Tech Brew Ride Home - Thu. 05/09 – The Weird Apple Ad Backlash

Episode Date: May 9, 2024

AlphaFold 3 is a new AI model to predict interactions and structures of proteins, the better to cure diseases and create medicine with. More cuts in Microsoft gaming. The community backlash erupting over at Stack Overflow. And that really weirdly tone deaf Apple commercial that has everyone so upset. Links: Google DeepMind unveils AI model for living cells (FT) Microsoft’s Xbox Is Planning More Cuts After Studio Closings (Bloomberg) Stack Overflow bans users en masse for rebelling against OpenAI partnership — users banned for deleting answers to prevent them being used to train ChatGPT (TomsHardware) Alphabet Progressing in Talks to Buy HubSpot, Sources Say (Bloomberg) That Weird Apple Ad "Crush!" 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, May 9th, 2024. I'm Brian McCullough today. Alpha Fold 3 is a new AI model to predict interactions and structures of proteins

the better to cure diseases and create medicine with. More cuts in Microsoft gaming, the community backlash erupting over at Stack Overflow, and that really weirdly tone-deaf Apple commercial that has everybody up in arms. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Again, this is one of those headlines that may be 100 years down the road. we will look back on as being more important than any other headline I read this year. Who knows? Google and DeepMind and Isomorphic Labs have detailed AlphaFold 3, an AI model to predict interactions and structures of proteins, DNA, RNA, and more, beating many other top models.

Quoting the FT. Google DeepMind has unveiled an artificial intelligence model of life's building blocks and their interactions within cells, boosting efforts to unlock secrets of disease and fine treatments for conditions such as cancer. Alpha Fold 3, the third generation of technology initially developed in 2018, gives the most sophisticated forecast yet of how tiny biological structures look and mingle, according to a paper published in Nature on Wednesday. The model developed with the Deep Mind Drug Discovery Spinoff Isomorphic Labs is the latest landmark in the quest to apply the predictive power of AI to improve understanding of life's miniature mechanisms and how they go wrong. Biology is a dynamic system, and you have to understand how properties of biology emerge through

the interactions between different molecules and the cells, said Sir Demis Haseibis, DeepMind's chief executive and co-founder. And you can think of AlphaFold 3 as our first big step towards that. The technological update expands its biological purview beyond the proteins it has previously analyzed, offering a rich review of the biochemical networks that make organisms function. The model covers the genetic code, DNA, and RNA, as well as the proteins that ligands, molecules that bind to others and can be important markers of disease. AlphaFold 3's capabilities open up fresh opportunities for researchers to speedily identify potential new drug molecules, said Max Jaderberg, Isomorphic Labs' chief AI officer.

Isomorphic Labs has partnerships with pharmaceutical companies, Eli Lilly, and Novartis. That allows our scientists, our drug designers, to create and test hypotheses at the atomic level and then within seconds produce highly accurate structure predictions with AlphaFold 3, Jaderberg said. This is compared to the months or even years it might take to do this experimentally. AlphaFold 3 demonstrates, quote, significantly improved predictive accuracy over many existing specialized tools, including those based on its own predecessors, the paper says. It shows that developing the right AI deep learning frameworks can greatly reduce the amount of data needed to obtain biologically relevant performance, the research ads.

We're seeing really incredible improvements that we think are going to unlock a lot of new science, said John Jumper, DeepMind's AlphaFold team leader, who cited the potential of the technique to improve knowledge of plant biology and thus food security. We're already starting to see biologists and early testers use this to understand how the cell works and start to think about how it might go wrong when in disease states, end quote. The molecules AlphaFold 3 suggests will still need to be validated experimentally and go through the normal process of clinical trials. DeepMind says it is making the majority of AlphaFold 3's functionality available through a server that will be free to access for academic non-commercial users, end quote. In a separate interview, Demeisa Sebas said AI breakthroughs in biology research could be a $100 billion plus business commercialized via DeepMind's spin-out isomorphic labs.

So, you know, there's that. Sources say Microsoft plans more cuts after closing several game studios as we discussed yesterday, as the massive activist. acquisition has ramped up scrutiny on the Xbox Division, quoting Bloomberg. The sudden closure of several video game studios at Microsoft's Xbox Division was the result of a widespread cost-cutting initiative that still isn't finished. This week, Xbox began offering voluntary severance agreements to producers, quality assurance testers, and other staff at Xenamax, which it purchased in 2020 for $7.5 billion, according to people familiar with the company's plans. Others across the Xbox organization have been told that more cuts are on the way.

employees were shocked by the unexpected shuttering Tuesday of three Xbox subsidiaries and the absorption of a fourth. The closures included Tokyo-based Tango GameWorks, which last year released the critically acclaimed action game Hi-Fi Rush. Tango was in the process of pitching a sequel, said the people who asked not to be identified discussing non-public information. During a town hall with Zenamex staff on Wednesday morning, Xbox President Matt Booty praised Hi-Fi Rush but did not specify why the company had shut down the development studio behind it, according to three people who were in attendance. Speaking about the closures more broadly, Booty said that the company's studios had been spread too thin, like, quote, peanut butter on bread,

and that leaders across the division had felt understaffed. They decided to close these studios to free up resources elsewhere, he said. Booty added that the shutdown of subsidiary Arcane Austin, the longtime developer of games such as Prey, was not connected to the performance of its new multiplayer game Redfall, a critical and commercial flop. Before its closure, Arcane had been looking to return to its roots by pitching a new single-player immersive sim game, such as a new entry in the Dissonored series, according to the people familiar. Jill Braff, head of Zanemak Studios, said in the town hall that she hoped the reorganization would allow the division which also develops Fallout and Doom to put more focus on fewer

projects. It's hard to support nine studios all across the world with a lean central team with an ever-growing plate of things to do, she said, according to audio of the meeting reviewed by Bloomberg, end quote. Some stack overflow users say their accounts were suspended after they attempted to alter their posts in protest of its open AI partnership to supply data for AI. There has been a brewing backlash as devs have been like, why am I giving advice to other devs on Stack Overflow, how to solve coding problems, you know, just for those solutions to go into AI training to potentially make my coding job redundant. I smell a Reddit-style community backlash brewing here.

businesses are great until the community realizes they are the ones owned. Quoting Tom's hardware. Stack Overflow, a legendary internet forum for programmers and developers is coming under heavy fire from its users after it announced it was partnering with OpenAI to scrub the site's forum posts to train chat GPT. Many users are removing or editing their questions and answers to prevent them from being used to train AI decisions which have been punished with bans from the site's moderators. Stack Overflow user Ben posted Massadon about his experience, editing his most successful answers to try to avoid having his work stolen by OpenAI. Ben continues in his thread, The Moderator Crackdown is just a reminder that

anything you post on any of these platforms can and will be used for profit. It's just a matter of time until all your messages on Discord, Twitter, etc. are scraped, fed into a model, and sold back to you, end quote. Harsh words, but words that ring true with fellow Stack Overflow users who are joining the post protest. Users are also asking, why chat GPT could not simply share the source of the answers it will dispense in this new partnership, both citing its sources and adding credibility to the tool. Of course, this would reveal how the sausage of LLMs is made and would not look like the shiny, super smart, generative AI assistant of the future promised to users and investors. Site moderators preventing high popularity posts from being deleted

is legally above board. Angry users claim they are enabled to delete their own content from the site through the right to forget, a common name for a legal right most effectively codified into law through the EU's GDPR. Among other things, the Act protects the ability of the consumer to delete their own data from a website and have data about them removed upon request. However, Stack Overflow's terms of service contains a clause carving out Stack Overflow's irrevocable ownership of all content subscribers provide to the site. Users who disagree with having their content scraped by ChatGPT are particularly outraged by Stackervo Stack Overflow's rapid flip-flop on its policy concerning generative AI. For years, the site had a standing policy that prevented the use of generative AI in writing or re-wording any questions or answers posted.

Moderators were allowed and encouraged to use AI detection software when reviewing posts. Beginning last week, however, the company began a rapid about face in its public policy towards AI. Stack Overflow's CEO spent his quarterly blog post praising the merits of generative AI saying, the rise of Gen AI is a big opportunity for Stack. Moderators were quickly and somewhat informally instructed to cease removal of AI-generated questions and answers on the forum. Stack is not alone in reversing a principled stance on AI for profit. Valve also silently removed its AI art ban on Steam, allowing over 1,000 AI-powered games

to flood the storefront. Stack Overflows Partnership with OpenAI also follows the LLM company's recent push for increased partnerships and marquee deals, including their major announcement of a $100 billion data center to be built with Microsoft, end quote. I don't remember if I mentioned this as a possibility before, but real quick to put this on your radar, sources say Alphabet has been progressing in talks to acquire marketing software provider HubSpot has even discussed terms. HubSpot has a $30 billion market cap, so that would be a pretty big deal. Quoting Bloomberg, HubSpot shares have gained about 32% over the past 12 months,

giving the company a market value of $30 billion, the stock jumped as much as 6% in pre-market U.S. trading Thursday. The potential deal would rank among the biggest takeovers this year. Buying HubSpot, a customer relationship management company that focuses on smaller businesses, would fill a gap that could help Alphabet compete with other players in that market, such as Microsoft, Oracle, and Salesforce. Reuters reported last month that Alphabet had met with bankers to discuss the possibility of an offer for Cambridge, Massachusetts-based HubSpot, end quote.

Finally today, this is not actually a really newsy story, but if you've been on social media at all over the last, I don't know, 32, 36 hours, you'll know that Apple released a commercial for the new iPads where they put a bunch of things in a vice and smush them all down. And the idea was that, voila, it produced the new iPads, which again are the thinnest things ever. I guess Apple was sort of saying, look, musical instruments, games, everything is in. in this one device. I have a link to the video if you haven't seen it. Now, this whole thing would probably have watched over me. If I had actually stopped to watch the commercial, I probably wouldn't have thought twice about it. I'm not sure I notice commercials much, but lots of people notice this one, and they pretty universally hated it. At first, I was like, come on, online outrage, knee-jerk instincts have gone too far, but when I saw what people were objecting to,

when I actually watched the video in light of their objections, kind of understood. I mean, it's a weirdly agro-commercial. Cute little toy things get crushed so that their eyes literally pop out. It's almost like the end of Toy Story 3. Let me give you a sampling of some of the reactions. Here's Kate Dighton. This ad perfectly encapsulates the insight that people think technology is killing everything we ever found joy in, and then presents that as a good thing. I haven't seen such a visceral backlash to a spot in a long time. Jared Sexton. Apple has unintentionally made one of the most fitting and revealing advertisements of the modern era. My God, this horror perfectly encapsulates the feeling of life as the powerful wreck,

escalatingly careless and clueless destruction. Bucco Capital did that Don Draper commercial pitch meme where, on the presentation board it reads, Crush society's symbols of creativity into a cold and personal slab of technology. Here's Tom Goodwin. If Samsung ever did this, people would destroy them, crushing things we love, things we played with to produce an identical black box. Showing expression, nostalgia, craft being destroyed at this pivotal moment in AI couldn't be any more tone-deaf. Lots of people made the comparison to the famous 1984 Macintosh commercial. Here's James Clark. Apple's new Crush ad,

let's call it 2024, is a visceral and metaphorical bookend to the 1984 ad. 1984, monochrome, conformist industrial world exploded by colorful, vibrant human. 2024, colorful, vibrant humanity is crushed by monochrome conformist industrial press, end quote. The actor Hugh Grant weighed in negatively. Pat and Oswald said this, quote, what kind of feeling do we want for this ad? The absolute annihilation of all artistic tactile human experience. Rewatch the opening of T2 Judgment Day, end quote. That's my observation. Like, as I said, when you actually watch it, It's just off. The tone is just off. It's weirdly cruel. Even if I don't share some of the neoludite reactions

of some people who are offended, it just makes you feel bad. The exact opposite of what Apple wants us to feel, how their commercials typically operate joy at the freedom that their tools could provide us. Two more points from me. Number one, this had to go through how many hundreds of people to make it to release from the ad agency to Apple's PR and marketing teams to the people who wrote and shot the thing to the C-suite. And no one, not a single person was like, a small note, maybe dial back the agro just a tad? How is that possible? I guess a bad scenario would be people did actually voice objections and were ignored, or maybe a worse scenario would be people didn't feel like they could even speak up. But man, I've rarely seen an ad turn off a

core customer base so viscerally so fast. Second point. Can we stop making everything thinner and lighter? We've reached optimal thin, in my opinion. I don't want my iPad or my iPhone or frankly my laptop any thinner. Lighter is fine, but that would require Apple to use plastic instead of high-end metals and glass, and, you know, that's against their high-end product ethos. So that's not going to happen. But the obsession with thin is how we got those terrible MacBook keyboards. And it's how Apple made this dumb ad. What's the big? thing about our new product that we can sell people on. It's the thinnest ever. Really? That's what we're down to, Apple, but also the rest of the gadget industry. I'm here to tell you we're mostly over thin.

We've gone to peak thin. Move on to something else. Thin doesn't move the needle anymore. You know what would? Longer battery life. You've gotten us all used to a certain battery expectation by eking out performance and power consumption gains, but every time you do gain even a sliver of a percentage of efficiency, you use that to make things thinner by another sliver. Stop it. Give us longer battery life, even if that makes things go in the opposite direction. I'd take a slightly thicker and heavier phone if I could get two days out of a charge, maybe? I don't know. This doesn't hold for everything. Wearables should still be thinner and lighter, but for things like phones, laptops, and tablets, all take slightly thicker and heavier for battery and performance gains

at this point? Instead of thinner and lighter, what if the mantra was thicker and heavier, slightly? Although maybe the tagline, thicker and heavier could use some work. Rant delivered, so nothing further for you. Talk to you tomorrow.