Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 08/21 – AI Grabs The Spotlight Back

Episode Date: August 21, 2024

AI news has been a bit quiet for a little while now, but the headlines came roaring back today. More evidence Waymo might be having some sort of tipping point. Can we really get 3D without the need to wear glasses? And the the interesting raise startup that is actually, literally, going to the moon, not in a figurative sense. Sponsors: LinkedIn.com/ride Links: Gemini in Gmail can now help polish up your drafts (The Verge) Microsoft releases powerful new Phi-3.5 models, beating Google, OpenAI and more (VentureBeat) OpenAI makes fine-tuning for GPT-4o customization generally available (SiliconAngle) Waymo says it has doubled its weekly paid robotaxi trips to 100,000 since May (CNBC) Samsung’s new Odyssey monitor lets you play games in glasses-free 3D (The Verge) Microsoft Teams’ new single app for personal and work is now available (The Verge) Big Tech’s bid to rewrite the rules on net zero (Financial Times) Starpath accelerates moon water mining plans with $12M in funding (TechCrunch) 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, August 21st, 2021. 2024, I'm Brian McCullough today. AI news has been a bit quiet for a little while now, but the headlines came roaring back today.

More evidence, Waymo might be having some sort of tipping point. Can we really get 3D without the need to wear glasses and the interesting raised startup that is actually literally going to the moon and not in a figurative sense? Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. High headlines are back with a vengeance. First up, Google has updated Gemini in Gmail to add a polish feature. to edit existing drafts on top of the formalize and elaborate features quoting the verge. The tools are available to people who pay for Google One AI premium accounts who have paid for Google's Gemini add-on for workspace.

If that's you, when you open an empty draft, you'll see a Help Me Write shortcut appear that you can tap to have Gemini draft text for you. Once you have 12 or more words in a draft, AI written or not, you should see a new Refine My Draft Shortcut shown in Grown. gray letters below the words. Swipe your thumb across the text, and you'll be given the choice to polish, formalize, elaborate, or shorten, or to have Gemini just write a whole new draft for you. And if the Refine My Draft shortcut doesn't appear, tapping the pencil icon does the same thing, end quote. Next, Microsoft released three five, three point five models designed for basic or fast reasoning

and more available for developers to download, use, and fine tune right now on Hugging Face. Quoting Venture Beat. Amazingly, all three models also boost near-state-of-the-art performance across a number of third-party benchmark tests, even beating other AI providers including Google's Gemini 1.5 Flash, Meadowslamma 3.1, and even OpenAI's GPT-40 in some cases. The Phi 3.5 Mini Instruct model is a lightweight AI model with 3.8 billion parameters engineered for instruction adherence and supporting a 128K token context length. This model is ideal for scenarios that demand strong reasoning capabilities in memory or compute-constrained

environments, including tasks like code generation, mathematical problem-solving, and logic-based reasoning. Despite its compact size, the Phi3.5 Mini Instruct model demonstrates competitive performance in multilingual and multi-turn conversational tasks, reflecting significant improvements from its predecessors, end quote. And finally, OpenAI has launched fine-tuning for GPT40, letting developers customize a version of the model with their own data sets to improve domain-specific performance. Quoting Silicon Angle, pre-trained models come with a lot of general information stored in them, often taken from a broad data set that covers a wide variety of subjects, so they are more or less a jack of all trades, but masters of none. When fine-tuning, the goal is to adapt the model for specialized

use or knowledge domains. It's similar to training an employee for a particular job, making them better and more efficient in an expert role. With the new, fine-tuning capability, developers can now train GPT-40 with custom data sets to get higher performance at lower costs for specific use cases to change the tone or behavior of the model. For example, the model could be fine-tuned to act as a professional tutor for a college-level coding course where students are learning to program in C++ and Ruby. The custom data set would include specific knowledge of the textbooks they were expected to learn from, the quizzes and tests they would encounter, and the type of behavior it would be expected to exhibit. In testing, opening I said that fine-tuned GPT-40 models have produced excellent results, end quote. I just said it sort of feels like self-driving tech might be reaching a tipping point, although maybe I should just say Waymo specifically seems to be cresting a wave. More evidence for that, quoting CNBC. Waymo is now providing more than 100,000 paid robot taxi rides per week in the U.S.,

according to a LinkedIn announcement by co-CEO KEDRA Malacana. That's double the 50,000 weekly paid trips the company reported in May. A spokesperson for the Alphabet-owned driverless vehicle venture told CNBC on Tuesday that San Francisco now serves the most trips among the cities where Waymo operates its commercial service, San Francisco, Phoenix, Austin, and Los Angeles. Waymo previously partnered with the ride-hailing giant Uber in Phoenix to bring its service to the apps existing users there. In a statement Tuesday, Waymo said that in June, it added 90 square miles to its service in Phoenix,

making it the largest autonomous ride-hailing territory in the United States. This month, Waymo also expanded its San Francisco Robotaxi service into three new California areas, Daly City, Broadmoor, and Colma, and is now testing its driverless vehicles on freeways around the San Francisco metro area. While CNBC could not independently confirm the company's safety claims, Waymo also said that over 14.8 million rider-only miles driven, the Waymo driver was 3.5x better in avoiding crashes that caused injuries and 3x better in avoiding police reported crashes than human drivers, end quote. So let me come back to that original number of doubling the amount of weekly robotaxy trips.

In essence, this was always a scale play, right? Drive enough miles, train enough data, and you can slowly expand, expand, expand, once you prove it in San Francisco and Phoenix, you bring it to Portland, to Atlanta, to Des Moines, once you pass some magical threshold, in theory, it's just a matter of flipping a switch and turning on service in another area and then another and then another scale. If that's what we're starting to see, if suddenly you see the right-hailing numbers doubling and then doubling and then doubling again and new markets being turned on, then not only will that magical threshold clearly have been passed, but the flip-over to this largely being a theoretical promise someday down the road and now suddenly becoming something commonplace will be quicker than, I think, is expecting. Samsung has unveiled a new Odyssey Gaming Monitor lineup that uses eye-tracking tech to convert 2D visuals into Glasses-Free 3-D set for release within this year.

So this is another old promise of technology may be coming true, 3D without glasses, quoting the verge. Samsung has announced a new Odyssey Gaming Monitor lineup at Gamescom that uses eye-tracking technology to convert 2D visuals into glasses-free 3D, the Odyssey. 3D is set for a global release within the year, according to Samsung and will allow users to, quote, seamlessly switch between 2D and 3D modes based on preference, which may tempt folks who are curious about 3D gaming, but apprehensive to commit. The Odyssey 3D is Samsung's first 3D gaming monitor, having first teased a concept display at

CES earlier this year. It'll be available in 27 or 37 inch sizes and features a 4K Q-led panel with a 165-hhertz refresh rate alongside a 1.1. millisecond response time and support for AMD Free Sync. Both monitors also include a single display port 1.4 and 2 HDMI 2.1 ports for connectivity and a tilting height adjustable stand to ensure you can best position it to experience 3D content. The Glasses Free 3D is achieved by combining a lenticular lens, specialized hardware that can detect different images to each eye, with a built-in eye tracking camera and view mapping to continuously adjust for depth perception. Acer uses a similar system in its own spatial labs, laptops, and monitors.

The resulting stereoscopic 3D can only be viewed by one person at a time, but that's hardly an issue for gamers. And my own experiences with the technology have left a good impression. It's really fun to see things jumping out at you without having to wear special glasses, end quote. No word yet on the price, though Samsung's Odyssey lineup of monitors is already pretty expensive, so adding this tech onto that probably likely won't come cheap. As it promised to do, Microsoft has launched a single unified Teams app that allows switching between work, personal, and education accounts on Windows and Mac. Quoting the Verge, you can also join as a guest without signing in, explains Emmett Filet, Vice President of Product at Microsoft. Whether you're joining a call to connect with a customer or discuss your school's fall fundraiser,

simply select your preferred account the moment you join the meeting, end quote. Microsoft has had a long and messy history, supporting work, personal accounts with Teams, Windows 11 first integrated teams into the taskbar, but the app only worked with personal accounts. Microsoft then removed this integration from Windows 11 last year, leaving users to have to install two separate Teams apps to access personal or work meetings. It was rather confusing to have Microsoft Teams free and Microsoft Teams work or school installed and have to make sure you launched the correct version. Thankfully, the confusing double-app situation all goes away with today's update so you can

simply see personal and work accounts side by side. notifications are also being improved with this updated app, so you can easily tell which team a notification has come from. If you already use Microsoft Teams on Windows or Mac, then it'll be automatically updated. Otherwise, you can download the new app at the Microsoft site, end quote. I recently suggested something like this was maybe inevitable, with AI and the related build-out of data centers and cloud infrastructure being so expensive and explosive. Remember, the big tech companies are spending tens of billions in Kappex, a quote, quarter on this stuff at this point? I suggest that all those carbon-neutral and reduced emissions

pledges might be in danger. So maybe companies would be tempted to cheat the numbers a bit, quoting the Financial Times. By its own account, Amazon is a green business leader, the world's most visited online marketplace and leading cloud services provider, says it hit its 100% renewable energy goal seven years ahead of its self-imposed target. But by another, Amazon is a heavy polluter, emitting much more climate-warming greenhouse gases through its electricity usage than cloud computing rivals. In the U.S., Amazon's vast home market fossil fuels accounted for about 60% of the electricity generated in 2023. The company can be presented as either hero or villain because of the rules on how greenhouse gas emissions are calculated, whereby companies can use

investments in clean power schemes to offset their real-world energy-related emissions. Social Media Group Meta, for instance, says it is already hit net zero emissions in its energy usage, but FT analysis of its 2020-surustainability report shows that its real-world CO2 emissions from power consumption the prior year were 3.9 million tons compared to the 273 net tons cited by the report. These tech giants are poised to become some of the biggest energy users of the future as they race to develop power-hungry artificial intelligence, potentially threatening their commitments to net zero.

Ahead of that, they are working behind the scenes to shape a once-in-a-decade rewrite of the rules governing how pollution from power use is disclosed. Companies including Amazon, Meta, and Google have funded and lobbied the greenhouse gas protocol, the carbon accounting oversight body, and finance research that helps back up their positions, according to documents seen by the FT. But Big Tech itself is split on how to craft the rules. A coalition that includes Amazon and Meta is pushing a plan that critics fear will allow companies to report emissions numbers that bear little relation to their real-world pollution and not fully compensate for those emissions. The current regime, for reporting greenhouse gas emissions dates back to the 1990s when nonprofit groups,

including Global Research Organization, the World Resources Institute, founded the Greenhouse Gas Protocol. The protocol's rules on carbon accounting are cited in EU and proposed Securities and Exchange Commission reporting requirements for larger companies, along with the Science-Based Targets Initiative, a voluntary oversight body for company climate targets. Each time a wind, solar, or hydroelectric facility generates a unit of clean power, its owner can issue an energy attribute certificate, typically known in the U.S. as a Renewable Energy Certificate or REC. These can either come bundled into a contract for clean power or can be bought individually from a generator or market intermediaries. Companies

can purchase RECs to buy down their environmental impact, according to the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Doing so helps buyers demonstrate the action they are taking to finance clean power and directs investment toward green energy development. Companies argue that since they cannot fully control the makeup of the grids they are connected to and since clean power cannot be distinguished from dirty. Once it is in the system, such certificates are a reasonable compromise and provide an incentive to invest. But Matthew Brander, a professor at the University of Edinburgh, says the system is akin to buying the right from a fitter colleague to say you have cycled to work, even though you arrived by a car that runs on petrol, end quote. Finally today, an interesting raise.

StarPath is a startup who has closed a $12 million seed round. That's pretty big for a seed, so this must be a potentially big opportunity, right? What does StarPath do? Oh, you know, it's planning to mine water on the moon. Quoting TechCrunch, NASA and the space industry are in agreement. If we want to establish a permanent human presence on the moon, we'll need to make use of every native resource we can, and none are as important as water ice.

StarPath Robotics is one of a handful of startups planning for this future. The startup is betting that there will be a thriving market for liquid oxygen, LOX, refined from lunar water ice, and that harvesting this resource will be key to humanity's expansion throughout the solar system. LOX is a crucial component of propellant for some vehicles like rockets and spacecraft like lunar landers, and it's used as the oxidizer alongside a combustible fuel such as hydrogen, kerosene, or methane. The company came out of stealth last September with an ambitious water harvesting architecture involving mining rovers, refineries, and LOX storage systems.

StarPath wants to launch a demo mission as quickly as we possibly can. CEO Zaraav Shroff said in a recent interview, to ensure the hardware will be ready whenever a launch vehicle is available, the company announced today that it has closed a $12 million seed round, co-led by 8VC and Fusion Fund with participation from Day One Ventures, Balarion space, and indicator ventures. Much of the architecture has remained the same since StarPath originally unveiled its plans last year. Essentially, the company wants to use fleets of might,

Rovers that dig up hundreds of tons of lunar dirt and return it to autonomous lunar processing plants that extract the water, splits those molecules into their constituent atoms and then liquefies the oxygen. The entire system would be powered by a massive solar array that's being designed in collaboration with space solar startup celestial. As of right now, there are few prospective customers for lunar LOX, but those that are planning moon missions could prove to be prolific buyers. Both SpaceX and Blue Origin have contracts with NASA, to land on the moon before the end of the decade. Shroff estimates that starship would consume around 100 to 300 tons of oxygen on the moon per flight, and something like Blue Origins Blue Moon

would consume tens of tons of oxygen per flight as well. Given that Star Path is aiming to produce around 1,000 tons of LOX per year, regular starship flights to and from the lunar surface alone could be enough demand to support this production capacity. At that rate, Schroff says any operator would be able to fly a vehicle to the moon and trust they will be able to refuel it, while they're there. By the end of this year, the company is aiming to conduct an end-to-end, full-scale demonstration of its system in a simulated lunar environment, which they'll build out at their 12,000 square foot premises. After that, they'll embark on a series of test campaigns before launching their first demonstration mission. The goal for that first mission is to harvest

the equivalent of around 100 tons of liquid oxygen per year. It's incredibly ambitious. Scientists have confirmed that water ice is on the moon, but no government or company has ever harvested it, let alone refined it in situ. The payoff for getting this technology online could be enormous. The company is betting with the moon just the first stepping stone to expansion throughout the solar system. Starpath already has its eyes on developing processing plans and rover harvesting fleets for Mars, which would be augmented from their lunar counterparts to convert CO2 in the Martian atmosphere into methane. Life can be multi-planetary in a very short period of time, Schroff said. If you make a thousand tons of liquid oxygen on the moon, your path to

making a million-person city on Mars is hard, but it's now possible." Nothing more for you today. Talk to you tomorrow.