Tech Brew Ride Home - Thu. 09/07 – And Now A Drone Breakthrough?

Episode Date: September 7, 2023

Chrome is getting a new coat of paint. China is increasingly banning iPhones. Are drones about to have a breakthrough moment just like self-driving cars? Apple is increasingly serious about AI. And in a way, are we seeing the first major musical artist of the AI era emerging? Sponsors: Netsuite.com/ride Links: Chrome is about to look a bit different (The Verge) China Seeks to Broaden iPhone Ban to State Firms, Agencies (Bloomberg) FAA Clears Drones for Longer Flights, Opening Door to Deliveries (Bloomberg) Apple Boosts Spending to Develop Conversational AI (The Information) Vitalik Buterin co-authors paper on regulation-friendly Tornado Cash alternative (The Block) OpenAI to Host First Developer Conference in San Francisco (Bloomberg) Ghostwriter Returns With an A.I. Travis Scott Song, and Industry Allies (NYTimes) 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 TechMame right home for Thursday, September 7th, 2023. I'm Brian McCullough today. Chrome is getting a new coat of paint. China is increasingly banning iPhones. Are drones about to have a breakthrough moment just like self-driving cars have? Apple is increasingly serious about AI. And in a way, are we seeing the first major musical artist of the AI era emerging? Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Your web browser is about to look a little bit different because Google plans to update Chrome to incorporate its material you design language in coming weeks, including refreshed icons and new color palettes. Quoting the verge. You can get an early peek at the new look in the image and gif below.

To me, the most noticeable change is that things look a bit more rounded, like the new corners near the top of the window. Chrome itself isn't the only thing that's getting a new look, as Google is updating the interface for the Chrome Web Store with some Material U design flare and rounded corners as well. Those changes are already live in public preview as spotted by 9 to 5 Google last week, and I've made an image slider comparing the old style to the new one below. I think the new store looks much better. Google is also making some updates to its safe browsing tools in Chrome to help keep you safe as you're browsing the web when you navigate to a potentially dangerous site. Google currently checks that site against a list that's stored locally

and updated every 30 to 60 minutes. But in the coming weeks, it will instead check sites against Google's list of bad sites in real time, a change that could stop you from going to a malicious site that was created only minutes before. By shortening the time between identification and prevention of threats, we expect to see 25% improved protection from malware and fishing threats, Google says, end quote. I didn't get to this yesterday, but China is apparently increasingly banning the use of iPhones and other foreign branded devices for work in that country, or even bringing those devices into the office if you work in a sensitive place. The bans are coming initially for workers in central government agencies, but this seems to be expanding. Quoting Bloom,

Berg. Several agencies have begun instructing staff not to bring their iPhones to work, people familiar with the matter said, affirming a previous report from the Wall Street Journal. In addition, Beijing intends to extend that restriction far more broadly to a plethora of state-owned enterprises and other government-controlled organizations, the people said, asking not to be identified discussing a sensitive matter. If Beijing goes ahead, the unprecedented blockade will be the culmination of a year-long effort to root out foreign technology use in sensitive environments, coinciding with Beijing's effort to reduce its reliance on American software and circuitry. It threatens to erode Apple's position in a market that yields

about a fifth of its revenue and from where it makes the majority of the world's iPhones through sprawling factories that employ millions of Chinese. It's unclear how many companies or agencies could eventually adopt restrictions on personal devices, and there's been no formal or written injunction as yet, the people said. State firms or organizations will likely vary in how strictly they enforce such bans, with some forbidding Apple devices from the workplace, while others could bar employees from using them entirely. Chinese state firms like oil giant PetroChina employ millions and control vast swaths of a centrally planned economy. Given Apple's relationship with Beijing and its importance to the economy, it, quote, has historically been viewed as relatively safe in China from government restrictions.

Key Bank Capital Markets analyst Brandon Nispell said in a report Wednesday, is the government changing its stance, end quote. Shares fell 2.8% in pre-market trading for Apple on Thursday following a 3.6% decline on Wednesday in New York. Apple's biggest single day dropped since August 4th. ST Microelectronics NV also declined on Thursday. The company enjoys widespread popularity in China, despite rising resentment of American efforts to contain the Asian country's technology industry, Apple's iPhones are among the nation's bestsellers and are common in both the government and private sector, end quote. Yeah, you think, oh, the government doesn't want iPhones and offices big deal. Well, given that the government is basically everything in China, and if the bans extend to

anyone doing business with the government in China. That's a big segment of the market. That's why Apple's stock price has been plunging. We've been talking about how maybe quietly there's been a threshold passing moment happening for self-driving cars recently. Today's Oddlots podcast was about this very thing, self-driving having a breakthrough. But what if drone delivery, another long-promised and hyped technology is about to have a moment as well? The FAA has approved UPS, U.S. U. avionics and Phoenix Air Unmanned to fly drones beyond operators' line of sight, which is a crucial key step toward making widespread package delivery by drone, a reality. Quoting the verge. This is the kind of move that opens the door for drone delivery companies like Wing, FedEx, and Zip

to deliver packages across a wider area and service more customers. UPS Flight Forward, a UPS subsidiary focused on drone delivery, can now deliver small packages beyond the visual line of sight without spotters on the ground monitoring the route and skies for other aircraft using Matternet M2 drones. The FAA also announced authorizations for two other companies to fly beyond site for commercial purposes. That includes Uavionics Corp and last week Infrastructure Inspection Company Phoenix Air Unmanned. UPS first received government approval to operate its drone service in 2019. The same year, the FAA authorized Alphabet's wing service to operate commercially. The company first focused on building a drone delivery network for U.S. hospital campuses. The news comes just a few days after Walmart announced

its partnering with Wing to make deliveries in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. So far, Walmart has already made over 10,000 deliveries across seven states via its partners drone-up, flight tracks, and zipline. The new partnership will allow the retailer to deliver to an extra 60,000 homes. Yet not all drone delivery programs have had a smooth go of things like Amazon's drone delivery service Prime Air. In May, the service had only made 100 deliveries, in California and Texas, the two locations it's operating. It's not clear what that number is now, but that's well behind Amazon's previous projection that it'd complete 10,000 deliveries to customers via drone by the end of 2023, end quote. From the, it would be odd if they weren't doing this

file, the information says that Apple's budget for training AI is now in the millions of dollars per day. Its conversational AI team foundation models has around 16 people led by roaming parents. Quote, the moves come four years after Apple's head of AI, John G.N. Andrea, authorized the formation of a team to develop conversational AI, known as large language models, before the technology became a focus of the software industry, according to people with knowledge of the team. That move now seems prescient following the launch last fall of chat GPT, a chatbot that catalyzed a boom in language models. Although GNandrea has repeatedly expressed skepticism to colleagues about the potential usefulness of chatbots powered by AI language.

models, the fact that Apple wasn't completely unprepared for the language model boom, could be considered an accomplishment and is the result of changes he made to the company's software research culture, several colleagues said. The team remains small, numbering around 16 people, but the budget for training Apple's most advanced models has grown to millions of dollars per day, one of the people said. For comparison, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, which created ChatGPT, has said it costs more than $100 million to train GPT for its most advanced version of the software powering the chatbot over a period of several months. The Foundation Models team at Apple plays a similar role to that of AI teams at companies such as Google and Facebook, where researchers produce

the AI models and other groups then implement these models in the company's products. The team has developed several advanced models. The company is testing internally. One Apple Chatbot based on an LLM could eventually interact with customers who use AppleCare, the company's after-sales service for warranty and technical support, said a person with direct knowledge of its development. Separately, the Siri team plans to incorporate language models to let users of the voice assistant automate complex tasks in ways they currently cannot, such as the aforementioned example of creating and sending a GIF with a simple command. This effort hasn't been previously reported. The new capability is related to Apple's shortcuts app, which lets users manually program a series of

actions using different apps, and is expected to be released alongside a new version of the iPhone's operating system next year. Google has similarly been working to upgrade. its voice assistant with language model software that can understand and handle more complex tasks, set a person with knowledge of the situation. People on the Apple team believe its most advanced language model, Ajax GPT, has capabilities exceeding those of OpenAI's GPT 3.5, the LLM that powered the initial version of chat GPT, according to the person. OpenAI has since launched a set of models that are significantly more powerful, end quote. Ethereum creator Vitalik Buteran has co-authored a paper on Privacy Pool

a blockchain protocol aiming to verify the legality of user funds without revealing a full transaction history. Quoting the block, with what could be a potential alternative to the troubled tornado cash, the paper posits that financial privacy can coexist with regulation. The authors describe the new platform as, quote, a novel smart contract-based privacy enhancing protocol designed to enhance transactional privacy on blockchains. Privacy pools aims to leverage zero knowledge proofs to determine whether user funds originated from lawful sources without revealing the complete transaction history. The primary goal of the project is to create what the authors describe as a separating equilibrium. Simply put, the system aims to filter out funds linked to criminal activities,

while striving to find a balance between privacy and regulatory requirements. The core idea of the proposal is to allow users to publish a zero-knowledge proof, demonstrating that their funds do not originate from known unlawful sources without publicly revealing their entire transaction graph. read the paper's abstract. The authors argued that financial privacy and regulation can coexist. They cited Tornado Cash as a useful privacy tool, but acknowledged its susceptibility to misuse by illicit actors. Tornado Cash faced legal difficulties last year over allegations that it facilitated transactions for the North Korea-linked Hacking Group Lazarus.

In August 2022, Tornado Cash was blacklisted by the U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control due to its alleged involvement in illicit activities, end quote. Mark your calendars, I guess. OpenAI has announced its first developer conference, OpenAI Dev Day. It's going to happen November 6th in San Francisco, though there are plans to live stream a keynote presentation. Quoting Bloomberg. In a blog post Wednesday, the AI startup said it will hold the event OpenAI Dev Day in San Francisco November 6. The company said it will host hundreds of developers from around the world, offering sessions with its technical staff and giving attendees a chance to look at the new tools it is building. OpenAI also plans to live stream a keynote presentation. With the event, OpenAI joins a long list of larger tech firms that host developer events

to deepen ties with third-party app makers and also show off their product pipeline to a broader audience. OpenAI said more than 2 million developers use its GPD4, GPD3.5, Dali, and Whisper AI models. Both GPT4 and GPT3.5 are used to operate chat GPT. The company first rolled out its application programming interface, which developers can use to add its AI models to their apps in 2020. We're looking forward to showing our latest work to enable developers to build new things, Open AI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman said in the blog post, end quote. Finally today, Ghost Rider, the anonymous creator who used AI to mimic Drake and the weekend,

has apparently been meeting with record labels and Grammy organizers, and has released a new song, quoting the New York Times. Earlier this year, when the anonymous musical creator known as Ghost Rider released an unauthorized track that used artificial intelligence voice effects to mimic the pop superstars Drake in the weekend, the fallout was immediate and far-reaching. The mostly original song, Heart on My Sleeve, was promptly removed from official streaming services, even as experts acknowledged that its use of AI fell into a rapidly expanding legal gray area. But while the major record labels sought to protect their intellectual property and scrambled to prepare

for disruptions to come, the track also proliferated on social media, earning millions of listens and helping to inspire a wave of similarly novel compositions. Throughout the aftermath, Ghostwriters stayed silent, at least in public. the scenes, however, the shadowy act and its team were making overtures to the very industry figures heart on my sleeve had unnerved. In the months since, those behind the project have met with record labels, tech leaders, music platforms, and artists about how to best harness the power of AI, including at a virtual roundtable discussion this summer organized by the recording Academy, the organization behind the Grammy Awards. On Tuesday, Ghost Rider returned with a new

track titled Whiplash, this time using AI vocal filters to sound like the rapper's Travis Scott and 21 Savage, and deliver a message to the industry. Me and writer raise a toast, the AI version of 21 Savage Raps, trying to shadow ban my boy, but you can't kill a ghost. The song, which was posted to social media platforms like TikTok and X, formerly known as Twitter, instead of Spotify and other proper streaming services, came accompanied by a statement that called on both Scott and 21 Savage to collaborate on an official release. The future of music is here.

Artists now have the ability to let their voice work for them without lifting a finger, Ghost Writer wrote, If you're down to put it out, I will clearly label it as AI and I'll direct royalties to you. Respect either way, end quote. Representatives for Scott and 21 Savage did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A representative for Ghost Writer who requested anonymity to not expose those behind the project, acknowledging that much of its marketing power comes from its mystery, confirm that Whiplash, like Heart on My Sleeve, was an original composition written and recorded by humans.

Ghost Writer attempted to match the content, delivery, tone, and phrasing of the established stars, before using AI components. They added that the Ghost Rider team had recently submitted Hard on My Sleeve for Grammy Awards in two categories at next year's ceremony, best rap song and song of the year, both of which are awarded to A-Tracks writers.

As far as the creative side, it's absolutely eligible because it was written by a human, said Mason of the Recording Academy, end quote. Because of that recent mini-series on the films of Park Chanwuk by the boys over at the Blank Check podcast, I was inspired over vacation last week

to finally dive into the only TV show that that Auteur has ever done, the John Le Carre spy thriller adaptation Little Drummer Girl. And let me tell you, I was a fan of Florence Pugh before, not saying I wasn't a fan, but man alive. I couldn't be more of a fan now. That is the best performance by any actor I've seen in years. Little Drummer Girl, check it out. Talk to you tomorrow.