 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners. Thanks to all of you including Dr. X-17, Dustin Campbell, and Tim Deputy. Coming up on DTNS, why the golden age of TV isn't ending, it's just on repeat. Plus, an open source way to do text generators on the cheap. And Lenovo has its first CES announcement. Merry CES-mas. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, December 20th, 2022 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. And out of the suburbs up Atlanta, this is Terence Gaines. And on the show's producer, Roger Chan. Oh my friends, we are in the waning days of 2022, but we still have news. We still have things to tell you, so thanks for being with us. Let's start with the quick hits. Amazon completed its Phase 1 rollout of the Matter Smart Home standard to Echo devices. This adds Matter support to Echo devices through Wi-Fi for smart plugs, smart bulbs, and smart switches. But it's only compatible with Android at least initially. In Phase 2 planned for 2023, Amazon plans to add Matter to more accessories and add support for the Thread Protocol and also iOS. It'll announce more Phase 2 plans at CES. Twitter expanded its pilot for Blue for Business where select businesses can pay for a subscription that gives them a gold check mark on the business's main account. And now, you'll be able to display a small company badge on employee accounts to show that you indeed work with that organization. Brands will also show a square profile picture rather than a round one to distinguish those accounts. No word on how much Blue for Business is costing, though. Also, Twitter CEO Elon Musk recently announced the platform will make major policy decisions through user votes, and in response to a suggestion on Twitter that only Twitter Blue subscribers be allowed to vote on those decisions, Musk replied, good point, Twitter will make that change. Amazon agreed to settlements on two European Union antitrust cases which involved treatment of third-party sellers on its platform. As part of the settlement for the next seven years in the European Economic Area, Amazon agreed to give third-party sellers an equal opportunity to be selected as the default option for its buy box, as well as to qualify for its Prime Shipping Program. Amazon also won't use non-public data about sellers to compete against them. However, the company will not pay a fine. How'd they pull that one off? I think Google and Apple would like to know. While the chip shortage has turned into a chip glut in many sectors, in fact, so much so that you're going to hear me try to take credit for my prediction that the chip glut would end in our predictions result show later this month, it has not been resolved for the automotive industry. The Financial Times reports that automakers are still running behind. Auto forecast solutions estimates that automakers will produce 3 million fewer cars in 2023 than they would have if they had all the chips they need. That is an improvement on this year, 2022. We're looking at a 4.5 million shortfall. Auto parts maker Stellantis head Carlos Tavares told Financial Times he thinks shortages will continue throughout most of next year. TikTok will launch a new feature to let users see why a video was recommended in the 4U feeds. Previously, it really didn't know. Users can see this in the share panel by clicking on a question mark icon labeled Why This Video? Reasons for recommendations include accounts already followed, previous content that was watched, likes or shares, comments, searches, and regional popularity. TikTok says it plans to expand the feature to bring more granularity and transparency to content recommendations. That ear! Those are. Those are? That is. That is the quick hits. Those are the quick hits. Those are both correct. Yeah, your ear heard them. Yes, they're done is the point. So let's talk about Lenovo. What have they got? Okay, so Lenovo announced what it's going to be showing off a CES in a couple weeks. As Tom mentioned at the top of the show, Lenovo does this. The IdeaPad Slim 5 laptop now lets you choose either an Intel or AMD processor. Intel's version will be called the IdeaPad Slim 5i for Intel. 14-inch versions of the laptops also come with an OLED display. The $350 IdeaPad Flex 3i Chromebook has a 12-inch screen, a 16-by-10 aspect ratio, and an option for a backlit keyboard. But the one that's getting the attention is something called the Go Desk Station with webcam. It's a few things. It's a USB hub, it's a wireless charger, it has a webcam, and it's also a lamp. The hub part has a 65-watt USB-C port, a 20-watt USB-C port, two USB-A 3.1 ports, and HDMI 2.0 supporting 4K, 60 frames per second screens. It also has a 15-watt Qi wireless charging pad and a Lenovo Go 4K Pro webcam that can do 4K up to 30 frames per second with autofocus and autoframing. That sounds like kind of a nifty device. But remember, it's also a lamp. The lamp is on a height-adjustable rotating arm. It's pretty thin, actually. It has three color temperatures and adjustable brightness up to 1600 lux at a half meter. It will be available in March, and if you're interested, it's not super cheap. It starts at $329. You know, so many people are making a big deal about this, but then you told me earlier today the thing that it's for. Yeah, it's for hotel rooms. Makes perfect sense. Yeah, when I was reading this, I was like, because, yeah, there were headlines being like, well, this is one of those crazy CES products, you know, we get them every year. And I'm looking at it, and I'm like, this is cool. It's a space saver. And I want one in every hotel room that I visit from this day forward. And that's what I was thinking. It's like a great little, you know, kind of like a mobile rig that you don't have to pack. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. It's a space saver because I do not have a lot of space in my workstation, but I have a webcam and a lamp, and I have a dock where I can plug in multiple USB ports. So this could cut that out, but I did not think about the hotel. And I think that's dope. Yeah. Yeah, although I don't know about the camera with the hotel. Like maybe there'll be a model where the camera is optional. That might be something Marriott is more likely to buy. Yeah, that's well, I don't know. I mean, more and more people are, you know, they do. They're doing work from maybe they're doing remote stuff. Yeah. Yeah, there's probably a little bit of like, well, how do I trust that the hotel is not spying on me? But, but, you know, you could kind of get that using the hotel Wi-Fi anyway. Well, you can put a sock on it like they do at the hotels, but that thing is for a different reason. So never mind. That was on the door. Never mind. Never mind. Never mind. Never mind. Never mind. Never mind. Rewind. Rewind. No, this is, this is, this is definitely, I'm happy to see the first weird CES product get announced. I don't think it's really that weird either. If you look at it, it's like, like you said, Ter, it's, it's a space saver. It's got great ports, like even if it was just a hub, a little bit expensive, but if it was just a hub, a 65 watt port, 20 watt port to USBAs, like these are kind of the ports that most people need these days. Not a, not a bad products, just a little, a little bit on the high end for the price, I guess. Yeah. I, I don't know. I, I'm not totally in the market for this right now. Cause my rig is just way less space savory. Uh, but, uh, but yeah, I think it looks nice and Seville seven is like, why would you want a camera in your hotel room? We're assuming you're doing video conferencing for your work. Right. Right. Yeah. You're sitting at a desk in your, you know, on zoom kind of thing. And you want a nicer camera than the one built into your laptop. Right. Or you just don't want to pack, you know, all that stuff yourself. If you, you know, are going to a hotel where you know that something like this would be. Or you're trying to stack your webcam on your laptop. Yeah. Anything you can find to get the high enough to where you don't look like you're looking up your nose during the, during the, How many ice buckets have I used to stack a webcam on in my life? Right. Uh, yeah. And the lighting with the webcam makes a lot of sense. We haven't even really mentioned that. I feel like it's fairly obvious is that, oh, because the webcam is in this, the lighting can adjust to help your shot. Like it's designed for it to do that. Which is really cool too. Yeah. Yeah. It's maybe for, I don't know, reading a book, but mostly for lighting yourself properly with the webcam. I don't know. I can do both. 330 bucks. Not super cheap. Like I said, but I think it's kind of a nifty product. Open AI is chat. GPT has become quite the tech darling, generating lots of conversation. Literally by asking it to generate a conversation, but also people are talking about what it's good at, what it isn't so good at yet, how it should best be used, all sorts of things. One thing that seems less discussed though is how much it costs. Associate professor at University of Maryland, Tom Goldstein did a little back of the envelope calculation and thinks it might be costing open AI about $100,000 per day. Now that estimate might not be totally accurate. It might be a little off, but it's probably close enough to say with some confidence that chat GPT is expensive to run. Yeah. Open AI has said it's expensive even if they haven't given the exact number. So we know that there's a new project to try to do text generators on the cheap though. You might recognize hugging face as the name of the folks behind the art generator crayon formerly known as Dolly Mini. Hugging face also backs a workshop called the big science project. Big science has brought together 600 scientists from 250 institutions in more than 50 countries around the world to study the capabilities of large language models and determine through that study how they can responsibly develop and deploy them. The team includes tech folks, of course, engineers, programmers, all the people you'd expect, but it also has experts in law, ethics, and public policy as well. Big science has developed a clever workaround to the cost of those LLMs. Pedals is the name of its distributed LLM. It's sort of like folding at home, but for generating text. It's being developed by folks at Hugging Face and Yandex Research and the University of Washington and has been released on GitHub under the open source MIT license. It can run Big Sciences Bloom model, which is similar to OpenAI's GPT-3. Yeah, so instead of a data center and the electricity it takes to run it and the hundreds of thousands of dollars you have to spend on GPUs, Pedals runs on your individual computers times a thousand. A bunch of people all running the Pedals software. You install some software, you connect to the Pedals network, and then you can generate text like you would with chat GPT, but you can also choose to contribute server resources to the Pedals network from your machine. Each Pedals server handles a part of the workload and then passes it off to someone else on the network. When you combine enough of those together, you can run the powerful language model on the cheap. Now, it doesn't run exactly as fast as chat GPT. Tech crunch as Kyle Wiggers found it a little bit slower, but in amount of seconds, you know, he said the longest, most complicated prompt he did took three minutes to generate. So most of the prompts took a few seconds, maybe a second or two longer than chat GPT, but it wasn't bad. So, all right, so the cost is the solvable part, right? But there are some thornier issues. First off, Bloom isn't really ready for primetime. It's meant for research. So it doesn't have systems to correct for biases and, you know, those sorts of things that people already talk about being an issue with these sorts of technologies. There are also known vulnerabilities in Pedals that could let people access your text prompts. So its operators recommend against entering any sensitive data into prompts. You might as well just assume someone will read them. You know, one of the reasons open AI obviously cost is one of these reasons, but one of the reasons open AI has put so many impediments into people using its stuff when its name is open is they say they want people to use it responsibly. Here's a product, here's a project, Big Science saying they're trying to figure out how to use it responsibly, but they're taking the tactic of make it as open as possible. Don't gate it so that we can learn from the mistakes. Terrence, what do you think of that? There's going to be mistakes to be made because people are not going to use it responsibly, especially that if they've announced and just made it open that they're not systems incorrect in place for biases and they don't and there are known vulnerabilities in that could let people do all the different type of things. So it's going to be a tightrope. A lot of their time is going to be spent in where do we draw the line between keeping it open in order to learn, in order to catch some of these things when we get ready for primetime versus you know what, this is going to be a tough challenge just to tackle this. Is it really worth it? You know, I see them trying to tow that line and that's going to be a tough one. Yeah, the GitHub vulnerability one, particularly telling people don't put sensitive info in here does constrain what you can use it for, right? So hopefully they get those fixed fast. The other one is the whole issue of misuse and yes, the fact is they want to see people misuse it so they can figure out how to stop them. Yeah. I get that, but that's makes a lot of people uncomfortable, I'm sure. Have you met Americans? Yeah, they're going to do that. They're going to accept the challenge. Let's not be American exceptionalists. There's people around the world who are good at this sort of thing. Earthlings will try to break something if possible. Yeah, my first question when I read about this was, well, first of all, I was like, cool, I want to participate. I would love to do this. Use my computer. Great. My second question was, okay, so how does this distributed way of creating something that becomes a machine-learned text generator that can give us great information and seems like a human itself. How is it going to get weird with this open-source setup with thousands of people trying to, not everybody is going to use it to do weird things, but a lot of people are. I think if you're a researcher, you're like, get weird. Let's figure out where things start to break down and how to build something that's smarter as a result. I just think it's probably pretty messy for a while before it gets to that point. For a while. I hadn't thought about this, but we have a test case with Dolly Mini, which is now called Crayon. The same conversation was being had that, you know what, they are not being as responsible as OpenAI because they're putting it out for anyone to use. And yes, we definitely saw Crayon, AKA Dolly Mini, used in some odd ways, but it hasn't turned into this big, massive nightmare. So maybe the same is true of pedals because they have people who are watching to see like, okay, that's something we need to figure out. Let's work on that. As long as they make sure we are watching, you know, maybe that will, you know, of course people are going to get weird, but at the same time it's like, all right, well, this is for research. So let me put something that is weird, but not offensively. I can be subjected to weird. I don't know. You know what, I think you're on to something, Terrence. The difference between 600 scientists working on a limited project, because big science is a year-long project, versus a vice president in charge of a small team who works at a company funded by ads. You know, there's different motivations there. I'm not saying that that's OpenAI, but you know, you got Meta, you got it, Google in on this too. Well, folks, if you're feeling social, and how could you not after that conversation, get in touch with us. We are available on the social networks. We're at DTNS on Twitter, at Daily Tech News Show on TikTok, and at DTNS pics with an X, DTNS PIX on Instagram. Insiders Paris Marks has an article up called The Golden Age of Streaming TV is over. I know the subhead says Netflix used to offer a library full of cutting-edge shows and movies, but now it's introduced ads and is producing more bland mass appeal shows just like cable. Now, Marks's argument is that streaming isn't making money as much as it used to, or at least the money may be distributed because there's so much competition, so no individual company is making as much money. So streamers are retreating to lowest common denominator shows. Basically, increased competition has forced Netflix to go from trying to replicate HBO in Marks' words to being more like the Hallmark Channel. Not to mention, they're adding quality shows like Love is Blind, Great Show, by the way. They nailed it. One or more of these may be among the favorites of people on this show. Mark has seen documents shared by talent agents that say Netflix is out there pitching big, broad stories that can be told on a budget. So they're reining in the purse strings. In the end, Marks notes that the same thing happened to cable, independent networks that people thought would topple the network bought by the big players. So ESPN went to Disney, USA went to NBC, etc. Now the same thing is happening in a kind of a different way to streaming where we're seeing the consolidation. Terrence, should we be surprised? No. Because it's entertainment in the end, you know, of course Netflix was, you know, the new kid on the block because they were the new kid on the block. Now they're not. So I don't know if that automatically excludes them from the golden age of television. I don't know what the golden age of television even is or let me say golden age of streaming TV is that just because they were spending a bunch of money and now they're trying to get like you said, pull the reins in and get more precise with what they use or they just putting out entertainment that people love. We get on streaming, we get on Twitter, we get on social media and talk about these shows and Netflix goes, oh, they want more of that. All right, give them that. So I mean, are we really surprised that they're essentially giving us what we want? Yeah, the argument that Mark makes saying less like HBO, more like the Hallmark Channel. Now it depends on the Hallmark Channel. That's my point. Depends on who you are, of course, but a lot of people are like Hallmark Channel is the best. You know, like just give me more rom-coms and I think in many cases first of all, sure, for a super high budget, super highly produced award-winning show, you're going to have to spend a lot of money and you can do that and you can have a hit and that can be extremely beneficial for any streaming service. We know what the, you know, the examples of those are, but to kind of have more stuff that is consumable, perhaps maybe it's not this, you know, Sunday night, 9 p.m. appointment viewing type thing, like some of the shows, you know, still enjoy, but you have more variety and people do like cable for the reason that you turn the TV on and then it's just kind of on. I feel like this is just a repeat. We see this over and over. We saw it with cable where cable networks were independent. They put on shows that the broadcast networks would never have done pushing the broadcast shows to be more creative and giving us a golden age of television in the 80s and 90s and then the big networks all merged together and bought up all the networks and then people said, oh, it's all reality shows now and the sci-fi network does wrestling, not sci-fi shows, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. It's the same thing again. We have a bunch of streaming networks come in. They try some stuff. We see shows that we never would have saw otherwise, which is cool. I'm not arguing with Marx that he's wrong. It is cool, but it always happens that people don't pay the bills and they make things that are massively popular. Unfortunately, it's not a trick. These are popular. There are people who like these kinds of shows and there's a little bit of looking down your nose at it when you say, oh, those Hallmark Channel shows. You may not like them. A lot of people may not like them. Maybe you can objectively prove in your doctoral thesis that they're bad, but that doesn't stop the fact that a lot of people are going to watch them, and that's why Netflix and others are going to make them. I mean, listen, I don't watch every reality show that's ever made, but I watch quite a few of them. And I have no shame in that. I love reality programming when it's catered to me. Love is blind. Great example of that. Also love the 90-day fiancee franchise, which there are like 100 spin-offs of now. I mean, you can watch that stuff all day and never even get to anything else. And I'm not alone. Again, I'm probably not going to learn a whole lot out of it, but it could be something that you put on when you're sleepy or you put on while you're cooking, or maybe you're just riveted and you sit there and watch it. Cable television has enjoyed these types of shows for quite some time. Why wouldn't the streaming services enjoy the same kind of eyeball retention for lack of a more human way to put it? Yeah, no, I just think that, I mean, this is the way things go. This, as they call it, is gone. So now it's just like this is just entertainment right now when Netflix and streaming was like this new thing with all these new different types of content. Now the newness is gone, the honeymoon is over, whatever cliche you want to use. Now we're back to just watching TV while we're cleaning up. They're still going to try and swing for a big hit with an original show here. Netflix is only one example, but just using it as the example for purposes of our conversation. I mean, Netflix has had lots of those wins. It's not like they're not going to stop trying. It's just that, yeah, you can't just pay for every big budget show that you think might be a win. I think what's interesting about this time around is instead of seeing everybody get bought up by the same companies, we've seen some new entrants that are going to stick. Amazon Prime Video is going to stick. Apple TV Plus is going to stick. Those two companies are not going anywhere, and they're going to keep making these shows. Netflix is probably going to stick. It would have been bought by now, I think. Now, never say never, it could become the next Yahoo and eventually get, you know, bought up or something. But right now, I don't think Netflix is in the market to sell itself. So you have three brand new entrants that are making lots of shows. And yet Netflix may be more like TNT or USA Network than people expected them to be, but Apple TV is definitely the HBO landscape right now where they're willing to just make prestige shows and not worry about whether they're successful or not. They want Emmys because they're going to make their money in other ways. So it's a more interesting landscape as this time it consolidates where it looks like maybe the Disney's, the Paramounts, certainly the Warner Brothers discoveries are the ones that are going to get eaten up possibly by some of these new entrants. Yeah, absolutely. Because again the reason why we switch from Cable is we need more choice. Now we've got tons and tons and tons of different choices. Now we're like, okay, wait up. So, you know, a lot of the peacocks, a lot of those shows may just get that back backseat to where they don't get that same type of and they'll get scooped up eventually. But like you mentioned, Netflix and Disney and HBO and Apple TV, you know, they're the big ones and they're going to keep that content. And like Sarah said, they're going to swing for the fences every once in a while and they'll keep us there. But they'll also do that guilt, you know, guilt television that people watch but really don't like to mention that they watch. But you know they're watching because you're watching them on Twitter talking about it and that's I mean, it's good for everybody. Yeah, normalize guilty pleasures. That's what I said. Indeed. Well, we were talking about crazy tech that we might see popping up at CES earlier in the show and gaming mouse manufacturer Final Mouse has scooped you all announcing the Final Mouse centerpiece. It's a $349 keyboard with a screen embedded underneath transparent keycaps and switches. The idea is to look like you're typing on the screen directly but it has a feel of a traditional mechanical switch type keyboard that a lot of people cannot live without. The Optimus Popularis was a similar product. You might have known it. You might have bought it. But that used its screen to display things like keyboard shortcuts. So Final Mouse's technology that it's calling display circuit glass stack seems a little bit more meant to be just fun than useful. Visualizations include a matrix matrix style green scrolling text, nature videos, some interactivity as well. There's one that it shows a pool of water under the keys and every time you press a key there's a little splash. There's even a simple interactive game option. Now the Final Mouse centerpiece can store three skins at any time. Additional skins are available to swap in and out on an app called the Free Thinker Portal. The keyboard's built-in CPU and GPU run the skins using Unreal Engine 5 and keyboard has its own GPU. Indeed it does. And for anybody being like what are you even talking about do check our show notes because there's a video that gives you a great indication of what this is. I mean it's my worst nightmare I also don't look at my keyboard very often because I'm looking at my screen I don't know. I would love for somebody to be like this is so cool and here's why. You know rather than sort of the novelty of being like I got a weird keyboard everybody look at this. But there's fish swimming around on my keyboard. You got a koi pond on your desk. I think this is for the niche folks to have the desk setup workstation as a actual hobby not necessarily for oh I need to set this up perfectly because I need to shoot videos or because I need to edit videos or because I'm on the stock market I need 14 screens. It's like what I've been able to check out is people have a desk setup as the hobby in and of itself and they take a lot of joy a lot of pride a lot of artistic artisanists if that's a word goes into setting up this perfect desktop and I could see this being this keyboard being something that people want to display just for the sake of being a display not necessarily being functional it's like pimp my ride but for exactly you know yeah like the the next gen laptop pimp my desk there you go yeah it's people are the mechanical keyboards so yeah this does not surprise me alright let's check out the mailbag let's do it so Rick wrote in with some thoughts on our sports conversation about sports rights from yesterday's show with IAZaktar joining us Rick says Apple doesn't have any sports executives on their team and is trying to dictate terms which will never happen Apple is out and now they're leaking to stay relevant remember that the Sunday package is nothing special all they're doing is taking all the broadcast feeds and making them available they get one minute an hour to sell and must turn over all the data Apple has been used as a stocking horse for a long time Amazon has been playing the game right by showing its commitment to the NFL Google has been a late entry to the talks and the must have tier one sports product to remain viable in future talks definitely good insight Rick thank you for this yeah I went and looked it up because I was like I think he's right I don't think they have a lot of sports executive the person that I found that's running business or Apple sports video for Apple is James DeLaRenzo he's a former person from Amazon where he was head of sports there and before that was at 120 sports and sports illustrated and CBS local so he's got some experience he's not a bad guy to be running it but he's not like a long time sports insider like Rick is talking about and using Apple to drive up the price very smart NFL yeah get Apple to bid that thing up and then when you go to Amazon you can say well Apple was willing to give us this much you know come on you have to get at least close well thanks Rick for writing in good insight indeed and if you have insight in anything that we talk about we do want your emails feedback at dailytechnewshow.com is where to send them so thanks to all of you and also thanks to Terrence Gaines for being with us today Terrence where can people keep up with your work sure sure sure you can find me on my all things Apple podcast at snopoescast.com that's where me and my co-host Nika Monford talk all things Apple and then some with then some being pretty much whatever else we want to talk about outside of Apple in addition to that you can talk you can find me at the tech John that's C-H-E-T-E-C-H J-A-W-N where me, Stephanie and Rob Dunwood talk about all things tech from a different a.k.a. black perspective so definitely check us out there and I definitely appreciate your viewership well we appreciate you being on the show we also appreciate two brand new bosses and we'd like to thank them now Herbert and Ashley just started backing us on Patreon thank you Herbert thank you Ashley and welcome yeah they get it in by the end of the year means clocks ticking on getting the new Patreon merch Dylan Peraltau did himself with the nine-year anniversary logo we're turning nine on January 2nd and so if you if you stick as a patron like Herbert and Ashley for three months you'll start getting some some stuff some stickers some mugs some T-shirts go check it out patreon.com slash DTNS speaking of patrons stick around for the extended show good day internet what will we talk about today we don't even know yet but you can catch the show live Monday through Friday DTNS is at 4 p.m. Eastern 2100 UTC you can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live we're back doing it all again tomorrow with Scott Johnson joining us talk to you then this show is part of the frog pants work get more at frogpants.com Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program