Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 09/24 – Sam Altman’s Few Thousand Days

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, September 24th, 2024. I'm Brian McCalla today. Sam Altman has a manifesto around AI, kind of. Telegram is beginning to walk things back a bit. Cloudflare wants to help you block the AI bots, new streaming device from Roku, and I guess TikTok can't win at everything. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Sam Altman released an essay yesterday where he said that superintelligence is right around the corner. Quote, this may turn. out to be the most consequential fact about all of history so far. It is possible that we will have

Starting point is 00:01:17 superintelligence in a few thousand days. It may take longer, but I'm confident we'll get there. How did we get to the doorstep of the next leap in prosperity? In three words, deep learning worked. In 15 words, deep learning worked, got predictably better with scale, and we dedicated increasing resources to it. That's really it. Humanity discovered an algorithm that could really truly learn any distribution of data, or really the underlying rules that produce any distribution of data, to a shocking degree of precision, the more compute and data available, the better it gets at helping people solve hard problems. I find that no matter how much time I spend thinking about this, I can never really internalize how consequential that is. There are a lot of details we

Starting point is 00:01:59 still have to figure out, but it's a mistake to get distracted by any particular challenge. Deep learning works, and we will solve the remaining problems. We can say a lot of things about about what may happen next, but the main one is that AI is going to get better with scale, and that will lead to meaningful improvements to the lives of people around the world, end quote. Now, I will be honest with you, despite all the attention this got online overnight, the whole thing is sort of vague and extremely cheerleading, kind of. Like, is this just some hype cycle chum? I mean, probably right, to a degree. though now we do have this clam chowder, as Gruber used to call it, to bring up and be like,

Starting point is 00:02:40 hey, Sam, it's been a thousand days, quoting TechCrunch. In Altman's latest post, the Open AI leader presents an incredibly positive update on the state of AI hyping its world-changing potential. Far from being an occasionally helpful alternative to Google Search or a homework helper AI, as Altman presents, will change humanity's progress for the better, naturally. Through rose-tinted contacts, Altman pitches the numerous ways he believes AI will save the world. But much of what he writes is seemingly meant to convince the skeptics of how much AI matters and could well have the opposite result. Instead of creating new fans, posts like this, may well invite increased scrutiny as to whether we're in an Emperor's

Starting point is 00:03:19 new clothes situation. As one commentator with the username Shark Jacobs on the technical forum, Hacker News writes, I'm not an AI skeptic at all. I use LLMs all the time and find them very useful, but stuff like this makes me very skeptical of the people who are making and selling AI, end quote. Then quoting from Ars Technica, the OpenAI chief envisions AI assistance becoming increasingly capable, eventually forming, quote, personal AI teams that can help individuals accomplish almost anything they can imagine. He predicts AI will enable breakthroughs in education, healthcare, software development, and other fields. While acknowledging potential downsides and labor market disruptions, Altman remains optimistic about AI's overall impact on society.

Starting point is 00:04:00 He writes, quote, prosperity alone doesn't necessarily make people happy. There are plenty of miserable rich people, but it would meaningfully improve the lives of people around the world, end quote. Even with AI regulation, like SB 1047, the hot topic of the day, Altman didn't mention sci-fi dangers from AI in particular. On X, Bloomberg columnist Matthew Iglesias wrote, Notable that At Sama is no longer even paying lip service to existential risk concerns, The only downsides he's contemplating are labor market adjustment issues, end quote. While enthusiastic about AI's potential, Altman urges caution too, but vaguely. He writes, we need to act wisely, but with conviction.

Starting point is 00:04:39 The dawn of the intelligence age is a momentous development with very complex and extremely high stakes challenges. It will not be an entirely positive story, but the upside is so tremendous that we owe it to ourselves and the future to figure out how to navigate the risks in front of us, end quote. You ask customers of Kaspersky Antivirus, guess what? You have a new antivirus program, whether you know it or not. That's because Ultra A.V. was installed remotely to replace Kaspersky on your PCs after a Kaspersky deal with Ultra AV owner Pango, quoting TechCrunch. Customers of Kaspersky Antivirus in the United States found out in the last few days that their cybersecurity software was automatically replaced with a new one called Ultra AV, according to several customers who post a new customer. posted on social media, and some of the customers said they had no idea this was going to happen. Quote, woke up to Kaspersky completely gone from my system with Ultra AV and UltraVPN, freshly installed, not by me, just automatically while I slept, a user on Reddit wrote.

Starting point is 00:05:43 Others in the same Reddit thread, as well as in other threads reported having the same experience. A reseller who until recently sold Kaspersky products prior to the recent sales ban, told TechCrunch that he was left annoyed by the move to automatically remove Kaspersky Software and replace it with an entirely different antivirus. A former senior U.S. government cybersecurity officials said that this was an example of the huge risk posed by the access granted by Kaspersky software. It's worth noting that, on the other hand, other customers did report receiving an email from Kaspersky about the transition to Ultra AV.

Starting point is 00:06:15 The transition to ultra AV comes months after the U.S. government took the unprecedented decision to ban all sales of Kaspersky's software across the United States. In June, the Commerce Department announced that sales of the antivirus software would be banned starting July 20th. After that, Kaspersky was allowed to provide limited security updates to customers until September 29th. In early September, Axios reported that Kasperski had reached a deal to offload its customers to American cybersecurity firm Pango, which owns Ultra AV, a relatively new antivirus software, end quote. Telegram now says it will give users IP addresses and phone numbers to authorities in response to valid legal requests, changing its terms of

Starting point is 00:06:58 service to deter criminal activity on the platform. Quoting Bloomberg, The platform changed its terms of service to deter criminals from abusing it. Durov said in a post on Telegram Monday, the move comes less than a month after his arrest in France, where he faces charges of alleged complicity in the spread of child sexual abuse materials. The move represents a marked difference from telegram's approach to government requests for data and its reputation for lax moderation. The United Arab Emirates-based platform has been notoriously non-responsive to take down requests from governments around the world and often ignored requests for information about suspected criminals.

Starting point is 00:07:32 The app using artificial intelligence and a team of moderators has now begun to conceal problematic content from its search results as part of its efforts to prevent misuse, Durov said. French prosecutors in August charged the Russian-born Durov in connection with alleged crimes committed on the app. The case portrays the billionaire CEO as the head of a company that refused to provide law enforcement with data to assist legal wiretaps on suspected criminals. Derov's arrest has led to a number of policy changes at Telegram. Earlier this month, Telegram disabled new media uploads, which Duraf said was aimed at stopping bots and scammers, end quote. Cloudflare has rolled out bot management,

Starting point is 00:08:13 a suite of free AI auditing tools meant to help monitor and selectively block AI scraping bots to all of its customers, quoting Wired. Internet infrastructure firm Cloudflare is launching a suite of tools that could help shift the power dynamic between AI companies and the websites they crawl for data. Today, it's giving all of its customers, including the estimated 33 million using its free services, the ability to monitor and selectively block AI data scraping bots. That preventative measure comes in the form of a suite of free AI auditing tools it calls bot management, the first of which allows real-time bot monitoring. Customers will have access to a dashboard showing which AI

Starting point is 00:08:49 crawlers are visiting their websites and scraping data, including those attempting to camouflage their behavior. We've labeled all the AI crawlers, even if they try to hide their identity, says Cloudflare co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince, who spoke to Wired from the company's European in headquarters in Lisbon, Portugal, where he's been based the past few months. Cloudflare has also rolled out an expanded bot blocking service, which gives customers the option to block all-known AI agents or block some and allow others. Earlier this year, Cloudflare debuted a tool that allowed customers to block all-known AI bots in one-go. This new version offers more control to pick-and-chose which bots they want to block or permit.

Starting point is 00:09:26 It's a chisel rather than a sledgehammer, increasingly useful as publishers and platforms strike deals with AI companies that allow bots to roam free. We want to make it easy for anyone regardless of their budget or their level of technical sophistication have control over how AI bots use their content, Prince says. Cloudflare labels bots according to their functions, so AI agents use to scrape training data are distinguished from AI agents pulling data for newer search products like OpenAI's search GPT. Websites typically try to control how AI bots crawl their data by updating a text file called Robots Exclusion Protocol or Robots.com. This file has governed how bots scraped the web for decades. It's not illegal to ignore robots. Dot Text, but before the age of AI, it was generally considered part of the web's social code to honor the instructions in the file. Since the influx of AI scraping agents,

Starting point is 00:10:15 many websites have attempted to curtail unwanted crawling by editing their robots.combeys. Services like the AI agent watchdog dark visitors offer tools to help website owners stay on top of the ever-increasing number of crawlers they might want to block, but they've been limited by a major loophole. Unscrupulous companies tend to simply ignore or evade Robots.comans. According to Dark Visitors' founder Gavin King, most of the major AI agents still abide by Robots.com. That's been pretty consistent, he says. But not all website owners have the time or knowledge to constantly update their robots.com.coms. And even when they do, some bots will skirt the files directives. They try to disguise the traffic. Prince says Cloudflare's bot blocking won't be a command that this kind of bad actor can

Starting point is 00:10:59 ignore. Robots.Tex is like putting up a no trespassing sign, he says, this is like having a physical wall patrolled by armed guards. Just as it flags other types of suspicious web behavior like price scraping bots used for illegal price monitoring, the company has created processes to spot even the most carefully concealed AI crawlers, end quote. Roku has unveiled the $100 Roku Ultra, which they say is 30% faster than other streaming players, has Wi-Fi 6, HDMI 2.1, Dolby Atmos, and the voice remote pro, and more. Quoting The Verge. One day after the Google TV streamer hits stores,

Starting point is 00:11:42 Roku is announcing its latest streaming player, and unlike Google's big design overhaul, the new Roku Ultra up is playing things safe. I'd argue maybe too safe. It's still $99.99. Still delivers Dolby Vision and Atmos, and it looks exactly the same as before, though the company says there are notable improvements inside.

Starting point is 00:11:58 The 2024 Ultra is 30% faster than any of Roku's other players, and it now features Wi-Fi 6. That upgrade puts it ahead of the Google TV streamer, which stuck with Wi-Fi 5. Roku is now on par with the Apple TV, but behind Amazon's flagship Fire TV streamers, which include Wi-Fi 6E connectivity, and yes, there's still a built-in Ethernet Jack for those of you who prefer wired setups. Plus, as an HDMI 2.1 streaming player, Roku Ultra offers quick media switching, QMS, delivering seamless, jutter-free transitions between different refresh rates or content sources on premium TVs. Roku's Paul Nagaroni wrote in a blog post. Note that your TV must also support QMS for this to work, and we're still in the very, very early stages of that. The Ultra ships with Roku's best remote, the voice remote pro, which itself has been upgraded with backlit buttons, USBC charging,

Starting point is 00:12:50 and new quick launch and live TV buttons. The former lets you, quote, see your personalized shortcuts, your go-to apps, your favorite voice command, switching the captions on and off right on your TV screen. The 2024-Ooku Ultra also, quote, uses it. advanced machine learning to anticipate which app you are going to open next and tease it up for our snappiest app loading to date, end quote. Spotify has rolled out its AI playlist feature in beta to premium subscribers in the U.S., Canada, Ireland, and New Zealand after launching in the UK and Australia, quoting the verge. Subscribers can locate the feature within the mobile app by tapping the plus button at the

Starting point is 00:13:31 top right of their Spotify library. Selecting AI playlist from the drop-down menu will then open a chat box to describe the playlist you want, such as spooky songs to play during Halloween or something folk music for a chill bath time. The feature will also provide suggested prompts. The AI playlist beta isn't currently available on the Spotify desktop or web apps. The generated playlists contain 30 songs that can be adjusted with additional prompts to better match the desired vibe, such as asking for more upbeat music. Descriptions that specify things like genres, decades, moods, or artists will see better results, but in my own testing, I found it was impressively capable of matching songs to even

Starting point is 00:14:09 niche descriptions, like, make me feel like a vampire hunter from Blade 1998, end quote. And finally, TikTok says it plans to shut down TikTok music on November 28th will be deleting all customer data. Did you even know TikTok had a music app? Exactly. Quoting Bloomberg. ByteDance, TikTok's owner created the music service to capitalize on the app's power and popularity with music fans. TikTok videos have been credited with the rise of hit songs and new artists and have led to clashes with record labels which have demanded higher payments for using their clips. The music app originally called Resso was launched initially in 2019 in a bet that the company could funnel TikTok users into a new standalone music service. It was available in

Starting point is 00:15:00 Brazil, Indonesia, Australia, Mexico, and Singapore. Instead of competing with music streaming services, TikTok will drive users to them via its ad to music app. app feature, the company said in a statement on Tuesday. The feature, which was introduced last year, lets users save tracks they like on TikTok to playlist on partner services such as Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon, end quote. So there is a big meta event tomorrow at One Eastern. I'm not sure what I'm going to do about that yet. You'll either get the show way early if I feel like there's enough news that I don't want to get crowded out. But I think chances are I will wait to cover the event itself and the show will be a bit later than usual. We'll see. Talk to you then.

Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 09/24 – Sam Altman’s Few Thousand Days

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