 This 10th year Daily Tech News show is made possible by you. Thanks for listening. All of you, including Andrew Bradley, Dale Mulcahy and Matt Zaglin. Coming up on this DTNS, Microsoft has a co-pilot for everything and that might mean you don't need to look for software anymore. Plus, Waymo adds its autonomous cars to Uber. So are we still 40 years away from autonomous cars? This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, May 23rd, 2023 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redbud, I'm Sarah Lane. Coming from your nation's capital, your boy, big Chris Ashley. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Cheng. How does it feel to be so close to the seat of power, Chris? It feels great, except I move just far away from it as possibly could without. We're still technically being here. Right. Well, Netflix just launched its password sharing crackdown in the U.S. So Americans get ready to rumble 799 a month. If you want to add a person to your account, here are the rest of the quick hits. Shutterstock announced it will buy Giffy from Meta for $53 million. Now, you might say that sounds like a lot, but in back in 2022, the UK's Competition and Markets Authority ordered Meta to sell the unit over competition concerns. Meta reportedly pay 400 million for Giffy back in 2020. Quite a discount. Maybe they threatened to call it Giffy if they didn't lower the price. Amazon unveiled the Firemax 11 tablet and it's 11 inches and starts at $230, gives you an aluminum enclosure, fingerprint readable reader, expandable storage and supports an optional stylus and magnetic keyboard. Sorry, though, headphone jack fans. It has none, but it's available for preorder right now, ship in June 14th. Adobe is now offering a new generative fill feature in Photoshop in beta. It draws, get it, from the Firefly image generation model to extend images and can add and remove objects with text prompts. An official public released is expected the second half of this year. The feature also supports content credentials, which attaches attribution data to an image to indicate that it was indeed edited with an AI system. Chris, Sarah, Intel's tearing up X86. It's starting over, starting from scratch. Actually just released a white paper outlining a new micro architecture for its chips called X86S. It eliminates the 16-bit and 32-bit legacy support. So if you get an Intel chip right now, it supports 16-bit, 32-bit and 64-bit operations. Given that 16-bit launched in 1978, the chances are very few of you would be affected by its absence, but there is a lot of 32-bit software out there. However, most recent OSs are 64-bit. So now's the time to start talking about this, plus virtualization can do a lot for legacy software to keep it running without having to rely on the chip to do it. So why do it at all? Well, you get rid of older support and that leaves more room on the chip die for other features. It increases the power efficiency. It could speed up boot times. It lowers the attack surface for security issues. And in the end, this is just a white paper. So don't get too afraid of it if you are afraid at all. It's just the beginning of the conversation. We're a long way from a shipping product. Don't you love how everything is either an S or a plus when they're like, let's keep the name, but spice it up a little bit. Why not put a 64, X8664? That wouldn't be confusing at all. I'll tell you why after the show. Okay. Meanwhile, Google followed up on stories that said that the company was going to offer AI tools to advertisers. Product Studio lets merchants on Google shopping and Shopify users of the Google and YouTube app edit and customize product shots using generative AI. You can do things like change the background image to be more seasonal or remove the background altogether or change the resolution of an image. Product Studio launches for US based sellers in the next few months. Google also repeated the plans that it announced at Google IO to place ads in its search chatbot. We still don't have a timeline on when though. All right. Well then, let's talk about what a different arm of alphabet the non-Google part of alphabet is doing, Sarah. Okay. So Alphabet's self-driving unit Waymo announced that it entered into a multi-year strategic partnership with Uber. I thought they hated each other. Well, the quick version here is that later this year, a set number of Waymo vehicles in the Phoenix area in the Metro Phoenix area will integrate into the Uber and Uber E-Taps for ride hailing and delivery services. We don't have information on how much those rides might cost or how many vehicles that Waymo might make available in its fleet, but you might be saying to yourself as you were Tom, wait, didn't Waymo sue Uber once over autonomous cars? The answer is yes. So let's talk about why they've possibly made peace. Yeah. So this announcement comes just a few weeks after Waymo's chief product officer, Saswat Panagrahi, said Waymo wants to increase its ridership tenfold by next summer. Waymo wants to do that. They want people in their cars. By partnering with Uber, Waymo expands its reach quite a bit. A lot more people use Uber's app than have installed Waymo's apps. So they get new customers beyond those who have got that branded Waymo one app, which many people have not and there's more. Chris, what else is in this partnership? Well, the Waymo Uber deal also includes Waymo via that's Waymo's autonomous trucking arm and Uber freight, which is Uber's logistics spin out. If this is all a little confusing, Waymo has clarified that it won't exclusively allocate vehicles to Uber. But when the Waymo vehicle is accessible for a qualifying ride and Uber user has the option to request a car through the Uber app. I mean, part of this sounds to me like Waymo is like our vehicles are sitting around. We need to do something with unused capacity, so to speak. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Mike, my guess is that they're like, okay, the apps probably not out there. It's probably not as good as what Uber had, what Uber provides. And so when you have, when you're faced with those decisions from a product standpoint, you really have one or two decisions you buy or your partner, right? Or you build, buy partner or build. And then you start weighing out, you know, which is faster, which is easier. And then in their case, they're like, it was easier to partner, which to me, I like to see these type of things happen. Yeah. Well, and Uber is going the opposite direction. The reason we had that lawsuit was stealing trade secrets about autonomous cars. Uber has long since abandoned its internal development of autonomous cars and is partnering with other companies, not just Waymo. Waymo isn't even the first autonomous car company it partnered with. It also partnered with Motional. So Uber is sort of saying we're a transport app. If you need to get something from one place to another, you use Uber for it. So if Waymo wants to tap into that and say, hey, we'll be the car. That's great. Just just like Uber doesn't say, oh, you can't use, you know, a certain brand of car to drive people around. They don't care. As long as you pass the background check and qualify and your car is in decent shape, you can use the Uber app to pick up people and give rides. There's they're going to work with Waymo on this too. And so it's good for Uber as well as good for Waymo. Yeah. Catherine Barna, who is a heads up PR at Waymo told TechCrunch of the snooze that Waymo is building a driver, not a vehicle to which I say, well, it's a vehicle also, but okay in a vehicle. But I guess what they're saying is we could put this in other cars too. Yeah, exactly. Right. Yeah. Well, honestly, the big thing that I'd like to see come out of this is if Uber says we, we not, you know, you don't have to build us to cars, but if you'd expand in areas where we're not, that would help us get, you know, expand our brand and get us in there faster. And that's the type of thing that I would see. I would like to see come out of this because I remember for quite some time, we was out there about was taking Ubers. There was none in my area for quite some time. Now they're everywhere. But there was a good little while where they was doing their thing. We didn't have an Uber in this area. There's a lot of places that don't have Uber that autonomous cars also have problems in, you know, certain rural unmapped areas, places like that, but there are still places where an Uber could operate, an autonomous car could operate, but they just don't have the drivers or even days where areas are like, ah, we don't have enough drivers today. So this could fill that gap. I don't know how far we are from that though because this is just in Phoenix. And while they've been slowly expanding the area they serve in Phoenix, it's not like Phoenix has been taken over by autonomous cars. The only other place they're doing this is San Francisco, even though they have some tests undergoing an Austin and LA. So it does, it feels like an expansion, but I have long since stopped saying, well, you know, give us a couple of years and it's going to be autonomous cars everywhere because five years ago, people were telling me it's going to be 40 years and those people are now, you know, 35 years away from being right. So I still don't know if 40 is the right number, but it's definitely taking longer than people thought, than some people thought. I mean, and also for anybody who's, oh, go ahead, Chris. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I just wanted to know who controls the A.C. Cause yeah, Phoenix is no joking at some time. Yeah. That better be, yeah. Is that a new app too? It is no joke, but Phoenix is also for anybody who's not familiar with the area, it's a very large, flat grid city. You know, some exceptions of course, but this is, you know, it's a, compared to San Francisco, it's a great place to test out stuff without a ton of, you know, hills and weather to. Yeah, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a good first. It's a good easy level to start on before you go to San Francisco and you raise your difficulty level. Yeah. All right, time for the Microsoft build news. Microsoft build developer conference happening starting today. We're going to talk about Microsoft's larger strategy with AI in a few minutes, but let's start with some of the more consumer facing announcements. So open AI will start using Bing as the default search experience in chat GPT. The chatbot will now include search and web data as well as citations, chat page, GPT plus users will get it starting now and eventually will come to free users too. Yeah, and that same marriage of chat GPT and Bing is also coming to Windows. Windows co-pilot will be available in the taskbar among other things. It'll let you adjust settings on Windows with a phrase so you don't have to figure out where they are. You can just sort of say what you want. It can also summarize content from the clip board. It can compose text, get answers to questions from the web and other chat body type things. Windows co-pilot is coming in preview in June. Yeah, we're going to talk about all the other co-pilots in a minute or two, but this is a great one. If I can just tell Windows, I need to turn the sound down on the headphone out port without having to remember which control panel, which settings of a place it is, what it's called. And granted, Chris, I know you and I were talking earlier today about the fact that you kind of get good at that and then Windows changes it on you. This is way better. So you can just always know like all I got to do is say it and then you don't have to rely on their graphic design interface or keeping up on changes. It just does it. And that's the thing that even after all these years from when Windows 8 launched, it seems like they're still trying to redo a lot of the underpinning UI because, you know, the control panel, it's been updated. But for the most part, once you need to get to some of those deep settings, it's back to, you know, what Windows used to look like. And honestly, sometimes I just struggle to find exactly what I'm looking for. So being able to tell my computer just to change the graphics or, you know, just to change the volume, a new window, all of that stuff, you know, you know, turn off the Wi-Fi, turn it on, reset the Wi-Fi, all of that stuff. I don't have to go look forward and click here and click there. It'd be it's awesome. I really like this. We've been promised this before. There was Clippy. There was Cortana. There was Bob like almost like they went with co-pilot because they were, you know, I mean Cortana was supposed to be what this is. You know, with voice. This is text. But yeah, basically the same idea. But say in natural language what you want and let me help you. Cortana was not long for this world, but that was, you know, early days of assistance. And, you know, we are in a new era now. And I don't know. I, I, I sort of struggle to be like, well, how hard is it to just like go to my menu settings and like do what I want to do? But that's because I'm just conditioned to think of it that way because those were my only options before. Yeah. And those kinds of things are never that hard until you don't have to do them anymore. And then suddenly you're like really glad. Remember when we used to scroll through scenes? I used to open folders from the DOS prompt because that's how I'd learned to do it. And then eventually I gave up and started using the graphical interface and never looked back. You know, it's the same idea. Like do you go to terminal to open all your folders? No, you could, but that's not the best use of your time. Well, then people would say yes, it is. If you're already in terminal, then maybe. Yeah. Yeah. But then you start thinking about all the app integration. So I know when I'm producing the podcast and I need to save a copy of this file and like here open this folder where I keep these files and then, you know, import these audio files in from this folder that I just created, you know, just being able to talk through that instead of just saying, you know, click here because I can't tell you how many times I started editing a show, but I automatically opened up the last show that I edited. So I'm pulling in old files and I'm like, oh my God, this is last week show. Yeah. I mean, so just, you know, being able to specifically as they pull in the files, I just created from this week's show and it's like, got you. You know what I mean? Can I get smart enough to say I want to do a new podcast edit and then it goes all of the genes that you normally do. Ooh, and open the template. Yeah. Right. Ooh, yeah. I could jam with that. And then it tells me I got you homie. I vetted it for you. I actually hosted it. Here it is. You're no longer needed. Go take a nap. Yeah. A few other notes without a build Bluetooth low energy coming to Windows in the May and now a non-security preview release live captions for Windows 11. Now support 10 new languages that includes simplified and traditional Chinese, Danish, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish. A new shield icon will start showing up over the network connection icon to let you know if your VPN is active, that's nice. And machine generated summaries of app reviews will be displayed in the Microsoft Store. More Microsoft build news in just a second. Have a thought about something on the show though and you don't know our email address. Let me fix that. It's feedback at DailyTechnewshow.com. All right, let's talk more about what happened at Microsoft build today. The main theme of today's keynote was co-pilots. Co-pilots is how Microsoft is branding the term of virtual assistance built into a specific tool. For example, GitHub co-pilot uses generative AI to help coders. Yes, and at Microsoft build, the company announced it's going to add co-pilots to Edge office. We mentioned the Windows one. Windows terminal is going to have its own co-pilot. Dynamics 365, which is actually powering a lot of these other ones. Power pages so you can build a website and that's just the ones I have off the top of my head. There's even a tool called Azure AI Studio that helps developers build their own co-pilots. So you can build an instance of something like chat GPT or GPT-4 using a company's private data. If we've had a lot of emails about people saying I'm not allowed to use chat GPT because we're worried about confidentiality. This would help get past that. In fact, Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott, who is also EVP of AI at Microsoft now, had an interesting exchange on the verge with Nilai Patel. He pointed out that up until now, you interact with a computer device by either writing a program for it if you're a developer or in most cases for those of us in the audience using a program. Somebody else right, even if you're a developer, you're not writing all your programs yourself. Co-pilots are moving us to a world where you may have to do less explicit work to align them and steer them to a task in Scott's words. This strikes me as a more profound effect than many of the other ones we hear about regarding these kinds of tools. You potentially won't need to look for software to do a thing. You won't have to go to an app store to do a thing. You could just ask your co-pilot to do it and it will either find the right API or possibly just write the code for a new piece of software for you on the spot. Is that too optimistic, Chris, to think that it would go that well? I don't think so actually just based off of what we've seen this year alone and how we've seen the use cases for a chat GPT and what people are doing with it, I don't think that's too optimistic at all because the idea that I could say, Hey, here's the three things that I do every day and can you automate these so they open up in sequence or do something in sequence is profoundly attractive to me. I can't tell you as I failed probably three or four times to learn how to write basic code and I just take the book and throw it across the room, not having to do that at all and just being able to tell it. This is what I want to do and it determines. Well, I need to write a little piece of PowerShell scripting to do this, but then there's an app that allows you to do that. I can put those things together and automate this task for you. I find that to be amazing and really, really cool. Yeah, Sam. I mean, my only question that I don't think was addressed this morning at the keynote was, okay, let's say I work for, you know, X company and I leave that company and I've got, you know, a variety of, you know, co-pilots that have helped me. Is that in any way tied to the company? Yes. Yes. These Azure instances are entirely within the company. So there's two things. There's two things going on here. One is the more like in the now announcement of these Azure instances, right? The Azure AI studio that says, hey, you want to use chat GPT in your company? You can whip something up to use it on your own data. I, I'm taking Kevin Scott's words and projecting them out a little farther and saying, but beyond that, beyond that today in the enterprise case, what about a situation where you've got something running on your operating system where you could say, hey, I need a program that will automate the podcast that I make every day. And that thing is sitting on your desktop. So it knows that because it knows you what you do. And it's like, oh, let me write a piece of software that makes that for you. Yeah. Crazy amazing. But, you know, and as, as awesome as that sounds, we shouldn't overlook the enterprise application and use cases as well because some of, even to some of the ones that laid out as an example, which is like summarizing meeting notes and, you know, just what just sending out to the team. So we've been able to request, hey, what are the key takeaways from this particular meeting? And it's saying here, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Here you go. Really, you know, I know my wife, she hates doing meeting notes and, you know, when she didn't have to do them anymore, she's, you know, she probably did it like a little two-step. And so having an AI being able to do that for you is pretty, pretty darn cool actually. And if you're sitting there going like, wait, isn't that what ChatGPT has been doing since last fall? No, not in the enterprise because to put your meeting notes through ChatGPT might violate your company's confidentiality. But with this, this instance that keeps it local, now you could say, oh, just train on the documents that are in the company instance. Don't let them out of the network. And now you can do the summarization and pull in other things and do all those things that you want to use it for and also have it limited so that it's not pulling in other things that would make it hallucinate more. It's limited to like just work on the data in our company. So it's going to have more relevant answers too. Yeah, and oftentimes we find ourselves looking at data and not necessarily interpreting it properly, right? And so you're seeing one thing, but there may be missing a nuance that could steer you into the next product direction or the next, you know, idea for the company. And so having an AI behind that and being able to look at the data you normally look at every day, but then then say, hey, what are some of the key trends that you're finding in this data? And it's like boom, boom, boom, boom. It could validate where you're thinking or it could help you point something that you missed. So all in all, I hate running reports. This one, you know, that's all I see in this is like, if I could tell it to, hey, run these reports, let me know what my trends are. What we're looking at for the last, you know, three years or something like that. I'm, oh my God, if we did this direction, that'd be all one. I'm still fascinated with this idea that I wouldn't even need to go get apps at some point that I could just tell my chatbot, you know, I, I want to do this. Yeah. I want to capture all the audio that's coming into my computer from this device, but not from this device, you know, and not have to try to configure audio hijack. It'll just go, oh, let me make that for you. Like that's, that's fascinating. One other thing that came out of build worth noting, Microsoft is working on watermark watermarking AI generated content. So Bing image creator and designer, which kind of their canva will detect images made with the C2PA spec, which can then reveal whether any kind of generative tool was used or not. They're using a certain standard. Not everyone is using that standard. So yeah, we've got a watermarking standards war brewing Microsoft's using the one that Adobe in fact, when we talked about that in the quick hits earlier today earlier in the show that that's the C2PA spec arm and Intel are using that spec. On the other hand, stability, shutterstock, Google and mid-journey are all using different standards for this right now. So we're going to have to have everybody, you know, come together like the smart home industry has done with matter at some point, but Microsoft is pick theirs at C2PA. Well, not everybody can agree on what the right display should look like. But if you like what what has been kicking around as of late, we've got foldables, we've got rollables and Samsung display announced the rollable flex. It's a vertically rolling display very much like a scroll that can extend from 49 millimeters to 254 millimeters. Company also showed off a sensor OLED display, which acts as a sensor that can recognize fingerprints anywhere on a screen as well as monitor heart rate and blood pressure with just a finger touching the screen. Rollable flex though is one example of what Samsung plans to exhibit at SID display week 2023 an annual display industry conference in the Los Angeles Convention Center kicked off today goes till Thursday. Yeah. So Tuesday, May 23rd, if you listen to this later, I was more impressed by the sensor display because we've seen rollable displays doesn't surprise me that Samsung would come up with a good one. And remember this is Samsung display. This is a different part of Samsung than Samsung the phone maker. So this may or may not end up in Samsung phones could end up in other phones. But that sensor where you don't have to build a fingerprint detector under the screen, right? The screen just is the fingerprint detector so that you can touch anywhere. You don't have to pick the right place and it can do blood pressure and heart rate. That's fascinating to me as a guy who takes his mother's blood blood pressure every single morning. Yes. Here, mom, put your hand here. Got you. Boom. Done. You know what I mean? That would be awesome and then but the fact that it rolled vertical actually super interesting to me because the first thing I thought of was sitting on a plane and being, you know, often you you spread wide you're spreading into somebody else's space, but vertical. That's all you baby. That's all your seat in front of you. Watch that thing. You're good to go. True. Yeah. I mean, and I know that, you know, we're talking millimeters. It's not that big, but you know, as somebody of, you know, I'm going through a move right now and, you know, everything I think about is, you know, when you look at like your future living room, you're like, well, where's the TV go? You know, everything has to go around that wall where the TV goes. So when you have things like this, you start to think, okay, well, maybe we can, we can make some use of some of, you know, we can work with that. Yeah, 254 millimeters. That's what eight inches, something like that. So it's probably not your living room TV, but it's phone size. It's sure. Yeah. And, you know, it just goes to show you that, you know, things can sort of, you know, expand and and then, you know, be compacted. I don't know, under the bed or something. All right. Let's check out the mailbag. Let's do it. This one came from Andrew who wrote in about the Azure private open AI instances that we mentioned earlier in the show today. Andrew's company is trying it in beta and he says, for companies that are already putting out some or all of the infrastructure in the cloud, it would be a good option. They even have a demo repo for tests driving a bot that only uses your private docs for answers. We're testing this at my office now with an eye to proving to ourselves that it's not phoning home. Okay. So Andrew is testing what they talked about at build that we were just mentioning and they're watching. They're looking to be like, all right, this isn't sending anything to Microsoft secretly behind the scenes. Is it even if meant well? So Andrew, let us know. Let us know what you find. Very good. Indeed. Andrew has a link to how they're using it. You can check that out in our show notes. But for now, we're going to thank you, Chris Ashley, because you did great today. Let folks know where they can keep up with your work. Hey, you can find me on hanging with my boys on SMR podcast or making some barbecue on barbecue on tech, either one of those shows you come check us out better if you check out both. Indeed. We also want to extend a special thanks to Dan Gardner. Dan Gardner, you know who you are, but for everybody else, you're one of our top lifetime supporters for DTNS. We want to thank you for all the years of support. Thank you, Dan. Thank you, Dan. Dan's one of the patrons who gets to stick around for the extended show. Good day Internet. HBO Max has relaunched as Max. We're going to talk about how that's going. Chris and I had very different experiences with it. And we're also going to talk a little bit about the beginning of that Netflix crackdown in the U.S. Just a reminder, you can catch the show live Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern. That's 2,800 UTC and you can find out more at daily tech news show dot com slash live. We are back doing it all again tomorrow with Scott Johnson joining us. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. I'm in the club. I hope you have enjoyed this. I'm in the club. I hope you have enjoyed this.