Tech Brew Ride Home - Thu. 01/11 – Bitcoin ETFs, For Real This Time

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 TechMeme right home for Thursday, January 11th, 2024. I'm Brian McCullough today. The Bitcoin ETFs are here for real this time. OpenAI's GPT store is here, finally. Surprising new layoffs at Google. Netflix continues to show signs that ads are really working out for them. The Rabbit R1 continues to be a shocking success and say hello to an AI George Carlin. Here's a Jimis today in the world of tech. It finally happened. The USSEC has approved 11. spot Bitcoin ETFs from BlackRock, Greyscale, Arc, 21 shares, Bitwise, Wisdom Tree, Fidelity, Vanek, Invesco, Valky, Valky, Hashtex, and Franklin. Quoting Reuters, most of the products are expected to begin

Starting point is 00:01:21 trading today, Thursday, issuers said, kicking off a fierce competition for market share. A decade in the making, the ETFs are a game changer for Bitcoin offering investors' exposure to the world's largest cryptocurrency without directly holding it. They provide a major boost for a crypto industry beset. by scandals. It's a huge positive for the institutionalization of Bitcoin as an asset class, said Andrew Bond, managing director and senior fintech analysts at Rosenblatt Securities. Standard-chartered analysts this week said the ETFs could draw $50 to $100 billion this year alone. Other analysts have said inflows will be closer to $55 billion over five years. The market capitalization of Bitcoin

Starting point is 00:02:00 stood at more than $913 billion as of Wednesday, according to Coin Gecko. As of December, 2012, total net assets of U.S. ETFs stood at $6.5 trillion, according to the Investment Company Institute. Bitcoin was last up 3% at $47,300. The cryptocurrency has soared more than 70% in recent months in anticipation of an ETF and hit its highest level since March 2022 this week, end quote. Yeah, what will be interesting to watch here is if that whole buy the room or sell the news theory plays out here and Bitcoin price actually drops in the year term. As you saw, it did get that 3% bump, but that's not like a 10 or 15% bump. Maybe the news is already priced in, or maybe that volume of inflow might actually happen and push the price up

Starting point is 00:02:47 further. Now, as you know, I'm not super deep in crypto circles, so what's interesting to me is why this finally happened now. According to CoinDesk, SEC Chair Gary Gensler conceded that losing a recent court case after rejecting Grayskills spot Bitcoin ETF left the agency with little choice, but to approve ETFs going forward. Quote, we did not approve or endorse Bitcoin, Gensler said. Investors should remain cautious about the myriad risks associated with Bitcoin and products whose value is tied to crypto, end quote. In fact, he said that Bitcoin, quote, is primarily a speculative, volatile asset that's

Starting point is 00:03:23 also used for illicit activity, including ransomware, money laundering, sanction evasion, and terrorist financing, end quote. And Gensler sought to make it clear that these ETF signoffs don't pave the way for any further action from the U.S. securities regulator. Quote, it should in no way signal the commission's willingness to approve listing standards for crypto asset securities, he said, nor does the approval signal anything about the commission's views as to the status of other crypto assets under the federal securities laws or about the current state of noncompliance of certain crypto asset market participants with the federal

Starting point is 00:03:54 securities laws, end quote. Bitcoin is the only digital asset that Gensler routinely acknowledges is not a security, maintaining that the vast majority of other. other tokens fit the legal definition of securities that are rightfully under the SEC's jurisdiction, end quote. Big surprising layoffs at Google. Google laid off hundreds of staff working on its assistant and says the restructuring would help improve assistant as the company explores integrating newer AI tech into assistant. Google is also reorganizing its devices and services teams working on the Pixel Fitbit

Starting point is 00:04:33 and Nest. Fitbit co-founders James Park and Eric Friedman are leaving Google. and sources are telling the times that several hundred employees from Google's core engineering division received notices that their roles were eliminated and lost corporate access. Quoting from Semaphore, Google told Semaphore the restructuring would help improve Google Assistant as it explores integrating newer artificial intelligence technology into its products. The company announced in October that it was using its generative AI chatbot

Starting point is 00:04:59 Bard to build a new version of Google Assistant that, quote, extends beyond voice, understands and adapts to you, and handles personal tasks in new ways, end quote. on the pixel and hardware front, quoting 9 to 5 Google. Previously, the Pixel Nest and Fitbit divisions had distinct independent teams to handle aspects such as design, hardware, engineering, software, UI, etc. Google's hardware effort basically housed a miniature company for phones, another for smart home, and a third for wearables. This in large part reflects how Google bought Nest in 2014 and then Fitbit.

Starting point is 00:05:29 In this reorganizing, Google is switching to a functional organizational model where, for example, there will be one team responsible for hardware engineering across Pixel Nest, and Fitbit. As such, there will be a single leader for that aspect of products across all Google hardware. It remains to be seen whether this will lead to more unified products across the different form factors with the pixel phone team largely staying in place today from what we've heard. Looking at the tech landscape, Apple has a similar functional organizational model with centralized software engineering services, hardware technologies, and hardware engineering organizations, end quote. Finally, quoting from the Times about the engineering cuts,

Starting point is 00:06:03 quote, the Silicon Valley Company laid off employees in its core engineering division as well as those working on the Google Assistant, a voice-operated virtual assistant, and in the hardware division that makes the pixel phone, Fitbit Watches, and Ness Thermostat, three people with knowledge of the cuts said. Several hundred employees from the company's core engineering organization lost corporate access and received notices that their rules were eliminated, two of the people said. Google said that most of the hardware cuts affected a team working on augmented reality, technology that combines the real world with a digital overlay, end quote. is also finally here. OpenAI has debuted a GPT store for paid users to share and find custom chatbots

Starting point is 00:06:44 and plans to start sharing revenue in Q1. Users have apparently already made more than 3 million chatbots, quoting Bloomberg. The product called GBT store will include chatbots that users have chosen to share publicly. It will eventually introduce ways for people to make money from their creations, much as they might through the app stores of Apple or Alphabet's Google. Similar to those App stores. OpenAI's GPT store will let users see the most popular and trending chatbots on a leaderboard and search for them by category. People who pay for chat GPT access, including enterprise customers and chat GPT plus subscribers are eligible to use or make custom GPs. Initially, users won't be able to profit off their chatbots, OpenAI said, but within the first three months

Starting point is 00:07:25 of the year, the company will share details on how people can make money from them. The company said, and its blog posts that people in the U.S. will be paid, quote, based on user engagement with their chatbots, end quote. recall that OpenAI had planned to roll this out before now, but that little brouhaha with the board firing Sam Altman thing happened. OpenAI says it plans to feature new GPTs each and every week. Right now, they're featuring, for example, one from Canva, and one that helps you find hiking trails that fit your fitness level, also a code tutor. Netflix says its ad tier has more than 23 million monthly active users globally, up from more than 15 million in November of 2023, and 85% of

Starting point is 00:08:10 customers on the ad tier are streaming for over two hours per day, quoting Variety. Netflix president of advertising Amy Reinhard spoke Wednesday at the Variety Entertainment Summit at CES 2024 at Las Vegas's ARIA Resort and Casino, quote, The thing we're really excited about is the engagement, she said, of Netflix's customers on ad-supported plans. 85% are streaming on the platform for more than two hours per. day, she said. The new 23 million plus figure comes after Netflix a little over two months ago said its ad-supported tier had over 15 million monthly active users worldwide. In an October

Starting point is 00:08:42 letter to shareholders, Netflix said ad tier subscriptions accounted for approximately 30% of all new signups in the 12 countries where it launched the platform. We are very fortunate to be able to take a long-term perspective on this, Reinhard said at the Variety Entertainment Summit. Scaling our business is absolutely our biggest priority right now, but we want to make sure we're doing that in a meaningful way for the members, end quote. Reinhard, formerly the VP of Studio Operations at Netflix, succeeded Jeremy Gorman as head of the company's advertising division. Gorman left Netflix in October 2023, having been there just over a year. Netflix introduced its basic with ads tier in the U.S. and 11 other countries in November 2020.

Starting point is 00:09:20 In the U.S., this service is priced at $699 monthly, significantly cheaper than the standard plan, which is $1549 per month, something something, not just reconstituting the cable bundle, but rebuilding traditional TV ads and all. X has quietly removed the ability for paying subscribers to set an NFT as a profile picture, a feature that Twitter launched actually back in January of 2022 for Twitter Blue subscribers, quoting TechCrunch. The feature was originally launched under Twitter's previous management in January 2022. At the time, the company allowed Twitter blue subscribers to set NFTs minted on Ethereum,

Starting point is 00:10:02 the ERC 721 or ERC 1115 tokens, as profile pictures, which eventually, actually showed up as hexagons. Users could click slash tap on the profile picture to know more about NFTs, including details like a collection of the NFT and contract address, token ID, and the app with which it was minted. X has now removed all descriptions about the NFT profile picture feature from its X premium support page, end quote. Users with NFT profile pictures still display hexagonal avatars, but it's uncertain if X will remove these. This follows a trend as social networks, including Instagram and Facebook, sunset their own NFT initiatives, despite meta-ending NFT support in March of 2023 and fluctuating values and high-profile tokens like BoredApe Yacht Club.

Starting point is 00:10:48 The NFT market has recently seen a resurgence with trade volumes topping $1.6 billion. I joked on threads last night that this was maybe the most successful hardware launch of the last five years, given all the hype it's gotten, but maybe I wasn't joking. Remember that Rabbit R1 that I told you about that got a ton of attention at CES? week. Well, after announcing the $199 R1 large action model AI handheld at CES, Rabbit now says it has sold 10,000 units in one day. A second batch of orders should ship in April to May of this year. When we started building R1, we said internally that we'd be happy if we sold 500 devices on launch day. In 24 hours, we already beat that by 20x,

Starting point is 00:11:36 Rabbit said on X. Rabbit unveiled the R1 at CES on Tuesday, featuring a compact 2.8 8-8-inch touchscreen and powered by Rabbit OS. The device employs a large action model acting as a versatile controller for various apps, as demonstrated during the event. It centralizes functions like playing music, grocery shopping, and messaging, reducing reliance on a cell phone. Additionally, it can be customized to interact with specific apps. While the initial stock is sold out, pre-orders for the R1 are available on Rabbit's website. Rabbit anticipates deliveries, as I said, between April and May of 2024. However, those who ordered in the first wave can't expect shipments starting March. Finally today, Dudzzi is a podcast generated by AI and curated by humans,

Starting point is 00:12:28 which has released an hour-long comedy special featuring an AI recreation of George Carlin, the comedian who died in 2008, quoting Rolling Stone. The hour-long special titled George Carlin, I'm Glad I'm Dead, is a product of Dudsey, a podcast run by AI, and curated by humans. Chad Coltkin and Will Sassau host the podcast and YouTube show and allow the Dudsey AI to draw from their emails, texts, social media accounts, and even their own work, from Sassau's performances on Mad TV to an old feature script written by Koltkin called Pizza the Movie. While the specifics on the company behind Dudsey's AI system aren't clear, Sassau denied the AI is fake in an interview with business intelligence,

Starting point is 00:13:11 and claimed an NDA prevented him from revealing the legal entity, the Carlin-generated impression is uncanny, unquote. The show starts with Dudsey taking the stage, emphasizing that the forthcoming content isn't George Carlin himself. The AI bot explains that by absorbing all of Carlin's works, the AI attempted to replicate his unique voice, rhythm, and outlook, focusing on topics that would likely have captivated him if he were here in modern times. This leads to a striking reimagining of the iconic comedian with the AI version of Carlin tackling contemporary hot-button issues like mass shootings and the impact of social media. The AI Carlin even addresses AI itself. Quote, there's one line of work that is most threatened by

Starting point is 00:13:55 AI, one job that is most likely to be completely erased because of artificial intelligence, stand-up comedy. I know what all the stand-up comics across the globe are saying right now. I'm an artist, and my art form is too creative, too nuanced, too subtle to be replicated by a machine. No computer program can tell a fart joke as good as me. and quote. Carlin's own daughter, Kelly, took to X to respond, quote, my statement regarding the AI-generated George Carlin special, My Dad spent a lifetime perfecting his craft from his very human life, brain, and imagination. No machine will ever replace his genius.

Starting point is 00:14:31 These AI-generated products are clever attempts at trying to recreate a mind that will never exist again. Let's let the artist's work speak for itself. Humans are so afraid of the void that we can't let what has fallen, into it, stay there. Here's an idea. How about we give some actual living human comedians a listen to? But if you want to listen to the genuine George Carlin, he has 14 specials that you can find anywhere, end quote. When a user asked later in the thread if, quote, this clown had permission, Kelly responded by writing in all caps, zero permission granted. Now here's the thing. You all have heard me experiment with AI voice stuff. I kind of wonder if maybe there's a cheat going on

Starting point is 00:15:12 here. Sure, it's entirely possible that they fed an AI a bunch of Carlin routines to get his voice down, but haven't we seen recently that AI bots themselves aren't that great at humor? Like, maybe the easiest thing to do would have been for a human just to write Carlin-style jokes and then feed it into the AI voice. I don't know. Maybe that's what happened here, but maybe not. I'm excited today. Not only tonight are Chris and I scheduled to record our first bonus episode in what, our first proper one in maybe six months. We're also recording tonight with the great John Gruber as our guest. Shockingly, John has never been on this podcast before,

Starting point is 00:15:59 so I'm looking forward to that. We'll have it for you this weekend, of course. Talk to you tomorrow.

Tech Brew Ride Home - Thu. 01/11 – Bitcoin ETFs, For Real This Time

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