically greeted Nvidia's announcement in March about producing a 72 chip rack. Now, though, some big customers are concerned. While Nvidia often changes its server designs before launch, changes to the Blackwell racks have come late in the production process,

according to several customers and suppliers. However, Nvidia may still be able to deliver the racks to customers by the end of the first half of next year, in line with its original schedule, and it hasn't notified customers of a delay. Some customers have received a small number of the 72 GPU servers on Sunday after the publication of this story, Dell, C.E.O. Michael Dell posted on X that his

company began shipping an undisclosed number of 72 chip racks to Corweave an Nvidia-backed cloud computing provider. Still, customers and suppliers said the overheating problem has persisted when suppliers have tried to mass-produce the racks. Two executives at large cloud providers that have ordered the new chips said they are concerned that such last-minute difficulties might push back the timeline for when they can get their GPU clusters up and running next year. The executives say they need at least several weeks to test the system and iron out possible kinks, especially given the novel design and unprecedented complexity. Some customers such as Microsoft plan to customize their blackwell racks by replacing some

components to suit their data centers, but the final design is still dependent on elements Nvidia needs to finalize according to someone who has been working on the design, end quote. But speaking of the cloud AI industrial complex, I have another story on how Wall Street specifically is preparing to cash in on the AI boom. I find this angle fascinating because over the last last 30 or 40 years, Wall Street has sort of been divorced from the tech boom in a way. Sure, when companies are preparing to go public and then do become public companies, big banks are there to help them do that and help them become big public-going concerns. But for most of the

founding and growth stage, it's VC money that does most of the financing and reaps most of the rewards. What this AI boom seems to be suggesting is that big banks can get in on the action in a big and mostly new way. Quoting Bloomberg. While much of the speculative hype around AI has played out in the stock market so far and seen in Chipmaker, NVIDIA's share price, the giddiness is spreading to

the sober suits of debt finance and private equity. Analysis by Bloomberg News estimates at least $1 trillion of spending is needed for the data centers, electricity suppliers, and communications networks that will power the attempt to deliver on AI's promise to transform everything from medicine to customer service.

Others reckon the total cost could be double that. Even Wall Street skeptics on AI's ultimate money-making potential, such as Goldman Sachs, head of Equity Research Jim Covello, have said it's worth staying invested in those who provide the plumbing. The wealth of Silicon Valley's and Seattle's tech giants, who want some of this capacity anyway for cloud storage and the like, offers a degree of comfort. Banks are racing to keep up with the burst of activity. J.P. Morgan Chase has set up a dedicated infrastructure team to corral its troops, according to a person with knowledge of the matter, as has Deutsche Bank and others.

One rival banker admits his firm is juggling so many data center deals that it doesn't have enough staff to cope with the workload. Black Rock's boss, Larry Fink, told Bloomberg TV his firm will raise as much as $120 billion in debt linked to data centers after teaming up with Microsoft to bankroll the development of the buildings and energy infrastructure. Bankers and private lenders will be desperate for a slice of such deals. Nevertheless, even amid the AI delirium, there are notes of caution. Some point out that while private equity firms have a solid pedigree in real estate, they haven't done construction work at the epic scale and expense of some of these data centers,

known as AI factories, in the lingo of Nvidia's founder and chief executive officer Jensen Huang. Innovation is constantly upending technology, adding jeopardy to long-term capital projects. And AI's acolytes still haven't dreamed up a killer app to match the widely successful e-commerce, and GPS location-based upstarts of the Web 2.0 era. Even if they do, the tech industry's brightest minds are working to make the software and hardware more efficient to lessen the need for scale and power. There's a lot of reason for optimism, said Barclay's Benjamin Fernandez, head of the bank's esoterics ABS business, which works on bonds backed by non-traditional assets such as data centers. But if for whatever reason it doesn't take hold and people don't find a way to monetize this investment in AI,

that could potentially pose risks, end quote. Nothing more for you today. Talk to you tomorrow.