 The 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by you, the listener, thanks to every single one of you, including Chris Benito, Steve Iadorella, and Jeffery Zilx. Coming up on DTNS, get a free TV, as long as you never turn off the ads. The new trend for online stores is to sell things offline, and how a chatbot can bring you closer to your favorite celebrity, Justin. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, May 15th, 2023 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. From lovely Cleveland, Ohio, I'm Richard Raffalino. From deep in the heart of Texas, this is Justin Robert Young. And joining us off-mic because StreamYard won't recognize his mic is our producer, Roger Chang. Wave to the folks, Roger. They can't see you, but it's nice to have you here. He typed yo into the chat, so let us know. All right, let us start with the quick hits. If you're feeling a stiff breeze from Redmond, Washington today, it might be a sigh of relief that EU regulators announced they'll approve Microsoft's $69, what does it matter? It's a lot of money to acquire Activision Blizzard. To get the approval, Microsoft offered antitrust remedies that will provide royalty-free licenses to cloud gaming platforms to stream. Activision games purchased by consumers will there before be part of that. Satya and company aren't popping any bubbly to celebrate yet, however, the US's Federal Trade Commission and Britain's Competition and Markets Authority have both moved to block the acquisition in recent months. CMA said it wouldn't approve it. FTC is suing to prevent it. And they both think there would be a hindrance of competition, particularly in cloud gaming. And now that the EC has some time on its schedule, having approved it, Bloomberg reports that it has started an informal probe of Microsoft Azure. The sigh of relief has ended. Yeah, it's nice that they're staying busy. Back in March, OpenAI announced it would offer plugins for ChatGPT. The company says it's now starting to roll out beta plugin access for ChatGPT plus subscribers this week. This will include plugins to have the chatbot access the internet for information when the plugins were announced. That was kind of the headline item. But there's also going to be 70 other third-party plugins and more than 70 of those, including things like playing chess, finding recipes, or offering nutrition advice. Oh, I might have to try one of those. Foxconn plans to invest $500 million to set up manufacturing facilities in the southern Indian state of Telangana. Telangana IT minister KT Rama Rao said the first phase of investment will create 25,000 jobs, at least that's what he promises. Foxconn first started operating in India in 2006. It already makes some iPhones in the country, so it's going to make more stuff. The U.S. Transportation Security Administration, you might know it as the TSA, is conducting a pilot program to use facial recognition to check IDs at airports. In 16 airports, passengers can volunteer to place their ID into a slot and look into a camera. Follow the birdie there. The system takes a photo and compares it to the ID, then passes the person through. The ID is never handed to any individual. And the photos are taken and any biometric information generated as part of the matching process are all deleted with the exception of a small amount kept for assessment for just determining how well the system is actually working. That data will be deleted after two years. So there's a timeline for deletion of all data. Participating airports include Baltimore, Washington DC, Atlanta, Boston, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, Orlando, Phoenix, Salt Lake City, San Jose and two Mississippi airports. Can I just say before, before we go any further, I definitely already, they have been doing this before this because I definitely went through this in Vegas. And did you enjoy it? It was very weird and I did not enjoy it, not being prepared for it. But you never had to hand over your ID. See, that's good. That was interesting. Yeah, as long as they promised they'll delete it. I think we need an audit, but I'm not against this. Finally, Alibaba confirmed a Chinese state media report that it would merge its autonomous driving research unit into its global logistics network called Kenya, indicating it will try to start monetizing the tech. The researcher had been conducted in Alibaba's Domo Academy, the company's research incubator lab. Domo already worked with Kenya over the last six years to use its little donkey robo van for last mile deliveries. All right, tell us about this free TV. Yeah, this is making a lot of waves today on the cyberspace. And I mean, let's back up a little bit here just for some context. You know, we see ads on TV. It's all the time, not controversial. Over the air TV, it's always been there. That's the reason things were on TV back in the day. Almost all major streaming services now offer ad supported tears. Been the big trend over the past, I don't know, 18 months. Even smart TV platforms. My own Roku shows me ads on the main menus. See them all the time, which is all to say, it takes a lot for an ad on a TV to raise some eyebrows. That's what Pluto TV co-founder Ilya Poznan did when he announced a new TV startup called Tele. It opened a waitlist to give away 500,000 TVs for free. Of course, there is a catch. Each set contains an always-on secondary 9-inch screen beneath its soundbar, which shows a variety of widgets, including ever-present ads, and about 25% of it. We've had ad-supported subsidized hardware for years. Think about Amazon's Kindles with their special offers and just ad-supported now over the last decade. But Tom, does a TV take it too far? This is an interesting following on of logic, right? If people don't already realize this, and I know lots of folks in our audience probably do realize this, your TV is as cheap as it was, in part because they build in some of the expectation of gaining revenue off the TV operating system. So the TV often has a license agreement. Visio got in trouble for not having a good enough licensing agreement, but they have a licensing agreement that says they'll be collecting some data on your use of the TV and selling that data in aggregate, not personalized, but anonymized to marketers to help them better target TV ads. So really what Telly is doing is saying, hey, what if we did that on a bigger scale enough that we could subsidize the price down to zero? In order to do that, they need to force you to see the ads because a lot of you probably say, well, I've got a TV operating system, but I never use it, so it can't track me. And yes, you can get around it that way. You can't with this because they built the system onto the television. They also have some pretty stiff terms of service that say, if we catch you trying to get around that, disable it, we will cancel your account and require you to send the TV back to us. And if you don't send the TV back to us or you send it back to us damaged, we're gonna charge your credit card for the TV because you have to have your credit card on file for this. So they are clearly going to make money off of this if they can get it in enough hands. I get where they're coming from on making this a business. Justin, do you think people will latch on to this? Will people get a free TV? Yes, although this is more free trial experience than it is out and out free, right? Like you can't just put your address down and a television shows up. You do have to have a relationship with the company and give them a credit card for collateral damage just in case you do something hinky. From the perspective of Telly, I think that they might be trying to find a niche so thin that it doesn't exist. Yes, there is a market for free televisions, but how big is that market in a world where you can go to Costco right now or Walmart or wherever you wanna go and get a really, really, really good television for less than $100 for a fairly large HD television. Secondary to that, obviously the ad market is in absolute turmoil. That's why we're trying gimmicks like this or at least gimmicks like this have money behind it, but you also have to remember the audience. Not every audience is equal. The audience that is being watched by a crowd that has more money or at least in the eyes of the advertisers has more money will be a more expensive ad to place. How expensive is the ad going to be able to be placed on a television set where you don't know if anybody is watching it and it's by people who want a free television, not exactly an indicator of a lot of disposable income. Sure. It's not the wealthiest segment of the market, probably not. No, no, no, no. I had Andrew Heaton on my show, a PX3, on Friday where he used to work at Fox Business. He was saying that this is true. Fox Business, just by the fact that it is watched by far, far, far fewer people than Fox News has a higher per ad sale rate. Why? Because the only people who watch Fox Business work at hedge funds and everybody else who watches Fox News does it. That's how tech TV was able to sell ads too. It didn't have the biggest audience, but it had a lot of wealthy people in the audience. The one segment I can maybe see wanting to adopt this is a no-cost upfront TV that has ads on it. I could actually see small businesses, bars, that kind of stuff where you're not gonna have a direct competitor. Against the terms of service, can't use it in a commercial setting. But I'm saying this idea, I'm not saying this particular segment, this idea of like, hey, I don't wanna pay anything for this, but I could use a TV. I don't care if there's an ad for Pizza Hut or whatever on my thing. You're already in my bar as you're watching this or something like that. But yes, what is- Maybe that is a better business for them. That's a good point. But it's not, right? They're going. So you were asking for a business model that's further compromised than the one that we're talking about. That's already leveraged to an absolute, very, very, very small proposition that enough people who want free televisions will be a very attractive ad market as long as the ad can never go away. Maybe, and maybe everybody at Telly will be able to play ding-dongs like me doubting them and say in your face. I doubt it. I will give them credit. They've headed off every possible expose that could be about them by basically putting all the damning things that we would read in other publications of, this TV is using its cameras to track you and say, no, you agreed to that. Like, literally, that's the whole pitch of this TV is we're tracking every- It absolutely is doing that. In fact, the terms of service say you must use the product as the primary television in your household. You can't even put it in a, you can't even put it in a spare room. My bathroom 55-inch TV is not working out, okay. All right. Well, if you want to buy a TV yourself with your own heart and money, you're going to have to go to a store. But for years, the wisdom has been, well, stores, in-person stores, brick-and-mortar stores, online is killing them. If you have not noticed, that changed. And it wasn't even recently that it changed. The Wall Street Journal has an article up from Kate King called online-only startups adopt a bold new strategy opening actual shops. It points out that more than 85% of total retail sales occurred in physical stores in 2022, according to the US Census Bureau. This is a trend that's been going on since 2015, nearly half of online footwear, apparel, and accessories brands, tracked by a company called Corsight, expanded to brick-and-mortar, not reduced to online. You might say, oh, it's because rents are cheap during COVID, everybody closed on. No, rents might be cheap some places, but average shopping center space, we're not talking about office buildings here, we're talking about retail space. Average shopping center space reached an all-time high in Q1. Vacancy in US retail fell to 5.6% in Q1. That's the lowest since tracking began by Cushman and Wakefield, anyway, in 2007. One of the interesting things in this is actually going along with that of why maybe, in addition to just there's an appeal to it, is that shopping malls and other retail locations are now way more open to shorter-term leases and more pop-up shop experiences. That's becoming less true, too. That kickstarted this, you're absolutely right. But now that it's rolling, they're even like locking in the longer leases. Can I challenge some of the premise of this particular conversation? All right, sure. Yeah, yeah. Right, there was a rise of online businesses through the 90s and the odds and the tens that killed off a lot of retail. Chapter ends, movie is over, Spider-Man is dust, right? Now a new story begins. Spoiler. You have a lot of companies that are digitally savvy that understand that they are not going to be physical only. And that's what I think is the lesson here. Physical only versus companies that understand that there are reasons to have a physical location, but you should not be totally ignorant or try to staple on an online strategy. No, that is in all phases. That is the real takeaway. The Wall Street Journal has lots of quotes from folks who once said, absolutely not. We will never go physical. Online is the only way. In 2012, one of the founders of a store said he'd rather die than open a physical store and they opened their first store in New York City in 2018. They now have 11 stores. So there is a premise of like the wisdom used to be like online is the future. But I think you're right, Justin. What has happened is cost of shipping rose. So that hits online more than physical stores. Digital advertising has not only got more expensive, but also the returns on digital advertising have diminished as we no longer have a boom market for digital advertising as we reach saturation. Those were two big advantages of being online. Yeah, because also Facebook crippled their product, which was the best way that you could reach people at a very specific, if not creepy level. That too, yeah. And that trend industry-wide. And then what companies like Warby Parker found was your data advantage as an online store is knowing where your customers are. If you open a location near where you know you have customers, they come to your store and they found it can roughly triple sales online in the region where they open it. Well, and tied to that is the mechanisms to get data out of retail customers, not just out of like sales or using demographics or advanced data to find the good location. But like once people are physically in the stores are also a lot better than they were 10, 20 years ago. So they can also, it's not as much as a data sinkhole to have a retail space. Like you're actually able to draw very similar insights to what you're getting in an online experience too, in addition to all the benefits of having a physical location as well. Yeah, to Justin's point, it's not one or the other. It's the combination of saying, where are my customers, what do I know about them and what's the best way to meet their needs? What really stood out to me in all of this is it's not Warby Parker opening stores, they've been doing that forever. They're relatively old for an online brand, right? But it was seeing that there are companies that are like a year, a year and a half into this that effectively like startups overnight like building this now in to their experience of like, yes, it's one thing for older legacy online retail to move into physical retail. We've seen everybody to do that after a certain point. It's building that from the ground up to me that really stood out in this as a kind of the insight from it. And where to the point now where companies are slowing it down? Allbirds is only gonna open three footwear stores this year when they were once an online only company, but it's because they're reaching saturation. The lease terms are getting longer. They're not not opening stores, they're just slowing it down. You're like, we're already into a maturity segment of that transition. Folks, if you haven't thought about that or anything we talk about on the show, be sure to send us an email. We love to hear from you. Our email address is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. Well, let's face it, fans want access to the people they're fans of. That's the very nature of fandom and the internet makes that access easier than ever. Of course, there's this asymmetry in that relationship still a problem. Karen Marjorie, for example, has two million followers on Snapchat. She spends several hours a day talking to a subset of those that pay for special access on Telegram. But there's a bottleneck, there's only one of her or there was. Last week, she launched Karen AI, a chatbot version of herself that fans can talk to for $1 a minute. The bot was created by the company Forever Voices with Marjorie claiming it was trained on more than 2,000 hours of content. Costs $1 an hour and generates more than, and it generated more than $100,000 in its first week. You know, this isn't limited to one human influencer either. Back in March, the Verges, Allegra Rosenberg covered character.ai which supports creating custom chatbots for whatever you want. Some of the most popular include Tony Stark, Iron Man, the Super Mario 64 version of Mario, Wahoo indeed, and characters from Genshin Impact. In coverage on both, we're hearing that these bots are being used as a way to combat loneliness. Tom, is the chatbot the first big new tool for fans to connect? Well, it's certainly the latest new tool for fans to connect. It's certainly an efficient way to connect with fans. It used to be, you had to show up in person. Then you could call a phone number maybe or get a newsletter. Then it became possible to follow a vlog of your favorites and maybe interact with them on a social network. Now you can have a chatbot just sitting on your own computer chatting away as if they are whoever it is that you're a fan of. And this to me is the first new one in a while. I think probably since the big chat social media stuff that frankly Tech TV pioneered back in the late 90s, it got perfected, but there weren't any super new elements of it over time. We were even doing video calls back then. Chatbots that are mimicking the person you're a fan of so you can have a personal conversation with them does seem to be the next step in what has been going on for a long time, which is I wanna get closer to the idol or the celebrity or whatever it is that I'm a fan of. Yeah, the reasons why people interact with, I'm gonna use quote unquote celebrities or influencers or people that you like, right, are varied. The conversation that you're going to wanna have at a book reading is different than what you'd wanna have at a wrestling meet and greet. What this initially makes me think about more than anything is a 1,900 number, something that was rampant throughout the 80s and 90s as a gigantic money maker for a lot of various different, not only brands, but also just interests. Wanna hear a haunted house ghost story? The creepiest stories are at 1,900. Yeah, everybody remembers the sexy 900 numbers, but there were so many different kinds of them. Oh geez, yeah, yeah, for various different reasons. I'm doing including psychics. Ms. Cleo is something that has had a big cultural impact. I think that this is just another version of that. That being said, I could see it having a lot more utility. I could certainly see, you know, there's a lot of folks who interact with me either on Twitter or email about various different political questions. Like, if I could just have a thing, we're here for $1, ask all of my collected ideas, writings and PX3 transcripts, ask a model trained on that, whatever that question is. I don't know, that might be worth it for some people. Yeah, Nick with a C is like, you might as well hire a lookalike, but lookalike might not get the personality right. Whereas this chatbot has a better shot than doing it. What's interesting, more expensive. Yeah, cheaper to get the chatbot too. But what's interesting about this as opposed to the 900 number is that was, you knew what you were putting out there as the person, whether you're, you know, the WWE or you're putting out gaming tips or walkthroughs. You knew the content, what people were saying. You knew what you were putting out there. And they specifically said in here, these chats are end to end encrypted. So they don't know how they're interacting. Now they've done a lot of testing and they say they've put in guardrails for inappropriate use and stuff like that. We've seen, like it's not, I'm not even concerned necessarily with this particular one, but as someone putting myself out there, like my brand is on there effectively. And the fact that I'm putting this, you know, this is effectively like a parasocial relationship, very similar to podcasting in some ways out there for this. But then to not have your brand of, I don't know what this is saying. I know it's trained well. I have some, you know, I have some either some sort of trust in the company or there's some sort of, you know, liability from the person that's setting all this up. There's a difference between character AI and Karen AI. Yes. Karen AI is like under the control of Karen Marjorie. Character AI is not under anybody's control. And that one's, that one's got a lot more of the concern that you're talking about. Yeah, that one, that one is feral. And guess what? We're all going to have to have a larger conversation about what our brand is and is not. Because this stuff is going to be created more and more locally. We're going to be able to do stuff with licensed characters and stuff like that, that no one's ever going to look to sell. But boy, the things that they're going to look to do to Mario in the comfort of their own home would probably make Nintendo's toes curl. It's this weird shift from like product to service and now like everything is brand wrapped up in this kind of stuff in a way that's accelerating in a way that it's just tough to wrap your head around like what all the implications are for something like this. Remind me on GDI to tell you, I did try out the chat character.ai again. And it was interesting. Two different characters, two very different experiences. I can't wait. HYBE is a music label that encompasses Ariana Grande, Justin Bieber, BTS, among many others. It began as a small label called Big Hit in 2005 and it only had one artist back then, a solo singer named Lee Hyun. Why are we talking about this? Because Lee has redebuted as Midnight, M-I-D-N-A-T-T, which could be Swedish for midnight or Korean for bare face. It is a music act that uses some machine generative tools to release songs in multiple languages at once. They're sung by Lee Hyun, but they are turned into languages that he doesn't speak. Midnight's first song is called Masquerade and on YouTube you can go change the language. They call it a dub, but you basically get the same song in Korean, Chinese, Vietnamese, Japanese, English or Spanish. HYBE acquired a voice synthesis company called Super Tone last year and it's using that technology to take the voice data of a native speaker of each language and combine it with the voice data of the singer to create a vocal track for each language that sounds like the singer is singing naturally in that language. They do say they have to do some manual adjustments to ensure that the emotion and the tone is right in each of these languages. Very different to have a music label saying we're using AI to change our own singer to be able to do different languages. I wonder, big caveat before we get into taking this absolutely seriously, I wonder how much of this is automated and the possibility that this might be a little fairer and else, right? Because the concept of having a song that has various different versions of it be out there is well known, right? And if this singer sang a crappy version of each language and then that was cleaned up, it's a different story than if he sang one thing and then everything else happened on the back end. But let's for now take it totally seriously. Yeah, it's certainly a capability increase even if it is a bit of a PR stunt, right? Because this singer could not sing this well in all of these languages. That is I think pretty clear. So they're able to do it. But also could somebody else sing that well in that language and then just change it in the way that we've seen already with like Drake and the weekend where we had new songs put together by somebody singing it and then just putting it in that first chorus. I mean, I definitely just see whether this is, this requires a ton of manual remediation. Like we get it into a basic state and then have to make sure all the inflections are appropriate for the language and for the emotional content and stuff like that. Or it's a fully automated like bake click. Now you're in singing in Spanish and stuff like that. I can just see like the record executive like looking like total addressable market and the Venn diagram just got bigger. Oh no, that's huge. No, that's exactly what PD Bong at HYBE has been saying is if Korean music is actually fading behind Afro beats and if we wanna survive as a record label we have to move beyond K-pop and beyond regular pop and go international. And this is a way to do that. It actually excites me that this will be, not that this music is not accessible. I can stream any music that's in Vietnamese or Japanese or Korean or anything like that, but like to make it more, I guess approachable, right? Well, if your favorite artist is Ariana Grande and you speak Portuguese and suddenly every Ariana Grande song is available in Portuguese. That's compelling. Yeah, it makes it also less just of a US export it feels like in a lot of ways. All right, let's check out the mail bag. Yeah, we got a great email from John from absolutely lovely Vietnam. He wrote in with some global perspective on chat GPT. He says, I hear you like many others often talk about how great chat GPT is as a former software developer in the US turned university professor in Vietnam. I was eager to explore this new technology since it seems to most strongly impact both programmers and university students. Since it came out six months ago I've been trying to use it to no avail after listening to your most recent episode of chat GPT. So I decided to try again. Sure enough, I still cannot. He said that as much as the tech looks great people are starting to use it to increase productivity but it's a major deal that people in Vietnam and he also says people in the global South can't even start to use it and that unequal access to a powerful new tools is a major ethical issue in tech. It's certainly an issue. Project Bard is not gonna be available in Europe because of regulatory moves. And I assume that's why chat GPT is not available in Vietnam. It's not because they don't like Vietnam. It's because they're worried that the government of Vietnam will take issue with it operating there. That said, I did a quick search. A lot of articles about Vietnamese businesses using chat GPT. So apparently there is no end of ability to use a VPN. I'm not saying that you should do that, John because I'm not sure what the legal tricks of that are but it appears that a lot of people are doing that whether they should or not. Yeah. Yeah. Obviously, as was discussed widely on Twitter over the last 48 hours, companies have to obey with local regulations else-wise face an outright ban. Yeah, yeah, for sure. All right, well, thanks to Justin. Robert Young, you were bringing the knowledge, bringing the takes, bringing the heat as always. Justin, thanks so much for being on the show. Where can people find out what's going on with world's greatest con and what's new? Well, as it turns out, we have another episode. I thought we were done with this season. But you were too. We had a Q&A episode where in, I mentioned to folks that back in 2008, I did a series for about a year and a half, a podcast series with James Randy. I had lost control of those episodes. And so folks found them all still uploaded the internet somewhere sent me those episodes. And one of them is James Randy just talking about Project Alpha. Oh, wow. We spend this season on, turns out I started the research for this season back in 2008, totally forgot about it. From the source too. From James Randy's mouth, it is a fascinating coda to this story. If you just listened to this season of World's Greatest Con, you are going to absolutely love hearing it from the mouth of Randy. What matches with what our boys say happened. What doesn't match with what our boys say happened. It's going to be all there this week. A unexpected episode seven of World's Greatest Con. The real con was that the season was over. It wasn't. That's amazing. Nobody expects episode seven. Thanks to our brand new bosses, folks. We're on the value for value model. If we didn't have patrons, we wouldn't be here. So big thanks to Philip and Adam who just started backing us on Patreon. Please, all the rest of you patrons, welcome in into the club, Philip and Adam. If you're considering being a patron, but you're like, I don't have the money, you can join for free. That's a new thing. Go to patreon.com slash dtns, scroll down past the paid options. You'll get monthly updates, Roger's column and the Friday Good Day internet. And remember patrons, you can stick around for our extended show, Good Day internet today. We'll be getting Justin's take on Vice, filing for chapter 11 bankruptcy. You can also get a 4 p.m. Eastern, 200 UTC find out more about that at daily technewshow.com slash life. Back tomorrow with I as actor. Talk to you then. This show is part of the frog pants network. Get more at frogpants.com. Simon Club helps you have enjoyed this program.