Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 04/29 – OpenAI Shopping?

Episode Date: April 29, 2025

Is Amazon about to start showing tariff prices in listings? Armageddon has finally come for Temu and Shein. Is OpenAI getting into the shopping game because their web search usage is exploding? And Project Kuiper finally gets off the ground in a literal and meaningful way. Links: 042925 (PunchBowl News AM) Kickstarter Introduces ‘Tariff Manager Tool’ to Add Charges to Already Fully Funded Projects (404 Media) Temu adds ‘import charges’ of about 145% after Trump tariffs, more than doubling price of many items (CNBC) Congress passes bill to fight deepfake nudes, revenge porn (Washington Post) Alibaba unveils Qwen3, a family of ‘hybrid’ AI reasoning models (TechCrunch) OpenAI Adds Shopping to ChatGPT in a Challenge to Google (Wired) Duolingo will replace contract workers with AI (The Verge) Amazon launches first Kuiper internet satellites, taking on Starlink (Reuters) 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 Tuesday, April 29th, 2025. I'm Brian McCalla today. Is Amazon about to start showing tariff prices in listings? Armageddon has finally come for Temu and Sheehan. Is Open AI getting into the shopping game because their web search usage is exploding? And Project Kuiper finally gets off the ground in a literal and meaningful way. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. A source says that Amazon plans to soon show shoppers how much President Trump's tariffs are adding to the price of each product right next to its total listed price. Quoting Punchbowl news, Amazon doesn't want to shoulder the blame for the cost of President

Donald Trump's trade war, so the e-commerce giant will soon show how much Trump's tariffs are adding to the price of each product. According to a person familiar with the plan, the shopping site will display how much of an item's cost is derived from tariffs right next to the product's total listed price, end quote. Now, as we discussed before, people are afraid to go first on stuff like this because they don't want to catch strays. Strays like this. A White House spokesperson this morning already said Amazon doing this is, quote, a hostile and political act. So we will see where that goes. But it should be noted that Amazon technically isn't the first to do this. Kickstarter has introduced a tariff manager tool that lets creators add extra charges for backers

on projects that were already fully funded to address U.S. tariffs, quoting 404 media. Over the past few weeks, we've been hard at work developing tariff relevant resources to support our community, from guidance to help creators navigate rapidly changing policies to tips on shipping logistics and even information to help backers better understand the challenges creators are facing. Our focus has been supporting you through uncertain times, but we also know that information alone isn't always enough. Kickstarter said in a blog post published last week announcing the tariff manager tool, built specifically to address the financial challenges posed by U.S. import tariffs, Starter's Tariff Manager is designed to give creators more control, flexibility, and transparency at one of the most critical phases of your journey.

Fulfillment, end quote. This makes sense because Kickstarter is a lot of bespoke hardware products and projects, right? A vast proportion of which likely sources the components of those hardware projects from China. More tariff stuff. Temu is adding what it calls import charges of between 130 and 150 percent, quote, due to recent changes in global trade rules and tariffs, Sheehan has also begun hiking prices but without explicit fees. Quoting CNBC, the fees which began cropping up over the weekend after price hikes went into effect on Friday,

costs more than the individual products consumers are buying and can more than double the price of a typical order. For example, a summer dress sold on Temu for $18.47 will cost $44.68 after $26.21 in import, charges are added to the bill, a 142% surcharge, a CNBC analysis shows. A child's bathing suit priced at $12.44 will cost shoppers $312 when the $18.68-import charge is taken into account, a staggering 150% fee. A handheld vacuum cleaner listed at 1693 now costs $4011 when factoring in an important charge of $21.68, which is roughly $137.37. percent markup. Rival discount retailer Sheehan has also hiked prices on its site, but it doesn't appear to be implementing import charges. The company added a banner at checkout that states tariffs are included in the

price you pay. You'll never have to pay extra at delivery. The moves come after Temu and Sheehan warned earlier this month that they would raise their prices after Trump slapped a 145% tariff on many imports from China and vowed to end the de minimis exemption on May 2nd. The widely criticized loophole helped accelerate Temu and Sheehan's growth in the U.S. because it allowed most packages to enter the country duty-free as long as the imports were valued under $800. Due to recent changes in global trade rules and tariffs, our operating expenses have gone up. Temu said on its site earlier this month, to keep offering the products you love without compromising on quality, we will be making price adjustments starting April 25, 2025. Temu has sharply slashed its online ad spending

in the U.S. since Trump announced sweeping tariffs. Temu's ranking in Apple's Apples App Store has since plummeted to number 73 after consistently ranking in the top 10, according to sensor-tower data. Sheehan is currently at 54 down from 15 last month. Temu shoppers have flooded a Reddit forum with posts decrying the tariff-induced import charges in the days since the company raised prices. In one post titled RIP Temu, it was nice while it lasted. A user wrote that the price of items went flying up on Friday. From shopping like a billionaire to shopping like a peasant in one day, a user wrote in a separate Reddit post on Saturday, end quote. The U.S. House of Representatives has passed the Take It Down Act to criminalize posting non-consensual intimate

imagery, including deepfakes and requiring online platforms to remove them, quoting the Washington Post. The bipartisan Take It Down Act, which passed the Senate unanimously in February, now heads to the desk of President Donald Trump, who is expected to sign it into law. The bill makes it a federal crime to publish non-consensual intimate imagery or NCI of any person and requires online platforms to remove such imagery within 48 hours when someone reports it. That would make it the first significant internet law of Trump's second term and the first U.S. law to take aim at the fast-growing problem of NCII. The bill's passage delighted many advocates for survivors and victims of revenge porn and sex-stortion scams, while some free expression and privacy advocates say they worry it will be abused.

Passage by a vote of 409 to 2 marks a victory for First Lady Melania Trump, who has championed the bill as part of her B-Best campaign against cyberbullying. The president indicated in March that he plans to sign it and quip that it is a personal boon, quote, because nobody gets treated worse than I do online, end quote. Today's bipartisan passage of the Take It Down Act is a powerful statement that we stand united in protecting the dignity, privacy, and safety of our children, Melania Trump said in a statement. Hundreds of AI undress apps that can forge images of real people in seconds have proliferated across the Internet in recent years, harnessing the same wave of technology that is powered image generation tools such as Dolly and Mid-Journey. Some of those apps advertise on mainstream social networks such as Meta's Instagram, despite violating those platforms' rules. Among the most common targets are female celebrities, including singer Taylor Swift and comedian Bobby Altoff, both of whom were the subject of sexually explicit AI fakes that went viral on Elon Musk's social network.

X in 2024. The imagery is also often used to harass, intimidate, or embarrass young women and teens. Those victimized have described their efforts to get non-consensual nudes scrub from the internet as a nightmarish game of whack-a-mole, end quote. Alibaba has debuted its Quen III family of openweight hybrid AI reasoning models, including Quen3-235BA-2-2B, with 235 billion total parameters and 22 billion activated parameters. tech crunch. Most of the models are or soon will be available for download under an open license on AI Dev Platform's Hugging Face and GitHub. They range in size from 0.6 billion parameters to 235 billion parameters. Parameters roughly correspond to a model's problem-solving skills and

models with more parameters generally perform better than those with fewer parameters. According to Alibaba, the Kwen 3 models are hybrid models. They can take time to reason through complex problems or answer simpler requests quickly. Reasoning enables the models to to effectively fact-check themselves, similar to models like OpenAIs O3, but at the cost of higher latency. Some of the models also adopt a mixture of experts or M-O-E architecture, which can be more computationally efficient for answering questions. M-OE breaks down tasks into subtasks and delegates them to smaller specialized expert models. The Quen3 models support 119 languages, Alibaba said, and were trained on a dataset of over 36 trillion tokens. Tocons

are the raw bits of data that a model processes. One million tokens is equivalent to about 750,000 words. The company said Quen3 was trained on a combination of textbooks, question and answer pairs, code snippets, AI generation data, and more. These improvements, along with others, greatly boosted Quinn3's capabilities compared to its predecessor, Quen, too. Alibaba said none of the Quinn 3 models seem to be head and shoulders above the top of the line recent models like OpenAIs 03 and 04 Mini, but they're strong performers nonetheless, end quote. OpenAI has begun rolling out product recommendations in ChatGPT for Pro Plus free and logged out users with buy buttons that link to merchants' websites, quoting Wired.

In a pre-launch demo for Wired, Adam Fry, the ChatGPT search product lead at OpenAI, demonstrated how the updated user experience could be used to help people using the tool for product research decide which espresso machine or office chair to buy. The product recommendations shown to prospective shoppers are based on what ChatGPT remembers about a user's preferences as well as product reviews pulled from across the web. Fry says chat GPT users are already running over a billion web searches per week and that people are using the tool to research a wide breadth of shopping categories like beauty, home goods, and electronics. The product results in chat GPT for best office chairs,

one of Wired's rigorously tested and widely read buying guides, included a link to our reporting in the sources tab. The new user experience of buying stuff inside of chat GPT shares many similarities to Google shopping. In the interfaces of both, when you click on the image of a budget office chair that tickles your fancy, multiple retailers like Amazon and Walmart are listed on the right side of the screen with buttons for completing the purchase. There is one major difference between shopping through ChatGPT versus Google. For now, the results you see in OpenAI searches are not paid placements but organic results. They are not ads, says Fry. They are not sponsored. So how does ChatGPT choose which products to recommend?

end? Why were those specific espresso machines and office chairs listed first when the user typed the prompt? It's not looking for specific signals that are in some algorithm, says Fry. According to him, this will be a shopping experience that's more personalized and conversational rather than keyword focused. It's trying to understand how people are reviewing this, how people are talking about this, what the pros and cons are, says Fry. If you say that you prefer only buying black clothes from a specific retailer, then chat GPT will supposedly store that information in its memory the next time you ask for you. advice about what shirt to buy, giving you recommendations that align with your tastes.

The reviews that ChatGPT features for products will pull from a blend of online sources, including editorial publishers like Wired, as well as user-generated forums like Reddit. Fry says that users can tell ChatGPT which types of reviews to prioritize when curating a list of recommended products. One of the most pressing questions for online publishers with this new release is how likely affiliate revenue will work in this situation. Currently, if you read Wired's review of the best office chairs and decide to purchase one through our link, we get a cut of the revenue and it supports our journalism. How will affiliate revenue work inside of chat GPT shopping when the tool recommends an office chair that OpenAI knows is a good pick because Wired, among others, gave it good reviews?

We are going to be experimenting with a whole bunch of different ways this can work, says Fry. He didn't share specific plans, saying that providing high-quality recommendations is Open AI's first priority right now and that the company might try different affiliate. revenue models in the future, end quote. So obviously a potential revenue driver for open AI, but also let's underline that reveal that people are doing a billion web searches a week on chat GPT already. Alarm bells at Google, no? Duolingo CEO Lewis von On says the company will gradually stop using contractors to do work that AI can handle as part of an announcement to be an AI first company. Quoting the verge. According to Von On, being AI first means the company will need to rethink much of how we work and that making minor tweaks to systems designed for humans

won't get us there. As part of the shift, the company will roll out a few constructive constraints, including the changes to how it works with contractors, looking for AI use in hiring and in performance reviews, and that headcount will only be given if a team cannot automate more of their work. Von Onn says that Duolingo will remain a company that cares deeply about its employees and that this isn't about replacing duos with AI. Instead, he says that the changes are about removing bottlenecks so that employees can focus on creative work and real problems, not repetitive tasks. AI isn't just a productivity boost, Von On says. It helps us get closer to our mission to teach well. We need to create a massive amount of content, and doing that manually doesn't scale.

One of the best decisions we made recently was replacing a slow man. annual content creation process with one powered with AI. Without AI, it would take us decades to scale our content to more learners. We owe it to our learners to get them this content ASAP. Von Ones email follows a similar memo Shopify CEO Toby Luckke sent to employees and recently shared online. In that memo, Luckie said that before Teams asks for more headcount or resources, they needed to show why they cannot get what they want done using AI, end quote. Amazon has launched 27 satellites for its Project Coiper Broadband Internet Program, the first batch of 3,236 satellites that it plans to send into low-Earth orbit.

Quoting Reuters, sitting atop an Atlas 5 rocket from the Boeing and Lockheed Martin Joint Venture United Launch Alliance, the batch of 27 satellites was lofted into space at 7 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time from the rocket company's launch pad at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. Bad weather scrubbed an initial launch attempt on April 9th. Kuiper is arguably Amazon's biggest bet underway, pitting it against Starlink, as well as global telecommunications providers like AT&T and T-Mobile. The company has positioned the service as a boon to rural areas where connectivity is sparse or non-existent. The mission to deploy the first operational satellites has been delayed more than a year.

Amazon once hoped it could launch the inaugural batch in early 2024. The company faces a deadline set by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission to deploy half its constellation, 1,618 satellites by mid-20206, but its slower start means Amazon is likely to seek an extension, analysts say. Hours or possibly days after the launch, Amazon is expected to publicly confirm initial contact with all of the satellites from its mission operations center in Redmond, Washington. If all goes this plan, the company said it expects to begin delivering service to customers later this year. ULA could launch up to five more Kuiper missions this year. ULA, CEO Tori Bruno, told Reuters in an interview this month. Amazon said in a 2020 FCC filing

that it could begin service in some northern and southern regions at 578 satellites, with coverage expanding toward Earth's equator as the company launches more satellites, end quote. Champions League semifinals this afternoon. Come on, you gunners.