Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 11/27 – ByteDance Retrenches

Starting point is 00:00:00 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, November 27th, 2023. I'm Brian McCalla today. A thin client from AWS, more bad news for gaming as BightDance pulls back from its gaming ambitions in a major way. Governments have more new joint guidelines for AI development, and Amazon now delivers more

Starting point is 00:00:51 packages than either FedEx or UPS. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. AWS Reinvent is happening sometime today. And ahead of that, AWS announced the Amazon Workspaces Thin client, a $195 compact computer adapted from the Fire TV cube, to let workers access cloud-based virtual desktops, quoting Silicon Angle. A virtual desktop is a workstation hosted in a data center rather than the user's office. Workers use such machines in much the same way as a standard personal computer, except they log into the machines remotely over the network. At many enterprises, employees access their virtual desktops from a thin client, a low-cost computer specifically optimized for accessing cloud-based services. The newly debuted Workspaces

Starting point is 00:01:45 Thin client is AWS's entry into the thin client market. It's a compact rectangular device that workers can use to log into virtual desktops hosted on the Cloud Giant's Amazon Workspaces service. Amazon Workspaces Web, a version of the offering that enables users to access virtual desktops from a browser, is supported as well. The third cloud service with which AWS's new thin client integrates is Amazon Appstream. It targets similar use cases as Workspaces, but diverges in the feature department. Companies can use Appstream to host virtual desktops, which typically contain multiple applications as well as to make individual business applications available to employees from the cloud. The Workspace's Thin Client is based on

Starting point is 00:02:31 AWS parent Amazon.com's Fire TV Cube, a streaming device originally designed for the consumer market, When attached to a TV, the device enables users to stream content from services such as Prime Video and Netflix. It can optionally double as a smart home management system. Under the hood, the FireTV Cube features an 8-core processor with a top speed of 2.2 gigahertz. The chip is supported by 2 gigabytes of memory and a 16-gabyte storage drive. USB and HDMI ports enable users to connect the device to home entertainment gear. The Workspaces Thin client features identical hardware specifications as the Fire TV Cube, but an entirely different software stack. According to AWS, the device ships with an operating system, firmware, and programs specifically developed for virtual desktop use cases. The onboard software is configured not to store files from a worker's virtual desktop locally, which means there's no risk of data theft if a Workspaces Thin client is misplaced.

Starting point is 00:03:31 The Cloud Giant has also repurposed the Fire TV cubes on-board USB and HDMI ports. Instead of connecting the device to a TV, workspaces-thin client users can use those ports to attach a mouse and a keyboard. That enables workers to use the device like a regular desktop. Organizations can manage their employees' workspaces, thin clients, using the AWS Management Console. According to the Cloud Giant, the console provides controls for regulating which user may access what application and how. A complementary monitoring tool enables administrators to track which devices are actively used, as well as check if they're running the latest available software or require patching, end quote. This is strategically interesting. Salesforce apparently plans to sell most of its big apps on AWS's marketplace. Quoting Bloomberg, Salesforce customers will be able to pay using credits on AWS Marketplace, Salesforce Executive Vice President Patrick Stokes said in an interview,

Starting point is 00:04:35 The agreement will also make it easier for customers to integrate AWS data into Salesforce products and use generative AI tools more effectively, he said. Listing on AWS Marketplace furthers Salesforce's goal of generating more sales that don't require the help of sales representatives to cut down on labor costs. We need to be doing more of that, Brian Millam, the company's chief operating officer, said in a September interview when asked about his plans to reduce expenses. Stokes said Salesforce is looking at more channel sales. opportunities, and could explore similar partnerships with other major cloud platforms like Microsoft

Starting point is 00:05:09 or Alphabet's Google. Amazon, which takes a cut of revenue made through the marketplace, has for years nudged its cloud customers to list their products on the platform. We had a lot of support from AWS to really go make this happen, Stokes said, noting that Salesforce uses AWS for the majority of its own cloud computing needs. There are incentives for those who use the AWS marketplace, a company that signs a multi-year agreement with AWS, for example, may qualify for discounts on AWS products if they commit to spending a minimum amount of money. The company's purchases on AWS Marketplace would count toward that minimum spend, end quote.

Starting point is 00:05:52 And this is an interesting pullback strategically, but it's also interesting on that macro level of games are really having a rough moment. Bite Dance reportedly plans to restructure its entire gaming business. Sources say BiteDance will wind down its Niverse gaming brand and Retrored. treat from mainstream video games as a part of that. Bite Dance plans to cut around a thousand jobs and discontinue all but a few games that have yet to launch, backing away from its aggressive investments in gaming it's made since 2016. Quoting Niki Asia, Bight Dance thinks the gaming division lacks focus and has limited prospects for monetization of

Starting point is 00:06:32 titles, preferring to focus instead on its core business of short video platform TikTok, Chinese sister app Doyen, and e-commerce, the person said. The TikTok operator has invested aggressively in gaming since 2016 to challenge compatriot Tencent Holdings, the world's biggest game company by revenue. Between 2019 and 2022, BightDance invested in more than 19 gaming companies with around $30 billion or $4.2 billion at current rates, Chinese state media reports. But amid a disappointing performance, BightDance started making substantial cuts in its gaming operations in the second half of 2021. Last year, numerous jobs were cut at Newverse, the brand BightDance

Starting point is 00:07:12 created in 2019 to push into global gaming. The company also disbanded one of its main game studios due to its disappointing performance last year. BightDance this month laid off 23% of the workforce or about 300 employees in virtual reality arm Pico as it struggles with sales at home and abroad. The shift away from video games comes as China's gaming sector struggles to recover amid the global economic downturn. Rival Tencent has managed to maintain growth due to its strong portfolio. While scaling back investment in gaming, BytDance has followed other big Chinese tech companies in increasing exploration of generative AI. Compared with rivals, ByteDance has been slow in releasing its own large language models, the technology that underpins generative AI technology like OpenAIs chat GPT,

Starting point is 00:07:57 but the company's AI division called Flow has intensified development of applications to embed in ByteDance products. BightDance quietly launched, AI bought Dow Bao in August and added an AI assistant to its office tool, Faisu, this month, joining the competition for workplace chatbots alongside Tencent and Alibaba Group Holding, end quote. And quoting from Reuters, BightDance's 2019 creation of Newverse was widely seen as a major push into global gaming and a strategic element of its competition with domestic rival Tencent, the world's biggest gaming company. But Newverse's performance has been patchy.

Starting point is 00:08:33 Its best-known game is Marvel Snap, an online card game that amassed a cult following but was not a commercial hit, end quote. The U.S., the U.K., and more than a dozen other countries have released new joint guidelines for AI system development, including creating systems that are, quote, secure by design. Quoting, the agreement is non-binding and carries mostly general recommendations such as monitoring AI systems for abuse, protecting data from tampering, and vetting software suppliers. Still, the director of the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, Jen Easterly, said it was important that so many countries put their names to the idea that AI systems needed to put safety first, end quote. 18 countries, including the United States, Britain, Germany, Italy, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Poland, Australia, Chile, Israel, Nigeria, and Singapore have signed the new

Starting point is 00:09:30 agreement. It focuses on addressing the security aspects of AI with recommendations emphasizing the need for security testing before releasing AI models to prevent. them from being exploited by hackers. However, it does not address broader issues such as ethical AI use or data collection practices. AI's increasing impact on industry and society has raised concerns, including its potential to disrupt democracy, facilitate fraud, and lead to job loss. Europe is ahead of the United States and AI regulation, with lawmakers in various European countries working on AI rules. France, Germany, and Italy have also reached an agreement on regulating AI advocating for, quote, mandatory self-regulation through codes of

Starting point is 00:10:08 conduct for foundational AI models. In the United States, the Biden administration has pushed for AI regulation to mitigate risks to consumers, workers, and minority groups while also bolstering national security through an executive order. However, progress on AI regulation in the polarized U.S. Congress has been limited. The new international agreement represents another effort among nations to address AI-related challenges, particularly in terms of security, but leaves more complex AI governance issues for future consideration. According to the journal, Instagram has been serving salacious reels, including risque videos next to big brand ads to test accounts that follow only young gymnasts, cheerleaders, and influencers.

Starting point is 00:10:54 Quote, the journal sought to determine what Instagram's Reel's algorithm would recommend to test accounts set up to follow only young gymnasts, cheerleaders, and other teen and preteen influencers active on the platform. Instagram's system served jarring doses of salacious content to those test accounts, including risque footage of children, as well as overtly sexual adult videos and ads for some of the biggest U.S. brands. The journal set up the test accounts after observing that the thousands of followers of such young people's accounts often include large numbers of adult men, and that many of the accounts who followed those children also had demonstrated interest in sex content

Starting point is 00:11:31 related to both children and adults. The journal also tested what the algorithm would recommend after its accounts followed some of those users as well, which produced more disturbing content interspersed with ads. In a stream of videos recommended by Instagram, an ad for the dating app Bumble appeared between a video of someone stroking the face of a life-size latex doll, and a video of a young girl with a digitally obscured face lifting up her shirt to expose her midriff. In another, a Pizza Hut commercial followed a video of a man lying on a bed with his arm around what the caption said was a 10-year-old girl. Meta said the journal's test, produced a manufactured experience that doesn't represent what billions of users see. The company declined

Starting point is 00:12:11 to comment on why the algorithm's compiled streams of separate videos showing children, sex and advertisements, but a spokesperson said that in October it introduced new brand safety tools that give advertisers greater control over where their ads appear, and that Instagram either removes or reduces the prominence of four million videos suspected of violating its standards each month. The journal reported in June that algorithms run by meta, which owns both Facebook and Instagram, connect large communities of users interested in pedophilic content. The meta spokesman said a task force set up after the journal's article has expanded its automated systems for detecting users who behave suspiciously, taking down tens of thousands

Starting point is 00:12:48 of such accounts each month. The company also is participating in a new industry coalition to share signs of potential child exploitation. Companies whose ads appeared beside inappropriate content in the journal's tests include Disney, Walmart, online dating company match group, Hymns, which sells erectile dysfunction drugs, and the Wall Street Journal itself. Most brand name retailers require that their advertising not run next to sexual or explicit content, end quote. Finally today, also from the journal, Amazon data, and also info from sources, suggests that Amazon shipped 5.2 billion packages in the

Starting point is 00:13:29 US in 2022, more than UPS, which is notable after it passed FedEx in terms. of packages shipped back in 2020. Amazon delivered 4.8 billion items ahead of Thanksgiving. Quote, the Seattle e-commerce giant delivered more packages to U.S. homes in 2022 than UPS after eclipsing FedEx in 2020, and it is on track to widen the gap this year, according to internal Amazon data and people familiar with the matter. The U.S. Postal Service is still the biggest parcel service by volume. It handles hundreds of millions of packages for all three companies. A decade ago, Amazon was a major customer for UPS and FedEx, and some executives from the incumbents and analysts mocked the notion that it could someday supplant them. Amazon's outsized

Starting point is 00:14:15 growth combined with strategy shifts at FedEx and UPS have changed the balance. Before Thanksgiving this year, Amazon had already delivered more than 4.8 billion packages in the U.S. and its internal projections predict that it will deliver around 5.9 billion by the end of the year, according to documents viewed by the journal. Last year, Amazon shipped five by 0.2 billion packages. As Amazon's share of deliveries has increased, FedEx and UPS have said in recent years they weren't in a race for volume and were instead focused on delivering more profitable parcels. FedEx parted ways with Amazon in 2019. Amazon accounts for about 11% of UPS's revenue. Overall parcel volume has dipped this year as consumers cut back on spending on goods and

Starting point is 00:14:55 diverted their expenditure to services, travel, and entertainment. Amazon's rise to the top carrier was once viewed as farcical by logistics CEOs. In 2016, FedEx's then-CEO Fred Smith dismissed the notion of Amazon becoming a threat to the logistics giant as fantastical. In all likelihood, the primary deliverers of e-commerce shipments for the foreseeable future will be UPS, the UPS Postal Service and FedEx, Smith said at the time. At the time of Smith's comments, Amazon was in a distant third place behind UPS and FedEx, but the company in the subsequent years made up ground building out one of the of the largest logistics networks in the world, end quote. Who knew that the Thanksgiving week

Starting point is 00:15:44 would be like the biggest tech news week of the year? Not only is Sam Altman officially back at OpenAI if you hadn't heard, but CZ also stepped down as CEO of Binance while he and Binance also pled guilty to federal charges of violating sanctions and anti-money laundering laws as part of a $4.3 billion settlement. Crazy. Crazy that all of that fell last week when news usually never happens. I may or may not try to do a summary for this weekend of the whole Altman saga. We'll see.

Starting point is 00:16:18 Talk to you tomorrow.

Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 11/27 – ByteDance Retrenches

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