 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners. Thanks to all of you, including Norm Fasikus, Chris Allen, and Chris Smith. Coming up on DTNSA, new chatbot portends the coming of OpenAI's GPT-4, and I'll break down everything you need to know about the streaming TV landscape, just in time to answer all your relative's questions at Christmas. Or whatever. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, December 1st, 2022, in Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. Happy December, everybody. From Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. From Los Angeles, I'm Justin Robert. And on the show's producer, Roger Chang. Happy Canadian Day of podcasting, everyone. Oh. And a blessed podcast day to all of our Canadian listeners. Blessed day. Blessed day. May the podcast download. Let's start with the quick hits. Researchers at Disney published a paper called Production Ready Face Reaging for Visual Effects, which details its new face reaging network, also known as FRAN, F-R-A-N. That's a neural network which automates the process of digitally changing the age of an actor. Disney says it's practical, fully automatic, and production ready method. Disney researchers generated thousands of examples of synthetic faces aged between 18 to 85 years old using the StyleGAN2 network to train FRAN and then developed a user-friendly interface for artists to use the tool in a production environment. Yeah, no Disney actor need ever age, ever again. Last pass disclosed that an unauthorized party gained access to some third-party cloud storage that LastPass used and accessed, quote, elements of our customer's information. Now, the company clearly stated no passwords were compromised, but because it's called LastPass, I see a lot of people still reacting as if your password got compromised. This is not great, but we're talking things like email addresses and maybe physical addresses depending. We don't know. They haven't given us that information, but it's a third-party access thing. It's not the password servers. The attacker gained access using information obtained in August 2022 breach of its developer environment. So again, not great, but not passwords. Salesforce co-CEO Brett Taylor will step down from the role on January 31st, leaving co-founder Mark Benioff as the sole CEO again. Taylor joined Salesforce through its acquisition of his company Quip back in 2016 and was named co-CEO last year. He also served as chairman of Twitter's board until it went private. Benioff said that Taylor left to found a new company. We have lots of things happening in the brain-computer interface world. Neuralink made several announcements Wednesday. A Neuralink team demonstrated a surgical bot that could insert electrode threads into a dummy filled with brain-like material in order to capture outgoing signals. During the demo, the robot was able to plant 64 threads, each a few blood cells wide in just 15 minutes. That was an actual demo that they did. That kind of precision may not even be necessary, though. Neuralink is wireless, and that same robot can also implant electrodes from outside the skull by just making some... It sounds horrible, small holes in the skull, but it's less invasive than, like, you know, wiring your brain. Neuralink is among many companies working on brain-computer interfaces. Others are Science Corp, Precision Neuroscience, and Synchron. Neuralink's first two applications are intended to help those with paralysis and to restore vision. Now, we don't know because we talked about it, but after we discussed Hive on Wednesday's show, the company announced it was taking its servers offline for a couple days to address stability and security issues. Hive is currently hiring for two developer positions, which would increase its staff to five. They may need more. I don't know. Just a gas. All right, let's talk about some large language models, Justin. Indeed, Tom. Technology Review reports on a spinoff of OpenAI's GPT-3 large language model called chat of AI. The implementation of the LLM is tuned for answering questions in a back-and-forth dialogue. OpenAI says it can answer follow-up questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests. Technology Reviews Will Douglas Haven tried it out and said that he still caught it making some stuff up. The difference is, if you ask chat GPT, are you sure it might say, OK, maybe not if it isn't? And it will decline to answer questions about topics it hasn't been trained on, including events that happened after 2021. It also will not answer questions about individual people. Yeah, so OpenAI asked people to give examples of good responses to various prompts and then use those responses to train chat GPT. Then humans scored how that initially trained model worked. Did it work? Did it not? Did we get good answers? Did we not? And then those scores were fed into a reinforcement model to further train the model. As a result, it's better than GPT-3, but it's not perfect. Yeah, one of the ways it's better is it can spot errors. Heaven notes in the Technology Review article, if you say to GPT-3, tell me about when Christopher Columbus came to the U.S. in 2015. GPT-3 will go, Christopher Columbus came to the U.S. in 2015 and was very excited to be here. But chat GPT will say, this question is a bit tricky because Christopher Columbus died in 1506. So it goes that extra step of seeing the mismatch. However, when Heaven tried to ask it about diffusion models, it took four refined questions to be like, nah, that's not what I mean by diffusion model. That doesn't sound like a diffusion model until it finally understood and properly responded. So it's not a model that you can use if you don't already know something about what you're asking, which does limit its usefulness. This shows how hard it is to train algorithms and to tell fact from fiction. OpenAI is also working on a model called WebGPT that can look up info on the Web and give answers with cited sources. They may also add that to chat GPT in the coming months. OpenAI has made a demo of chat GPT available at chat.openai.com where you can report flaws you find to help them improve the model. Yeah, and I don't think OpenAI was trying to pretend it was. This isn't the thing that solves it all and you can just never be fooled by this. It's still, like you said, Justin, it's still hard for an algorithm to be able to tell fact from fiction, but there's a lot more fail safes here. And if you're willing to say, well, I'm not going to trust everything, but I know enough about what I'm asking it that I can get some useful responses and give me context. One person from OpenAI was saying that they use it for coding to kind of help them review their code and help them spot errors. Seems like it's an improvement on GPT-3 in that respect and probably a pointer to one of the many improvements everyone expects when GPT-4 comes out. Yeah, 100%. I have great, great, great faith that GPT-4 is going to be something that is not only impressive, but possibly even game changing for how we understand AI. When we look at these applications, whether it be this or Dahli or any of the other things that OpenAI has done with GPT-3, I think we should really just think of them as applications that's based on the OS of what they have created here. So look at them not as gigantic step forwards in AI in general, but rather just this is how powerful this engine is. And if you point it in this direction, this is what it can do. Obviously it needs to be trained like any model needs to, but from what is being whispered about GPT-4, that engine might be getting exponentially more powerful. Yeah, I mean, I find it interesting that the way to train the model seems to be, at least from the reviews I've read, is try to trip it up, you know? See, Christopher Columbus came here in 2015, right? And it goes, hmm, well, hmm, maybe you're right, but I don't think you're right. That wouldn't make sense since he died so many years earlier. I mean, that is a great way to make a model smarter. But I mean, I kind of liken it to like the early days of Wikipedia when I didn't trust what was going on with moderators on Wikipedia as much as I do now because the system is sort of in place. This feels like the first steps of kind of the same idea where it's like, all right, if I ask a question and I get an answer, do I trust that answer? Or do I think that I've somehow confused the AI? Well, the fact that it could even get to the point of human moderators, whether or not they are right or wrong or wise or stupid, is really a gigantic step forward. The idea that AI can only succeed if it is omniscient, I think, is a little bit of a red herring for AI's real true purpose, which is just going to be sorting through a lot of information very fast and being able to give you a lot of ideas or a lot of decision making that would otherwise be either time-consuming or impossible in the way that we normally do it or very, very costly. And I think that's what GPT-4, that's really where the worth is going to be, not necessarily it being an answer machine that always gives you the right answer. Yeah, I think we need to set our expectations around these models. I think there's two extremes. One extreme is too optimistic that these algorithms can do everything when they can't. And then the other extreme is too pessimistic, which is to say that, well, because they're flawed, they shouldn't be used at all. And we're going to talk to Andrea Jones-Roy about this on Monday, but I think the answer is you should be very clear on how good the model you're using is and what it's good at and what it's not. And then, like any tool, it's useful. None of us don't use search just because search isn't perfect. We all know search isn't always going to return the thing we're looking for, but we kind of understand that and we understand the boundaries in which it is. And so we still use search and we use it with an expectation of how good it's going to be and maybe it's going to get better over time, but we kind of know where it is. And I think that's going to be true with all different kinds of these models. That's the other thing is there's not an AI. I think we need to get out of that way of thinking about it too. There's lots of different flavors of it. I think that's a really good comparison. I mean, when I search something that I don't know much about, it's kind of like, let's just get on the board here. Give me some results and then I can refine things from there. And I think this probably should be addressed the same way. Well, if you've got thoughts about this, maybe you are an AI and you'd like to chat in our Discord. You can do that by linking your Patreon account at patreon.com. Well, streaming TV services obviously pay a big part in the holidays. So, you know, think about you're watching your holiday specials with your family, your troubleshooting everything because you're the tech person in your family. When you gather together, you may even get them or the devices they run on as gifts. You know, mom says, cool, I love this new cord cutting thing. How do I use it? With all that in mind, we decided to put together an overview of the current world of streaming TV for both the new and the experienced. Some of you are very experienced. Some of you are kind of just getting into it. So Tom started covering this at CNET way back when Netflix had just launched a streaming service and Voodoo was a set-top box. So, Tom, you know, the most obvious question that some people still have is, have a cable subscription? Like, is this going to be better? What are the advantages? Yeah, I still see this a lot. Some people going like, well, I might as well just go back to cable. Cable and even broadcast, remember, only give you access to hundreds of shows at a time. You can only see what is linearly being broadcast. Even with your DVR, which you can save for a while, but you got limited space, you still have to wait for the episodes to air to record. Now, cable does have some on-demand offerings and even access to shows on apps, but they are limited and they almost always contain ads. Many streaming services offer thousands of shows and every show they offer is available the minute you launch that app. A lot of them are ad-free and you won't fill up your DVR having to save them because they're just there in the service. You don't have to manage anything. Also, cable gives you limited options over what channels you get and how to pay for them. Usually it's a few tiers. Most streaming services offer all their content for a much lower price than cable. Each streaming service won't have the breadth of cable, right? So you'll need multiple streaming services, but you have more control over them because they are cheaper and you can subscribe to more than one at a time and increase your breadth and add and remove services as you need. You don't have to call the cable company. You don't have to return any equipment to do that. There are more kinds of services that people realize though, Tom. What are they? Glad you asked, Justin. I'm going to lump streaming services into a few categories here. The biggest and the one most people think about is called SVOD, a streaming video on demand. That's the Netflix category. Disney Plus, Hulu, HBO Max, Paramount Plus, Apple TV Plus, Amazon Prime, even Peacock. They're all parts of that. There's a subcategory of those that are more niche. Your Brit Box, which does British TV, Vicki, which does Asian dramas, Shudder, does horror. Then you've got your movie services, stars, epics, showtime. There's Fast, which stands for free ad-supported television, streaming television. Tubi, Pluto, Zumo, Free V, the Roku channel. Those are all fast services. Peacock even has a limited fast service that you can get without having to pay it. Those only require you to install the app and create an account. Some like Tubi are mostly on demand, so they work like Netflix. They just have ads. Others like Pluto have a grid, although they also have some on-demand services. But that's kind of, I think, when people think of streaming services, what people are mostly talking about. Yeah, so people say, wow, how great I have all of this content for free. However, if you want to see certain shows or you want to have a certain experience, add-ons are kind of the way to do that with a lot of these services. So what is the add-on landscape looking like these days? Yeah, it's kind of confusing because Roku calls it a channel store when they talk about their app store. But you'll hear it called channel stores sometimes. It's almost like cable. It's the ability to add one or more of those niche channels to a bigger one. So Amazon lets you add stars. Apple TV Plus lets you add Paramount Plus. Hulu will let you add Showtime. That way you don't need to use multiple apps to access content from multiple services. You could just use the one app. You just have the one bill. And it's easy to add and remove those services unlike cable. You can go channel by channel. Not all services are available this way on all platforms that have a channel store. So this isn't really a cable replacement, although I think a lot of these platforms would like it to become one. They would like to be the platform that handles all the other services for you. We're just not there yet. Now, Tom, I think I remember seeing some services that seem a lot like cable. What's up with those? There are streaming services that imitate cable, Justin. YouTube TV, Hulu Live, Sling TV, Direct TV Stream. Unlike most of the ones we've mentioned so far, these are mostly US services. There are some analogs overseas. They give you a grid of channels that you can watch live. The ability to record shows on a cloud DVR. That grid that you would get from your cable service. And they all have the same limitations of traditional cable. Except that they're easier to sign up for and cancel in most cases. And you use the equipment you have. You use your TV, your Roku, whatever. They also tend to have fewer channels than cable TV. They just don't have all the deals yet. And while they cost less than cable, the cost has been rising. And they often appear to be more expensive than cable because cable advertises low introductory prices. But in general, they're still cheaper. So there are definitely the folks who say, alright, streaming, I'm in. But other people say, well, I really just only care about certain shows, individual shows and movies. Like maybe DVD or Blu-ray library that I have in my house. So how do those people get service? Yeah, so those are the stores, right? Your Apple store, your Google store, YouTube sells things through the Google store on YouTube. We mentioned Voodoo before. Voodoo is a store where you buy movies and TV shows. Amazon has a store as part of their service as well. And then there's a service called Movies Anywhere that will sync your movie purchases across these services for almost all the studios. There is no such service for TV shows, though. You buy TV shows on Voodoo, you're going to have to watch them on Voodoo. You buy a movie on Voodoo, though. And if it's part of a studio that participates in movies anywhere and you've linked it to movies anywhere, then that movie would show up on your Apple movie app. It would show up on your Google movie app, et cetera. Well, I'm glad that we got to the end of all the services available on streaming. Unless there's more. Justin, do you like the sports? I do. Live streaming sports services are probably another example here. ESPN Plus, or ones from the leagues themselves like MLB. There's community-oriented stuff as well. YouTube, Weverse, live news streamers. Those are usually free with ads. So you can get CBS ABC and NBC News apps that are absolutely free. They're just ad-supported. And then there's paid news services like Fox Nation. And some of the news services give you more if you log in with a cable subscription, et cetera. All right. So if you're thinking, why do these Netflix-like services change content? Why does stuff move around so much? Is there a way to keep track of it? And is this still the Wild West? Or can I just pick one option and get all the things? No, you cannot pick one option to get all the things, sadly. I feel like that was a lie that Netflix didn't combat in the early days. People were like, oh, Netflix, someday it'll have all the things. Netflix never promised it would, but they kind of let people believe that. But yeah, it's a big question that people have. Why does stuff move around? This is a complicated one. But I'll try to give a simple answer. Netflix has its own studio, and it makes a lot of things there. But the vast majority of Netflix content, including a lot of Netflix originals, are made elsewhere, and Netflix pays for them to be made by somebody else. Some are purchased from production companies, and those production companies agree to give Netflix all the rights to a show. Those are indistinguishable from shows produced in-house, so there's really not a real difference. But sometimes those production houses will keep some of the rights, some of the worldwide rights maybe, so Netflix might not be able to show it in all markets. For instance, Star Trek Discovery used to show on Netflix outside the U.S. and Canada. And then CBS said, no, we want to put this on Paramount Plus overseas too, and they took the rights back. There's a bunch of Korean shows that show on cable and broadcast TV in Korea, but outside Korea you get them on Netflix. Some are just fully licensed, where Netflix just paying a temporary license. That's how they got Seinfeld. And this is because Netflix doesn't have the huge studio operation that the legacy companies have. If you're a large legacy media company, like a Disney or a Comcast, you have huge studio operations. You have movie studios, you have network studios, you've been filling your services with your own stuff. Disney Plus is probably the best example of that. Almost every Disney made property ever is available on Disney Plus, almost. Not all of them, though. Well, color me befuddled, Tom. Why don't everything that Disney or NBC makes end up on their own streaming services like Disney Plus and Peacock? Have you heard of money, Justin? Oh, hell yeah. I've heard of money. Yeah. So subscription services are an improvement over sales of individual items like DVDs, because the revenue is recurring. So you sell a DVD, you get that money once. Sell a subscription, you get that money every month. That's why music has embraced streaming. However, once you have that money, it's hard to increase it for individual subscribers. You have to add more subscribers to get more money, unless you can add features like 4K or surround sound. But there's a limit to how much people will add. If you own the content, though, another way to make money is to license it to another streamer. So for example, you own the Harry Potter movies. You let them disappear from your service for like six months. It's a good bet that the subscribers will be able to find something else on your service that'll keep them from cancelling, at least if you're doing your job right. So you're not going to lose money because you're not going to lose many subscribers. And then you license out Harry Potter for six months to another service and they pay you. So you make more money than you otherwise would. When you bring Harry Potter back to your service, you can then make a big marketing push and possibly get some new subscribers. So you can't do this all the time with everything. But if you strike the right balance, you can bring in some extra money and extra subscribers and beef up the bottom line for everybody at the company. Well, so for anybody who's learned a little bit more about what's going on on the company side and how distribution happens, what devices should people use to stream to make it as easy as possible? Yeah, yeah, we don't have time to really cover that question entirely. But for most people, the smart TV is probably where they should start. If they don't have a smart TV or it's old and slow or the options are limited, Roku is probably the easiest. It has the widest variety of services. Chromecast is cheap. It can be a little fiddly for people if they're not as tech savvy. But if they use their phone a lot, it's a good affordable option because it casts shows from the phone to the TV. Amazon's Fire TV is great if the person lives in the Amazon universe. If they're already on Prime Video, if they're buying shows through Amazon, if they're adding those channels, Fire TV works great for that. Apple TV the same if you live in the Apple universe. If you like buying your stuff through iTunes, you got Apple Music, all of that. It's a little more expensive than the other options too, but Apple people are usually used to that, so I guess it's not that big of a deal. I'm an Apple TV person mostly because it's just where everything is. I've got the apps for the things that I care about the most, whether it's live TV or movies or a variety of shows that I care about, but Roku would work exactly the same way, at least for my purposes. Justin, I don't know if you have other options, but I feel like, as Tom said, if you've got a smart TV that can handle this, that's sort of the point of a smart TV. My smart TV is sort of smart, but it's also old enough that it doesn't really work that well, so I don't access content that way. Yeah, I have a few smart TVs. They're really slow comparatively to some of the apps including Roku and Apple TV, and also entering passwords and usernames via their interface is a little annoying, at least on some of them. But in general, I think it's a great way to enjoy content, and they make fantastic stocking stuffers. Well, I suppose we should check out the mailbag then. Let's do it. So this one came in from Comey. Comey had a recommendation and also a question related to Nicole Lee's smart home gift guide that we had on Tuesday's show. This is a good one. Comey says, I have a tablet in our bathroom wall that plays movies on repeat. I enjoy watching a few minutes of random segment content, random depending on when I enter, every time I am in the bathroom to do whatever. The key point is that the tablet keeps playing the movie 24-7. So I don't have to touch it with a dirty or wet hand, but the wired speaker is turned on only when someone enters the bathroom and then closes the door. Otherwise, the audio would be distracting when we're not actually in the bathroom. Comey says, I use the old power strip with a motion sensor, but I replace the motion sensor with a magnet switch that closes when the door is shut. AC power doesn't go through the sensor cable, so it was a simple and safe wiring between the power strips, RJ11 jack, and the magnet switch. Here is Comey's question. Is there a simpler product that would turn on the power only when the door is closed? I like my setup. I highly recommend it. But the hurdle would be to come up with that door triggered power outlet. I asked this question in office hours when I was just streaming to folks earlier today on our Twitch channel, and Chaos ASL suggested a smart outlet that triggers on an open-closed door sensor. So you'd put a sensor on the door that can tell your smart home system whether the door is open or closed, and then have a routine or something like that that would say if the door is closed, turn on the power outlet to the speakers. So you'd have just the speakers plugged into that because it sounds like he wants the TV to keep playing, so there's always a random point. So you'd have to plug the tablet into a separate outlet from the speakers. You could have the speakers plugged into a smart outlet that would turn itself on and off. I have to say, Comey, I love this idea. At first I was like the same movie playing over and over, but you're not in the bathroom all day. You kind of go in there and go, oh, look, it's the scene I haven't seen in a while. And maybe you have, I don't know, 10 movies loaded up in there. It's kind of fun. It's a fun way to enjoy a bath. It's the modern equivalent of leaving magazines in a wicker holder. Have I read this magazine before? Yeah, but I still like it, and I'm going to be here for a minute. Exactly. Well, thanks to everybody who writes in with the questions and comments. Do keep that feedback coming. Feedback at dailytechnewshow.com is where to send those emails. And thank you to Justin Robert Young for being with us today. Justin, where can people keep up with your work? Well, they can head on over to Where Not Wrong. It's a podcast featuring myself, Jen Briney and Andrew Heaton. And on this edition of the program that just uploaded today, an email from Tom Merritt. Wait, which Tom Merritt? You. Are you sure? Oh, I know. There are quite a few. Oh, I know. I double checked. I backtraced it. I just, I just, I just... It's on the blockchain. I was ripping you all apart of that email. You all have to listen to hear my ranting take. Amazing. Skating email. Like you've never heard them before. Yeah. Well, it's lovely that Tom is sending you emails to Where Not Wrong. Also lovely is getting brand new bosses. And we would like to thank Matthew for being our brand new boss. Today, Matthew just started backing us on Patreon. Thank you, Matthew. And welcome. I like to think of Matthew as a trendsetter, right? You know, like, you want to look to Matthew if you want to be following the cool stuff. Patreon.com. Speaking of patrons, stick around for our extended show, Good Day Internet. We affectionately call GDI, which rolls right in after DTNS wraps up. But just a reminder, DTNS is live. You can catch the show Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern, 2100 UTC. Find out more at DailyTechNewShow.com. Slash live. I will be out tomorrow, but we got a jam-packed show with Rob Dunwood and Len Peral to join us. See you then.