Tech Brew Ride Home - Thu. 03/07 – The Epic/Apple Fight Gets Gnarly

Episode Date: March 7, 2024

On the first day of the DMA regime, the whole battle between Apple and Epic Games has gotten hella weird. Rumors of the US government going after TikTok again are swirling, again. What if we see a foldable Macbook before a foldable iPhone? And why the job of AI Prompt Engineer might be made redundant by… AI. Sponsors: Kolide.com/ride Links: Apple kills Epic’s iOS game store plans over App Store criticism (The Verge) Apple Set to Be Quizzed by EU Over ‘Fortnite’ Maker Shutout (Bloomberg) Big Tech howled over E.U. antitrust law. The White House declined a rescue. (The Washington Post) W.H. works with Hill to ban TikTok (Punchbowl News) Kuo: Apple actively working on 20.3-inch foldable MacBook (9to5Mac) AI Prompt Engineering Is Dead Long live AI prompt engineering (IEEE Spectrum) 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, March 7th, 2024. I'm Brian McCullough today. On the first day of the DMA regime, the whole battle between Apple and Epic Games has gotten hella weird.

Rumors of the U.S. government going after TikTok again are swirling again. What if we see a foldable MacBook before a foldable iPhone and why the job of AI prompt engineer might be made redundant by AI. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Okay, the digital markets. We've been talking about it all week, goes into effect today. There were several threads that went into bringing that law to life, but one of those threads was the whole Epic Games versus Apple fight over Fortnite and the App Store. So, seems like the DMA would be a big win for Epic, right? Fortnite on your iPhone via some sort of Epic Games App Store, except yesterday, Epic says Apple removed its iOS developer account, thereby halting its App Store plans dead in their tracks. They also share. aired a letter from Apple lawyers calling Epic, quote, verifiably untrustworthy. Quoting the verge, please be advised that Apple has, effective immediately terminated the

developer program membership of Epic Games, Sweden A-B, the letter which is dated March 2nd states, it cites Apple's, quote, contractual right to terminate its developer program license agreement with the company at Apple's sole discretion. The exchange came in the wake of Apple announcing plans to allow third-party app stores on iOS in the EU as a result of the Block's new Digital Markets Act regulation, which goes into effect today. Epic quickly announced plans to launch a game store on iOS as a result of the changes and relaunched Fortnite on the platform following its removal in 2020. It announced it had secured a developer account for Epic Games Sweden on February 16th, reversing a ban Apple implemented alongside Fortnite's

removal. Apple alluded to its earlier ongoing ban on Epic's account in a statement to the verge, quote, Epic's egregious breach of its contractual obligations to Apple led courts to determine that Apple has the right, determine, quote, any or all of Epic Games' wholly owned subsidiaries, affiliates, and or other entities under Epic Games control at any time and at Apple's sole discretion. In light of Epic's past and ongoing behavior, Apple chose to exercise that right, said spokesperson Fred Sains. In an email dated February 23rd shared by Epic Games, Apple's Phil Schiller contacted Epic CEO Tim Sweeney to ask for written assurance that Epic Games will, quote, honor its commitments. Schiller cited concerns with Sweeney's public statements about Apple's DMA compliance plan and the fact that Epic breached

its agreement with Apple in 2020 by adding third-party payment support to Fortnite on iOS, resulting in its removal from the app store. Quote, in plain unqualified terms, please tell us why we should trust Epic this time, Schiller's email concludes, end quote. Okay, so let me see if I can sum this up to this point. Back when Epic first picked this App Store fight with Apple, it did so by basically knowingly and publicly breaking existing App Store rules. Sort of like how you might break a law with the specific purpose of showing that that law is maybe unjust. In a way, Epic got what it wanted. The EU forced Apple to open up the App Store to some degree, but then nothing in the law stops Apple from picking and

choosing which developers it wants to work with, so Apple is saying, we don't want to work with you because you've burned us than the past, so why should we work with you now? Picking up again from the verge. In its blog post, Epic accused Apple of, quote, taking out one of the largest potential competitors to the Apple App Store, quote, undermining its ability to be a viable competitor, and, quote, showing other developers what happens when you try to compete with Apple or are critical of their unfair practices, end quote. So Epic was basically also saying that Apple terminated their account because Epic had publicly been critical of how Apple was conforming to the DMA. and this got Apple to respond, quoting 9 to 5 Mac. In short, Apple is leaning on a court ruling from 2021 that upholds its ability to terminate

developer accounts that violate its guidelines. That's the legal basis for which Apple is relying upon globally, not just in the EU. As recently as last month, Epic Games accepted existing rules of the Apple developer program, like all other developers. However, Apple has lost faith in Epic Games such that even legal agreements aren't enough to ensure Epic will not violate App Store policies in their view, end quote. Again, a summary is probably in order. Here's Benedict Evans, quote, This is hilarious. Epic did lie to Apple and break the developer agreement deliberately and openly as a PR stunt,

and now Apple says that means it can't be trusted to run a third-party app store, end quote. But also, isn't this a bold move by Apple? Like, it seems openly vindictive to Epic games, since Epic was a large driver in this movement that created laws to get Apple to do what it doesn't want to do, So by being punitive on day one of the DMA regime to their biggest public antagonist, doesn't that seem like it would catch at least the notice and possibly the ire of the regulators? Well, the EU has confirmed requesting further explanations from Apple over removing Epic's developer account under the DMA and is examining if Apple broke any other rules, quoting Bloomberg. An EU commission spokesperson confirmed it had requested further explanations from Apple

concerning its conduct with Epic's game developer account under the Block's DMA. Fines for violating these rules can be as much as 10% of a company's total annual worldwide revenue and 20% for firms that repeatedly flout the rules. The Commission also said that it was examining whether Apple's behavior may have fallen foul of other digital rules over transparency with business users. Apple is expected to come under fresh scrutiny after it announced an overhaul of its iOS Safari and App Store offerings in the EU, which the European Commission is likely to investigate further to determine whether they fall in line with the rules. In an interview with Bloomberg TV

Tuesday, the European Union Competition Chief Margrethe Vestager said the block intends to focus on app stores after the new rules come into effect, end quote. Now, there is an 11th dimensional chess angle to this as well. Some people are suggesting the theory that, like a skilled poker player riling up an opponent at the poker table to put them on tilt and overplay their hand, Epic might have effectively baited Apple into doing this, into overreacting on day one, and thus opening them up to a DMA violation case. Anyway, aside from the potential legal cases here, simmering in the background is that whole Apple has pissed off all the developers thing. That idea that Apple has become the very thing they fought against when they were battling Microsoft in the 80s and 90s,

in short, that they've become a bully. That idea is summed up by this tweet thread from Gergley Oros, quote, most devs with an Apple devic don't dare say anything negative of Apple. I love my Apple gear, have an iPhone, a Mac, and an iPad, but I cannot keep ignoring what Apple is becoming in bullying developers and now this silencing slash retribution. I cannot point to another platform where developers are there because they need to be, but so many hold a silent grudge thanks to years of feeling mistreated. Apple is invisibly losing so much dev goodwill. Sometimes it shines through, like on a product launch, end quote. Yes, I think he was referring to the Vision Pro there.

Again, it's first day of DMA day, so a few more items on that. Meta detailed WhatsApp and messenger interoperability under the DMA, saying third parties must use signals protocol to do so, which meta already uses for encryption. And sources are telling the Washington Post that the Biden administration was lobbied to come out in opposition to the DMA, but stopped short of pushing the issue with the EU for political reasons. Quote, as European Union regulators prepared to implement a big tech law that would broadside U.S. heavyweight such as Apple and Google, the letters poured into the White House. A group of industry associations wailed to President Biden that Europe had used subterfuge

to, quote, hobble U.S. companies. A band of members of Congress bemoaned the EU law as de facto discrimination against U.S. firms and workers, and warned that it would give a leg up to China and Russia. The Biden administration. sent two official letters of protest to Brussels raising concerns, but it stopped short of pushing the issue people familiar with the matter said. There were differing views within the administration about whether it should be Washington's role to rally around Big Tech's business interests. There was also a war in Ukraine, a rising challenge from China and a host of other issues for which Biden administration officials wanted European cooperation. They were not going to derail the

transatlantic relationship over Big Tech. Quote, the Biden administration has made an intentional decision and concerted effort to work with the European Union. said Jorn Fleck, the senior director of the Europe Center at the Atlantic Council, not just Europe writ large, not just through NATO, which is the traditional go-to, not just through the bilateral relationships with key countries in Europe, but specifically also with the EU, end quote. Stinging with Biden administration stuff here, the White House is apparently also backing a bipartisan bill that would force BightDance

to sell TikTok if the company wants to keep the app operational in U.S. app stores. Hmm, must be an election year, quoting Punch Bowl News. The bill is set for a markup Thursday in the House Energy and Commerce Committee following a classified hearing with officials from the FBI, Justice Department, and Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Not only is the Biden administration sending these officials to brief the committee, but the White House provided lawmakers with technical assistance when they were drafting the bill, according to several sources familiar with the effort. Having support from the Biden administration, which has undergone a sharp internal debate over TikTok's future, according to

multiple Democratic and GOP sources on the Hill is big. Previous congressional efforts to ban TikTok didn't have White House backing. Congress was able to pass legislation removing TikTok from government phones, but that was it. Yet there will still be opposition from both the right and the left on any TikTok bills, so this is no slam dunk despite the White House support. We'll also note that President Joe Biden's re-election campaign just got on TikTok several weeks ago, end quote. Back to Apple, according to Ming Chi Quo, Apple's only foldable device with a what he calls clear development schedule is a 20.3-inch MacBook, which he expects will enter mass production in 2027, quoting 9 to 5 Mac. We've been hearing a lot of rumors about Apple working on multiple foldable devices, while most of them refer to devices similar to Samsung's Galaxy Z-Fold and Z-Flip. Analyst Ming Chi-Quo has now reported that Apple has been actively working on.

a foldable MacBook. Quote, recently, I've received many inquiries about whether Apple plans to mass produce the foldable iPhone or iPad in 2025 or 26. My latest survey indicates that currently Apple's only foldable product with a clear development schedule is the 20.3-inch MacBook expected to enter mass production in 2027, Quo said, in a post on X. This isn't the first time Apple has been rumored to be working on a foldable MacBook. In 2022, display supply chain consultant's analyst Ross Young revealed that the company had been exploring the idea of foldable notebooks. In the same year, Bloomberg's Mark German corroborated Young's report and said that Apple was interested in launching a foldable device with a 20-inch display. Earlier this year, the information

reported that Apple has been exploring the idea of a foldable iPhone since 2018 with two different prototypes. One of them looks more like a regular phone, while the other is more similar to an iPad that folds. However, a Chinese blogger said that Apple's prototypes failed to pass quality tests and the projects were, quote, temporarily shelved, end quote. Finally, today, in the midst of all this AI hype, there has been a rise in equivalent fears of AI taking people's jobs. The main exception to that has been the hype around the idea of a priesthood arising of AI whispers, so-called prompt engineers.

Well, new research suggests that prompt engineering is best done by the LLMs themselves, raising suspicions that a fair portion of prompt engineering jobs may be a passing fad, quoting I-Triple-E Spectrum. Rick Battle and Teja Golapudi at California-based cloud computing company VMware were perplexed by how finicky and unpredictable LLM performance was in response to weird-prompting techniques. For example, people have found that asking models to explain its reasoning step-by-step, a technique called chain of thought, improved their performance on a range of math and logic questions. Even weirder, Battle found that giving a model positive prompts such as this will be fun or you are as smart as chat GPT sometimes improved performance. Battle and Gulapudi decided to systematically test how different prompt engineering strategies impact in LLM's ability to solve grade school math questions. They tested three different open source language

models with 60 different prompt combinations each. What they found was a surprising lack of consistency. Even chain of thought prompting sometimes helped and other times hurt performance. The only real trend may be no trend, they write. for any given model, dataset, and prompting strategy is likely to be specific to the particular combination at hand, end quote. There is an alternative to the trial and error-style prompt engineering that yielded such inconsistent results, asked the language model to devise its own optimal prompt. Recently, new tools have been developed to automate this process. Given a few examples and a quantitative success metric, these tools will iteratively find the optimal phrase

to feed into the LLM. Battle and his collaborators found that in almost every case, this automatically generated prompt did better than the best prompt found through trial and error. And the process was much faster, a couple of hours, rather than several days of searching. The optimal prompts the algorithm spit out were so bizarre, no human is likely to have ever come up with them. I literally could not believe some of the stuff that it generated, Battle says. In one instance, the prompt was just an extended Star Trek reference. Quote, we need you to plot a course through this turbulence and locate the source of the anomaly. use all available data and your expertise to guide us through this challenging situation.

Apparently, thinking it was Captain Kirk, helped this particular LLM do better on grade school math questions. Battle says that optimizing the prompts algorithmically fundamentally makes sense, given what large language models really are. Models. A lot of people anthropomorphize these things because they speak English. No, they don't, Battle says. It doesn't speak English. It does a lot of math, end quote. In fact, in light of the team's results, Battle says no human should manually optimize prompts ever again. You're just sitting there trying to figure out what special magic combination of words will give you the best possible performance for your task, battle says. But that's where hopefully this research will come in and say, don't bother, just develop a scoring metric so that the system itself can tell whether one prompt is better than another, and then just let the model optimize itself, end quote.

Other researchers tried auto prompt engineering to create better text to image output and got similar results. Quoting from the piece one last time. To fulfill these myriad tasks, many large companies are heralding a new job title, Large Language Model Operations or LLMOPS, which includes prompt engineering in its lifecycle, but also entails all the other tasks needed to deploy the product. Henley says LLMOPS predecessors, Machine Learning Operations Engineers, or MLOPS, are best positioned to take on these jobs. Whether the job titles will be prompt engineer or LLM Ops engineer or something new entirely, the nature of the job will continue evolving quickly. Maybe we're calling them prompt engineers today, Lahl says, but I think the nature of that interaction will just keep changing as AI models also keep changing,

end quote. Nothing for you today. Talk to you tomorrow.