Tech Brew Ride Home - Thu. 05/02 – TikTok Can Jam Again

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 for Thursday, May 2nd, 2024. I'm Brian McCullough today. The music is back on TikTok with a new deal struck. Maybe a third of Americans were affected by that change health care hack. Why are companies suddenly cutting teams you'd think would be sacred cows? Airbnb wants you to stay in the house from the movie up, and we finally know just how much Google pays Apple for the search default in iOS. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. TikTokers, your long musical nightmare appears to be over. Universal Music Group and TikTok have struck a new music licensing deal to bring UMG music back to the platform, including improved remuneration and AI protections. Quoting variety, as part of the agreement,

Starting point is 00:01:19 the company stated they will, quote, deliver improved remuneration for UMG's songwriters and artists, new promotional and engagement opportunities for their recordings and songs, and industry-leading protections with respect to generative AI. UMG's music will return to the platform imminently, and the companies will collect. collaborate on realizing, quote, new monetization opportunities utilizing TikTok's growing e-commerce capabilities and will work together on campaigns supporting UMG's artists across genres and territories globally. Beginning in February, the ban resulted in a near complete blackout of all music owned, distributed, and published by the company on the platform. The videos were still there, but the music was muted, although there was no shortage of artists breaking the band,

Starting point is 00:02:01 both officially, Taylor Swift in an apparent UMG-sanctioned promotion around her new album, the tortured poets department, and unofficially, plenty of others. While UMG's reasons for the band were indisputably high-minded, an attempt to fight for greater compensation and intellectual property protections for its artists, and, of course, to protect its own interests, there is no question that it caused significant disruption in countless artists' careers. For the past five years, TikTok has been the single most influential music discovery and promotion vehicle and music companies have badgered their artists to become active or viral on the

Starting point is 00:02:34 platform, leading some to spend their own money in an effort to do so. But beginning in February, UMG, artists suddenly found those efforts muted by their own company. A month later, songs with writers signed to Universal's Publishing Division faced a similar fate. The band was difficult to enforce any way. Unlike streaming services, rights holders, usually record labels, are not the only entities who can upload music to the platform. Virtually anyone can, and since the app is controlled by TikTok, labels and other rights holders cannot do anything about infractions except issue takedown notices and other legal notifications. Also, TikTok's detection software can be alluded with some sped up or slowed down or otherwise altered songs, which many users do when including music in their posts.

Starting point is 00:03:16 There is also the possibility that some involved parties turned a blind eye to some infractions, end quote. United Health CEO Andrew Whitty testified before the House yesterday that the recent change health care hack impacted, quote, maybe a third of Americans, and notifying victims will take, quote, several months, quoting TechCrunch. Witty said he was reluctant to give a more precise answer because the company is still investigating the breach and trying to figure out exactly how many people were affected. In a written statement filed by Witty ahead of the two hearings, the CEO wrote that, quote, so far we have not seen evidence of exfiltration of materials such as doctors' charts or full medical histories among the data, end quote.

Starting point is 00:04:03 According to Witty's testimony, the hackers, quote, used compromised credentials to remotely access a change health care Citrix portal, which was not protected by multi-factor authentication, a basic cybersecurity measure that adds an extra step to log into accounts and systems. Had that portal had multifactor authentication enabled, the breach may not have happened. Several senators grilled Whitty on that failure, asking him whether United Health and change health care systems are now protected with multi-factor authentication. During the Senate hearing, Witty said, we have an enforced policy across the organization to have multi-factor authentication on all of our external systems, which is in place, end quote. As mentioned, there was also a separate Senate hearing, and in that one, Witty also said that the company paid a $22 million ransom to the hackers who accessed that server that wasn't protected by MFA. Quoting CNBC, The decision to pay a ransom was mine, Widdy said. This was one of the hardest decisions I've ever had to make, and I wouldn't wish it on anyone, end quote. United Health is one of the largest companies in the world with a roughly $450 billion market cap. It's business unit Optum, which provides care to 103 million customers and change health care, which touches one in three patient records, merged in 2022. As a result of this malicious cyber attack, patients and providers have experienced disruptions and people are worried about their private health data, Witty said. To all those impacted, let me be very clear. I am deeply, deeply sorry. Senator Tom Tillis held up a bright yellow copy of hacking for dummies during the hearing, saying the breach is United Health's responsibility to fix. This is some basic stuff that was missed, so shame on internal audit, external audit,

Starting point is 00:05:39 and your systems folks tasked with redundancy. They're not doing their job, Tillis said, end quote. I don't know what's going on with people laying off key team members that you think would be important. to their areas of growth and strategic importance just generally. Sources are saying that Google laid off at least 200 employees from its core teams, including its Python developer team, with plans to move some of those roles to Mexico and India. Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't Python the most popular language used for AI and ML? Quoting CNBC, the core unit is responsible for building the technical foundation behind the company's flagship products and for protecting users' online safety,

Starting point is 00:06:25 according to Google's website. Core teams include key technical units from information technology, its Python developer team, technical infrastructure, security foundation, app platforms, core developers, and various engineering roles. At least 50 of the positions eliminated were in engineering at the company's offices in Sunnyvale, California, filing show. Many core teams will hire corresponding roles in Mexico and India, according to internal documents viewed by CNBC. The teams involved in the reorganization have been key to the company's developer tools in area Google is streamlining as it incorporates more artificial intelligence into the products. In February, Google announced a major rebrand of its chapout from Bard to Gemini, the same name as the suite of AI models that

Starting point is 00:07:06 power it. The core layoffs also include the governance and protected data group, which will be at the center of regulatory challenges facing the company, particularly as lawmakers across the globe, focus more on developments in AI. The European Union's Digital Markets Act, which went into effect in March aims to clamp down on anti-competitive practices in tech, end quote. Hmm, team's key to AI and staying on the right side of EU regulation. Again, is this cutting off your nose to spite your face? I direct you to my questions about Tesla and the Supercharger team yesterday. Anthropic has launched a free iOS app of its AI tools and also team, its first enterprise plan, which offers access to its Claude III opus, sonnet, and haiku models for $30,

Starting point is 00:07:57 per user per month, quoting CNBC. The new plan for businesses dubbed team has been in development over the last few quarters and involved beta testing with between 30 and 50 customers in industries such as technology, financial services, legal services, and healthcare, Anthraic co-founder Daniela Ammodai told CNBC in an interview, adding that the idea for the service was partially borne out of many of those same customers asking for a dedicated enterprise product. The team plan offers access to all three of Anthropics' latest Claude models with increased usage limits, admin tools, and billing management, as well as a longer context window, meaning the ability for businesses to have multi-step conversations, and upload long documents like research papers and legal contracts for processing according to Anthropic. Other features coming include citations from reliable sources to verify AI-generated claims per the release. The team offering requires a minimum of five users.

Starting point is 00:08:54 Anthropics' first iOS app is free for users across all plans and also available starting Wednesday. It provides syncing with webchats and the ability to upload photos and files from a smartphone. There are plans to launch an Android app too. We actually just hired our first Android engineer, so we are actively working on the Android app. Amo Di told CNBC, adding that the engineer starts next week. News of the team plan and iOS app comes more than a month after Anthropics' debut of Claude 3, a suite of AI models that it says are its fastest and most powerful yet. The new tools are called Claude 3 Opus, Sonnet, and Haiku. The company has said the most capable of the new models,

Starting point is 00:09:32 Claude 3 Opus, outperformed open AIs, GPT4, and Google's Gemini Ultra on industry benchmark tests, such as undergraduate level knowledge, graduate level reasoning, and basic mathematics. This is also the first time Antarctic has offered multimodal support. Users can upload photos, charts, documents, and other types of unstructured data for analysis and answers. The other models, Sonnet and Haiku, are more compact and less expensive than Opus. The company declined to specify how long it took to train Claude 3 or how much it costs. But it said companies like Airtable and Asana helped A.B. Test the models. In a release Wednesday, Anthropic confirmed that other current clients using Claude include Pfizer, Asana, Zoom, Perplexity AI, Bridgewater,

Starting point is 00:10:12 Associates, and more currently, end quote. Airbnb has launched icons, a new category of experiences that lets users meet celebrities, stay in outlandish venues, including a replica of the house from Pixar's Up, quoting The New York Times. The sleek mansion in the hills overlooking Las Vegas could have been featured on MTV's cribs, but the highlight of Aubrey Garza's weekend stay there wasn't the palatial rooms or the marble fireplace. It was meeting her Airbnb host, Christina Aguilera. It just felt like a dream, Ms. Garza 26 said.

Starting point is 00:10:54 When she was growing up, her bedroom was decorated with posters of the pop star. Ms. Garza had nabbed one of the once-in-a-lifetime promotional stays that Airbnb has occasionally listed in recent years. The popular, if rare, listings have included not only private hangouts with celebrities, but also stays in a Barbie mansion modeled on the one from the hit movie and a replica of Shrek's swamp dwelling in the Scottish Highlands. On Wednesday, Airbnb announced that it was expanding that stunt and promotions like them under a new permanent category called icons featuring unusual and ambitious partnerships with brands and celebrities. At a news conference in Los Angeles on Wednesday, Brian Chesky, Airbnb's chief executive, introduced the inaugural slate of icons listings. It was headlined by a

Starting point is 00:11:37 replica of The Floating House from Up, the 2009 animated Pixar film, Balloons, and All. With the help of a giant crane, the house will be suspended high in the air over the New Mexico Desert. Asked whether the house, which does not appear to be connected to the ground by pipes or wiring, had plumbing and electricity. The company said it was, quote, fully functional. Asked for details, the company said the house is, quote, connected to a generator and other utilities that will be disconnected and reconnected before and after flying. Other listings include a recreation of the mansion from the X-Men 97 cartoon built to appear two-dimensional and the Minneapolis house where Prince's character lived in the 1984 film Purple Rain.

Starting point is 00:12:17 Only a few people have been able to stay in Airbnb's previous fantastical listings, but the company said it expected roughly 4,000 customers to book stays in ICON's listings in 2024. Another 10 listings are slated to go up by the end of the year. Booking periods will vary. Dates for the uphouse are open through mid-September. With icons, Airbnb is hoping to capitalize on the success that earlier listings have achieved as promotional tools ready-made for Instagram selfies and eye-catching headlines, Mr. Chesky said. He pointed to the success of Airbnb. B's collaboration with Mattel last summer, which brought the Malibu Dreamhouse to life ahead of the release of the blockbuster Barbie film. The Buzz interested other brands. I think what they've seen is that these prior icons have become cultural sensations, quite literally. Mr. Chesky said in a phone

Starting point is 00:13:03 interview, the Barbie listing got two to three times as much press coverage as when Airbnb went public in 2020, Mr. Chesky said. The Shrek Swamp listing was viewed on the platform more than 200 million times, end quote. Finally, today, as ever, trials are good for shaking loose data points we'd never get otherwise. For example, the U.S. versus Google case has finally given us hard numbers on something we've always speculated about, i.e. Google paid Apple $20 billion in 2022 to be the default search engine in Safari. Using that year as a reference, that means that Google's payments constituted 17 and a half percent of Apple's operating income, quoting Bloomberg. The deal between the two tech giants is at the heart of the landmark case in which antitrust enforcers

Starting point is 00:13:53 alleged Google has illegally monopolized the market for online search and related advertising. The Justice Department and Google will offer closing arguments in the case Thursday and Friday, with a decision expected later this year. Google and Apple had hoped to shield the payment amount from public disclosure. At the trial last fall, Apple executives testified that Google paid billions without specifying a number. A Google witness later accidentally disclosed that Google pays 36% of the rest of the rest of the revenue it earns from search ads to Apple. The agreement with Apple is the most important of Google's default deal since it sets the search engine for the most used smartphone in the U.S.

Starting point is 00:14:27 Apple first agreed to use Google in the Safari browser in 2002 for free, but the companies later decided to share revenue made from search advertising. By May 2021, that translated to Google paying Apple more than $1 billion a month for its default status, prosecutors said in the filing. Microsoft, which operates competing search engine Bing, has repeatedly tried to entice Apple away from its relationship with Google. The company offered to share 90% of its advertising revenue with Apple to make Bing the default search in Safari. According to court documents, those figures also weren't previously disclosed. Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Sachin Nadella testified at the trial last year that the company was willing to make a number of concessions, including hiding the Bing

Starting point is 00:15:07 brand to persuade Apple to make the switch, which he said would be game-changing. Whomever they choose, they king-make, Nadella said of Apple, end quote. And one more nugget from the same trial, Microsoft invested in Open AI because they were afraid of falling behind Google in the AI race. Kevin Scott said he was, quote, very, very worried in a 2019 email to Sachin Adela, Bloomberg again. Scott, who also serves as Executive Vice President of Artificial Intelligence at Microsoft, observed that Google's search product had improved on competitive metrics because of the alphabet company's advancements in AI. The Microsoft executive wrote that he made a mistake by dismissing some of the earlier AI efforts of its competitors. We are multiple years behind the

Starting point is 00:15:50 competition in terms of machine learning scale, Scott said in the email. Significant portions of the message titled Thoughts on OpenAI remain redacted. Nadella endorsed Scott's email, forwarding it to chief financial officer Amy Hood and saying it explains, quote, why I want us to do this, end quote. Microsoft has subsequently poured more than $13 billion into its partnership and backing of OpenAI, tapping the startup's generative AI technology to enhance its Bing search service. edge internet browser, and most notably, integrate an AI co-pilot service into Windows. Nadella has elevated the AI race to a priority at the company, also recruiting DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Soliman to run its consumer AI business.

Starting point is 00:16:29 Nadella answered questions about the email when he testified at the trial last fall. The company's Open AI, quote, investment was not made with the narrow focus on just search, he said at the time, end quote. Nothing for you today. Talk to you tomorrow.

Tech Brew Ride Home - Thu. 05/02 – TikTok Can Jam Again

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