Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 04/04 – Dogecoin Twitter Logo (Cause Why Not?)

Episode Date: April 4, 2023

We’ve said before that Elon owns Twitter, so if he decides to change the logo to a Shiba Inu, you know, why not? Apple kinda sorta bites the bullet on layoffs. What’s going on with the Apple Weather app? Do we want universities to call the use of ChatGPT plagiarism? And data on the corporate takeover of AI development. Sponsors: OregonState.edu ZocDoc.com/techmeme Links: Twitter’s new dog icon is sending dogecoin — sigh — to the moon (TechCrunch) Spotify shuts down its Clubhouse-style audio app Spotify Live (Musically) Google to cut down on employee laptops, services and staplers for ‘multi-year’ savings (CNBC) Apple to Cut Jobs in Some Corporate Retail Teams in First Known Layoffs (Bloomberg) Apple Weather forecasts suffer rare outage (AppleInsider) Universities express doubt over tool to detect AI-powered plagiarism (Financial Times) AI is entering an era of corporate control (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, April 4th, 2023. I'm Brian McCullough today. We've said before that Elon owns the thing. So if he decides to change the Twitter logo to a Shiba Eno, you know, why not? Apple kind of sort of bites the

bullet on layoffs. What's going on with the Apple Weather app? Do we want universities to call the use of chat GPT plagiarism and data on the corporate takeover of AI development? Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. I think I use this. this joke recently, but the dream of 2021 is alive at Twitter, because as much as things have changed since the go-go times, I guess some things remain the same, doge coins price spiked more than 25% after Twitter replaced its bird logo with a doge image, quoting TechCrunch. The particular dog image, a Shiba Inu, corresponds with the logo of the dogecoin, blockchain, and cryptocurrency. Normally, the swapping out or addition of an icon inside an app is

not news. In this case, cryptocurrency investors sent the value of Dogecoin sharply higher in the wake of the inclusion of its logo in Twitter's app. In short, the social media services update has led to a pump. The greater context for this latest bit of Twitter silliness is that the owner of the social media service, Elon Musk, is in court over Dogecoin, looking to dismiss a massive suit relating to the cryptocurrency. In that suit, Musk's lawyers recently called Dogecoin, quote, a legitimate cryptocurrency that continues to hold a market cap of nearly $10 billion, end quote, arguing that Musk's tweets thereof were just that. We suppose that this app update is part of Musk's general view on the litigation, end quote. Because for other things that were big in 2021,

the narrative has definitively broken at this point. Spotify is shutting down its clubhouse-style audio app, Spotify Live, which was previously called Locker Room, and which was acquired as part of its 57 million euro Betty Labs deal back in March of 2021. Quoting musically, locker room was a sports-focused version of Clubhouse, the social audio app that was creating a huge buzz in tech circles at the time. Spotify paid 57 million euro for Betty Labs in March 2021, promising to, quote, evolve and expand locker room into an enhanced live audio experience for a wider range of creators and fans, end quote. The app was rebranded Spotify Green Room and relaunched in June that year with Spotify commissioning several radio-style live shows,

focusing on sports, music, entertainment, and lifestyle. It was renamed again in April 22 to Spotify Live and integrated into Spotify's main app. However, by the end of 2022, Clubhouse's star had waned while Facebook, which, characteristically had rushed to launch its own version, had pulled back from live audio. Meanwhile, Spotify canceled several of Spotify Live's original shows. Now Spotify Live is itself being canceled with users being delivered the news this afternoon. 57 million euro is a lot to pay for an app that you shut down two years later, even if you do learn some useful lessons along the way. Spotify Live's demise will be seen as a setback for the streaming services,

ambitions to expand beyond music into other kinds of audio, as part of its long-term plan to compete with radio for listeners and advertising budgets alike, end quote. Yeah, these are the sort of headlines we get in 2020. documents seen by CNBC suggests that Google is cutting back on perks like fitness classes, but also nickel and dimming things like tape, staplers, and the frequency of staff laptop replacements. Non-engineers, for example, will get assigned a Chromebook by default going forward. Quote, Google's finance chief Ruth Porritt recently said in a rare company-wide email that the company is making cuts to employee services. quote, these are big multi-year efforts, Porret said, in a Friday email titled,

Our Companywide OKR on durable savings, end quote, elements of the email were previously reported by the Wall Street Journal. One of the company's important objectives for 2023 is to, quote, deliver durable savings through improved velocity and efficiency, Porret said in the email. All PAs and functions are working towards this, she said, referring to product areas. OKR stands for objectives and key results. Porette referred to the year 2008 twice in her email. We've been here before the email stated. Back in 2008, our expenses were growing faster than our revenue. We improved machine utilization, narrowed our real estate investments, tightened our belt on T&E budgets, cafes, microkitchens,

and mobile phone usage, and remove the hybrid vehicle subsidiary, end quote. Among the equipment changes, Google is pausing refreshes for laptops, desktop PCs, and monitors. It's also, quote, changing how often equipment is replaced. according to internal documents viewed by CNBC. Google employees who are not in engineering roles but require a new laptop will receive a Chromebook by default. Chromebooks are laptops made by Google and use a Google-based operating system called ChromeOS. It's a shift from the range of offerings such as Apple MacBooks that were previously available to employees. It also provides the best opportunity across all our managed devices to prevent external compromise. One document about

the laptop changes said, an employee can no longer expense mobile phones if one is available. internally, the document also stated, and employees will need director or above approval if they need an accessory that costs more than $1,000 and isn't available internally. Under a section titled Desktops and Workstations, the company said Cloudtop, the company's internal virtual workstation will be the default desktop for Googlers. In February, CNBC reported the company asked its cloud employees and partners to share desks on alternating days and are expected to transition to relying on cloud top for their workstations. Google employees have also noticed some more extreme cutbacks to office supplies

in recent weeks. Staplers and tape are no longer being provided to print stations company-wide, as part of a cost-effectiveness initiative, according to a separate internal facilities directive viewed by CNBC. We have been asked to pull all tape slash dispensers throughout the building. A San Francisco facility directive stated, if you need a stapler or tape, the receptionist desk has them to borrow, end quote. And Apple has kind of sort of become the last major tech company to bite the bullet on layoffs. Sources are telling Bloomberg that Apple plans to eliminate a small number of its corporate retail staff, marking its first known job cuts since embarking on a belt tightening effort back in 2022.

Quoting from Bloomberg. The company is shedding positions in what it calls its development and preservation teams, said the people who asked not to be identified because the move hasn't been announced. Those groups are responsible for the construction and upkeep of Apple retail stores and other facilities around the world. While the number of positions being eliminated couldn't be ascertained and is likely very small, the move represents a new step for the world's most valuable company whose peers have been slashing their ranks in the face of a shaky economy and sluggish consumer spending. Apple is positioning the move as a streamlining effort rather than layoffs. They told employees that the changes were designed to improve upkeep of stores globally,

and that the company will provide support to affected workers. The iPhone maker has largely held off on corporate layoffs, even as it trims budgets and pairs back much of its contractor workforce, including on-contract engineers, recruiters, and security guards. The company previously cut corporate jobs before the pandemic when it eliminated a couple hundred members of its self-driving car division. Some management roles are also being eliminated, while those employees could be rehired as so-called individual contributors.

They may not have the same compensation, according to the people. In a few instances, some employees are exempt and will keep their jobs without needing to reapply. Apple had 164,000 employees as of September when its last fiscal year ended. The company didn't expand its workforce as quickly as many big tech companies during the pandemic, decreasing the need for major layoffs. Its peers, including Amazon and Alphabet's Google, have cut tens of thousands of jobs, end quote. Apple is confirming what users, including myself, have been seeing an issue. with its weather app on iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, and macOS. O'S, ongoing for over five hours as of this morning, though some users, again, including myself,

have had issues for over a week now, quoting Apple Insider. Users of Apple's weather app around the world have periodically been getting blank screens as no data is available. It appears to have been a worldwide issue, though not necessarily for all users in all regions. Currently, most weather data is back, although at times the chosen city has to be reloaded before forecasts appear correctly. Apple's official system status site acknowledges that there is an issue. However, it claims that the impact is now solely affecting users in Alaska. It's unlikely that Apple gets all of its weather data from a single data provider in Alaska, so presumably the system status reflects only the current issue and that it has been

improving overnight. That appears to reflect how certain regions are now getting forecasts, at least if the weather app is forced to reload a city's data. However, if it's correct that it's a data outage, it would suggest that there have been multiple such outages at data providers around the world. According to Apple, the issues began at 11 p.m. Eastern on Monday, end quote. I would like to take this opportunity to remind Apple that their weather app sucks generally and that they killed the best weather app ever made, which was dark sky. Bring that back, please. Anti-plagiarism software maker Turn It In has launched a service to detect A.m.m.

AI-generated text in academia, claiming 98% confidence compared to OpenAI's 26%. And yet, academia is a little wary of this new tool, quoting the Financial Times. Turn It In, which is already used by more than 10,000 educational institutions worldwide, is launching a service on Tuesday, saying, quote, educators told us that being able to accurately detect AI written text is their first priority right now, said to an in chief executive, Chris Karen. They need to be able to be able to. detect AI with very high certainty to assess the authenticity of a student's work and determine how to best engage with them, end quote. The launch has proved contentious, though. Some institutions,

including Cambridge and other members of the Russell Group, the body that represents leading UK universities, have said they will opt out of the new service, according to people familiar with the decision. Universities are worried the tool may falsely accuse students of cheating, involves handing student data to a private company and prevents people from experimenting with new technology such as generative AI. The concerns have been widely held, one person familiar with its discussion said. The Russell Group declined to comment. Charles Knight, Assistant Director at Consultancy Advance HE said lecturers were concerned that they would have no way to investigate why essays had been flagged as being written by AI. In a single university, an error rate of 1% would mean hundreds

of students wrongly accused of cheating, he added, with little recourse to appeal. It's a black box, he said. We've got no idea what those results mean, and we aren't able to have a look at how the software came to those conclusions, end quote. Turn it in, did not immediately respond to a request for comment to the concerns raised about the AI detection tool, but the company said in a statement about the tools launch that the technology had been in development for years and provided resources, quote, to help the education community navigate and manage it, end quote. And finally, today, some interesting data points about this new AI, I guess,

we could call it an industry now, because a new report sort of shows that AI is entering into an era of corporate control. According to Stanford's AI index in 2022, industry produced 32 notable machine learning models compared to Academia's mere three. Now, weirdly, global private investment in AI also fell 26.7% year over year, quoting the verge. The 2020, the 2023 AI index compiled by researchers from Stanford University as well as AI companies, including Google, Anthropic and Hugging Face, suggests that the world of AI is entering a new phase of development. Over the past year, a large number of AI tools have gone mainstream from chatbots like ChatGBT, to image-generating software like Mid-Journey. But decisions about how to deploy this technology

and how to balance risk and opportunity lie firmly in the hands of corporate players. The AI Index states that for many years, academia led the way in developing state-of-the-art AI system, but industry now has firmly taken over. In 2022, there were 32 significant industry-produced machine learning models compared to just three produced by academia, it says. This is mostly due to the increasingly large resource demands in terms of data, staff, and computing power required to create such applications. In 2019, for example, OpenAI created GPT2 in early large language model or LLM, the same class of application used to power chatGPT and Microsoft's Bing chatbot.

GPT2 costs roughly $50,000 to train and contains 1.5 billion parameters, a metric that tracks a model size and relative sophistication. Skip forward to 2022, and Google created its own state-of-the-art LLM called POM. This cost an estimated $8 million to train and contains 540 billion parameters, making it 360 times larger than GPT2 and 160 times more expensive. AI developments increasing resource requirements firmly shift the balance of power toward corporate players. Many experts in the AI world worry that the incentives of the business world will also lead to dangerous outcomes as companies rush out products and sideline safety concerns in an effort to out-maneuver rivals. This is one reason many experts are currently calling for a slowdown or even a pause in AI development, as with the open letter signed last week by figures including Elon Musk. Other highlights from the report, private investment in AI decreased for the first time in a decade in 2022. Global private investment in AI has been climbing for years, but decreased by 26.7% from

2021 to $91.9 billion in 2022. Side editor's note here, I bet that number is going to go way up in 2023, continuing to quote, training big AI models has environmental costs. A 2022 paper estimates that training a large AI language model called Bloom, emitted 25 times as much carbon as that of flying one passenger from New York to San Francisco and back. By comparison, OpenAI's GPT3 was estimated to have a carbon cost 20 times that of Bloom. AI can potentially help reduce emissions, though. In 2022, Google's subsidiary DeepMind created an AI system called B-cooler that reduced energy consumption by 12.7% in a three-month experiment in the company's data centers by optimizing cooling procedures, by optimizing cooling procedures. It's not clear if Google ever adopted this system more widely. Chinese people are more hopeful

about AI than Americans. An Ipsos survey in 2022 found that 78% of Chinese respondents agreed with the statement that, quote, products and services using AI have more benefits than drawbacks. Chinese citizens were most enthusiastic about AI, followed by respondents in Saudi Arabia, 76% and India, 71%. U.S. respondents were among the least enthusiastic of those surveyed, with only 35, percent agreeing with the above statement, end quote. And by the time that he arrives, he will read, I have lied. He'll go drinking to his friends, to his foes. But drinking is the devil that tears one apart, leaving memories of what should have been and wasn't. It's good to be on the road back home again, again. Talk to you tomorrow.