Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 08/27 – More On Pavel Durov

Episode Date: August 27, 2024

As more details come out about the arrest of the founder of Telegram, a deeper look at Pavel Durov himself. We have the date of the iPhone event. We have a new record gaming number from Steam. And are Apple’s experiment with big budget Hollywood movies losing them bucket loads of money? Sponsors: DataTribe.com/challenge Thorne.fit/ridehome Links: Telegram Founder’s Arrest Part of Broad Investigation, French Prosecutors Say (NYTimes) Macron loves Telegram. French judges hate it. (Politico) How Telegram’s Founder Went From Russia’s Mark Zuckerberg to Wanted Man (NYTimes) Steam surpasses 37 million concurrent users for the first time ever thanks to Black Myth: Wukong (PC Gamer) Anthropic publishes the ‘system prompts’ that make Claude tick (TechCrunch) Apple Rethinks Its Movie Strategy After a String of Misses (NYTimes) 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, August 27th, 2024. I'm Brian McCullough today. As more details come out about the arrest of the founder of Telegram, a deeper look at Pavel Dorov himself. We have the date of the iPhone event. We have a new record gaming number from Steam and are Apple's experiments with big budget Hollywood movies losing them bucket loads of money. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. French prosecutors are saying that Pavel Dorov's arrest is part of a probe, quote, against persons unnamed into CSAM drug sales and more on the app, and also because the app was not working well with authorities. Quoting the times. Lorry Bikow, the Paris prosecutor said in a

statement that the arrest was part of an investigation open on July 8th, quote, against person unnamed on a raft of potential charges, including complicity in the distribution of child pornography and selling of drugs, money laundering, and a refusal to cooperate with law enforcement. enforcement. The investigation is being handled by cybercrime and anti-fraud specialists. Miss Bikow said it is within this procedural framework that Pavel Duraev was questioned by the investigators, she said. It was unclear whether any of the charges listed would be held against Mr. Duraev himself. In France, complex criminal cases are handled by special magistrates who have broad investigative powers and can place defendants under formal investigation, charging them when they believe the evidence warrants it.

But the magistrates can later drop charges if they do not think evidence is sufficient to proceed to trial and cases can take years. Mr. Derov's arrest has become a point of contention in the debate about free speech on the internet. President Emmanuel Macron of France on Monday dismissed accusations from supporters of Telegram that the arrest was an example of government censorship. The arrest of the president of Telegram on French soil took place as part of an ongoing judicial investigation. Mr. McCrone said in a statement posted on X, it is in no way a political decision. It is up to the judges to rule on the matter, end quote. It was an unusual step for Mr. Macron, as French leaders usually refrain from commenting on the early stages of criminal investigations, end quote. Yes, on that, Politico says that in France, telegram is avidly used within political and media circles, including by President Macron himself, who has used the app for nearly a decade. According to a French justice official not working on the case but familiar with its background, Telegram had drawn frustration in France due to its reluctance to cooperate with authorities. They have pissed off people with their refusal to give answers in dirty files, said the official,

who is granted anonymity to speak candidly. Authorities have tried to curb telegram's use in official circles over confidentiality concerns. In November of last year, then Prime Minister Elizabeth Bourne banned ministers and their teams from using WhatsApp, telegram, and signal, stressing that, quote, these digital tools are not devoid of security flaws and therefore cannot guarantee the security of conversations and information shared via them, end quote. Top officials within the French National Assembly also unsuccessfully urged lawmakers to, quote, limit their use of social media apps and messaging services, including Telegram.

In both instances, MPs and cabinet members were encouraged to use lesser-known French alternatives. But Macron's own party, Renaissance, still uses a Telegram channel to send public communications, to journalists in a private channel that includes 150 members of the press, as does the French Interior Ministry. Macron has also used a public channel where statements and recent news are shared, followed by upwards of 30,000 subscribers, as does the French presidency. During the 2017 presidential campaign, French security officials had already warned the Macron camp about their telegram use. They told us we were being watched, that we were at risk of hacking, and that we had to be careful with telegram, which is a Russian app.

a Macron advisor was quoted as saying by newspaper Liberation, end quote. Meanwhile, back to the Times, which has a deeper dive profile of Durov, which is useful because I don't think many people knew the whole telegram story as well as other big tech stories. Quote, more than a decade ago when Russia pushed Pavel Durov to shut down the pages of opposition politicians on a Facebook-like site he had created, the tech entrepreneur responded online by posting a cheeky picture of a hoodie-wearing dog with its tongue out. Official response to the intelligence services to the request to block groups, he wrote unapologetically. Telegram has long been underpinned by Mr. Durav's anti-authority ethos and commitment to free speech,

a devout techno optimist with a flair for trolling authorities online. The 39-year-old said, He believes strongly that governments should not censor what people say or do on the internet. That guiding maxim helped Telegram become a popular chat app for Russians, Iranians, and others living under authoritarian governments. But Mr. Duraev's laissez-faire approach to policing the platform has also attracted terrorists, extremists, gunrunners, scammers, and drug dealers. Secrecy trumps the closer policing of online speech, Derov has said. Privacy ultimately is more important than our fear of bad things happening like terrorism, he posted in 2015. But Mr. Duraov's biggest priority is

Telegram. In 2014, he left Russia amid growing scrutiny from its security services and eventually decamped to Dubai, where he said the government would not interfere with his business. Since then, he has fought with Apple and other major governments over content controls. Telegram has faced temporary or permanent bans in 31 countries, according to Surf Shark, a maker of VPN software used to avoid internet blocks. In college in St. Petersburg, a friend showed Mr. Derov an early version of Facebook, founded by Mark Zuckerberg. Inspired Mr. Derov set out to make his own version. Vanktaki, a service he started in 2007. dominated Russia within a few years. It also attracted notice from the Kremlin, which demanded

information about its users. Mr. Derov said that he began building telegram to be a more secure way to communicate after Russian security forces showed up at his apartment around 2011. Mr. Durov, who was still running Voktaki while building telegram, said the government had eventually given him an ultimatum, hand over data about users or lose control of the company and be forced to leave the country. I chose the latter, Mr. Derov said. said. Since disavowing Russia, Mr. Derov has lived itinerantly, surrounded by Telegram engineers. He moves location every few months, former employees said. He has spent time in Barcelona, Bali, Berlin, Helsinki, and San Francisco, even as he made Dubai, Telegram's formal headquarters. He remains an earnest engineering leader, often obsessed with the app's features at the expense of making money or moderating criminal activity, former employees said.

Mr. Derov has citizenship for the United Arab Emirates and France, according to Telegraph. Though he travels by private jet, he has said he eschus buying things, keeping hundreds of millions of dollars in his bank account and Bitcoin to ensure he can be free. Bloomberg has estimated his net worth at more than $9 billion. Telegram is now approaching 1 billion users worldwide, making it larger than X. Telegram works as a messaging app similar to WhatsApp or IMessage, but it also hosts groups with up to 200,000 users and has broadcasting features that help people and groups share views with even larger audiences. The service is particularly popular in Ukraine, Brazil, Indonesia, India, and Russia, end quote. Apple has officially announced a September 9th event at Apple Park, with the iPhone 16 lineup, new Apple Watch models, and AirPods 4 expected to be unveiled. The invitation says it's glow time, which what? I don't know.

And no one seems to be speculating about that clue online very much. But anyway, mark your calendars, I guess. Steam has hit more than 37 million concurrent users. They did this on August 25th for the first time ever. That is up from the previous all-time record of nearly 33.7 million concurrent users back in January. This happened after apparently Black Myth Wu Kong's release, quoting PC Gamer. The number of people actually in a game concurrently has seen a comparable pop as well, according to SteamDB from 10.8 million when that January record was set to more than 12.5 million

at the time of this newest record. Steam is a very reliable number go-up operation as a regular thing, but even so, this particular peak coming in the later days of summer, not exactly a time of peak gaming interest, I don't think, is interesting. The peak concurrent user count sailed past 36 million back in March and came oh so close to breaking 37 million in June before sliding back down to mid-34 million peaks through most of July. It's always fun to speculate about the reasons behind Steam's concurrent user peaks. Sometimes it's the holiday season. Sometimes it's bad weather.

Sometimes it's a really big game. Most of the credit for surpassing the big 3-7, I think, has to go to Black Myth Wukong, which launched on Steam on August 19th and quickly powered its way to the top of the charts, becoming the second most played Steam game of all time. Its peak concurrent player count of more than 2.4 million crushed previous records held by games including Pal World, CSGO, and Lord Arc, and now stands second only to P-U-B-G Battlegrounds. These numbers are a clear reflection of the importance of China to Steam's future growth, and I have no doubt will be seeing more of it, driven by new Chinese blockbusters in the future.

Is a new record of 40 million concurrent users possible by the end of 2024 at this point? I would not bet against it, end quote. Anthropic has published a change log for the system prompts of its sonnet, opus, and haiku models, the first major AI vendor to do so. Quoting TechCrunch, generative AI models aren't actually human-like, they have no intelligence or personality. They're simply statistical systems predicting the likeliest next words in a sentence. But like interns at a tyrannical workplace, they do follow instructions without complaint, including initial system prompts that prime the models with their basic qualities,

and what they should and shouldn't do. Every generative AI vendor, from OpenAI to Anthropic, uses system prompts to prevent, or at least try to prevent, models from behaving badly, and to steer the general tone and sentiment of the model's replies. For instance, a prompt might tell a model it should be polite, but never apologetic, or to be honest about the fact that it can't know everything. But vendors usually keep system prompts close to the chest, presumably for competitive reasons, but also perhaps because knowing the system prompt may suggest ways to circumvent it. The only way to expose GPT4O's system prompt, for example, is through a prompt injection attack, and even then the system's output can't be trusted completely.

However, Anthropic, in its continued effort to paint itself as a more ethical, transparent AI vendor, has published the system prompts for its latest models in the Claude, iOS, and Android apps, and on the web. Alex Albert, head of Anthropics developer relations, said in a post on X that Anthropic plans to make this sort of disclosure a regular thing as it updates and fine-tunes its system prompts. The latest prompts dated July 12th

outlined very clearly what the Claude models can't do, e.g. Claude cannot open URLs, links, or videos. Facial recognition is a big no-no. The system prompt for Claude Opus tells the model to always respond as if it is completely face-blind and to avoid identifying or naming any humans in images.

But the prompts also describes certain personality tracing characteristics, traits and characteristics that Anthropic would have the Claude models exemplify. The prompt for Claude III opus, for instance, says that Claude is to appear as if it is, quote, very smart and intellectually curious, and, quote, enjoys hearing what humans think on an issue and engaging in discussion on a wide variety of topics. It also instructs Claude to treat controversial topics with impartiality and objectivity, providing, quote, careful thoughts and clear information and never to begin responses with the words, certainly or absolutely. It's all a bit strange to this human.

The system prompts, which are written like an actor in a stage play, might write a character analysis sheet. The prompt for Opus ends with Claude is now being connected with the human, which gives the impression that Claude is some sort of consciousness on the other end of the screen, whose only purpose is to fulfill the whims of its human conversational partners. But of course, that's an illusion. If the prompts for Claude tell us anything, it's that without human guidance and handholding, these models are frighteningly blank slates, end quote. Finally today, go with me on this. Are you aware there's a new movie coming out, starring George Clooney and Brad Pitt. It's called Wolves, and it's some sort of action comedy about two professional hitmen or cleaners or something like that. Apple won the bidding for the movie in 2021 by promising they would release it in theaters like they did with Killers of the Flower Moon before releasing it on streaming, or at least concurrently, or something like that. Quoting from the New York

Times, however, Brad and I made the deal to do that movie where we gave money back to make sure that we had a theatrical release, Mr. Clooney said last year. an interview with the Hollywood trade publication deadline. But this month, just weeks before the film was set to show up in thousands of theaters around the United States, Apple announced a significant change in plans. Wolfs will now be shown on a limited number of movie screens for one week before becoming available on the company's streaming service on September 27th, end quote. So not great, because maybe you're pissing off the talent there, but not really the biggest story in the world. What made this notable to me comes further in the piece where it

gives us some insight on how Apple is doing with their movies, and TLDR, I think they're losing a lot of money. Quoting again, despite the filmmaker's desires, the About Face follows a middling run at the box office for Apple, which began releasing films into theaters around the country via partnerships with traditional studios in October. It joined forces with Paramount Pictures to release Martin Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon, which cost $200 million to make and grossed $157 million worldwide. Ridley Scott's Napoleon cost $200 million and grossed $200,000. $21 million worldwide. The $200 million spy thriller Argyle grossed $96 million. And most recently, Apple teamed up with Sony to release Fly Me to the Moon, which costs $100 million, but grossed just $40 million worldwide

despite the star power of Scarlett Johansson and Channing Tatum. None of Apple's films have done well. Stephen Galloway, the dean of Dodge College of Film and Media Arts said in an interview, financially you might think it doesn't matter, but this is a company worth $3.3 trillion. dollars. Psychologically, it does. Apple's brand is quality, cutting edge, sleek, refined, forward-looking, and so now you're tarnishing that brand with what seems like in old-fashioned, not relevant, not part of the zeitgeist slate, end quote. With Wolf's, Apple substantially outbid its competitors, according to three people with knowledge of the process, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss financial terms, paying Mr. Clooney and Mr. Pitt more than

$35 million each, and the director, who also directed Spider-Man Homecoming, more than $15 million. Apple executives in Cupertino were already questioning the entertainment units over the amount of money being spent on movies, and the people said there was a thought within the company to not risk a public disappointment should the movie not succeed at the box office, end quote. So I guess the Gallagher brothers have at long last agreed to reunite, and it's all British Twitter can talk about this morning, the return of Oasis. Honestly, what do you think the odds are that they'll just end up getting mad at? each other again and this doesn't ever actually happen. I tried checking Polymarket to see what the betting was, but I couldn't find anything there. Still, I think it might be a safe bet that maybe not all of these dates planned will actually happen. Talk to you tomorrow.