Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 08/29 – The Crypto Regulators Come For NFTs

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 Tech meme right home for Tuesday, August 29th, 2023. I'm Brian McCullough today. Google's Cloud Next conference drops a ton of AI announces. OpenAI releases a business-oriented version of ChatGPT. The regulators have come for NFTs, and now the question is, are all NFTs securities are just the ones they find? And let me introduce you to Twitch's big new competitor. But are they really eating Twitch's lunch or just a front for gambling-related streaming? Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. The Google Cloud Next Conference was today, and there were a whole bunch of announces. For example, Google Cloud announced its fifth generation tensor processing units,

Starting point is 00:01:15 which they say promise 2x training performance improvements per dollar compared to 2021's fourth-gen TPUs. So that should give you an indication that most of the announces involved AI in one way or another. For example, again, Google wants you to know it is AI agnostic by adding AI tools from others like Meta's Lama 2 and Anthropics Clod 2 to Google Cloud. Quoting Bloomberg, this is part of the company's effort to position its platform as one where customers have the freedom to choose an AI model that best meets their needs, whether from the company itself or one of its partners. More than 100 powerful AI models and tools are now available to Google Cloud clients,

Starting point is 00:02:01 the company said. The company also announced wider availability of its duet AI product for customers of its workspace productivity suite with access for the public to follow later this year. Users can tap a generative AI helper, which responds to prompts to help create content on apps like Google Docs, sheets, and slides. Duet AI, introduced in May, can take notes during video calls, send meetings, summaries, and translate captions in 18 languages, Google said. Through a new feature called Attend for Me, users can dispatch the tool to join meetings on their behalf, deliver messages, and create a recap of the event. Google also said it has new partnerships

Starting point is 00:02:42 with companies such as GE appliances and Fox Sports, which will allow customers to take advantage of AI, for example, to create custom recipes or see a playback of a sports event from Fox's broadcast catalog, end quote. And don't worry, Google is bringing more AI to its various messaging and chat and meetings products, so you can continue to be confused about when, you can, to use which tool for what? Let's start with Google chat, their answer to Slack and Microsoft Teams. Google plans to update chat with a new design, add in more Duet AI tools, add huddles for audio and video calls, sounds like Slack, doesn't it? Capacity for 500,000 people in group channels and a lot more, quoting the Verge. Duet is the flagship new feature and potentially a reason

Starting point is 00:03:31 for a lot of workspace users to start using chat. You can use Duet to search and ask questions about all your stuff in Drive and Gmail and summarize both documents and conversations. You'll also be able to use AI-powered Autocracked in chat, and thanks to smart reply, you might never have to manually talk to your coworkers again. You'll be able to talk to duet in a one-on-one chat or invoke it in a group chat or space to get stuff done. You essentially have a co-worker who has infinite memory and amazing recall at your fingertips, says VAMC Jasty, Google's product lead for chat. Outside of the AI integrations chat is also getting a facelift.

Starting point is 00:04:10 The app has, until now, look like a fairly bare-bones messaging app, with a list of conversations on the left and the active chat on the right. Now it's going to have a lot more going on, and yes, it will look a lot more like Slack and Teams. There will be a new home view with all of your recent conversations, plus dedicated ways to see all your starred conversations and mentions. For now, everything will be reversed chronological, but Google says it plans to start more intelligently organizing and organizing, things next year. The interface as a whole is getting a bit of a cleanup too, with larger buttons

Starting point is 00:04:41 and aesthetics borrowed from Google's Material U design language, end quote. Then Google Meet is Google's answer to Zoom, right? Well, Google has announced AI features coming to meet as well, including expanding duet AI to take notes, mid-meeting summaries, and the ability for the AI to again attend meetings on your behalf. Quoting the Verge again, if Google meets new AI tools or as good as advertised, you might never need to pay attention to another meeting or even show up at all. At its Cloud Next conference today, Google revealed a handful of new AI-powered features coming soon to meet. One of the biggest new AI-enabled features is the ability for Google's duet AI to take notes in real time. Click Take Notes for Me, and the app will capture a summary and action items as the meeting is going on.

Starting point is 00:05:28 If you're late to a meeting, Google will be able to show you a mid-meeting summary so that you can catch up on what happened. During the call, you'll be able to talk privately with a Google chatbot to go over details you might have missed. And when the meeting is over, you can save the summary to docs and come back to it after the fact. It can even include video clips of important moments. Another new meet feature, let's do at attend a meeting on your behalf. On a meeting invite, you can click an attend for me button, and Google can auto-generate some text about what you might want to discuss. Those notes will be viewable to attendees during the meeting so that they can discuss them, end quote. Don't worry, though, OpenAI is not standing still.

Starting point is 00:06:12 Yesterday, they announced probably their most meaningful new product since the launch of ChatGPT. That would be the new GPT-4-powered Chat-GPT Enterprise, with improved privacy, performance, and data analysis features. Pricing is dependent on each company's usage. Quoting TechCrunch, ChatGPT Enterprise, which OpenAI first teased in a blog post earlier this year, can perform the same tasks as ChatGPT, such as writing emails, drafting essays and debugging computer code. But the new offering also adds enterprise-grade privacy and data analysis capabilities on top of the vanilla chat GPT, as well as enhanced performance and customization options. That puts ChatGPT Enterprise on par feature-wise with Bing Chat

Starting point is 00:06:56 Enterprise. Microsoft's recently launched take on an enterprise-oriented chatbot service. Chat-GPT Enterprise provides a new admin console with tools to manage how employees within an organization use chat GPT, including integrations for a single sign-on, domain verification, and a dashboard with usage statistics. Shareable conversation templates allow employees to build internal workflows leveraging chat GPT, while credits to OpenAI's API platform let companies create fully custom chat GPT powered solutions if they choose. ChatGPT enterprise in addition comes with unlimited access to advanced data analysis, the chat GPT feature formerly known as code interpreter, which allows ChatGPT to analyze data, create charts, solve math problems, and more, including

Starting point is 00:07:40 from uploaded files. For example, given a prompt like, tell me what's interesting about this data, chat GPT's advanced data analysis ability can look through the data, financial health or location information, for example, to generate insights. Advanced data analysis was previously available only to subscribers to ChatGPT Plus, the $20 per month premium tier of the consumer ChatGPT web and mobile apps. To be clear, ChatGPT Plus is sticking around. OpenAIC's ChatGPT Enterprise as complementary to it, the company says, end quote. One last thing on the AI beat today, just making a note of this meeting of the AI Five Families. Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai, Sam Altman, and Jensen Huang are among those expected to attend Senator Chuck Schumer's first AI Insight Forum on September 13th.

Starting point is 00:08:38 Quoting the Hill. The event will be closed to the press, but there will be a readout following its conclusion, according to the announcement. The forum is part of Schumer's plan to weigh regulation of the booming AI industry, which lawmakers have been racing to better understand since OpenAI's chat GPT tool burst into popularity after its November release, end quote. NFTs are not safe from the crypto regulatory crackdown. In a first, the SEC has charged impact theory with offering unregistered securities by selling NFTs. They also made Impact Theory destroy any NFTs. They had control over.

Starting point is 00:09:23 The LA-based entertainment company also agreed to pay a $6.1 million fine, quoting the verge. In 2021, the company sold three tiers of NFTs that it called Founders Keys. Quote, Impact Theory invited potential investors to view the purchase of a key NFT as an investment into the business, stating that investors would profit from their purchase. if Impact Theory was successful in its efforts. The SEC complaint says. Impact Theory said it was, quote, trying to build the next Disney and that the proceeds from the sales would be used for, quote, development, bringing on more team and creating more projects. It's not clear whether the enforcement action means the SEC broadly views NFTs as securities offerings. The SEC complaint focuses on how the NFTs were marketed and how the proceeds would be used. Some

Starting point is 00:10:09 NFT projects such as MBA Topshot have said their products are more like collectibles. Those NFTs aren't marketed as a way to build IP for an entertainment company, and the Topshot team hasn't said that the proceeds will be used to develop the project. Still, the NFTs in the impact theory didn't generate a dividend for their owners to SEC commissioners noted in a dissent to the action. The handful of company and purchaser statements cited by the order are not the kinds of promises that form an investment contract, wrote Hester Pierce and Mark Ueda in their statement. They also listed a series of questions that the enforcement action raised, including about what kind of guidance to craft about NFTs as an asset class, end quote.

Starting point is 00:10:51 Let me introduce you to kick, a Twitch rival launched in 2022 that is gaining traction among creators for its looser moderation policies and its 95-5 revenue split. Quoting NBC News. Felix XQC Langell and Caitlin Amoranth, Syragusa, were two of Twitch's biggest stars. Between them, they amassed nearly 20 million followers on Twitch alone. But in June, both left the streaming giant for lucrative contracts with a rival platform Kik, which boasts looser moderation policies and practices. They left amid an exodus of popular Twitch creators that continues, despite criticism over the

Starting point is 00:11:40 personalities kick has attracted and reports that it has ties to gambling industry figures and influencers. Since Amazon acquired Twitch for $970 million in 2014, the platform has enjoyed a near monopoly on the U.S. streaming market. Business especially boomed during the pandemic. According to the verge, hours watched jumped 50% from March to April, 2020, and 101% year over year. By May 2020, it had reached 1.654 billion hours watched per month. While most partnered streamers split their subscription revenue 50-50 with Twitch, some of its biggest creators cut more lucrative 70-30 deals, but the platform sparked Furer in September when it revealed it would strip some of those

Starting point is 00:12:22 streamers of their 70-30 cuts. At the time, Twitch President Dan Clancy argued that the change would not only help Twitch pay for the rising cost of hosting live video, but eventually help streamers too. Enter Kik. The fledgling platform launched eight months ago, backed by gambling industry heavyweights Bijan Tarani and Ed Craven, the co-founders of stake.com, an online casino based in Australia, and Tyler Trainwreck Nicknam, a popular gamer and gambler. Its concept bears a striking similarity to Twitches, with one major exception.

Starting point is 00:12:54 It offers streamers a whopping 95-5 revenue split. A spokesperson for KIC called the split simple back-of-the-napkin math for any serious Twitch creator, tired of handing over 50% of their subscription dollars to Twitch. In what was widely viewed as an effort to win back Creator Trust, Twitch then backpedaled on its initial payment structure plan and instead introduced the Partner Plus program, which allows eligible streamers to earn 70% of their subscription revenues up to the first 100,000 brought in every year. But then many streamers were ready for something new. For Syragusa, the choice was clear. I was the top female streamer on Twitch,

Starting point is 00:13:32 but they never reached out with any recognition, she said in an interview. On the other hand, KIC is open from the beginning and communicative. They are open to hearing suggestions. There are decision makers available for creators to discuss about the platform's future, end quote. Although the details of Syraguse's contract are yet to be made public, Langell's has garnered significant attention, a two-year, non-exclusive, $100 million deal that rivals some of the biggest contracts in sports. And they are not the only streamers to have left, Switch, in recent months popular Fortnite streamer Tyler Blevins, known to fans as Ninja, and chess grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura, have joined Kick, bringing their followers with them.

Starting point is 00:14:13 But several popular streamers and others have voiced concerns about gambling content on kick. In a post on X, Twitch's former director of creative development, Marcus DJ Wheat Graham, who is now vice president of community development at Fortis Games, called Kick a sham. There are so many red flags present that it is important. watching people who I respect give this platform an ounce of credibility, he said, pointing specifically to the lack of transparency around the platform's reported connections to crypto gambling. Subcategories for streams featuring slots and casinos remain prominently displayed on the front page of the site, even after Craven reassured users last month that the platform

Starting point is 00:14:51 would remove, quote, some unnecessary exposure to such content. The most popular gambling streams often include slots and casinos, wherein streamers play the slots for their audience, often for hours on end as viewers follow along in the live chat. Some streamers have even been sponsored to produce such content, including Langell, who previously admitted to a gambling problem and apologized for exposing his audience, much of it underage, to his gambling content. His most recent kick stream featured slots on stake.com. There is a reason gambling had to be regulated for public health and safety of its consumers, Fong said. A spokesperson for Kikk noted that gambling is popular on many platforms besides Kik, and that, quote,

Starting point is 00:15:32 Kik has heard the call against gambling, and we created a toggle feature found on any user's dashboard that allows you to remove all gambling content from your Kik experience, end quote. Finally, today, we've been talking recently about how self-driving robotaxies might have had a breakthrough moment. I'm not saying that we've satisfied my longstanding self-driving cars bet yet, maybe not even close, but the Robotaxy industry, as we've discussed, suddenly does seem to be taking its first toddler steps. If that premise is true, if this is real, then we would logically need to

Starting point is 00:16:09 see robotaxies coming to more cities, right? So where might that expansion happen? Axios has us covered. Quote, after investing tens of billions of dollars in research and development robotaxy companies Cruz and Waymo are now shifting their focus to commercialization. The goal is to scale rapidly by deploying Robotaxy fleets across multiple cities in fast succession. Phoenix, San Francisco, and Austin are currently the only cities where the public can hail a driverless robotaxie, but that list could grow by a dozen or more within the next year. Most of the planned markets are in the sunbelt where the weather is favorable, AVs tend to struggle in snow, and state policies are welcoming. GM-owned crews has really hit the accelerator, announcing testing in 14 cities, including

Starting point is 00:16:55 Seattle, San Diego, Miami, Nashville, Raleigh, Charlotte, Atlanta, and Washington, D.C., Dallas and Houston are the closest to commercial service. We're on a trajectory that most businesses dream of, which is exponential growth, Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt told GM shareholders in July. Crews aims to deliver $1 billion in revenue to GM in 2025. While it took years for Cruise's vehicles to master driving in San Francisco, the underlying technology adapts quickly to new environments, Vogue said in a recent thread on X, the site formerly known as Twitter, since each new city requires less work than the last. We've been able to ramp up the rate at which we launch a new cities, he wrote. Each time we add a new city, the performance in our current cities keeps getting better, he added,

Starting point is 00:17:41 as Cruz's technology learns from exposure to new situations. 23 states have passed laws allowing AV testing and or deployment, according to the Autonomous Vehicle Industry Association. A handful of others, particularly in the Northeast, allow testing, while 13 states have no AV-related statutes, end quote. Nothing for you today. Talk to you tomorrow.

Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 08/29 – The Crypto Regulators Come For NFTs

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