Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 03/13 – TikTok On The Brink?

Episode Date: March 13, 2024

The TikTok legislation has passed the House, but it’s path through the Senate is uncertain to say the least. The first real AI regulation has passed, in Europe, of course. Arm’s new chips for self-driving cars. Did Cerebras just break Moore’s Law with its new AI chips? Spotify has music videos. And Perplexity continues to try to become Google Search faster than Google search can become them. Sponsors: Shopify.com/ride Nutrafol.com/men code: RIDEHOME Links: TikTok bill, racing toward House passage, faces a minefield in the Senate (Washington Post) How TikTok Was Blindsided by U.S. Bill That Could Ban It (WSJ) World’s first major act to regulate AI passed by European lawmakers (CNBC) Stripe in ‘no rush’ to go public as cash flow turns positive (FT) Arm unveils first chip design to power self-driving cars (FT) AI startup Cerebras unveils the WSE-3, the largest chip yet for generative AI (ZDNet) Spotify adds music videos in some countries (TechCrunch) Perplexity brings Yelp data to its chatbot (The Verge) 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 TechMeme right home for Wednesday, March 13th, 2024. I'm Brian McCullough today. The TikTok legislation has passed the House, but its path through the Senate is uncertain to say the least. The first real AI regulation has

passed in Europe, of course. Arms new chips for self-driving cars did cerebrus. Just break Moore's law with its new AI chips. Spotify has music videos now and perplexity continues to try to become Google Search faster than Google Search can become them. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. So it actually looks like TikTok is on the brink. The U.S. House of Representatives just voted on that TikTok bill, and it passed by a tally of 352 to 65. However, its path through the Senate is less clear because there is not yet a companion bill in that body. Also, quoting the Washington Post. Senator Rand Paul pledged in an interview to block any measure that he felt violated the Constitution. Paul's opposition squelched a similar legislative effort a year ago.

Americans, quote, choose to use TikTok and express themselves. Paul said Tuesday, I don't think Congress should be trying to take away the First Amendment rights of 170 million Americans, end quote. President Biden has said he would sign the legislation if it cleared Congress. In a letter to members of Congress on Monday, TikTok executive Michael Beckerman said the bill raised, quote, serious constitutional concerns and was being rushed through at an unprecedented speech. without even the benefit of a public hearing. He added, quote, you have preconceived notions about TikTok based on what you read in the media rather than facts or reality, end quote. This vote to approve marks the first time a chamber of Congress has greenlit legislation that could lead to the nationwide

prohibition of a social media platform. A hold by Paul could deal the bill a significant blow, delaying a vote in the Senate by a week or more. The Senate is only in session three of the next six weeks and faces a calendar of pressing measures related to government funding, taxes, and judicial appointments. On Tuesday's Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer made no commitments about the measure's advancement. Let's see what the House does, he said. I intend to consult with my relevant committee chairman to see what their views would be, end quote. It looks like my suspicions were right. It feels rushed, but this was a stealth operation. TikTok thought it was out of the woods when the Biden campaign got a TikTok account a few weeks ago, but all the while, the administration was

planning a rollout of this bill catching TikTok very much by surprise, quoting the journal. This process was intentionally conducted in secret because the bill authors knew it was the only way they could move it forward. A TikTok spokeswoman said, inside TikTok some leaders were aware that lawmakers were working on legislation, but they didn't expect it to win so much support so quickly, some of the people familiar with the matter said. It was slow going until October 7th. The attack that day in Israel by Hamas and the ensuing conflict in Gaza became a turning point in the push against TikTok. Some people would acknowledge the matter said. People who historically hadn't taken a position on TikTok became concerned with

how Israel was portrayed in the videos and what they saw as an increase in anti-Semitic content posted to the app. House lawmakers on Tuesday were able to attend a classified briefing from intelligence officials on the administration's worries about the video app and how it could potentially use the data it collects. Two weeks ago, executives from TikTok's U.S. operations flew to their company's international headquarters in Singapore with good news. They told bosses that after years of battling over its fate in the U.S., the popular video app wasn't in imminent danger of being banned in its most important market, according to people familiar with the meetings. Among the positive signs, President Biden's election campaign had just joined the app on Super Bowl

Sunday. Days after returning to the U.S., they learned they had miscalculated, end quote. The EU Parliament has approved the AI Act, voting 523 in favor and 46 against, despite competition fears, the act. born back in 2021, puts AI tech into various risk categories, and is the first major regulatory law around AI, pretty much anywhere, quoting CNBC. The regulation is expected to enter into force at the end of the legislature in May after passing final checks and receiving endorsement from the European Council. Implementation will then be staggered from 2025 onwards. Some EU countries have previously advocated self-regulation over government-led curbs amid concerns that stifling regulation could, set hurdles in Europe's progress to compete with Chinese and American companies in the tech sector. Detractors have included Germany and France, which house some of Europe's promising AI startups.

Legal professionals described the act as a major milestone for international AI regulation, noting that it could pave the path for other countries to follow suit. Once again, it's the EU that has moved first, developing a very comprehensive set of regulation, said Stephen Farmer, partner and AI specialist at international law firm Pillsbury, end quote. Speaking recently about the Reddit IPO, I mentioned major unicorns still waiting to go public. Arguably, the biggest unicorn of them all, Stripe is still waiting. And in a new memo, John Collison said Stripe is in no rush to go public and that its payments volume rose 25% year over year to $1 trillion last year. A source also said Stripe hit $1 billion in net revenue in Q3 of

2023, quoting the Financial Times. 2023 was a big year. We hit dual-mile of $1 trillion in payment volume and being cash flow positive, said John Collison, Stripe's co-founder and president. We don't disclose the historical financials, but obviously Stripe has been in build mode up to this point, end quote. The San Francisco and Dublin headquartered company is among the most valuable private businesses in the U.S., alongside Elon Musk's SpaceX and Artificial Intelligence Company OpenAI. In 2023, Stripe raised $6.5 billion from venture capital investors, including Thrive Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and Founders Fund in a private stock sale. That was one of the largest ever in the U.S. The sale allowed the company to pay billions in tax liabilities

associated with its employees' stock units. You are starting to see this a bit more with pre-IPO companies such as OpenAI, Canva, SpaceX, private companies doing tender offers for staff who tend to have more concentrated positions in the company's stock, said Collison. Many venture-backed companies have avoided going back to investors who gave them money as the market peaked in 2021, mindful that any fresh capital is likely to come at a lower valuation, but some are now running short of cash, according to industry groups, as many as two-thirds of venture-backed startups, will need to raise money this year. The mistake would be private companies refusing to acknowledge market realities. Businesses don't do themselves any favors by having valuations

veer away from the fundamental value of the company, said Collison in the memo, end quote. I continue to be amazed by the degree to which silicon technology has gone through an explosion in recent years, semiconductor in silicon technology. Here's another example. Arm has unveiled its first Neoverse chips for self-driving cars, seeking to grow its non-smartphone revenue. The first vehicle with these chips is likely still four to five years out, but, quoting the financial times. Amazon Web Services, Mercedes-Benz, Nvidia, and Texas instruments are among the companies incorporating arms new designs into their products and development systems. For instance, Nvidia's drive Thor platform for autonomous systems, including self-driving vehicles

and robots, uses arms latest Neoverse central processing unit or CPU. Renee Haas, who was appointed chief executive of Arm in 2022, has made the automotive market one of arms key focus areas in tandem with expanding in the data center and Internet of Things, as Arm diversifies away from just the smartphone market. Smartphone sales have declined in the past two years, but Haas said last month are starting to show signs of recovery. About 35% of arms royalty revenue currently comes from smartphones with 65% from other sectors. Automotive revenue remains the smallest of its four main segments, according to a recent investor presentation, but it's one of the fastest growing. The automotive chip market was worth about $19 billion in

2022, according to Arm, or about 10% of its $200 billion total addressable market, end quote. Has a new style AI chip actually broken Moore's Law? Cerebrus has announced the WSE3, a TSM-made 5-nanmeter chip, almost the size of a 12-inch wafer with 4 trillion transistors up from 2.6 trillion in the WSE-2.2.2. all for training AI models. Serebris is making the claim that this has broken Moore's law in a sense, quoting ZDNet. The race for ever larger generative of artificial intelligence models continues to fuel the chip industry. Cerebrus released the WSE2 in April 2021. Its successor, the WSE3, is designed for training AI models, meaning refining their neural weights or parameters to optimize their functionality before they are put into production. It's twice the performance, same power,

draw same price, so this would be a true Moore's Law step, and we haven't seen that in a long time in our industry, Cerebus co-founder and CEO Andrew Feldman said in a press briefing for the chip, referring to the decades-old rule that chip circuitry doubles roughly every 18 months. The WSE doubles the rate of instructions carried out from 62.5 petaflops to 125 petaflops, the size of almost an entire 12-inch wafer, like its predecessor, the WSE has shrunked its transistors from 7 nanometers, 7 billionths of a meter to 5 nanometers, boosting the transistor from 2.6 trillion transistors in the WSC 2 to 4 trillion. TSM, the world's largest contract chip maker, is manufacturing the WSE3. As with the prior to chip generations, Feldman compared

the WSE's enormous size to the current standard from Nvidia, in this case the H-100 GPU, which he called this poor sad part here in a slide-deck image. It's 57 times larger, Feldman said, comparing the WSE against Nvidia's H-100, it's got 52 times more cores, it's got 800 times more memory on ship, it's got 7,000 times more memory bandwidth, and more than 3,700 times more fabric bandwidth. These are the underpinnings of performance, end quote. Feldman said a new CS3 computer equipped with the WSE was capable of managing a hypothetical language model of 24 trillion parameters. That surpasses current leading generative AI technologies, including OpenAIs GPT4, which is believed to have around 1 trillion parameters. Feldman also emphasized

the user-friendliness of programming the cerebrus machine compared to traditional GPUs. He said that training GPT3, with its 175 billion parameters on a GPU, demands over 20,000 lines of code in multiple languages, including Python, C, C++, etc. In contrast, the WSE3 requires merely 565 lines of code. Feldman also showcased the CS3's efficiency in training large language models by comparing it to existing AI training clusters. Specifically, he claimed that a group of 2048 CS3 units could train META's 70 billion parameter Lama 2 model 30 times quicker than Meta's current setup, reducing training time from 30 days to just one. Wild. More details from the unveiling. Feldman says they are working on a cluster of 64 CS3 machines and that, like Nvidia, they are selling everything.

they can make at the moment. Demand is through the roof. Cerebrus also announced a partnership with Qualcomm to drive down the cost of inference. They're doing this in clever ways, like using sparsity to eliminate 80% of unnecessary computation, and speculative decoding, essentially using smaller versions of an LLM to make predictions which are then checked for accuracy by the bigger version of the model. The expectation is that AI development will increasingly pivot toward the inference market, as the application of inference leaves behind data centers to encompass a broader range of edge devices. I believe that more and more, the easy inference will go to the edge, and Qualcomm has a real advantage there, Feldman said.

Spotify has rolled out music videos to its mobile and desktop apps in beta in 11 markets, including Brazil, Italy, and the UK, available to premium subscribers only. The U.S., you'll note, is not part of this rollout yet, quoting TechCrunch. Here's how it's going to work. Instead of searching for music videos directly or browsing videos in a separate section of the app, music videos can be started from the now-playing screen. When you're listening to a song that has a music video, you can tap on a button that says switch to video to switch to video. The music video starts playing from the beginning, even if you were in the middle of the track and replaces the album artwork. If you want to view the video in full screen, you can rotate your phone to landscape.

For this feature, Spotify isn't simply embedding a YouTube video or partnering with a third-party company. The company is hosting these videos directly and delivering them to its users without any ad. When asked about royalties when a song is played in video format compared to an audio stream, the company didn't answer. If you want to go back to background listening, you can tap on the button that says switch to audio to turn off the music video. And if you watch the music video until the end, Spotify will play the next song in your cue in audio. On desktop, music videos appear in the right-hand column with information about the current song and artist. Spotify says that the feature is also available on TVs where it makes a lot of sense. As a reminder, the company has released

apps for the Apple TV, Android TV, Fire TV devices, gaming consoles, and several smart TV models. At first, only a limited number of music videos will be available in Spotify, but the company has already secured distribution rights to add more videos down the road, end quote. And finally today, perplexity that AI startup gunning directly for Google Search is adding things to make it more like Google Search. Perplexity is licensing Yelps data and integrating its maps, reviews, and other details in responses when users ask for restaurant recommendations from Perplexity. Quoting the Verge, Perplexity CEO Aravind Sarinvus tells The Verge that many people are using chatbots

like regular search engines. It makes sense to offer information on things they look for like restaurants directly from the source. So it's integrating Yelp's Maps, Reviews, and other details in responses when people ask for restaurant recommendations. Our underlying motivation is that we started off as this tool that appealed to people doing fast checks and research. But research can be on anything like what if you're a coffee addict and you want to know where the good coffee shops are, says Shrina Boss. The responses include links to

businesses' Yelp pages so users can view more reviews or other details. Perplexity did not disclose the financial details of the deal and says it will not use Yelp's data to train any model as the company uses existing models like GPT and Claw2 for the chatbot. Perplexity is the latest AI company to cut a deal for a source of continually refreshed up-to-date information, though Serena Vass points out it is not partnering with Yelp, but rather licensing its data. Perplexity plans, more integrations like this in the future, and it already works with the answer engine Wolfram Alpha for mathematical computations. Serena Voss provided a few potential examples, like working with providers of shopping data or financial data, end quote. Fingers crossed, Chris and I

are going to be able to ask Aravind about all that later today when we interview. him for this week's bonus episode. This was the interview that was postponed last week, so let's hope today's the charm. But also, this came up again, so I'll address it again, since people continue to be confused by it. I often have things to say outside of the regular confines of the show, like right now. And when I don't, I say usually nothing for you today, talk to you tomorrow. Why do I do that? People often tweet at me like they did yesterday. How can you have nothing to say? You just gave me the tech news for you. for 15 minutes. Right, but I have nothing extra to say. And if I just said nothing and had the music

fade out, you might be confused even further. You might not listen for when I do have something to say, like now. For a while, I tried to keep a list of song lyrics that I could just use in lieu of saying nothing to say, but I'm too lazy to do that consistently, it seems. I will try harder, more song lyrics when I can repopulate the list. Talk to you tomorrow.