Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 12/10 – Amazon Autos

Episode Date: December 10, 2024

You can now buy a car on Amazon. A new AI unicorn doing something with AI I hadn’t heard about before. New AI enhanced smartglasses. Microsoft says it has a new datacenter design that uses zero water. And if you were able to use Sora yesterday, what was that like? Sponsors: Shopify.com/ride Links: You Can Buy a Car on Amazon Now (Wired) US finalizes $6.1 bln Micron chip-making subsidy (Reuters) Memory chip maker Micron’s $6.1 billion grant confirmed by Commerce Dept. (Washington Post) OpenAI-Backed Language Tutor Startup Doubles Value to $1 Billion (Bloomberg) Solos challenges Meta’s Ray-Bans with $299 ChatGPT smart glasses (The Verge) Microsoft Unveils Zero-Water Data Centers to Reduce AI Climate Impact (Bloomberg) Bluesky teases paid subscription, Bluesky+, in new mockup (TechCrunch) I just went hands-on with Sora — the good, the bad, and the wow (Tom's Guide) 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, December 10th, 2024. I'm Brian McCullough today. You can now buy a car on Amazon. A new AI unicorn doing something with AI I hadn't heard about before. New AI enhanced smart glasses. Microsoft says

it has a new data center design that uses zero water. And if you were able to use SORI yesterday, what was it like? Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Say hello to Amazon Autos, which lets U.S. users buy a Hyundai with plans to add dealerships and other manufacturers in 2025. In other words, Amazon is finally breaching the final frontier in retail sales, cars, quoting Wired. Assuming you want a new Hyundai specifically, you can now buy the car on Amazon. The Korean automaker is the only manufacturer working with Amazon autos, though Amazon says it will roll out, pun almost certainly intended, services with additional dealerships and manufacturers in 2025, end quote. The marketplace lets buyers search nearby Hyundai dealerships,

for their ideal vehicle configuration, picking everything from trim to interior features. Shoppers can estimate trade-in values through Amazon's third-party valuation tool and choose between full payment or financing options, though rates aren't standardized. The platform streamlines paperwork with e-signatures and lets-buyer's scheduled dealer pickup while featuring Amazon's signature elements like user reviews and that familiar add-to-cart button. Yes, you can add a $66,000 Ionic 5 to the same cart as you're, toilet paper, I guess. The service comes with limitations, though, no shipping, dealership pickup is required, new Hyundai's only, no used inventory yet, and availability restricted to 48 states,

which excludes Alaska and Hawaii. Amazon isn't actually selling the cars directly. They're facilitating deals between buyers and dealerships, navigating around U.S. regulations that prevent direct retail car sales. But this actually plays into how cars are increasingly sold and maybe even increasingly thought of these days, where vehicles are essentially computers on wheels and brands like Tesla and Rivian already sell direct to consumers online. While some dealers remain skeptical about Amazon's long-term success here, the tech giant is betting that simplifying the traditional dealership experience will be enough to capture market share, their value proposition, eliminating the dreaded haggling process through a streamlined digital marketplace.

The U.S. Commerce Department has finalized more than $6.1 billion for memory chip Micron to fund its New York and Idaho factory projects, one of the largest Chips Act subsidies, and probably the biggest one beyond Intel, quoting Reuters. The Commerce Department in Micron have also agreed to preliminary terms for an additional investment of $275 million to expand the chipmaker's facility in Manassas, Virginia, which primarily manufactures chips sold in the automotive networking and industrial markets. The additional investment will help onshore a critical technology relied upon by our defense industry, automotive sector, and national security community, the White House said, end quote. And quoting the Washington Post. The grant is designated for the

construction of two chip factories in Clay, New York, and Boise, Idaho, as well as an expansion of an existing facility in Manassas, Virginia. Biden administration officials in recent weeks have been locking in grants under the 2022 Chips and Science Act, which allocated tens of billions of dollars to build chip manufacturing facilities in the United States. Previous grants finalized over the several weeks include $11 billion for Intel and $6.6 billion for Taiwan Semiconductor manufacturing company. During the election campaign, President-elect Trump criticized the grant program and said he prefers to promote U.S. chip manufacturing by levying tariffs on semiconductor imports, end quote. I've got an interesting raise for you because it's an angle to AI I haven't heard of before.

Speak is an AI language learning startup. It uses AI to teach English by focusing on speaking, not gamification. And it is now raised $78 million led by a sell at a $1 billion valuation, taking its total funding to $162 million, quoting Bloomberg. While competitors like Rosetta Stone and Duolingo have dominated the language learning market for years, Speak is betting that it can use AI to help make people more fluent in a new tongue. Instead of trying to gamify the learning process, the startup focuses on developing authentic speaking abilities. With Speaks app, users can practice a new language by communicating verbal, with an AI system. The San Francisco-based company's speech recognition model adapts to users' accents,

allowing the app to offer real-time feedback. Historically, the only way to actually become fluent is to hire a human teacher or tutor, co-founder and chief technology officer Andrew Sue said in an interview. Until the past few years, the technology just hadn't existed to build an AI or software-based conversational partner, end quote. Speak has a subscription-based revenue model with a premium service starting at $20 per month. Chief Executive Officer Conner Zwick said the company is approaching profitability and had revenue in the, quote, eight figures. While the consumer market has historically been its focus, Speak also has an enterprise offering that's been gaining traction, Zwick said. Many companies around the world pay for their employees to learn English, and we've seen eight of the

top 10 largest employers in Korea pick up Speak for Business, he said, end quote. But it is interesting that this is a consumer AI play, not a model play, not a use AI. to do accounting or law or whatever play. According to Pitchbook, even though Enterprise AI startups raised $16.4 billion this year, AI companies focusing on consumers have raised only half that. So interesting trend spotting, perhaps. Speaking of trends, you know I've been banging the drum

about how smart glasses seem to be the product category on the up. More sign of this as Solos has debuted the AirGo Vision, a camera-equipped pair of smart glasses, featuring visual recognition powered by OpenAI's GPT40, available now starting from $299. Quoting The Verge. Solos's camera-equipped smart glasses have arrived to provide some much-needed competition against Meta's raybans.

The Ergo Vision is available now starting at $299, the same price as the Rayband meta-Iware tech, and features integration with OpenAIs GPT40 AI model to identify and answer questions about the people, objects, and text seen by the camera. This allows the ergo vision to do things like translate text into different languages, provide directions to nearby locations or landmarks, and give the wearer more information about what they're looking at. Solo says the glasses can also be integrated with other AI models like Google Gemini and Anthropics Claude, something the company previously teased when it announced the Ergo Vision in June. One thing we promised to deliver on was allowing consumers to have control over their experience with AI and smart technology, particularly with privacy options in mind.

Solo's co-founder Kenneth Fan said in the announcement. That's why we developed frames that can easily be changed to decide when and where a camera may be appropriate without sacrificing any of the fun features, end quote. Similar to Meadows' Rayban Collaboration, Ergo's vision device enables on-demand photo capture. The innovative design places the battery and touch controls within USBC rechargeable hinges, while offering a modular approach users can swap between camera equipped and standard frames, effectively transforming the device into an audio-only wearable when desired. Ergo's pricing strategy reflects this flexibility, with standalone frames available at $149,

or a privacy-focused bundle combining both camera and regular frames for $349. Design-conscious users can choose between seven colorways and two distinct styles, the bold, square-framed Krypton 1 with pronounced nosepads or the more streamlined Krypton 2 model. I'm also noting that once again this is showing that AI, might be the enabling factor for this new product category all by itself. No wonder we hear those rumors of Sam Altman wanting to get into hardware with the likes of Johnny Ive. Microsoft has unveiled a data center design that uses zero water for cooling, which might sound like not exactly exciting news, but consider that a typical data center uses more than

125 million liters of water per year. So this would be a big deal, quoting Bloomberg. Launched in August, the new design uses a closed loop to recycle water. Liquid is added during construction and continually circulated, obviating the need for fresh supplies. Data centers will still require fresh water for worker facilities like bathrooms and kitchens. Microsoft spent more than $50 billion on capital expenditures in the fiscal year ended June 30th, the vast majority related to data center construction fueled by demand for artificial intelligence services. It plans to top that figure in the current year requiring rapidly rising amounts of energy to run the networks and water to cool equipment. Many of the latest facilities

are going up in hot, dry areas like Arizona and Texas, making it even more critical to find ways to conserve water. Microsoft's existing data centers will continue to use a mix of older technologies, but new projects in Phoenix and Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin will begin using the zero water designs in 2026, end quote, and quoting data center dynamics. All Microsoft data centers designed from August 2024 will use the new design, expected to come online from late 2027. By adopting chip-level cooling solutions, we can deliver precise temperature control without water evaporation. Steve Solomon VP of Data Center Infrastructure Engineering at Microsoft said, these new liquid cooling technologies recycle water through a closed loop. Once the system is filled

during construction, it will continually circulate water between the servers and chillers to dissipate heat without requiring a fresh water supply. Solomon added, the shift to the next generation data centers is expected to help reduce our WUE to near zero, for each data center employing zero water evaporation. Moving from evaporative systems to mechanical cooling is expected to increase the power usage effectiveness of the data center design. However, our latest chip-level cooling systems will allow us to utilize warmer temperatures for cooling than previous generations of IT hardware, which enables us to mitigate the power

use with high efficiency, economizing chillers with elevated water temperatures, Solomon said. There is also expected to be a nominal increase in data center power usage as a result. However, the company said that it was working on other innovations to provide, quote, more targeted cooling and reduce power usage, end quote. In mockups posted to GitHub, Blue Sky, is teasing Blue Sky Plus a $72 per year or $8 per month subscription offering, profile customizations, higher video upload limits, and more. This has been rumored for a while, along with maybe someday also running ads, but maybe this is a stopgap to forestall that eventuality. Quoting TechCrunch, though the company warns on GitHub that the list here is a user, interface mock-up only and the paid features could very well change ahead of the launch. There's reason to believe that at least some of these are under consideration for Blue Sky's

premium subscription. When earlier discussing its subscription model this past fall, Blue Sky said in a blog post it would offer premium features like higher video quality uploads or profile customizations colors and avatar frames. Both of these features are now included in the user interface mockup of the subscription currently known as Blue Sky Plus. In addition, the placeholder text in the mockup indicates Blue Sky could be considering other paid features like custom app icons, a Blue Sky Plus profile badge, inline post translations,

post-analytics, and bookmark folders, a feature set that could rival X. Of most interest is that Blue Sky Plus could be weighing offering verification profile badges as part of its subscription unless that feature is also only placeholder text as opposed to an idea Blue Sky is developing. However, the company recently spoke about its plans for verification and how the open nature of its network could make its system work a lot differently than paid verification on X and Metas platforms. While that may be true, it would be interesting if Blue Sky still decided to put its verification tools behind a paywall of sorts. The mockup also shows pricing of $8 per month or $72 per year for Blue Sky Plus, but that is not final either.

The user interface mockup was spotted by Blue Sky user at Sari X, Y, Z, whose posts about the finding ended up seeing hundreds of likes, quotes, and reposts on the emerging social network, which now has 24.7 million users. Blue Sky Software engineer Dan Abramon, who previously worked on React and Redux at Meta, responded in the thread to caution Blue Sky users that the list of features shown in the UI mockup doesn't necessarily match what will be released. Some of these features are likely to make it, but please don't take this as an actual list of planned features, he wrote in his reply on Blue Sky. We'll announce the actual list when more work is done. Abramov also clarified that the coming soon label means nothing,

as it's just a test of UI treatment for upcoming features, end quote. Finally, today, apparently everyone rushed to try SORA yesterday, so much so that users were encountering this message. SORA account creation is temporarily unavailable. We're currently experiencing heavy traffic and have temporarily disabled SORA account creation. If you've never logged into SORA before, please check back again soon. So it seems like the system was a bit overwhelmed by all the attention, but given that this was the big news of the week, how about a review? What was it like to actually use Sora if you were actually able to do so? quoting Tom's Guide. My first prompt was, a video of me writing for Tom's Guide. Although this prompt was about as boring as I could get, I chose it on purpose. I wanted to see what type of creative liberty Sora would come up with in an effort to determine what mistakes it might make. My plan worked. In this video, you can see the person is typing, but missing the keyboard completely, almost as if they are tapping their laptop nervously for inspiration. This prompt was a huge success and demonstrates what I wrote about earlier regarding Sora not understanding,

in general. This makes sense because physics requires some understanding of the way objects respond to one another. Similar to LLM's hallucination, SORA's video models struggle to put together videos with the movement of the objects. Photorealistic feature videos are a dead giveaway that the video was made with AI. I also prompted it with a chef preparing a colorful vegetable stir fry in a modern kitchen. This prompt assesses Sora's capability to portray human activities, culinary details, and indoor environments. This was a very realistic video, yet it still had some flaws For example, the chef was mixing veggies with a full uncut pepper in the bowl. Steam was rising from the bowl, but it was on the counter, not on the stove.

Maybe the veggies are that hot. Veggies aside, the chef's motions, facial expression, and details were very lifelike, leaving me wowed. Then I simply prompted video remix. I found a video of a bird on a porch and decided to remix it by asking Sora to add a cat to the video. I wanted to evaluate the remix features while seeing Sora's strengths and limitations. I noticed Sora went ahead and named the prompt. prompt, mysterious cabin encounter. I'm definitely in awe of Sora's ability to create landscapes and creatures, but I was surprised that Sora did not actually include a cat in the video. Instead,

it took the creative liberty to make the cabin visitor a mystery, as the title suggested. Overall, I was generally impressed. I've used other video generators that have stunned me with similar results. However, other generators take much longer to generate. Sora created the videos quickly in less than five minutes. My prompt was turned into a fairly realistic three to five second video. The site was easy to use, and all the features and what they did were clear, especially after watching them demoed today. I did find it a little tricky to navigate back home after a video was created. I ended up just using the back arrows to get back to home and create a new prompt. As was mentioned in the demo today, users should not log on to Sora thinking they are

going to create a full motion picture, even when using the storyboard feature, the videos are seconds long. The ability to edit the prompt and remix videos that other users have created is pretty cool. I was intrigued by the different prompts others used, particularly the simplicity of prompts that generated fascinating videos. I am excited to play around more with SORA, but I know those 50 prompts will go very quickly. I'll have to choose my prompts wisely, end quote. I guess you wouldn't have to be very eagle-eared to hear my voice deteriorate over the course of this recording, like you can tell which of the segments I recorded towards the end. Day three of the cold has been the worst one yet. As you can hear, hopefully I'll have improved some by tomorrow. Talk to you then.

You know,