Tech Brew Ride Home - Thu. 01/12 – Touchscreen Macs?

Episode Date: January 12, 2023

Is Apple finally ready to bring touchscreens to Macs? Sam Bankman Fried has a Substack. Apple Maps courts businesses. Is Twitter going to auction off user handles? And what tech publication that I quote from all the time has been using AI to write entire articles for months now? Links: Apple Is Working on Adding Touch Screens to Macs in Major Turnabout (Bloomberg) Sam Bankman-Fried sticks to his script (Axios) Apple Maps’ business listings are about to get more detailed with launch of ‘Apple Business Connect’ (TechCrunch) Twitter Said to Consider Selling User Names to Boost Revenue (NYTimes) Carta lays off 10% as CTO lawsuit looms (TechCrunch) CNET IS QUIETLY PUBLISHING ENTIRE ARTICLES GENERATED BY AI (The Byte/Futurism) OpenAI begins piloting ChatGPT Professional, a premium version of its viral chatbot (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 Tech Meme right home for Thursday, January 12th, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough today. Is Apple finally ready to bring touchscreens to Macs?

Sam Bankman-Fried has a substack. Apple Maps, courts businesses. Is Twitter going to auction off user handles? And what tech publication that I quote from all the time on this show has been using AI to write entire articles for months now? Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. John Baranthal yelling voice. God damn, Mark. German, are you going to take a break this week or just another big scoop every day?

Mark's latest Apple scoop is maybe the biggest this week, though. His sources say that Apple is working on Macs with a touchscreen. The first model may be a MacBook Pro with an OLED display, supporting gestures even, set to be released in 2025. Quote, for more than a decade, the company has argued that touchscreens don't work well on laptops and that the iPad is a better option if someone wants a touch interface. Apple has also worried that touchscreen Macs could cannibalize iPad sales. But rivals have increasingly added touchscreens to computers, putting pressure on Apple to do the same.

A Mac resurgence in recent years also has made the business a bigger moneymaker than the iPad, and the company wants to keep its computer lineup as compelling as possible. Based on current internal deliberations, the company could launch its first touchscreen Mac in 2025 as part of a larger update to the MacBook Pro, according to the people who asked not to be identified because the plans are private. The current work calls for Apple's first touchscreen MacBook Pro to retain a traditional laptop design, including a standard trackpad and keyboard. But the laptop's screen would support touch input and gestures, just like an iPhone or iPad. Over time, Apple could expand touch support to more of its Mac models. As part of the MacBook Pro revamp, Apple is also

planning to move its displays to organic light-emitting diode or OLED technology. The company currently uses LCDs, liquid crystal displays on its Macs, but iPhones and Apple Watches already rely on OLED. Those screens offer improved brightness and color and will also come to the iPad Pro in the first half of 2024. If the touchscreen Mac moves forward, it would be a significant turnabout. The late Steve Jobs said the idea of having computer users reach up to touch an upright screen, quote, doesn't work. Touch surfaces don't want to be vertical, he said in 2010. After an extended period of time, your arm wants to fall off, end quote. But this past October, Apple sounded less hostile to the idea of touchscreen Macs. When asked about the prospect at a conference,

Software Engineering Chief Craig Federigi answered, who's to say? End quote. Now, disappointingly for me, nowhere in that was speculation that eventually you could detach a Mac screen and use it as an iPad without the keyboard. But doesn't that seem like the logical endpoint here? The idea of having everything on your laptop and your tablet in essentially one device was always why the Surface Book Pro was tempting to me. I don't know how much appetite folks have for this story, though the crypto world is up in arms about it this morning. So I'll touch on this lightly, and if you have an interest in it, feel free to investigate further. Sam Bankman-Fried this morning published a substack post offering his account of how FTX collapsed, sticking to his claims of innocence.

Quoting Axios, Bankman Fried mostly rehashes what he said before, including in the leaked congressional testimony he planned to give before his arrest. I didn't steal funds, he writes, adding, even now, I believe that if FTX International were to reboot, there would be a real possibility of customers being made substantially whole, end quote. Last week, Bankman Fried's attorneys asked for his seized $465 million stake in stock trading app Robin Hood, saying it was needed to fund the Bankman Fried's legal defense. That notably contradicted Bankman Fried's assertion to multiple publications, including Axios, that his primary concern was making FTX customers whole. In his Thursday post, Bankman Fried blames his lawyers for the contradiction, writing, quote,

I have, for instance, offered to contribute nearly all of my personal shares in Robin Hood to customers, or 100% if the Chapter 11 team would honor my DNO legal, legal, expense identification, end quote. Back to Apple, because Apple has launched Apple Business Connect, letting U.S. business owners update and manage their information for Apple Maps, a pretty basic feature that Google Maps has had since 2005, quoting TechCrunch. The service is a long time coming for Apple Maps, although first launched in 2012. The mapping platform for years has relied on a simplified system Apple Business Register to update Maps listings,

corrected information, and it leveraged third-party data from partners like Foursquare, Yelp, and TripAdvisor to provide users with other business information ratings and reviews. For comparison, Google has allowed business owners to manage their listing since 2005, though its product, now called Google Business Profiles, has gone through numerous name changes since then. Apple says it won't remove its integrations with Yelp as Apple Business Connect launches. Customers will be able to see Yelp photos and reviews in the business place cards and will be able to choose Yelp as their provider for things like placing an order or reviewing a restaurant's menu, for example. However, the new system will allow business owners to now augment their listings

with the important details they may lack, resulting in richer, more detailed, and more up-to-date listings. After going through a verification process, business owners will be able to update their business place card with basic information like the business hours, phone numbers, address, and more, including an about page, as well as with their business logo and photos. For the first time, they can also update the business's category and even add subcategories to help Maps users find their business when searching. And they can customize the information that appears in the good-to-know section of their listing, which includes helpful info like whether a place is good for kids, has free Wi-Fi, offers free delivery, is wheelchair accessible, and the like.

If the location on the listing is wrong, the owner can move the pin on the map to a more precise location as well. In addition, some business listings on Apple Maps feature an action button that allows a customer to take some sort of action like booking a hotel room with booking.com, ordering groceries with Instacart, or as of recently, finding a parking spot with Spot Hero. With Apple Business Connect, the business owner will now be able to add custom actions like these for themselves. The listings can also, for the first time, be customized to display time-limited special offers and incentives, like food deals or tickets to a show. These updates or showcases can include some explanatory text, a photo, and even a custom action

for customers to take. They are free to use, end quote. Sure, but this is obviously a play to expand Apple Maps' advertising products, right? Speaking of maybe finally monetizing valuable assets that have sat fallow for years, sources are telling the New York Times that back in December, Twitter started considering auctioning off usernames to generate revenue. Elon Musk had said he wants to free up around one and a half billion inactive users. usernames on the platform. Quote, engineers have discussed running online auctions where people can bid for the usernames, which are the words, numbers, or string of characters that follow the at sign

by which accounts are identified on the platform. Mr. Musk's username, for example, is at Elon Musk. It's unclear if the project will move forward and if the plan affects all usernames or only a subset, the people said, but Mr. Musk said last month that he wanted to start eliminating inactive accounts on Twitter and free up one and a half billion username. names. Only certain usernames, such as those of well-known people, brands, and popular names may have value. Unique usernames, also known as handles, can be lucrative. They are often claimed by early adopters of social media platforms, and some people and brands are willing to pay thousands

of dollars for them. Black markets have sprung up where people can buy original gangster or OG usernames that are desired because they feature a short word or a number and may have been abandoned by their owners, end quote. Yes, just ask our friend Chris Messina about that sort of thing. Sorry, but we got to do a bad times and tech headline round up here, because these are some big names in these headlines. Alphabet's life sciences unit Verily is laying off about 15% of its staff or more than 200 employees and discontinuing work on several products. Breaking into healthcare continues to be the Great White Whale of Silicon Valley, I guess. Supply chain software startup Flexport is laying off 20% of its global workforce or around 640 employees. The company raised

$935 million at an $8 billion valuation a year ago in February 2022. Sources say Stripe has lowered its internal valuation by around $11% to $63 billion, its third known cut, since June 2022, bringing the total reduction to around 40% in the past six months. And Equity Management Service, Carter, is cutting 10% of its staff impacting around 200 employees. The company was valued at $7.4 billion in August of 2021. It's also suing its former CTO, quoting TechCrunch. As TechCrunch reported earlier today, Carter is suing its former CTO, Jerry Taltin, who was fired four cause almost three weeks ago.

on December 23rd, according to the company. In Carter's lawsuit, the company references Tulton's, quote, wrongful and illegal acts as an executive of Carter, including discrimination and the sexual harassment of at least nine women, according to a Carter spokesperson. It doesn't help that several users of Carter's services, which range from cap table management to fund administration, have been less than impressed by the platform in recent months. TechCrunch spoke to a fund manager who was transitioning away from the platform and who claims that his team had four different account managers in a less than two-year contract, which, quote, certainly didn't help with continuity and understanding of our fund and needs, end quote. According to crunch-based data,

CARTA has raised $1.1 billion from venture capital investors, including, most recently, a $500 million series G by Silver Lake. Other investors in CARTA include Andrewson Horowitz and lightspeed venture partners. So far, the company says it is used by more than 30,000 companies, over 5,000 investment funds, and half a million employees of its customers, end quote. I can tell you anecdotally that even though we have used Carta for ride home media, I've not used Carta for the Ride Home Fund as of yet. But believe me, that's not for lack of trying on Carta's part, not for lack of nudging me. Over the last two months, I've been getting on average an email a day from Carta trying to get me to jump over. Seems like folks were

trying to hit some sales goals there last quarter. CET has been using AI, which it calls automation technology to write financial explainer posts under a CNETMoney staff byline apparently since November of 2022. Quoting the bite. In the absence of any formal announcement or coverage, it appears that this was first spotted by online marketer Gail Breton in a tweet on Wednesday. The articles are published under the unassuming appellation of CNET money staff and encompasses topics like, should you break an early CD for a better rate or what is Zell and how does it work. That byline obviously does not paint the full picture, and so your average reader visiting the site likely would have no idea that what they're reading is AI generated. It's only when you

click on CNET Money Staff that the actual authorship is revealed, quote, this article was generated using automation technology reads a drop-down description, and thoroughly edited and fact-checked by an editor on our editorial staff, end quote. Since the program began, CNET has put out around 73 AI-generated articles. That's not a whole lot for a site that big, and absent an official announcement of the program, it appears leadership is trying to keep the experiment as low-key as possible. CNET did not respond to questions about the AI-generated articles. Based on Breton's observations, though, some of the articles appear to be pulling in large amounts of traffic in spite of Google having vowed to penalize AI-generated content last year. Futurism has reached out

to Google for comment. AI-generated articles are not new. There's tons littering the internet already, some as low-tech as copying a human written article and swapping certain words out with synonyms to obfuscate the plagiarism. But AI usage is not limited to those kinds of bottom-of-the-barrel outlets. Even the prestigious news agency, the Associated Press, has been using AI since 2015 to automatically write thousands and thousands of earnings reports. The AP has even proudly proclaimed itself as one of the first news organizations to leverage artificial intelligence. It's worth noting, however, that the AP's auto-generated material appears to be essentially filling in blanks in predetermined formats, whereas the more sophisticated verbiage of CNET's publications suggests that it's using something more akin to OpenAI's GPT3, end quote.

Yeah, back to what was briefly mentioned just there in the article about Google and AI generated content. Like, I actually hadn't thought about the SEO angle of all of this. Maybe Chris and I will get into this on our big Twitter space today about AI tools, but consider this scenario. Google is rightly worried that AI tech could endanger its search ads business, but also what if in the meantime a flood of AI SEO content just takes over the web and makes Google's search results worse than they already are? AI could kill Google's golden goose coming and going.

Finally today, OpenAI says it's starting to think about monetizing chat GP. possibly via a chat GPT professional version because, of course, they are, quoting TechCrunch. In an announcement on the company's official Discord server, OpenAI said that it's starting to think about how to monetize chat GPT as one of the ways to, quote, ensure the tools long-term viability. The monetized version of chat GPT will be called chat GPT professional, apparently. That's according to a waitlist link OpenAI posted in the Discord server, which asks a range of questions about payment preferences, including, quote, at what price per month would you consider chat GPT to be so expensive that you would not consider buying it, end quote. Just an editorial

aside here by me, maybe they should ask chat GPT that. Continuing to quote, the waitlist also outlines chat GPT professionals benefits, which include no blackout, i.e. unavailability windows, no throttling, and an unlimited number of messages with chat GPT, quote, at least two X, the current regular daily limit, end quote. OpenAI says that those who fill out the waitlist form may be selected to pilot chat GPT professional, but that the program is in the experimental stages and won't be made widely available at this time. Chat GPT had over a million users as of early December, an enviable user base by any measure, but it's a pricey service to run. According to OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman, chat GPT's operating expenses are eye-watering, amounting to a few cents per chat in

total compute costs. ChatGPT is hosted in Microsoft's Azure Cloud. OpenAI is under pressure to turn a profit on products like ChatGPT ahead of a rumored $10 billion investment from Microsoft. OpenAI expects to make $200 million in revenue in 2023 a pittance compared to the more than $1 billion that's been invested in the startup so far. Semaphore reported this week that Microsoft is looking to net a 49% stake in OpenAI, valuing the company at around $20,000. $29 billion. Under the terms of the deal, Microsoft would receive three quarters of OpenAI's profits until it recovers its investment, with additional investors taking 49% and OpenAI retaining the remaining 2% in equity, end quote. As I just mentioned, Chris and I are doing a space today,

I believe at 4 p.m. Eastern, though maybe it could be 8 p.m. Eastern, but check Twitter at 4 because I think we're going to try to go for that time period. We're going to talk about my recent AI experiments, not to talk about what I'm doing exactly, but sort of using that as a lens to see where these AI tools are at, basically. Are they ready for prime time to actually do real work with? Could you build a real business, just using chat GPT, etc? If we have time, I also want to go into the economics of OpenAI and that whole relationship with Microsoft, because there have been some interesting details coming out about that this week that I haven't had a chance to get to on the show. So look out for a bonus episode

All About AI this weekend. Talk to you tomorrow.