 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners, thanks to all of you, including Justin Zelers, Pepper Geese, Carmine Bailey, and Brian Yeager, our lifetime supporter. On this episode of DTNS, Apple relaxes some app store policies, large language models really need more data, and are getting it any way they can. And what would the EV cool down anyway? This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, April 8th, 2024. From Studio Animal House, I'm Sarah Lane. And from somewhere near your nation's capital, yo boy, Mr. Big Chris Ashley. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Che. Chris, you and I were just talking before the show, have we ever done a Monday show just us? I mean, obviously we have Roger and Joe with us as well, but this might be a first. Yeah, this is a first. Those guys are just, you know, watching greatness when you're dressing. It's all about us. All right, with that, we're kidding, of course. Let's start with the quick hits. The US Commerce Department announced on Monday it signed an agreement to give Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing or TSMC's US subsidiary TSMC Arizona $6.6 billion in direct funding under the Chips and Science Act to set up semiconductor factories in Phoenix, Arizona and provide up to $5 billion in loans. The Chips Act was signed into law in 2022 and had a pledge of about $280 billion overall to boost domestic chip research and production in the US. As of now, around $52 billion has been set aside to subsidize domestic chip manufacturing. TSMC says it plans to build a third fabrication unit in addition to two being built right now with the influx in money and will also manufacture it to nanometer or even more advanced chips. Spotify users in Australia and the UK now have a feature that lets them create a playlist using a text prompt. Spotify suggests you try things more inventive than a known genre like jazz or pop. Suggestions like songs to serenade my cat or beats to battle a zombie apocalypse as examples and LLM makes your text and combines that with the system already knows about your listening habits and preferences to create the playlist. You can make refinements to the original playlist like less slow songs or more angst Spotify hasn't said which models it uses, but it says it uses several. Boy, the companies don't like to talk about what their models are doing. Do they? We will definitely be talking about that later on in the show. But first over the weekend, Brazil Supreme Court Judge Justice Alexandra de Moraes opened an inquiry into Elon Musk over alleged obstruction of justice. This is after Musk said he was going to reactivate accounts on X that the judge had previously ordered blocked. Now Musk has said the restrictions are unconstitutional and has called on Moraes to resign. Neither X nor Brazilian authorities have disclosed which social media accounts are in question and were ordered blocked. And it isn't even clear when the order was issued, but it is at issue at this point. Moraes responded on Sunday that Musk is leading into fake news on social media. That is, uh, Brazil stands anyway and said in a statement that if X fails to comply with the order, it will be fined 100,000 rails, which is about 19,740 US dollars per day. That was the Brazilian version of bring it. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reports Apple has discussed automating household functions and offering a revamped Apple TV set top box with a built-in camera for FaceTime, video conferencing and gesture-based controls, which patently Apple notes it covered in it 2016 patent report. Gurman also notes that a low-end iPad could power something like a home smart display akin to an Amazon Echo, show or even Amazon's Astro robot actual new iPads in various configurations are rumored to be announced May 6th. I mean, if we have a roving iPad that is a robot that goes around your house, I'm not going to be mad at that. I think that's pretty far fetched, but hey, you know, patents or patents, at least Apple's thinking about it. Windows Central got ahold of an internal email from Microsoft showing that Xbox president Sarah Bond has set up a team to work on game preservation and forward compatibility so that all games can be played on future versions of Xbox hardware. A lot of people think that is a pretty great thing. Xbox has also become Diablo 4's most prominent platform since the game's inclusion into Xbox Game Pass. Okey-dokey, Chris, let's talk about what concessions Apple has made as of late after the EU Commission fined Apple $2 billion and announced that Apple has to do more to comply with the Digital Markets Act, DMA, as we talk about it here on the show quite frequently as of late on Friday, Apple updated its app store guidelines. It has introduced a few things, including music streaming services, entitlements that's designed to make it easier for music streaming apps to redirect users to an external website in the EU. Think by button, Apple and Spotify have been going back and forth about this for a while, but this would apply to other developers as well. It will also allow game emulators on its platform for the first time. That's globally, not just in the EU. If you have a game emulator, Apple says it's cool. It does say of the new additions that retro game console emulator apps can offer to download games but are responsible for all such software offered in that developer's own app, including ensuring that such software complies with the guidelines and all applicable laws. So some of that is kind of legal mumbo jumbo. But Chris, I was asking you before the show, you know, how much, you know, do you dabble in game emulators? I mean, is this something that you're you're excited about? Yeah. So as much as people want to probably jump on the ha ha and point the fingers at Apple and whatever, to me, this is just a little bit more exciting is the fact that they are now allowing emulators. I remember back when everybody wanted to run an emulator on their phone, pull out their old school nostalgic games, you know, the new games that run on the iPhones and Android phones are amazing. But man, you know, for old heads like myself, there's nothing like maybe running old school Mortal Kombat or something like that on your phone while you're waiting for a flight. So I find that to be super interesting. And the other aspect of it is, well, now that these things are OK to run on there, will you see like Sega's and Nintendo's actually built something to kind of, you know, facilitate this? I mean, I would think, right? I mean, you're you're you're describing yourself. And probably a lot of people listening to this are nodding like, yeah, I would love that. You know, I would love this to be something that I can use on an iOS device if I happen to have one. Yeah, on the go at an airport. I don't know, you're waiting for the car, which whatever you're doing. This is, you know, it's somewhat casual gaming, right? Because it's on a mobile device. But, you know, it's it's it's the games that, you know, you know and love. And sometimes sometimes we like that old stuff. It's weird because emulators are a huge on Android. RetroArch being the number one app for that. But I can I can sort of see why Apple was reluctant because it is a vector for security issues because you are essentially running software that you yourself do not vet and in a in an emulation machine that runs on top of the phone. So, you know, for a company like Apple, who wants to be super like our securities tight as a drum, that is that is a non negligible access point for for some of that. But it's it's interesting to to note that Apple will kind of come around if you kind of drop the legal hammer. That's right. Yeah. If you're like, hey, anti trust, we're not going away. Apple's like, OK, a couple other things Apple's doing. Clarified that any app, especially a super app, we chat being a good example of that, an app that offers a lot of things within one app can now offer many games as long as they're in HTML5. They can't offer native apps for those games because then you get into sort of a different app store. So there's some limitations there, but again, a concession. And yeah, the FTC is is is probing Apple right now. It's an anti trust lawsuit streaming apps, a big issue. Streaming apps, music streaming, game streaming, you know, a lot of stuff. Apple could still have to, you know, deal with past violations. But the moves that it's making seem to indicate that it just wants a lot of these problems to go away. And, you know, letting letting developers do a little bit more, not the end of the world. You know, Apple still makes a lot of money. They're not in dire straits here. Yeah. So you think, you know, what I'm seeing the rider on the wall, it would be kind of a side note to see if if the judge is like, OK, we see you guys finally gave in, so we're not going to hit you as hard. So give us, you know, a little bit less money for your transgressions. OK, so let's talk about AI and how it all works, Chris. Are you ready? I am ready. I mean, I sometimes I feel like it's Grand Hog Day because every day is a is a fresh hell of AI news. But this is a big New York Times expose of sorts. It dropped over the weekend. This follows up on a Wall Street Journal article that we talked about here on DTNS last week, originally reporting that AI companies, such as Open AI, were maybe not necessarily playing by legality rules while gathering high quality training data. An example was taking data from YouTube videos, you know, using a model to transcribe those videos and use all of what was said in the videos to train models. YouTube said that's a violation of their terms. So he better not have done that. Open AI was a little bit cagey about it. The New York Times now reports that Open AI developed something called the Whisper Audio Transcription Model to transcribe over a million hours of YouTube videos to train GPT-4. That is, at least at this point, its most advanced LLM. Now, Open AI reportedly knew this was legally in a gray area, but believed it to be fair use. That's what the Times says. But the Times sources say Google itself has also gathered transcripts from YouTube for its own training models. The same amount unclear because neither company is really talking about how they're actually doing it and what they're, you know, and what the processes are. But Google had its legal department reportedly tweak its policy language to expand what it could do with consumer data, Google Docs, for example, office tools. The Times also reports that meta, not to be outdone, also discussed unpermitted use of copyright works while working to catch up to Open AI, because that's kind of what everybody else is doing at this point. And, you know, possibly taking steps like paying for book licenses so that it could just, you know, train its models on on books that it had a license to do or even buying a book publisher to just own the data outright and potentially keep other models from being able to scrape that same data. So this is a lot of mumbo jumbo, jumbled up mess. But and the thing that annoys me about it before we get into the fun part of it, but is you can never tell who's doing it because they actually have genuine concerns over user data and who's doing it to slow down the competitor so they can catch up. Right? And, you know, every time you see one of these, like, all right, what's what's in it for you if this, you know, if these lawsuits or these accusations go through. So what that said, you know, this stuff is here. It's not coming. It's here. It's just doing some amazing things already. And so of course, these guys are trying to find as much data to feed it as possible. So yeah, my at first reading when I saw this and I was like, well, of course, Google can use YouTube to feed its AI because they write same company, you know, right? Yeah, but they're both alphabet. Yeah, there is a line in there that I had to reread. And it says that YouTube's Term of Service prohibits use of the videos for applications that are independent of the video platform, which I would then say, oh, OK, well, there's so maybe within their own company, they're saying, hey, if it doesn't feed you to then, you know, you can't use that data. So yeah, so if I upload a YouTube video, which I haven't in quite some time, but, you know, let's just say hypothetically, and, you know, there's, you know, a bunch of, you know, I don't know, I read a poem or I, you know, talk about tech or whatever it is that I'm doing and that audio can be extracted. That, you know, Google is not, you know, again, Terms of Service here, you know, a little bit of a gray area. Google should not be able to take that transcription and use it somewhere else because I have only, you know, allowed. Yeah, you know, we have a handshake agreement on YouTube specifically. Right. Now, obviously, you know, it's Google. So they're going to they're going to push the line a little bit. Open AI using all of that data and Google saying, you know, you can't do that. And again, New York Times reporting like not only did it do it, but it has a tool, you know, to do, to do that specifically. And we're talking like a million hours of audio that can train a model. I think what, what I don't know, what we're getting into here is it's sort of like two things. First is what company is going to sue the other company first, because this is going to be just a, you know, a bleep show. But also we're getting to this kind of like idea of the internet as vast as it is, is also sort of finite for models. You know, it's like, you know, you give the model everything and then you start to get creative. Right. What else can I give it? Yeah, no one's paying attention. I'm going to take a bunch of audio data from YouTube. And I mean, video data as well, I suppose. But that would be a different model than what we're talking about right now. But it's like, you, you know, the models just, they're not going to get better unless you keep feeding them. Right. It's like a, it's like this weird, yeah, like, like feed the beast. Right. So what I'm hoping comes out of this though, and is, is everybody starts to pay more attention to just how important data and your data is to these companies. And we should really start putting more pressure on our representatives to start taking that data more seriously and start putting things in place, more things in place where we have more control over the data, because these guys are all fighting each other for our information and our data that we've, you know, that we're probably just loosely putting up on YouTube and other platforms, not realizing how it's going to be extracted for, you know, other uses. And I'm not saying these uses are nefarious, but, you know, you should probably have a say whether you want your data used in these things. And, you know, the EU definitely has done a way better job of taking that to the forefront. I would just love to see that here. And for people to understand that your data is valuable. Indeed it is. And you might be sitting here listening to us saying, yeah, it is. And I have thoughts. If you have thoughts, you have a lot of different ways that you can get a hold of us. Your feedback is really, really important. You can get in touch with the DTNS audience on The Socials, DTNS Show on X, or Twitter. Mastodon at mstdn.social, Daily Tech News Show on TikTok, and DTNS pics that's PIX on Instagram and threads. All right, Chris. Let's talk about vehicles because this is kind of your wheelhouse. A recent Gallup poll shows that Americans are expressing a serious interest in owning an EV declining from 12% last year to 9% this year. The percentage of those saying they would not consider buying an EV increasing from 41% to 48%. So you have a decline in interest and you have an incline and non-interest. However, the poll also shows a 3% increase in EV ownership, with 7% of those respondents saying they owned an EV versus just 4% a year earlier. Key findings in the poll show that income and age very significant factors in EV ownership and interest in owning an EV as well. Those making over $100,000 or, you know, annually, or in the 18 to 29 years old range had higher rates of EV ownership or interest in EV ownership than people making less or in an older age bracket. This is a really interesting report and it's pretty timely as well because here I am almost coming up on two years of owning my lightning. I find this shift to be rather peculiar, but interesting nonetheless. Why? Because, you know, it seemed like there was way more excitement than there is now. Of course, you got a lot. I still run into people who are like, hey, your truck is awesome. I love all the features of it. It's just not for me. You know, I still run into that all the time. But at the same time, like just yesterday, I was parked at an event and, you know, people are staring at my lightning and then in comes another lightning, which is it's very, it was very rare before for me to see two in the same area. Then what do you do? Like a little dance, you know? No, he was actually. Headlight flashing. We give this off to the lightning nod. You know, it's a secret. It's a secret nod we give to each other. No, just kidding. No, but he was actually kind of staring at my truck because of course my truck is towing, you know, 4,000 pound trailer. So, you know, which is like the, you know, the taboo for electric vehicles. But so, yeah, so I'm starting to see way more lightnings out there. I see Teslas all the time. And of course, this is all anecdotal, but it doesn't really speak to the study. So when we dug into the study a little bit, especially earlier, we're finding that some of the changes make sense, right? Because at this point, if you remember back even when I was looking to buy my truck, there was the talk was that they were marching to the affordable EV and they were going to get prices down. And they were going to get that EV under like $30,000 and blah, blah, blah. And the prices went up, not down. And so it makes perfect sense that you would see a decline in people who are looking to get an electric vehicle because they're just too darn expensive. Ford announced delays on the production of some EV models. Company shifting to more hybrids following the Toyota model, I suppose. Its new EV pickup will be delayed until 2026 and its three-row SUV has been pushed back to 2027. And the company plans to offer hybrid powertrains across its Ford blue lineup by 2030. So, you know, none of this stuff is happening tomorrow, but it's definitely in the works. The company also saw an 11% decline in EV sales in January with the EV lineup losing $4.7 billion in 2023. But Ford does say sales have increased by 86% throughout the entire first quarter versus last year. I don't know, Chris. I mean, when I put all these numbers together, it's like, okay, it seems like a few years ago and, you know, it's not all pandemic stuff, but I think a lot of this was sort of, you know, people trying to think different, right? Like, you know what? It might be time to do some things differently around these parts. I thought, and especially because you just had a lot more options for EVs in general, you got, you know, this influx in interest. And now you see, especially in the used EV market, you know, stuff that would be, I mean, way out of my price range, like not even a conversation where now I could be like, I mean, I'd still have to finance it, but this is actually looking pretty nice. I mean, again, you need, you know, you need a house with, you know, a place to charge and you have to work all that stuff out. But I think most EV owners will say it's not that big a deal. You know, you just get used to it. The way you get used to going to a gas station every once in a while. I think you point out something that is very important. And I think every EV company, except for Tesla, has kind of missed a mark on. And there's still a taboo about charging these EVs. And it's still the number one question I get asked. How long does it take to charge? How do you go on trips? And, you know, and it's all revolves around charging. And I don't think I think they've made steps in the back end to rectify this, you know, the fact that Ford has signed the deal for Chevy and Rivian have signed that deal with Tesla to start using their chargers. I put in my application. I filled out my form so I could get my free adapter and which will solve a lot of problems. But they're just not really talking about this stuff and putting it out there. You know, I would love to see commercials around, hey, charging is not that big a deal. It's not as big a deal as you think it is. You know, they're especially with this Tesla thing coming up. So, you know, Tesla saw the riding on the world. They knew they had to have an infrastructure to support the vehicles. And it was very, very smart of them to get the charge network out there immediately. And, you know, it's also smarter these guys to say, you know what, electrify America is not doing the job. So we're going to just sign with Tesla and start using their chargers. I think it's interesting to what you're talking about, Chris, is that the interest in hybrids have increased. They've taken up that slack, indicating that people do want some sort of electrified vehicle. But hybrid makes sense because you don't have the range anxiety, right? As long as you have, still runs on gas, although it's more efficient. And I also think there's a confluence of factors. Automobiles in general have gotten more expensive, whether they're EV or traditional. If you look at the starting price for a new car, it's around $25,000. You know, excluding the lower end models, which I might add, there are fewer entry-level models available across all the manufacturers than there were 15 years ago. You have maybe a Corolla Nissan Centra, but you don't have the Tercels, the Paseos, you don't have all the cars in the 80s, Hyundai's Excels in the 80s and 90s that people could step up into because they didn't have enough money, right? You could get a Chevy Cavalier for like $15,000. And yeah, it wasn't the greatest car in the world, but it would last you five years, right? And that's five years of worth of getting from point to point AP. But when you're asking people to do this huge step up, I mean, that's a lot of money to ask for someone who just maybe finished college or someone who is still working, you know, a job that isn't giving them a six-figure. Yeah, it's a ton of money. Yeah, if they had gotten these prices down, I think that people, way more people would be more interested in them. And, you know, and I will say this about the hybrid aspect. You know, Rod and I used to talk about hybrid all the time and he said something to me that has always stuck with me. And I'm not against hybrids, but you should understand that if you decide to go hybrid, you're getting the worst of both worlds, right? So all the stuff that you have to worry about with the electric vehicle you have there and all the stuff that you have to worry about with the gas-powered vehicle, you have there, right? You got to get oil changes. You got to get transmission fluid, all that stuff because it all exists, right? So it's not, you know, so the only thing really to me that hybrid solves is anxiety, but it must be important enough for people that they're like, you know what, we'll put these, continue to develop these hybrids because, you know, we can sell them and people have less, less worry. But you would think that if you guys just start marketing that charge, like I told the story like when I drove to Tennessee and I stopped, plugged in my truck to get charged. I went to the bathroom, grabbed a coffee, grabbed a snack, came out and my truck was almost uncharging. It's not, you know, this is not all the cases, but charging is way faster than people think it is, especially nowadays at the, you know, bigger charges. Of course there are slower charges out there that still exist, but these fast charges that they're putting in, they're pretty darn fast. You know, back in the day, a friend of mine had a Model S Tesla and he was one of the, you know, he was on the very early side. There weren't a lot of Tessels around and we took a trip from San Francisco to LA and we, you know, had to stop and charge halfway there. And like we had to, I mean, it was fun, but we had to like go into a restaurant, have dinner for like an hour, you know, in order to be able to, you know, make the rest of our trip. It's very different now. Yeah. And I tell people that, you know, it's not you, a lot of, most people don't just stop to get gas. You know, they're like, I'm going to stop here, get gas and keep going on the trip. They get out of the car to stretch their legs. They go eat, they drink, you know, they go to the bathroom. They, you know, chit chat, whatever. And by the time, and I'm telling you, within that 20 minutes, you may be halfway charged, you know, because most of the times you're going to stop, you're not stopping at zero and you're not charging all the way back to a hundred, right? Right, right. In that band. I mean, unless you're living on the edge. Right. Right. Right. Which I did. I mean, I'll tell you, my car often tells me like 10 miles left until you're completely out of gas. And I'm like, so I have 10 miles. It's like 10 miles plus a lot of driving in the car. Oh boy. Yeah. Right. Especially in, you know, I live in a city. 10 miles. It gave me a lot of places. All right. Let's check out the mail bag. Mohan wrote in, uh, that he was listening to Friday's episode. He says, this morning I was listening during my workout and someone, maybe Tom mentioned there was a podcast app before Google podcasts. And in fact, there was Mohan says, I used it. It worked in conjunction with Google reader. RIP. It was called Google listen. You would drop an RSS feed into reader and then listen to episodes with listen, which was in sync with reader. This was around the buzz out loud era. So mid 2000s. Mohan says, that's how I consume my podcast before the demise of reader. And since then I've migrated to pocket cast and have stayed on it ever since. Um, Chris, what is your podcast app of choice? I'm almost ashamed to say I just use the default Apple podcast. It's, oh, don't be ashamed. I mean, same. Yeah, because, you know, I would think that as a tech guy, I'd probably find the coolest thing. But honestly, most of the time I'm listening to podcasts, I'm in my vehicle. You know, I'm not, I love listening to podcasts or tons of them I listen to, but I don't, I don't, you know, they're not playing while I'm doing most other things. They're mostly when I'm driving. Uh, so, you know, the default app is good enough for me. I don't need to stop one location and pick up in another location and those cool features that exist. I just needed to download it, have it ready and let me listen to it when when the time comes. Well, when you're not listening to podcasts, what are you doing and how can people keep up with you? Well, when I'm not listening, you know, sometimes I'm creating them. Yeah. And by all means, even though we're not recording as often as we were before, we're still putting out episodes of barbecue and tech and SMR podcast. New episodes of both are going up this week. Uh, yeah. So come check us out. You know, I'm starting to incorporate conversations about starting the new uh, barbecue and tech food truck business, uh, on the end of on the show and you know, the new techniques and things I'm learning on there. So come check it out if you want to hear some cool barbecue stories. Excellent. Patrons do stick around for our extended show, Good Day Internet. We're going to talk about if Microsoft is finally ready to go head to head with Apple's M3 chips because Microsoft says, yes, we are ready. We'll discuss. And also maybe we'll discuss some solar eclipse stuff. You know, it's like a really small thing that happened today that only like three people know about, but we'll discuss it. But just a reminder, you can also catch our show live Monday through Friday, 4pm Eastern. That's 2100 UTC and you can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We're back tomorrow explaining Google's just launched find my device network with Ron Richards joining us. He should know. Talk to you then.