Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 10/23 – Strong ARM Tactics

Episode Date: October 23, 2024

A huge dispute in the semiconductor space has gone nuclear with implications that are crazy. Anthropic’s new AI app can control your computer for you. Runway’s new model lets you do your own motion capture. And farewell to Foursquare, the OG version at least. Links: Arm to Scrap Qualcomm Chip Design License in Feud Escalation (Bloomberg) Anthropic’s new AI can use computers like a human, redefining automation for enterprises (VentureBeat) Apple Sharply Scales Back Production of Vision Pro (The Information) Runway’s Act-One uses smartphone cameras to replicate facial expression motion capture (Silicon Angle) ‘This is a game changer’: Runway releases new AI facial expression motion capture feature Act-One (VentureBeat) Farewell to Foursquare’s app (TechCrunch) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As the crispy chicken sandwich from 7-Eleven, people always call me loud. And I'm like, yeah, I know. I'm crispy. Did you expect me to whisper? If you want quiet, go eat some soup and reflect. Like, I know I'm a handful. I'm bold, I'm juicy. Throw some pickles and barbecue sauce on me, and baby, I'm a whole meal.

And with seven rewards, I'm just $4. Quiet. No. Krispy, saucy, and $4? Very. Only at 711. Valley 362326, participating stores only while supplies lastly out for full terms. Welcome to the TechMeBrain home for Wednesday, October 23rd, 2024. I'm Brian McCullough today. A huge

dispute in the semiconductor space has gone nuclear with implications that are crazy. Anthropics' new AI app can control your computer for you. Runway's new model lets you do your own motion capture and farewell to Foursquare the OG version at least. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. So this is quite aggressive and potentially a bombshell in the chip industry. Arm, is apparently canceling a license that lets Qualcomm use Arms intellectual property to design chips, escalating the legal dispute between the companies that I didn't quite know was happening, and certainly not with this level of stakes. Like, this is wild. Strong arm tactics, if you will. Oh, wait, I'm not the first to that pun, if you will. Quoting Bloomberg.

Arm, based in the UK, has given Qualcomm a mandate. 60-day notice of the cancellation of their so-called architectural license agreement, according to a document seen by Bloomberg. The contract allows Qualcomm to create its own chips based on standards owned by Arm. The showdown threatens to roil the smartphone and personal computer markets, as well as disrupt the finances and operations of two of the most influential companies in the semiconductor industry. Qualcomm sells hundreds of millions of processors annually technology used in the majority of Android smartphones. If the cancellation takes effect, the company might have to stop selling products that account for much of its roughly $39 billion in revenue or face claims for

massive damages. The move ratchets up a legal fight that began when Arm sued San Diego-based Qualcomm, one of its biggest customers for breach of contract and trademark infringement in 2022. With the cancellation notice, Arm is giving the U.S. company an eight-week period to remedy the dispute. Representatives for Arm declined to comment, a Qualcomm spokesman. person said the British company was trying to, quote, strong arm a long-time partner. It, quote, appears to be an attempt to disrupt the legal process and its claim for termination is completely baseless. The spokesperson said in an emailed statement, we are confident that Qualcomm's rights under its agreement with Arm will be affirmed, end quote. The two are headed to a trial to resolve the breach

of contract claim by Arm and a countersuit by Qualcomm. The disagreement centers on Qualcomm's 2021 acquisition of another Arm licensee and a failure, according to Arm, to renegotiate contract terms. Qualcomm argues that its existing agreement covers the activities of the company that it purchased the chip design startup Nuvia. Nuvia's work on microprocessor design has become central to new personal computer chips that Qualcomm sells to companies such as HP and Microsoft. The processors are the key component to a new line of artificial intelligence-focused laptops dubbed AIPC, Earlier this week, Qualcomm announced plans to bring Nuvia's design called Orion to its more

widely used Snapdragon chips for smartphones. Arm says that move is a breach of Qualcomm's license and is demanding that the company destroy Nuvia designs that were created before the Nuvia acquisition. They can't be transferred to Qualcomm without permission, according to the original suit filed by Arm in the U.S. District Court in Delaware. Nuvia's licenses were terminated in February 2023 after negotiations failed to reach. a resolution. Arms moved to cancel Qualcomm's architectural license looks like an effort to gain leverage in advance of the party's December 16th trial, Bloomberg Intelligence Analyst Tamlin Basin, and Kunjan Sobhani wrote in a research note. Our thesis, arms suit against Qualcomm likely ends

in a negotiated license granting the chipmaker's rights to customize arm architecture, but at a higher royalty rate than Nuvia had been paying. Like many others in the chip industry, Qualcomm relies on an instruction set from Cambridge, England-based Arm, a company that has created much of the underlying technology for mobile electronics. An instruction set is the basic computer code that chips use to run software such as operating systems. If Arm follows through with the license termination, Qualcomm would be prevented from doing its own designs using Arms instruction set. It would still be able to license Arms blueprints under separate product agreements, but that path would cause significant delays and force the company to waste work that's already been done.

Under Chief Executive Officer René Haas, Arm has shifted to offering more complete designs, ones that companies can take directly to contract manufacturers. Haas believes that his company, still majority owned by Japan's SoftBank Group, should be rewarded more for the engineering work it does. That shift encroaches on the business of Arms traditional customers like Qualcomm, who use Arms technology in their own final chip designs. Meanwhile, under CEO Cristiano Ammon, Qualcomm is moving away from using Arm designs and is prioritizing its own work, something that potentially makes it a less lucrative customer for Arm.

He's also expanding into new areas, most notably computing, where Arm is making its own push. But the two companies' technologies remain intertwined, and Qualcomm isn't yet in a position to make a clean break from Arm, end quote. So basically, Arm is picking a major fight with the biggest designer of semiconductors, at least for most, Mobile. Super. Quoting Matthew Connitzer on Twitter, that's incredibly nuclear of arm. I'm not even entirely sure this is going to be a beneficial move, end quote. Anthropic has released a new Claude 3.5 Sonnet model that can interact with desktop apps by imitating mouse and keyboard input via a computer use API, which is now in beta, quoting TechCrunch. In a pitch to investors last spring, Anthropics said it intended to build AI to power virtual assistance that could perform research,

answer emails, and handle other back-office jobs on their own. The company referred to this as a next-generation algorithm for AI self-teaching. One, it believed that could, if all goes to plan, automate large portions of the economy someday. It took a while, but that AI is starting to arrive. Anthropic on Tuesday released an upgraded version of its Claude 3.5 Sonnet model that can understand and interact with any desktop app. Via a new computer use API, now in Open Beta, the model can imitate keystrokes, button clicks, and mouse gestures, essentially emulating a person sitting at a PC.

We trained Claude to see what's happening on a screen and then use the software tools available to carry out tasks, Anthropic wrote in a blog post shared with TechCrunch. When a developer tasks clawed with using a piece of computer software and gives it the necessary access, Claude looks at screenshots of what's visible to the user, then counts how many pixels vertically or horizontally it needs to move a cursor in order to click in the correct place, end quote. Developers can try out computer use via Anthropics API, Amazon Bedrock, and Google Cloud's

vertex AI platform. The new 3.5 Sonnet without computer use is rolling out to Claude apps and brings various performance improvements over the outgoing 3.5 Sonnet model, end quote. Anthropic has introduced an action-execution layer that enables Claude 3.5 Sonnet to perform desktop commands and browse the web, marking Anthropics' first venture into AI web browsing capabilities. Early adopters include Replit, which uses the model for autonomous app verification during development, while Canva is exploring its potential for design and editing workflows. According to Anthropic, 3.5 Sonet shows superior performance in coding tasks outperforming OpenAI's leading models on various benchmarks. The model exhibits notable adaptability,

autonomously correcting errors, and persisting through complex multi-step tasks without explicit training for these behaviors. However, the system still has significant limitations. In tests of practical applications like airline booking tasks and processing returns, 3.5 Sonnet's success rate was mixed, failing over 50% of the time with flight modifications and about one-third of attempts with return processing. Anthropic acknowledges technical constraints in the model's ability to handle basic interface interactions like scrolling and zooming. The system's screenshot-based approach to processing visual information also means it sometimes misses fleeting elements like notifications or temporary prompts, end quote. The system screenshot-based approach to processing

visual information also means it sometimes misses fleeting elements like notifications or temporary prompts. Quoting Venture Beat. What sets this new capability apart from traditional automation tools is that Claude isn't confined to specific workflows or software programs. Instead, it can see a screen using screenshots, interact with various applications, and adapt to different tasks as they come up. This flexibility makes it more versatile than the current robotic process automation or RPA technologies. For example, in a demo shared by Anthropic, Claude helps complete a vendor request form for Ant Equipment Company. In the video, Claude starts by taking a screenshot of the computer screen, identifies that some necessary information is

missing from a spreadsheet, then navigates to a CRM system, locates the required data, and fills out the form, all without human intervention. This level of automation could have major implications for industries like finance, legal services, and customer support, where tasks often involve switching between multiple systems and applications. Claude could open spreadsheets, run analyses, and create visualizations. For customer service, it could navigate CRM systems to quickly find and update customer information, Anthropic told Venture Beat, end quote.

Sources are telling the information that Apple has sharply scaled back Vision Pro production since early summer and could stop making the existing version entirely by the end of 2024. Quote, the move suggests that Apple has enough inventory built up to meet demand for the foreseeable future. It follows Apple's decision earlier this year to focus on building a model that's cheaper than the current version, which retails for $3,500, for possible release by the end of 2025, as the information has previously reported. As part of that decision, Apple suspended

work on a second-generation version of the high-end device for at least a year, according to another person directly involved in the company's supply chain. The first version has met weak demand, a result of its high price, and the lack of apps available on it. Employees at three Vision Pro suppliers that supply a range of electrical and mechanical components told the information, they have so far built enough components for between 500 and 600,000 heads, sets. One of the employees said their factory suspended production of Vision Pro components in May based on Apple's weak forecasts, and their warehouse remains filled with tens of thousands of undelivered parts, end quote. I know there are new AI video tools every day now, but runway

has just rolled out something that I think is the most impressive thing I've seen in a while. It's called Act 1, a Gen 3 alpha tool for animating AI-generated characters with realistic facial expressions using video and voice recordings as inputs. All you really need is your smartphone, quoting Silicon Angle. Runway said in a blog post today that the tool is being rolled out to users starting today and can be accessed by anyone with a runway account. That said, it's not entirely free to use as users will be required to have enough credits on their account to access the startup's most advanced Gen 3 Alpha video generation model. The Gen 3 Alpha model debuted earlier this year introducing support for text to video, image to video, and video to video modalities,

meaning that users can write a description of a scene, upload an image or video, or use a combination of those inputs as prompts. Once prompted, the model will go about creating a slick video that tries to match the user's vision. Although Runway's Gen 3 Alpha model can create some impressive videos, one area where it has always been a bit weak is facial animation, particularly in creating accurate facial expressions on characters that can match the mood of the scene. In the filmmaking industry, facial animation is an intricate and expensive tasks that involves using sophisticated motion capture technologies, manual face rigging technologies, and a lot of heavy editing behind the scenes.

Runway is trying to make advanced facial animation more accessible with Act 1. Using the tool, creators will be able to animate their video characters in almost any way they can imagine without needing to use pricey motion capture equipment. Instead, Act 1 makes it possible to use your own videos and facial expressions as a kind of reference, transposing them onto AI-generated characters. It's incredibly detailed, able to replicate everything from micro-expressions to eye lines onto various different characters, end quote. And quoting Ventra Beat. Traditionally, facial animation requires extensive and often cumbersome processes,

including motion capture equipment, manual face rigging, and multiple reference footage. With Act 1, runway, aims to make this complex process far more accessible. The new tool allows creators to animate characters in a variety of styles and designs without the need for motion capture gear or character rigging. Instead, users can rely on a simple driving video to transpose performances including eyelines, micro-expressions, and nuanced pacing onto a generated character or even multiple characters in different styles. A single actor using only a consumer-grade camera can now perform multiple characters with the model-generating distinct outputs for each. This capability is poised to transform narrative content creation, particularly in indie film production and digital media,

where high-end production resources are often limited. In a public post on X, Cristobal Valenzuela, co-founder and CEO of Runway, noted a shift in how the industry approaches generative models. Quote, we are now beyond the threshold of asking ourselves if generative models can generate consistent videos. A good model is now the new baseline. The difference lies in what you do with the model, how you think about its applications and use cases and what you ultimately build, Valenzuela wrote, end quote. And finally today, pour one out for a real one. 4-square is planning to sunset its city guide app on December 15th to focus entirely on the check-in app swarm, reversing a 2014 decision to split its services into two apps.

Quoting TechCrunch, I would be lying if I didn't admit that I have been in a real funk these last few days over this news, writes Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley, speaking about the company's plan to sunset the Foursquare City Guide app later this year. The Foursquare apps closure scheduled for December 15th of this year isn't surprising. It's been a long time since Foursquare was talked about in the same breath as other social networks. When Foursquare launched, people were competing to become the mayor of their favorite venue and were less concerned about the safety issues of sharing their real-time location online. Still, Foursquare's original app had been a clever way to explore cities and their offerings, as an early example of how

social networks could leverage smartphones's location capabilities to build an entirely new type of experience. Now that mass of collected data that fueled the company's city guide will disappear for its end users. In an email sent to users, Foursquare writes, after many wonderful years of leaving tips and reviews around the world together, we've made the tough decision to say goodbye to the city guide app. The app itself will shutter on December 15th, with the web version soon to follow the email noted. The move prompted Crowley to become a bit nostalgic about what it's like to say goodbye to a product he had worked on for so long. In a post on threads, the founder wrote, I have a really good blog post somewhere in me about the danger of falling in love with the

companies you build and products you create, but it's not the right time to write it. The neglect of FSQ's apps story has been a drumbeat in my personal online experience for like five years now, and I let it affect me more than I should, aka dude, just get over it, is easier said than done. While Foursquare, the company continues to Survive. Crowley notes it has over a hundred million in revenue in his subsequent post. The focus of its efforts will now be on the check-in portion of the experience, not the city guide, end quote. In the rad history feed, the newest episode is on the history of the comic strip Calvin and Hobbs. Give it a listen. It's with the comedian and Stephen Colbert writer, Daniel Kibblesmith,

who is also a comic book writer like Marvel Comics, which I know is. different from a comic strip, but he had a lot of interesting things to say about this from a creator's angle. Listen to it, enjoy it, subscribe to the podcast. Write a review if you could. Talk to you tomorrow.