Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 07/24 – Llama 3.1 Bests The “Frontier Models”?

Episode Date: July 24, 2024

Meta’s Llama 3.1 shows that open models can at least go toe to toe with proprietary AI models. Why did the Google-Wiz deal fall apart? Was the CrowdStrike outage a part of it? Kamala Harris, AI czar? And what do the reviews of the recent Samsung foldable phones say to us about those Apple foldable phone rumors? Links: Meta puts open source AI on the podium. (Ben's Bites) The first GPT-4-class AI model anyone can download has arrived: Llama 405B (ArsTechnica) Google’s Aborted Deals Show Antitrust’s Long Shadow Over Tech (Bloomberg) Google’s $23 Billion Snub From Wiz Will Sting Them Both (Bloomberg) A Kamala Harris Presidency Could Mean More of the Same on A.I. Regulation (NYTimes) Apple Moves Forward With Foldable iPhone (The Information) The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 is a great phone that’s out of ideas (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, July 24th, 2024. I'm Brian McCullough today. Metaselama 3.1 shows that open models can at least go toe to toe with proprietary AI models. Why did the Google Whizdeal fall apart? Was the crowd strike outage a part of it?

Kamala Harris, AI czar, question mark, and what do the reviews of the recent Samsung foldable phones say to us about those Apple foldable phone rumors? Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. As alluded to yesterday, META debuted Lama 3.1 405B, the first frontier-level open-source AI model, according to Mark Zuckerberg, as well as new Lama 3.170B and 8B models. Meta also says it's working on Lama 4 already, which you'd expect, quoting Ben's Bytes. Lama 3.1 405B is the biggest llama of them all. Using it as a teacher, meta, has a teacher. Meta has retrained its 8 billion and 70 billion versions two. Together, these models have a context window of 128,000 tokens. This means you can enter hundreds of pages' worth of content in your prompts. They're multilingual in eight languages, English, German, French, Italian, Portuguese, Hindi,

Spanish, and Thai. They come with support for using tools like web search, math reasoning, and code execution. They are open source. You can download the weights and use them in your applications. Lama 3.1 models are not multimodal, however. They don't understand or create images, but multimodal llamas are coming soon. Not only Lama 3.105B is the smartest LLM ever released openly, it also humbles the closed giants. Its benchmark scores near and sometimes top GPT40 and Claude 3.5 Sonnet. Although nothing is truly open source in AI, this launch is more than just open weights. Meta has released a massive technical report outlining what the challenges they faced building a model of this size were and how they overcame them, end quote. So a couple things to touch

on there. Let me underline that the 405B model represents the first time an open source model has been able to go toe to toe with the state of the art, in this case, GPT40. Second, note how they mentioned that they used the bigger model to train the littler ones. Well, looks like you can do that, too, as Meta says that for the first time ever, it will allow development. to use the outputs from Lama models, including the 405B1, to improve other models. In other words, to create synthetic data to train your own models on. This all came with a 2,300 word manifesto that Zuck posted on his Facebook page yesterday outlining why he believes open models are the way to go. Alphabet earnings, not sure there's much really to discuss here. Q2 revenue was up 14% year over

year. Net income was up 29%. Search revenue was up, so no negative effects from AI that we can see yet, at least when it comes to the revenue side of the search equation. And they noted that their headcount was down 1%. The stock opened down more than 5% this morning, so the street has concerns, I guess. It's around capital spending, but everybody's doing capital spending a lot right now, right? But the stock has been on a bit of a run up over the last six months or so. So who knows, maybe it's just profit-taking. On the cloud side, revenue. grew 29% and Google Cloud exceeded 10 billion in quarterly revenue and 1 billion in operating profit for the first time ever. YouTube revenue was up 13% to 8.66 billion, but that was below estimates.

I wonder if that YouTube number has become so important that it too can move the stock these days. I may be more interested in this. Sources tell Bloomberg that the Google Wiz deal fell apart, in part due to antitrust fears, but also maybe the crowd strike outage, which increased the potential value of a cloud security company like Wiz, quote, a large reason the advanced talks between Google and Wiz failed, according to people familiar with the situation, a faulty software update from CrowdStrike holdings that caused Microsoft Windows to crash on millions of devices around the world. That episode increased interest in and the potential value of companies that offer cloud security features like Whiz, said the people asking not to be identified discussing private matters.

The first thing I thought of when I saw the Crowdstrike News was, oh, the $23 billion valuation for Wiz has just gone up a little bit, said Stefan Siluinsky, Global Head of Software Research at BNP Paribos. But also looming over both of Google's failed deals, they're referring to the recent HubSpot deal there, was the specter of antitrust. Google has faced a litany of monopoly cases around the globe over the last decade with scrutiny growing even after the company stopped pursuing as many deals. Now that Google is back on the market, it's once again dealing with the regulatory pressures that have scuttled multiple high-profile tech purchases in the past year. Wizz turned down the deal partly over concerns it would lead to a protracted approval

process, Bloomberg News previously reported. One of the last big proposed tech takeovers, Adobe's $20 billion overture to web design startup Figma fell apart at the end of 2023, clashes with regulators in the UK and Europe. A month later, Amazon dropped its bid to buy Rumba Maker I-Robot for similar reasons. Amazon's abandoned bid, quote, spooked a lot of people, Swinsky said. Lina Khan had the impact of preventing some large M&A just by being present, end quote. More from Parme Olson, also in Bloomberg, quote. Wizz's rejection combined with the testy regulatory environment puts Google in an even more awkward position in its efforts to grow its cloud business, which has 11% of the market behind Microsoft's Azure with 25% and Amazon's AWS, the leading

player with 31%, according to Synergy Research Group, a market intelligence firm. But grow it must, as the company's longtime reliance on advertising leaves it exposed to slowing growth or interest rate hikes. Acquisitions are the way to go, since Google has a spotty history in turning its own innovations into lucrative products. Google researchers invented the Transformer, for instance, but it was Open AI that first commercialized it successfully. Transformers. Former is the T-In-Chat-GPT. Two years ago, Google managed to buy cybersecurity firm Mandiant for $5.4 billion. The addition of Wiz, which specializes in cybersecurity for cloud-based applications,

could have rounded out that security offering and given Google Cloud a strong selling point against its bigger competitors. Google didn't respond to request for comment. Wiz will have its own price to pay for the snub. According to people close to the company, its founders haven't walked away from Google as a negotiating tactic, but genuinely want to become as big as rival Palo Alto Networks, which similarly has Israeli founders, went public in 2012 and has a market cap of $100 billion.

Wizz's founders previously sold a security company to Microsoft for $320 million and are already multi-millionaires who aren't lured by the prospect of a sudden jump in personal wealth, or keen on being plugged into a legacy tech giant, two people close to the company tell me. Fine, but in the meantime, many of Wizz's engineers will be disgruntled at having lost out on a windfall. Snubbing an acquirer isn't unheard of in Silicon Valley. Mark Zuckerberg said no to $1 billion from Yahoo in 2006, and the founders of Snap declined $3 billion in 2013 from Zuckerberg, but $23 billion is a different conversation. A founder of WhatsApp once explained to me that when Zuckerberg came to him with a $19 billion takeover offer in 2014,

the Facebook billionaire quote made us an offer we couldn't refuse. The WhatsApp founders surmised that if they rejected the offer, they'd face a revolt from staff. Of course, WhatsApp's tiny workforce of 50 stood to become multimillionaires, and Wiz has a larger staff of 1,200, but they are still missing a life-changing payout. It's hard to overstate how audacious Wiz appears by leaving $23 billion on the table, but it does leave both companies in something of a bind. Google must now find another route to augmenting its lagging cloud business. Wiz must also live up to the very high expectations it has set for itself, end quote. Okay, maybe that's another reason why Google's stock is down.

Investors might be realizing that Google won't be able to acquire their way. way to growth in the cloud after all. All right, politics once again, and it's for the same reason we did this last time. Details like this seem relevant to our interest. Did you know, Kamala Harris took a leading White House role on AI, including meeting with executives. So a win for her might mean a continued relatively smooth runway for AI companies, quoting the times. As AI czar, she brought the chiefs of OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, and Anthropic to the White House to agree on voluntary safety standards for the technology. She led a White House executive order mandating how the federal government should use and develop AI, and she pushed Congress to adopt regulations to protect individuals from AI killing jobs and other harms, although little legislation has emerged and the companies have so far faced few roadblocks. We, quote, reject the false choice that suggests we can either protect the public or advance innovation,

Ms. Harris said in a speech in November calling for both global regulation and further accountability from companies. We can and must do both, she said. Now, as the Democratic Party's presumptive presidential nominee, a win for Ms. Harris could mean a continued relatively smooth runway for AI companies, which have enjoyed little U.S. regulation and the chance to shape White House and congressional views on the technology. Ms. Harris has previously taken a tougher stance on big tech. As the former district attorney of San Francisco and then Attorney General of California, she pushed for laws against cyberbullying and to promote greater privacy for children online. As the state's attorney general, she worked to stem the spread of intimate images taken without

their subject's consent on big tech platforms. She brings a very kind of lawyerly, kind of thoughtful mindset about thinking about all sides of the issue, said Alondra Nelson, a former director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, end quote. There's also some talk in Silicon Valley that folks hope Kamala Harris could provide a chance for a reset after years of bipartisan criticism in Washington, D.C., towards big tech companies, quoting Politico. The feedback I'm getting, but certainly not confirmed by the VP, is that she will be far more open to business, artificial intelligence, crypto, and government as a service, billionaire investor Mark Cuban, himself once rumored to be a possible presidential

contender said in an email to Politico, he added, quote, changing the policies, changes the message and lets everyone know she's in charge and open literally for business, end quote. On one hand, Harris took steps as California's Attorney General to crack down on data privacy violations, years before the state passed the country's toughest law protecting consumer data, including by creating a privacy enforcement and protection unit in her department. The steps earned Harris praise from privacy advocate organizations that have complained about Congress's inaction on privacy, including organizations such as the Center for Democracy and Technology and the Electronic Privacy Information Center, which gave her an award for her work in 2015.

On the other hand, unlike Biden and Trump, Harris has not called for revoking the online industry's 28-year-old liability shield, Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which protects companies from being sued for user-posted content housed on their platforms. She did, however, vote for a package of bills signed by Trump that created an exception to Section 230 to hold platforms accountable for sex trafficking. One tech CEO said on Monday that Harris has an opportunity to win new support and perhaps donations from West Coast Tech executives. executives and venture capitalists who liked Obama's emphasis on innovation, but have largely soured on Biden for what they call his failure to push for high-stakes immigration reform, or to lay out clear rules for AI, cryptocurrency, and other emerging technologies. If by the end of the week, she had a tech policy framework out there, a 10-point plan for pro-business, pro-tech,

pro-entrepreneurship, and it was credible, I think she could very quickly rally a significant portion of the ecosystem, said Aaron Levy, the Silicon Valley-based CEO of the cloud computing company box. If Harris does unveil such a plan, Levy said he's heard from, quote, a dozen plus tech CEOs who would be absolutely willing to support her, end quote. From the, this pops up every six months or so file. Sources tell the information that Apple is working on a foldable clamshell design iPhone that could debut as soon as 2026 and has gone so far as to reach out to Asian component suppliers in recent months. So, you know, it's just a rumor that surfaces every six months until it stops being a rumor and starts getting real.

Quote, Apple recently created an internal code name for the product V68, signaling that the idea has moved beyond the conceptual stage and is now an official product in development with suppliers. The people said typical iPhone models take about 24 months to successfully manufacture from start to finish, though a foldable iPhone could take longer to develop, given that foldable screens are still a new technology. Two problems may stand in the way of a foldable iPhone. Apple's engineers have struggled for years to overcome the technical challenges of building such a device, such as eliminating the crease that forms in the middle of the display after repeated folds. Apple designers have also previously mandated that a foldable iPhone should be

half as thin as current iPhone models so that it wouldn't be so thick when shut, the information reported in February. The company may have resolved that issue. Next year, the company plans to release a significantly thinner iPhone internally codenamed D23, the information reported in May. Apple's designers also have struggled to come up with enough compelling features that would make consumers want one, especially given its high retail cost compared to non-foldable phones, according to people with direct knowledge of its previous efforts, end quote. At the very least, though, a foldable would give you that strangers stopping you on the street and saying, ooh, is that the new iPhone? What do you think of it, moment, that Apple hasn't had for years

now. More than again, maybe not. The Samsung Galaxy Z-Fold-6 reviews are in, and the consensus seems to be very good battery life, easy multitasking, and seven years of updates is great. but it has a narrow cover screen, it's bulky and heavy, as that last segment suggests, and it's expensive. As ever, I'm going with the review from The Verge, which they've titled, The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 is a great phone that's out of ideas. Going the conclusion, Samsung likes to emphasize the ways that foldables have reached parity with slab phones. That's basically true of the Folds camera system, which is at its best taking photos of people.

And while I don't agree that the cover screen feels as easy to use as a traditional smartphone, it does seem that the Fold 6's battery life is just as strong as the best slab phones. I tested the phone with the always-on display enabled full-time and put it through the ringer on a couple of long bike rides using GPS and streaming music. Even so, I usually had at least 50% left at the end of the day. But the Z-Fold 6 still falls short of slab phones in one significant way. Durability. Samsung made some tweaks to the materials and the hinge mechanism to improve protection

against drops and it remains fully water-resistant, but dust is still the enemy of a folding phone. Don't get me wrong, the Samsung Galaxy Z-Fold 6 is an amazing gadget. The fold has one of faithful following and rightfully so. Multitasking on the big screen is effortless, build quality is as good as foldables get, and the battery reliably lasts a day or more. Heck, you can plug the whole dang thing into a display and use it like a computer. Samsung pioneered the foldable phone, but now it's stubbornly iterating on that original concept, and it feels like the time for iteration is over. The company seems committed to its current long and narrow template rather than adopting a wider format. Personally, I think the One Plus Open is the ideal foldable design,

and it's about halfway between the tall and skinny Z-fold-6 and the wide and short Google Pixel fold. Not to mention, this phone costs nearly $2,000. Can't we ask for a little more than improved flatness? I want an S-pen included, like it is for the less expensive Galaxy S-24 Ultra, and some way to store it without having to buy a special case with a pen slot. Or how about, I don't know, cool modular accessories, a better video conferencing experience, free screen protective replacements for everyone. Let's dream big, people. The Z-Fold 6 is one hell of a nice place to stay, but to me at least, it doesn't feel like home, end quote.

Nothing for you today. Talk to you tomorrow.