Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 06/26 – An eInk Phone That Might Be Worth Buying?

Episode Date: June 26, 2024

The ChatGPT macOS app is now available for everybody. Google drops continuous scroll for search. Waymo drops the waitlist in San Francisco. Are the AI characters on Character.ai somehow… changed? And is there an eInk phone that I might actually have to try out? Sponsors: Lumen.me/ride Links: OpenAI’s ChatGPT for Mac app is now available to everyone (9to5Mac) Google dropping continuous scroll in search results (Search Engine Land) Waymo ditches the waitlist and opens up its robotaxis to everyone in San Francisco (The Verge) Tech Investor Sean Parker Leads Rescue of Struggling AI Startup (WSJ) ‘No Bot is Themselves Anymore:’ Character.ai Users Report Sudden Personality Changes to Chatbots (404 Media) The Boox Palma is an amazing gadget I didn’t even know I wanted (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, June 26, 2024. I'm Brian McCullough today. The chat GPT MacOS app is now available for everybody. Google drops continuous scroll for search. Waymo drops the waitlist in San Francisco. Are the AI characters on character AI somehow changed? And is there an

E-ink phone that I might actually have to try out? Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. OpenAI's ChatGPT MacOS app is now available to all users after initially only being available to chat GPT plus subscribers, quoting 9 to 5 Mac. OpenAI touts that the chat GPT app for MacOS is designed to, quote, integrate seamlessly into anything you're doing on your computer. The app was built to be native to the Mac and offers an easy keyboard shortcut to launch it from anywhere, which is command space. The chat GPT app for MacOS lets you easily interact with the chatby. You can also choose to attach things like files, photos, and screenshots to your messages and have chat GPT use that material. You can also access the voice mode feature to interact with chat GPT using your voice.

OpenAI says that a new version of voice mode with GPT4O capabilities will be available on the Mac within the coming weeks. You can download the chat GPT app for macOS from OpenAI's website. It's available for free, while ChatGPT Plus subscribers can sign in and access their full account, end quote. Google is dropping continuous scroll from search, saying it didn't lead to significantly higher user satisfaction, and pagination actually enables serving results faster, quoting search engine land. Google search will stop its continuous scroll user experience where Google loads more results as you scroll past the first page of the search results. Instead, you will see the classic and

old pagination bar at the footer of the Google search results. Starting today, Google will start to turnoff continuous scroll for the desktop Google search results. Google launched continuous scroll on desktop search in December 2022, and first in mobile search in October 2021. So continuous scroll only lasted about a year and a half for desktop. Google will remove continuous scroll from the mobile search results in the coming month. A Google spokesperson told search engine land that today, June 25th, removing the ability to continuously scroll on desktop search results, followed by mobile in the coming months. The next at the bottom of the page will show a desktop search and the more results button will show on mobile search. Google said this change

is to allow the search company to serve the search results faster on more searches instead of automatically loading results that users haven't explicitly requested. Google also told us that it found that loading more results automatically didn't lead to significantly higher satisfaction with Google search, end quote. More notations to make for your calendar, Samsung has scheduled its next Galaxy unpacked event for July 10th at 9 a.m. Eastern Time in Paris, where Galaxy AI updates, the Galaxy Z-Fold 6 and Z-Flip 6 are expected to be unveiled. And Google will hold a pixel event on August 13th at 10 a.m. Pacific time in Mountain View, where the Pixel 9, Pixel 9 Pro Fold, and Pixel Watch 3 are all expected.

Ah, Google, what happened to your usual New York City events? Waymo has dropped the wait list in San Francisco, so now anyone can and download the Waymo app and Hail a Robotaxy. In Phoenix, Waymo has been open to the public since October of 2020, quoting The Verge. Waymo began its commercial test service in San Francisco in August 2021, with a rollout to trusted testers, pre-approved writers, some of whom were asked to sign non-disclosure agreements. In March 2022, Waymo began offering driverless rides for its staff. Since then, it's been giving rides to regular people who sign up for its waitlist, which the company says approximately 300,000 people have done since it first launched.

Now Waymo's driverless ride hail service will be available to anyone who downloads the app and requests a ride. This is similar to how Waymo operates its Robotaxy Service in Phoenix, which has been open to the public without a wait list since 2020. And it comes at a time when Waymo is trying to cement its lead in the Robotaxy industry, as some of its competitors are hamstrung by mishaps or a need to keep testing. Waymo has been operating in the Bay Area for years, slowly expanding its service area, and introducing more driverless vehicles to its fleet, the fact that it's now opening up its service to all residents of San Francisco, population 808,437, is a sign of growing confidence from the Google spin-off.

Opening up the service to more people who want to pay money to ride its driverless vehicles is a crucial step towards the normalization of autonomous vehicles, and it's important for Waymo and its parent company alphabet to turn a historically money-losing operation into one that can break even or even perhaps be profitable, end quote. Looks like Stability AI has given itself a lifeline or some prominent investors have. Sources say investors committed $80 million to take over the company, and some suppliers have forgiven debt obligations to keep the company alive, quoting the journal.

Investors, including ex-Facebook President Sean Parker, are committing $80 million to take over Stability AI, an image generation startup that took off with the artificial intelligence boom, but quickly ran into business problems. The investment group, which includes former Google Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt and early backers of London-based stability, has struck a deal with suppliers to forgive some $100 million owed by stability, according to people with knowledge of the arrangement.

The investors also negotiated for the startup to be released from $300 million in future obligations largely meant to go to cloud computing providers. The recapitalization is intended to grant a new lease on life for the company behind stable diffusion, an image generation tool that competes with OpenAI's Dali and startup mid-journey. Stability raised $101 million in late 2022 in a round valuing it at $1 billion, but struggled since then to build a business model around its technology, an open-source tool other companies can use free.

Stability talked to investors this past year about raising more capital but didn't land a deal, according to a person with knowledge of the effort. Despite its problems, Parker said the company's core technology remained popular, which gave him faith it could become financially successful. The business challenges are all things that we know how to solve, he said. Parker, who will become executive chairman of Stability AI's board of directors, declined to comment on the company's valuation following the new investment. Stability co-founder Imad Mastaki resigned as CEO in March following pressure from investors.

Under Mastaki, a series of high-profile employees left. The company also failed to pay mounting bills, including for computational resources that are the lifeblood of the AI industry, people with knowledge of the company's finances said, end quote. We were talking about them just yesterday, right? Well, users of the popular AI chatbot platform Character AI are reporting that their bots personalities change a few days ago. They're not as fun as they once were, users are saying, quoting 404 Media. Character AI, which is valued at $1 billion after raising $150 million in a round

led by A16Z last year, allows users to create their own characters with personalities and backstories or choose from a vast library of bots that other people or the company itself has created. In the R-slash-character AI subreddit, where users trade advice and stories related to the chatbot platform, many users are complaining that their bots aren't as good as they used to be. Most say they noticed a change recently in the last few days to weeks. Reddit user Bard B-Q starred told me in a message that she noticed a difference in her bots, her favorite being several distinctly different models of Asturian from the role-playing game, Baldersgate, around June 22nd.

all of a sudden my bots had completely reverted back to a worse state than they were when I started using character AI, she said. The bots are getting stuck in loops, such as can I ask you a question or saying they're going to do something and never actually getting to the point, end quote. She's noticed that their memory is limited to the last one or two messages and they all seem interchangeable, whereas before she could choose which Asterion she felt like talking to. Before the recent change, just a handful of days ago, I could experience those distinct personalities and I, no longer can anymore, she said. Strangely, the last few weeks before she perceived a change in her bots were, quote, some of the best performance I have seen out of CAI since I started using it, she said. The memory was fantastic, and the bots were, quote, able to make twists and progress the plot in unforeseen ways that really blew my mind, she said. They also acted more adult.

I know I fall into a category of users who aren't necessarily looking for racy or adulterous content, but as an adult, 28 years old, I can appreciate and understand darker themes in my role plays, she said. In a company blog post last week, Character AI claimed that it serves around 20,000 queries per second, about 20% of the request volume served by Google Search, according to public sources. It serves that volume at a cost of less than one cent per hour of conversation, it said. The platform is free to use with limited features, and users can sign up for a subscription to access faster messages and early access to new features for $9.99 a month. I asked Character AI whether it's changed anything that would cause the issues users are reporting.

We haven't made any major changes, so I'm not sure why some users are having the experience you describe, a spokesperson for the company said in an email. However, there is one possibility. Like most B2C platforms, we're always running tests on feature tweaks to continually improve our user experience. So it's conceivable that some users encountered a test environment that behaved a bit differently than they're used to. Feedback that some of them might be finding it more difficult to have conversations is valuable for us,

and we'll share it with our product team, end quote. Finally today, a device I think I might need to actually buy and try out. For years, some of us have wondered if an e-ink phone might be worth having, but in The Verge, David Pierce says he's found one and says it is, in fact, worth having as a, like, a paperback version of a Kindle. quote, there are really only three things you need to know about the Bukes Palma. One, it's about the size of a smartphone. Two, it runs Android with the Play Store.

Three, it has an E-ink screen. There are other specs and features I'll get to, but that combination, smartphone Android E-ink, is the Palma's whole reason for existence. In a couple of months of using the Palma, a $280 device that has been on sale since last fall, that combination has turned out to be exactly what I needed, because it's smartphone size with a 6.1 inch screen and an overall footprint just a smidge larger than the Samsung Galaxy S24 Plus, I can hold it in one hand and fit it in my pocket. Because it runs Android, I can download any app I need.

And because it's E-ink, the battery lasts somewhere between four days and a week. The screen is easy to look at even in the dark. And this is the most important part. Most apps are just awful to use. Sure, the Palma can technically download TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. It can even stutteringly play videos from those apps. But because of E-Ink's low-resolution, slow refresh rate, and overall black and whiteness, it's a crummy enough experience that I'm never tempted to do so.

Instead, I find myself doing the things the Palma's screen is built for. This thing is first and foremost an e-reader. It's just that unlike all the other e-readers, this one lets you read in whatever app you'd like to use. The first app I downloaded onto the Palma was Amazon Kindle, which is where all my digital books are. And before you're like, dude, why didn't you just buy a Kindle? The second app I downloaded was Readwise Reader, an app for reading and organizing long form articles, PDFs, and just about anything else. Already I'd accomplished something no other E-reader offers. Then I downloaded a couple of

news apps, flipboard, and the note-taking app, Obsidian. Two months later, those are still the apps I use most on the Palma. Bookes pre-installs a few others like a voice recorder and a music app, but I barely touched those. Who needs them when I have? Android. I downloaded Pocketcasts and Spotify instead, and now my palma is my iPod, in addition to being my Kindle. When I go out for coffee in the morning or to walk the dog in the afternoon, only the palma comes with me. I've been amazed by how much of my phone activity disappeared when I put all my listening and reading into another device. I never noticed how often I dig my phone out to change songs, only to get pulled in by a Slack message or a Gmail notification. Come to think of it,

thanks to the notification mute feature in Bookes' version of Android, I don't think I've gotten a single notification the whole time I've had this thing. Now that I'm bringing the Palma and not my phone with me to the coffee shop, I'm getting more reading done because TikTok isn't remotely tempting on this device. I'm actually offline most of the time. I'll just take it off airplane mode to sync the various apps, then shut off the connection and go back to reading. A device that is easy to have with me that can technically do everything,

but only makes it easy to do the stuff I want, has been everything I wanted. Blogger Craig Maud said the Palma's combination of size and screen sold him on the device. It's perfect one-handed. It's not heavy. It's not going to fall on your face in a weird way, he said. You've got it in your hand with your thumb on the volume controls and you can easily go through an article until you fall asleep. Did I mention you can set the Palma to flip pages when you press the volume buttons? Love that. Mod called the Palma a gentle lullaby of a reader. Matt Martin, the CEO of Calendar startup clockwise and another new Palma owner, echoed the sentiment.

I aspire to read more, he said. I aspire to not spend the 30 minutes before bed on Instagram Reels. He downloaded the New York Times app, InstaPaper, Libby, and Kindle, and said he's been reading more and reelsing less ever since. Bookes didn't build a perfect gadget here, not by any stretch. The plastic body is a little flimsy. The screen is set pretty far behind the bezels. Everything takes a half second longer than it should. The screen can be unresponsive at times, and I wish it would full refresh the E-ink to remove ghosting a little more often. There's a dedicated button for doing that last part, though, which helps. For a $280 e-reader, I'd expect a little more polish in both hardware and software. Worst of all, the Palma runs Android 11, which is already wildly out of date, and I'm not counting

on books updating it soon or ever. More than likely, my Palma will just slowly stop working app by app over the next couple of years. That's particularly frustrating, given how simple my needs are. For playing music and reading articles, there's no reason this shouldn't last forever. all Bookes really did was put together the right set of ingredients, size, screen, apps, into something that feels less like a replacement for my smartphone and more like a compliment to it. I keep finding small new things I like doing on the Palma rather than my phone. I have the New York Times games app on there now for some E-ink crosswords, and I just installed the Roku app, for instance, so now it's a backup remote control and a place to plug in my headphones when I need to listen quietly, end quote. God, I am so late on the show today. I'm very, recording this now a half an hour after I usually have this published and out to you. So sorry that I'm a bit late today. Talk to you tomorrow.