Tech Brew Ride Home - Thu. 04/11 – Humane AI Pin Reviews

Episode Date: April 11, 2024

Apple is notifying people their iPhones may have been compromised. Spotify wants you to mix up your music. Adobe is paying handsomely for videos. And the biggest new gadget review event in a long time. Link: Apple alerts users in 92 nations to mercenary spyware attacks (TechCrunch) Spotify Plans New Remixing Tools for the TikTok Generation (WSJ) Adobe Is Buying Videos for $3 Per Minute to Build AI Model (Bloomberg) Humane AI Pin review: not even close (The Verge) 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, April 11th, 2024. I'm Brian McCullough today. Apple is notifying people their iPhones may have been compromised. Spotify wants you to mix up your music. Adobe is paying handsomely for videos

and the biggest new gadget review event in a long time. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Apple is sending out threat notifications to iPhone users around the world, quoting TechCrunch. The company said it sent the alerts to individuals in 92 nations at 12 p.m. Pacific time Wednesday. The notification which TechCrunch has seen did not disclose the attacker's identities or the countries where users receive notifications. Quote, Apple detected that you are being targeted by a mercenary spyware attack that is trying to remotely compromise the iPhone associated with your Apple ID, it wrote in the warning to affected customers. This attack is likely targeting you specifically because of who you are or what you do. Although it's never possible

to achieve absolute certainty when detecting such attacks, Apple has high-concustom. confidence in this warning. Please take it seriously, Apple added in the text. The spyware alerts arrive at a time when many nations are preparing for elections. In recent months, many tech firms have cautioned about the rising state-sponsored efforts to sway certain electoral outcomes. Apple's alert, however, did not remark on their timing. We are unable to provide more information about what caused us to send you this notification, as that may help mercenary spyware attackers adapt their behavior to evade detection in the future, Apple told affected customers. Apple previously described the attackers as state-sponsored but has replaced all such references with mercenary spyware attacks.

The warning to customers adds mercenary spyware attacks such as those using Pegasus from the NSO group are exceptionally rare and vastly more sophisticated than regular cybercriminal activity or consumer malware, end quote. Sources are telling the journal that Spotify is developing tools to let subscribers speed up, mash up, or edit songs as a type of playback feature. Rights holders would be paid for the songs. Quote, the feature would be a bet on the future of music consumption that Spotify hopes will deepen user engagement and appeal to young users while generating new revenue for artists. Fans, particularly people in their teens and 20s regularly manipulate songs for social media, adding their own flair and then splicing the catchiest snippets into viral dance challenges, tutorials and memes.

But artists and labels don't often get paid for those altered versions of their songs, which are hard to track and are often distributed on a range of platforms including TikTok and Instagram Reels. Spotify's exploration of the new tools spotlights a scramble among music and tech executives to ensure artists and labels continue to make money even as the way fans consume music evolves. Rights holders, labels, publishers, and artists would be compensated when fans stream modified versions of their music on Spotify, the people said. Under the plan, Spotify is discussing, the new tools could function as a type of playback feature with users deciding, for example, at which speed they want to listen to a song. The users could potentially then save their preferred versions to virtual collections for repeat listening. The effort is an opportunity for Spotify to seize listening time that has so far seeded to social platforms such as TikTok. On TikTok, 38% of songs had their speeds or pitches modified in 2023 up from 25% in 2022, according to the content identification technology and data firm Pecks.

Some of the more basic features Spotify is working on, such as speeding up and slowing down, would likely be made available to regular subscribers who typically pay $10.99 a month. More advanced song modification features could be part of a new higher-priced super premium tier that Spotify is developing. While discussions about the tools are early and licensing agreements have yet to be worked out, the goal is to allow users to share their modified tracks across Spotify, but not to outside platforms such as social media apps. The singer-songwriter Isabel Larosa noticed the popularity of sped-up songs on TikTok and decided to release faster versions of her songs along with the original recordings.

Fans have listened to the sped-up version of her most streamed song on Spotify, I'm Yours almost as much as the original version. Some listeners still like to make their own versions of her work. It can help build a more dedicated fan base because they feel they can engage with the song and be part of your success, she said. Major artists have also begun releasing many versions of the same song to feed fan appetite for a diverse range of iterations while ensuring they receive royalties from the tracks. At the end of February, Siza put out a new single Saturn, plus four additional versions live, sped up, acapella, and instrumental. Some users manipulate full tracks and fraudulently upload them to Spotify and other streaming services

where they can rack up millions of streams and royalties that don't flow to the original artist. One unsanctioned sped-up cover version of the Keene hit Somewhere Only We Know raked in more than 33 million streams after it was uploaded to Spotify. The artist listed behind the track DJ Tech, whose most popular tracks include modified versions of songs by Ed Shearin and Adele, has nearly one and a half million monthly listeners on Spotify, DJ Tech, didn't respond to requests for comment. quote. See, didn't I say somebody should do this? I was thinking of a startup doing it, but then who needs a middleman? According to documents seen by Bloomberg, Adobe is offering its photographer and artist network, $120 a pop for videos of people engaged in everyday actions are around

$2.62 to around $7.25 per minute to train AI. Quote, Adobe is requesting more than 100 short clips of people engaged in actions and showing emotions. as well as simple anatomy shots of feet, hands, or eyes. The company also wants video of people interacting with objects such as smartphones or fitness equipment. It cautions against providing copyrighted material, nudity, or other offensive content. Pay for the submission works out, on average to about $2.62 per minute of submitted video, although it could be as much as about $7.25 per minute. The listing highlights the massive amount of data needed to build AI models underlying popular content creation products such as ChatGPT. There has been much

debate and controversy over the source of that data. OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Moradi said in a viral interview clip with the Wall Street Journal last month that she wasn't sure whether SORA was trained on user-generated videos from Google's YouTube as well as meta-platforms, Facebook, and Instagram. Adobe has sought to differentiate its models by training them primarily on its vast library of stock media for marketers and creative agencies. In cases where its stock library falls short, it has procured images directly from contributors. It has also offered pay for contributors to submit a mass amount of photos for AI training, such as images of bananas or flags. Those jobs have paid in the range of six to 16 cents per image, according to listings seen by Bloomberg.

Open AI's demonstration of its video generation model, Sora re-ignited fears among investors that the longtime creative software leader could be disrupted by the new technology. Adobe has said it's working on video generation technology with plans to discuss more about it later this year, end quote. Fine, I don't care. I just want to intercept the trend. of companies paying us to send them content to train their AI on. Normalize piecemeal content work. If everyone is going to sell their content soon, don't leave out the little guy. Finally, today I said this was the biggest gadget review day in a while, and that's because we're reviewing a totally new form factory, new genre of gadget, AI-powered hardware.

The humane AI-pin reviews are out, and the consensus seems to be hardware-wise. It's well-made. Photos from it look good, and it is easier to access. then your phone, which is the entire point, right? But it doesn't work half the time. It's really slow, and it's missing basic features. All the reviews are fairly mixed, but as ever, I'm going to go with my folks at the verge. David Pierce's headline reads simply, not even close. Quote, Humane has spent the last year making the case that the AI pin is the beginning of a post-smartphone future in which we spend less time with our heads and minds buried in the screens of our phones and more time back in the real world. I came into this review with two big questions about the AI

pin. The first is the big picture one. Is this thing anything? In just shy of two weeks of testing, I've come to realize that there are, in fact, a lot of things for which my phone actually sucks. I've learned to do a lot of things on my phone that I might like to do somewhere else. So yeah, this is something, maybe something big. AI models aren't good enough to handle everything yet, but I've seen enough glimmers of what's coming that I'm optimistic about the future. That raises the second question, should you buy this thing? That one's easy. Nope. No-uh, no way. The AI pin is an interesting idea that is so thoroughly unfinished and so totally broken in so many unacceptable ways that I can't think of anyone to whom I'd recommend spending the $699 for the device

and the $24 monthly subscription. As the overall state of AI improves, the AI pin will probably get better, and I'm bullish on AI's long-term ability to do a lot of the fiddly things on our behalf, but there are too many basic things it can't do. Too many things it doesn't do well enough, and too many things it does well, but only sometimes that I'm hard-pressed to name a single thing it's genuinely good at. None of this, not the hardware, not the software, not even GPD4, is ready yet. As a piece of gear, the AI pin is actually pretty impressive. It's smaller than you might think, roughly the size of four quarters laid in a square,

or half the size of a pack of orbit gum. It's not heavy, about 55 grams, according to my scale, roughly the same as two, two AA batteries or the key fob to my car, but it's definitely solid made of aluminum and designed to survive falls or even the occasional trip through the washing machine. In all of Humane's demos and marketing, the AI pin sits in the same place on the right or left side of your chest, right below your collarbone attached via a magnet that also acts as a battery booster. It's a pin on a lapel. It's a little fiddley to get situated, but the magnet does hold through all but the thickest of clothes. You don't have to use it this way. You can hold it in your hand or even talk to it

while it's in its desk charger, but the AI pins built-in microphones are designed to hear you best from that angle. The slightly downward-facing camera sees best from there, and the upward firing speakers work best in that spot. Having the thing right there did make me use it more, sometimes for things I wouldn't have bothered to pull out my phone to do. It feels a little like the early days of Alexa and Siri a decade ago when you discovered that saying set a timer for 10 minutes beats opening your phone's clock app by a mile, and you can do it with sticky fingers too. Except, oh wait, the AI pin can't set an alarm or a timer. It can't add things to your calendar either or tell you what's already there. You can create notes and lists, which appear in the Humane

Center web app. That is also where you connect the device to your contacts and review your uploaded photos. But if you try to add something to the list later, it'll almost always fail for some reason. The problem with so many voice assistants is that they can't do much, and the AI pin can do even less. Every time the AI pin tries to do seemingly anything, it has to process your query through humane servers, which is at best quite slow and at worst a total failure. Asking the AI pin to write down that the library book sale is next week, handy. Waiting for 10 seconds while it processes, processes, and then throws a generic couldn't add that error message, less handy. I'd estimate that half the time I tried to call someone, it's

simply didn't call. The more I tested the AI pin, the more it felt like the device was trying to do an awful lot, and the hardware simply couldn't keep up. For one, it was pretty much constantly warm. In my testing, it never got truly painfully hot, but after even a few minutes of using it, I could feel the battery like a hand warmer against my skin. The closest thing the AI pin has to a screen is its laser ink projector. You summon it by tapping once on the touchpad or by asking it to show me something. The projector's user interfaces, how can I put this nicely, bananas?

To unlock your device, which you have to do every time you magnetically reattach the AI pin, you move your hand forward and backward through a series of numbers and then pinch your thumb and forefinger together like to select a number. It feels a bit like sliding a tiny trombone. It feels like Humane decided early on

that the AI pin couldn't have a screen no matter what and did a bunch of product in interface gymnastics when a tiny touchscreen would have handled all of these things much better. Kudos to Humane for swinging big, but if you're going to try to do phone things, just make a phone. In general, I would say that for every successful interaction with the AI pin, I've had three or four unsuccessful ones. It's all made worse by the AI pin's desire to be as clever as possible.

Translation is one of its most hyped features, along with the fact that it supposedly automatically discerns which languages to translate. When you land in Spain, boom, it switches to Spanish. super cool and futuristic, in theory. In reality, I spent an hour in our studio trying desperately to get the AI pin to translate to Japanese or Korean, while the Verges' Victoria Song, who speaks both, sat there, talking to it in those languages to absolutely no avail. Rather than translate things, it would just say them back to her in a horrible and occasionally almost mocking accent. Still, even after all this frustration, after spending

hours standing in front of restaurants, tapping my chest, and whispering questions that go unanswered, I find I want what Humane is selling even more than I expected. A one-tap way to say, text Anna, and tell her I'll be home in half an hour, or remember to call Mike tomorrow afternoon, or take a picture of this and add it to my shopping list, would be amazing. I hadn't realized how much of my phone usage consists of these one-step things, all of which would be easier and faster without the friction and distraction of my phone. But the AI pin doesn't work. I don't know how else to say it. I hope Humane keeps going. I hope it builds in this basic functionality and figures out how to do more of it locally on the device without killing the battery,

I hope it gets faster and more reliable. I hope Humane decides to make a watch or smart glasses or something more deliberately designed to be held in your hand. I hope it partners with more music services and productivity apps and more sources of knowledge about the internet and the world. I hope the price goes down. But until all of that happens and until the whole AI universe gets better, faster, and more functional, the AI pin isn't going to feel remotely close to being done.

It's a beta test, a prototype, a proof of concept that may be. someday there might be a killer device that does all of these things. AI gadgets might one day be great, but this isn't that day and the AI pin isn't that product. I'll take my phone back now. Thanks, end quote. He rated it, by the way, four out of ten. Nothing for you today. Talk to you tomorrow.