Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 05/24 – Microsoft Build Wrapup

Episode Date: May 24, 2023

All the headlines from yesterday’s Build conference. The big Netflix password crackdown has begun. Did Elon buy Twitter to dethrone Fox News? Is an Uber/Waymo partnership the start of a beautiful relationship? And is Final Cut Pro on the iPad actually what everyone wanted? Sponsors: Miro.com/podcast OregonState.edu Links: Microsoft’s Azure AI Studio lets developers build their own AI ‘copilots’ (TechCrunch) Microsoft’s Copilot and Bing AI plug-ins will be interoperable with ChatGPT (The Verge) Netflix’s password-sharing crackdown is here — and it costs $7.99 per month (The Verge) Elon Musk’s right-wing media venture scores another big win (WashingtonPost) Uber teams up with Waymo to add robotaxis to its app (The Verge) PSVR2’s early sales beat the original, Sony claims (VideoGamesChronicle) That podcast ad you're listening to may soon be AI. Spotify is reportedly developing bots to mimic your favorite hosts. (Insider) Final Cut Pro for the iPad is slick but limited (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, May 24th, 2023. I'm Brian McCullough today. All the headlines from yesterday's Build Conference. The big Netflix password crackdown has begun. Did Elon buy Twitter just to dethrone Fox News? Is an Uber-Wamo partnership, the start of a beautiful friendship, and is Final Cut Pro on the iPad actually what everybody wanted? Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Yesterday was the Microsoft Build Developers Conference, and would you be shocked to learn? that AI had a major presence in the presentation. Microsoft did things like Unvale Co-Pilot in PowerPages into preview, letting U.S. customers use an AI assistant to build business data-centric websites

using natural language. They added AI-generated app review summaries to the Microsoft Store and an AI hub to highlight AI apps designed to guide customers on what they called their AI journey. But maybe the most interesting, they debuted Azure AI Studio. which lets customers combine a model like GPD4 with their private data, whether that be text or images, in order to build, you know, your own co-pilots. Quoting TechCrunch. Microsoft defines a co-pilot as a chatbot app that uses AI, typically text-generating or image-generating AI, to assist with tasks like writing a sales pitch or generating images

for a presentation. The company has created several such apps, such as Bing Chat, but its AI-powered co-pilots can't necessarily draw on a company's proprietary data to perform tasks, unlike co-pilots created through Azure AI Studio. In our Azure AI studio, we're making it easy for developers to ground Azure Open AI service models on their data and do that securely without seeing that data or having to train a model on the data. John Montgomery, Microsoft's CVP of AI platform, told TechCrunch via email, it's a tremendous accelerant for our customers to be able to build their own co-pilots, he said. In Azure AI Studio, the co-pilot

building process starts with selecting a generative AI model like GPT4. The next step is giving the copilot a metapromp or a base description of the copilot's role and how it should function. Cloud-based storage can be added to AI co-pilots created with Azure AI Studio for the purposes of keeping track of a conversation with a user and responding with the appropriate context and awareness. Plugins extend co-pilots, giving them access to third-party data and other services. Microsoft believes the value proposition in Azure AI Studio is allowing customers to leverage open AI's models on their own data in compliance with their organizational policies and access rights and without compromising things like security, data policies, or document ranking.

Customers can choose to integrate internal or external data that their organization owns or has access to including structured, unstructured, or semi-structured data, end quote. Microsoft also said that it has agreed to sign all AI images generated by Bing Image Creator and Microsoft Designer with a cryptogram. watermark according to the C2PA specification. This is part of that movement to head deepfakes and misinformation off at the pass with all of this new AI generated image stuff. They also announced that OpenAI plans to use Bing as the default search experience for chat GPT, starting on May 23rd for chat GPT plus users, and soon for free users via a chat GPT plugin. And on the plug-in front,

Microsoft said it plans to adopt the same plugin standard that OpenAI introduced for ChatGPT, enabling interoperability across ChatGPT and Microsoft's co-pilot offerings. Quoting the Verge. It's a welcome step forward for the future of AI chatbots, meaning plugins won't be restricted to one particular platform, and developers and users can build them across both consumer and business-focused experiences. But until Google signs up to the same Open Plugin standard for Bard, it's limited to two companies that have a close partnership. Microsoft is already using plugins in Bing with OpenTable

and Wolfram Alpha, and it's now expanding to support plugins from Instacart, Kayak, Klarna, Redfin, and Zillow. Plugins are essential for AI chat bots like BingChat and ChatGBT to expand their abilities and tap into new sources of information from the web and third-party developers. OpenAI first started supporting plugins with ChatGBT in March, and Microsoft's fresh commitment to support the same Open Standard could pave the way for a lot more third-party functionality inside BingChat and Microsoft's copilot platform. Bands in town, Bohita, Cloudflare, Coopert, Fair Portal, Fiscal Note, Golden, Lexi shopper, likewise notable, one-word domains, prompt perfect Shopify, SkyScanner, Spotify, SpotNana, and Trip.com are also enabling plugins for BingChat soon, end quote.

The great Netflix crackdown on password sharing in the U.S. at least has begun. Quoting the verge. If you have the Netflix standard plan that costs $15.49 per month, then you have the option of adding one extra member who can use the service outside your household for $7.99 extra each month. Anyone who pays for the Netflix premium package with 4K streaming has the option of adding up to two extra members, but each one will still cost another $7.99. The U.S. isn't the only country where the new rules are rolling out either, as Netflix in the UK will charge subscribers five quid each month for extra member slots. Netflix subscribers on its two cheapest plans, basic or standard with ads, don't have the option to add extra members to their account at all.

Netflix subscribers in the U.S. who share the service outside their household will get an email about the company's password sharing policies beginning on Tuesday, according to the blog post. Netflix's paid password sharing experiments have been happening for a while. while, and it expanded its tests to Canada, New Zealand, Portugal, and Spain in February. The password sharing crackdown was originally supposed to hit the U.S. at the beginning of this year, but the company pushed that launch back again in April. A support page explaining the new setup describes extra members as someone who will have their own password and profile paid for by the person who invited them to join. Extra member accounts also have their own set of restrictions.

They have to be activated in the same country. They can only view or download content on one device at a time. they can't create extra profiles or login as a kid's profile. Your Netflix household, according to the company, is set based on where you watch Netflix on a TV and what IP address that device uses. The location can be reset using the app or a TV or a device connected to a TV by choosing to confirm or update your household and responding to a verification link sent to the account's listed email address or phone number, end quote.

You might have seen Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is planning to launch his presidential bid on Twitter spaces sometime later today in a discussion with Elon Musk moderated by David Sacks. This is kind of getting into politics more than I usually do with this show, but there's an angle to all of this that I think fits into the whole Elon Twitter saga as we've been discussing it. Lots of folks in media and politics have noticed that certain folks on the right seem to be turning on Fox News. You have Tucker Carlson saying he's launching a new show on Twitter, after he was fired from Fox, you have Ben Shapiro saying he's bringing his entire shows to Twitter later this month. Now you have DeSantis launching his campaign there and not on Fox first.

So the question is, was this the plan all along? Did Elon buy Twitter because he saw that he could turn it into a next generation conservative media platform that would dethrone the Fox News Empire? If so, very plot of succession of him. Or is this just the latest pivot? to try to make Twitter make money. Quoting the Washington Post. That DeSantis is announcing his candidacy on Twitter as a testament to the platform's newly achieved status on the right. DeSantis used to give favored status to Fox News,

including at one point signing legislation live on the channel's morning show. While he will still reportedly give an interview to the right-wing cable news channel after the Twitter event, the allure of the social media platform's metrics was apparently too much to resist. Twitter is positioned to compete against Fox News in key ways. after the 2020 presidential election Fox News found itself pulled between the massive appetite from its viewership for claims about election fraud and its ostensible news gathering duties. That tension led to the defamation lawsuit from Dominion voting systems that will cost Fox

more than three quarters of a billion dollars in a settlement. Musk's Twitter can give that same audience an endless supply of election denial from users that Musk can frame as his simply allowing free speech. That said, it's not clear over the long term that the audience, that stuff will switch over from cable news. Twitter and other social media tools are much less heavily used by the older Americans who are Trump's and Fox's base of support. DeSantis will be speaking to lots of people on Wednesday, but how many of them are core Republican primary voters? For the moment, Musk can bask in his successful effort to shape the political conversation.

He can use the DeSantis conversation as a jumping off point to show new or lapsed Twitter users that the platform is friendly to their politics and worldview, end quote. This actually makes a ton of sense. Could solve a bunch of problems for both companies. Uber and Waymo have signed a multi-year partnership to, quote, make the Waymo driver available to more people via Uber's app, starting in Phoenix with what they call a set number of Waymo cars. Quoting the Verge.

The set number of Waymo vehicles will be available to Uber riders and Uber Eats delivery customers in Phoenix, where the Alphabet company recently doubled its service area to 180 square miles. The partnership was described as multi-year-year. with the goal of bringing together Waymo's world-leading autonomous driving technology with the massive scale of Uber's ride-sharing and delivery networks, end quote. Catherine Barnah, a spokesperson from Waymo, declined to disclose the number of vehicles that would be halleable through Uber's app, though she did share that the vehicles will not be exclusive to Uber.

For example, Phoenix residents can also summon a Waymo vehicle through the company's Waymo One app. Uber and Waymo have a pre-existing partnership involving autonomous long-haul trucking. That venture, which is still ongoing, allows fleet owners to deploy. trucks equipped with Waymo's autonomous driver for on-demand delivery routes offered by Uber Freight, the company's trucking division. Waymo also had a partnership with Lyft to deploy its robo-taxies on the smaller Ride Hail Company's app, but that ended in 2020 during the pandemic. Lyft has been a great partner over the years and we intend to keep dialogue open as we continue to scale, Barnas said in an email. And Waymo isn't the only Robot Taxi company to appear in Uber's

app. Motional, a joint venture between Hyundai and Aptive has its vehicles available to hail on Uber's app in Las Vegas. Infamously, Uber was developing its own fleet of autonomous vehicles with the intention to eventually replace all of its human drivers, but the program was shut down after a woman was killed by one of the company's vehicles in 2017. That incident occurred in Tempe, Arizona, right outside Phoenix, end quote. I said at the start that this could be huge for both companies, because this would allow Waymo an easy way to scale out, right? I've heard that Waymo wants to 10x the number of rides they do this year, then 10x it the year after that, that, Uber gives them the platform to do that scaling, and though I'm sure they'd price it

the same as regular Uber rides for now, so as not to offend Uber's drivers. I mean, let's be real. Long term, this could solve the unit economics problem for Uber. This is interesting. In light of the forthcoming Apple headset announced, Sony apparently sold around 600,000 PlayStation VR2 units during the first six weeks of availability for that device after its February 22nd launch, which is a mere 8% more than the original PSVR sales six weeks on from its initial launch. So they did 8% better with Gen 2. Not sure if that's great. Quoting Video Games Chronicle. The figure suggests that previous analyst estimates, which had the new headset having sold around 270,000 units by the end of March, were somewhat behind actual figures. In March, Sony's executive deputy president and chief financial officer,

Hiroki Tatoki said he thinks the headset has a, quote, good chance about selling the first PlayStation VR, which had sold 5 million units by the end of 2019. Bloomberg claimed earlier this year that Sony had previously aimed to ship 2 million PlayStation VR2 units during the headset's launch quarter and had then halved those projections to just 1 million in the first quarter and 1.5 million between April 2023 and March 2024. Sony denied Bloomberg's previous claims, but so far has reportedly declined to comment on Bloomberg's. latest story. The company has also yet to publicly state how many PSVR two units have been sold in total since the launch, end quote. Spotify is building AI tools trained on its host's voices to create targeted ads, according to Bill Simmons, the founder of the Spotify-owned podcast network, The Ringer, quoting Insider. I don't think Spotify is going to get mad at me for this, but we're developing that stuff, Simmons said in a conversation with Derek Thompson, an editor at the

Atlantic on an episode of the Bill Simmons podcast. There's going to be a way to use my voice for the ads. You have to obviously give the approval for the voice, but it opens up from an advertising standpoint all these different great possibilities. In theory, Simmons said, an AI bot that was trained on his former podcast and writing would even be able to create a podcast that hit all of the same beats that Simmons touched on during his own recordings. Would people rather interact with the bot or listen to my podcast, he asked, end quote. But to be clear, I'm assuming what they're talking about here is Simmons doesn't have to go into the booth to record his ads for the pods. The advertiser would just send the copy and the AI would do the read. But then also, again, it could be targeted and have

different copy for different people. Heck, you could even have the ad speak your name if Spotify knows that. Finally today, quick review of what it's like to use Final Cut Pro on the iPad. The Verge says the touch-friendly design is cool, but in limited cases, and, Mac interoperability isn't as great as it could be. It also lacks some key features like the Blade Tool, but, quoting from the conclusion, overall, there are a lot of things I liked about editing with Final Cut Pro on the iPad.

I'm surprised at how many of the features are missing. The coloring options are lacking, some very common features like the Blade Tool or ability to enable and disable clips are gone. You can't import LUTs, the stabilization is missing. I could go on. I wouldn't even say these are necessarily professional level tools, and I already talked about the whole file management side of things.

It baffles me. On the other hand, I'm editing 4K Prores video and Final Cut Pro on a tablet with one of the best HDR-enabled screens ever made. I'm using an Apple pencil to draw animations directly onto my footage. The experience itself is remarkably good, and for $5 a month, it's a very accessible, powerful tool. But ultimately, when it was time to edit the video I created to test Final Cut, I went back to the Mac. I could have done it on the iPad for sure, but some of my slider be.

would have been a lot shakier and I would have been frustrated with the end result. If you're starting out, this will be an incredibly intuitive and easy app to get going. But for someone with an established workflow like myself, it's still missing some crucial features, end quote. Once again, nothing for you today. Talk to you tomorrow.