Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 01/03 – Eventually, CES Comes For All Of Us

Episode Date: January 3, 2023

CES kicks off with Intel detailing it’s new 13th gen chips for laptops. A big PyTorch warning. Why that whole Southwest Airlines mess happened. Layoffs are a problem for tech startups, but the number of tech workers is still growing in a healthy way. And pour one out for 3G technology. Sponsors: MeetFabric.com/ride RocketMoney.com/ride Links: Intel’s 13th Gen mobile processors include the first 24-core laptop CPU (The Verge) PyTorch discloses malicious dependency chain compromise over holidays (BleepingComputer) Southwest Meltdown Shows Airlines Need Tighter Software Integration (WSJ) Gemini’s Cameron Winklevoss Slams Crypto Exec Barry Silbert Over Frozen Funds (Bloomberg) Tech Layoffs Are Happening Faster Than at Any Time During the Pandemic (WSJ) As Silicon Valley Retrenches, a Tech Talent Shift Accelerates (NYTimes) Startups End a Bruising 2022, Stare Down Another Challenging Year (WSJ) Farewell to 3G (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 TechMeme right home for Tuesday, January 3rd, 2023. I'm Brian McCullough today. CES kicks off with Intel detailing its new 13th gen chips for laptops. A big pie torch warning, why that whole Southwest Airlines mess happened.

Layoffs are a problem for tech startups, but the number of tech workers is still growing at a healthy clip. And pour one out for 3G technology. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Every year, we come back from the New Year's break, only to get inundated with C.E. news. This year is starting out no differently. Intel this morning unveiled its 13th-gen range for laptops, chips including the flagship Core I-9-3-980-HX with eight performance and 16 efficiency cores and low-end mid-range chips, quoting the verge. Intel's 13th-gen-destop CPUs have already delivered impressive performance to beat their AMD counterparts, and now Intel is

bringing Raptor Lake to its mobile processor lineup. The flagship Core I913980 HX is built for upcoming gaming laptops, and there are also the regular HP and U series chips for a variety of more mainstream laptops. Intel's Core I913980 HX is the star of the show with a 5.6 gigahertz turbofrequency and 24 cores. It's the first time a laptop CPU has supported a 24-core configuration, and Intel claims it's the world's fastest mobile processor. Intel has repurposed the same dye it uses for its desktop 13th gen processors for its HX CPU series with eight performance cores and 16 efficiency cores on the flagship core I913980 HX. That's the same number of performance cores on the previous core I9-12-950 HX, but double the number of efficiency cores. It's all packaged into a 55-watt chip that's designed to be paired with the latest

discrete mobile GPUs for high-performance workloads and gaming. Intel claims the end result is up to 11% faster, single-thread performance, and up to 49% faster multitasking performance over the same 12-gen chips. Gaming performance is said to be up to 12% faster, but we'll need to test the chips fully to see how the performance improvements impact battery life. There's also support for both DDR4 up to 3,200 megahertz, and DDR5 up to 5,600 megahertz, with up to 128 gigabytes of RAM supported. Tell's latest 13th-gen mobile HX chips also include support for Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.2, and Thunderbolt 4. Acer, Dell, HP, Lenovo, MSI, AIS, and Razor have all committed to bringing 13th-gen

HX laptops to market, and there will be more than 60 in total, end quote. Congratulations, devs. Here's your first story of the year, and it's a warning. Pye Torch has identified a malicious dependency using its Torch-Tryton library name, warning that nightly version users should uninstall, quoting bleeping computer. Between December 25th and December 30th, 22, users who installed PyTorch Nightly should ensure their systems were not compromised. PyTorch Team has warned.

The warning follows a Torch Triton dependency that appeared over the holidays on the Python package index registry, the official third-party software repository for Python. Please uninstall it and torch Triton immediately and use the latest nightly binaries newer than December 30th, 2022, advises Pi-Torch team. The malicious Torch-Triton dependency on Pi-Pi shares name with the official library published by the Pi-Torch Nightly's repo. But when fetching dependencies in the Python ecosystem, Pi-Pi normally takes precedence causing the malicious package to get pulled on your machine instead of Pi-Torch's

legitimate one. At the time of writing, bleeping computer observed the malicious Torch-Triton dependency had exceeded 2,300 downloads in the past week. This type of supply chain attack is known as dependency confusion, as first reported by bleeping computer in 2021, just as the attack vector was popularized by ethical hacker Alex Berson. From computer vision to natural language processing, the open source machine learning framework PyTorch has gained prominence in both commercial and academic realms, end quote. No doubt you heard about that recent Southwest Airlines meltdown over the holiday travel season,

since there's a tech angle to this, let me give you a post-mortem on what happens so you can sound in the no to your non-tech friends. Basically, what got exposed was an over-reliance on aging crew assignment software, SkySolver, forcing the company to return to manual scheduling, pen and paper, quoting the journal. Southwest relies on crew assignment software called SkySolver, an off-the-shelf application that it has customized and updated, but is nearing the end of its life, according to the airline. The program was developed decades ago and is now owned by General Electric. During the winter storm, amid a huge volume of changes to crew schedules to work through, SkySolver couldn't handle the task of matching crew members and which flights they should work,

executives of the Dallas-based carrier said. Southwest Software wasn't designed to solve problems of that scale, Chief Operating Officer Andrew Waterson said Thursday, forcing the airline to revert to manual scheduling. Unlike some large rivals with Hub and Spoke networks, Southwest planes hop-scotch from city to city, which may have been another complicating factor. Many carriers still rely on homegrown solutions, which largely. were built on legacy mainframe computers, analysts say. Analysts and industry insiders say the airline industry is overdue for a massive technology

overhaul that would take advantage of highly scalable cloud technologies and fully connect disparate sources of real-time data to better coordinate crews with aircraft. The airline sector has been among the slowest to adopt cloud-based and analytics technologies that could help solve complicated transportation network problems, those analysts say. Airline operations software historically has lagged behind other technologies because, in part, a small number of providers build dedicated systems that can handle the scale of a major airline like Southwest, said Tim Crawford, a CIO strategic advisor at Enterprise IT advisory firm Avoa. The global airline IT market generated $21.2 billion in revenue in 2019, market research firm

Frost and Sullivan said, and leaders include Amadeus IT Group, International Business Machines or IBM, and Sabre, formed in 1960 through a joint initiative between American Airlines and IBM. Partnerships with cloud providers like Alphabet's Google Cloud and Amazon's AWS also are expected to help airlines and solution providers improve their technologies, Frost and Sullivan said. They are part of the technology partner ecosystem, which could help them become future direct competitors to airline software companies, according to Frost and Sullivan. Dr. Edward Rothberg, chief scientist of Garobi Optimization, a startup that develops mathematical optimization software used by carriers, including Air France KLM, said Southwest Hopscotch, to point-to-point model rather than the hub and spoke model greatly increases the difficulty of the problem requiring more computational power than its current systems are likely able to handle. Much of the complexity behind airline operations technology stems from the many real-time

data points and constraints, a single system must take into account including federal regulations, weather, crew status and location, and aircraft maintenance and routing, said Jehan Alamzad, a airline analyst at consulting firm CA advisors. Mr. Alamzad said the most serious IT challenge airlines face stems from the applications developed in silos by vendors and the airlines themselves. When carriers upgrade to newer analytic software to improve the routing of their aircraft, for example, those systems aren't connected with software they can use to manage the crew who work those flights. While that lack of connection isn't usually a problem in airlines' day-to-day operations, it can become disastrous during severe disruptions, like during the holiday store, Mr. Alamzad said, end quote.

I'll let the Bloomberg lead sum this one up, quote, the fallout from the collapse of Sam Bankman-Freed's crypto empire just got messier with digital asset entrepreneur Cameron Winklevoss, accusing fellow businessman Barry Silbert of, quote, bad faith stall tactics and the intermingling of funds with his conglomerate that Winklevoss says, has left $900 million in customer assets needlessly in limbo since FTX's meltdown. Gemini Trust Company founded by Winklevoss and his twin brother, pause redemptions on a lending product called Earn, which offered investors the potential to generate

as much as 8% in interest on their digital coins. It did so by lending them out to Genesis Global Capital, one of the companies owned by Silbert's digital currency group. The Earnhalt came in November after Genesis suspended both redemptions and new loan originations at its lending unit because of its exposure to FTX. Genesis has told clients that it would take weeks to find a path forward, and that bankruptcy may be one possibility. Winklevoss, facing pressure of his own, from his own angry customers, locked out of their Gemini accounts, and a lawsuit alleging fraud in an open letter Monday said he had provided Silbert with multiple proposals to resolve the issue, including as recently as December 25th. He told Silbert, quote,

This mess is entirely of your own making, citing some $1.67 billion owed to Genesis by DCG, which it used for other business purposes within Silbert's conglomerate. This is money that Genesis owes to earn users and other creditors, Winklevoss said. It's not lost on us that you've been working desperately to try to firewall DCG from the problems that you created at Genesis, Winklevoss wrote, you should dispense with this fiction because we all know what you know that DCG and Genesis are beyond commingled, end quote. Silbert in a tweeted response refuted several accusations in Winklevoss's letters saying DCG did not borrow $1.67 billion from Genesis, and quote, never missed an interest payment to Genesis and is current on all loans outstanding, end quote, without providing more detail. Silbert also claimed

DCG delivered a proposal for resolving the dispute to Genesis and Winklevoss's advisors on December 29th, but had received no reply. For his part, Winklevoss asked Silbert to, quote, publicly commit to working together to solve this problem, which he says affects more than 340,000 earned customers by January 8th. He didn't say what would happen if no agreement was reached by then, end quote. More data points on tech's no good 2022 layoffs. Fi estimates that tech companies cut over 150,000 jobs, jobs just in 2022, compared to around 80,000 layoffs between March and December of 2020 in the height of the pandemic, and 15,000 across the entirety of 2021. Still, that 150,000 numbers seems a little low to me, but here's what they say, quoting the journal. The estimates include large employers

such as Facebook parent meta platforms, more than 11,000 layoffs announced in November and Amazon, about 10,000 possible job cuts, as well as smaller businesses in the U.S. and abroad. The figures are rough estimates and don't capture all layoffs but reflect a trend that is playing out in many of the largest tech companies. Many laid off tech workers are finding new jobs quickly, however. About 79% of workers recently hired after a tech company layoff or termination landed their new job within three months of starting their search, according to a ZipRecruiter survey of new hires, end quote. Indeed, it's not all bad for tech workers just for tech-specific companies. Employment in tech occupations grew 12% year-over-year to a record 6.39 million

in the U.S. in November 2022. But here's the thing. Working in tech doesn't necessarily mean working in a tech startup. In a reordering of the market for tech workers, more technology professionals are looking beyond the well-known big tech employers to companies in many other industries that increasingly offer challenging opportunities. Dispersing talent beyond the major tech companies, some analysts say should be welcomed. If this transition redeploys skilled tech workers to other sectors of the economy, that may very well be a healthy development, said Tim Herbert, chief research officer at Comp TIA, a technology education and research organization. The trend had been underway before, according to recruiters and labor analysts, but the employment reset in the tech industry, they say, is accelerating the shift, alphabet, Amazon, and meta. They're not hiring?

Well, J.P. Morgan Chase, Walmart, and United Health are in need of tech talent. Overall employment in tech occupations has grown this year to a record 6.39 million in November, according to government statistics reported this month. That was slightly up from the previous month and a 12% increase from November 2021. Today, a majority of tech jobs are at companies outside the tech sector in industries like banking, retail, healthcare, and manufacturing, whose operations are increasingly becoming digital. These mainstream companies, unlike their Silicon Valley counterparts, did not go on manic hiring sprees during the pandemic, but they continue to invest in tech skills nonetheless. Nearly every company is going through this.

They need tech talent, said Lori Beer, Global Chief Information Officer at J.P. Morgan, end quote. And also from the journal, more data that we kind of already knew, but quote, venture capital investment in U.S. startups in 2022 was on pace to fall by a third from 2021, according to research from pitchbook data, which provided data through December 12th. Startup funding declined sequentially each quarter during the year. The market for U.S. initial public offerings, a way of startups raising money and allowing their investors to cash out, had its worst year since 1990, according to University of Florida finance professor Jay Ritter. Another risk for startups is that the long-term partners who provide the funding for venture capital firms are on pace

to receive less than payouts on their investments in 2022 than in any year going back to at least 2006, according to data from investment firm Hamilton Lane. This shortfall, combined with investment losses in public stocks and other assets, leaves them bereft of cash to plight into new venture capital endeavors, said Miguel Luena, Hamilton Lane's managing director of fund investments. Startup company evaluations, while down 43% on average in the fourth quarter from a year ago, according to Pitchbook, generally remain higher than their public tech stock peers, investors said. There's been very little adjustment of prices so far, said Mike Volpe, a venture capitalist with index ventures. Once startups run out of money, he said,

that is when valuations are going to correct, end quote. Finally today, end of an era. Verizon decommissioned its 3G network on December 31st, the last major U.S. carrier to do so after AT&T and T-Mobile turned off their services in February and March. Quoting the verge, while 3G will still exist in other countries for quite a few more years, Verizon's deadline is pretty much the end of the line for it here in the U.S. The tech hasn't gone gentle into that good night. Carriers delayed their shutdown several times.

There were tiffs between DISH and T-Mobile, and you can't just turn a network that had been around for years off without things starting to break. Some notable examples. Some connected cars and trucks have been pushed offline, as have parking meters and older Kindles. AT&T's shutdown was even blamed for delays in reporting voting results in Michigan this year. Part of the reason carriers are decommissioning their networks is to help build their new ones. As we saw earlier this month, T-Mobile's latest and greatest 5G tech makes use of spectrum that was once part of its three. 3G network, end quote. Yes, CES starts right now, so get ready to get some headlines this week. Some years, CES headlines completely take over, but other years like last year, not so much.

I think CES is basically back in full swing now, so we might get a bigger batch of headlines than normal. And as much as one-third of the exhibitors this year are apparently exhibiting for the first time, so maybe a lot of surprises. I'll be interested to see to what degree people do or do not try to lean into the whole Metaverse idea this year. Also, is this going to be the year of headsets, both AR and VR, so will an industry grow up around that? I skipped going to CES again this year, but I intend to go next year, so keep that in mind,

and maybe we can all meet up then. Talk to you tomorrow.