Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 02/28 – Elon Wants To Compete With OpenAI

Starting point is 00:00:00 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, February 28th, 2023. I'm Brian McCullough today. AI-powered Bing is now integrated right into Windows. Elon wants to compete with OpenAI, a company he co-founded. Major financial institutions continue to back away from crypto while NFTs on the Bitcoin blockchain are on the rise.

Starting point is 00:00:52 The iPhone SE might not be dead and how the last pass debacle happened. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Microsoft has released a Windows 11 update. adding the new AI-powered Bing search to the task bar. Also, phone link for iOS screen recording as well for the first time, notepad tabs, and more. But you can see what the headline here is. Quoting the Verge. The new Bing integration is a surprise edition that Microsoft hasn't been testing with its Windows insiders. A new Bing icon will appear within the search box in the task bar, with Microsoft highlighting the new chat answers experience in the search flyout. While chat answers won't be available directly within the search flyout, Windows 11 users will be

Starting point is 00:01:42 able to quickly start a Bing chat in Edge from here, providing they have access to the Bing preview. More than a million people are now testing the new Bing preview in 169 countries, and Windows Chief Panos Panay says in a blog post that, quote, soon hundreds of millions of Windows 11 users can get access to this incredible new technology to search, chat, answer questions, and generate content from right on their Windows taskbar, end quote. That suggests that Microsoft is planning to greatly expand the new Bing preview. The expansion of Bing chat to the Windows 11 task bar comes just a week after Microsoft rolled out the same mode to Bing on mobile and in Skype conversations. Microsoft is also

Starting point is 00:02:22 getting ready to demo its chat GPT like AI in Office apps soon. This big new Windows 11 update isn't just about Bing, though. Microsoft is also opening up a preview of its phone link app for iOS, meaning iPhone users can link their devices to Windows. This will include access to send and receive messages, yes, even iMessage, calls and notifications. Microsoft is also improving its widgets system in Windows 11 to include third-party options from meta and Spotify. Even the touch experience in Windows 11 is getting improved today thanks to a new tablet optimized taskbar. If you have a device like a Surface Pro, then disconnecting a keyboard will now collapse the taskbar to make it more compact with a simplified taskbar design for touch. Windows 11 is also finally getting an official screen recording tool.

Starting point is 00:03:09 While Xbox GamePass has offered the ability to record apps, the snipping tool now includes screen recording to let you capture an entire screen or crop for apps, end quote. The information is reporting that Elon Musk approached AI researchers in recent weeks about forming a new research lab to develop a chat GPT alternative. You might recall that Musk co-founded OpenAI itself back in 2015 explicitly to be a neutral AI developer to keep AI technology from being dominated by major tech platforms. We can see how that turned out just in the previous segment. Quote, in recent months, Musk has repeatedly criticized OpenAI for installing safeguards that prevent chat GPT from producing techs that might offend users.

Starting point is 00:04:00 Musk, who co-founded OpenAI in 2015, but has since cut ties with the startup, suggested last year that OpenAI's technology was an example of, quote, training AI to be woke, end quote. His comments imply that a rival chatbot would have fewer restrictions on divisive subjects compared to chatGPT and a related chatbot Microsoft recently launched. To spearhead the effort, Musk has been recruiting Igor Babushkin, a researcher who recently left Alphabet's Deep Mind AI unit and specializes in the kind machine learning models that power chatbots like chat GPT. In an interview, Babushkin said,

Starting point is 00:04:36 Building a chatbot with fewer content safeguards is not Musk's objective. Quote, the goal is to improve the reasoning abilities and the factualness of these language models, he said. That includes making sure the model's responses are more trustworthy and reliable, he said. Babushkin said he and Musk have discussed assembling a team to pursue AI research, but the project is still in the early stages with no concrete plan to develop specific products. Babushkin said he left DeepMind last week, adding that he has not officially signed onto the Musk Initiative. I'd like to work with Elon on something in the LLM space, he said, referring to large language models. LLMs are a form of machine learning that trains on a large amount of text to learn the nuances of writing and speech

Starting point is 00:05:18 and predict which words should come next after looking at one or more sentences. Musk's move is notable because in 2015 he co-founded OpenAI as a non-profit to rival profit-minting AI tech powerhouses like Google, but Musk walked away from the startup in 2018 citing disagreements with its leadership around the time it launched a for-profit arm. Babushkin was a lead author of a 2019 Deep Mind Research paper demonstrating a machine learning model that could play the video game Starcraft at a level of Grandmasters, the most highly ranked players of the game. He is also listed as a co-author on a 2021 paper outlining a machine learning model called Gofer, an LLM comparable to the one behind ChatGPT, end quote. And Meta has formed a team to add generative AI to its products, led by Ahmad L. Dali, who joined Meta in 2020 after 16 years at Apple and is currently reporting to Chris Cox, quoting Axios.

Starting point is 00:06:19 Meta is unifying its generative AI work across the company into a new product team tasked with more quickly integrating the latest technologies into its products. On Friday, the company, They released one of its large language models, Lama, under a open source license. We are creating a new top-level product group at Metup focused on generative AI to turbochards our work in this area, Zuckerberg said in a post to Instagram and Facebook on Monday. In the short term, we'll focus on building creative and expressive tools, he said. Over the longer term, we'll focus on developing AI personas that can help people in a variety of ways, end quote. We're exploring experiences with texts like chat in WhatsApp and Messenger with images,

Starting point is 00:06:58 like creative Instagram filters and ad formats, and with video and multimodal experiences, Zuckerberg added. We have a lot of foundational work to do before getting to the really futuristic experiences, but I'm excited about all of the new things we'll build along the way, end quote. Meta has been doing a lot of research in the space, but has been more cautious than Microsoft and Google in putting such technologies into products. The new organizational changes aim to ensure that the language and image models that Meta's researchers have been creating show up more quickly across products like Instagram and Facebook, as well as in the company metaverse work. Meta will continue to have researchers working on longer-term work across various

Starting point is 00:07:33 forms of AI outside of this product team, including those doing academic research that meta will continue to publish and share externally, end quote. Meanwhile, the recent embrace of crypto by big financial institutions continues its sudden retreat. Reuters says that Visa and MasterCard have paused plans for partnerships with crypto companies and some product launches until markets and the regulatory environment improve. Quote, recent high-profile failures in the crypto sector are an important reminder that we have a long way to go before crypto becomes a part of mainstream payments and financial services. A spokesperson for Visa, the world's largest payment processor, said,

Starting point is 00:08:15 That does not change the company's crypto strategy and focus, however, the spokesperson added, a spokesperson for MasterCard said, quote, Our efforts continue to focus on the underlying blockchain technology and how that can be applied to help address current pain points and build more efficient systems, end quote. Over the past couple of years, major card firms had warmed up to crypto as the popularity of the asset class exploded, with some touting it as the next big thing in finance. Card companies, which pocket a small percentage of the dollar value of transactions they process, had announced multiple partnerships with crypto firms and put in place dedicated teams to explore

Starting point is 00:08:48 blockchain technology. MasterCard teamed up with crypto leader Nexo in April to launch what it called the world's first crypto-backed payment card. In November, Visa severed its global credit card agreements with FTZE. just a month after announcing an expanded partnership with that exchange. Card Company American Express said in 2021, it would consider using crypto as a possible option to redeem reward points in the future. But it is not viewing crypto tokens as a strategic priority in the near term.

Starting point is 00:09:16 A source familiar with the matter said, in the near term we don't see crypto replacing our core payment and lending services, an Amex spokesperson said in an emailed statement, adding that the company continues to explore meaningful use cases for the technology. They cannot and should not move ahead until there is a clear regulatory framework, said Thomas Hayes, chairman and managing member at investment firm Great Hill Capital. Delays are not attributable to their core business, as that remains strong. They are related to an uncertain regulatory environment for crypto and demand slash interests for crypto services declining in the near term, end quote.

Starting point is 00:09:55 Speaking of about faces, this one surprised me. Our friend Ming Chi Kuo says Apple has restarted work on an iPhone SE with a 6.1-inch OLED screen and an Apple-designed 5G modem. Quoting Mac rumors. In a series of tweets today, Quo said the new iPhone SE will be similar to the standard iPhone 14, which features a 6.1-inch OLED display with thinner bezels. The current iPhone SE is equipped with a 4.7-inch LCD display with thicker bezels. The new iPhone SE will be equipped with Apple's custom-designed 5G modem, with connectivity limited to sub-6 gigahertz bands of 5G,

Starting point is 00:10:33 the analyst said the current iPhone SE already supports 5G but uses Qualcomm's custom Snapdragon X57 chip. Quote did not indicate when the new iPhone SE would be released, but it likely won't be available until March 2024 or later, based on when previous models of the device launched. The current iPhone SE was released in March 22, for example, with pricing starting at $429 in the U.S. The device is Apple's last iPhone with a home button and touch ID, but face ID is likely for the new model if it is based on the iPhone 14, end quote. Yuga Labs has announced its first Bitcoin NFT project called 12fold, which contains 300

Starting point is 00:11:17 limited edition generative art pieces inscribed to the Bitcoin blockchain. I know I'm late to this and have been hearing rumblings about it for months, but yes, NFTs on the Bitcoin blockchain is a thing, going to Crypt. It's one of the highest profile launches to date via ordinals, a recently launched way of committing artwork and media to Bitcoin by permanently attaching each to an individual Satoshi, or one 100 millionth of a full Bitcoin. The pieces, all 12 by 12 grids, an homage to the manner in which data is stored on the Bitcoin blockchain, will combine 3D graphics and hand-drawn features. The project was designed and created by Yuga's in-house art team, and the company said that

Starting point is 00:11:58 it has no connection to its Ethereum-based IP, and will have no future interactions or utility in that regard. 12-fold marks a departure from Yuga's past offerings in a few ways. Most notably, every other project under the Yuga banner currently lives on the Ethereum blockchain, the leading network for NFT projects. 12-fold also stands apart from those projects in terms of size. Whereas all other Yuga-owned collections boast 10,000 or more NFTs, 12-fold will consist of only 300 pieces. It's closer an approach to autoglyphs in influential Larva Labs generative art project on Ethereum that spans just 512 NFTs. Ordinals have commanded the attention of the NFT world over the past month, and while the idea of NFT-like assets imprinted on the blockchain has irked some Bitcoin

Starting point is 00:12:42 maximalists, it's catching on in a big way. More than 200,000 unique ordinals have been minted as of today, including from notable projects like D-Gods and OnChane Monkey. There are even Cryptopunks clones on Bitcoin now, end quote. Finally today, last pass has been, frankly, admirably, open with their findings about how hackers stole their password vault data back in 2022, apparently by exploiting an RCE flaw in third-party software to install a key logger on a DevOps engineer's computer. But even if it's admirable that they're being so open, I wonder how admirable the security behind this problem actually was. Quoting, Bleeping Computer, last pass disclosed a breach in December where threat actors stole partially encrypted password vault data

Starting point is 00:13:34 and customer information. The company has now disclosed how the threat actors perform this attack, stating that they used information stolen in August breach, information from another data breach, and a remote code execution vulnerability to install a key logger on a senior DevOps engineer's computer. LastPass says this second coordinated attack used the stolen data from the first breach to gain access to the company's encrypted Amazon S3 buckets. As only four last pass DevOps engineers had access to these decryption keys, the threat actor targeted one of the engineers. Ultimately, the hackers successfully installed a key logger on the employee's device by exploiting a remote code execution vulnerability in a third-party media software package. The threat actor was able to capture the

Starting point is 00:14:17 employee's master password as it was entered after the employee authenticated with MFA and gain access to the DevOps engineer's last past corporate vault, reads a new security advisory published today. The threat actor then exported the native corporate vault entries and content of shared folders, which contain encrypted secure notes with access and encryption keys needed to access the AWS S3 LastPass production backups, other cloud-based storage resources, and some related critical database backups, end quote. The use of valid credentials made it difficult for the company's investigators to detect the threat actors' activity, allowing the hacker to access and steal data from LastPass's cloud storage servers for over two months between August 12,

Starting point is 00:14:57 2022 to October 26, 2022. Last Pass ultimately detected the anomalous behavior through AWS Guard duty alerts when the threat actor attempted to use cloud identity and access management roles to perform unauthorized activity. The company says they have since updated their security posture, including rotating sensitive credentials and authentication keys and tokens, revoking certificates, adding additional logging and alerting and enforcing stricter security policies, end quote. Did they also update their posture to include? not allowing one of the people with the keys to the kingdom to log in from home. Lots of people online are pointing out that this timeline lines up with when the home media

Starting point is 00:15:38 server product, Plex, was exploited. So it seems the attacker used this guy's home complex system to get into his home network. Nothing for you today. Talk to you tomorrow.

Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 02/28 – Elon Wants To Compete With OpenAI

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