 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners. Thanks to all of you, including Reid Fishler, Larry Bailey, and Michelle Sirju. Coming up on DTNS, Amazon Web Services wants to help you run your own AI models. Windows 11's next gen has some official and unofficial news. And let's talk more about that Nvidia RTX 4070. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday the 13th of April 2023 in the home of rock and roll. I'm Rich Trafalino. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Yes, that's right. And Roger, I would even say, why don't we just co-host a show together today? Why not? I think two guys in two shirts in two different parts of the country, it's going to be awesome. Yeah, I was going to go shirtless today, but I'm glad we decided to make it a short day. So let's get it started with a little something we like to call the Quick Hits. Google released the first beta for Android 14. This adds a new share sheet where developers can add custom app-specific functions. It supports users applying per app language settings, and supports apps restricting sensitive data visibility for accessibility services. Some interesting features for sure. Nike Asia sources say Apple began talks with suppliers to begin producing MacBooks in Thailand. Suppliers say that these could either complement plan MacBook production in Vietnam, or serve as a backup location. Apple reportedly has been producing Apple watches in Thailand for over a year. The popular caller identification service TrueCaller introduced an update to provide live caller ID on iOS for subscribers. It's not been available for a while, but the feature is still limited when you compare it to the Android version. For example, users must ask Siri to search TrueCaller as a call comes in, just won't do it automatically. This will search through a set of numbers of directories that stored in Apple's call kit framework, and that's determined by a TrueCaller spam algorithm, although they do update those directories daily with fresh numbers as relevant. In other news, Carmen announced the $450 Instinct 2X Solar smartwatch. Carmen claims on the devices, quote, smartwatch mode, it can get an unlimited battery life through solar charging if you wear it three hours outside in 50,000 lux conditions. So basically direct sunlight. So wear some sunscreen. In fitness modes with GPS on, the watch will drain much, much faster, and the watch will also include a multi-LED flashlight as new tracking activity like obstacle courses, sounds like my life, and advanced fitness features. 50,000 lux sounds like you're on the surface of the sun, but this is like, I just, there's no clouds. It just sounds like sun blindness without, or snow blindness without the snow. And the latest update to Google Maps adds navigation enhancements for National Park, something you might need to solar watch for. The app will now highlight an entire trail route on the map and provide precise directions rather than just providing a start pin for the trail. The app also highlights popular destinations in a park. Maps will also support downloading park maps for offline access. Which I think is super about time they do because there's nothing worse than hiking and realizing, hey, my map doesn't work because I ain't got a connection. Yeah, not exactly great. So let's get in to talk about some of the other news of the day. We're going to be talking about Amazon Web Services, obviously the giant in when it comes to cloud infrastructure. Well, they announced some new services target at corporate customers. I guess not surprising, it's AWS wanting to run their own generative AI models. This includes things like using custom hardware for instances to more cost effectively run them. Cost is one of the big things with a lot of these models. The cloud provider will make models from some big names available. They're not kind of sticking to one horse here. They have models from Anthropics, Stability, AI, AI21 Labs, as well as Amazon's own Titan model. So you have a lot to choose from and probably going to be adding more over time. According to AWS CEO Adam Salipski, we believe that customers are going to need a lot of different generative AI models for different purposes. Now, Roger, this announcement very much feels in contrast to what we've been seeing from Microsoft with their Azure OpenAI services, right? Yeah, I mean, this seems more like an agnostic approach than Microsoft's more like, you know, come into the family. Honestly, it actually sounds like the better route, but it might be a little too early to tell. Adam Salipski is correct that there are going to need, that there will be a need to have different generative AI models depending on the workload or the tasks that you have, right? If you want to generate images, you probably don't need a chat GBT-like generative chat bot to help you with that. So, you know, it could be one of those things where a client could very well just kind of pick and match what they need for their particular business or production output. Yeah, and a lot of the generative AI use cases we've seen are kind of unusual sometimes for this kind of stuff direct to consumer, for lack of a better word, right? Where it's, hey, this is chat GBT. You can access it right in your browser. We're going to integrate this into Microsoft Word, which is a user-facing application, if nothing else. Same thing with all these image generation stuff. And while we've seen, like I said, with Azure OpenAI service from Microsoft, we've seen some enterprise moves to this. When you start talking about AWS, this is the boring corporate kind of rollout for generative AI, where I really feel like this is going to get into the hands of a lot of people in more indirect ways, right? We've talked about some of the applications for this, right? But AWS already has hooks into so much of, you know, the Fortune 500, Fortune 1000, you know, whatever designation you want to have, where these are companies that are huge, they want to be tech forward, they have like a legitimate technological need, whether it's customer service or any number of different applications where this would come in handy, yet they lack the ability. We talked about how OpenAI working with Microsoft, partly because they needed their cloud infrastructure to train all of these data sets. And when you're talking about very specific applications, we're talking about customer service where you can't have, you know, an AI turn, a chatbot turn toxic in that encounter, having very specific models, having this already in court, probably going to plug into exactly the AWS workflow that all of these organizations have. I mean, this seems to me to be the way to spread this like super quick. Well, and this is the thing, generative AI right now is the hotness, right? Everybody wants to get on it. And they want to plug it in whether or not it makes sense, right? Oh, I'm Zillow. I'm going to throw in a chatbot so it can tell you how many 2,000 or 2,100 square feet, you know, in your price range or as in the city. I mean, there's a lot of things that people are now imagining. Now, of course, none of these are going to last, you know, for any duration. And, you know, as things begin to shake out, but I think we're at the beginning of the land rush, right? Everyone's running and they're screaming into the store, you know, trying to get what they think is going to give them an advantage against their competitor and possibly, and possibly help them take that leg up on their business. Right now we're seeing a seismic shift in the way a lot of businesses operate the pandemic, inflation. These are all having impact, whether it's employees, the way companies do business to the way, you know, you interact with customers. And generative AI seems to be the magic answer that solves all that until it doesn't. So everyone is just going to try to do everything they can. And Amazon actually might be on to something because, hey, we're going to give you a plethora of tools to figure out what you want to do and how you want to do it. And if it doesn't work out, you know, you can scale back, not on everything, but just the stuff that you don't need. Yeah, and I feel like this is almost the opposite of kind of Microsoft's play, at least for the moment, because Microsoft right now is betting on they made the right technological bet in this moment with open AI, right? So that gives them an advantage because they're early to the leading edge of this technology. Whereas Microsoft is saying, hey, we are, excuse me, Amazon is saying, hey, we are betting that these are all going to get to a level of very good in a very short period of time. So why not give you models that probably we can price differently also? You know, instead of just paying for chat GPT or for GPT 3.5 or GPT 4 and paying for that at a specific rate or something like that, you can use our Titan model. It's not as good. We're telling you it's not as good, but it might be perfect for a very simple customer service chat bot application or something like that. And then if you want to move on to something like Anthropic, we can actually create like different price tiers and kind of create a kind of a competitive marketplace where you can kind of plug and play as your needs are across your business. I think it's a, you know, and Microsoft can always adopt this model anyway, but I think it's a fundamental difference in how they're viewing this market. And I am curious to see how it shakes out. I mean, they aren't widely divergent in their business direction with generative AI, but it is different enough that I think it will be very educational to see what works because, you know, as they say, hindsight's 2020. All right, well, we're going to be moving on talking about some Windows 11 and some gaming, but to do so, I think we're going to have to bring on Patrick Norton. Patrick, thank you so much for being on the show today and for joining us for this. Thank you so much. My apologies for being late. I managed to do something terrible with a pre-AI and darn near pre-computer automobile. I also want to make this joke again. Who knew that the Terminator was going to come, Skynet was going to come via Bing of all places. I just bad AI joke. We got a slate of Windows 11 form factor news today. Official news Microsoft announced it will bring Windows 11 to its HoloLens 2 headset. Remember HoloLens? It's not dead yet. Proving that Microsoft still remembers it exists. The update won't bring any notable user-facing updates, but offer, in theory, a better app experience because of upgraded performance. Microsoft will also add in some developer-facing updates. The big one is Edge WebView 2, which lets devs embed HTML and JavaScript easily to apps and generally improve web-powered apps. Look for the free optional update in June. So from the... Go ahead. I was just going to say, for you Windows 10 diehards, you're not going to be forced to upgrade your HoloLens, but it's nice that it's out there. But we also saw some interesting leak news, and this comes from the Twitter account, hoxodh0x0d. I have to read Twitter handles. It's always awkward. They published a video from a Microsoft-held hackathon back in September, and this demoed a concept. It's pretty interesting. Windows 11 UI optimized for handheld PCs, specifically running on a Steam Deck. Of course, we've seen a lot of Steam Deck-ish Windows PC of late. We talked about the ASOS ROG Ally, catchy name as it were there. This particular mock-up shows a launcher and a game shell on the Steam Deck with a Windows UI that are optimized for gaming controls and touch. This is a... from an internal hackathon, though, it's like put some context here. No indication that Microsoft leadership will further develop this idea. If you actually watch the slide deck, it's kind of charming how like... I don't know. This is a slide deck I would put together. It's not polished, right? It wasn't meant for any kind of press screening or anything like that. But Patrick, Roger, I'm curious, given the interest in the form factor from hardware makers, I guess does it make sense for Microsoft to be looking at something like this? Patrick? You know, with the amount of money Microsoft has, it probably makes sense to them to be looking at everything. I'm also kind of laughing because unlike our friends at Google and killed by Google.com remains one of my favorite and most heartbreaking websites in the universe, they will actually keep throwing resources at a product until it either succeeds or they've literally given it a solid chance. I'm curious, you know? They're everywhere. There's certainly been some huge successes in that venue that handheld device area. So yeah, I'd like to see them develop it. Who knows though? I mean, at this point, hardware development is such a complicated thing for manufacturers. It feels that way, maybe. Honestly, this is kind of what Microsoft has been doing forever. Remember when they used to do phones because hey, what else could live, what else can windows live on? A phone or this or that or a handheld, you know, Steam Deck-like device. I think it makes sense because there's a lot of interest. I mean, Steam Deck has done a lot better than I thought it would and it is the first kind of gaming handheld form factor where it's a tablet but you have controllers on the other side that isn't from a company called Nintendo. And I think Microsoft is seeing this is a potential avenue. Maybe it won't pan out, won't hurt. Well, this is what's interesting to me because I thought the whole deal with the Sacha Mania era of Microsoft is they were getting away from the let's put windows on everything. The more I've been thinking about this, the more, I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft came out with this. Obviously they have the engineering talent to do something like this. But in some ways I think they would see this as a middle ground that may be going away in that Microsoft is already investing heavily into the cloud gaming sphere, right? And if you're doing that, you kind of don't need necessarily this specialized device or you can let the bevy of other companies that are making cloud the cloud gaming hardware and then they can just run services on top of that and get a piece of that without having to get their hands dirty with hardware. And I'll say, but I'll say this for PC gaming if you want a game on a PC you aren't running Linux. You run a handful of Valve games. You run Linux. But if you want to run all the triple A titles you're going to need to have windows running on that machine. And it only makes sense if you're going to get 95% of the games playable on a PC that you can download off Steam or Epic Store or whatever, you're going to need to be able to run Windows on it and so that totally makes sense. But when you dig into this story, right? There's a hackathon project they're getting things running on a Steam device. They've got Steam Deck controls working from Windows. They've got a gaming shell customized for Windows. I mean, this certainly seems like an internal effort to create a competitor in that area. Or it could be like, hey, ASUS or Razer or whomever you go spend the money to actually make these and we'll just give you out the reference designs like we do with DirectX. Hey, get it and spend the money and we'll cut a portion from our license for your profits. I'm just going to say looking at the videos also for this, the launcher that they put together. Admittedly, this is a hackathon. It's a small team working on this. I'm just going to come out and say this looks a lot like Windows 8. I'm sure Microsoft is not like hearing me say that, but it's very like tile UI looking in its thing. And you know what it turns out? That UI is probably pretty good for like a game controller, right? Because that's not too far off. I mean the whole problem with the tile UI was that it was really designed for touch screens that nobody really had when Windows 8 launched. So, you know, they're a little too far ahead of the curve on that one. And frankly, if it gives a quality gaming experience, is anybody going to care? That is that is the key indeed. Well, we love to hear from we love to hear from all of our supporters. So if you have some time, please fill out our latest survey. Let us know what about DTNS is working for you. And, you know, maybe what isn't. Just visit dailytechnewshow.com slash survey to let us know your thoughts. We truly appreciate it. All right. The NVIDIA RTX 4070 graphics card. It's available today. Did you mark your calendars? I hope you did. I popped up in my notifications for sure. It's touted as a cheaper alternative to the RTX 4070 Ti, the company released at the beginning of the year has a price of $599. So, you know, that's that may be some scratch to you and me, but it's $200 cheaper than the RTX 4070 Ti. Sounds great, right? Well, maybe not. According to some online reviewers, the value prop for the RTX 4070 isn't all that great. So Patrick, you've been following all the ins and outs of this story. Can you kind of break down what's going on here? Why the mixed reaction? Well, the mixed reaction, you know, it's the mixed reaction is essentially, you know, in the post Bitcoin or in the post mining era of GPUs when you can actually buy a GPU without mortgaging your house, the value proposition I think has radically changed as we go from generation to generation to generation of GPUs, right? You used to expect some big jumps, some big changes, some radical performance and things are a little chill. So when we look at the 4070, you know, I started going back and forth with Brad Chakos from over at PC World and, you know, this is on one hand, this is an extraordinary piece of technology, right? 5,888 CUDA cores. It's running at 1,920 megahertz, bumps up to almost 2,500 megahertz. 12 gigabytes of GDDR 6X RAM. We'll talk more about that in a second. It is a fantastic 1440p card and it's got DLSS 3. So if you're big into ray tracing performance, if your game supports it and, you know, 1440p is the sweet spot for this. It is a nice jump in performance up from the 2070. It's less impressive or less dramatic in terms of performance bump from the 3070. So I almost feel like we have a sort of every other GPU upgrade path that's starting to loom here. When you look at the price, it is, you know, 100 bucks less than a 3080, which is good. You know, MSRP anyhow, right? 3080s are pretty much, at least as of my most recent search, gone from the shelves and the channels. And a lot of 3070 GPUs are actually currently selling for anywhere from 650 to 680. There are several cards I've found for selling pretty much at that $600 MSRP. I like, you know, part of the reason I started chatting with Brad Chakras on this was, you know, he's like, you know, TIL $600 is a budget graphics card. Which is, you know, a lot of money, period, end of discussion. And my thought was, oh my goodness, will it, you know, NVIDIA's 1080p, you know, sweet spot gaming card beat $500, which is just staggering. I used to build $500 gaming PCs, the entire PC, including the GPU, or at least having onboard graphics that would function until you could buy a GPU. And, you know, Chakras' response was like, I deeply hope not. He thinks, and a lot of other people have speculated that a $400 4060 GPU targeted at 1080p gamers might happen. You know, he also noted that the 4070s did not sell out. In fact, I'm looking at, you know, one of my favorite online, you know, sellers here. And I'm pretty sure there are still a ton of 4070 cards available at my local store. Which, you know, if you think about a year ago is kind of ridiculous. A new card came out. It didn't sell out immediately. You know, didn't they restrict availability enough? Like a launch of a new console platform? But I'm actually kind of really curious to see where this goes. Because, you know, I have a small creature who's been getting into gaming and it's time to move him on to a dedicated gaming rig. And I really, really don't want to spend more on the GPU than I did for my last three or four general use PCs. Which just maybe me not adapting to the times. But it is a dream. So is the logic here from NVIDIA, the 4070 is your 3080 replacement? But that really, I mean, it seems... Well, it's a lot of it's about, you know, the challenges. If you're a 4K gamer or if you plan on upgrading to a 4K monitor in the near future, which if you look at Steam statistics is still a tiny percentage of gamers, at least on Steam. You know, the 12 gigabytes of VRAM on this is not going to deliver as much as you want, especially if you're running ray tracing. There has been a lot of cranky, angry online Reddit forum Twitter back and forth about how they, you know, this could have been a great 4K card, but they got into memory to force you to pay a couple hundred dollars more to get a better gaming experience if you spend more money on 4K. And I think, you know, it's frustrating whether you are a, you know, somebody who's deep in, you know, Adobe Premiere or some other application that takes advantage of CUDA cores. Or if you're a gamer, you know, so many things here, like one 1440p fantastic card. You know, if you've got the money and you're a 1080p gaming, probably still a fantastic card. If you're a 4K gamer, it's not the card you want to buy and that people have been really cranky about because a lot of what they're doing is they intentionally they intentionally took the VRAM they needed out of this card that forced me as a 4K gamer to spend too much money for a GPU. Now, given what you just said though about, you know, kind of the situation with the supply chain not like being semi-functional at this point where it doesn't immediately sell out and go for triple the price on eBay, is there is there a chance that like, because like last time I built a gaming PC was in the days where like MSRP so it's been a hot minute, but is it combined, is there anything AMD is putting out there to directly compete with this right now that would put the price pressure on this? Absolutely, in fact, and you know, AMD went out of their way to point out that they have several like $500 GPUs with 16 gigabytes of VRAM that are available right now. So there's definitely there's a huge amount of market competition at this point and I think probably a little more competition for 4K gaming. So we kind of separate supply chain issues and supply chain issues because you know, supply chain issues are affecting availability of silicon of substrate or have been right. It's less now. There's still a lot of challenges. You know, we're affecting the availability of parts. A lot of the scarcity on GPUs we saw in the last couple of years was because people who were literally using GPUs to to print money in a metaphorical sense were buying all the GPUs and they had spreadsheets that were able to spend up to this much on this GPU and still make money off of it if we keep it running for six months. So they were buying staggering amounts of GPUs before we the simple gamers and video editors of the universe could actually buy a card or buy a card that we could afford. So there's that, you know, thanks to some changes in the mining universe that has changed that level of scarcity but at this point, I think it's I don't think there was a lack of of GDDR6X RAM to manufacture a few more you know, gigs of RAM on these cards. Real quick, if someone was wanting to upgrade and they were maybe in a 3060 or lower like in the 2000 series would it make sense to just get a 3080 at this point if it is 100... I don't think there, I did a brief search before the show, about an hour before the show and I could not find a 3080 for sale or anything remotely in the neighborhood of a breath of the MSRP like I was looking at stuff that was in the $12 to $1300 range and if you're going to spend $1200 by a 4080 now if you have a you know, source of 3080s that are close to MSRP that gets kind of interesting, I think at this point you know depends on your monitor size, depends on how much gaming you do, depends on what your budget is but I think 3080s have kind of vaporized from the channel watch them all, you know, show up at MSRP tomorrow just to get your goat there, Patrick, right? Yeah, well I'm looking at I've checked at least three major sources and not a single one of them had a 3080 in stock they had 30 parties, third party sellers that were selling 3080s for like $1200 but you know buying a 3080 for $1200 seems kind of silly to me. All right, well the last time I was probably looking to build a Windows gaming PC was probably close to the time that Winamp was close to relevant but we're talking about it again everyone's favorite skeuomorphic media player for Windows but let's do a brief timeline here of Winamp's demise and resurrection remember back in 1999 AOL acquired Winamp's developer for $80 million and then in 2013 AOL announced that Winamp was shutting down but it didn't actually shut down Radiotomy, the Belgian audio platform bought Winamp as part of a deal for the entire Nullsoft brand then Radiotomy evolved into the Lama Group which claims Winamp still has 83 million users worldwide and has also launched a new revamped Winamp player that's right it's back this includes a new fan zone for selling exclusive content and experiences and listeners now have a new mobile friendly web player with apps based on the classic version due later this year it also offers the web app offers podcasts radio stations, soon the ability to play local files and connect to streaming services you know, Roger Patrick do you get a chance to check this out I am downloading it as we speak I think around Winamp version 3 I fell off the cart because at that point it became a little bloated and ponderous and there were at least a handful of other players that were a little less bulky like VLC that I migrated to yeah I signed up for the web version of this you have to create an account or something like that and it is I don't know why they announced it like this because it feels like a complete ghost area there are like four bands when you click on indie or hip hop or electro there are four bands that you have never heard of now it is interesting I can see what they are doing here because when you click on some artists it is like you can pay a dollar and get access to exclusive stuff like it is almost like a patreon for a kind of experience or something like that but the UI of the web app looks nothing like the classic Winamp that would get all the nostalgia feels for the millennials out there so I kind of don't know what the play is here I will definitely check out their mobile apps whenever they come out if it looks just like old Winamp I am going to at least try it out for like 5 minutes but that is such a nostalgic for like 90s computing that anytime I see something with Winamp I am going to check it out they got me I am not one of the 83 million users no idea where they are getting that number from I am pretty sure it is probably just left over boxes that kids installed at the computer lab and someone has that one that one Pentium 2 box sitting in the corner running it they are discounting all PCs and landfills to get to that number it is it is bizarre the brand new Winamp lives on there is no like source of open source or private applications that are trying to give you a better music experience Rune Labs which is dedicated to audio files you have to pay for it which makes people really angry but they do a phenomenal job of bringing together a tremendous amount of stuff you can do to your music in terms of how you can handle it or parse it or stream it around your house it brings together a really beautiful interface over a bunch of different streaming services there is Volumio and Rune Player which is very different from Rune Labs which are open source projects this looks like if you can actually get your services to run on this I can get the appeal but I am with you I look at the player.winamp.com website and I feel absolutely none of the love I had for Winamp Rich listen we eventually got a Duke Nukem game maybe we will get an actual authentic feeling Winamp for all of the 90s feels there is a downloadable windows player for Winamp but I am a little afraid to install it looking at this interface because the tears will come because I remember my little pencil it would need to get that it would need to show up in something like Stranger Things where they just jump ahead into the 90s and one of the kids in the college dorm room with Winamp running have you heard about Napster and Winamp listen as long as it keeps whipping the llamas but everybody will be happy and also whipping but is Patrick Norton thank you so much for being on the show today and dropping the knowledge on all things graphical and windows gaming thank you so much where can people check out where are you at? AVXL.com AVXL.com it's a weekly podcast to do with Robert Heron about home theater and audio and if you are at Axpona this weekend I'll be up there Friday and Saturday and do a little hangout on Friday night if you are out there listening to all the speakers and headphones and good stuff at Axpona in Chicago alright thank you Patrick and also give a special thanks to Douglas Thornburg one of the OG's one of our Top Lifetime supporters Douglas, thank you so much for all of your years of support for keeping the show going, for keeping us awesome. We truly, truly appreciate it. Remember patrons, you can also stick around for our extended show, Good Day Internet. We're going to be talking about more things, music adjacent. We're going to be talking about Spotify's new tool to turn radio into more podcasts. Be sure to stick around to check that out. Remember, you can catch the show live Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern, 2100 UTC. To find out more, just head on over to DailyTechNewShow.com slash live. We'll be back tomorrow with Jeff from Classic Conversations podcast talking about how Chad GPT is making his podcast production easier and we'll have one per altitude.