Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 02/26 – Alexa+

Episode Date: February 26, 2025

Amazon finally updated Alexa with generative AI. It’s called Alexa+ and it can do plenty of neat things, but unless you’re a Prime subscriber, it’s gonna cost ya. DeepSeek is rushing its next AI model to press its momentum. Zuck wants to build a $200B AI datacenter. And how the SteamDeck has created a whole new category in gaming. Sponsors: shopify.com/ride Links: Amazon announces AI-powered Alexa Plus (The Verge) Amazon unveils a new and improved Alexa, Alexa+ (TechCrunch) DeepSeek rushes to launch new AI model as China goes all in (Reuters) Meta Discusses AI Data Center Project That Could Cost $200 Billion (The Information) How North Korea pulled off a $1.5 billion crypto heist—the biggest in history (ArsTechnica) Three years later, the Steam Deck has dominated handheld PC gaming (The Verge) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As the crispy chicken sandwich from 7-Eleven, people always call me loud. And I'm like, yeah, I know. I'm crispy. Did you expect me to whisper? If you want quiet, go eat some soup and reflect. Like, I know I'm a handful. I'm bold, I'm juicy. Throw some pickles and barbecue sauce on me, and baby, I'm a whole meal.

And with seven rewards, I'm just $4. Quiet. No. Krispy, saucy, and $4? Very. Only at 711. Valley 362326, participating stores only while supplies lastly out for full terms. Welcome to the TechMame right home for Wednesday, February 26, 2025. I'm Brian McCullough today.

Amazon-friendly updated Alexa with generative AI. It's called Alexa Plus, and it can do plenty of neat things, but unless you're a prime subscriber, it's going to cost you. DeepSeek is rushing its next AI model to press its momentum. Zuck wants to build a $200 billion AI data center and how the Steam Deck has created a whole new category in gaming. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Amazon just unveiled Alexa Plus, the long-awaited Genocide. Generative AI version of the voice assistant we know and love trained to detect tone and mood. Quoting the verge, Amazon first announced it was going to supercharge Alexa with AI back in September 2023. Back then, the company made a lot of big claims saying that Alexa would understand context

or build automated routines for you. You need it only ask. But by the following June, around when Apple announced its own Siri AI upgrade, reports emerged that the company was struggling to realize its efforts and that some employees were leaving because they didn't think this version of Alexa would ever work. quote. And quoting TechCrunch, Amazon says that the new Alexa can answer questions like, how many books have I read this year, drawing on info from an Amazon customer account. It can notify users when, for example, new tickets for a concert drop and help with certain tasks like booking a dinner reservation. Like other assistants on the market, the upgraded Alexa has visual

understanding through a device's camera. It can take in a visual feed and respond to questions taking whatever's happening in the feed into account. The new Alexa knows almost everything in your life, your schedule, your smart home, your preferences, the devices you're using, the people you're connected to, and the entertainment you enjoy, Amazon's devices and services chief Panos Penae said, Penae said that the improved Alexa can understand tone and the environment around it and adjust its responses on the fly. She's been trained in a couple of different ways from EQ to humor to understanding, he added. She understands, I'm a little bit nervous. She's trying to calm me. Beyond tasks like creating quizzes from study guides and creating basic travel itineries,

Alexa Plus can answer questions like, what's the best pizza nearby? Answers are informed by what's in Alexa's memory and preferences that Alexa has noted over time, end quote. Back to the verge. Alexa Plus will also be able to carry on conversations from uttering its wake word, which is still just Alexa. It also has vision capabilities and can take pictures and analyze images. Amazon demoed other abilities such as Alexa prompting you to tell you about concert ticket availability and being able to tell you about local businesses, referencing Yelp to do so, and book dinner reservations. The company says it can read a study guide and test you on the answers.

Amazon also said you can use Alexa Plus to research trips and create itineries, end quote. You can interact with all this on the website Alexa.com and a new phone app, but here's the catch. Alexa Plus is a subscription service costing $19.99 a month, though it is free if you're a prime member. Early access rolls out next month. It will work on almost every Alexa device Amazon has shipped. Signs that DeepSeek is not going to rest on their laurels and will instead try to push their advantage. First, they've cut their API prices in off-peak times between 1230 a.m. and 8.30 a.m. Beijing time by 75% for the R1 model and 50% for the V3 model. You want to know what those hours coincide with. Those are U.S. and European daylight hours. Quoting Reuters, Wednesday's price discounts are the latest in a series of moves by Deep Seek that have shaken the AI industry in China and abroad. The company is now accelerating the launch of a successor to January's R1 model. People familiar with the company have seen. said, end quote. Yes, on that, Reuters is also reporting that while Deepseek had planned to release their next model, likely called R2 in May, they now want it out as soon as possible.

Rumors are that Deepseek owner High Flyer built a 10,000 A100 GPU cluster in 2021. Quoting again, the company says it hopes the new model will produce better coding and be able to reason in languages beyond English. Details of the accelerated timeline for R2's release have not been previously reported. The launch of Deep Seek's R2 model could be a pivotal moment in the AI industry, said an analyst at tech services provider, Zensar. Deep Seek's success at creating cost-effective AI models would likely spur companies worldwide to accelerate their own efforts, breaking the stranglehold of the few dominant players in the field, they said. As one of the few customers with a large A-100 cluster, High Flyer and Deep Seek were able to

attract some of China's best research talent to former employees said. The key advantage of vast computing resources is that it allows for large-scale experimentation, said Liu, the former employee. Some Western AI entrepreneurs like Scale AI CEO Alexander Wang have claimed that Deepseek had as many as 50,000 higher-end Nvidia chips that are banned for export to China. He has not produced evidence for the allegation or responded to Reuters' requests to provide proof. If Deepseek becomes the go-to-a-I model across Chinese state entities, Western regulators might see this as another reason to escalate restrictions on AI chips or software collaborations, said Stephen Wu, an AI expert and founder of

hedge fund Carthage Capital. Further limits on advanced AI chips are a challenge that Liang has acknowledged. Our problem has never been funding, he told Waves, in July. It's the embargo on high-end chips, end quote. Thus, another motivation for getting the new model out fast. Continuing to read the tea leaves and watch for if people are still willing to spend ginormously on AI. Sources say meta is in talks to build a new data center campus for AI that could cost over $200 billion, based on the number of chips and the amount of power for the site. Quoting the information, meta's proposed new data center campus, which hasn't previously been reported, would be several times larger than a new AI data center in Louisiana that CEO Mark Zuckerberg discussed

last month, which he implied would be about four miles long. The discussion suggests meta is preparing for a multi-year surge in demand for generative AI among its billions of users through an AI chatbot available in all its apps. It also shows the lengths to which Zuckerberg may go to keep up with rival OpenAI, which has embarked on a joint venture with SoftBank to spend $500 billion over four years on new data centers for its AI. Leaders at Meta and OpenAI grew concerned about the speed with which XAI stood up a data center to develop AI in Memphis, Tennessee last year, prompting them to move faster with their projects, according to people who have spoken to them. Meta executives have told data center developers that the company is open

to building the bigger campus in states, including Louisiana, Wyoming, or Texas, according to someone who spoke with them. Senior executives this month visited potential sites, this person said. The meta executives discussed eventually needing between 5 and 7 gigawatts of power for the site. By comparison, OpenAI has planned to acquire 8 gigawatts of power for its proposed array of data centers known as Stargate by 2030. Each gigawatt is enough to power 750,000 homes. To put OpenAIs and meta's projects in perspective, at the end of 2023, Microsoft's entire Azure cloud business,

had around 5 gigawatts of capacity, according to a former employee. It could take meta more than five years to get that kind of power for its proposed campus. It's unclear whether meta will build the facilities on its own, contract with an outside developer or partner with a cloud computing provider like Oracle or CoreWeave that would help with construction and operation. Meta uses its own data centers and also rents AI servers from cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services and Oracle. Meta wouldn't necessarily be on the hook for building out the proposed Data Center campus if Zuckerberg changes his mind down the line, according to a person who has been involved in the talks. Large data center deals tend to happen in phases, so Meta's deal might

give it the exclusive right, but not the obligation to continue growing the project. Meta would likely need to sign a long-term data center lease to secure the campus, but it wouldn't need to commit to buying a certain number of AI chips, which is the most expensive aspect of such a project, end quote. Remember that $1.5 billion-bite-bit crypto heist, the biggest in history? Well, how the hackers managed to pull this off is interesting. For the first time, they got into a so-called cold wallet, which has huge implications for the entire crypto industry. Basically, they hacked the very UI of the wallets.

Quoting ours, technica, multi-sig cold wallets, also known as multi-sig safes, are among the gold standards for securing large sums of cryptocurrency. More shortly about how the threat actors cleared this tall hurdle. First, a little about cold wallets and multi-sig cold wallets and how they secure cryptocurrency against theft. Wallets are accounts that use strong encryption to store Bitcoin, Ethereum, or any other form of cryptocurrency. These wallets are assigned an encryption key pair. The public key serves as the wallet address so others know how to find it, although

some account holders opt to keep it private. The private portion of the key pair, meanwhile, is a long alpha-numeric string required to move funds out of the wallet. wallet. Transfers require hot wallets. These are accounts that are always connected to the internet and store the private key. Over the past decade, hot wallets have been drained of digital coins supposedly worth billions, if not trillions of dollars. Typically, these attacks have resulted from the thieves somehow obtaining the private key and emptying the wallet before the owner knows the key has been compromised. Given the vulnerability of hot wallets to theft, many account

holders store the private keys offline, so they are kept separate from the address. These cold wallets can store the offline private keys in different ways. The most secure practice is to secure the keys and a special purpose piece of hardware, often in the form of a USB dongle, that will decrypt them only when certain authentication steps occur. Multi-sig cold wallets go a step further in much the same way that nuclear arms systems are designed to require two or more authorized people to successfully authenticate themselves before a missile can be launched. Multisig wallets need the digital signatures of two or more authorized people before assets can be accessed. Bybit was largely following best practices by storing only as much currency as needed for day-to-day activity in warm and hot wallets and keeping the rest in the multi-sig cold wallets.

Transferring funds out of cold wallets required coordinated approval from multiple high-level employees of the exchange. The By-bit hack has shattered long-held assumptions about crypto security. Dick Labarda, Roman Zakin, and Oded Vanunu, researchers at security firm at Checkpoint wrote Sunday, no matter how strong your smart contract or logic or multi-sig protections are, the human element remains the weakest link. This attack proves that UI manipulation and social engineering can bypass even the most secure wallets. It's still unclear how the attackers managed to hack the UIs of multiple by-bit employees whose signatures were required for the funds to be moved out of cold storage.

But as researchers Dan Guido, Benjamin Samuels, and Anishneik of security firm Trail of Bits noted, these hackers have been long known for their relentless social engineering prowess. They often spend weeks or months building online personas that ultimately win the trust of targets. That persistence likely allowed the thieves who hit Bybit to somehow tamper with the UIs of each company employee whose digital imprimatur was required to move the funds out of cold storage and ultimately into wallets the hackers controlled all at breakneck speed, end quote. Finally today, Valve's Steam Deck, the handheld video game system, just celebrated its third birthday, and The Verge looks at how in basically no time it has come to dominate the handheld PC gaming market with about 50% market share in 2024, according to IDC.

Quote, add it up and just under 6 million shipments of handheld PC gaming devices have happened in three years. One way to view that, it's a small and not really growing market, IDC is forecasting under 2 million shipments in 2025, rather, than any major expansion. Another is that it's simply early days for the category. Meta's Raymans only sold 2 million pairs between October 2023 and February 2025, but its maker is taking that as a sign it could sell 10 million each year. I think it's amazing AMD Gaming Marketing Boss Frank Azur tells me discussing IDC's numbers for handheld gaming PCs. This didn't exist three years ago. We went from nothing, zero, to incremental category creation in the millions of units. But out of those six million shipments, the lion's share have been the steam deck itself, according to IDC's estimates.

All of the 2022 shipments are the steam deck, and word tells me upwards of 50% of the 2023 shipments and 48% of the 2024 shipments are the deck as well. Doing the math, Valve now has shipped upwards of 3.7 million steam decks, and has quite possibly crossed 4 million by now. With as few as 2 million windows handheld shipping in two years, it's not a huge surprise that AMD and Intel aren't spending big on more custom chips, like the one that's still working perfectly well for the Steam Deck, particularly if the rumors are true that early Windows handheld buyers return their purchases at unusually high rates. Anecdotally, I've seen lots of open-box stock of the AISIS ROG ally when I've looked at

Best Buy online and in person. But I hope AMD will invest in making that Steam Deck lightning strike again, because when every other low-power gaming chip is originally aimed at laptops rather than handheld, we get disappointments like the new Lenovo Legion GoS, which couldn't stand up to the three-year-old Steam Deck's one-year-old OLED revision in my review or the original MSI Claw. Or we get pretty good handhelds like the Rog Ally X that offset

power-hungry chips with a big-ass battery but cost $800 or more. Not that chips are the only reason the Steam Deck has come this far, not by a long shot. It's the combination of valves pick-up and play SteamOS, which lets you simply press a button to easily sleep and resume, and its proton

capability layer and pre-compiled shaders that incredibly often make Windows games run on Linux better than they run on Windows. Then there's its infinitely customizable and comfortable controls that make decades of older games playable. It's also the price. Think console, not gaming laptop, and how incredibly easy Valve makes it to temporarily tweak performance in exchange for more battery life and how many additional things you can do with a Steam deck if you try. Epic Games Store and Ubisoft and even Blizzard games are playable if you jump through a couple of hoops. It can easily stream your PlayStation with the chikey app you can find in the Linux desktop

app browser, letting the handheld double as a PlayStation portal. Valve has consistently said that it will wait until it can provide a leap in performance without sacrificing battery life before it introduces a Steam Deck 2, and it won't be using this year's AMD Z2 chips. Between that promise, the many excellent new games that do target Steam Deck, the high prices of new Nvidia GPUs, and the idea that new Microsoft and Sony handhelds are likely a few years away, I don't think there are all that many reasons to wait to buy today's Steam Deck, unless the Nintendo Switch 2 somehow supplants the Steam Deck as the handheld that game developers prefer to target with games, end quote.

If I had something more to share with you today, this is where I would do it, but I don't, so I won't talk to you tomorrow.