Tech Brew Ride Home - Thu. 11/16 – Microsoft’s Ignite Conference

Episode Date: November 16, 2023

All of the big announcements from Microsoft’s development conference yesterday, including the debut of their own AI chips. YouTube is bringing AI to Shorts. Threads is kinda doing hashtags, though Chris Messina has thoughts. And the new UPS warehouse where the robots way outnumber the humans. Sponsors: Miro.com/podcast notion.com/ride Links: Microsoft rebrands Bing Chat to Copilot, to better compete with ChatGPT (The Verge) Microsoft officially launches Loop, its Notion competitor (The Verge) Microsoft Unveils Its First Custom-Designed AI, Cloud Chips (Bloomberg) YouTube Shorts Challenges TikTok With Music-Making AI for Creators (Wired) Threads starts testing hashtags…without the hash (TechCrunch) Robots to Outnumber People at UPS’s Massive New Warehouse (Bloomberg) 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, November 16th, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough today. All of the big announcements for Microsoft's development conference yesterday, including the debut of their own AI chips. YouTube is bringing AI to shorts. Threads is kind of sort of doing hashtags, though Chris Messina has some thoughts.

And the new UPS warehouse where the robots way outnumber the humans. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Microsoft had their big Ignite conference yesterday. And of course, AI took seven, stage. I'm going to run down sort of the consumery stuff first and then hit what may be the biggest news at the end. First, Microsoft is rebranding Bing Chat as Microsoft Copilot to better take on chat GPT, pitching Copilot as the free version and copilot for Microsoft 365 as the paid version, quoting the Verge. Microsoft launched its big AI push earlier this year as part of its Bing search engine integrating a chat GPT-like interface directly into its search results.

Now less than a year later, it's dropping the Bing Chat branding and moving to co-pilot, the new name for the chat interface you might have used in Bing, Microsoft Edge, and Windows 11. Microsoft initially talked up the Google Search competition for its AI ambitions earlier this year, but it now looks like it has its site set on ChatGPT instead. The Bing Chat rebranding comes just days after OpenAI revealed 100 million people are using chat GPT on a weekly basis. Despite a close partnership worth billions, Microsoft and OpenAI continue to compete for the same customers seeking out AI assistance, and Microsoft is clearly trying to position co-pilot as the option for consumers and businesses. BingChat and BingChat

Enterprise will now simply become co-pilot, explains Collette Stalbomber, general manager of Microsoft 365. The official name change comes just a couple of months after Microsoft picked co-pilot as its branding for its chatbot inside Windows 11. At the time, it wasn't clear that the Bing Chat branding would fully disappear, but it is today. End quote. Also announced, copilot Studio, a no-code tool that lets companies customize Microsoft 365 copilot, or integrate custom chat-GPT chatbots made with Open AI's GPT. Also announced, Windows AI Studio, which lets developers access and tweak AI models. There were various AI updates to teams like generative backgrounds and voice isolation and plans to integrate its mesh mixed reality platform in January 2024. Then there's Loop,

a Notion-like collaboration and productivity app in general availability on the web and mobile after a public preview in March, quoting the Verge. Loop lets you use flexible collaborative work spaces and pages to make it easier to cooperate on work. If you're familiar with Notion's interface at all, Loop looks and feels remarkably similar, right down to the ability to easily access a bunch of tools and formatting options by typing the forward slash key, which pulls up what Microsoft calls the insert menu. But because Loop is built by Microsoft, that means it has some useful integrations with other Microsoft software. For example, you can take parts of loop pages and share them across other Microsoft apps like Teams chat and Outlook, which seems like a handy way

to be able to work on things together without being forced to context switch between apps. Microsoft's AI-powered co-pilot assistant is also available within loop, which can help with things like drafting text and summarizing pages in the app, end quote. But finally, as promised, what was perhaps the biggest longer-term headline was, why be so dependent on Nvidia chips if you're Microsoft and have to go hat and hand to get your hands on the silicon you need? Microsoft is announcing the Maya 100 chip for Azure. Clients, already in testing for its Bing and Office AI tools, and Cobalt, a chip for servers launching in 2024, quoting Bloomberg. Microsoft unveiled its first homegrown artificial intelligence

chip and cloud computing processor in an attempt to take more control of its technology and ramp up its offerings in the increasingly competitive market for AI computing. The Maya 100 chip, announced that the company's annual Ignite Conference in Seattle on Wednesday, will provide Microsoft Azure cloud customers with a new way to develop and run AI programs that generate content. Microsoft is already testing the chip with its Bing and Office AI products, said Ronnie Burkhar, a vice president who oversees Azure's chip unit. Microsoft's main AI partner, chat GPT maker OpenAI, is also testing the processor. Both Maya and the server chip cobalt will debut in some Microsoft data centers early next year.

Microsoft's multi-year investment shows how critical chip, have become two gaining an edge in both AI and the cloud. Making them in-house lets companies ring performance and price benefits from the hardware. The initiative could also insulate Microsoft from becoming overly dependent on anyone's supplier, a vulnerability currently underscored by the industry-wide scramble for Nvidia's AI chips. Microsoft's push-in-processors follows similar moves by cloud rivals Amazon, acquiring a chip maker in 2015, selling services built on several kinds of cloud and AI chips. Google began letting customers use its AI accelerator processors in 2018. Microsoft will also sell customer services based on Nvidia's latest H-200 chip and advanced

microdevices MI300X processor, both intended for AI tasks sometime next year. Still, the industry seems to be embarking on a lasting shift toward in-house chips. This transition is particularly bad news for Intel, whose own AI chip efforts are running behind. Meanwhile, with Cobalt, Microsoft is joining efforts by Amazon and AMD to grab share in the server chip market, which Intel currently dominates. Maya is designed to help AI systems more quickly process the massive amounts of data required to do such tasks as recognized speech and images. Azure Cobalt is a central processing unit that will come with 128 computing cores or many processors, putting it in the same league as products from Intel and AMD. The more cores, the better, because they can quickly. divide work into small tasks and do them all at once. Cobalt also uses arm holdings designs,

which proponents say are inherently more efficient because they were developed from designs used in battery-powered devices like smartphones. Both chips will be manufactured by TSMC, end quote. YouTube is now letting some shorts creators test Dreamtrak, a new deep mind-powered AI tool to generate and remix music in the style of nine different artists. Quoting, wired. To whip up a 30-second clip with Dreamtrak, a creator just has to enter a prompt, such as a ballad about how opposites attract, upbeat acoustic, then select which artists the song should be styled on. The new AI capabilities might help Google Lur users from TikTok, where AI tools for adding visual or audio effects are hugely popular.

YouTube says it is looking into how artists whose work helped train its music-generating algorithms will receive a cut of future ad revenue generated by videos featuring AI-generated audio. That would represent a test of a novel way for artists to profit from AI built-in part on their work. Dreamtrak uses an AI algorithm called Lyria, developed by Google DeepMind, the unit charged with keeping the company at the cutting edge of AI. YouTube's global head of music, veteran music mogul Lyre Cohen, who helped launch the careers of artists including Public Enemy, run DMC and the BC Boys told Wired on Wednesday that he was blown away after hearing a demo of its output at Google Deep Mind's London headquarters in May. I knew we not only had something unique and

special, but something that I believed that the music industry would dig and want to work with, Cohen says. Cohen says the seven artists who opted to let Dream Track replicate their styles did so out of a desire to embrace generative AI on their terms. Our partners, many of whom lived the Napster days, didn't want to play defense. They wanted to play offense. And they were excited about the possibilities, he says. In August, YouTube announced that it was creating an incubator to engage with artists on ways of using generative AI, end quote. Threads is testing tags, a way of categorizing posts similar to hashtags without the hashtag symbol being visible, initially in Australia and other countries starting soon, quoting TechCrunch.

Instagram's Threads app has been duping Twitter slash X in a number of ways, And today it's adding one more feature that's been core to the Twitter experience for years. Hashtags. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that threads will begin testing the ability to tag topics on threads to categorize posts by interest or theme. Though users will call up the tags feature using the hashtag symbol, it won't actually display the hashtag symbol when the tags are shown. Instead, the tags will appear as clickable blue links. The test will initially begin in Australia and the threads team will then iterate on the experience based on user features. feedback, the company tells TechCrunch. In his announcement, Zuckerberg wrote that more countries

will be able to test the tag soon. To use the new tags, you'll tap a new hashtag button in the threads app or type the symbol using your keyboard followed by text. As you start typing, various tags will appear to help you auto-complete your tag or you can create a new tag from scratch. After you choose the tag and publish your post, anyone can click on the tag to see other related posts on the same topic. In other words, they work just like Twitter's hashtags but are a more elegant as they drop the symbol as the prefix. Also, unlike X, threads will only allow one tag on a post at a time, a decision the company likely made to cut down on spam. Often, spammers will stuff a post with many popular and trending tags to get their posts discovered in search.

Beyond the spam factor, adding multiple tags to a post has become a somewhat cringy thing to do otherwise, as it appears to be attention-seeking behavior. Still, this limitation could be a hindrance at times, as users will want to find posts about events that don't have a single define hashtag or where multiple hashtags are being used to discuss the topic, like hashtag Apple Event and its variations, or they may want to combine hashtags like hashtag Apple Event and hashtag VisionOS, for example, to narrow down on topics being discussed. In the current iteration of Threads tags, they'll have to pick only one tag. The feature was earlier spotted in development, but there has been much discussion as to whether or not hashtags have a place in the future of social networking, as some see them as a relic from older times.

The idea for the hashtag was proposed by tech veteran Chris Messina in a 2007 tweet as a way to group topics, trends, and events. Twitter eventually adopted the feature in the product, and then other social media platforms did the same. But with threads, meta has the ability to rethink existing social conventions and experiment with how they may need to evolve to meet the needs of modern web users. Messina himself is not thrilled with the change. Snarked Messina in a post on threads. This is wild. Threads is actively repressing, suppressing the Octothorpe, also known as the hashtag. Why not remove the dollar sign prefix in front of numbers two?

We know it's a number. We don't need that context. It's inferred, end quote. Actually, Chris is traveling right now. Otherwise, I'd have audio from him for his thoughts on this. But he also threaded, quote, If threads federates, it'll be on a protocol that I started, originally called activity streams and now matured into activity pub. I don't need hashtags on threads to satisfy my ego. I really don't. I want a replacement for Twitter.

And hashtags were essential to how I used Twitter. Other people used hashtags effectively on Twitter, too. That's why I am advocating for unadulterated hashtags on threads, because they should belong as much as I'm trying to belong here to. hashtag I demand hashtags, end quote. Between you and me, if I were meta, I'd full-on claim hashtags. I'd hire Chris to be the face of the hashtag movement. And then I do a big marketing and PR push with him that is like, look, hashtags have left Twitter. They now live on threads. Instead of trying to do their own thing or reinvent the wheel and halfway do hashtags,

they should just steal them. And then make a show about how what was good about Twitter has now moved. on to threads. Finally, today, UPS has announced a new $79 million 20-acre facility near Louisville, set to be staffed by over 3,000 robots handling manual tasks and only around 200 human workers helping them. Quoting Bloomberg, United Parcel Service just opened its largest warehouse, a sweeping 20-acre facility on the outskirts of Louisville, Kentucky. But don't expect the break room to get too crowded. the package handling giant plans to fill the $79 million facility with more than 3,000 robots by the end of next year to handle tasks like lifting and reduce the need for manual labor.

That level of automation means UBS can run the warehouse with about 200 workers, which are expected to increase over time. It's the linchpin of our strategy, Bill Seward, president of UPS supply chain solutions, said of the automated space. it's important to be able to deliver best-in-class cost and best-in-class service for your customers. Large operators, including UPS and GXO Logistics, are using the draw of automation to grab market share from companies that run older facilities and count more on human workers. The robots increase the speed and accuracy of processing orders, keep better track of inventory, and save space by fetching products that are stacked higher in the building,

Seward said. Sales at UPS's logistics business, have climbed 11% in the first nine months of this year, even as overall sales for supply chain solutions, which also includes freight forwarding and truck brokerage, fell more than 22% amid a cargo slump. Seward said the logistics business has twice the operating margin as its typical competitors, but didn't provide a number. UPS declined to say how many fewer workers are needed in an automated facility compared with a more manual one. Kentucky's Governor Andy Beshear's administration said the facility could create 500 distribution and logistics jobs. The robots help increase worker retention by

about 30% and reduce injuries from lifting heavy objects and repetitive motion by 40%, Seward said. The warehouse workers are separate from UPS's main small package delivery business and our non-union employees. They're performing extremely effectively because the automated facilities have very high service and speed performance, he said, end quote. Nothing for you today. Talk to you tomorrow. Oh, boo-hoo.