 Daily Tech News show is made possible by you, the listener, thanks to all of you, including Pat, Mike Cortez, Erwin Stewart, and brand new patrons Maxime and Ed. Welcome, Ed, everybody! On this episode of DTNS, Patrick Beja is here to talk about Unity's multi-platform strategy and Ubisoft's AI NPCs, plus Threads takes a few more steps towards the Fediverse. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, March 20th, 2024 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. From Columbus, Ohio, I'm Rob Dunwood. I'm the show's producer. From the forests of Finland, I'm Patrick Beja. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Yes, indeed! Patrick Beja, the coolest French podcaster we know, is back. Welcome, Patrick. It's good to have you. It's nice to be here. I totally did not feed you that line about, but you probably only know one French podcaster, right? It's still true. I think I might know one other, but it's still true. Is it the solstice yet? Almost. March 20th. Equinox. Equinox. Equinox. It's, you know, in Finland, it is so important because that's when you start to have hope again. You start to, you know, think that life might go on. And it's been a few weeks that we kind of start wondering if it might. And now we have the confirmation because we have a little bit more sun. So, yes, it's good. Yeah, according to a quick search, Tuesday, March 19th at 8 p.m. in the Pacific time zone was solstice. So, or equinox. Keep saying solstice. Happy equinox, everybody. Equinox. And congratulate Patrick on getting more sun. All right. Let's start with the quick answer. The US executive branch has agreed to authorize $8.5 billion in direct funding and a further $11 billion in loans to Intel as provided by the US Chips and Science Act. So the way it works, Congress passes the act and then the executive branch authorizes the funding. Intel will use the money to build chip plants in four US states. Huh? I think they might be swing states in the upcoming election. So odd. The goal is to bring US share of advanced chip production from close to zero, as it is right now, to 20% over the next few years. Business Insider sources say OpenAI may release GPT-5, the next version of its generative model this summer. OpenAI is testing the model after which it will do a safety test before public release. A CEO saw a demo of GPT-5 called it, I should say, materially better and suggested one new feature would be the ability for enterprise clients to call unreleased OpenAI agents to perform tasks on demand. Yesterday, we mentioned that two of the co-founders of Inflection AI were headed to Microsoft to start a new division there. A few more details will help you understand this story. The remaining co-founder who stayed with Inflection is Reid Hoffman. If you're like, that name sounds familiar. It's because he happens to be a Microsoft board member because he is a co-founder of Microsoft owned LinkedIn. But he is staying on at Inflection with new CEO, Sean White and whatever staff that didn't head to Microsoft AI because it looks like a big chunk of them went with their bosses. But Microsoft is also a big investor in Inflection. So it seems to be a case of Microsoft incubating a startup probably at Reid Hoffman's idea, then eating the good parts. Inflection's original business was multi-platform conversational AI, which would try to remember not only you, but previous conversations it had with you. And the new focus now that all of those people have gone over to Microsoft will be on building custom generative chatbots for commercial customers. India's Ministry of Electronics and IT announced on Wednesday that it has amended the IT rules of 2021 to solidify the legal basis of the President Information Bureau's fact-checking unit. That unit will monitor platforms with more than five million users in India to make sure they do not display, store, transmit, or otherwise share information that deceives or misleads users about matters pertaining to the government. Critics say the Bureau sometimes labels factual information critical of the government as misleading. Which I'm sure in their opinion it might be. Stardew Valley 1.6 came out Tuesday and according to SteamDB data, it reached 146,159 concurrent players on Steam, beating the previous peak of 94,875 set in January 2021 right after 1.5 came out. That puts it above the current high numbers of PAL world and since we're talking about actual games, EA says it has deployed a layered series of security updates to Apex Legends to address vulnerabilities that were exploited to add cheats to players competing in the global series this past weekend. So just following up that they fixed that patch. Did you see that, Patrick? I saw it after the fact, but it's kind of crazy because people were hacked as they were playing participating in the eSports tournament. So you can see in the videos one of the players is telling, is speaking with his teammates and he's like, okay, I see them, I see them, they're here and oh wait, I'm being hacked, I'm being hacked. And then he freaks out and he logs out because he's afraid that the authorities of EA would accuse them of cheating. So he just logs out and he starts praying that, you know, things go well, but it was pretty crazy to see that happening. Yeah, it was kind of impressive presence of mine, to be honest. All right, Rob, tell us what's going on in the Fediverse. Yeah, so yesterday was the first day of the FEDI forum, the two-day virtual unconference that discusses the future of the Fediverse. And on Tuesday's presentations, Metas Peter Cottle showed off a brief demo of how users can eventually connect their accounts and post to the Fediverse through threads. The Fediverse is an interconnected social platform ecosystem based on an open protocol called Activity Pub, which allows you to report your content, data, and follow a graph between networks. Threads is one of the many platforms aiming to join the Fediverse. Mastodon is arguably the most notable platform currently there. Interestingly, Blue Sky, the Jack Dorsey-started decentralized social network, uses the currently incompatible IT protocol or AT protocol to do what Activity Pub does. My questions to you, Patrick, are if threads eventually joining the Fediverse is a big deal and are competing protocols a good thing? So, to the first question, yes, of course. The size of threads is completely dwarfs any other instance of the Fediverse. And a thread actually joining the Fediverse would make the Fediverse into an actual global important thing. I'm sure people who enjoy Mastodon and other Fediverse instances and pixel-fed and all of those would say, but it's already a big thing. Well, we could debate that. They're big and big, right? Yeah, exactly. Threads is what, 100 million users already or close to that? And Mastodon.social is like a couple of million currently. So, yeah, there's big and there's big. Obviously threads joining that would be massive. It wouldn't mean that everyone using threads would be aware of the Fediverse, but it would mean that everyone would have super easy access to it or essentially already have access to it. We will leave aside for the moment the question of whether or not other instances will rebel against threads and block it because it comes from Facebook and is very centralized at its core, which many have threatened to do. So we'll see how that will go. But to the second question, I think a lot of people don't realize why Blue Sky is different from Mastodon and why it is an interesting alternative decentralized social network. What Blue Sky does, which is different, is that it externalizes many aspects of a centralized service, whereas Mastodon is created so that anyone can create an instance and interconnect all of them together, which is cool. Blue Sky essentially feeds, which is not just a list of people that you follow or don't follow, but you can customize with algorithmically different feeds and you can externalize also different moderation services or moderation styles. So you could construct your presence on the network with different feeds, with different moderation rules that you would subscribe to or pay for. So it is pushing the decentralization idea much further than Mastodon is, which Mastodon does it in a very straightforward way, which is interesting. But what Blue Sky does is interesting as well, I think. Yeah. And this Fediverse interaction, just to keep this in people's minds, is proceeding slowly. When they roll it out, it's in the alpha stage right now and they haven't rolled it out to everybody. But when they roll it out to everybody, you won't be able to do everything you can do on a Mastodon instance. Right now, you can only see likes. You can't even see replies. And it's very limited what they can do. But what they were showing off is how they will label to show like, oh, this person has a Mastodon integration or Fediverse integration, not Mastodon particularly. And you can be able to get their Fediverse ID to add them if you are on something like Pixel Fed or Mastodon. And how you can't be sure if you delete a thread that has been pushed to the Fediverse, that it will be deleted on every Mastodon or other server out there. So they are delaying posts five minutes before they push them to the Fediverse, just in case you suddenly decide immediately you don't want it out there. So it's going to be a very slow and very interesting integration, I think. I certainly do and I think it will, no matter what happens, it will remain a small part of threads users that will be aware of the Fediverse. But it might interest some people who might not have heard of it just by the labeling thing alone. Yeah. Yeah. And it will certainly help spread the word and raise some awareness. Ubisoft revealed a GDC that it has been developing an NPC, a non-player character that uses large language models so it can have more realistic conversations with players and developers. Players create Neo NPCs, sorry, developers create Neo NPCs by feeding a description of its backstory and personality into the large language model. That creates the NPC and then players can speak into a mic and their speech is transformed into text prompts for the chatbot powered NPC. Occasionally, a pre-written game plot, like you would get in a traditional NPC, will show up in response. So please, I need you to go kill 10 hogs and then come back and I'll give you a reward. We'll still be part of the mix. Ubisoft's Neo NPC was made with Nvidia's audio to face application and in-world's large language model. Ubisoft says the characters are still prototypes. So they're demonstrating them, but they're kind of quirky and they're like, yeah, we haven't worked out all the details. The Verge's Sean Hollister described the characters as, quote, awkward, a little stunted with lag before replies and occasional vocal stutters. But you know, hey, prototype here. Patrick Rockpaper Shotgun quoted Brendan Keough saying, why would I want to listen to dialogue? Nobody wrote. Whereas Ubisoft's CEO, Yves Gemma said, you don't have to make them human. You have to say what they are. What's important is make sure they've games become more intelligent. Do you have a side you prefer in this argument? I think a lot of people are going to have a, you know, knee-jerk reaction saying, but I don't want that because I want real people writing my NPC's dialogue and I don't want to speak to them. I don't want... I certainly can understand the idea that you don't necessarily want to have a full conversation with every NPC you meet. And it will be awkward, at least for now. It will be awkward. There will be lag, etc., etc. What I think is interesting is that this is an actual video game developer testing this Ubisoft because we've seen it from NVIDIA before. We've seen it a few weeks, a few months ago. And Ubisoft actually trying to see if it can be implemented and benefit the player is the really interesting thing here. The way I think of it is think of a randomized algorithmic, the word is caping me, level generation, for example. You can use it badly and you can use it well. And it certainly is not applicable everywhere, but in a game like, let's say, Hades where you go from room to room and you randomize your runs with, you know, a roguelite or something like that, randomization or algorithmic level building can make sense. I think I would be surprised if these types of technologies never bring anything to any NPC in any game, right? It's not going to be good for all of them, but certainly in some cases, depending on the type of game you want, it could bring something. If you can focus the NPCs well enough and if you don't easily jailbreak the AI and it starts saying silly stuff for, you know, you start bleeding one NPC into the other, like if it's done well, it could bring something to the game, I think. I'm already starting to feel the cognitive dissonance from this, from holding two completely disparate thoughts at the same time. I love this and I hate this. I want my NPCs to be useful while not being there at all. Is it just get out of my way and let me do what I want to do or at least be useful to me and to help me meet to do the things that I'm trying to get done. So I'm kind of excited about this, but I could see it making games a nuisance. And I do get the point. You know, I like games for story. I generally will play a game on story mode just because I want to get all the story. If it was never written, I don't necessarily want AI making stuff up, you know, about the story. But then that sounds kind of cool. I might actually like that. So I don't know how to feel about it. But that's the thing. You're, I mean, that you're exactly on point. Like if you go out and start talking to an NPC and you start having a full conversation as if it was a real person, is there any point if it's not a real person, right? Like if it just starts, imagine you plug in chat GPT and you start chatting, you just, you don't necessarily always just chat with chat GPT just to chat. You need to have a point to it, even if the point is to, you know, I don't know, some therapy support or something like that, which some people use it for, which actually might be useful as well. I don't know. In game therapy. Why not? Yeah. I think the point is this is one tool and you don't use, you know, not every game has to be 3D, not every game has to have auto generated levels, not every game. And in this case, it might be useful in some instances. But I think they will be relatively limited. Yeah, I hit upon the same things that y'all are talking about. And to me, it's a game design question, not a technology question. This is a great tool to have in the arsenal. There certainly are times when I wish NPCs didn't feel so automated, where I would like to ask them other things and see if I could glean other things and feel more immersed in the world. But I'm with you, Rob, at the same time, I don't want to have to be sitting around trying to guess what to say to get them to give me my quest. I want that to be easy. So it's about game design and having characters that are using the generative models for NPCs where appropriate and it doesn't get in the way of you enjoying your playing, right? That being said, currently, the interaction with NPCs is dialogue trees, right? It's just one, you say something and you can choose like four different things to say. They answer, again, you choose four different things. This is very primitive. It is extremely primitive. So I'm sure some interaction, it's impossible that no interaction will be made better by having an actual conversation with the NPC. The important thing is to focus it. I think they can. Yeah. No, I think you're absolutely right. I played that too early. If you can't get enough Android in your life, then listen to Android Faithful every week. Android aficionados, Ron Richards, Wen Tui Dao, Michelle Ramon and Jason Howell team up like a team of superheroes and bring you the latest Android news and information. They just had another excellent episode on Tuesday. You didn't watch it live, maybe, but you can next week Tuesdays at 8 p.m. Eastern, 5 p.m. Pacific. But don't worry if you missed it live. You can always find it on demand at androidfaithful.com. On Monday, Unity Technologies, developer of the Game Engine Unity, hence the name, released its 2024 Unity Gaming Report at the Game Developers Conference. Insights and data from more than 5 million Unity Engine developers was put together. More than 342 billion ad views were used to generate the report and collect all of this. Among the findings was an increased diversification of revenue sources such as in-app advertising, a finding of increasing retention for games that are powered by in-app sales, rapid adoption of AI, 62% of studios incorporating AI tools into workflows, mostly for coding and assistance, and expanded multi-platform and multiplayer development. Patrick, that seems to be the one that caught your eye. Why did that recent trend catch your eye? Yeah, this is really the most interesting aspect of the report for me. Now we have to keep in mind that this is games using the Unity Engine, so Unity is used a lot across platform, so multi-platform, so that skews it a little bit. But still, it kind of puts a data point on something that we've been seeing and feeling in the industry for a while, which is a lot of developers are going multi-platform, including some of the bigger developers who are also platform holders. We've heard about all the hula-baloo about Microsoft putting games on PlayStation and PlayStation putting many games on PC, which they didn't use to do, and how generalized that trend is becoming. And this report is kind of saying, yeah, it's significant. We're seeing, I think they said, 40% increase from two years ago, so it's really not nothing, even for specifically Unity. And I think you can explain it in a straightforward manner. There are IPs that you have used as much as possible, and then you still want to extract revenue out of them, so you will put them on other platforms, because then the people who didn't get access to it on your initial platform can also give you money. And it's the same for developers who actually develop multi-platform from the get-go. Let's try and reach people where they are. I think an easy way of extrapolating too much is going to that idea that, well, that means platforms are dead. And that's where I would like to kind of take the counterpoint a little bit. Multi-platform is very obviously getting more and more important, but platforms, I think, are here to stay. And if you want to understand why, the answer is very easy. It's because it makes more money for the platform holders. And usually those big companies like money, so if your option is to get 100% of the revenue or 70%, usually they prefer 100%. So yes, multi-platform, expanding a lot, but platforms are not going to go away, PlayStation is still here, Xbox is still here, the Switch or whichever it turns out to be for the next one is still going to be here. As a gamer, I am really interested in the multi-platform stuff because I actually have a, I still have an Xbox 360, I've got two Xbox ones, various models of them, I have PlayStation 5, and I got a couple switches. And I don't often play the same game on multiple devices, but I kind of would like to be able to. So if multi-platform gets it to where, I'm probably still going to always have each of the platforms, but if I take my Switch with me and I can continue playing a game that I normally play on Xbox or on PlayStation, that is a plus to me. I would actually play a premium for that to be able to port games in between systems relatively easily. So I am excited about this. I'm with you, Patrick, I don't know that the game developers, I don't know that PlayStation is going to want to make less PlayStation, I don't know that Microsoft is going to want to make less Xboxes, but those two companies, I don't believe they act, I think they're loss leaders for them. I don't know that they make a lot of money selling those devices, they still make their money primarily on the games, and I see this as a way for them to do more of that. So I think a lot of people look at this and think, well, get a Steam Deck or get a ROG Ally or whatever, a portable PC console type thing that looks like a Switch and you buy all your games on PC and you'll be good. And the ideal situation is that every game comes out on every platform and that would be fantastic, but I disagree. I think that means every platform is a PC and then you lose the exclusives when that happens because every platform can run every game. The point of the exclusive, you're right, they don't make the platform holders, don't make a lot of money on the consoles themselves. They make money on the royalties, not the royalties, the commissions they get from everybody selling games on their platforms once they have a large install base. And in order to get a large install base, what they need to do is get people to buy their platform because they can get something there that doesn't exist elsewhere. So in effect, what you do when you say, I want every console to be a PC, is you're telling PlayStation, we don't want you to make The Last of Us again. We don't want Microsoft to make Halo, although that might not be such a bad idea. We don't want Nintendo to make Zelda. Of course, if there was only PCs, I'm sure they would still want to make those games, but the real motivation to make them excellent and to make them stand out is that it will bring players to their platform that they then monetize. So we don't want those platforms and those exclusives to go away, I don't think. Although the same thing doesn't happen in television. We don't need a platform for someone to make a good television show. Of course you do. HBO is a platform. But it's not. The platform is the Apple TV, or the Roku, or the TV. It's the service that is Max or Netflix. Yeah, Potato Potato. The new platform for Xbox is the Game Pass. The reason they're saying, oh, we want our thing to be everywhere is that they're doing a bait and switch. They're just changing the nature of their platform and providing Game Pass to PlayStation owners or switch owners is just a way to insert their own platform. Yeah, you can call it a service, but it's the same thing. You want people to come to your platform to then monetize them in other ways. I think it's important to have a little bit of a distinction there because I think folks will get caught up in the idea of Microsoft has to always make the Xbox or Sony always has to have the PlayStation, but they can keep their platform by having Game Pass, like you said. That could be the platform for Microsoft in the future, right? Could be. Yeah. Again, that's a whole other rabbit hole to go down on cloud gaming and all of that, but Microsoft's certainly positioning itself for that eventual possibility. I mean, Steam is a platform, impossible to move out of its dominant position, but yeah. Yeah, yeah. All right, before we wrap up, Rob, let's check out the mailbag. So yeah, we have an excellent mailbag item from Tim, who writes in, Hey, DTNS crew as a merchant mariner and former crane engineer, I wanted to give a little extra context on the ports needing to be made ready for those ships with the sailing wings on them. Tom mentioned air clearance for things like bridges, which will matter in some cases, but nearly every port will have to be retrofitted to support these kinds of vessels, primarily because of the huge gantry cranes that are used to load and unload the ships. The crane's booms extend over the entire width of the ship and move to containers or move containers between the vessels and shore. Those cranes will have to all be tall enough to clear the wings while they're performing cargo operations. While most gantry train's booms are raised and lowered, it's very slow and usually done as little as possible. For example, to get around the ship's house, which is the navigation bridge in the living area for the crew. And when the ship is arriving and departing, having to raise the crane boom to go between cargo bays would significantly increase the time to work each bay. Another potential issue that could require modified procedures and training of longshore teams is removing and replacing the massive hatch covers that make the cargo bays watertight. Those hatches are enormous and would be very difficult and very heavy to move in out of place without hitting the wings. None of those things are insurmountable, but there is a lot of shoreside work that will have to be done alongside the wing engineering before vessels can be put fully into service. Man, when we were talking about this, and to catch anybody up if you mixed yesterday's episode, we were talking about the technology being proven that these big wings they put on ships can capture enough wind energy to save a lot of money, save a lot of fuel on ships. They've been testing them for six months. But I mentioned, as Tim mentioned here, that you would have to reengineer ports. And I knew there were people out there who were like, why do you have to change the ports? Just a boat, it goes in. And I was, I knew there was more to it. But the only thing I could think of off the top of my head was bridges. And I was like, man, I wish I knew more about ports. But thankfully I didn't have to know more about ports because Tim deputy knew about ports and wrote in this excellent email. Thank you, Tim. This is, this is fantastic. Tim knows a lot about ports. So yeah, this is an excellent email. Now I have a better understanding of like, oh, yeah, okay, it makes sense. If you have three big towers, you know, for, for collecting wind energy on top of a boat, the cranes aren't going to be able to unload the ship. That's, that's fantastic. So thank you, Tim. I love it when people with actual knowledge of stuff like Tim has right in and help us all get a little smarter. Thank you, Tim. Keep those coming feedback at daily tech news show.com also something we would like to keep coming is Patrick Beja. Welcome back to the show. It's been way too long. I know you've been up to stuff though. In the meantime, what, what have you been doing to tell folks about? Well, I do shows in French because I am French. I do the rendezvous tech and the rendezvous, which are weekly shows about tech news and gaming news. We take, you know, a little bit of a industry analysis approach. And it's in French. So I don't know it will be interesting to you if you don't speak French, but if you want to learn, it's a good way because it's a topic you might know. All of these are linked at notpatrick.com. Very easy to get to. I have fallen off my study of French in favor of Korean lately. But when I was trying to, to, to learn French listening to your shows was helpful because I know you. So I was, it was easier to understand. And I know the topic. So I was like, okay, I can put together with context a lot of things. So really, it really is helpful. It's, it's no joke. Go check that out. Patreon, stick around for the extended show, Good Day Internet. We look at a Deloitte survey to see what consumers say they actually want from streaming services. And it's not just for them to stop raising prices. In fact, that doesn't seem to be part of it as much as you might think. You can also catch the show live Monday through Friday at 4pm Eastern, 200 UTC. Find out more at DailyTechNewShow.com, Forsyth Live. We'll be back tomorrow with Justin Robert Young. TNS Family Podcasts. Helping each other understage.