 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners. We thank you. We're in your ears right now. Thanks to you, Steve Aderola, Jeffrey Zilx, Kriya Artem and new patrons. Welcome them all in, Brian, Joe Catskill and Yash. On this episode of DTS, Open AI has a new CEO. It's the old one, Sam Altman. Spotify finds a way to anger indie artists again. Good for you, Spotify. And Netflix wasted $50 million on a sci-fi series that was never made. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, November 22nd, 2023. In Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Dreaming of Turducken, I'm Sarah Lane. In Salt Lake City, I'm Scott Johnson. And the show's producer, Roger Chang. Makes me wonder if I'm not in Los Angeles. Am I still Tom Merritt? Have you ever tried? I have. I went to Brussels recently and I was still Tom Merritt, but. But you didn't say that on the show, Tom. That's true. That is true. I've only done that from London, I think, in Las Vegas and Austin and Greenville, Illinois. In Brussels, you probably just turn into a waffle if you do that. I would have, trust me. And really, that actually sounds kind of fun. Yeah. You know what else sounds fun? Talking about the tech news of the day, by the way, heads up. If you're not in the U.S., you may not realize we have two holidays coming up Thanksgiving and Black Friday. So we will be off for the next two days, but we'll be back on Monday. Let's start with the quick hits. Binance CEO Cheng Peng Zhao has pled guilty to violating the U.S. Bank Secrecy Act and will also step down as CEO of the company. The company's former global head of regional markets, Richard Tang, will take over the Binance CEO role. Binance will now operate under a new compliance program, and the company has agreed to be observed by an independent compliance monitor. Compliance, more like, right? Nvidia had a good Q4, beat analysts' expectations for both revenue and income. And Nvidia's revenue grew 206 percent year over year. That's the kind of number you get when a company's like one year old. Data center revenue grew 279 percent. And gaming revenue rose 81 percent, which isn't bad, but it kind of shows that gaming is kind of a side business for Nvidia these days. Looking ahead, Nvidia warns of declines in sales in China and the Middle East, largely due to U.S. restrictions, though it does say that sales in other regions would offset the decline. Watch out, Hollywood. Stable diffusion is coming for you. The company announced its new video model can now generate 14 to 25 frames of video up to four seconds based on a prompt. So I'm kind of kidding about the Hollywood thing for now because these are just snippets, but this is how it starts. The videos can be between three and 30 frames per second with 576 by 1024 resolution. Stable video diffusion is only available for research purposes for now. But if you're a user like me, who's interested in signing up, you can get on a wait list for an eventual text to video interface. It's kind of they're kind of like animated gifts almost that that you know it and just really nice ones. Yeah, yeah, really, really good ones. Microsoft Threat Intelligence reports that malicious attackers have breached Taiwan's Cyber Lake software company. If that rings a bell, you may recognize it from multimedia devices like DVD players. The supply chain attack surfaced as early as October 20th. A trojanized installer was hosted on legitimate infrastructure at Cyber Lake and has been detected on more than 100 devices worldwide. So it got out there. It can affect systems not protected by FireEye, CrowdStrike, or Tainium and then deliver a malicious PNG that can be used to steal sensitive data and perform other exploits. Microsoft has disallowed a compromised certificate to prevent further infections and GitHub has removed that PNG secondary payload. Malicious PNG is the name of my cover pan. That's a good one. Isn't it? Julian Sancton, who has filed a lawsuit against both Microsoft and Open AI on behalf of a group of nonfiction writers, alleges that Open AI uses the author's work to train its models without obtaining proper permission. Screenwriters, fiction writers and comedians have previously sued Open AI Open AI this year with similar allegations. Ladies and gentlemen, put your hands together for malicious PNG. On court. A lot of things happened in the roughly two and a half working days before a holiday weekend over at Open AI. You may have heard it in the news. Sarah, what's the latest? OK, Sam Altman is returning as Open AI CEO. He will not take a position at Microsoft, which was announced on Sunday, after all. And Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says Microsoft supports Altman's return to Open AI, but Altman does not retain his previous board seat. Now, three members of Open AI's board have resigned. That includes Open AI's Chief Scientist, Ilya Sootskover, though apparently he'll stay Chief Scientist and remain at the company. And I guess he still regrets being a part of this move, as he said on Twitter over the weekend. Adam D'Angelo, who is also Cora's CEO, is the single board member to stay on in this transition. We'll see if he stays on forever, but he's going to stick around to represent the interests of the former board. And then the new board members for now are Salesforce co-CEO Brett Taylor, former Salesforce co-CEO Brett Taylor. He is now the chairman of Open AI's board and former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, Larry Summers joins the board, probably to offer regulatory advice and connections to government as Open AI is going to be facing a lot of government scrutiny. Former board chair and Open AI President Greg Brockman is returning to the company as an employee, not yet with a board seat. We'll see if they give him one later. And all sides agreed that an independent investigation that CEO for two seconds Emma Cheer said would be conducted around the events will look into Altman's firing and find out what led to it. Yes, so comments from both the board's press release about all of this news and also Microsoft CEO's Dr. Dela imply that the Open AI board structure may yet change with a suggestion of a nine person board to be created at some point with Microsoft holding a seat. So on the morning stream, I was joking with Scott that hey, if you haven't checked the news on Open AI since Thursday, let me tell you what happened. All the board members but one quit and they have two new ones. Everything else is the same. Yeah, this is a very exciting plot for the pilot of a new HBO show. And I hope they go through with it. But for real, though, this is this is some crazy couple of days that nobody saw coming. This isn't the same as some company having issues or other predisposed, whatever. And then us witnessing kind of the cracking of something. It all just happened like kind of out of nowhere. And then Microsoft being involved is a bit of a not really an official mediation perspective for them, but they're they're kind of doing that. They're the power broker, right? They own 49 percent of the for-profit version of Open AI and they have all the IP locked up. And so that gave them the leverage to say, well, if you're going to get rid of everyone, we'll hire them. And I think that's really what pushed the board into changing its mind was Microsoft saying, we you can't take away the IP. We've got ironclad contracts on that. And if you're going to do this and if all of your employers are going to quit, we still want to take advantage of them. We'd rather not have the disruption and have to start over from scratch and have open AI stay in business. And so that kind of pressure pushed them to say, OK, yeah, that makes more sense. Let's do that. Yeah. And that makes sense to me. I guess I wonder, you know, they're talking about this investigation, which I think will be interesting. But will we hear any of this because they're in a weird position. They're not public in a normal way, right? Yes, this morning, the way the the way the board works. Open AI Global is the for-profit company that Microsoft owns 49 percent of. Employees and other investors own another 49 percent and 2 percent and control, which is a whole separate thing. But you can still you can only own 2 percent and still control something is owned by open AI, the open AI that has the board. So the board of open AI is for a nonprofit that owns and controls the for-profit. But because it's structured that way, you don't have the traditional shareholder influence. The board. Essentially, nobody can do anything about the board unless the board itself. Yeah, exactly. The board is beholden and could be sued if they don't follow their charter. But their charter is to encourage the safe development of AI for the benefit of humanity. And a lot of things have been made about the fact that various members of the board were saying over the weekend, apparently that, hey, you know what, if this if this all goes to crap, well, maybe we're fulfilling our charter leading people to suspect that there were concerns about safety. Yeah, that was the big question I had about it. And I'm over the weekend when, you know, you know, it was Sunday evening, I guess, when the the going story was that Altman and Brockman and whoever else they wanted to bring along with them would be joining a new AI team of which Altman would be the CEO at Microsoft. I thought, you know, and people went, look at Satya Nadella. I mean, the man can't lose, you know, you just acquired a company for zero billion dollars. But I was like, OK, but we're starting something new within Microsoft, which was unexpected, but open AI doesn't cease to exist. You didn't just absorb the company. Like that would be they essentially would have, right? If you play this out, if Altman comes over and if 95 percent of open AI staff quits and goes to Microsoft and Microsoft has the license to all the IP, there's nothing there's nothing left of open AI at that point. And so they essentially would have owned it. It just seemed it seemed like it was going that that that was simply too easy of a solution. And it was. Yeah, I think I think it was a gambit where they were like, well, we'll do it if we have to if they call our bluff. But right, we'd rather not. And then it turned out they didn't have to that that especially is borne out by the fact that Microsoft has an executive vice president of AI, CTO Kevin Scott, who never freaked out. We never saw Kevin Scott going, hold on, you're doing what? You're going to make him CEO. I'm C. I'm CTO. Like, you know, how's that going to work? Kevin's like, well, I got 778 new employees. Oh, well, all right, I guess. Maybe not. You know, I'll just enjoy my holiday weekend. Meanwhile, open AI has not stopped announcing things. In fact, the company announced that chat GPT's voice feature is now available to all users who use free chat GPT, not just premium users. So as a user, you can tap the headphones icon to talk in chat GPT and hear responses. This is Apple only. So the feature has been available to paying users since September. As far as when I last checked on the desktop version, it's not available, but it is on mobile. The example posted with the feature announcement read, it's been a long night for the team and we're hungry. How many 16 inch pizzas should I order for 778 people? That would be me asking chat GPT the question. Ha, ha, ha, we all get the joke, y'all. That was referring to the number of people who work at open AI, who weren't exactly sure who they worked for. And maybe they still aren't, but I think things are slightly clearer today. I think it's pretty impressive that they kept pushing code and Brockman even promoted this before the agreement was announced that he was coming back, which was, you know, let a lot of people to be like, why would he like, why is he promoting things open AI? If he's so angry, well, because he's coming back. Well, speaking of angry, a lot of people get angry at Spotify and they just announced three major changes to how they pay royalties to musicians. Let's see if you get angry at any of them. Number one, music labels will be charged a fee when flagrant streaming fraud is detected. All right. I think everybody's cool with that one. If you're it's flagrant, you know, it's very clear it was fraud. You get you get charged for that non music audio like static or white noise, which has become very profitable and popular on Spotify will now only be monetized after two minutes of listening, not 30 seconds. So the idea here is to encourage you to make actual music and not just lay back and make a bunch of money that Spotify now can't spend on musicians because you just put white noise up there. I guess if you don't make white noise tracks, you're probably fine with this, right? This isn't going to get pissed off too many or even even many people who do would be like, no, you know, that seems fair. I'm still making some two minutes. I mean, most people will do that. Fine. So go far so good, right? If we can get through this third change without people getting angry, Spotify gets the win. Music tracks will only make money after they reach one thousand plays within a twelve month period. Oh, you just upset every small musician on the planet. Yeah, they're not going to be real happy about that. I mean, to me, listen, I if I were to take up the ukulele and, you know, put some stuff on Spotify and get nine hundred and ninety eight plays in an entire year, I might say, well, that sucks. You know, put myself out there. Some people dollars. Yeah, like, it's not so much that I thought I was going to get rich off of this. It's because I just want to be represented in, you know, in this machine. Yeah, you want to get started. You don't want to. You can't go from zero to Taylor Swift, you know, in a week, you've got to chip away and you can still keep building an audience. You're just not going to get the twenty five cents a month that you get at a thousand plays here's why I'm mad. And it's not even I mean, this could apply to tons of companies and lots of businesses. But the reason I'm annoyed with this is it when you're a company that is trying to show beggar profits, what do you do? Usually you make cuts that seem small on the individual level, but actually add up to big money, whether you're a I could stop you right there, Scott. The forty million dollars they estimate will not go to these tracks with fewer than thousand plays will be paid to those with higher performing artists. So they're not cashing in the savings. Well, they're actually putting it back in the pool just for more successful artists. I guess that makes. But again, see, that's going to make more sense for them on a bottom line level. Whereas if you want to if you want to position yourself in the market as look, we are the premier streaming service for music. And then we want everyone bottom level all the way to the top. So get in here, bottom levelers. And then a few years later go, eh, you better do this much a year. Forget it. There's a big waste of everybody's time. Goodbye. Like I it feels a little like a punch to the gut to those who are just trying to. Some of the back end, though, you know, I have to assume that Spotify has been looking at these smaller, you know, the ukulele saras of the world artists who, you know, there are probably a lot more of those than there are of the cash cow artists that Spotify, you know, hopes to bank on and always plan to bank on in the, you know, in the past. So to be able to not just like it's not saying like sweep out people who don't offer value, but to be able to allow the Spotify, you know, kind of engineering system to work on what works. And I'm sorry, but that makes sense to me. I think you're right. I think the probably the biggest cost saving Scott here isn't the amount of money paid directly to the artist. It's the amount of time to maintain a system that has to pay thousands of, if not millions, more artists, very small amounts of money that they won't have to, you know, reduce the cost of accounting and infrastructure to do that. And I'm sorry. I get I get where you're coming from, Scott, on an emotional level, but on a nuts and bolts level, like you're still encouraged to get to a thousand plays. If anything, it's encouraging people to work even harder to succeed so they cross that threshold rather than giving you 25 cents and having you go, well, why did I even bother? Like, well, OK, so I agree with all of that from a perspective of the company. But I will say this is a good message or a good lesson for creators. Just know this, the platforms that are offered to you and said, hey, come over here, make a bunch of money over here on YouTube or over here on Spotify or wherever it is, wherever the promise is. Just know you don't actually have that much control over whether or not you at the bottom level get to get the shake you think you deserve. And whether you whether you deserve it or not, as a whole another argument. But my point is you bought into something that was kind of a utopian thing going on with Spotify for a while. This is like realism setting in a little like it did with YouTube, a little like it does with tech talk and everybody else. Just know these platforms aren't necessarily out to make it. So you're the next big thing. They just want to chase the next big things and it's fine. I don't know if I see that in this particular case, but we can we can the little guy. I want the little guy to win a win is 25 cents. Well, hopefully the little guy has now saved that 25 cents and we can help them save even more with the DTS Black Friday code starting at midnight, 12 01 a.m. on November 24th, Eastern time and going until midnight Eastern time Sunday, the 26th. Use the code techturkey at daily technewshow.com slash store and it'll get you 20% off everything. We've got the new winter hats in there. We got t-shirts. Go check it out. Daily technewshow.com slash store the code tech turkey between Thursday and Sunday for 20%. Just kidding. Nice. The New York Times had an article published Friday called The Strange $55 million Saga of a Netflix series you'll never see. It tells the story of a director, Carl Wynch. Some of you may be familiar with him who made the, I guess, sort of flop, at least at the box office, 47 Ronan, getting 50 million or so from Netflix to make a new sci-fi series, which never actually finished an episode. It's kind of a sad tale. But is the sad tale a streaming TV excess sad tale or something about just one individual having some sort of a breakdown? I have you, Tom, I know you've got thoughts. Who wants to go first here? Because boy, there's a lot. Go ahead, Tom, you seem to be all set for this. What do you get? So we all read the story. And I was prepared based on the headline to see like, oh, OK. Netflix overdid it. They were throwing money around. And when you throw money around, sometimes you throw money after bad things. And I was I was ready to say, yep, that was the peak when everybody was spending and it was just spend a lot and hope you hope you hit some hits. And I get where that was coming from. That's not what happened here. Carl Wynch, he directed one movie. It was a flop, but he also won prizes at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival. He was a student at the Ridley Scott School, so he had cred. They weren't just throwing money after someone without any credibility. And he got an eight figure deal to create a sci-fi series based on his work that he had already done. He had done six episodes of four to ten minutes each. And he had that to show. So it doesn't seem as unreasonable when you know those things to say, oh, Netflix saw somebody with good training, you know, diamond in the rough. And at a time when everybody was taking risks, took a risk on it. The rest of the story, I don't know what you guys think, but it feels more like Wynch was just somebody who's having troubles and probably needs some kind of help. But this is an exception, and it's an exception that I don't think Netflix reasonably could have seen coming. Well, I don't, you know, I don't think this is actually a fair way of putting this, but I'll say it anyway. There was a time there where it felt like Netflix was giving out deals like candy, and they were doing it based on creative work from others. Sometimes they were unknowns to the larger public, but they had a successful little short film where, you know, they showed promise or whatever. That's what you're trying to find. There was something that, you know, Amazon Studios, you know, was sniffing around and, you know, you want to just sort of overbid and Amazon almost got this one exactly and get the thing. Yeah. Yeah. Those two are always at each other's throats for big deals like this. And so, you know, this Flanagan leaving Netflix thing is a big example of that, and that's also a thing where they took a risk on a director that was successful, but they didn't know how we'd do with serialized television or with, you know, a season of something like Hill House and the other stuff he ended up succeeding with. And he succeeded wildly. I this just feels like they tried another one of these guys showed promise. Turns out he's got some issues, some problems, some stuff that, you know, is legitimate mental health issues that he needs addressing and is addressing. But sometimes that's water and oil, right? For whatever your process is and you bring somebody else in, you know, it's like trying to work with certain no tour directors. They've got certain rules. They got certain ways they want to do stuff. And I think Netflix is just like factory, let's go. And it needs to be good, needs to hit a certain level. But it's very much a factory, you know, with a lot of success, not all the time, you know, but something like this, you look at the number and you go, Oh, gosh, you know, I mean, we really got the car before the horse on this one. And I'm not even really talking about what issues Wrench may have or not, you know, in his personal life, but just, you know, what, what, what is the product sci-fi show? Great. Sounds great. Everybody wants to hear more about it. You know, there was work that was done on this project, you know, significant work, people who, you know, put, you know, their livelihoods into it and Netflix kind of now, you know, being in litigation saying, well, you didn't give us the product, you know, and this director apparently says, well, yeah, you didn't offer me the support that I was promised. So, you know, that's something that they're going to have to work out between themselves, but it does feel like something, you know, whenever this deal was made was at some strange streaming fever pitch, you know, where it was like, let's just get it before someone else does. We don't even know what it is. But see, I don't think that that's what happened. I think this is correlation, not causation. Yes, things were at a fever pitch, but this seems reasonable. Yes, 47 Ronin was a flop, but Keanu Reeves from 47 Ronin also invested in organic intelligent, which is the sci-fi series that he pitched to Netflix. Scott Stuber worked for Netflix and produced on 47 Ronin. They didn't check with him apparently, according to The New York Times about wrench, but it wasn't like this guy came out of nowhere. The pitch seems fine. And to Scott's point, I feel like sometimes people have weird personalities and you're like, you know, they're maybe a little difficult to deal with, but they make great stuff. And in a world where you're looking for rookies, you're looking for good bets and diamonds in the rough. I don't think Netflix could have predicted, oh, this guy's going to totally fall apart. He's going to take money and put it in cryptocurrency. He's going to divorce his wife. So so, yeah, I I look at this and I'm like, that this is this is an unusual situation. I don't think this is emblematic of what was going on at the time, even though there was a lot of crazy stuff going on. No, no, you might be right that this was just one of those flukes just happened to be a lot of money at stake. So we're talking about it right now, but still a lot of money at stake. Well, if you're like me, I mean, $55 million for TV is is not. I mean, it's it's right there in the middle, right? Yeah, I mean, it sounds like a lot to me and I would take it. But but but it's a fairly normal budget. It's going to be rich people more often as somebody who is looking forward any time they announce new science fiction projects on any streaming service, but in particular, Netflix, I get really excited and I make sure to watch that stuff. And I would have been very interested to see this. But I also know these sometimes come with a lot of baggage and then they don't succeed and they get canceled prematurely anyway. So the whole business is based on so much risk and reward that this is just another one of those. And I don't know. It seems high profile because no one throws $55 million in the toilet. Yeah, not potentially. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, before we go, let's look at the toilet. Nope. No 55 million there. Too bad shame. Yeah. But we do have a mail back is not in the toilet. Absolutely not. This one comes in from Gary, who recently got Apple's latest AirPod pros. We were talking about them yesterday with Robert Herron. Gary says the noise cancellation is much better than the original pros that were accidentally destroyed in a bizarre sprinkler repair mishap. Gary, I'm sorry to hear that. He says I not, I really like the new conversational awareness feature though. If I start to speak the volume of whatever I'm listening to first lowers, then mutes and then pauses. Very handy when I'm working around the house and my wife has a quick question type thing, but I found another use for that feature. The other day we were with another couple. It was a noisy restaurant and I couldn't understand what anybody was saying. I put in my AirPods, started talking and suddenly the restaurant noise went away so we could have a conversation. Gary says I had my hearing checked last year and I was told I'm not quite ready for hearing aids, but when I inevitably get some, I hope they work in noisy environments as well as the AirPods Pro 2, uh, second gen. I, you know what? I've had this experience on airplanes where I put in, uh, the AirPods with the noise canceling on and I actually can hear Eileen talking to me better because it's canceling out that airline stuff. And it's also canceling her out a little, but not the same. And so it comes through more. Oh, interesting. I was, I've, so I'm not in the, I haven't had an AirPods Pro for either any iteration. I guess there's been two. I haven't had them at all, but I have some third party stuff that attempt to do similar things. And now I can't live without certain awareness mode stuff. Like it's just, it used to be, I didn't care that much if I couldn't hear what Kim was asking or somebody else was yelling my name. But now that I've, now that I got this going on and, and I, and that happens again, yeah, it's bad. So I gotta, I've changed my tune on that. I think this is going to be a crucial feature for all earbuds moving forward, whether you buy the, I mean, I've, I've got AirPods Pro as well. And I, I'm very impressed by them. I know that there are other models that will, will do a lot of the same stuff. So, you know, not pushing Apple too hard here, but really appreciate Gary saying, you know, here's kind of a use case that really is helping me in some sort of transitional time where, you know, audio might be a little harder for me to process than it used to be. Thanks, Gary. Indeed. And also thanks to you, Scott Johnson, whether you hear us or not, we're here for you. So let us know what you're up to over the weekend and beyond. Scott, what are you up to over the weekend? Sorry, I have my headphones that I couldn't hear you. I am spending a bunch of time with family this weekend, but I am also still putting out content. Where do I put all that content? Well, if you're looking for podcasts, you're looking for art stuff, if you're looking for board games, if you're looking for all the cool things that are happening at frogpants.com, then that's the place to go. Frogpants.com will get you all that stuff and more. Go check it out. If you haven't before, again, that is frogpants.com. Patrons of the show not only get an RSS feed that doesn't have any ads in it. They not only get bonus content, but they get to stick around for the extended show. Good day, Internet. We're going to do a Black Friday price quiz. We usually do fun stuff on Fridays, but we're not doing a Friday show this week. So stick around. Can you guess the closest Black Friday sales price with us before everyone else does? It's like Bob Barker is with us. Yes, he never left. I'm very excited. But just a reminder that DTNF itself is live Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern 2100 UTC and you can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live reminder. We're off Thursday and Friday for the American Thanksgiving holiday, but we're back on Monday with a shounen morse coming in hot. Have a great weekend, everyone. This week's episodes of Daily Tech News Show were created by the following people. Host producer and writer Tom Merritt, host producer and writer Sarah Lane, executive producer Booker Roger Chang, producer writer and co-host Rob Dunwood, video producer and Twitch producer Joe Coots, technical producer Anthony Lemos, Spanish language host writer and producer Dan Campos, science correspondent Dr. Nikki Ackermanns, social media producer and moderator Zoe Detterding, our mods Beatmaster, W. Scottis 1, BioCow, Captain Gipper, Steve Garterama, Paul Reese, Matthew J. Stevens, a.k.a. Gadget Virtuoso and J.D. Galloway, mod and video hosting by Dan Christensen. Music and Art provided by Martin Bell, Dan Looters, Mustafa A, A-Cast and Len Peralta, A-Cast ad support from Tatiana Matias, Patreon support from Tom McNeil. Contributors for this week's shows include Nika Monford and Scott Johnson. And our guest this week was Robert Herron. Thanks to all the patrons who make the show possible. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at Frogpants.com. Fireman Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.