Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 07/17 – Sorry, More Politics…

Episode Date: July 17, 2024

Sorry, we gotta do more politics. Can’t avoid it cause now Trump likes TikTok and seemingly hates Mark Zuckerberg. Mistrals two new models. A big Pixel phone leak. And the interesting new “sketch to image” AI tool on the new Galaxy phones. Sponsors: CleanMyMac X with promocode: techmeme Links: Trump on Taxes, Tariffs, Jerome Powell and More (Bloomberg) Exclusive: Google-backed software developer GitLab explores sale, sources say (Reuters) Mistral releases Codestral Mamba for faster, longer code generation (VentureBeat) Giant Pixel 9 leak gives us our first real-world look at the Fold, faster charging specs, and more (AndroidAuthority) Samsung’s new image-generating AI tool is a little too good (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 TechMean right home for Wednesday, July 17th, 2024. I'm Brian McCullough today. Sorry, we got to do more politics. Can't avoid it because now Trump likes TikTok and seemingly hates Mark Zuckerberg. Mistrels, two new models, a big pixel phone leak, and the interesting new sketched image AI tool on the new galaxy phones.

Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Yes, more politics. I'll explain why in a second. But in a new interview, Donald Trump said, quote, I'm for TikTok because you need competition, and quote, if you don't have TikTok, you have Facebook and Instagram, and quote, that's Zuckerberg. More specifically, quote, at Maralago, the one exception to his claim to not want to harm U.S. tech companies and to privilege domestic ones over foreign ones is TikTok. Discussing his recent embrace of the Chinese-owned social media platform where he's already quite popular, Trump mentions that banning it in the U.S. would benefit a company and a CEO. He has no desire to reward. Quote, now that I'm thinking about it, I'm for TikTok because you need competition,

he says. If you don't have TikTok, you have Facebook and Instagram, and that's, you know, that's Zuckerberg. It's an outcome he won't abide. He's still stung by Facebook's decision to bar him indefinitely in the wake of the January 6th attacks. Quote, all of the sudden, Trump grouses, I went from number one to having nobody, end quote. His reversal on cryptocurrency has been marked by similar dynamics. Not long ago, he criticized Bitcoin as a, quote, scam and a, quote, disaster waiting to happen. Now he says it and other cryptocurrencies should be, quote, made in the USA. He frames this about face as a practical necessity. Quote, if we don't do it, China is going to figure it out and China is going to have it or somebody else, he says. Not coincidentally, the crypto industry spurned by the Democratic Party, brimming with cash and eager for friends in Washington,

has now found its way to Trump. Quote, thanks largely to the actions of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Biden administration has stumbled into becoming anti-crypto, says Justin Slaughter, policy director at the crypto-focused investment firm paradigm. Quote, given that about 20% of Democrats own crypto per polling, and its ownership skews young and non-white, this was politically unwise, end quote. Trump has moved to fill the void, declaring in a May speech that he would, quote, stop Joe Biden's crusade to crush crypto. The following month, he reaped the benefits raising money from Bitcoin miners at a Mar-a-Lago

fundraiser. Trump's campaign then announced it would, quote, build a cryptocurrency. Army, and it now accepts crypto contributions. Some in Silicon Valley have learned that the best way to Trump to alter his position on something is to appeal to him directly. That was certainly the case for Tim Cook. In 2019, Apple looked set to be a victim of Trump's trade war with China with billions of dollars at stake as the president announced 25 percent import tariffs. He then publicly rejected Apple's request for an exclusion. Quote, Apple will not be given tariff waiver or relief for Mac Pro parts that are made in China, he wrote on Twitter, make them in the USA, no tariffs.

At Mara Lago, Trump speaks fondly of Cook and reveals how Apple's CEO persuaded him to relent. He recalls Cook reaching out privately and asking, quote, could I come in and see you? Trump appreciated the gesture of respect from the head of what at the time was the world's most valuable company. Quote, that's impressive, Trump says. I said, yeah, come in. Trump remembers that Cook was straightforward. Quote, he said to me, I need your help. You have tariffs of 25 and 50 percent on Apple products imported from China, he recalls. He said, quote, it would really hurt our business. It would destroy our business potentially. And Apple spokesperson declined to comment. Trump wasn't looking to do that. Mainly he wanted to demonstrate that he could bring manufacturing jobs back to the U.S., as he'd promised to do. In his telling, he prevailed upon Cook to expand domestic production. I said, I'm going to do something for you guys, Trump recalls, but you have to build in this country, end quote. Four months later, Apple announced it was beginning construction on a campus in Austin. The press release quoted Cook saying, quote, building the Mac Pro, Apple's most powerful device ever, in Austin is both a point of pride and a testament to the enduring power of American ingenuity, end quote. Cook then gifted Trump,

a $5,99 Mac Pro, one of the first made in the Texas factory, end quote. So I think it's worth, again, noting who one of the nominees for president has a beef with in the tech industry and who he doesn't. He used to have a beef with TikTok. It was his administration that set in motion the wheels to ban TikTok potentially. So just through the lens of again, the tech industry nationwide, this is worth internalizing. Quoting again, During his presidency and afterward, Trump frequently took aim at the U.S. tech industry. For much of that time, Twitter now X, was his platform of choice for venting displeasure with companies such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter itself, pre-Elon Musk. In 2020, he signed an executive order reducing legal protections

for social media platforms under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, and his government launched antitrust probes into Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google actions carried on and expanded under Biden. Trump's attacks on Big Tech have never been ironclad statements of policy or principle exactly, not unlike his tariff proposals. They've served at least as much as leverage plays, his staking out negotiating positions that companies and CEOs must respond to. The central complaint he and Republicans used to make was that tech companies were biased against conservatives, shadow-banning them, deplatforming them, and allegedly suppressing right-leaning sources in search results. Today, Trump's focus is on a more broadly appealing charge

that out-of-control tech companies are harming children, to the point even of causing a nationwide epidemic of suicides. They have become too big, too powerful, he argues. They're having a huge negative impact on especially young people, end quote. This position may stem from Trump's understanding of how televised drama can shape public opinion. In February, during a Senate hearing of tech executive, Zuckerberg was effectively bullied into apologizing to families in the audience who said social media abuse had driven their children to suicide. It was an arresting moment, and Trump has harnessed the charge for his campaign. Quote, I don't want them destroying our youth, he says, of social media companies.

You see what they're doing, including even suicides, end quote. The sources say GitLab, which has around a $8 billion market cap, is exploring a sale after attracting interest from its peers, including Datadog, which has around a $44 billion market cap. Quoting Reuters. Deal making in the technology sector is picking up as advances in artificial intelligence and cloud computing push companies to expand their offerings. Alphabet is in advance talks to acquire cybersecurity startup whiz for roughly $23 billion

after previously exploring an acquisition offer for marketing software company HubSpot, Reuters has reported. The technology sector accounted for the largest share of mergers and acquisitions during the first half of 2024, jumping more than 42% year-on-year, to $327.2 billion globally, according to data from Deal Logic. GitLab's platform allows development, operations, and security teams to design and manage software using a single tool. It has more than 30 million registered users and is deployed by more than half of the Fortune 100 companies, according to

its website. Its nominal headquarters are in San Francisco, but all its employees work remotely. GitLab's shares, which have been trading in New York since their initial public offering in 2021, are down 16 percent so far this year underperforming a 3% rise in the S&P 500 application software index on concerns about its customers cutting spending. While the company reported robust year-on-year revenue growth of 33% to $169.2 million and posted its first ever positive cash flow in its latest quarter, it acknowledged it faces headwinds in pricing its offerings as it competes with Microsoft following its $7.5 billion acquisition in 2018 of rival GitHub, end quote. As I mentioned there, I think I told you before that Alphabet had been considering acquiring HubSpot,

though those negotiations seem to have broken down, maybe that's why they're now eyeing whiz. don't know. Mistrol has launched two new 7 billion parameter LLMs, CodeStroll Mamba for cogeneration based on the Mamba architecture, and MathStrel for math reasoning and scientific discovery. Quoting Venture Beat, the well-funded French AI startup Mistrel known for its powerful open source AI models launched two new entries into its growing family of large language models today, a math-based model and a code-generating model for programmers and developers. Mamba seeks to improve upon the efficiency of the transformer architecture used by most leading LLMs by simplifying its attention mechanisms. Mamba-based models, unlike more common transformer-based ones, could have faster inference times and longer context.

Other companies and developers, including AI21, have released new AI models based on it. Now using this new architecture, Mistrels aptly named CodestrolMomba 7B offers a fast response time even with longer input texts. CodeStroll Mamba works well for code productivity. use cases, especially for more local coding projects. Mistral tested the model, which will be free to use on its Mistral La Platform API, handling inputs of up to 256,000 tokens, double that of OpenAI's GPT40. In benchmarking tests, Mistral show that Code Stromamba did better than rival open source models, Code Lama 7B, Code Gemma, 1.17B, and DeepSeek-in-Human-Eval tests. Developers can modify and deploy code Stroll Mamba from its GitHub repository and through Hugging Face. It will be available with

an open-source Apache 2.0 license. Mistral's second model launch is Mathstrel 7B, an AI model designed specifically for math-related reasoning and scientific discovery. Mistral developed MathStrell with Project Numa. Massdral has a 32,000 context window and will be under an Apache 2.0 open-source license. Mistril said the model outperformed every model design for math reasoning. It can achieve, quote, significantly better results on benchmarks with more inference time computations. Users can use it as is or fine-tune the model. Mathstrel is another example of the excellent performance slash speed trade-offs achieved when building models for specific purposes, a development philosophy we actively promote in La Platform, particularly with its new fine-tuning capabilities,

Mistrell said in a blog post. Math-strol can be accessed through Mistrel's La Platform and Hugging Face, end quote. FYI, there's been a huge leak from the Taiwanese regulator NCC. Basically, if you want to know a ton about the specs from the upcoming Pixel 9, Pixel 9 Pro XL, and Pixel 9 Pro Fold, complete with pictures, click through to this piece from Android Authority. Quote, the 9 Pro Fold appears to have slimmer top and bottom bezels on the inside display compared to the original pixel fold. The display crease also seems somewhat reduced, although we can't be sure of that until we, get some hands-on time. The phone is also lying completely flat in these pictures. The first-gen fold couldn't be opened all the way. The NCC reports also reveal new charging speeds,

which are measured as a part of the Taiwanese regulatory process. Unfortunately, the tests only reveal an approximate charging speed, not an exact value, so while we know it will be faster, we don't know how much exactly. The value that stands out the most is 32.67 watts for the Pixel 9 Pro XL. It is safe to assume the device will support at least 35 watts, which would make it a modest yet nice upgrade over the Pixel 8 Pro, which only supports up to 30 watts. Lastly, the reports list the radio support on the Google Pixel 9 series. All models are certified for thread, while the base Pixel 9 doesn't have ultra-wideband, unlike all the other variants. The Google Pixel 9 series is expected to launch at the Made by Google event on August 13th, end quote.

Finally today, speaking of Android phones with the recent Galaxy events, I'm not sure we mention this. New Galaxy phones have an AI-based sketch-to-image tool. The Verge took a look at how it works, and again, this is probably one where you're going to want to click through to see the pictures. Samsung would very much like us and its shareholders to know that its new phones are the AIS'd phones that have ever A-I'd, and the Fold 6 that I'm testing comes with a new tool called Sketch to Image. Draw a rough sketch on a photo or an empty note page, and it will use generative AI to turn that thing into an image. I shrugged it off as just another AI thing when Samsung announced it onstage at unpacked. But y'all, it's really good, so good that it worries me a little.

Using the sketch to image tool in a note is pretty harmless. You draw something, you highlight it, and choose from a handful of styles like 3D cartoon and illustration to turn your doodle into something more detailed. Your image is sent to the cloud, and after a few moments, you'll see a handful of options to choose from. The results are usually cute and fun. I took requests from my two-year-old, and we drew goofy-looking dump trucks and school buses. Sometimes you get a teddy bear with too many arms, but nothing serious. Using sketched image on a photo is where things get weird. I'm the world's worst artist, and this tool translates my very basic sketches into photo-realistic images.

The AI-generated elements are incorporated into photos convincingly, scaled and matched to the surroundings in a way that makes them hard to spot as fakes. That's how I arrived at the B-problem. I took a photo off a dock just south of downtown Seattle with some flowers in the foreground. Because they're close to the camera and my focus was in the distance, they're slightly blurred. I drew the world's worst sketch of a bee on one of those flowers, figuring AI would insert an in-focus image of a bee giving it away easily as a fake. Wrong. The AIB is blurred, just like the flower it's landing on.

If I didn't know AIB's origin story, there's no way I'd think twice about it if I scrolled past that image on Instagram. I'd assume the photographer snapped the picture at just the right time or hung around waiting for a B to fly into the frame, things that take skill and patience. Not the case. In fact, I'm not even sure I'd spot the AI-generated content watermark in the corner of the image. I messed around with sketched image a lot over the past week, and the results aren't always blurry be good.

Often they'll have the telltale signs of generative AI art, words scrawled in an alien-looking language or strange textures that don't look quite right. Convincing at a glance, but if you look for more than a second, you'll notice that something is off. Sometimes the content gives itself away. I don't think anyone believes I saw a massive pirate ship anchored in Elliott Bay or a giant orange cat in an intersection in West Seattle. But even when the images are so outlandish that nobody could mistake them as genuine, they look realistic. Generally, big things will look obviously fake, but it's very easy to add another car to a photo of a busy road or a sailboat in the distance, and most people will be none the wiser.

Aside from that AI watermark, which is easily cropped out, there's really no way of knowing that there's anything unusual about the image. That's weird. I don't want to blow this out of proportion. Using sketched image is entirely optional and plenty of people will never even find it in the gallery app. Out of FocusB isn't going to undo the fabric of our society, but I do think we're at an interestingly weird place with AI. Sure, you've been able to add an out of Focus B to an image in Photoshop for ages, but putting this capability in the very same device you use to take the picture and distribute it is another thing. The capabilities and accessibility of generative A. AI tools are outrunning our shared understanding of what might be real and what might be fake

when you scroll through Instagram, end quote. Yesterday, Chris and I pulled the trigger on another AI investment, which means the AI fund has basically one more bet to make before we've deployed all our capital. So obviously, last call to invest in the pure AI fund. More info at ridehome fund.com. If a couple more of you come through as LPs, maybe we can make a couple more bets. Also, if you want to get a piece of these final AI deals via the rolling fund, you have until the end of next month for your money to go into that fund to participate in these last deals. More info at ridehomefund.com there too.

Though, if anybody is serious about either one, email me at brian at ridehomefund.com because I can maybe share details of our existing investments for you to mull over serious inquiries only. Talk to you tomorrow.