Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 02/14 – Elon, If You Want It Or Not

Episode Date: February 14, 2023

People are saying Elon is showing you his tweets whether you asked to see them or not. More fodder for the charge that these chat bots are being rolled out quick and dirty. More fodder for the charge that US regulators are fencing in crypto. TikTok is trying to court the olds. And Amazon’s autonomous shuttle service his hit real world roads. Sponsors: RelationshipHero.com/techmeme Links: Twitter is just showing everyone all of Elon Musk’s tweets now (The Verge) Twitter delays new paid API launch by 'a few more days' (AppleInsider) Microsoft’s Bing AI, like Google’s, also made dumb mistakes during first demo (The Verge) US Crackdown Seeks to Push Crypto Back to the Fringes of Finance (Bloomberg) TikTok Turns to New Tactics to Spur Growth as Boom Times End (The Information) Amazon chief vows to ‘go big’ on physical stores (FT) TikTok’s Parent Takes On Meta in Battle for Virtual-Reality Market (WSJ) Amazon’s Self-Driving Car Shuttles People on Public Roads for the First Time (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 TechMame Right Home for Tuesday. February 14th, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough today. People are saying Elon is showing you his tweets, whether you ask to see them or not. More fodder for the charge that these chatbots are being rolled out quick and dirty. More fodder for the charge that U.S. regulators are fencing in crypto. TikTok is trying to court the olds, and Amazon's autonomous shuttle service hits real-world roads. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Some Twitter users, even those who do not follow, Elon Musk are saying that their for-you feed has been full of Elon's tweets and replies after changes made to the algorithms over the weekend. Quoting the Verge. Several of us here at the Verge are

seeing more Musk replies than usual, and I personally counted five at the very top of my feed, with many more sprinkled in between tweets from other users. The same is true for some accounts that don't even follow Elon Musk. And in apparent acknowledgement, Musk tweeted, quote, please stay tuned while we make adjustments to the algorithm, end quote, early Tuesday morning. This comes just days after Musk complained that his tweets weren't getting enough views and even fired an engineer over it. As reported by platformers Zoe Schiffer and Casey Newton, internal Twitter data indicates that while Musk's account rose to peak popularity in search rankings in April of 2022, engagement has since dropped significantly and engineers found no

issue with Twitter's algorithm. Over the weekend, Musk's said Twitter rolled out some sort of change to fix his visibility issue, with the billionaire CEO stating that 95% of his tweets weren't getting delivered in his words. I'm not sure if this is at all related to this Elon-filled feed, but I'm hoping Twitter fixes this issue soon, unless the new mandate is to get the boss more views by any means necessary, end quote. Well, I mean, and I'm not the first to say this, but if I paid $44 billion for a social platform, you better believe you'd see what I had to say on that platform. But I actually suspect that this has been happening for a little while now. There are certain Twitter insiders that I'm fairly sure I've never

followed, and I've seen them showing up in my feed over the last couple weeks. I know that that can happen to a certain degree. The Algo shows you what it thinks you want to see. I actually think, though, that this isn't any sort of bug. I think this is the soft rollout of Twitter showing you what Elon wants you to see for reasons I've just stated. It's his social network. work, so he's going to boost the content he wants to boost. P.S. Remember that whole Twitter changing the API, thereby cutting off various third-party apps and bots and the like. Well, that has been delayed for a few more days, at least according to Twitter, quoting Apple Insider. The latest delay doesn't have a date attached, unlike the

previous two announcements. First, Twitter announced that the free API would be cut off on February 9th and replaced with an unknown paid plan, and then that cutoff was pushed back to February 13th without warning. The latest delay simply states that the company will be taking, quote, a few more days to ensure the developer community will have an optimal experience with the new API. It isn't clear yet what the paid and limited free tiers will look like when they launch, but the current announced rate is a $100 per month API fee. A limited free access tier to the API is also being introduced, but all that is known is that it enables 1,500 tweets per month from a single authenticated user token. This is a right-only API.

so third-party clients will not be coming back, nor will this enable RSS feeds to read Twitter timelines. Twitter claims the changes will increase quality, reduce spam, and enable a thriving ecosystem. It's not quite clear how that will be accomplished, end quote. I think I may have mentioned this before, but whenever this gets enacted, this is going to seriously impact tech meme the website. The automated surfacing of tweets that I like to quote from is going to be cut off to one degree or another, so we'll see how that affects things if and when this actually comes to pass. This keeps happening. At Microsoft's demo last week, the new Bing incorrectly summarized GAP's Q3-2020 earnings

and provided wrong info on a pet vacuum and Mexico City nightlife, quoting the verge. In one of the demos, Microsoft's Bing AI attempts to summarize a Q3-2020 financial report for Gap clothing and gets a lot wrong. The Gap report mentions that gross margin was 37.4% with adjusted gross margin at 38.7% excluding an impairment charge. Bing inaccurately reports the gross margin as 37.4% including the adjustment and impairment charges. Bing then goes on to state Gap had a reported operating margin of 5.9% which doesn't appear in the financial results. The operating margin was 4.6% or 3.9% adjusted and including the impairment charge. During Microsoft's demo, Bing AI then goes on to compare Gap financial data to Lulu Lemons,

same results during the Q3-2020 quarter. Bing makes more mistakes with the Lulu Lemon data, and the result is a comparison riddled with inaccuracies, end quote. You might remember that Google's own AI chatbot Bard made some similar errors in its debut demo as well. Given yesterday's news, I thought this analysis from Bloomberg might be filling in some blanks for us. Bloomberg says they see a pattern that U.S. financial regulators are rapidly closing crypto's key routes to the banking system, pushing the industry to the fringes of said system. Quote, crypto's free pass is getting yanked as the most powerful U.S. financial regulators rapidly close key doors to the country's banking system. The increasingly aggressive posture,

which has taken shape through public and private actions in the week since the collapse of crypto exchange FTX could push the industry to the fringes of finance. It means new ventures may be smothered before they get off the ground, and banks and digital asset companies are likely to scrap existing ones and up-end business models. The regulators are effectively building a wall between crypto trading and the banking and the securities markets to prevent the types of systemic vulnerabilities that led to the 2008 financial crisis, said Todd Baker, senior fellow at Columbia University's Richmond Center for Business Law and Public Policy. U.S. officials they're working together on crypto and deny that there's some broad effort to crush it.

They say responsible innovation that plays by the rules is fully supported. At the same time, FDX's sudden failure forced authorities to act on concerns that the next crypto disaster could be far more severe if digital asset firms managed to grow large enough to affect the financial system. Interviews with more than a dozen current and former regulators, industry executives and lobbyists paint a picture of a deepening crackdown that has the sector on its back feet. requested anonymity to discuss the situation candidly. Quote, regulators understand they can't fully de-platform crypto, but they can certainly try to wall it off and minimize any risks, said Nick Carter, general partner at Castle Island Ventures.

I've talked to banking executives and crypto CEOs, and they are telling me there's a highly coordinated move underway to try to ring-fence crypto to cut it off from traditional finance, said Carter, who called the moves Operation Choke Point 2.0 in a recent essay. Fear over the escalating clampdown has contributed to a sell-off in crypto with Bitcoin declining for two consecutive weeks, eating into its gains at the start of 2023, end quote. TikTok is reportedly planning to let creators charge a dollar or more for videos and is working on a creator fund 2.0, which would pay creators with more than 100,000 followers. All of this in aid of basically turning around flatlined growth, quoting the information.

TikTok has begun working on ways to expand its audience by attracting older users and by better rewarding creators, the lifeblood of the app, whose viral videos have been vital for driving the app's growth over the years. It's currently working on a paywall video feature that could allow creators to charge fans a dollar or another price of their choosing to watch a video, a person familiar with the effort said. It also has plans for a new creator fund, dubbed creator fund 2.0 inside the company that aims to give creators higher payouts than an earlier version did. according to people familiar with the project. Crater Fund 2.0 could launch in the U.S. as soon as next month, according to one of the people. TikTok joins a long list of consumer internet companies from Amazon to Peloton that's grappling with a slowdown after having experienced eye-popping growth during the pandemic.

TikTok's growth has been so swift, though, that it raises the question of whether the company's business will mature much sooner than those of its rivals. At the same time, TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese internet company ByteDance, has to sort out its growth challenges amid increasingly hostile accusations in Washington, D.C., that the app poses a threat to national security. The app reached one billion monthly users globally in September 2021, in about half the time it took Instagram to reach that same point. And despite the drop in U.S. user numbers last year, TikTok continues to grow in markets outside the U.S. in January, it had 1.73 billion users 18 and over globally,

up 9% from the same month, a year earlier, according to data.a.I. even if its audience growth in the U.S. has stalled, TikTok's influence derived from its white-hot status remains undiminished. The app is capturing cultural attention, driving social trends, and forcing big tech rivals like meta-platforms, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook, to clamor to keep up. It's still the shiny new thing, said Amber Venn's Box, co-founder of creator commerce startup LTK, and quote. Interesting VR data point here, BightDance's Pico, more than tripled its share of the global VR headset market. year over year to around 15%. So today, Valentine's Day marks the day that I learned that ByteDance had a VR headset named Pico. For comparison, Meta's market share with the quest lineup fell from 90% to around 75%. Quoting the Wall Street Journal. Two years ago, BightDance bought Pico,

a Chinese startup that makes VR headsets. That launched a new front in the Chinese company's competition with Meta, whose Instagram and Facebook services have been battling for users and advertising against TikTok as the short video app sword in popularity. Pico's headset shipments have since jumped, turning it into a small but fast rising number two to meta in the global market, according to to industry data, even though PICO doesn't sell its consumer headsets in the U.S. Meta held 90% of the market share about a year ago, according to research firm International Data Corp. By the third quarter of 2022, the latest period for which data is available, its market share had dropped to about 75%. Market share for Pico, more than

tripled over the same period to about 15%. No other VR headset maker held more than 3% of the market. Meta's headset shipments in the third quarter declined 48% from a year earlier. IDC's data shows by dances Pico was the only headset maker to increase shipments in a market that was estimated to be worth $4 billion as of 2022. Pico offers headsets for personal use in Europe and Asia markets that have been more open to devices from Chinese companies than the U.S. consumers in those markets have gravitated to PICO partly in response to a $100 price increase meta introduced to Quest last year, said Jetas Urbani, research manager at IDC. After the increase, meta's Quest 2 costs $399. Pico's main consumer headset retails for roughly the equivalent of $450.

Pico also has been available in some markets broad where meta's device hasn't in the past, he said. The latest data doesn't reflect sales of PICO's newest consumer headset, the PICO 4, that was released to favorable reviews in October. If anything, you'd see their momentum increase in the fourth quarter. Mr. Obani added. Meta also released a new headset in October, the Quest Pro aimed for professionals, which retails for $1,500, end quote. Speaking of companies head faked by COVID times, maybe Amazon isn't having second thoughts about its grocery business, or at least its retail arms. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy says the company plans to go big on physical retail in 2023, blaming a lack of normalcy during the pandemic for its stumbles. This is from the Financial Times. Pulling back its expansion plans on grocery led to a $720 million impairment in the last

quarter of 2022, Amazon said this month, as some of its Amazon fresh grocery store locations were closed and new openings paused. Remember, a lot of these opened right in the heart of the pandemic, Jassie said, so we haven't had a lot of normalcy. We're experimenting with selection. Checkout formats, assortment, price points. I'm encouraged. We have several that I think are promising, end quote. Revenue for Amazon's physical store unit, as broken out in its quarterly earnings reports, has grown only 10% since the Whole Foods deal and represents just 3.4% of Amazon's business. We're just still in the early stages, Jassy said. We're hopeful that in 2023 we have a format that

we want to go big on on the physical side. We have a history of doing a lot of experimentation and doing it quickly, and then when we find something that we like doubling down on it, which is what we intend to do, end quote. Finally today, Amazon Zooks says its fully autonomous vehicle carried staff between its two main buildings in Foster City, California, on public roads for the first time, quoting Bloomberg. Last week, the electric vehicle, which doesn't have a steering wheel, ran a mile-long route carrying staff between Zook's two main buildings in Foster City, California, the company said in a statement. The first will now operate a shuttle for employees on the same trip while it seeks additional clearances

to expand its service to the public. The company said the Robotaxy Trip marks the first time that a vehicle designed without human controls has carried passengers on a public road. Zook's driverless testing permit, which it has held since September 2020, was extended by California to include the purpose-built Robotaxie. To date, Zook's public road testing has been limited to a fleet of retrofitted gas-powered cars that carry sensors, powering the self-driving technology. The Zook's Robotaxi doesn't have traditional controls or pedals and can carry four passengers split across two inward-facing rows of seats. On the Foster City route, it will travel at a top speed of 35 miles per hour. Zook's unveiled its Robotaxie at the end of 2020 and has been conducting testing

in its own facility, end quote. Chris Messina asked last night if this satisfies the conditions of my longstanding self-driving bet, and the answer is no. Not until I get my burrito delivered to me for lunch. Nothing for you today. Talk to you tomorrow.