 Coming up on DTNS, a big science project takes shape. Automation continues to shape the labor market. And how could a new U.S. digital regulator shape the future? This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, May 24th, 2021. From Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. From lovely Cleveland, Ohio, I'm Rich Strafilino. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Also joining us today, Nate Langson. Hello, Nate, welcome back. Thank you for having me once again. I'm returning like an annual common cold. But much more frequently, thank goodness. No, it's great to have you. And I heard the weather's been somewhat non balmy over in your neck of the woods lately. Yeah, it's lame. It's the only thing I can say. It's lame. Besides, besides weather, which we always talk about before the show, we were also talking about fizzy water and soda and seltzer and soda water and what lemonade is in the UK and all sorts of stuff. If you want that wider conversation on our expanded show, Good Day Internet, you can get it by becoming a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Reuters reported it has seen a letter sent Friday from India's Information Technology Ministry to social media companies, asking them to take down any content that refers to an Indian variant of the coronavirus. Coronavirus variant B1617 was first identified in India last year, but the ministry says the who has not associated the term Indian variant with the B1617 variant of the coronavirus in any of its reports. The smartphone maker Honor confirmed that its new Honor 50 series will come pre-installed with Google services running Honor's Magic UI on top of Android with a Snapdragon 778G chipset. Honor was spun off from Huawei last year and is therefore no longer impacted by US sanctions that caused Google to revoke Huawei's Android license. All right, in global chip shortage, not getting worse news, TSMC announced it will increase auto chip output by 60% in 2021, representing a 30% increase over the 2019 pre-pandemic levels. That's good. However, in global chip shortage, potentially deepening news, Taiwan's director general of Taipei's cultural and economic office in New York warned that a sudden rise in community transmission of COVID-19 in Taiwan may further exacerbate the ongoing chip shortage. The country previously had zero reported cases of community transmission for the last eight months and it now has over 700 reported since May 9th. About 1% of Taiwan's population is vaccinated. The FBI issued a flash alert that the ransomware group behind an attack on the Irish healthcare system also targeted at least 16 healthcare and emergency networks in the US, including police and 911 dispatch centers. The threat actors used the Conti ransomware attempting to both lockout and extort victims with potential data leaks. The FBI didn't identify specific victims or say if any organizations paid a ransom. And the Chinese short video platform Kaishou reported a net loss of 57.8 billion yuan, that's about 8.98 billion US dollars in Q1, up 89% on the year. That is the loss increase, even as revenue increased 37% on the year to 17 billion yuan. Arrival to ByteDance-owned Doyin, Kaishou saw slowing monthly active user growth as well, up 5% of the year to 520 million users with advertising now surpassing tips and virtual gifts as its top source of revenue. All right, let's talk a little bit more about science. Big science. Fact, that's actually the name of the project. A group of more than 500 researchers have signed on to the Big Science Project, an effort led by the startup Hugging Face, which is just a great name. Props to you to build an open-source large language model to better understand natural language processing. This is taking an open science approach with a goal of sharing all resources with the greater scientific community. Now under the project, all researchers will focus for a year on answering how and when these LLMs should be developed and deployed to gain their benefits without known harmful consequences. The Big Science Project will look at things like the environmental cost of ever increasing number of LLMs, how to responsibly source training data rather than just scraping the web and developing multi-linguality. The goal is not to create a commercial product, rather, but create publicly documented research to understand all of the pieces of an LLM impact and its generated outcomes. This is really a fascinating project and it kind of takes an interesting idea almost like a software development sprint, but for scientific research, and this may be common, I won't pretend to be super familiar with like scientific research, but this idea of, hey, these are things that are becoming increasingly pervasive. We have things like GPT-3, we have Google just announced their Lambda LLM that they're gonna kind of integrate across all of their services. And there's a lot of organizations that are really anxious to use these startups funding all sorts of efforts in this regard. And with a lot of these kind of neural network machine learning kind of interfaces, a lot of it is for a lot of businesses like a black box, you put stuff in, stuff comes out, and if it works, it gives you business value. Don't ask a lot of questions. It's really good to see, okay, that we have no commercial benefit to this and we just need to figure out, come at this from many different angles, like the environmental cost. I've never heard that discussed in these kind of systems. Training data has kind of been top of mind when a lot of these ethical AI discussions. So really an interesting model to kind of provide a really great research corpus for these models as they continue to gain popularity. Yeah, and I think that the idea of things being open sourced and not necessarily being developed for a commercial purpose will help some of those unknown unknowns be figured out. Particularly as we've seen a lot of examples in the past of AI, let's say, well, we've certainly seen racist AI. We've certainly seen an awful lot of discriminatory AI based on the models that they're trained on. And I think that it's the kind of thing that the more people are able to share and build on each other's work, the more reliable these tools are gonna be, which can only be a good thing. And it's the kind of thing that only works when it's open. So I'm massively in favor of this. Yeah, I agree. I think that large language models, LLMs, you figure, okay, well, the more research, the better. And that's kind of what it sounds like the big science project is about, but in the sense of, okay, well, where are they being deployed, right? How big are they? Who then would like to use them? Something like multilinguality, for example, is a great example of, okay, well, let's say that there was a model and it worked well, but it was pretty fluent in like a single language. Now, is that going to influence how it is used and by whom it is used in the future and can scientists work together to make sure it's as inclusive as possible and is able to reach as many scientists as possible? And I wonder if this is not related, but I wonder if this is an impact. We had a story on Daily Tech headlines about Alphabet's Deep Mind had kind of been seeking greater autonomy and those discussions had reportedly been shut down. And their kind of whole thing was, we wanna take a part of, we wanna be able to do more things to kind of benefit the overall science community when it comes to AI research using more of a nonprofit kind of structure. It ends up not kind of working out. This seems to be maybe an answer to that, address the same kind of concerns that I guess Deep Mind reportedly had. Indeed. All right, next up, Facebook's Vice President of Global Affairs and former UK Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg wrote an op-ed for CNBC calling for US lawmakers to create a new digital regulator. Clegg says it could have, this regulator would have oversight of content, data and economic impact in the digital space comparing it to the US Federal Communications Commission's oversight of telecoms and broadcasters. So an FCC for digital essentially. Clegg also outlined for the areas for lawmakers to address, not surprisingly, reforming section 230 was included, kind of a common call that we've seen from a number of platforms and stakeholders now. Clegg called on the continued protection from liability for platforms with robust capabilities for identifying and removing illegal content. Clegg also called for transparency, accountability and oversight of any removal of content. He also called on Congress to create a strong deterrence against something called influence operations, organizations that intentionally mislead or erode public trust. This includes transparencies for when these are discovered but also mechanisms for lawful information sharing on these organizations and the ability to impose liability on the organizations carrying them out rather than the platforms, aka potentially Facebook. Third was also a call for federal privacy regulation. Clegg called on a sensible middle ground where some progress could be made despite maybe partisan rumblings on either side of the aisle. And fourth was a call for data portability standards to give consumers a better chance to vote with their feet on services rather than be locked in. That last one absolutely fascinates me because we're sitting here on the anniversary of GDPR. Everybody's favorite internationally observed annoyance. That's had some good results in some ways but we're at the, I think maybe fourth year anniversary maybe even five but it's certainly a few years right this week I believe. And the data portability is one that I've always thought that's right for being used in a better way. Like if you can essentially say, well, this is all the information or profiling and everything that a business has about me that I've given over the years. If I have an ability to move that to one of their competitors, then maybe the competitor sees my data as valuable that has an actual dollar or pound or whatever currency value attached to it which could result in discounts or promotions that you get by moving over. But we've not really seen any use of that because the standards that are required are not implemented. And so a move like this would be brilliant if it works. I think we've seen over the last four years or so that there seems to be very, very little incentive for a business to want to implement this whether or not this could be essentially legislated for in some way will be a very interesting one to watch but I've not seen any evidence that they're being appetite for that particular bit yet. I also thought the idea of deterring influence operations on platforms was interesting. The way that Clegg, if I understand this correctly the way that Clegg is describing it is, okay, let's say there's an organization that is existing on a particular platform in order to mislead the public or to a road public trust. Okay, I can think of a few examples of things that I've seen that would fall into that category but instead of, and let's say I read this on Twitter instead of it being Twitter that comes under fire for allowing this content to the organization that posted it, saying you knew better than to go to a social media platform and spread all this misinformation and I know that does happen to some extent already but to kind of bypass the platform as, you know, again platforms is just a tool they didn't do anything kind of that would create some interesting scenarios I think. I think these play into a lot of what Facebook has been telling at least in US testimony kind of its advantages in scale in that by being able to be this massively scalable operation they do have the ability to sort content identify and remove illegal content and they can show that they've removed however many millions or billions of posts related to that and then, you know, and have the mechanisms to kind of audit regularly and the scale to do so and the same thing for these kind of influence offerings I think this is playing to Facebook strength we've seen a couple of security stories coming out where Facebook's helping to disrupt, you know hacking groups or groups that are tied back believe to a state actor or something like that and advance persistent threats is the lingo there so a lot of these are already like clags like hey we should have legislation that plays to a lot of the things that we're already really good at the thing that kind of stands out to me in terms of the data portability Facebook has made at least token passes on this in that they are part of the data portability project they are increasingly letting you get some of your like personal media and stuff to transfer between services now that's different than just being able to click download and get like, you know, a big zip file or something like that at least maybe content that doesn't have long term value for them they'll let you get out of the platform I will be interested, you know, there's Clegg was very wanted to talk about like non-partisan solutions let's find middle ground let's bring people both sides of the aisle together he's wants a regulator modeled off the US FCC which at times can has a history of being a very, very, very partisan institution depending on who's president at the time so I do have to wonder how much that regulator could operate, you know, in a sensible middle ground you know, and well, who knows if there is appetite for adding more regulators at the federal level at this point. Well, if you follow the automobile industry and especially if you follow the EV automobile industry you probably didn't miss the news last week that Ford had revealed a lot of details about the F-150 Lightning electric pickup truck gotten a lot of press, gotten a lot of interest and that includes the F-150 Lightning Pro that's the version of the truck aimed at the commercial market it can travel 230 miles on a single charge and starts at just under $40,000 that's for the standard package now we have more information on the Lightning Pro's extended range version it's capable about 300 miles on a single charge has a 240 volt battery, 80 amp charger it's called the Charge Station Pro it can also fill the battery to 100% in eight hours so, you know, if you have overnight you're pretty much good to go price is just under $50,000 so you're bumping up about 10K for the extended range version again, this is for the commercial market now Ted Canis, general manager of Ford's North America commercial business says the average F-150 commercial customer in the US right now drives less than 174 miles on the daily basis and that's 95% of the time so 95% of the time the average commercial customer is driving about just under half of what an extended range Lightning Pro would afford Ford would include an online tool as well for fleet managers and other commercial customers to factor in purchase and lease costs federal and regional tax incentives regional fuel and energy costs all stuff that has to be factored in if a fleet is thinking about going electric or partially the F-150 Lightning Pro is set to start deliveries next year with a smaller 12-inch version of its infotainment system running Sync 4 the consumer version has a nice 15-inch version so, you know, it's 12 inches still not tiny but it's smaller also vinyl seats that are durable designed for hardware anybody want one? I do, I really want one I do, I want the consumer F-150 and I don't even need a truck it's crazy, I don't know what's come over me I think I'm just, I'm feeding off of a lot of other people's energy but the commercial aspect of this I think is really interesting Ford saying, hey, we have crunched some numbers here we have commercial customers people do need these kinds of trucks people are interested in going electric at least, you know, in some capacity if it makes sense for their bottom line and we don't think that our range is going to be a problem most of the time for customers who need to depend on these vehicles for things other than, you know, kind of consumer-community stuff this is where Ford differs from the other EV players on the market like the Rivians, the Teslas because Ford understands who their customers are and they understand who the target audience for this particular truck is the consumer version is targeted toward people who need a truck on the off chance like I need to load a couch in the back or I gotta move my kids' bikes or something else the commercial version is designed for that kind of constant daily duty not high mileage, but constant stop and go we gotta move shrubs we gotta move men from one place to another we gotta carry the tools in the back of doing like instruction work and this is the thing I've always often said this the key to the fastest EV adoption at least in the United States or North America is fleet sales if you can sell enough EVs at one time to a particular purchaser whether it's governmental or a large contractor or municipality they oftentimes when they buy cars like for example think of Hertz or a rental car company when they buy a large fleet of cars oftentimes on the lot when you go to the airport they have a gas pump there to load up the car right before to top off the car right before they goes out to a client you can do that now with electricity you don't need to dig an expensive holding tank that has to be EPA checked to make sure it doesn't leak you offload a lot of the complexities and you amortize the cost of the car and especially with electric cars as you heard from a round table EV round table the maintenance costs are less so for a large corporation if they crunch the numbers it could actually be an added benefit plus without the need to find fuel you just need to cook up a 240 80 volt system on premises you could eventually allow the public to use it for a fee whether it's like the post-off got a bunch of EV trucks we got a couple of charging stations you want to use it you pay like 50 bucks you get a month pass or something and I think that could slowly increase adoption of EVs but it would also help for because they'll be out on the front I'll just say this is incredibly important I mean obviously there's no breaking news this is an incredibly important vehicle for Ford to nail I think it's very surprising to see these prices I know like $40,000 is a lot for me to spend on a car for truck buyers though for a new truck again as a starting price that's not bad the question I have though is so that average of 174 miles 95% of the time if you have that 230 mile truck and you're towing anything I imagine that number goes down quite a bit maybe even with the 300 so that would be my question is it's going to come down I think the first generation will sell on novelty and will sell on, it's a good price people that like EVs, that like that instant torque that like that power very tempting it'll be that second generation where they'll be like hey you got that F-150 Lightning what was like when you took your camper out I think, I mean not from a fleet sale perspective the pro has its own levels of concern but in terms of this being it has to be the number one seller for Ford this is their golden goose in terms of those kind of sales I think that'll be incredibly important that second generation too and if you're wondering why I have nothing to say it's because I have nothing of value to add to this I don't drive and I have no interesting cars but you look so great in F-158, I know it who wouldn't? Yeah, right? Yeah, trucks, what are you going to say? Hey, before we move on if you want to expand your tech skills and you're Spanish at the same time while you're in luck because Dan Compos is here to help Hello friends of DTNS it is time for the World of the Day we are out to you by Noticias de Tecnología Express Ah, waiting or using something for the first time you know that feeling, right? In Spanish, we have a verb for that action estrenar it applies for more things than clothes and has a similar meaning to premiering something like a new film or launching new features in a platform or an app if you use TikTok's new automatic caption estás estrenando una nueva función also, you can say that when TikTok releases such options TikTok estrenó una nueva función you can learn this and more words by listening to Noticias de Tecnología Express available every Friday All right, well with work disruptions caused by the pandemic there are now 8.2 million fewer workers employed in the US than there were a year ago however, when we look at terms of productivity we're looking at goods and services we're roughly the same as pre-pandemic levels despite all of those job losses some of this is representative of a trend that economists have kind of seen in deep recessions where output recovers faster than the labor market but a big part comes down to automation economists are seeing that automation is letting companies fulfill orders they'd otherwise have to turn down due to inadequate labor and this is only accelerating automation is expected to have long-term impacts from slower job growth to projected doubling of robots in the global economy by 2025 the World Economic Forum forecast last year that by 2025 automation would create 97 million new jobs but eliminate 85 million so there is a net game there with jobs like office support, food service, production and customer service the most vulnerable that means that jobs will show up that jobs will show up to replace what is being lost but there will be a lag though a lot of these trends have been forecast for a while the pandemic forced a lot of industries and businesses into kick starting automation initiatives Nate, I'm sure you've seen quite a bit of this over the last year does that kind of jive with what you've been, your experience? Yeah, I mean, we've got an unemployment rate to the moment I think around just under 5% obviously our country is smaller, is less populous but the figures have been quite shocking in a way and I think that every time I hear stories about people fearing for their jobs because of the rise of automation my instinct is always to think back to the industrial revolution and the Luddites that would go around smashing up looms because they thought automated or machine-based textile industries were going to be destroyed because of looms and then we're going to put them out of work obviously we just then needed people to build looms and run factories and repair looms and there's been many, many cases time and time again we see it with music piracy and the music industry thinking cassettes were going to kill them and then MP3s were going to kill them and it always ends up being that humans in society tends to be pretty smart at adapting and staying relevant even in the face of something and expected like automation and pandemics so I remain pretty confident but at the same time we're fortunate to be in employment and have jobs and I do sometimes think well maybe I should be speaking to more people who are unemployed and see if they agree with what I'm saying so I don't know if that answers your question but they're the emotions that rise whenever I hear about this topic. I do think it's always eye-opening to me to hear from sort of that long-term economic standpoint, right? It's historically there are deep recession trends where output ends up recovering faster than a labor market. Okay, that makes sense. You kind of go, okay, that definitely makes sense. What we're going through right now is of course compounded because we've had this pandemic sort of, I don't know, it's a gap year of sorts a little bit more than that. So a lot of things were maybe they were on the table maybe they were ideas that were being floated around maybe a variety of companies management team sessions were like, yeah, we got to get on that automation thing and we're forced to a lot more quickly. So yes, when you see a ripple effect like that that would perhaps be a ripple over a decade or more become something that sort of gets changed really quickly because people physically could not do the jobs that they were otherwise going to do otherwise and through no fault of their own, then yeah, it takes a while for things to shake out. And I know we talk about it all the time on the show but it's like, if there are more jobs that are predicted to be created the jobs that are lost, even though there are jobs lost and not all of those people can just flip a switch and go into a different role in a best case scenario the folks who were doing the older version of the job are now freed up to do jobs that are better suited to them and make better use of their skill set. And Beatmaster in the Discord was asking about how many musicians are making a living through music now compared to before. I think on the back of my comments about MP3s and cassettes maybe, but the entire landscape of recorded music and that industry has changed so enormously over that period that there are more musicians but there are also more ways for music to be distributed and consumed and that means there's more piracy and ways to get around paying for things but that opens up new opportunities like live streaming and things that you can only get if you pay and support a band directly. And so I kind of feel that like with what I was saying previously that we just as a culture at least in over the last few decades we have this ability to just respond pretty quickly to whatever the environment or the healthcare system or whatever it is throws at us. And I remain pretty confident that we'll be fine once again but maybe I'm just the optimist and maybe I should be saying it's all doom and gloom it's terrible, we should all go and... Hear the robots, coming for you. Well, this perhaps isn't doom and gloom. Microsoft updated its Xbox cloud gaming app for Android to add better support for the Surface Duo. Now the mobile device will work like a giant Nintendo DS when held in the clamshell compose mode with the top display showing the game and the bottom showing a virtual version of an Xbox controller. There are currently more than 50 titles that support Xbox touch controls, that's what it's called, is the Surface Duo a failure you might ask? Clickbait headlines, wanna know. Microsoft got the price from $1,500 to $1,000 that could indicate slow sales. It could also be the normal price cycle of an aging product, but the device is also getting an international launch later in 2021 with Microsoft continuing to update features, so it does not seem like it's dead and gone, just the opposite. Yeah, this is, Microsoft a lot of times plays a longer game with their hardware and if you remember the original surface tablets, a lot of them weren't exactly super well received, I think they built that into a respectable business. The fact that they keep adding features, and this is a big feature for this, I think it's an interesting you case, obviously if you're a hardcore gamer, a touchscreen Xbox controller isn't exactly the most precise interface, but it still allows you to play and you are able to take advantage of that second touchscreen, tells me that Microsoft is not giving up on this form factor that maybe a surface duo sequel might be on the way. You have that really high price, you only get the super enthusiast to buy that first gen, then you release a product in the second gen that has all of these interesting features at seemingly maybe a little bit more affordable price, smaller bezels, all that kind of stuff, not an unusual product cycle for any company to go through and Microsoft again, doesn't need a bank on hardware, can take their time and kind of figure this out. So that's kind of what I'm reading into this, even at 1,000 I think I'm gonna probably pass on my surface duo for this gen. Well, Twitch has many categories of streaming, if you're a streamer, you have one to choose from, well you have many to choose from, but you choose one, but now you can choose another and it's called pools, hot tubs and beaches because after Twitch received pushback from some advertisers and some viewers over the trend of hot tubs, actual hot tubs and people sitting in them often wearing bathing suit, a tire or other, you know, scantily clad stuff, it started to pick up steam, it's a bit of a Twitch meme on the platform and Twitch created the new category to let the streamers stream. Hey, if you wanna be in a hot tub all good, here's the place that we're going to add this category to and you can go nuts and also let advertisers limit participation in those particular streams more easily, everybody wins. After Twitch pulled advertising from some hot tub streamers without warning last week and that's actually what was the big story, you know, a lot of streamers were like, what the heck, what did you do this for? It told the verge that had been a mistake and that quote, being found to be sexy by others is not against our rules and Twitch will not take enforcement action against women or anyone on our service for their perceived attractiveness end quote. You know, when you go into writing corporate communications as a career, I don't know if anyone thought that being found to be sexy by others, it's not against our rules, would be something to have to put out in a press release but that happened at Twitch. Obviously, hey, you want advertisers to be able to know the content they're putting their ads on. So, you know, Twitch responding to the memes and what's hot, including the hot tub. So it makes a lot of sense for them. Yeah, if you have thoughts on this or anything that we talk about on this show, past shows, maybe something we might talk about on our future show, do send it our way because we love your feedback. The email address is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. Shout out to patrons at our master and our grandmaster levels. Today, they include Paul Boyer, Kevin, and Paul Thiessen. Also, we've got a brand new boss and we wanna thank that boss named YT. YT just started backing us on Patreon. Thank you to our newest boss. Yes, yes, thank you to all our bosses and to Nate Langson. Nate, thanks so much for being on the show. A blast, as always. Where can people find more of your great stuff if they're so inclined? If they are so inclined, I do a show every week for Bloomberg and I did one this week all about understanding lossless audio and specifically how it works and why people should maybe care about it. And the best way to find that and my podcast text message is to go to twitter.com slash Nate Langson. All those links are there and thank you very much for having me back once again. Thank you so much, Nate. We are live on this show Monday through Friday, 4.30 p.m. Eastern, 2030 UTC. Join us live if you can. We'd love to have you. You can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. Tom is back tomorrow and we'll be joined by Peter Wells. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Frog Pants Network. Get more shows like this at frogpants.com. Diamond Club, I hope you have enjoyed this program. Thank you.