Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 08/02 – Elon’s Gonna Get Me To Pay For Blue

Episode Date: August 2, 2023

Seems like I’ll have to be paying up for an X Blue subscription any day now. Meta releases a new AI music generator. We might actually be getting a big tech IPO in a matter of weeks. Amazon is readying an aggressive new push into groceries. And what happens when an online creator replaces themselves with an AI bot? Links: X, formerly Twitter, now lets paid users hide their checkmarks (TechCrunch) TweetDeck is now called ‘XPro’ (9to5Google) Meta’s AI music generator could be the new synthesizer — or just muzak (The Verge) SoftBank’s Arm Targets $60 Billion Value in September IPO (Bloomberg) Microsoft Teams adds spatial audio for more immersive conference calls (The Verge) Amazon Unveils Biggest Grocery Overhaul Since Buying Whole Foods (Bloomberg) One of Gaming’s Biggest YouTubers Wants to Replace Himself With AI (Wired) 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, August 2, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough today. Seems like I'll have to be paying up for an X-Blue subscription any day now. Meta releases a new AI music generator.

We might actually be getting a big tech IPO in a matter of weeks. Amazon is readying an aggressive new push into groceries and what happens when an online creator replaces themselves with an AI bot? Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Twitter check-in, or, you know, X check-in. X now lets X blue subscribers hide their verified checkmarks, although the checkmark might still appear in some places and some features might not be available because, you know, it's cool when the paid product is so controversial, people actually want to hide it. Quoting TechCrunch. The company has updated the help page for paid subscriptions, which is titled About Twitter Blue, saying that even if you hide the checkmark, it might be visible in some places. The company didn't give any further details about those placeholders. As a subscriber, you can choose to hide your checkmark on your account. The checkmark will be hidden on your profile and posts.

The checkmark may still appear in some places and some features could still reveal you have an active subscription. Some features may not be available while your checkmark is hidden. We will continue to evolve this feature to make it better for you. The page reads. This will supposedly help users benefit from subscription features without showing that they are a verified account. The option to hide the checkmark will show up in the profile customization section of account settings, end quote. Also, Twitter has renamed TweetDeck to X-Pro, although again, the URL remains tweetdeck. com, and much of the copy is unchanged, including the Tweet Like a Pro tagline, quoting 9 to 5 Google.

X has yet to update all of the copy with the tagline mentioning the old name, a powerful real-time tool for people who live on Twitter. There is a link to LegacyXPro at the bottom, which still works, like Twitter for Mac, and loads the pre-preview version of tweet deck. The new X-Pro still needs to add multi-user support, which is important for large accounts and brands. The new name doesn't roll off the tongue, while the lack of space between the X and Pro feels particularly egregious.

What this rebrand has going for it is how it describes the app's purpose right in the name. Meanwhile, X-Pro still works without a blue subscription as of today, but the company previously announced that this would be changing in the coming days, end quote. Yeah, so when that happens, I guess I'm finally going to have to start paying for Blue, but good to know that when it does happen, I can hide that I have my badge. Meta has released AudioCraft, a new open-source AI model that lets users create music and sounds via prompts, consisting of music gen, audio gen, and N-Codec models, quoting the verge. It consists of three AI models, all tackling different areas of sound generation.

MusicGen takes text inputs to generate music. This model was trained on 20,000 hours of music owned by meta or licensed specifically for this purpose. AudioGen creates audio from written prompts, simulating barking dogs or footsteps, and was trained on public sound effects. An improved version of meta's encodec decoder lets users create sounds with fewer artifacts, which is what happens when you manipulate audio too much. The company let the media listen to some sample audio made with audio craft, the generated noise of whistling, sirens and humming sounded pretty natural. While the guitar strings on the songs felt real, they still felt, well, artificial. Meta is just the latest to tackle combining music and AI. Google came up with MusicLM, a large language model that generated minutes of sound based on text prompts and is only accessible to researchers. Then an AI-generated song featuring a

voice-likeness of Drake and the weekend went viral before it was taken down. More recently, some musicians like Grimes have encouraged people to use their voices in AI-made songs. Of course, musicians have been experimenting with electronic audio for a very long time. Edm and festivals like Ultra didn't appear out of nowhere, but computer-generated music often sounds manipulated from existing audio. Audiocraft and other generative AI-produced music create those sounds just from texts and a vast library of sound data. Right now, AudioCraft sounds like something that could be used for elevator music or stock songs that can be plugged in for some atmosphere rather than the next big pop hit. However, Meta believes its new model can usher in a new wave of

songs in the same way that synthesizers changed music once they became popular, end quote. It's been a while, but we're still expecting to have our first Blockbuster Tech IPO in quite some time later this year. Sources say SoftBanks' Arm is targeting an IPO at a valuation of between $60 and $70 billion as soon as September, a sign of bullish interest in AI chips. Quoting Bloomberg. The Road Show is scheduled to start the first week of September with pricing for the IPO the following week, said one of the people asked not to be named because the talks are private. The latest target for arms valuation underscores a shift in market mood in favor of technologies linked to generative AI and chips. Earlier this year, bankers were pitching a range of valuations

for the chip designer from $30 billion to $70 billion, Bloomberg has reported. Softbank, led by Masayoshi Son and Arm Chief Executive Officer Renee Haas Long, considered the bottom of that range too low. Arm executives may still be be gunning for a valuation of as high as $80 billion, but the odds of achieving such a target are uncertain, one of the people said. The chip company is looking to raise as much as $10 billion in the IPO. Bloomberg News has reported, at the top end, arms debut should be the largest from the tech industry since Alibaba in 2014 and meta-platforms, then Facebook, in 2012. It lands during a dry stretch for IPOs, given global economic uncertainty and the war in Ukraine. While the Cambridge-U.K.-based

company's technology is used in almost every smartphone on the planet. Its place in the industry has long been obscure. Arm sells the blueprints needed to design microprocessors and licenses technology known as instruction sets that dictate how software programs communicate with those chips. The power efficiency of arms technology helped make it ubiquitous on phones, where battery life is critical. René Haas, who took over as CEO last year, is now working to expand beyond the smartphone market, which has stagnated in recent years. He's targeting more advanced computing, for chips for data centers for cloud computing and artificial intelligence applications. Processors for that market are among the most expensive and profitable in the industry.

Amazon has adopted arm-based chips for its Amazon Web Services because it says they are more efficient, both in terms of energy and economics. They are used by 40,000 AWS customers. Estimates for arms value have fluctuated wildly in tandem with chip stocks since SoftBank acquired the company for $32 billion in 2016, delisting it from the London Stock Exchange. SoftBank founder, Son, has particularly talked up the potential for arms future growth and dominance in chip IP. In February last year, San said he wants arms debut to be the biggest in the history of the semiconductor industry, end quote. You might have already noticed this, but Microsoft has rolled out spatial audio for teams

on Windows and MacOS after a few months of testing this. The audio of each person on a call now has a distinct position, at least as far as your ears can tell. Quoting the Verge. Team Spatial Audio aligns the perceived audio location of each participant with their video representation to make it easier for users to track who is speaking, to understand better when multiple speakers are speaking at the same time, and to lower meeting fatigue and cognitive load. Microsoft's Hong Sodoma wrote, but Microsoft has hit a wall when it comes to spatial audio and Bluetooth earbuds and or headphones, at least for now.

Please note that you will need a stereo-capable device such as wired headsets or stereo-capable laptops, Sodoma said. Bluetooth devices are currently not supported due to protocol limitation. Next-generation LEA audio with stereo-enabled Bluetooth devices will be supported. If your wireless headphones connect via a USB dongle, you might also be able to take advantage of spatial audio. It's purely Bluetooth devices that can't do so yet. LEA Audio is still in its infancy and must be supported both by the source device and the audio accessory.

Select earbuds from Samsung, Sony, Oneplus, Earfund, and other manufacturers have already been updated to be compatible. Back in May, Windows 11 gained support for Bluetooth LE. So in the coming months, hopefully Team Spatial Audio will start working wirelessly with some of the above earbuds. Just don't count on any of Microsoft's own Bluetooth gadgets getting LE audio anytime soon. Remember the Surface earbuds? We never saw a sequel for those, so I'm guessing sales were on the disappointing side. But even the Surface headphones, too, which I quite enjoyed, haven't gotten a successor. This is where it pays to have an ecosystem.

Apple's been offering spatial audio across its platforms for some time now, but hopefully, L.E. Audio will gain some serious momentum as we head into the fall, end quote. In the coming weeks, Amazon is apparently planning to roll out the biggest overhaul to its grocery business since buying Whole Foods six years ago. This would include things that customers have been asking for, like one cart, for all of your supermarket offerings. Quoting Bloomberg. Amazon is revamping stores, testing new highly automated warehouses,

and for the first time, offering fresh food delivery to customers who aren't prime subscribers. In a move likely to play well with shoppers, the company also plans to merge its various e-commerce supermarket offerings from Whole Foods, AmazonFresh, Amazon.com. into one online cart. In an interview with Bloomberg Business Week, Tony Hogget, the former Tesco executive leading the charge, describes the company's ambitions to transform Amazon from something of a niche grocer, specializing in organics and home delivery of cereal and paper towels,

into a destination for shoppers trying to stretch their dollars and consolidate trips to the store. We're serious about grocery, he says. Our plan is on building this really strong grocery relationship with customers over time, end quote. Today, August 2nd, Amazon will begin in inviting people without prime subscriptions in a dozen U.S. metropolitan areas, including Boston, Dallas, and San Francisco, to order groceries online from Amazon Fresh stores and warehouses. Previously, only shoppers paying the annual $139 prime subscription could get food delivered from fresh. The company aims to make the offer standard nationwide by the end of the year and eventually include products from Whole Foods and other grocers. Delivery fees range from $7.95 to $13.95

or $4 more than Prime members pay. Amazon customers have, long-expressed frustration that they need to check out from three separate webpages to get everything on their shopping lists. Consumers who want king's salmon filets sold at Whole Foods, a pack of shredded lettuce sold by Amazon Fresh and a box of Cheerios, sold with other shelf-stable products by Amazon.com, sometimes found themselves making three different orders, ferried to their homes and three separate deliveries. The company is looking to simplify the process this year or next by stocking more Whole Foods products in Amazon warehouses and creating one cart. We were recognize that still needs to be improved, said Hoggett, the senior vice president for worldwide

grocery stores. In the physical world, the company is revamping its fresh stores, placing crispy cream coffee and donut stands near the front door, adding roughly 1,500 items to what had been limited inventory for a full-sized supermarket and trying to make the space more inviting with bright colors. Grocery analysts and some shoppers were turned off by the chain's sterile utilitarian design. It just feels soulless, said Peter Abraham, a marketer in Los Angeles, who dropped in on a fresh store a few times and has stopped going back. For the most part, Whole Foods has been largely siloed from Amazon's other grocery businesses. Hoggett, who moved with his family to Austin and works out of the grocer's downtown headquarters, is starting to change

that. Whole Foods executives now oversee all of Amazon's grocery real estate and branding, while a longtime Amazon executive leads Whole Foods technology teams. Hoggett has brought running colleagues from his Tesco days with deep industry experience, including Claire Peters, who leads worldwide strategy for Amazon Fresh online and in-store, and Peter Bowery, who leads store operations. Bishop says Fresh seems to be trying to find its own industry niche. Cheaper than mainline full-service grocers owned by Kroger or Albertsons, if not as cheap as Walmart or Aldi, the German giant that is the fastest growing grocery chain in the U.S. In addition to delivery fees, Amazon Fresh tries to defray the cost of e-commerce with prices

that, in a recent check Bishop conducted, stand about 13% higher online than in store. Hoggett is betting Amazon can emerge as a one-stop shop for groceries. Surveys show households tend to shop at multiple markets depending on whether they're stocking up on staples or preparing a special meal. We think we can bring that four or five different grocers down to one or two with Amazon being one of those grocery relationships, Hoggett says. To get there, he's taking a step. Grocery watchers have been predicting since Amazon bought Whole Foods, letting people get their Coke and Doritos at the organic grocer. Those items won't appear on store shelves, which still adhere to the chain's pre-Amazon quality and ingredient

standards. Instead, the company will see if shoppers are keen on ordering their guilty pleasures online and picking them up at their local Whole Foods, end quote. Finally today, Jordie Vandenbushy, aka Cueble Cop, one of the most popular gamers on YouTube, was suffering the all-two common burnout that creators online inevitably face. When everything is you in terms of content, you never really get a break. So he's come up with a solution. He's retiring, but he's not going away because he's putting an AI bot of himself in his place. Quoting Wired, Van Denbushy's AI influencer platform, which launched this week after a suitably excitable level of hype on Twitter from its creator, is his attempt to make that happen. It comprises two versions of

an AI tool. The first is trained on a creator's likeness, their on-camera performances and what they say in videos, and is used to create new content. It appears to be similar to Forever Voices, the controversial AI tool behind the Karen AI virtual influencer, which outsource maintaining connections with fans on behalf of creators. The other involves simplifying the act of creation as much as possible by taking simple prompts, such as turn this article into a video formatted like an interview involving two people and producing the end result. The latter is similar to a tool called QuickVid, which has seen some early adoption. Van D'Bushy wouldn't reveal much about how the tools were built, but regardless of their origins, they're coming at a critical

time for generative AI and its impacts on how people work. And Van Bouchy's way of doing things could have lasting impacts on creators on YouTube and beyond. While not retiring, Van Bushi is happy to replace himself in the creative process with the AI he's been working on. Quote, we've seen a lot of success with these systems, he says. I'm very confident that they can reproduce creativity, so much so that I'm willing to bet my entire business on it. As of this writing, the AI video he released Tuesday has nearly 3,000 views. He claims to have a waitlist of 500 influencer friends within the industry eager to adopt his AI tools, though he can't give them access until the cost of creating new videos drops to an economical level, which he believes

will happen as technology advances. This presents an entirely new option for creators to essentially clone themselves and continue without worrying about aging, gaining weight, or otherwise evolving in any way that could alienate certain segments of their audience, says Leah Haberman, an influencer marketing expert and instructor at UCLA. However, Haberman isn't fully convinced audiences will want to embrace AI-generated creators as readily as the creators themselves are. Their appeal, quote, is their humanity and ability to create these parisocial relationships with their audience, where people either relate to them or aspire to become them, she says. A virtual influencer will only ever present as entertainment, at least until we get to sentient beings, end quote.

Yeah, for the Ride Home Fund, I kicked the tires of an AI startup that was pitching itself to OnlyFans creators, allowing them to replace themselves in various situations. We didn't end up doing the investment for a number of reasons, but fundamentally, I also just couldn't shake the most fundamental question. Like, OnlyFans is OnlyFans because you feel like you're authentically interacting with a real person. Will people still want to interact with a creator? if they know the creator isn't really there? In a way, that's like the fundamental question of this AI moment, isn't it? Talk to you tomorrow.