Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 06/28 – Who Needs A Mac Pro?

Episode Date: June 28, 2023

Even in bankruptcy, even FTX is like, maybe we’ll hold on to these AI investments. Could Windows itself become a fully cloud product? Has Google canceled its AR project? How AI is making even Billy Bean look like old school baseball. And who needs a Mac Pro when you’ve got a perfectly good Mac Studio or even Mac Book? Links: FTX Halts Sale of Its $500 Million Stake in AI Startup Anthropic (Bloomberg) AI Frenzy Draws Hordes to Private Markets in Industry Gold Rush (Bloomberg) Microsoft wants to move Windows fully to the cloud (The Verge) Google killed its Iris augmented-reality smart glasses as it shifts attention to building AR software (Insider) DoorDash launches hourly rates and location sharing for couriers (The Verge) Baseball Scouts Call In Artificial Intelligence Help From the Bullpen (WSJ) The Mac Pro’s biggest problem is the MacBook (The Verge) Eat Your Heart Out, Tesla. Mercedes-Benz May Have the Fastest EV Yet. (Barron's) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the TechMeme right home for Wednesday, June 28th, 2023. I'm Brian McCullough today. Even in bankruptcy. Even FTX is like, maybe we'll hold on to these AI investments for a bit longer. Could Windows itself become a fully cloud product? Has Google canceled its AR project? How AI is making even Billy Bean look like old school baseball? And who needs a Mac Pro when you've got a perfectly good Mac studio or even a Mac book? Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Interesting new little nugget from the FTX bankruptcy. Sources say FtX has abruptly halted the sale of its $500 million stake in AI startup Anthropic. FTC's bankers had reportedly been shopping its anthropic stake around in early June, but I guess the pool of the AI moment makes them think, hey, do we need to fire sale this thing? We've got real value here, quoting Bloomberg.

Semaphore reported earlier in June that FTCS had been shopping, its Anthropic holding with an expectation of fetching nine figures. Privately held Anthropic, founded in 2021 by former Open AI employees, has become one of the hottest companies of the current AI boom. Anthropics said in May that it had raised $450 million to support the development of its AI bot dubbed Claude. Buyers in the secondary market for shares in private companies have been actively seeking opportunities to acquire stakes in Anthropic, including at a premium, according to Rainmaker Securities co-founder Glenn Anderson. According to Semaphore's June report, Anthropic is valued at $4.6 billion, and quote. Indeed, AI investors are snapping

up privately held startup shares on marketplaces like Equity Zen and Rainmaker. Some Anthropic bidders are paying up to 25% as a premium. This is from a different Bloomberg piece, quote. Institutional investors are getting more aggressive, Breanne Lynch, Equity Zen's head of market insight said in an interview, transactions among retail investors and AI companies also picked up from May to June, she said. Rainmaker's co-founder Glenn Anderson noted the number of buyers is outstripping those looking to sell pushing prices well above earlier funding rounds. Anthropic bidders are willing to pay as much as a 25% premium to its recent round, while Open AI bids are in the 80s from what he believes was an earlier round priced at $67, he said, end quote.

And another interesting nugget from the FTCV Microsoft case. This time, filings have shaken loose an internal Microsoft presentation from June 2022, discussing building out Windows 365, quote, to enable full Windows streamed from the cloud to any device, end quote. Hmm, this is a deep cut, but 25 years on, Scott McNeely's thin client suddenly looks closer to reality, quoting the verge. Windows 365 is a service that streams a full version of Windows to devices. So far, it's been limited to just commercial customers, but Microsoft has been deeply integrating it into Windows 11 already. A future update will include Windows 365 Boot, which will enable Windows 11 devices

to log directly into a cloud PC instance at boot instead of the local version of Windows. Windows 365 Switch is also built into Windows 11 to integrate cloud PCs into the TaskView virtual desktops feature. The idea of moving Windows fully to the cloud for consumers is also presented alongside Microsoft's need to invest in custom silicon partnerships. Microsoft has been doing some of this for its arm-powered Surface Pro X devices. Bloomberg also reported in late 2020 that Microsoft was looking at designing its own arm-based processors for servers and maybe even surface devices. More recently, we've heard Microsoft could be working on its own

AI chips too. In another slide in the presentation, Microsoft mentions the need to, quote, shore up Windows, commercial value, and respond to Chromebook threat for its modern work priorities in its 2022 financial year. Long-term opportunities on the commercial site include growing the usage of cloud PCs with Windows 365, end quote. Okay, go with me on a flight of fancy for a second. Windows in the cloud. What if generative AI becomes a key computing tool for everyday folks in coming years? Didn't we just discuss that to make it work, something like that Open AI copilot would need to run a fair amount of the AI compute on device. Performance of sending everything AI to the cloud just wouldn't work well enough. So what if in your laptop of the

future, all of your apps and clients, even the OS, is what is in the cloud? And your local, tangible hardware and compute power is mostly devoted to running the LLMs and the AI on your local machine. A new report says Google has canceled its Iris AR Glasses project. It did so earlier in 23, apparently to focus on creating AR software platforms to license to headset manufacturers. Quoting Insider. Google killed off a project to build a pair of augmented reality glasses. It had been working on for several years. The glasses known internally by the codename Iris were shelved earlier this year following layoffs, reshuffles, and the departure of Clay Bavore. Google's chief of augmented and virtual reality, according to three people familiar with the matter. A Google spokesperson

declined to comment. The Verge first reported on the existence of Project Iris in January 2022, describing the device as resembling a pair of ski goggles. However, Google employees said the ski goggles were actually the foundations of a separate AR project that since been announced as a partner product with Samsung, while Iris was a series of devices more closely resembling eyeglasses. Google planned to build and launch Iris as its own product and it shorted up talent through acquisitions. In 2020, the company announced it had purchased North, a Canadian startup that made AR glasses, an early version. of Iris closely resembled Norse first device, the focals, while a later version that Google publicly

demoed had translation features. Since shelving the iris glasses, Google has focused on creating software platforms for AR that it hopes to license to other manufacturers building headsets. It's building an Android XR platform for Samsung's headset and has been working on a microXR platform for glasses a person familiar with the plan said. Employees working on the microXR software are using a prototyping platform known internally as Betty. One employee described Google's new ambition as being the Android for AR, focusing on software rather than hardware. Insiders say Google leaders kept changing the strategy for the iris glasses when they were in development, which led to the team continually pivoting, frustrating many employees, end quote. DoorDash has announced new features

for couriers, including earn by time for a guaranteed hourly minimum rate, also real-time location sharing, and dash along the way, which I'll explain. in a second. Quoting the Verge. With the update, couriers will now see the option to earn by time, which offers a guaranteed hourly minimum rate for the time they spend on making deliveries. According to DoorDash, the clock starts as soon as a courier accepts an order and ends when it's dropped off. That marks a big shift from the way things are currently set up, which has couriers earning a base pay based on various factors about an order, like time, distance, and desirability. Not every order will have the option to earn hourly rates, however, as DoorDash states,

Couriers can only enable it at the start of every dash where earned by time is available. Additionally, DoorDash is rolling out a location sharing feature that lets couriers share their real-time location with up to five contacts. This should help give couriers peace of mind as they go about their routes as friends and family members can track their location and call for emergency assistance if needed. It also built upon DoorDash's existing safety features, including reminders for customers to turn on their porch lights when they're expecting an order as well as a way for couriers to ditch rude customers without consequence. One other handy update is a dash-along-the-way option that lets couriers pick up orders on the way to a specific destination. There's also a new tipping option that lets customers add a tip or boost the one they've already given after checkout, which should hopefully remind shoppers to properly tip their couriers, end quote. Something, something, there's no corner of anything, anywhere that AI might not be able to disrupt.

Major League Baseball has partnered with Uplift Labs, which uses AI to detect players' flaws, forecast their playing potential, and flag injury risks based on images captured by two iPhone cameras. They're using it right now at the MLB draft combine in Arizona, quoting the journal. Uplift says it uses artificial intelligence to translate the images captured by the phone cameras into metrics that can quantify elements of player movement. It believes the data it generates can detect players' flaws, forecasts their potential, and possibly flag their potential for injury. We have metrics on things like kinematic sequence, strides, length ball contact timing, said Sukumasa Kabayama, who found it uplift in 2017. At the same time,

we also have this new kind of very early injury warning detection. Let's say if you have too much of an arm flare, you know, there may be potential overload on the elbow, which can unfortunately lead to Tommy John surgery. Biomechanics and analysis associated with it is something that we know is a pretty significant piece of where the game is headed, said Bill Francis MLB's Senior Director of Baseball Operations. Traditionally, it has been very hard to do. at scale because of the expensive hardware, end quote. The use of uplift was optional for players at the Combine. Agents say there is a divide in who may benefit from submitting biomechanical data pre-draft and who could be hurt by it. The League and Players Union have implemented signing bonus

protections for any player who submits to a pre-draft physical, but the top players in any draft class typically opt out of the process. Under the new policy, if a player submits to a pre-draft physical, he is ensured that he will receive at least 75% of the slot value as a signing bonus or become a free agent. If a player is already projected to go near the top of the draft, MRI data or movement data may be used by a team to find potential red flags in the player's athletic profile, which could be used to negotiate a smaller bonus for the player as he enters professional baseball. But some player agents believe that movement data could help players who are likely to go in later rounds of the draft, showing deeper skill sets that may not be immediately apparent in the

players' high school or college results. Baseball's information age has presented a consistent dilemma to those who aspire to play the game at the professional level. The same information that could be used to turn you into a better player could also be used to devalue you, end quote. The verge makes an argument that I certainly agree with personally. Apple finally released new Mac pros, but who needs them? Even if you're a heavy-duty creator type, you can probably do just fine with a Mac Studio or even a Macbook. boat. Now, of course, the Mac Studio is here, and while the Pro delivers impressive performance, you can now get that same performance in a less expensive and much more compact chassis.

I had similarly specced models of the Pro and the Studio on hand to test. Both included Apple's 24-core M2 Ultra processor with 76 GPU cores, as well as 128 gigabytes of unified memory. While the two look quite different and the Mac Pro has a couple extra ports, I can confirm that their performance is close to the same. The primary advantage that the Mac Pro can claim over the studio is the fact that the former has PCIE expansion slots, six full-length PCI-E Gen 4 slots, specifically, as well as a half-length Gen 3. These in theory allow for some degree of modularity where a user could slot in additional storage, I-O, or other peripherals.

Except that doesn't include desktop GPUs, which mitigates the utility of these slots for graphic use cases significantly. The Mac hasn't supported NVIDIA's cards for quite some time, and Apple's own silicon doesn't support AMD's GPUs either. Further muddling this matter is the fact that most PCIE cards can now be used with Thunderbolt via an external enclosure. You specifically need to require the X-16 speeds in order to gain a tangible benefit from those extra thousands of dollars. The slots, with those caveats, didn't blow anyone I spoke to out of the water. Would it be nice to have? Yeah, totally. If it wasn't a machine that started at $7,000, said Evan Stone, a senior iOS engineer at the Software Development Agency Martiancraft. Stone also works on the MacBook Pro with M1

Max, and he's a fan. He has one for work and another for home. Pacerro used to be a huge fan of the Mac Pro's expandability, but his new MacBook performs so well that he doesn't feel the need to add anything extra. The new silicon chips and those built-in GPUs that they have and the neural networks, I'm finding that most of my needs are met, he says. I'm like, do I just settle in and see how this goes, end quote. Finally today, if you like me are not a car person, you might not have been aware of this as a possibility. So let me turn you on to the idea that we might be getting a huge breakthrough in electric vehicles. Say hello to Axial Flux Motors, quoting Barron's. Mercedes has unveiled a hypercar it thinks could be one of the world's fastest EVs. Outside Mercedes-Benz's

research and development North America Center in Carlsbad, California near San Diego earlier this week, company had stationed an iconic 1950s-era 300-SL Galang, as well as its outlandish G-wagon-based Mercedes Project Mondo G Moonlander with fashion brand Montclair. The R&D Center is also a major design center, and Mercedes chose it as the place to unveil the Vision 11, a bright orange gall-wing door electric concept car that the company hopes will set speed records like its namesake 11 in the 1960s. The C-11, a fiberglass GT that ran variously with Wankle rotary, turbo diesel, and V8 power was both an innovative design and a record setter in the late 1960s and early 1970s. But it was never put into production. The 111, although it's far more outlandish,

than the C-11 could actually end up as a production hypercar. If so, it will be ultra-fast and feature three or four of the super-thin electric motors from Yasa, the British company acquired by Mercedes-Benz in 2021. In original C-11, one of just 11 surviving and also orange from the 16 made, was also on hand. The Yassa motors could be a major technological breakthrough, though they're based on principles laid down by Michael Faraday in 1821. Axial flux motors are used in CD drives, but not currently in electric cars other than the Ferrari SF90 Stradale, a hybrid model, explains Tim Wilmer, Yasa's founder. The motors, notably thinner than the standard radial flux. motors promise higher torque and power density with less weight and volume. A 250 horsepower motor

could weigh only 52 pounds. In the near future, Wilmer says, the motors could be placed in the car's wheel hubs, a goal for many automakers that is so far proven elusive in production. Yass's technology, which simplifies electric motor design, was spun off from Oxford University in 2009. Markets Schaefer. Mercedes-Benz's chief technology officer says the Vision 111 will be chasing records just like the C-11 did. Collaboration with Yasa and the company's Formula One team will make the victories happen, he said, adding that the car is both a showcase for a new power train and an aesthetic statement, quote, proving to our customers that we're pushing the limits, end quote.

Mercedes also announced that starting on Friday, customers with their MBUX infotainment system will be getting chat GPT integration because, of course. Zelda update, we've embarked on the fifth sage mission. Spoiler alert, there's a fifth sage, and technically a sixth, but, you know, whatever. I've also almost double-maxed out the battery, so now my hover bike can basically go from one end of Hyrule to the other, and I only have to land for a recharge every now and again. This is my version of long-haul EV travel, y'all. Talk to you tomorrow.