 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners thanks to all of you including Kirk Stephenson, Ms. Music Teacher, James C. Smith, and new patrons Christopher, Royce, and Ole them bones. On this episode of DTNS, Open AI is making more money than even it expected. Samsung doubles down on the smart kitchen and is no company safe from price hikes Sony weighs in. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, August 30th, 2023, from Studio Dog Snores. I'm Sarah Lane. From Salt Lake City, I'm Scott Johnson. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. We've got all sorts of stuff to talk about. We've got kitchens that are getting smarter. We've got AI that is getting bought. Earlier in the day, Google announced a hardware event on October 4th, 10 a.m. Eastern Time in New York City. Company is expected to unveil the Pixel 8, Pixel 8 Pro, and Pixel Watch 2. Let's move on to the quick hits. Huawei launched its Mate 60 Pro phone for $6,999 or about $960 US dollars without any real advertising or promotion. Caught some people by surprise. Users who bought the phone have been conducting tests that they say showed it could match the network speeds of 5G chipset phones, as well as screenshots saying it uses a Kirin 9000s chip. Well, we got some more news from Google Cloud Next, which is happening this week. General Motors announced Google Cloud's conversational chatbot, Dialogflow. You have heard of it. We'll now be part of non-emergency on-star features answering common questions, like navigation questions, that sort of thing. Dialogflow can also identify words that indicate an emergency situation and then route the call to a live advisor. The service is available in most GM models newer than 2015. GM says the on-star digital assistant handles over a million inquiries per month in the US and Canada. Also from Google Cloud, Google Chat now has some new operability with third-party platforms, Slack and Teams, and they're doing this through Myo or Mio. Not sure what's the way they say that. I think it's Mio. Across platform subscription service, the feature is available now in beta with general availability coming later in 2024. Yeah, I would say Mio, but it could be Myo. I think it's Mio. Mama Mio. Yeah, like me, Mio. Yahoo Mail. Many of us still have a Yahoo Mail account and that has a new beta for an AI tool with four big features, a writing assistant, a message summaries, shopper saver, and search. The AI search allows for natural language queries like asking to bring up all mail from a certain contact that you have or when you plan to meet with somebody else. The AI beta is currently only available to Yahoo Mail users in the US and there's a sign-up page if you want to learn more and gain access. Time to dust off your Yahoo Mail address, everyone. Dutch Sustainability-Minded Smartphone Company Fairphone announced the Fairphone 5, like previous models. The Fairphone 5 is designed with user repairability in mind and comes with a 90 Hertz, 1223 by 2070 OLED display. It has two 50 megapixel cameras on the back that are user replaceable and one 50 megapixel selfie camera up front. The user replaceable battery is rated at 40 to 200 milliamp hours, 30 watt charging and is usable for 1,000 charging cycles. It has a Qualcomm QCM6590 8 gigabit of RAM and 256 gigabytes of storage. That's expandable up to two terabytes with a microSD. Prices start at 699 euros in the Eurozone for 619 pounds in the UK. No plans for US release yet. The company is taking pre-orders now though. Now, a lot of those specs are pretty good. Remember when a 50 megapixel selfie camera would have been outlandish? I remember when this 50 megapixel camera period was outlandish. Well, you're right. Exactly. Exactly. You know, it's sort of like a 50 megapixel selfie camera on the front, but you got duals on the back. It's like, wow, we've really come a long way when it comes to cameras on mobile devices. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration or NHTSA ordered Tesla to disclose how many vehicles have the updated option to use the autopilot driver assist mode for extended periods without driver checks. Chief counsel John Donaldson wrote, quote, the resulting relaxation of controls designed to ensure that the driver remain engaged in the dynamic driving task could lead to greater driver inattention and failure of the driver to properly supervise autopilot. End quote. All right. Let's talk a little bit about open AI. You were wondering how much open AI's chat GPT is making inroads. Well, the information's got you covered. Their sources say the company is expected to make more than $1 billion US in revenue in the next year from sales of AI software and computing power. This is a significant figure by any stretch or reasoning because it's way above the estimate AI itself had previously given investors. So what do you think is actually going on here, Sarah? Yeah. Okay. So open AI does a variety of things, but chat GPT is its big cash cow right now. Before chat GPT launched, open AI projected revenue of $28 million in 2021. That was annual saying, yeah, I think we got something here and we might be able to license it. Not too shabby, right? The latest estimate indicates that open AI is now generated more than $80 million in revenue per month. So not only does that just blow the initial number out of the water, but that's monthly, not annually. A lot of companies want to pay for versions of this. You might already use versions of this from other customers that open AI is working with, like Zoom or Stripe or Notion or Databricks. Microsoft uses open AI's technology in Office 365, Bing Chat, GitHub Copilot and others. Now just a few days ago, open AI had launched chat GPT Enterprise promising more privacy, direct connectivity to more enterprise software, which also competes with Microsoft's offerings, which leads me to suspect that Microsoft and open AI might not have the Chummy relationship that they have now, but Scott, this really speaks to how seemingly out of nowhere, if you follow the space, it wasn't totally out of nowhere, but for many people, especially on the consumer side and even people on the enterprise side, open AI and chat GPT really did sort of arrive out of nowhere to the point where everyone said, Google Bard is late. Well, Google Bard was not late, maybe just late to the PR game. But I wonder how long a company like open AI can enjoy being first. Open AI can certainly say that for now. But yeah, what do you think? Yeah, they've got the lead for now. I mean, the phrase tech first is worst, at least in technology space is I think sometimes accurate. I hate to say it, but there are a lot of cases, a lot of historical cases where big innovation comes out of somebody you never see coming. And then what happens is the established long term deep roots tech companies either do their own thing or do something better or do something new because they've got both the capabilities and the vast resources to kind of pick up new trends and take them in new directions. Things like the iPod are good examples compared to all the other MP3 players that kind of died on the vine at the time. And there are lots of other examples. You could even argue Google with its superior search algorithm coming along after other search engines existed and sort of cleaned house. I fear for them for open AI that they're going to have a similar situation. I think they are smart though to quote unquote flood the enterprise market with their tools and be the place, a du jour that everybody wants to get these tools ready for their enterprise solutions, Microsoft included for now anyway, because that way they can help entrench themselves. I think this is a really smart idea. I think the wrong thing to do would have been them to sort of keep it to themselves, just have the web portal for chat gpt.com and sort of scooch along like that. I think that would have been a major mistake. So I think they are trying to do the things that will help them maintain and keep longevity. But if history has anything to say about it, my guess is down the road, Google as a major factor here, but Google and Apple and Samsung and everyone else in their dog are going to have a pony in this race and they're going to want their own dog in this race. There's two animals that put in the same race crazy, right? Well, that's how crazy the AI business is going to get. And I do think that it's going to be hard to compete with these mega tech corporations down the road, because they have endless resources and really deep pockets to wait out the fad part of it to wait out the hiccups part of it and to just sort of be there long term. So AI, open AI's get their work cut out for them. ZDNet on the subject of open AI and chat gpt specifically, ZDNet points to a Pew Research Center survey. This is really recent from July 17th through the 23rd, just over 5000 panelists. So somewhat small of a survey, but the idea was to learn about chat gpt use. This is US based. The study found that of the respondents, some had heard of chat gpt, but of those only 24% said they'd ever used it, amounting to 18% of US adults overall. So if you're saying, well, I don't even really use chat bt. I mean, is it going to change my life? It might not have yet. So don't feel like you're completely left out of this. I think quite a few companies are, yeah, in the race to make the AI version of open AI is chat gpt, that's, you know, better than the first. And we're still in those early days, but looks like open AI for now is printing money until everybody else catches up. Also, don't throw away the idea that they could be acquired at some point. And that's entirely possible that somebody as big as Google or Microsoft could swoop in and buy those guys. 100%. Yeah. Yeah. Or who knows, open AI could buy somebody else. What the money they're making? They could buy me. Well, while we're waiting for that to happen, a little news from Samsung, the company launched an app for Android and iOS called Food. It's a personalized AI powered food and recipe app available in eight languages, serving 104 countries. And it's drawing from the database from the app WISC. You might recall Samsung acquired WISC a few years ago. WISC is a standalone app still, but this is using that same database in more of a Samsung smart home product offering. Users can search for more than 160,000 recipes, use them to make their eating plans. More recipes are planned going forward, but it's a pretty solid start. Samsung food can connect to Samsung family hub smart appliances, refrigerators, ovens, stuff that Samsung wants you to use more of and have a good reason to do that. The AI part of the food app is recommending daily meals. You have got dietary preferences. It learns more about those. It also learns more about what you like based on those dietary preferences. Maybe you just never want to play mentioned ever again. Also is trying to give you better nutritional ingredient breakdowns. You can add items to shopping lists, send them through e-commerce checkouts, kind of an one-stop shop for not only wanting food, making the food, eating the food, and then ordering the food later. We all love the idea of this. Many people say, well, there are other options than there are. Samsung would like you to be within their own ecosystem though. This is another offering to do that. Scott, we talk sometimes, and we've even sort of snickered about smart home appliances, particularly smart kitchen appliances like, who's ever going to buy the smart refrigerator? They exist. They're designed to track your health. Samsung makes them. Does this end up selling more Samsung hardware? I think possibly. I think you made a really good point about ecosystem. I think that's a really important thing here. But I think more fundamentally, something that has occurred to me lately, and I've heard others try to describe this, it's kind of hard to quantify because we're still early days on what AI's applications are. But to me, it's like the internet. If you go to chat GPT, it's like the internet of old. And by old, I mean the last 20 years. You get in, you search for a thing, you do a thing, you say a thing. It's kind of got this multi-purpose use. And so does chat GPT. It's not really meant to be a very focused, narrow use case. It's kind of broad. And what this represents is something more akin on the internet anyway, to a smart light turning on when I want it to or me verbally telling it to turn on. That's still an internet-based function. That's still me using the internet to do a thing. But it's not the same as an email or text or anything else. So this like narrowing of use cases is where things get interesting to me. And this to me is example of that. They're saying, look, you've got dietary restrictions, you have allergies, you've got preferences, whatever it may be. And all of that information is part of this machine learning. And that machine learning, in addition to other outside resources, along with a well-contained ecosystem of services and devices, that being Samsung stuff, this seems like a match made in heaven to me. They already have a very dominant place in the kitchen markets, specifically fridges. They're everywhere. My fridge is the same. And I didn't even try to shop for one. That's just the one I have. And the idea that you could have all that happen in a way that is actually accurate isn't just guesswork, isn't just based on, well, we sort of think based on your survey, you might like this today. These are going to be the future applications of this stuff. And they're going to be these narrow, laser focused applications. And I am personally very excited about that. That alone makes me more interested in AI than anybody generating an image and saying, look, I'm a painter now, or anybody. We all got to eat. Yeah, we have to eat, we have to drive, we have to think, we have to talk, we have to use the world around us in ways that this is going to benefit in ways we haven't even thought of yet. But this is a great example of that sort of thinking outside the box, but also in the box, if that makes sense. And really narrowing down what something like this can do for me and you every day. Yeah, I formerly had a Samsung fridge. Boy, was that a piece of junk, but it wasn't smart. And maybe I just got a lemon. It happens. But Samsung, if you look at the smart hub specifically in the kitchen, there's smart oven stuff, there's smart blenders, obviously the fridges. There are lots of things, if you were to say, well, not all my stuff is Samsung, well, okay. I mean, that isn't unlike saying, well, not all of my electronics are Android based or Apple products, that sort of thing. But for those of us who have a few of these, I think this does take you a step further into what I've always found frustrating about some of this smart cooking ability to get recipes and add things to your shopping list. That's all possible, but you really have to work at it. Some time back, this was kind of in pandemic days when I had a little bit of extra time on my hands and I was doing like very specific calorie counting of every single thing that I ate. I didn't even really have an end game. I just thought, well, this will be fun. I'll just know a little bit more about what I'm putting into my body, especially when I eat a loaf of banana bread by myself several times a week. And that was all good, but I could not find a solution that was any less cumbersome than me entering all of this stuff manually and then kind of thinking, okay, based on what I know, here's what I should eat later, or here's maybe the fiber that I haven't had in a while or the protein that I would like to have after 6pm type stuff. All of this, I believe I understand what Samsung is going for. And it is, please buy our products, but even if you buy a few of them, let's make this kind of an entire classroom of learning about what you need, and we're going to do the heavy lifting for you so you're doing as few manual things as possible that end up being cumbersome, which is why people end up not using things like this. Yeah, and a whole new place for, you know, frigid air algae and everybody else to compete on. I'm excited to see this heat up and, you know, try it. I want a new fridge. Tell me what to eat, fridge. Paging Huey Lewis. New song. If you missed out on Tom's How to Make a Great Podcast class, and a few of you didn't said, hey, we want this. What are you going to do it again? Fear not. You can still get the online course at our DTNS Patreon store. Tom explains the basics of podcast producing. Tom is very good at this. You might have noticed. He also shares his ideas and experiences on what makes a podcast great in general on various genres. You can get the class either as a downloadable file or you can stream it over at patreon.com. Now, as you know, here on the show quite a bit and even recently been talking about how streaming services are trying to weather the storm of too many cooks in the kitchen. We just talked about one kind of kitchen. Let's talk about another. But that's when it comes to movies and television shows. There are a lot of people trying to compete for your eyeballs, which has led to maybe too many options and also prices raising. How do we feel about that? Well, I don't feel great about that. And it's kind of funny. We've been talking about streaming services, you know, raising prices because everybody's trying to make the most of doing this. Normally, when stuff like this floods the market, you see prices going down. But we're in a new era of streaming. Seems as though no one is immune even in the world of gaming. Sony announced on Wednesday, it is raising the price of its PlayStation Plus subscription next month. And boy, are people not thrilled about this. PlayStation Plus's essential plan will go from $60 to $80, $20 increase, extra plan from 100 to 135. You can do the math there and the premium plan from $120 to $160. New pricing starts on September 6th. Now, if you say, well, hold on a second, I'm currently a PlayStation Plus subscriber, you're not going to see these new prices until November 6th though, a little bit of a respite there, but you are going to see them eventually. If you fuss with your current subscription though, in this grace period of sorts, like you upgrade or you downgrade or you buy additional time type thing, then you go over to the new plan. So take that into consideration if you're looking to fuss with your current subscription at all. It's very telco of Sony. I went through this with Verizon quite recently, where I, anyway, that's a story for another time. But for its part, Sony says this will continue bringing high quality games and value added benefits to the service, and adds that the yearly plans will still come at a discounted rate as opposed to the one or three month subscriptions that it offers. That's pretty standard. You pay for more time, you get a little bit of a discount. But like I said, from what I can see online, a lot of people are saying price increase, maybe not the hugest surprise, but these price increases are kind of dramatic. What do you think? They are, they're really dramatic. And the only thing I think of is we've got this also coming soon-ish from Microsoft, although I don't believe we know an exact number yet for what Game Pass is changing to. The one simplification there, it is one service. Well, Game Pass Ultimate versus a lower service, but it's one big service, basically. It's one tier. And having that at $14.95 as it currently is month to month has been a pretty great value for gamers. I didn't think that would last forever. My expectation is this will end up at $19 a month or something like that, which was the previous high Sony tier for premium, which was also $19.99 a month if you paid month to month. These are significant price increases. And for a company in Sony's case, who had an extremely good recent quarter, recent few quarters, mostly on the back of PlayStation sales, I feel like it's then disingenuous for them to say things like, for us to continue to bring you blah, blah, blah as you put it, which I think is exactly appropriate. You can tell I'm not really happy about this. I think this is a bad deal for consumers. I really do. It's too much of a jump. And I feel like it could be wrong, but I feel like we're being experimented on. And Microsoft's not immune to this. I think they're doing similar things. They're literally dropping their $1 14 day Game Pass trial that they've had in place forever. They're dropping that like three days before Starfield launches, which is easily their biggest game launch of the year, maybe of the last five years. It's a massive thing for them. And there's no way this is a coincidental occurrence where they're going to change that. Basically, they don't want people playing their big triple A game for 14 days for essentially for free because a dollar is barely anything. And it just makes me, as someone who follows this stuff pretty closely, feel like I'm being experimented on. They are trying to see what the market will bear. And I think in Sony's case, it really feels like that to me because this across the board increase, significant increase, mind you, for a service that still hasn't proven itself, that still isn't quite up to Game Pass par by a lot of measures. And I like it. I enjoy mine, but am I going to keep doing it for this increase? I don't think I am because they're not really presenting anything new with it. They're not saying, well, in addition to this, you're going to get these extra games or this other thing, you're going to play this longer, get access to these betas. They're not saying any of that. They're basically just saying, hey, that thing you already get, here's more, it's already not perfect, but pay more for it anyway. This is going to be a real sour deal. And gamers are notoriously cheap. So I'm not saying it'll backfire them completely, but nobody's happy about this change. I mean, you know, I know this wouldn't be gaming specific, but, you know, Netflix raises its price, a dollar or two a month, and people get mad. You know, it's like, I have a certain budget. Sure, a dollar or two maybe isn't the end of the world, but I have a budget. You know, that budget is important to me. Sony hiking something up 20 bucks a month, which goes up from there, depending on, you know, the extra plans or the premium plan, even that you could get, you know, which goes up $40 a month, that's a lot of money. It's a lot of money. It's a lot without, again, without saying, usually when you pay an increase like this, something comes with it in normal life terms. I don't mean streaming services, but if I'm going to get a car and spend the extra five grand on some upgrades, they're going to say, well, here are those upgrades, right? You expect to do that. You expect inflation over time, but not all at once like that, and then not give you anything. If they said, oh, I'm sorry, your car as of next week is going to be another five grand. Oh, what are you giving me for it? Well, it's the same service. You're just going to pay more for the car. I would be livid. It's a week until you bring in you a high quality car. Yeah. To me, to me, the smells, you know what this reminds me of too? Maybe that's why I'm getting so mad about it. It reminds me of rent hikes. It just, that's what that feels like. It feels like for no reason, you're all profitable beyond measure. You just have money to burn all you guys doing this. And you've had record profits and you're unwilling to throw us a little bit of a bone here. This isn't going, I mean, it will represent a big increase for them and maybe pad them out for a number of quarters, but you can't do this in perpetuity. I think this is just- Well, but not if you lose a lot of, I think you hit it on the head a couple of minutes ago, Scott, when you said, this is just Sony testing the waters here, saying what can we get away with until people say, well, this is ludicrous and I'm just going to go to a competitor or I'm just going to cancel this outright. And again, for a profit company can do as much as they want to do with that. They might not get the results that they're looking for, but we're still in these early days of these subscriptions. You're not wrong about that. I think that's a big part of this and the saturation of the market, but I don't know how they think they're going to compete with everyone else also raising their service prices. Like somebody, something's got to give. Maybe Sony is cocky enough to think that everyone else will give, but I don't know if that'd be that cocky. Well, you know who's kind of cocky and aunt. You know why? Because they're small. They can get through any crevice. They build their own colonies. They're actually quite smart. Don't want them in the house, but I got to give it up for a good old aunt. Ants are useful in scientific research because of a lot of the things that I just described. They're small. They can work together. They create farms. Three researchers from the University of Western Australia tested the combat effectiveness of ants against small groups of very powerful combatants against an exponentially larger group of weaker opponents in both simple or flat to complex terrain. If you're saying, uh, what are we talking about? Like some sort of like, you know, like gladiator ant situation kind of the researchers drafted a larger number of invasive Argentine ants and a smaller number of the local, but larger in physical size variety, known as the meat ant. Argentine ants are around 2 millimeters in length. They're small. Meat ants are four times the length and 40 times the weight. They're big old meat ants. Next, the researchers use the real time strategy game age of empires too. I'm not even kidding about this to run simulations of combat. Then they tested the same simulation using the ants. The results ended up being kind of similar. Small numbers of very strong warriors. Those were the meat ants, the big ants were able to defeat larger numbers of weaker opponents, AKA the Argentine ants, more of the Argentine ants, but they weren't really individually stronger. The mortality of the stronger warrior meat ants was low, but did increase slowly as the number of opponents they faced grew. Scott, I don't know. Game of Thrones here. Little bit. Um, I love this whole thing for a very, a variety of reasons. I love this, but my main reason for loving it is because, uh, I think it just sort of, to me, it seems obvious on the face of it. If you have an elite group of Navy SEALs and you put those up against, you know, let's say there's 10 of those guys, you put them up against 30 regular infantrymen. I think I give the SEALs an advantage for a while until you keep reinforcing the army on the other side. And then yes, there's an overwhelming, you know, you can overwhelm. But, uh, so to me it's obvious, but to, to know that it's, or to sort of confirm what feels obvious, to do an experiment like this and do it in this way is both super nerdy and kind of great to have a little confirmation of what I already thought. But I think this is great. And I love, I love this kind of experimentation, especially when it comes up on this show. Me too. And I'm sorry, all the ants that I killed recently, um, did you kill a bunch recently? Well, what's, uh, I didn't mean to, I don't know, you couldn't live in harmony. I would have just politely let them out the front door, but they didn't want to go that way. They were probably meat ants. Yeah. So I had to kill them dragon style, but, uh, yes. Um, thank you to everybody who uses ants as research, uh, for us to figure out more about, uh, how to build our own armies going forward in the future, especially in the kitchen with our new Samsung smart home. Thanks to you Scott Johnson for just putting up with me today. Always good to have you on the show. Let folks know where they can keep up with your latest. Well, it's my favorite part of Wednesdays and, um, I usually talk about game stuff and all that on here. And today I'm going to do something different. I talk about movies on the weekend and a little show called, uh, film sack. We've been doing it forever. Uh, well, 2009, if you want to count that as forever. And, uh, it's available every week over at film sack.com. If you like old movies, new movies and everything in between, we watch them all and we talk about them. And we have a really great time. So go check out what we're doing over there at film sack.com. Do it. Do it now. But just a reminder to patrons do stick around. We have an extended show called good day internet or GDI. Today we're going to be talking about how Activision is doing more or at least something new to moderate so-called toxic behavior in games like call of duty, modern warfare three. If it works, would other companies follow suits? But just a reminder, you can catch the show live. We record it live Monday through Friday at 4pm Eastern at 20 hundred UTC. You can find out more at daily tech news show.com slash live. We're going to be back doing it all again tomorrow with Tayshia Custody joining us. Excited for this one. Talk to you then. This show is part of the frog pants network. Get more at frogpants.com.