Tech Brew Ride Home - Thu. 07/14 – Is TikTok A Threat To Google Search?

Episode Date: July 14, 2022

Celsius files for bankruptcy. Tesla loses a key Autopilot exec. Netflix chooses Microsoft for it’s ads partnership. Could TikTok be a long-term problem for Google Search? And the reviews are in for the new Macbook Airs with M2 chips. Sponsors: Ahead Of Its Time podcast WorkCheck Podcast Links: Embattled crypto lender Celsius files for bankruptcy protection (CNBC) Inside Celsius: how one of crypto’s biggest lenders ground to a halt (Financial Times) Tesla AI leader Andrej Karpathy announces he’s leaving the company (CNBC) Netflix is partnering with Microsoft for its new ad-supported tier (The Verge) Google Cloud launches its first Arm-based VMs (TechCrunch) Google exec suggests Instagram and TikTok are eating into Google’s core products, Search and Maps (TechCrunch) APPLE’S NEW MACBOOK AIR M2 IS THE START OF A WHOLE NEW AIR-A (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, July 14th, 2022. I'm Brian McCullough today. Celsius files for bankruptcy. Tesla loses a key autopilot exec. Netflix chooses Microsoft for its ads partnership. Could TikTok be a long-term problem for Google search? And the reviews are in for the new

MacBook airs with M2 chips. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Celsius has officially filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in New York, declaring assets and liabilities between $1 billion and $10 billion, quoting CNBC. In a Wednesday statement, Celsius said it would look to stabilize its business by restructuring in a way, quote, that maximizes value for all stakeholders, end quote. Celceus said it has $167 million in cash on hand to support operations in the meantime. The Hoboken, New Jersey-based company made headlines a month ago after freezing customer accounts blaming extreme market conditions. The company has more than 100,000 creditors, which could include both customers and lending counterparties, according to the bankruptcy document.

Its largest unsecured claim comes in the form of $81 million from Cayman Islands-based Ferros Fund. The filing also lists billionaire FtX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried's trading firm Alameda Research as a creditor with a $12 million unsecured loan. Celsius was one of the largest players in the crypto lending space with more than $8 billion in loans to clients and almost $12 billion in assets under management as of May. Celsius said it had 1.7 million customers as of June and was competing with its interest-bearing accounts and yields as high as 17 percent, end quote. Bloomberg is reporting that Celsius has repaid more than $900 million in debt to various

defy platforms while its customer withdrawal freeze still continues on reaching a full month of nobody being able to get their money in or out at this point, thereby raising a legal debate on who should be paid first in, like this, and quoting the Financial Times. Interviews with a dozen former Celsius employees, as well as customers, investors, and industry executives revealed that the company was poorly positioned to ride out the market turbulence. Internal documents reviewed by the Financial Times backup these concerns, the company's own compliance department, warned of poor oversight, weak internal systems, and the possible misrepresentation of financial information. Together,

they suggest that a reckless pursuit of high returns, as well as losses from a string of bad bets contributed to the downfall. Celsius did not respond to a request for comment, end quote. Eyes raised emoji. Tesla's senior director of artificial intelligence, Andre Carpathie says he is leaving the company after about five years. Carpathie led the computer vision team for Tesla's autopilot, quoting CNBC. Carpathie's departure follows the closure of a Tesla office in San Mateo, California, where data annotation teams were helping to improve the company's driver assistance technology. According to records from the California Employment Development Department, 229 people were dismissed from that office. Carpathie, whose title was

Senior Director of AI, worked out of Tesla's former headquarters in Palo Alto, California, and reported directly to Elon Musk. It's been a great pleasure to help Tesla towards its goals over the last five years and a difficult decision to part ways, Carpathie wrote on Twitter. In that time, autopilot graduated from lanekeeping to city streets, and I look forward to seeing the exceptionally strong autopilot team continue that momentum, end quote. He added, I have no concrete plans for what's next, but look to spend more time revisiting my long-term passions around technical work in AI, open source, and education, end quote. CEO Elon Musk thanked Carpathie for his work in response, end quote. So is this another reaction to the whole return to the office order?

Also, apparently, Carpathie had been on sabbatical for the past few months. So I guess the otter thing to me about this story is Elon Musk allows sabbaticals. Netflix has named Microsoft as its, quote, global advertising technology and sales partner for its upcoming ads-supported streaming tier, rumored to arrive later this year. Bit of a surprise picking Microsoft, though, quoting The Verge. In a post on Microsoft's blog, the company says marketers will work with Microsoft to bring ads to the Netflix ecosystem. Today's announcement also endorses Microsoft's approach to privacy, which is built on protecting customers' information. Mikhail Parakin, Microsoft's president of

Web Experiences says, outside of Netflix, Microsoft is also reportedly looking into bringing ads to free-to-play Xbox games. Choosing Microsoft recalls a close relationship between the two for streaming launches. The first version of Watch instantly that streamed mostly B-movies, used Microsoft's silver light technology to deliver video instead of the more common flash player until it was replaced by HTML5, and the Xbox 360 was the first console with an HD Netflix streaming app, end quote. Google Cloud has announced a preview of Tao T2A, its first arm-based virtual machines, powered by Amper Ultra, with up to 48 VCPUs, each with up to 4 gigabytes of memory, quoting TechCrunch. It's been a long time coming, but Google Cloud today announced its first

ARM-based VMs following AWS with its Graviton instances and Azure, which also recently launched ARMVs. But while AWS built its own custom chips, Google Cloud is following Azure's lead here by using chips from Ampeer. These new virtual machines, which are now in preview, will join Google Cloud's line of tau VMs under the T2A moniker. This line launched almost exactly a year ago using AMD Milan processors to offer a better price performance ratio. The new chips will come in predefined skews with up to 48 VCPUs, each with up to 4 gigabytes of memory. The VMs will offer up to 32 GbPS of networking bandwidth and support the usual range of storage options available in the Google Cloud ecosystem. Google says these CPU specs will make these machines usable for a wide range

of workloads, including as web servers and for running containerized microservices, data logging applications and more. Like the AMD powered tau chips, Google sees these as its price performance optimized solution. A 32-cortal T2A VM in Google Cloud's U.S. Central One region will cost $1.23 per hour, for example. Users will be able to use the likes of RHEL, CentOS, Ubuntu, and Rocky Linux on these machines, in addition to Google's own container optimized OS for running containerized applications. At this point, ARRMS, has become table stakes for most OS and software vendors, which in turn also greatly enhances the usefulness of these VMs and those of Google's competitors, end quote.

I need to dig deeper into this, but a Google exec is suggesting Instagram and TikTok are eating into Google's core products, especially search and maps, quoting TechCrunch. Senior Vice President Prabhakar Raghavan, who runs Google's knowledge and information referenced the popular social apps in a broader conversation at Fortune's brainstorm tech conference about the future of Google's products and its use of AI. In a discussion about the evolution of search, he somewhat offhandedly noted that younger users were now often turning to apps like Instagram and TikTok instead of Google search or maps for discovery purposes. We keep learning over and over again that new internet users don't have the expectations and the mindset that

we have become accustomed to, Raghavan said, adding the queries they ask are completely different. These users don't tend to type in keywords, but rather look to discover content in new, more immersive ways, he said. In our studies, something like almost 40% of young people when they're looking for a place for lunch, they don't go to Google Maps or search, he continued. They go to TikTok or Instagram. That figure sounds a bit shocking. We have to admit, Google confirmed to us, his comments were based on internal research. That involved a survey of U.S. users ages 18 to 24. The data has not yet been made public, we're told, but may later be added to Google's competition site, along with other stats, like how 55% of product searches now begin on Amazon, for example.

While older internet users may not be able to wrap their minds around turning to a social video app to find a restaurant, this trend could cut into Google's core business of search and discovery over time, not to mention the ads sold against these sorts of queries. While younger users may eventually launch some sort of Maps app for navigation purposes, this data indicates they don't necessarily start their journey on Google anymore. That means all the work Google did over the years to organize, curate, and recommend various businesses, such as local restaurants or its creation of discovery tools inside Google Maps, could be lost on these younger internet users. Raghavon also explained how younger people were generally interested in more visually rich forms

of search and discovery, and that wasn't just limited to where to eat. He pointed out that the young people coming online today had never seen a paper map, but maps products have been designed to look like a paper map that's been stuck on a phone. This doesn't meet younger users' expectations and is the wrong experience to offer them, he said. We have to conjure up completely new expectations, and that takes altogether new technology underpinnings, Raghavan noted, end quote. So I've been used to believing that TikTok is endangering meta's business,

as we've discussed, maybe all social networking companies are threatened by TikTok, but could TikTok really be a long-term threat to Google as well? That's what I need to think about a bit. Though might this also tie into the whole apps? Apple ATT changes and controversy. Our friend Chris Mims recently had a piece suggesting that that whole super app concept from Asia is getting another hard look from a lot of folks, because if you can keep your users in your app, then you don't have to worry about third parties. All the data is first party in that scenario, and thus yours to do with whatever you want, which makes me

think. I'm sure there's a history on this, and I'm sure it was explored extensively, but why did Facebook never attempt to eat Google's lunch itself by building more robust search inside all of its apps. Finally, today, the reviews of the M2 MacBook Air are here, and as per usual, I'm going to go to The Verge, to quote from the intro and the conclusion of their review. Dan Seaford reminds you of that issue where the base model of the new MacBook Airs have slower SSD speeds, but he says this, quote, the M1 MacBook Air was and still is one of the most impressive laptops we've ever tested. Dieter Bone called it a triumph at the time.

That's quite a bar to live up to, and with all the changes Apple made to the M2 model, it's fair to wonder if this new model can best the prior version. For the most part, that answer is yes, but as they say, the devil's in the details, and there are quite a few details to note here. The new MacBook Air borrows a lot of its design and shape from the MacBook Pro 14 and 16 that debuted,

late last year. It's symmetrical and squared off with a more brutalist presentation than prior MacBook Air models. Yet it's remarkably thin, just a smidge over 11 millimeters, and that thinness is immediately noticeable when you open the lid and start typing on it. It's also noticed when you slot it into a bag or carry it around. The older MacBook Air's tapered shape had less visual weight and might have looked thinner, but the new model is indeed slimmer than its predecessor. It's also slightly lighter at 2.7 pounds versus the older models 2.8. That's not a huge difference, and the air is far from the lightest computer you can buy, but it does make it extremely portable and easy to tote around wherever I need it.

This new air is a beautiful computer, and I think the design will work well for the next five or possibly more years, or until Apple updates it again, unless you get the new midnight color. This new color is gorgeous out of the box with a deep blue-black finish that can change depending on the light, but as soon as you pick it up, it gets covered in greasy fingerprints that are at sure to clean off.

It really marrs what is otherwise a striking finish. Apples far from the only company to face this problem with dark aluminum. Razors' laptops have been fingerprint magnets for years, but it's enough of an issue that I wouldn't buy the midnight model. I've also had the opportunity to test the model in the silver-gold starlight color, and its surface stays fingerprint-free. If you only do photo or video editing occasionally, there's no good reason to trade away all the benefits that the air has

over the 13-inch M2 Pro, such as the better screen, better webcam, mag-safe, thinner and lighter weight, and so on, just to save a few seconds on tasks. If you are going to be relying on your computer for regular intensive creative work, however, such as professional video editing, raw photo editing, or even a lot of coding work, the air is probably not the right computer for you, and you should probably be looking at a MacBook Pro model, likely a 14 or 16-inch model. But for the vast majority of laptop users, the M2 Air more than suits their needs and comes in a lighter, quieter package than the MacBook Pro models. The new MacBook Air is a success on virtually every level. It's got a better screen,

thinner and lighter design, better speakers, a much improved webcam, an excellent keyboard and trackpad, more convenient charging, and excellent build quality. But that success comes at a cost, literally. And the performance and advancements over the M1 model aren't as stark as the design and feature improvements are. The M2 Air is a better choice for the vast majority of people over the 13-inch M2 Pro model, even though the pro has slightly better performance and longer battery life. The harder choice for many laptop buyers coming from older Intel MacBooks or even switching from Windows to Mac for the first time, will be choosing between getting similar performance and battery life with the M1 Air for a significantly lower cost, especially when you consider

how easy it is to find M1 models discounted, or paying more for the better quality of life features that come with the M2 model. I'd personally lean towards the M2 Air, the thinner design and better screen are very compelling for me, but only if I was willing to spend $1,500 or more to get one with at least 512 gigabytes of storage and perhaps 16 gigabytes of RAM. If that's just too much for your budget, then the M1 Air remains an excellent option, end quote. Nothing for you today, although I did put an order in for one of those new MacBook airs with the M2 chip. It says it's going to get here August 1st. I don't think we're doing a Twitter space tonight, but I'll tweet out later if we change our mind on that,

assuming we don't change our mind. Talk to you tomorrow.