 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by you, the listeners. Thanks to all of you, DeGracia A. Daniels, Irwin Sterr, Ken Hayes, and everybody welcome our brand new patron, Sean. Welcome, Sean. Sean, you're helping to make Molly Wood Fridays happen. On this episode of DTNS, Scott Johnson explains why Summer Games Fest has replaced E3, plus why the EU is threatening to break up Google's ad business and journalists have to compete with TikTok stars now. Sorry, that's just the way it is. Journalists, get your dance shoes on. This is the Daily Tech News for June 14th, 2023 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Grimace, the giant taste bud. I'm Sarah Lane from Salt Lake City. I'm Scott Johnson and I'm the show's producer, Roger J. Sarah outing herself as believing the taste bud theory on Grimace from McDonald's. You never know. You know, I just I just take it aside. I like having some fun with the studios these days. We have a Grimace related story in the rundown, ladies and gentlemen. I hope we don't have to cut it. Let's get right to things then and start with the quick hits. Amazon Web Services or AWS is world's biggest cloud computing provider. And during an AMD event this week, Amazon exec Dave Brown said that the company is considering using M.I. 300 AI chips from AMD. Brown told Reuters that the company hasn't made a final decision just yet, but that AWS declined to work with NVIDIA on its DGX cloud offering. Now, AWS has been selling NVIDIA's H100 chip since March, but as part of systems of its own design. Another another example, two days in a row, AMD coming for NVIDIA. Interesting to watch. The European Commission has formally complained against Google in a new antitrust filing that Google abused its dominant position in the digital ad market. Google operates ad placement on its own sites as well as ad exchanges that place ads on other sites. In fact, they operate something in all parts of the advertising chain. In a preliminary opinion, the EC says that the only remedy might be to force Google to sell off parts of its ad business if it's found guilty. That is not yet a recommendation, just a possibility that was raised in the complaint. Google, of course, disagrees with all of this, saying the complaint is bogus because the digital advertising world is a highly competitive sector. Look at Facebook or something. Google now has a chance to respond to the complaint in writing and request a hearing, which they will do, and which they will then defend themselves and see what happens. Vodafone and CK Hutchinson have agreed to merge their UK mobile businesses and a deal that if it goes through would create the biggest wireless company in the region if regulators approve it. The deal would have Vodafone owning 51 percent of the new company and CK Hutchinson, which is based in Hong Kong and operates the network three in the UK owning the other 49 percent. Vodafone would have clearance to acquire the merged entity after three years. If at that point the business reaches a value of at least 16.5 pounds, a billion pounds, rather, not 16.5 pounds, that would be in your pocket right now or it's kind of the equivalent of 20.9 billion US dollars, that would be including debt as well. The deal is expected to close before the end of 2024. Oh, three and Vodafone merging. One more down, one less competitor in the UK. OpenAI released new versions of GPT 3.5 Turbo and GPT-4, including a capability called function calling company explained in a blog post that function calling lets developers describe programming functions to the model GPT 3.5 Turbo or GPT-4 and then have those models create code to execute those functions that can be used to help create chatbots that answer questions that can call external tools and like check on a database or an API or something, convert natural language into database queries and poll structured data from text. OpenAI also announced that it's reducing the price. If you've been waiting for the price to go down, here you go. GPT 3.5 Turbo is 25 percent off for now. And they reduce the price for the OpenAI text embedding model as well. If you use that. Good news for Pixel Watch users, you can now get an at a glance complication on your watch if you choose the rectangular complication slot of the modular two or modular three layouts of the utility watch face could also work for a third party watch face as well. So you choose allow assistant to access your calendar and then you can get day and date with an icon for current weather conditions and temperatures and will likely be able to do other stuff like show upcoming events with a countdown nine to five Google says they weren't able to replicate that just yet, but expect that to work. Also noted that at a glance was not part of the June 2023 pixel feature drop, so this appears to be a new little gift, or maybe it just wasn't ready. And when the announcement. Pixel must. All right, the European Union's European Parliament has passed a draft of a law known as the AI Act. So this is the last thing before it gets reconciled and becomes law. Here's some of the highlights in it. The Act bans the use of AI for predictive policing. Real time biometric ID in public like facial recognition. Emotion recognition for law enforcement, border management or workplace uses. And it also bans untargeted scraping of images from the internet or closed circuit television to create a facial recognition database. Can't just do the big wide net thing anymore. It categorizes applications by risk as well. So for example, video games and spam filters are in the lowest risk category. Apps that use AI to evaluate your credit risk or decide whether to issue well alone are examples in the highest risk category. And those are where the strictest controls would be applied. Social media recommender systems, as they call it, were added to the high risk category as well. If you're in that highest risk, you will have to meet all the requirements for transparency. So anything about what copyrighted data was used for training. This particularly applies to chatbots like chat GPT and requires companies to disclose when content was generated by a machine model. So you have to say if you're giving someone content, hey, we used AI to make this. It also requires preventions against the generation of illegal, racist or biased content. In other words, you have to show that you're doing something to try to stop it. EU competition chief Margaret Vestier told the BBC, probably the risk of extinction may exist because they asked her about it. But I think the likelihood is quite small. I think the AI risks are more that people will be discriminated against. The AI act now heads to the last step, reconciliation. That's where the European Parliament, the EU Council and the European Commission all kind of agree on their versions of the draft. That is usually not a problem. That means it's 99 percent going to become law. They just had to figure out how to dot the I's across the T's. However, that means you probably won't see this come into effect until 2025. So they'll pass the law, maybe the end of this year, maybe the beginning of next year and then the dated actually goes into effect because they always give a little running time for people to get up to speed and get ready to enforce it usually around a year. This also comes a day after Ireland's data protection authority put the roll out of Google's chatbot Bard on hold. The authority said it needed to see details on how Google is protecting user data before they can let that roll out. So not exactly related to this this law, but the kind of thing that would be regulated by this law. You know, I was trying to go ahead, Scott. I was just going to throw out there that I find nothing about this to be a bad idea. I think all of these things are smart. I think that I hope at least what I hope anyway is all the big AI companies, the companies involved in it, the industry at large adopts a lot of this stuff anyway. These kinds of protections, this kind of thinking around it. And a lot of them are and they've already said said as much. But I can't there's really hardly anything here. Usually I look at the European stuff and there's something going on. I go, that's a little overreachy. That seems like maybe that's a little too far. I don't feel that way here. I feel like these are these are practical, smart things that we should probably put in place sooner than later. And why not have it start in the EU? That's all be like. I was I'm kind of in your camp. I was trying to pick this apart, trying to figure out like, OK, where are they going astray with this? And for the most part, this is really great for privacy. You know, you know, citizen privacy where I think the the the law, should it go into law, might have some issues is things like generation of illegal racist or bias content. Well, illegal, OK, you know, the law is the law, right? Racist and bias content, especially when it comes to a lot of these these new tools can be in the eye of the beholder a little bit. You know, if if if if it runs a fell of law, then that is one thing. If a company, for example, you know, you know, open AI says, OK, well, we're working on, you know, you know, bias in our product and the EU says, well, you're not working well enough, you know, then what happens? So, you know, that's that's kind of where I see this becoming a potential issue going forward. Otherwise, I am with you. I think most of the stuff sounds pretty on point. Yeah, they the it's it's important to know because that's a really good point that the law will not make it like a findable offense if any illegal content gets generated by accident. What they want to see are you are making a good faith effort to implement safeguards in your models that that try to say, you know what, let's let's reduce the racist content. Let's reduce the illegal content. Let's let's reduce the chances, not reduce the content, reduce the chances. I think it's reasonable to say, like, look, these things are going to be unpredictable. And sometimes that might still happen, as long as you can show you're working on it and putting in safeguards, which both Google and open AI have been very upfront about saying they're doing. Then it is your points is well taken, Sarah, the the devils in the details. What do you consider bias? And what do you consider preventing bias is is is going to be up for debate. And I'm not looking at the actual text of the law yet to tell what that is. But but as far as that goes, I do think that that can be done reasonably to say, like, look, we just need to make sure you're putting in the effort to make some guardrails. We don't expect it to be perfect. On the other hand, you can say that about every single part of this. We don't know what the dangers of these these models are. These seem reasonable. They may be entirely ineffective. They may do nothing to prevent the things because we just don't know. I'm glad on the one hand that we're getting ahead of the issue, right, that we're not waiting for there to be a bunch of damage before we start to talk about the best practices. On the other hand, this may not be enough. And best of your even acknowledge that. She's like, look, it's better to do something than not to do anything. So we're going to try this and see how it goes. And that that made me feel a little better about that, too. Well, this year's Reuters Institute digital news reports, an annual report, shows that when it comes to news content and how we all digest it, more of it than ever is being consumed through platforms like TikTok. That would be over legacy media like a newspaper or an online newspaper or television, average data across the 46 countries that were surveyed in the annual report, so that search and other aggregators have also increased at least slightly over time, probably not all that surprising. Younger users less likely to go directly to a new site or an app and more likely to use social media for their news. Yeah, let's look at a few of these numbers. In all age groups, Facebook in particular is declining as a source of news. Facebook itself has been de-emphasizing news, so that probably shouldn't be a shocker. Twenty eight percent surveyed say they accessed news using Facebook in 2023. That's down from 42 percent in 2016. TikTok is growing the fastest for news consumption. It's being used by 44 percent of 18 to 24 year olds around the world in general. And by 20 percent of that age group for news with the heaviest use in parts of Asia, Latin America and Africa. So, Scott, the article in the conversation about this report says, and I'm going to quote, younger groups expect news to be engaging, participatory and be available on their terms. That's why they're looking forward on TikTok more often. So now's your opportunity to expel them from your lawn. Do journalists have to compete with celebrities and influencers? Well, this old guy in his lawn are going to surprise some people. I agree with the kids on this. I think that this genie is out of the bottle. Nobody wants to sit down with the Wall Street Journal in their 20s and go, all right, let's look at the long form version of this story, and I'm not going to be able to interact with it, comment on it or do anything really much other than read it, consume it and think about it. I think that is just changed and it's changed to a degree that there really is no going back. And you see some traditional news personalities or I shouldn't call them personalities, journalists who have pivoted pretty well. I think of like Ben Collins, who's got a big social media imprint, just won a big award. He's controversial in some ways, but he's a news guy who disseminates news, but does it in this way. He gets out in front of it. He does these kinds of videos, their short form, their interactive as much as they can be. And he interacts with his readers, you know, slash fans. I guess we have to call them that now. I think that that's just the way it is, whether we like it or not, is a whole different question, but I do think that if the traditional news or journalism in general wants to compete for the ears and eyes of people today, they have to adopt these new methods of doing it. And if they don't, they will get lost in the shuffle. I mean, it might even be, I'd look at TikTok and think, well, how would I get my news from TikTok? And I guess you can go and do a search and there's an option for, you know, they have categories in all of them's news so you can look at news stuff. But for the most part, people are flicking through there and getting whatever the algorithm gives them. And sometimes that can be news. You know, I'd be, I'm very curious about the actual day to day consumption. Like there's more to that story than I think we have here. I think a lot of it is search, too. Like people go like, oh, I heard about a thing. Let me look on TikTok for the answer. Yeah. And I think that they're YouTube, you know, is a similar beast and certainly had a similar impact early on where people are like, well, I don't want to read a article about it. I'd rather listen to this talking head, explain it because I like that guy. And he's funny and he says this and I like his voice. There are other factors now other than just reporting, truth, a couple of photos and your story's over. There's more that people expect. And I just think I use the genie in the bottle example and I really believe it. I think that's just that's just where we're at. And there's no going back. So it kind of it. This reminds me of, you know, the term citizen journalism being thrown around. Let's use Twitter as an example, right? You know, oh, you know, people are on the ground, you know, you know, real time videos, that sort of stuff. That still happens. That happens in a lot of places, you know, but it was sort of eschewed as, well, you know, you know, these aren't real journalists. We don't know who these people are. You know, what if they're, you know, there's media manipulation going on. Because, you know, these aren't trusted sources. I am pretty old school when it comes to the idea of trusted sources. That's just the way that I was taught. The other day, a friend of mine who's in her 50s, but she has a 10 year old, was talking to me about researching something on TikTok. And I was like, well, how do you research like a medical topic on TikTok? And she says, well, you just, you know, use the right keywords and 100 videos come up and you learn all sorts of things. And she is not the only person who has described that to me. I am still in that like, sounds crazy. Is this really how we're doing this right now? But at the same time, news organizations can have TikTok accounts. You know, this is, it all feels like the next wave of the citizen journalism thing that could be, you know, an old, you know, it could be a newspaper outlet. It could be me. It could be you. It could be somebody, you know, who has an agenda, you know, and you have to try to filter that out or at least take that into consideration. But it doesn't mean that it's not good news. It's just it's just a new era. No, Wayne's is saying in our chat, anyone else get really annoyed when they can only find videos when you're looking for a how to and not a written article. Yes, oh, my God, V responded. Yes, all the time. We just dated ourselves. Yeah, absolutely. We're like, you know exactly what demo all four of us, all five of us are in because of that, because that doesn't bother a lot of other people. And in fact, my wife is one of them. She she looks for stuff on TikTok all the time for answers, recipes and things. She hands me TikTok for recipes and then I have to sit there and let it loop and I get annoyed because I'm like, why don't I just have written instructions? It's just it's just a difference in the way these things are. And when I see the the fights between the publishers and Google and Facebook over paying for carrying news, I think y'all are fighting a war that's over. The there is no law that can force people to go to websites and read the read the content. This is just a new way that people are behaving now. And you're going to have to deal with it. You could you could ignore it to your own peril or you can go niche or you can embrace it. But but the fact of the matter is what this writer's story is showing is that this this is the way people are choosing to consume things now. And that doesn't mean we should kill printvert journalism or that, you know, that we should give up on it. But it is occupying a different portion of the mindset that it used to. They still have short memories. They've forgotten that this this exact same sort of disruption happened when they came around. So just go look. I mean, I'm still just to just to I mean, not to date myself necessarily. But I think brains process things in lots of different ways. I still when I want directions and I get into my car, I'm going somewhere I've never been before, I want to see a list of where I turn and on what street. I don't want it to just tell me on the fly. That's fine. And I get that. It's very helpful, you know, but like that that's just one example of, you know, the same sort of person saying like, I don't want a video for a recipe. Just show me the recipe. Yeah, yeah, that's that's me. Yeah, it doesn't make me right. No, me either. It's just nobody's right or wrong. I think we have more options than ever. And that's a better way to look at it. Exactly. All right, folks. Listen, we have a goal. We want to get Molly Wood on the show more often. I know a lot of you want that. Those of you who are patrons and want that, you're doing the right thing. But we need to hit four thousand paid patrons by June 29th to make it happen. That's 28 new patrons a day because we're only 15 days away. So if you've been like, oh, yeah, I've been meaning to do that. Now's the time. Make Molly Fridays happen at patreon.com slash D T N S. Well, Jeff Keeley's summer game fest took place last week and set some records. So it's no surprise that the fest officially announced it will return in June of 2024. Now, a lot of folks consider this solidifying SGF, as it's known, as the heir apparent to E3. Now, E3 has been a little rocky over the last couple of years. Some people say E3 is gone for good. Scott, explain to the fine folks what summer game fest is and how it differs from E3 or or how it's similar. Well, in a lot of ways, it is similar. And this being that this being kind of the death knell E3 year where the three folks basically said, yeah, we're canceling everything and they did it in relatively short amount of time before the actual event. I think it was only about a month or month and a half ago, something of that effect and that a lot of people go on. Well, of course, it's it's ending. Nobody wants that anymore. But it turns out we want something and Jeff Keeley and his people have stepped in and provided not just one, but a couple of ways of doing this. Essentially, this is a two times a year thing, even though they're structured differently, you have games fest that just happen and they have the game awards toward the end of the year. And both of them are kind of focused in the same way. One happens to have some awards almost as a side note, but they're both about big reveals and hey, you didn't heard of this game coming or we've got a release date for game you were watching. These kinds of things have now become common at his event at this event. And I say his he's got a good team working on it now, so it's not like he's doing this out of his basement. But I watched the entire thing top to bottom and it was good this year. One thing you remember, though, when you're watching these part of the reason E3 suffers is because E3 was never really great at figuring out how to properly monetize everything they charge for booth space. They had other ways of doing it, but the revenue model is a little bit busted. And so when you watch games fest, you might feel like you're getting commercialed a little bit and you are like. Jeff Keely will often show a cool new reveal of a brand new game. And then right after that, do an ad for, I don't know, DoorDash or something. And he did this time. Actually, it was literally a DoorDash commercial in the middle of it. The audience even laughed like it's still it's a more communal kind of fun way of doing it. But at the end of the day, they're paying bills. They have commercials for Samsung TV or monitors that come on during it. Yeah, it's a show, not a show. Exactly. It's not really a conference, but they get the right points and they hit them, hit them well. For example, we hadn't even heard of this new Prince of Persia 2D game called The Lost Crown. We didn't even know it was coming. So this is a 2D Metrovania style game that is very much a throwback to the origins of Prince of Persia. Some of my fellow oldies will know what that was like. And this was the first glimpse we got of that. So that was a big deal. This new Sonic game, which appears to be aimed directly at Sonic purists from the old days and the new and hands on says that thing's really great. People have been playing it and say it's it's awesome. And again, first time view here, a major company with a major announcement happening only at Game Fest and it used to be reserved for E3 stage stage moments. This is the this is the show where I found out that John Carpenter, famed horror filmmaker, extraordinaire, is working on a video game called Toxic Commando, or at least he's involved. We don't quite know how involved, but I assume it's his concept and they ran with it, some sort of zombie shooter thing. But, you know, again, a cool thing to hear about Nick Cage came out on stage and talked about a game that he's going to be appearing in. He's in Dead by Daylight, which is a already. Wait, Nicholas Cage, Nicholas Cage, not Nick Cage. Not Nick Cage. Sorry, Nicholas Cage. Yeah, yeah. He. Scott, you know, he's he's pretty familiar with Nick Cage. Yeah. So for a second, I thought you bit John Cage, so that's why I had to go or Nick Fury. Who knows where I was going? But anyway, he came out and was charming and funny. And he's coming up in some DLC. It's kind of a small thing, but a big get to get him on stage. So that was very cool. A bunch of games we already knew about that we're already excited about. More got shown of those. Space Marine 2's co-op got revealed and super stoked about that. And maybe the biggest get of all. And this is one thing that sets the show apart. Nobody else quite has this with the exception of Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, with their own separate showcases, which they do throughout the year. This is easily a follow up to that. And that was Final Fantasy 7 Rebirths. Finally, we got a view or we knew this was in the making because we've already played the first part of that game. But this follow up, the second part called Rebirth, got shown here. We have footage, we have some story content, some gameplay content. That is a massive, massive get because people are really, really hot on that follow up and not since maybe 1990, you know, the late 90s with the original Final Fantasy 7, have I seen this kind of fervor for that sort of thing? So anyway, a lot of those kinds of announcements and reveals, which is very healthy for an event like this, they also encourage people to co-stream it, which I was very appreciative of. They want you to do that for them. So they kind of pull out all the stops to make that possible. So bottom line for me is this is an event maybe paired with the game awards that have proved individually and together to draw a big audience. They had record breaking audience this time versus last year. And I think this method of delivery is, you know, we talk about TikTok and how people get their news. This is this is how we do game news releases, industry stuff. Now, this is just how it gets disseminated, whether we like it or not. The old stage way can still be fun and we can find ways to do it. But at the end of the day, specials like this are the way it's going to happen. And the many in person events that happen all around the country and the world every year, those can keep happening as a complement to this, not a contrast to this. And there's even rumors that Jeff Keely and crew are considering some kind of physical con. Those are rumors only and I've thought a bunch about this. And I think it makes perfect sense that they could tie that together. No word on that, maybe in a year or two. But all signs point to this is the way people want to go. I think Jeff is very smart about this sort of thing and is perfectly suited to be sort of the leadership behind it to make it happen. And I think people should check out, you know, go look at the archive. It was really well produced this year. They did a good job. Well, a small fast food joint you'd probably never heard of McDonald's. Scott. Yeah, yeah, I know it's it's I never heard of it either. I launched a 2D retro game, Scott, I thought you'd like this that stylized like a Game Boy color, you know, the Game Boy that was in color in celebration of legacy McDonald's mascot Grimace's 52nd birthday. Yes, Grimace is 52. McDonald's and cruel KROOL toys embedded at the website Grimace's birthday.com. So you can play it on desktop or mobile. You control Grimace. He's on a skateboard as he searches for his missing friends. He wants to get enough milkshakes for his birthday party. And yes, if you're wondering, there is a ROM. So you can port it to Game Boy emulators as well. Yeah, this is the thing. I played this briefly. It's fine. It's fine. Like I kind of miss the days. Is it supposed to be anything but fine? I mean, it is. But what it is, is it's a very it's very much like hey, 90s kids. We remember you and Gen Z and even younger are all like into Y2K 90s-ish stuff. So I think it's playing on that too. Oh, big time. Yeah. I mean, I just bought a brand new little game system that runs old Nintendo Game Boy games and, you know, there's there's nothing wrong with a little nostalgia. It's just a little weird in 2023 that there's a grimace video game. It's a very. I thought the same thing. In fact, I asked a couple of my friends who are just more into gaming than I am. I was like, is this cool? And a friend of mine, you know, within like five seconds sent me an eBay link to an unopened Game Boy color that's going for like $18,000 or something crazy. Now, of course, if you had one in a drawer as a kid and you still have it, it's not going to be worth that. But I was like, no, no, no, that isn't really my question. My question is, do we want to play the grimace game? And again, I don't think that's really the point. The point is that it's possible. Yeah, not that it's really the best game ever. Grimace revival going on that McDonald's is leaning into because you don't celebrate his 52nd birthday for, you know, like that's Grimace has become a meme somehow recently. Grimace is meme material. And I probably always was, but I feel like now is the time. It's like Shrek and other things. They hit a certain age and people go, oh, let's make this the meme. Nobody's talking about Mary Maccheese. Nobody cares about the fry guys. Nobody's talking about the camp burglar. We care about grimace. The fry guys. Now, where are them? Where are they? Hamburglar. Actually, I've heard a little. There's a little bit of hamburger rub, please. Well, you know, you never know how you're, you know, going to kind of strike a nerve. So Grimace, happy 52nd and to many more. Also, thanks to you, Scott Johnson, whether it's your birthday or not, we are always glad to have you on the show. Let folks know we're then keep up with the rest of your work. Well, my big purple life happens over at frogpants.com. And in particular, the show called Core, where we are going to talk a lot about what happened at Summer Games Fest, not just that, but Microsoft's big event that happened over the weekend, along with the Starfield demo and so much more going on right now in games. You can also get status on what happened to Bo, my co-host, who is aiming for hardcore 100 levels in Diablo 4 to get on a statue permanently at Blizzard. And he did it. He was in the top 300. Yeah, amazing. So find out about all of that and all the cool stuff we have to say about the new lineup of games we've been shown this summer over at frogpants.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Now, folks, I hope we have distracted you somewhat from the absence of Reddit in your life as more than 8500 subreddits are still blacked out. Stick around patrons or become a patron and then go get the rest of the episode. Good day, internet. That Reddit blackout shows, no signs of stopping. And Apollo developer Christian Selleck gave an interview to The Verge that answered almost all my questions about why this is happening. The only one I have left is why so mad, Steve Huffman. But we're going to discuss all that. You can catch our show live Monday through Friday, 4 p.m. Eastern 20 hundred UTC and you can find out more at daily technewshow.com slash live. We're back doing it all again tomorrow with Justin Rubber Young joining us. Don't miss it. See you then. This show is part of the frogpants network. Get more at frogpants.com. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.