 Daily Tech News show is made possible by you, the listener, thanks to all of you, including Vince Power, Chris Benito, Steve Ayadarola, and new patrons, two of them, one named Peter, and the other named Peter, all the Peters. Welcome to the show. On this episode of DTNs, Google's got lots of AI news out of its cloud conference. Ron Richards from Android Faithful is here to help us understand the launch of Find My Device on Android. Join us. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, April 9th, 2024 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Animal House, I'm Sarah Lane. I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. And joining us, CEO and co-founder of Scorbit and host of Android Faithful, Ron Richards. Welcome back to the show. Thank you. It's good to be back on a beautiful day here in New York at 70 degrees out where Spring is sprung and I can't wait to talk to be inside to talk technology with you guys. This must be what happens after an eclipse. Everybody gets a wonderful weather because it's like 70 something degrees here, too. We've had nothing but torrential rain for like six months here in the New York Tri-State area. And then the one day at 70 degrees, I said to my wife, I'm like, Oh, I can't play with the kids because I have to podcast. Well, thank you for picking us over your family and sunshine and priorities. Yeah. All right, let's start with the quick hits. Nikkei reports that Microsoft is investing at $2.9 billion in data centers in Japan by 2025, set to be formally announced during Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida's visit to Washington, DC this week. Microsoft plans to install advanced AI chips at two existing sites in Eastern and Western Japan. It will also unveil an AI related reskilling program in Japan to train 3 million workers over three years and set up a research lab on robotics and AI. In other moving chip production and research around the world news, yesterday we passed along TSMC getting some Chips Act money to expand manufacturing in Arizona. And Reuters says that the Chips Act is going to send $6.6 billion Samsung's way next week, which would be used to expand chip output and subsidize construction at four new Taylor Texas facilities near Austin, Texas, as well as one other undisclosed location. Ooh, where could it be? Fancy. A Wall Street Journal investigation found that Russian and Sudanese paramilitary groups are buying Starlink satellite internet equipment through third parties. The third parties get the equipment used either through legitimate sites like eBay or other means where it is legal to obtain it. And they resell it to the paramilitary groups where volunteers then sometimes smuggle the hardware to its new location. Ukraine is working with SpaceX to stop unauthorized users from accessing Starlink in that country. New rules will soon prohibit equipment from accessing Starlink there unless registered, but it is unclear how effective that's going to be hasn't started yet. For its part Sudan says SpaceX is not working with it to stop unauthorized access in Sudan itself. Automatic the company behind WordPress.com Tumblr pocketcast simple note has purchased Beeper the company that briefly tried to bring Apple Messenger access to Android users. Beepers 27 employees will join automatic and that includes Beeper CEO and co founder Eric Mijakowski who will become automatic's head of messaging overseeing not only Beeper but also a similar service that automatic already owned called texts.com. At its vision 2024 event today Intel shared details on its gaudy three AI processors which it says have 1.7 times the training performance 50% better inference and 40% better efficiency than Nvidia's H 100 processors all with a cheaper price. Ooh shots fired Intel also announced new branding for its data center CPU portfolio. The granite rapids and Sierra force chips are now branded as the Xeon 6 family expected this year until also announced development for an AI NIC ASIC for ultra ethernet consortium compliant networking and an AI NIC chiplet that will be used in future XPU and gaudy three processors which will also be available to external customers through Intel Foundry. Hey you know when it takes two years for your competitor Nvidia to ship a GPU because they're in such high demand you might as well make some smart. Alright a lot of news coming out of Google's next conference in Las Vegas Google announced a few details about a custom built arm processor for cloud computing called axion. It is being made for Google by Broadcom if you're curious. It's based on arms Neoverse 2 designs and Google says it delivers 30% better performance over what they use for AWS and Azure on their native arm processors as well as 50% better performance and 60% better energy efficiency than competitive X86 processors axion chips will be available for Google cloud customers to take advantage of later this year snap is apparently one of the companies who's going to take advantage cloud resources powered by axion chips will power snap Google is using axion chips in services powering YouTube ads and the Google earth engine already as well as a few other Google services and Google did say it will continue to offer Nvidia chips including a few of the brand new Blackwell chips as well. Ron I know you don't really follow the cloud processor market as closely but you know what it does make sense to for Google to be in this game since AWS and Microsoft's Azure and everybody's doing it right. Well yeah I mean that the obviously the chip arms race just continue with the crazy success and videos had all that sort of stuff and we see like we've already seen in the mobile devices with the tensor chips you know like Google is taking it upon themselves to be the change they want and not be so dependent on other manufacturers like Blackwell or Nvidia so they're really kind of just you know continuing their main strategy of kind of controlling their own destiny and you know I always wondered what Google earth was running on and there it is it's running on axion so there it is. Something that a lot of people are keeping an eye on is Google's Gemini Gemini's latest version 1.5 pro is available in public preview on Google's AI app building platform Vertex AI it can handle 1 million tokens which means about 70,000 words 30,000 lines of code an hour of video or 11 hours of audio all at once. If you're keeping count it's four times as high as Claude 3 and eight times as high as GPT-4 Turbo Max. It can compare and analyze content in TV shows, conference calls, recordings and the like across multiple languages and also make transcripts of audio and even audio from video. Gemini 1.5 will power new features in Google's code assist letting you update cross file dependencies and review large chunks of code all at once. And this this is just like the Gemini stuff I've been following along because like we all know that like if like a year ago it felt like Google was scrambling to keep up with open AI and like what was going on in the in the AI space and then Gemini I keep saying Gemini like like the like the Apollo mission right the Gemini mission like a NASA and NASA tech from in Texas in 1965. No but the the thing when Gemini Gemini came out was that a we said keep an eye on what Google does with this stuff because open AI is cool and chat GPT is cool and Sora is neat but Google has the applications to apply this technology against it and really turbo charge what you can do with it and that's what I've been keeping an eye on is how they apply Gemini and then the fact that Gemini rolls out and on the heels of it after 1.0 1.5 is arriving so quickly they are iterating so fast and it's almost you know it's it's really hard to keep up in fact but that's the idea is that they want you know to have Gemini be able to handle a large massive amount of input and be able to be a tool and I gotta admit the code assist stuff is just game changer for programmers. I don't know if any of you had a chance to play with it but like the integration with Gemini into Android developer studio and stuff like that it makes coding like it takes away the menial tasks and coding and let the AI do it so that you can be more creative and what you're developing and so it really really is changing things very fast. I was talking to a scripture about this exact thing over the weekend and and he was showing me like look this is my crappy code and this is this is what it can do like we 100% use we 100% use it for Scorbit my company the we have a mobile app and we use it to let you know what's wrong with this block of code and it comes back with like three things that are wrong here's how you can fix it and it's like it's like working with a developer who doesn't get annoyed by you asking dumb questions. Does the developer get anything wrong Codewyans have you been like I haven't I haven't noticed it personally I haven't noticed it yet we haven't had any hallucinations yet we're all of a sudden it renders like a different thing but you're always on the lookout for that too because that's the concern is that you know garbage garbage out right yeah and it will get things wrong that was another thing the developer I was talking about is like yeah occasionally it's like oh that's not right but he's like I review everything just just to make sure so and I think the upshot of this is we're in the arms race now right Claude three just came out and was like we're so much better than GPT-4 Turbo Max and then Gemini 1.5 Pro comes out like guess what we're even better than Claude three and you know GPT-4.5 is gonna come or something pretty soon and and that's the way it's gonna go they all have code assist they're all really good at it co-pilot is great at it so yeah this is uh this is now we're off to the races now we're off to the benchmark let the lawsuits begin exactly uh google's text to image model image in or imagine I guess is how they want us to say it imagine to got some updates as well adding the ability to add and remove elements from images within painting and out painting this is something Dolly and others have had so it's kind of catching up here also the synth ID watermark feature is now available for all images you create with image edge and text to live video will let you create four seconds of video from a text prompt so it's you know uh no open it's an animated gif yeah exactly you can make a nice under construction gift a lot of money's been spent to make that animated gift I was adding I was at an event at google here in New York last november and they actually had one of the lead project managers working on I believe working on it uh imagine or imagine um and this is back in november before any of the text to image stuff was actually public and kind of gave a sneak preview and he showed the kind of iteration they've gone in their development of what their text of speech development has been and then gave the first I think I was lucky enough to be one of the first public glimpses of the video generation aspect and I mean and again akin to what's you know with open AI and Sora this stuff is mind blowing right it's just the applications are crazy but what I do think is like I'm waiting to see the the artist and the the the movie directors who use these tools to do the next thing because the challenge is that at four seconds of video with the same prompt you never get the same thing every time so you can't tell a linear story yet right like you could say you know give me a a a a New York City apartment and you'll get a different one every time so like in order to use this from a creative standpoint there's still a lot of development that's got to happen but it's it's mind blowing to see it in work and if you want to try image into it's available in vertex AI as well uh we also have google vids which lets you create visual presentations from text prompts so you collect your assets from something like google drive assemble them in order then you can add a voiceover even a video of yourself and then edit that into a final video now you can do this all manually but you can also let Gemini make a draft of the video for you it can also make storyboards it can at least attempt to write scripts and use text to speech to narrate those scripts google will launch vids in public beta in June in workspace labs although some workspace customers have been testing it for things like training videos, HR announcements, and even meeting recaps. I saw this at that same demo back in November and as someone who has built lots of presentations and decks and things like that the the idea of making this work go faster um was greatly appreciated and and uh I think that this has the potential to really like not only impact um you know like you know programmers and things like that but also like marketing folks and people in the business side and it all goes back to last year google i o uh jason howell and uh went down myself back when we were at all about android interviewed Dave Burke from uh the android team over google and again it's the ai uh you know kind of uh value proposition which is you know you know it made the made the comparison to laundry we're like in the 1890s you spent a week doing laundry and then the washing machine got invented and now it takes three hours or two hours or whatever it is and and it gives you more time with these tools to be more creative and what you're you're making as long as the interfaces are manageable for the everyday user and that's what we're seeing this evolution evolution go through i'm really excited about this yeah yeah i i saw a lot of headlines were like google's vid isn't for hollywood it's for hr and i'm like okay not every video has to like threaten uh the workers like uh i guess this might threaten some workers uh but threaten them with training videos that are made faster by hr i mean threaten them with you know that presentation that they didn't want to build manually so many decks in my life so many yeah actually now that i'm saying this out loud i'm like oh no this is going to be more decks this is going to be more poor uh but but hopefully it'll be used for good uh google workspace subscribers will soon be able to use voice prompts to kick off the ai based help me write feature in gmail instead of having to type it out uh company also launching a feature in gmail for workspace that will instantly turn rough drafts into more polished emails so you could say like and i knock this out here make it work better uh and paying subscribers will be the first to get access to these new features before google considers rolling them out to everybody is is it is should i be ashamed to admit that i use help me write in gmail no i mean it's a feature it's so cool they want people to use yeah i've i've i've not used that um do you think it it works as advertised yeah i mean if anything what i found in my life is i'm a much better editor than writer right so i could very much easily say respond to this email with you know with with enthusiasm and blah blah blah and it'll come back with it and like okay great i can make some nips and tucks to make it in my own voice and then send it's it has saved me time so because typing just takes so long i i know it's so hard so hard to type but i mean you know sometimes sometimes it is time consuming i wonder how much uh we will be talking you know it and not the two distant future of like yeah ron responded to me seemed like 30 human you know or like like i think you put a lot of like ron into that like more like 70 human today but my favorite was when this first came out i immediately said uh write a email to my wife about how much i love her etc and and i just took what it gave and hit send and we were both in this house and she came from her her office over to mine and she's like that was so sweet and i just looked at her i just looked at her and she's like that was ai wasn't it i was like yep yeah gotta love it yeah gotta love it uh we also have vertex ai agent builder which lets companies quickly build customer service chat bots the agents are tied into google search to ground them and reduce those unhelpful hallucinations like telling you love your wife right or are telling you that you can get a refund on your airline i was just gonna say did you see that airline story that was crazy yeah yeah where the chat bot was like no you're totally right you should get a full yeah you get a bereavement fair refund no problem yeah uh so yeah no this this this is also table stakes right like having the ability for companies to create their own spin up their own customer service chat bots it's just what everybody is offering these days well we talked a lot about google just now but what about apple apple a lot of power users sometimes uh hipster users uh sometimes uh i don't know the rest of the world is like uh apple you know what apple has a lot of a lot of news every week i lean reveria and i host apple vision show we're 10 episodes in now to talk about apple's vision compared to what we as consumers all want and what we can all get out of apple products get subscribed now at apple vision show dot com google's find my device network for android finally launched on monday uh it uses a network similar to the one that apple uses using some bluetooth to let android users crowdsource finding missing devices without compromising your security or privacy features include locating an android phone by using other android devices to approximate its location uh if you've got a nest home device it can tell you how close it is to that uh if the missing device is close enough to the find my device app it can give you some visual clues if you've got the pixel eight uh your pixel eight doesn't even have to have battery it can be powered off and this still works which is magic starting in may the network will support new chipolo and pebble b bluetooth tracker tags and compatible tags from motorola gio and ufee later this year users will also be able to share access to the tags with multiple users all right ron i know you've been kind of excited for this feature to come out so uh what do you think what are your initial thoughts in all fairness i haven't been as excited as my co-host and android faithful michelle roman who's been um we you know how on the podcast you have several drinking games emerges to fight that it was uh every time michelle mentions the find my device network these past couple months was one of our drinking items um it's just something that that um we know has been coming for a while google announced it a while ago we knew they were working on it and we knew that they were also working on it uh in collaboration with apple and the idea was is that they were creating a shared spec across this type of find my device network because this will work i mean this is mainly like the i don't know what what do they call it in ios or the apple with the apple tags find my find my right yeah this is easy find my friends find my device now just find mine exactly and so this is the equivalent of that for the android platform but this also works if you have an ios phone if you happen to be an apple you know an apple user ios phone but you're using you know google products or if you get the chipolo or pebble b or whatever the app will still work on ios so there was a interoperability that was happening there and then also google and apple agreed to work on a spec to have both platforms share uh the unwanted tracking protocol to avoid from any you know kind of any nefarious stuff happening on so google's been ready google's been champion at the bit to get this out uh apple not so much uh apple has failed to meet their deadlines or uh do what was previously agreed upon when it comes to the unwanted tracking protocol and so since last fall we've kind of been like we know this is coming what's going on when is when is it happening when is it going to roll out and then much sure surprise indicators started coming out of google via emails and kind of messaging to direct users that this might be coming very soon and then sure enough yesterday the news hit that it is rolling out and it seems as if google just you know got tired of waiting for apple and just and just move move forward which uh bravo to them don't get you know don't get hamstr- i have no idea what apple's motivations were in not doing their portion of it it'd be nice if everything all worked together but that's kind of you know it'd be nice if a lot of things work together as beaver as approved to us it might be motivations it might be technical difficulty it may in which case that's another reason apple wouldn't want to talk about it because they don't want to admit it's a technical difficulty they can't overcome right and it could be it could be priorities i mean apple's a very busy company they've got a lot of stuff going on if they don't see if they don't see the value of getting this stuff done or not so i'm glad that google has decided not to just basically stick sit around and be waiting because you know as you know sarah mentioned motorola ufi chipolo pebble b these these partners are ready to roll out product um and all the stuff especially with android 15 you know we're gonna you know android 15 and full developer preview you know the train is leaving the station on the next wave of of how android works um and this is a big part of it right the fact that you can uh this whole uh system works even if your phone is if you if your phone battery dies and you lose it you can still find it with this network which is crazy right um i don't know if the battery dies or not but the phone is off it will work um but uh the important the big important thing with it though is that uh when you're using your phone you do need to leave bluetooth on as bluetooth is what is kind of powering the network of devices and everybody talking to each other um and so that's one aspect if you are an android user you want to make sure you always have bluetooth on if you're using the find my device network um but hey for me somebody you know i've lost we've all lost our keys our wallets or whatever putting in the you know i the use case apple has proven the use case with the apple tags and we saw the use case already with like tile and what were some of the other ones um tracker and things like that back in the day the idea of these low power bluetooth networks that allow you to located a physical device are great to see it implemented at the os level um really just makes android you know it's another piece of the puzzle for android to be that much more robust and that much more competitive with ios totally and especially if you have multiple devices that are you know in various ecosystems i mean i'm pretty much ios only or you know maco apple os you know in my house all the things you know but uh yeah and you might say like how often do you lose your phone sarah and i'm like uh a lot you know i use my apple watch to be like ping ping ping where's the sound coming from oh there it is between the couch cushions but i've also had you know freak out moments where i'm like where is my macbook or you know where's my phone where's you know a variety of things and fine my is an absolute godsend even if i look and go okay so my phone's dead and it's at my friend's house at least i know where it is okay we'll worry about that later at least i know so this is a this is a you know a great great great option for folks who are in the google ecosystem yeah and and if anything it's funny because i've used fine my on on the max i think it's because uh believe it or not my aforementioned wife she's on an iphone right we're a split household here um yeah and you know one day she lost her phone and and we're you know we're going and it's the kind of thing where you know senior moment no i'll find it like you don't want to help like it's somewhere in the house sorry looking for it and then after about a half an hour i was like hang on i grabbed her laptop and i pulled right you start like like pulling up cushions you're like it's not under here but let's just try it like i was in the bathroom and i went downstairs and then like you're trying to retrace your steps and things like that as opposed to someone like me whose phone is like permanently attached to either my hand or my pocket and i don't you know knock on wood i haven't lost the phone in a very very long time um but sure enough the her phone was in the car out front she didn't even think to look there she thought it was somewhere in the house right so find my help to do that um yeah so having it having it here on the android network is is great and on the operating system but to me the real kind of piece of it is that it's one thing to be able to find your device because google's had that andro has had that ability to locate a device like if you've had a phone you could still go into you can go into a web browser and locate that phone if you lost it right that was something that already existed but it's this expanded crowd sourced driven by bluetooth network um that enables so much more functionality to it and then the little devices that are going to be rolled out by the by the partner companies so that you can tag non android things to make them part of that network that really makes it that much more robust that much more powerful yeah and you know we don't have time to get into it fully but there's a lot to being done to protect that location because when you say location and tracking people freak the f out uh so you should know its location is end to end encrypted uh unless you tell people please find this device they will not be able to go find that location unless you approve it to be pushed out to the network all the stuff that is being passed around from bluetooth to bluetooth is anonymous and encrypted and it's only ever revealed to other devices if you want it to be revealed in order to find something and there's even uh three settings right i don't know if you got into that yet but there's there's a default setting that's kind of in the middle but you can do a more private setting or a less private setting that improves the accuracy yeah and and those those options are what's needed and then the whole thing with apple goes back to the idea of unwanted trackers and that you're able to identify is someone tracking someone attempting to track you that you don't want and and stop that from happening right which is that level of protection um which i think any sort of location tracking needs and google is taking the right step and that this should be uniform across all the technology this should be a protocol that we're all using yeah yeah it's it's it's worth looking into if you're you're concerned about it but you you you can pass a long information but bluetooth always passing a long information we're always pinging things and you're like no i'm not your headphones go away so it's just using that same it's using that same information passing around to go oh wait you want to find a thing well let me see if i have that in my database well the number number of times i walked through new york city and my wi-fi picks up uh office jet printers yeah all right let's check out the mail bag this one comes in from brandon weighing in our conversation with chris ashley yesterday about evs who are the good for brandon says i was selling a gas powered vehicle not too long ago and the gentleman who bought it showed up with his partner in an ev they bought my car and then he asks me we're where's a good place to charge he was not in a tesla so i said no i don't know and said sometimes wall greens down the street has some chargers working the target had tesla chargers his partner drove home to san francisco he had to hunt for a charger and charge for the next few hours i'm near santa cruz about 200 miles away so stories like that are probably a big reason people prefer a hybrid over full evs at this point in the bay area um this is brandon talking about the bay area in california at least it is very common to run into santa cruz for the day on a weekend we're vise versa i took my family to the san francisco zoo if i had an ev i couldn't do it on one charge for most evs can i tell you this this hit home for me because i was recently in dallas texas uh for the texas pinball festival a couple weeks ago and i rented a car from budget and it was one of those things where i paid less for like a mystery vehicle like you didn't know what car you got and i ended up getting realized they do that yeah i know i was like i'll roll the dice what do i get um and i ended up getting a hundai ionic like the eb one right really nice car um i have never been more stressed out over a weekend than i was with this car because it felt like worrying about your cell phone running out of battery and when you're gonna be able to plug in a charge times 10 because like i drove from the airport to the hotel and then i drove out to a barbecue place and it's giving me my range but i'm in a strange town i don't know where i don't know there was there was no instruction from the rental place on how to charge it or where any any of this sort of stuff and i'm like we're i'm one of us right we're tech tech people like this shouldn't be a problem i was so stressed out yeah well outside the comfort zone right i mean that's a big part of it like even if you are like okay i've identified where to charge you're like i'm not in my you know i'm not in my routine yeah exactly it's routines will become normal and this won't be a big a deal infrastructure has to be developed for that to happen and i already can hear a couple of ev drivers out there saying well hold on let me explain like yeah it feels that way but this is why but blah blah blah so please i'd bite you send those long feedback at daily tech news show doc i really want this that is it Nebraska somewhere in the midwest that's repaving their roads with charging plates in the in the road yeah while you drive your charging like that's where we need to get to like and solar and roads and just yeah i'll be in charging for cars can you imagine that'd be amazing well ron richards besides uh wanting um to charge your car as you drive across the state of Nebraska let folks know where they can keep up with you when you're not on uh dts with us for sure yeah so when i'm out on social media i'm at ron xo across all the various platforms the most active on instagram you can find me posted you know when i go to concerts and food i eat and movies and things like that but please do if you listen to this show you're probably aware of android fateful the podcast that i do with uh winter dow michelle roman and jason howell we broadcast on on these same channels as dts every tuesday at 8 p.m eastern 5 p.m pacific if it's everything you need for android it's all there we just launch shirts we're doing cool stuff so check out android faithful and as i mentioned earlier um i i work with j annison uh on a company called scorbid uh which is all about pinball so if you're into pinball uh download the scorbid app we actually just released an app update yesterday uh for both ios and android um we've got a new feature where you can see uh get an interactive visualization of your pinball score you can see how quickly you got to that score um how if you're curious how somebody got such a high score you can see what you know kind of modes they play and things like that um if you're into pinball please check it out just google scorbid will come up check it out email me any feedback but thank you everybody thank you guys for having me on the show i appreciate it of course uh and uh i'm happy that scorbid is is still kicking and doing well that's so awesome more to come more to come exactly this is gonna be a busy year for scorbid that's what i was in an hour-long meeting with jay earlier today we got lots of plans coming so that's great that's great uh patreons stick around for the extended show good day internet wordpress owner automatic as you heard in the quick hits uh has been on a tear buying companies that maybe didn't seem like they were going to be thriving anywhere else uh so what are we thinking of them purchasing beeper we're going to talk about that with ron stick around we are but just a reminder you can catch the show live monday through friday at 4 p.m eastern 200 utc and you can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live scott johnson's going to join us tomorrow discussing next gen xbox hardware talk to you then the dts family of podcasts helping each other understand diamond club hopes you have enjoyed this program