 This 10th year of Daily Tech News Show is made possible by its listeners. Thanks to all of you, including Tim Ashman, Johnny Hernandez, and Hi Tech Oki. Plus, our brand new patrons, they didn't take the Memorial Day weekend off. We have Mark and Joseph. Thank you, Mark. Thanks, Joseph, for your support. Coming up on DTNS, AI existential risk again gets the spotlight. The memification of education and Computex is back in a big way. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, May 30th, 2023 from lovely Cleveland, Ohio. I'm Rick Strapolano. And coming to you from the DMV, your boy, big Chris Ashley. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Yeah, big thanks to Chris for stepping up. Will Smith was scheduled to be on today. We was having some technical issues. We will reschedule him, but we have the great Chris Ashley on. So let's get everything started with the quick hits. Amazon began testing dine-in payment options in its app with select restaurants in Bengaluru, India. Users have an option for paying with credit cards, bank accounts, UPI, and Amazon Pay later in the app. India's dominant food delivery services, Zomato and Swiggy, both offer similar dine-in payment options. So Amazon catching up there. Niantic is known for its popular AR phone apps, notably Pokemon Go. But its latest release shows it has plans for mixed reality as well. The developer announced a new web app called Wall. This can be played on a phone as an AR experience, but can also use the Passive video feature on Meta's Quest 2 and Quest Pro VR headsets. The app presents a talking owl that interacts with the user with facts about a virtual redwood forest. Niantic director of product Tim Emerick, or Tom Emerick, excuse me, said it created the app to demonstrate its eighth wall development platform for building web-based AR apps. Apple released its Apple Music Classical app for Android after debuting the iOS app back in March. This release comes ahead of some other Apple-owned platform, so putting priority on mobile. There's no Mac or iPad optimized version of the app as of yet, and the iOS app isn't viewable with CarPlay. Said no to Amazon discontinued its celebrity voices for its virtual assistant. Amazon launched the feature back in 2019 with the voice of Samuel L. Jackson and later adding Shaq and Melissa McCarthy. In addition to no longer being available for purchases, users who paid for them will also lose access. The Samuel Jackson voice is already gone, and while the other two voices are still available, they will also be discontinued September 30th. According to an updated support page spotted by Mark Gurman, EagleEye, as always, Apple will shut down its MyPhotoStream photosyncing service on July 26th, with users able to upload photos until June 26th. Now, if you say I have no idea what this is, this was Apple's pre-iCloud photosyncing service that it launched back in 2011, which synced photos to Apple's cloud for a rolling 30 days, but store up to 1,000 photos on your disparate devices. Apple will point users to iCloud as a replacement. All right, so over the weekend, a story broke out about an attorney using chat GPT to do case research for an affidavit. Of course, this was spotted because no one could find out any of the cases. And it turns out the chatbot made up some of the cases that were filed in court. The judge was super happy about it, as you can imagine. That's an example of the here and now risk something like generative models can do. But we also recently got this statement crystallizing the concerns of AI's existential risk. This is a direct quote of the statement here. Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal scale risk such as pandemics and nuclear war. That statement was signed by Google's former AI chief Jeffrey Hinton, as well as CEOs of Google DeepMind, Anthropic, Stability AI, Inflection AI and Open AI, as well as dozens of other researchers. Oh, and Grimes signed it to for reasons. This was published by the Not-for-profit Center for AI Safety or CAIS. You may see it in the press, which said it made the statement purposely concise to open up the discussion about AI's most severe risk. So, Chris, I guess we'll take them up on this. Let's open up the discussion. I'm curious how you're looking at this statement. So, anytime I see a statement like this, I have to get super cynical and it's unfortunate, but it's just the way it goes in the nature of today's world. Because what I look at this and I say, okay, by any means, any new technology that is exploding onto the world should always be looked at from a perspective of, you know, what are we doing as far as damaging people and interactions and, you know, the universe itself. But at the same time, when you look at all of the people that kind of signed on to this thing, I would be hard pressed to say that any of them didn't bring a technology that some way damaged our society to some extent. So, I'm like, again, it's one of those cases of right message, wrong messenger. But Chris, who would be I guess who would be the right messenger then like if this same message was delivered by who would it would it sound better from I guess. So, I think if the technology was brought about with the same with this message in the beginning like hey we're bringing this out. And, but we have these caveats around making sure that we're not damaging that would have been the point and the, and the appropriate point and the probably the best first people to make this statement right because that is that scene would be seen to be more honest. You know, but when you have companies that are literally fighting to make sure that they can take advantage of this very same technology that they're talking about they want to find ways to put rules around and traditionally they have been against having additional rules put on their organizations and and regulations put on top of them. So all of a sudden they're all for regulations now I don't I don't buy that you know what I mean so it's just to me it's just like, you know, I have a hard time believing that these guys are coming from a righteous place which is to me always my barometer as to how I feel about somebody's statement right isn't righteous. It's really interesting that two of them. Google deep mind and throbbing and open AI are active players currently in the in the AI development space. And I've always wondered, you know, one of the great things about regulations is that it kind of freezes things in place. Right. And like oftentimes regulations are built around what's already available. And you can use them as a way to kind of kind of set up the playing field. And if you're someone who's already dominant in that field, you can set it up in a way that kind of advantages your playbook as opposed to your competitors. And for me that would be the cynical take yet they of course they want regulation because they're kind of they're kind of at that point in the field where they are so I won't say so far ahead but they're definitely leaning the pack that as soon as you have the regulations in place it keeps them where they are and maybe puts puts a drag on any up and comers. And that's a great point because I actually had it from the opposite side right because if you're behind, you also want regulations out there to slow down your competitors who are ahead of you. Right. So, but that's a great point is to, you know, hey, let's keep the other folks behind which also does happen right. Yeah, and I mean I think it's really important to stipulate you know we've we've already seen a lot of these companies open AI and Microsoft, coming out and saying you know hey we want to get ahead of regulation here. Maybe not the way the EU is looking at it right now with their AI act, but this very much sets the bar very high when it comes to like the very specific harms societal scale risks is essentially it feels like this is setting the expectation of regulation at right, as opposed to we had a statement from the director of the Center for Excuse me here. I want to make sure I get the name of right. The center that we were talking about here Dan Hendricks saying that things like systemic bias misinformation malicious use cyber attacks and weaponizations were examples of like the here and now dangers as opposed to existential risk that is down the road. It's very clear to say this isn't an either or thing. It would be reckless to ignore those, but it seems also very clear like the reason opening I it feels like assigning on to this is because they want to set the where they want to set the bar for regulation. I was just saying like, you know, because they're so they're so influential in this space, they could probably have a hand in writing some or least drafting some of that regulation, you know, with with with what they think is beneficial. It's very interesting because it is very apocalyptic the way it's described. And part of it, I think, is a way to kind of get people to notice and then take action, but action that benefits all the players at the same time. It's kind of a weird, almost beneficial system. And it's not that regulation is bad. In some cases, it's very good. But what what to what Chris was saying, I mean, in a way, you kind of want to follow the money to see who's who's really benefiting from it. Right. And the fact that this organization they put together did not clearly put out there where their donations are coming from. That already puts me on edge, right? It's because, you know, most of the times you got to follow the money if you want to see where these things are coming from. And the problem and the problem why this is such a weird discussion is because we all agree, definitely pay attention to what AI is doing where it could potentially damage us down the road, what type of things are going to happen. 100% we agree with that. Yeah, at least anybody I think that we'll be looking at this and see what's going on. So that's what makes it such a weird discussion is like you got the right message, but I want to hear from you. And it's also notable that despite the fact that there is a huge list of AI researchers and that looks like, oh, every AI researcher is worried about this. It's important to note that we don't have any signees from META, Amazon, Apple, not on there, not too surprising from Apple, but you know META and Amazon, lots of AI research there as well. And also the one of the researchers that was awarded the Turing Award along with Jeffrey Hinton, Jan LeClune of NYU also works at META came out and said the most common reaction by AI researchers to these prophecies of doom is face palming. So this is not like a consensus reaction among AI researchers either important context. Well, another important thing besides the fate of AI on humans existence is memes. If you look at any online space for community chances are high that you'll run into memes. This is especially true for things like subreddits and discord servers because mostly everyone on them understands the original message that's often lamped in one of these image macro memes. Now, Tech Crunch's Amanda Sieberling has highlighted a new ed tech startup called Antimatter that's trying to turn this on its head. What if educators used memes to help ensure students understand what they're learning? Antimatter provides iOS and web based meme making tools and teachers get recommendations about how to use these tools with students. Antimatter is also working on enterprise tools and eventually hopes to build a larger puzzle based learning platform. All right, Chris, is this something sounds something like that might actually engage students or is it just going to give them a shrug where it's another kind of quote. How do you do fellow kids moment from 30 Rock? So I find that to be a fascinating great question because in my opinion, it doesn't matter if it either or right because at the end of the day, all my favorite teachers that I learned the most from always was able to communicate with me at the at the level that I was operating at. Right. So, you know, they could use vernacular that I was familiar with or they could make a joke about something or they could talk about something in a TV show or and it just helped me it helped resonate with what I was trying to learn. So by the same manner, I believe that the kids that are looking at this, even if they find a teacher to be goofy or the meeting to be goofy, they'll remember it because it's goofy. Yeah, I mean, and if they find it to be funny or really actually really good, they'll remember it because it's funny and really good. So I think it doesn't matter. I love that they're doing this. It kind of reminds me so depending on when you went to junior high or grade school. You might remember a game called Oregon Trail or if you're from my generation, you remember the game where in the world is Carmen San Diego. And all these were games that were designed to with a focus on education where in the world Carmen San Diego where in the USA is Carmen San Diego is focused on geography knowing places, their relation to each other and what they're they're known for culturally. Oregon Trail supply figure your, you know, your your troop of people don't die from dysentery or whatever and you made it. It was a good game. And I'm wondering if this is one of those things where we're finding the most appropriate tools to kind of talk to kids in a way that's engaging. I mean, I do see a danger here because it really depends on the the person using it. If you do it right, it can be like a game where people, the kids really get engaged and learn something or it can be really bad. Like in the early 80s and early 90s where everyone was making a rap video about stranger danger, what to eat, you know, things about health. And they were very cynically done without really understanding what hip hop was about. So you had really bad cringy music that just turned off people and in many ways became memes themselves now that if you surf the Internet. Except for don't copy that floppy certified banger. Yes. The difference between those those rap videos, though, are those were like so top down, right? It was like interpreting like a like a culture that was not theirs to speak to it generally. I'm sure some of them may have came from a place of, you know, being informed about that kind of stuff. But the vast majority of them, the reason their memes is because it's someone completely out of touch with that trying to make it. What's exciting me about this any matter of stuff is actually some of like the lesson plan details you get. And it kind of shows that like they they understood like they have talked to kids, right? Because it's not just, Hey, here's a blank meme filled this in with details about World War One. That's like one example of they showed like, Hey, you can you can use it like this. But the more exciting one to me is they have. Alright, here is a subject that we've just recently studied. Half the kids, you make any meme about this. Alright, or maybe from a select set, make a meme about this. And then another kid is going to try and figure out what this meme was about. So if like you're in a calculus class about a calculus concept or something like that. And so it shows that's like this has to be kid convert like or like youth conversant, right? It can't just be, Oh, lame adult is coming up with this. It like it has to speak within that generation for it to work. And I think that's like a super smart approach to doing that, right? As opposed to just wrote stuff. Right. And I think the thing that I love the most about this is that live off who's, you know, in charge of this. He jokes about turning a kid from a C to a C plus student, which, you know, on the face of it, you're like, come on, you want to see student to be an A student. But his point is I'm not trying to give these guys, you know, all this additional work where it becomes a chore to do this. I, you know, I want these guys to have fun and get excited about learning. And then if they get better grades along the way, so be it, you know, just added bonus. So I love the approach that he's taking with this instead of just assuming that this is the problem and I have the solution for it. You know, it's literally let's let the kids use what they do every day anyway to find better ways for them to learn. Right. And I think that's the mistake we make a lot is we all think we have to answer and then we just say just do it like this. And then, you know, it's not beneficial to the kid. But if you allow the child to do something like this, that's in their own realm, then now they're going to find the best ways to learn for themselves. Well, if you have thoughts about memes in education or anything else that we've talked about this show, you don't know our email address. I don't know if you've ignored it all these times. But here it is feedback at daily tech news show dot com. Send us an email. Let us know your thoughts. All right. Well, we've just seen the first in person Computex in three years. Yes, it's back. And I don't I don't know about you guys, but it seems like it was like a big deal this year. Like usually Computex. I don't know. It's just a couple of posts. It's kind of like a techie, like insider, very, very back end kind of show. Lots of interesting announcements on this. So I wanted to run down some of them. I think first off, we have to acknowledge like NVIDIA kind of led the show with a lot of killer announcements. The one that was getting a lot of steam was the NVIDIA DGX G H 200. And this is basically like their platform for a generative AI supercomputer. It uses like the specs on this are crazy. It uses 256 of these grace hopper like SOC is basically to form a single GPU 144 terabytes of shared memory. And they're claiming one X a flop of performance. We're going to see Google, Meta and Microsoft as customers of these and NVIDIA is going to be making their own supercomputer based on that as well. We're also seeing an NVIDIA Media Tech partnership on car infotainment. Basically Media Tech is going to be using NVIDIA chips and software and it's going to integrate into NVIDIA self driving tech. And then we also had kind of a corollary to this. You know, we saw NVIDIA top a one trillion dollar market cap. Just the stock price went up because they had a bunch of exciting announcements, but that's kind of rarefied air for that company. So Chris is there like out of these like like what what's speaking to you from from what you saw from NVIDIA. Well, there's a couple of things that really caught me about this and how it kind of let off everything. And one was, you know, we've been talking AI for what six months now, seven months. And, you know, we've mostly been talking about a software and we've been talking about it from a societal impact. But it didn't even dawn on me that, you know, the hardware side of it where and all these hardware guys jumped right in the game was like, yeah, yeah, we're going to provide, you know, virtualization in our platforms to make sure that the, you know, these desktops and laptops can take advantage of AI much more efficiently. And it's just it just blew my mind. So it made me start to wonder, it's like, where else is AI going to play and, you know, have an impact where we just didn't even think of it yet. So that's the first thing that caught me. The second thing was the infotainment system in the cars. You know, I was one of those guys that had the ridiculous stereo system in the car. And I miss being able to have the third party stereo installed and have these crazy subwoofers in the back and all this stuff. I mean, you can still do it, but, you know, you're not taking out your infotainment system. And so when you saw that, you know, that I think was, was it Ford or Chevy? One of them was removing Apple. I believe it was Ford. I believe it was Chevy. It was GM. It was GM. So moving carplay, which I thought was like that kind of caught everybody off guard is like, why would you do that? You know, I thought that the car manufacturer getting into customizing the infotainment system was was going the way of the Dota, but it seems like now that in videos, you know, creating chips for these systems, it seems like this may be coming roaring back with, you know, individual car manufacturers, you know, developing their own infotainment systems and I don't know if it's a good thing or a bad thing. My guess is I'm not going to enjoy it as much because I actually wanted those people that really do enjoy carplay. But those are the two things that kind of caught my eye out of this initial launch. Roger, is anything stood out to you? So one of these, the big one, of course, is Grace Hopper. I mean, it's if you've seen it and I've seen videos of the actual units huge, it's heavy, but it's incredibly like fast. Well, what's interesting is they're pairing an arm design with their GPU to create this super on a very fast custom made interconnect and they put them side by side. So there's enough throughput. I think it's 96 gigs or more. I mean, it's crazy fast. And they did mention they did all their comparisons vis-a-vis their GPUs with an x86 platform. They were saying how much more power efficient per watt, how much more performance you got per watt using the Grace Hopper setup with an arm CPU and their GPU. And it's really telling that they kind of see x86 as kind of a legacy device in this space because unlike other server workloads where you use x86 because you have a lot of old software that you need backward compatibility with, with a lot of these AI systems, a lot of these companies are just writing everything from scratch. So there's no backward compatibility to worry about. So you want to go with the most efficient power efficient devices that you can. It also speaks to me with the Nvidia $1 trillion market cap is that this is where Nvidia has always wanted to be. It's where it's planned to be. GPUs for gaming, GPUs for the consumer set was the stepping stone to get there. And I'm wondering in a way because of the kind of rather lukewarm reception to the latest 4060 Ti mid-range GPU that Nvidia put out. If that was just a case of Nvidia focusing so highly on the AI portion of their business that everything else is just kind of back burner stuff for the foreseeable future. Because I mean, this trillion dollar cap didn't come from, hey, we're going to we're going to power the next, you know, doom, we're going to power the next, you know, FPS. We're powering AI and that's that's where the money is, you know, right now. The other thing just to keep an eye on Nvidia and media tech consolidation in this infotainment market, right? You have Qualcomm, Intel and Nvidia media tech. And that is not a huge business for Nvidia yet. So they're partnering there one of the few areas I think where they don't want to get edged out for sure. Some of the other stuff coming out of Computex. We have new ARM GPU and CPU cores. Big news here is that these are all going 64 bit like for their IP package of the current gen stuff moving away from 32 bit legacy support. And they're providing modest like 15% improvements in performance performance provide across both of their flagships on there as well. We also have Intel showing off their vision processing units for their meteor like stuff. So kind of low end background AI processing. And then the last one I wanted to get your guys's feel for it was the ASUS GPU power slot. So basically like if you plug in a GPU now, you have to wire in all these heavy cables if it's a high end one. There's a slot in a motherboard and there's a slot in the card to power the card. Roger, what are you the most excited for there? This is the thing with the ASUS GPU power slot. It sounds like a great idea, but it's very, right now it's just one company that's publicly pushing for it. This reminds me a bit back in the 90s when IBM pushed their micro channel architecture because they were got tired that they weren't getting royalties for the ISA bus. The 16 bit and the 8 bit, you know, the expansion slot on the back. And all the other PC companies got together, Dell, Tandy and a few others compact and say, well, no, we're going to create our own standard and it became the EISA, the enhanced industry standard slot. Anyways, all that became nothing because Intel came up with PCI. I didn't charge anyone anything or small royalty fee for it. And that's became the standard that replaced everything. And it sounds great. I mean GPUs use a lot of juice. And my latest GPU, it's a 3060 Ti, takes 200 watts to run a video card. It's like crazy. And this is a nice clean way to do it, but they would have to get everyone on board. And that means gigabyte, as rock and all the other board makers, as well as Intel and the ATX, you know, manufacturing factory board. So every one puts the slot at the same spot. And the ARM GPU CPU cores, this is kind of what I was expecting moving over to 64 bit. It's probably going to break some OS and some applications. But the great thing about ARM is it's not that hard to recompile for 64 bit registers. So I always find it amazing that these companies still try and, you know, try to corner some type of technology. Like, have you not learned from the past and seen that this never goes well? But unless you open it up for everybody and just get everybody on board, what are you doing? So we'll see. Hopefully, you know, they, you know, I'm not a hater. So if they make it happen, good for them. But at the same time, it's like, come on, if you're coming out with this, you're telling everybody how great it is. But if you don't have everybody else on board, what are we doing here? So that I always laugh at the one I see that those type of, oh, we got this new proprietary. The one thing I'll say, though, is we just saw a little bit of a controversy with poorly seated power cables, causing issues with high end, very expensive GPUs. All of a sudden, ascent come out there, even if it's not completely open and say, you don't have to worry about that. It just clips in the bottom when you're plugging your PCI connector. Everything's all good. That's a decent sales pitch. Yeah, it definitely is a decent sales pitch, but it comes with a price tag. And, you know, you know, folks nowadays are going to be like, yeah, I can do that cheaper. So I'm not willing to plug in a cable over. Also, Skelly, Skelly 2909 makes a good point. You have to run up to what, 600 or 500 watts through the motherboard? Yeah, that's the other thing. Yeah, I don't know. You're going to need some power regulation on that for sure. That is an impressive climb. I didn't even think about that really great point. We also had some great points in our mail bag. Roger, what have we gotten there today? Yeah, Adam wrote in to thank us for the show and let us know he's been a patron for a few years, but he asked us a question. He wants to know, do we know or do we happen to know who he can contact regarding installing an EV charging station for commercial use? He lives in a small Northwest Kansas town, but it happens to be at the intersection of two fairly busy highways. He's considering trying to install a few commercial chargers on a piece of property near that intersection with a plan to expand to more chargers later. However, there's no one local that he knows of that has any experience or understanding about how to do this, and he's turning to us for help. So, out there, you know what I mean, out there, our audience, anyone have any advice? And if you do, please send it over to feedbackedayletechnewshow.com. Well, let me just say that, you know, haven't gone through three months of getting my charger installed. My suggestion, I have no idea about a commercial one, but I would first find out who's the city council. Where is the city council that governs that area and start with them because here at my house when I try to get it, I had to go through the homeowners because they govern the area. And so I would start with maybe locating who the councilman is for the area if one exists and start there and work your way through that. Yeah, I'm excited to hear if we get some great feedback and Adam, where do you take this because that sounds kind of cool. All right, well, thanks also to Chris Ashley for being on today's show. Bring in the fire as always, the fantastic takes all of the smoky goodness. Chris, where can people find more of your great stuff if they want to follow you on the cyberspace? You can definitely, if you look, if you're hungry, come check me out on barbecue and tech. But if you want to, you know, sit down and chill with me and the boys come holla at us at SMR podcast, me and the homies talking tech every week with a slightly different perspective than you hear. There's a reason why we're your favorite podcast, favorite podcast. All right, well, patrons, stick around for our extended show, Good Day Internet. We're going to be talking about the Arc Browser's new feature that lets you theme websites. And I'm a little excited about it. Remember, you can catch the show live Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern, 200 UTC. Find out more at DailyTechNewShow.com slash live. We'll be back tomorrow talking about one of NVIDIA's other announcements at Computex about integrating natural language into video games with Scott Johnson. Can't wait for it. See you then.