Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 03/27 – Hulu Comes To Disney+; WWDC Gets A Date

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 Wednesday, March 27th, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough today. Disney launches Hulu on Disney Plus. Apple schedules WWDC.

Starting point is 00:00:44 Some Apple users are reporting being victims of MFA bombing attacks, what it will mean to be certified as an AI PC and more crazy data on the hunt for talent in the AI wars. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Disney has launched Hulu on Disney Plus after testing the integration in beta last year. Disney Plus users that do not subscribe to Hulu can still search for Hulu shows, quoting the Hollywood Reporter. For subscribers to both Disney Plus and Hulu, whether through a bundle or individually, but with the same email address, Hulu content and a new Hulu tile will automatically populate with all Hulu shows now fully baked into the system. For Disney Plus subscribers that do not subscribe to Hulu, the service will still allow users to search for Hulu shows

Starting point is 00:01:33 and will also feature tiles encouraging users to upgrade to a bundle. If a user clicks on a Hulu show and decides to subscribe, they will be able to watch it immediately. Disney is going to start rolling out a marketing campaign for the combined app building off the campaign it kicked off during the Super Bowl. In Phase 3, which begins today, Hulu shows like Family Guy and the Bear will be added to the current Disney Plus campaign that has been in the market for the past few months, end quote. And quoting the verge. It's just Hulu inside of Disney Plus turns out to be a bigger deal and a bigger undertaking than it sounds. as it has prepared to integrate Hulu. Disney has also been changing the way the whole company thinks about streaming. It has worked to better integrate everything from login tools to advertising platforms to metadata and personalization systems

Starting point is 00:02:19 so that Disney can go from owning a collection of streaming services and platforms to having something much more like a single product across the whole company. So yes, Hulu is just a tile, but that tile also seems to represent something bigger inside of Disney. The full Disney plusification of everything, as the tech and strategy, it built over the last few years, percolates out to everything else Disney does. We zoomed out and took a very long-term approach, says Aaron LaBerge, the president and CTO of Disney Entertainment and ESPN. We're going to be running a streaming service forever, end quote. Here's just one example of what that looks like. Chris Lawson, the EVP of content operations at the company, estimates that Disney had to move more than 100,000 individual assets from Hulu to Disney

Starting point is 00:03:01 Plus in order to make this work. It's a mixture of content that we own and content from our partners, he says, every partner shares that content in different ways, in different formats, with different metadata attached, end quote. Apple has officially scheduled WWDC 2024 for June 10th to June 14th as a virtual event with a June 10th keynote where Apple is expected to unveil its AI strategy, iOS 18, and more, quoting Mac Rumors. The keynote event will be available on the Apple developer app, the Apple website, and YouTube, with Apple also planning to share videos and information all week long.

Starting point is 00:03:41 Though WWDC-2020 is an online event, Apple is once again planning a special event for select developers and students, which is set to take place on June 10th at the Apple Park campus in Cupertino, California. Attendees will be able to watch the keynote and State of the Union presentations at Apple Park, as well as meet Apple employees and attend the Apple Design Awards. Current Apple Developer Program members, Apple Entrepreneur Camp alumni, prior Swift Student Challenge winners, and current Apple Developer Enterprise Program members can enter to attend the Apple Park event with Apple choosing participants through a random lottery. Apple normally holds a swift student challenge when the WWDC dates are announced, but the challenge kicked off earlier this year.

Starting point is 00:04:21 Winners will be announced on Thursday, March 28th. Winners will be eligible to attend the special event at Apple Park, and 50 distinguished winners will be invited to Cupertino for a three-day experience, end quote. Reading the tea leaves of the invite, like we always like to do, they mashed up the Ws on WWDC to make it look like a series of Vs, the letter Vs, I don't know, Kind of like how Volkswagen does their logo sometimes. Don't know what that suggests, combining Ws in a visually confusing way, but there you go. Some Apple users are reporting being targeted in MFA or Multi-Factor Authentication Bombing Attacks, in which their devices are inundated with alerts to approve a password change or login,

Starting point is 00:05:06 quoting Krebs on security. In this scenario, a target's Apple devices are forced to display dozens of system-level prompts that prevent the devices from being used until the recipient responds, allow, or don't allow to each prompt. Assuming the user manages not to fat finger the wrong button, on the umpteenth password reset request, the scammers will then call the victim while spoofing Apple support and the caller ID, saying the user's account is under attack and that Apple support needs to, quote, verify a one-time code. Parth Patel is an entrepreneur who is trying to build a startup in the conversational AI space.

Starting point is 00:05:40 On March 23rd, Patel documented on Twitter slash X a recent fishing campaign targeting him that involved what's known as a push bombing or MFA fatigue attack, wherein the fishers abuse a feature or weakness of a multi-factor authentication system in a way that inundates the targets devices with alerts to approve a password change or login. All of my devices started blowing up my watch, laptop, and phone, Patel told Krebs on security. It was like this system notification from Apple to approve a reset of the account password, but I couldn't do anything else with my phone. I had to go through and decline like 100 plus notifications. Some people confronted with such a deluge may eventually click allow to the incessant password reset prompts just so they can use their phone again. Others may

Starting point is 00:06:25 inadvertently approve one of these prompts, which will also appear on a user's Apple Watch if they have one. But the attackers in this campaign had an ace up their sleeves. Patel said after denying all of the password reset prompts from Apple. He received a call on his iPhone that said it was from Apple's support. The number displayed was 1-800-275-2273, Apple's real customer support line. I picked up the phone, and I'm super suspicious, Patel recalled. So I asked them if they can verify some information about me, and after hearing some aggressive typing on his end, he gives me all this information about me, and it's totally accurate. All of it, that is, except his real name. Patel said when he asked the fake Apple support rep to validate the name they had on file for the Apple

Starting point is 00:07:05 account. The caller gave a name that was not his, but rather one that Patel had only seen in background reports about him that are for sale at a People's Search website called People Data Labs. What sanely designed authentication system would send dozens of requests for a password change in the span of a few moments when the first requests haven't been acted on by the user? Could this be the result of a bug in Apple's systems? Apple has not yet responded to requests for comment. Throughout 2022, a criminal hacking group known as Lapsis used MFA bombing to great effect in intrusions at Cisco, Microsoft, and Uber. In response, Microsoft began enforcing MFA number matching, a feature that displays a series of numbers to a user attempting to log in with their credentials. These numbers must then be entered into the account owner's Microsoft Authenticator app on their mobile device to verify they are logging into the account, end quote.

Starting point is 00:07:59 We're used to the Googles and Metas and Amazon's and Microsofts of the world being big investors in this AI era. but do you know who has actually been the biggest acquirer so far? The $43 billion startup Databricks, which last June ponied up $1.3 billion for generative AI startup Mosaic ML. Well, fruits of that acquisition clearly, as Databricks this morning unveiled a new open source model called DBRX, which cost around $10 million to develop over several months, and Databricks says outshines Lama 2, mixtral, and grok. Quoting Venture Beat. The model which contains 132 billion parameters outperforms leading open source alternatives like Lama 270B and Mixtral on key benchmarks measuring language understanding,

Starting point is 00:08:43 programming ability, and math skills. While not matching the raw power of OpenAI's GPT4, company executives pitched DBRX as a significantly more capable alternative to GPT3.5 at a small fraction of the cost, end quote. And quoting Silicon angle. The company said it's open sourcing the model to encourage customers to migrate away from commercial alternatives. It cited a recent Andresen-Horowitz survey that found that nearly 60% of artificial intelligence leaders are interested in increasing open-source usage or switching when fine-tuned open-source models roughly match the performance of proprietary ones. The most valuable data, I believe, is sitting inside enterprises. DataBricks chief executive Ali Goetzi said in a briefing with journalists, AI is kind of precluded from those spheres,

Starting point is 00:09:29 so we're trying to enable that with open source models, end quote. DBRX uses a mixture of experts architecture, a type of neural network that divides the learning process among multiple specialized sub-networks known as experts. Each expert is proficient in a specific aspect of the designated task. A gating network decides how to allocate the input data among the experts optimally. The MEOE architecture is built on the Megablocks Open Source project,

Starting point is 00:09:54 which its developers said can more than double training speed compared to other MOE architectures and is up to twice as compute-efficient, end quote. But, quoting TechCrunch, it's exceptionally hard to use DBRX unless you're a Databrix customer. That's because in order to run DBRX in the standard configuration, you need a server or PC with at least four Nvidia H-100 GPUs. A single H-100 costs thousands of dollars, quite possibly more. That might be chump change to the average enterprise, but for many developers and solopreneurs, it's well beyond reach.

Starting point is 00:10:25 and there's fine print to boot. Databricks says that companies with more than 700 million active users will face, quote, certain restrictions comparable to metas for Lama 2, and that all users will have to agree to terms ensuring that they use DBRX responsibly. Databricks hasn't volunteered those terms specifics as of publication time. Databricks presents its Mosaic AI Foundation model product as the managed solution to these roadblocks, which in addition to running DBRX and other models provides a training stack for fine-tuning DBRX on custom data. Data. Customers can privately host DBRX using Databricks's model serving offering. Rowe suggested or they can work with Databricks to deploy DBRX on the hardware of their choosing.

Starting point is 00:11:06 Also, DBRX is not multimodal. Unlike some more recent flagship generative AI models, including Gemini, it can only process and generate text, not images. And we don't know exactly what sources of data were used to train it. Rao would only reveal that no Databricks customer data was used in training DBRX, end quote. Intel has shared Microsoft's AI PC requirements for the first time, requirements such as adding a co-pilot key, and also expanded its AI PC acceleration program to help developers and hardware vendors, quoting Tom's hardware. Intel plans to deliver over 100 million PCs with AI accelerators by the end of 2025. The company is already engaging with more than 100 AIISVs for PC platforms and plans to have over 300 AI accelerated

Starting point is 00:11:59 applications in the market by the end of 2024. To further those efforts, Intel is planning a series of local developer events around the globe at key locations, like the recent summit it held in India. Intel plans to have up to 10 more events this year as it works to build out the developer ecosystem. The battle for control of the AI PC market will intensify over the coming years. Canalist predicts that 19% of PCs shipped in 2024 will be AI capable, but that number will increase to 60% by 2027, highlighting a tremendous growth rate that isn't lost on the big players in the industry. Microsoft's and Intel's new co-developed definition states that an AIPC will come with a neural processing unit, or NPU, CPU, and GPU that supports Microsoft's

Starting point is 00:12:44 copilot, and come with a physical copilot key directly on the keyboard that replaces the second Windows key on the right side of the keyboard. Co-pilot is an AI chatbot powered by an LLM that is currently being rolled out into newer versions of Windows 11. It is currently powered by cloud-based services, but the company reportedly plans to enable local processing to boost performance and responsiveness. This definition means that the existing Meteor Lake and Risen laptops that have shipped without a copilot key actually don't meet Microsoft's official criteria,

Starting point is 00:13:14 though we expect Microsoft's new definition to spur nearly universal adoption of the key. While Intel and Microsoft are now promoting this jointly developed definition of an AIPC, The Intel itself has a simpler definition that says it requires a CPU, GPU, and NPU, each with its own AI-specific acceleration capabilities. Intel envisions shuffling AI workloads between these three units based on the type of compute needed, with the NPU providing exceptional power efficiency for lower intensity AI workloads like photo, audio, at video processing, while delivering faster response times than cloud-based services, thus boosting battery life and performance while ensuring data privacy by keeping data on the local

Starting point is 00:13:53 machine. This also frees the CPU and GPU for other tasks. The GPU and CPU will step in for heavier AI tasks. A must, as having multiple AI models running concurrently could overwhelm the comparatively limited NPU. If needed, the NPU and GPU can even run an LLM in tandem, end quote. Finally today, the Wall Street Journal has another look at the fierce competition for AI talent right now. Quote, some hard-defined tier one AI engineering candidates can easily get total compensation packages of $1 million a year or more. Salespeople in AI are also in demand and hard to find. Selling at the beginning of a technology transition when things are changing rapidly requires a different skill set and depth of knowledge. Candidates with those skills are making

Starting point is 00:14:45 around double what an enterprise software salesperson would, but that isn't the norm for most people working in AI, Rao says. For managerial roles in AI and machine learning, base pay increases ranged from 5 to 11% from April 22 to April 2023, according to a WTW survey of more than 1,500 employers. The base pay increases of non-managerial roles ranged from 13 to 19% during the same period. Levels.foy co-founder Zuhayr Musa says the median salary for six candidates who had consulted their career services platform about job offers from OpenAI was $925,000, including bonuses in equity. The median compensation of 344 machine learning and AI engineers at Meta, who revealed their pay to levels.fyii was nearly $400,000 a year, including bonuses and equity. He added, end quote.

Starting point is 00:15:45 Somebody emailed Gabe Rivera recently and asked him why this podcast doesn't have an ad-free feed. So I guess that's just a reminder to me that people don't listen to every single thing I say on the show or even every episode. So reminder that you can sign up for an ad-free version of the show at tech.supercast.com. It's five bucks a month, and it saves you about an hour of time every month. If you listen daily, again, that's tech.comcast.com.com. Talk to you tomorrow.

Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 03/27 – Hulu Comes To Disney+; WWDC Gets A Date

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.