Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 04/10 – A Bunch Of Datapoints

Episode Date: April 10, 2024

More AI announces from Google. More hints on how Apple will bring AI to iPhones. And a bunch of interesting datapoints: how much Apple has moved away from manufacturing in China, how much money TikTok’s parent company is making, are kids warming up to VR and are alternative browsers benefitting from the DMA? Links: Google Launches Coding AIs That Could Rival Microsoft's Github Copilot (PCMag) Apple's new AI model could help Siri see how iOS apps work (AppleInsider) Apple’s India iPhone Output Hits $14 Billion in China Shift (Bloomberg) ByteDance Profit Jumps 60%, Taking It Past Archrival Tencent (Bloomberg) Exclusive: EU's new tech laws are working; small browsers gain market share (Reuters) Survey shows that teenagers are using more VR devices in the US (9to5Mac) Kobo announces its first color e-readers (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 Tech meme right home for Wednesday, April 10th, 204. I'm Brian McCullough today. More AI announces from Google. More hints on how Apple will bring AI to iPhones and a bunch of interesting data points. How much Apple has moved away

from manufacturing in China. How much money TikTok's parent company is making? How much the kids might be warming up to VR and how much alternative browsers are benefiting from the DMA. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Google kept going with AI announces yesterday. They introduced two Gemma variants to be potentially rivals to GitHub co-pilot, code Gemma to help with code completion, and recurrent Gemma to provide researchers faster inference at higher batch sizes, quoting PCMag. The first is Gemini Code Assist, which is based on Google's Gemini Model, formerly known as Bard. Gemini Code Assist is designed to write code in C, C++, Matlab, Ruby, Rust, JavaScript, Python, and SQL, to name a few.

It can currently handle 22 different programming languages and can also handle questions about Google Cloud, debug existing code, or explain your own code to you in more detail. Code Assist is part of the company's Gemini for Google Cloud offering, which Google is selling to businesses. Dubbed Code Gemma, Google's new Gemma AI variant is able to code in Python, JavaScript, and Java, to name a few mentioned in Google's announcement. The Tech Giant is releasing three different versions of Code Gemma, 17B version, is designed for, for code generation and existing code line completion, while a second 7B version is more tuned for code chat and instruction following. A third smaller 2B version is one intended to be downloaded locally to one's computer and can fulfill code completion requests quickly, Google says. The code Jemma models were trained on 500 billion tokens of data,

including web documents, mathematics, and code. Google's posts suggest that code Jemma could be a good tool to help engineers reduce the amount of generic boilerplate code they have to write. To original general purpose versions of Gemma were first released back in February, Gemma's base models aren't currently available to the general public, but can be accessed through Nvidia's chat with RTX or the Opera One browser's developer version, end quote. Apple researchers published a paper on ferret UI, a multimodal LLM tailored for enhanced understanding of mobile UI screens, quoting Apple Insider. Apple's ferret LLM could help allow Siri to understand the layout of apps in an iPhone display,

potentially increasing the capabilities of Apple's digital assistant. Apple has been working on numerous machine learning and AI projects that it could tease at WWDC 2024 in a just-release paper. It now seems that some of that work has the potential for Siri to understand what apps and iOS itself looks like. The paper released by Cornell University on Monday is titled Ferret UI, Grounded Mobile U.S. understanding with multimodal LLMs, it essentially explains a new multimodal large language model that has the potential to understand the user interfaces of mobile displays. The Ferret name originally came from an open source multimodal LLM released in October by researchers from Cornell

University working with counterparts from Apple. At the time, Ferret was able to detect and understand different regions of an image for complex queries, such as identifying a species of animal in a selected part of a photograph. The new paper for Ferret UI explains that while there have been noteworthy advancements in MLLM usage, they still, quote, falls short in their ability to comprehend and interact effectively with user interface screens. Ferret UI is described as a new MLLM tailored for understanding mobile UI screens, complete with referring, grounding, and reasoning capabilities. Part of the problem that LLMs have in understanding the interface of a mobile display is how it gets used in the first place. Often in a portrait orientation, it often means icons and other details

can take up a very compact part of the display, making it difficult for machines to understand. To help with this, Ferret has a magnification system to upscale images to, quote, any resolution to make icons and text more readable. For processing and training, Ferret also divides the screen into two smaller sections cutting the screen in half. The paper states that other LLMs tend to scan a lower resolution global image, which reduces the ability to adequately determine what icons look like. Adding in significant curation of data for training, it's resulted in a model that can sufficiently understand user queries, understand the nature of various on-screen elements, and to offer contextual responses. For example, a user could ask how to open the reminders app

and be told to tap the on-screen open button. A further query asking if a 15-year-old could use an app, could check out age guidelines if they're visible on the display. While we don't know whether it will be incorporated into systems like Siri, ferret UI offers the possibility of advanced control over a device like an iPhone. By understanding user interface elements, it offers the possibility of Siri performing actions for users in apps by selecting graphical elements within the app on its own, end quote. Quoting Robert Scoble on Twitter, someone responded to me the other day, the new Siri isn't multimodal. That just isn't a rational statement to me. Everything will soon be multimodal, which means your camera,

sensors, microphone can be listened to by your AI. Siri will know soon what you are looking at, holding, touching, gesturing toward, moving toward, or away from, etc. At least if you have a Vision Pro. OpenAI can't do that. June's WWDC is going to be so interesting, end quote. Speaking of Apple, sources say they've assembled $14 billion worth of iPhones in India in the last fiscal year doubling production year over year. Apple now makes as many as 14% of its iPhones in India. That's about one in seven, for those of you not good at math like me, quoting Bloomberg. The ramp-up suggests Apple is accelerating efforts to cut its longstanding reliance on China as geopolitical tensions mount. The country remains its largest iPhone-making hub and biggest overseas market,

but that's also where Apple's revenues are plunging, hit by ascendant rivals such as Huawei and an expanding ban on the use of foreign technology in the workplace. The big jump in Indian activity marks a win for the administration of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, which has applied foreign firms, including Apple with financial incentives to try and attract high-end manufacturing. The government says the growth in manufacturing has created 150,000 direct jobs at Apple's suppliers. Government policies, quote, have helped companies such as Apple to expand production in India. Technology Minister Hachwini Vaishnaugh told Bloomberg News, after the report. We will build on this momentum and are committed to a stable and transparent policy

regime that will turn India into a globally trusted manufacturing hub, end quote. Foxconn assembled nearly 67% and Pegatron, about 17% of the India-made iPhones in the fiscal year ended March 2024, according to the people. The remaining iPhones were made in Wistron Corpse Plant in southern Karnataka State, which the salt to software conglomerate Tata group took over last year. Tata plans to build one of the country's biggest iPhone assembly plants, end quote. Here's some interesting horse race data sources say bite dances ebidda rose 60% year-on-year in 2023 to $40 billion. Its overall sales rose from $80 to $120 billion for the first time. That means Bight Dance has surpassed Tencent in revenue and profit, quoting Bloomberg. While BightDance's

internal figures haven't been independently audited. They suggest the ad-churning social media juggernaut became one of the world's fastest-growing tech giants in 2023. The owner of TikTok and Chinese twin Dow Yan last year cemented its position as one of China's internet leaders alongside Tencent and Alibaba, which have both struggled to rekindle growth at a time of economic uncertainty and consumer wariness in the country. In the domestic market, Doyen is morphing into an all-in-one platform akin to 10-sense Wii chat with its added features encroaching on Alibaba's e-commerce turf and competing with Maitwan for food delivery orders. Even with the strong results, Bight Dance decided to overhaul management of its China operations in February with Kelly Zhang stepping down from the chief

executive role without plans for appointing a successor. Overseas, the successful rollout of TikTok shop in markets like the U.S. and Southeast Asia have unlocked new revenue sources beyond digital marketing. TikTok is seeking to grow the size of its U.S. e-commerce business tenfold this year. It has 170 million users in the country. Like its China peers, Bight Dance has started to unwind risky bets in recent months. It has cut hundreds of jobs at its gaming development and enterprise software units, which dragged profitability and largely failed to live up to their promises. Instead, the company is trying to catch up on generative AI, building its own chatbots and large language models. BightDance's long-awaited stock market debut remains a distant possibility,

as the company grapples with elevated scrutiny in the U.S. In December, the firm offered to buy back up to $5 billion in shares from investors at evaluation of $268 billion. At its peak, Bightance was valued at more than $400 billion in some private trading, end quote. And some data points on how the whole regulatory push is going vis-a-vis, you know, browser choice and stuff like that. Aloha browser says its EU users have jumped by 250 percent just in March,

after the European Union's DMA came into effect. Vivaldi, Ecosia, Brave, Duck, DuckGo, and Opera also saw growth, quoting Reuters. Founded in 2016, Aloha, which markets itself as a privacy-focused alternative to browsers owned by big tech, has 10 million monthly average users and earns money through paid subscriptions rather than selling ads by tracking users. Before EU was our number four market. Right now, it's number two. Aloha CEO Andrew Frost Moro's said in an interview, Norway's Vivaldi, Germany's Ecosia, and U.S.-based Brave have also seen user numbers rise following the new regulation. U.S.-based Duck. Go, which has about 100 million users, and its bigger rival, Norway-based opera, are also seeing growth in users, but said the choice screen rollout is still not complete. We are experiencing record user

numbers in the EU right now, said Jan Standahl, Vice President at Opera, which counts over 324 million global users. Apple is now showing up to 11 browsers in addition to Safari and the choice screen curated for each of the 27 countries in the EU, and will update those screens once every year for each country. While Duck. Dot.O. and Opera are offered in Apple's lists in all 27 countries. Aloha is in 26 countries, Ocosia is in 13, and Vivaldi in 8. Google is currently showing browser choices on devices made by the company and said new devices made by other companies running Android operating systems will also display choice screen in the coming months. A Google spokesperson said they do not have data on choice screens to share yet.

As iPhones have a bigger market share than Google branded phones, the growth for smaller browsers is currently coming at the cost of Safari. Opera said most of the positive trends are from people making Opera the default browser on their iPhones. But browser companies criticized how Apple and Google roll out the new features, which they described as slow and clunky, and they believe are slowing the migration of mobile users to new browser choices. Mozilla, which owns Firefox browser, estimated that only 19% of iPhone users in the region received an update in a rollout that appeared much slower than previous software updates, the company said, end quote.

This data point is maybe a bit ifier, but a Piper Sandler survey of 6,020 U.S. teens says that 33% of them now own a VR device, up from 31,000. percent in the fall of 2023, and weekly users of VR devices increased to around 13 percent from around 10 percent. Now, small changes percent-wise, but I'm highlighting this on the speculative premise that teens historically lead adoption of new technologies like VR, quoting 9 to 5 Mac. The increased interest in virtual reality devices coincides with the launch of the Apple Vision Pro, which arrived in stores in February, although it was announced by Apple last year. Again, the high price of the device is still a factor in preventing more people from getting one,

but it does seem that Apple has succeeded in making people more curious about having AR VR-VR headsets. Another thing to keep in mind is that the hype created by Apple Vision Pro also ends up benefiting its competitors who offer more affordable devices. According to analysts, Apple expects to ship up to 250,000 Apple Vision Pro units in the U.S. by the end of the year. Piper Sandler's survey also reveals some other interesting data about teenagers' interactions with technology. For instance, Instagram has seen a, quote, big improvement and is now the number two favorite app among teens in the U.S. TikTok remains in first place while Snapchat has fallen to number three, end quote. Finally today, some gadget news from a category we don't really talk about much, but I'll be honest with you, my Kindle is maybe my most beloved device. I use it every day.

So interesting to see that at long last, color e-readers might be ready for prime time. Rakutenkobo announced its first color e-readers, the $220-cobo Libra color, and the $150 cobo-clera color available for pre-order now and shipping April 30th. Quoting the verge. Both use E-Aink's latest kaleido color screen technology, which has subtle pastel-like hues and drops from a 300-pI gray-scale resolution to a 150 pPI when you view content in color. I'll be testing both e-readers soon, but so far. far, they look like small upgrades to Kobo's existing e-readers. That's not a bad thing, though.

The 7-inch Kobo Libra 2 is my favorite e-reader outside of Amazon's ecosystem, offering the Kindle Paper Rights IPX8 waterproof design, but with extras like physical page turning buttons, no lock screen ads, and more storage. The $2190.99-c. Cobo Libra Color retains all of those features, but is also now compatible with the Kobo Stylus 2, just like the Kobo Elipsa 2E. However, it's $30 more expensive than the Kobo Libra 2, and you'll have to buy the stylus separately for $6999. The $149.99-c. Cobo-Clarra color is slightly more distinct from its closest sibling, the $139.99.0.99-cobo Clara 2E. It offers the same 6-inch display and IPX-8 waterproof design, but now comes with 16 gigabytes of storage as well as an improved processor. I hope so, that Kobo Clara 2E Sluggish Performance was one of my

chief complaints. Cobo also introduced an upgraded black and white Cobo Clara BW with the same storage and processor upgrades for 12999, end quote. I've been waiting literally forever for Amazon to update my beloved Kindle Oasis, but it looks like that's been discontinued, which sucks. I cannot tell you how useful it is to have physical page turn buttons on an e-reader. But maybe Amazon is just waiting to refresh their mid-tier with color screens. Maybe with physical page turn buttons, I reiterate, and I cannot stress this enough. Physical page turn buttons are so, so superior than having to lift your finger each time to touch the screen every freaking 30 seconds when you want to turn the page. Talk to you tomorrow.