 Coming up on DTNS CES is off. Are we sad a bet for clean nuclear power hits a milestone in France and Andrew Maine explains How he let us have AI conversations with Ada Lovelace and the Hulk This is the Daily Tech news for Tuesday July 28th 2020 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt and from studio Redwood I'm Sarah Lane and I'm the show's producer Roger Chang Author of the girl beneath the sea Andrew Maine is with us. How's it going Andrew? Fantastic You've been working with open AI and allowing us to talk with any author. That's not alive. That's pretty cool Any person any any person right not just anyway fictional or otherwise. Yeah, exactly So we will talk a little bit more about that later in the show. We just talking about how Andrew came about that We may on good day internet have David Foster Wallace's favorite movies So if you want that wider conversation become a member patreon.com slash DTNS, let's start with a few tech things you should know Spotify updated its group sessions beta feature to let up to five premium subscribers Listen to music or podcast together all members of the listening parties host and guests can control playback They can skip tracks or episodes and then add items to the queue, you know alone together Spotify first launched group sessions in beta back in May Google announced plans to build an undersea cable to connect the UK Spain and the United States It's Google's fourth privately owned undersea cable now that will help Google save some money But an industry insider told DTNS the average user will see nothing from this although It is nice to see new fiber in the water an example of a cable that might actually impact your general use is the Oman to Perth Cable to be completed in December 2021 That will be the only cable directly connecting Europe Middle East and Africa to Australia and avoiding routes through the South China Sea Intel announced Monday that its chief engineering officer Dr. Venkata Murthy Rendu Chintala will leave the company on August 3rd His technology systems architecture and client group will be split into five teams technology development Manufacturing design engineering architecture and supply chain management all reporting to Intel CEO Bob Swan Netflix received the most Emmy nominations of any studio digital or otherwise with a hundred sixty Ozark alone had 18 Though HBO's Watchmen had more than that Amazon got 31 nominations total Hulu 26 Apple TV plus 20 Disney plus 19 Mostly for the Mandalorian Quibi got ten Oculus got three and YouTube got two Look at Quibi folding at home and Rosetta at home both now support arm 64 devices Meaning you can run them on Android devices Raspberry Pi devices and more both projects are being used for research on the corona virus Good day internet has a folding at home team that you can join if you haven't already And it's time to check in on SARS-CoV-2 vaccine progress As we mentioned phase 3 vaccine trials are the ones used to demonstrate effectiveness in a large group of people and usually The last step before a vaccine can be submitted for approval for use Vaccines from AstraZeneca, Sinovac, China National Biotech are all already in phase 3 and Monday a vaccine from Moderna began It's 30,000 person phase 3 trial at more than a hundred sites in the United States a vaccine from CanSino is also approved for use by the Chinese military and in negotiations with several countries to begin its phase 3 trial Alright, let's talk about CES Let's do it the consumer technology Association who are the folks who put on CES each year announced that there will be no physical event in January 2021 after initially planning a hybrid in person and virtual show Instead an all virtual format will let exhibitors and attendee attendees and also the press engage through online talks and meetings The CTA says it consulted with more than 10,000 attendees and other stakeholders in the show and found out many just Didn't want to physically attend due to health concerns about the virus the CEO Shapiro Unfortunately, I forget his first name Gary Shapiro said quote we realized with no vaccine It's just not possible to have a physical CES our event has been primarily an indoor event If it were a financial decision, we would go forward He cited a shortage of physical tests as one element of the decision as well The 2022 CES is still planned as a hybrid physical and digital event based on what the CTA learns from this coming one so we're all very sad that we will not be able to eat the shriveled apples in the press luncheon kits and And get kind of jostled, you know going through the LG Big booth and I mean that's the thing is when we because DTS has been going for some years now And you know, we've all been there in in years past. We're all very well aware of how crowded it can get Particularly when the show opens to public So the whole idea of it being hybrid when we heard about this couple months ago Which was what a lot of shows were sort of mulling over it was like, okay Well, that's smart, but how would that even work? I mean, it's it would be just completely different experience. You'd have to You know, you'd have to trickle people in really slowly and you know force people out at a certain time So other people could come through it sounded like a mess to me Yeah, and and it was at a time when we thought the infections were starting to trail off So January felt like well, maybe by then it won't be so bad And then of course we saw some resurgence and I think that's why the CTA decided to make the decision it did DT and S didn't go to CES for the first few years And what we missed was getting in touch with people having people that were there easily just come by and beyond the show That might not be able to otherwise and if you're not gonna have a lot of people there I was still wondering like even if I feel safe if am I gonna get that benefit out of going so they've taken the decision out Of my hands for this year Andrew as someone who consumes the news coming out of CES Is this something that changes your mind at all about it? I? No, I mean I don't I think that's sort of like some of the more interesting cycles sort of started to happen outside CES besides like you know how you know The resolution of TVs, you know, so I kind of think that maybe it's for the better Yeah, I Think it's probably fine It we're gonna get all this the same amount of news and like I said having covered CES Locally without being in Las Vegas the first few years. I never felt like I was missing out on the news I was missing out on on just meeting the people and that's that's just something we're used to right now There's an energy thing that you just yeah person, which is yeah, I think that's when people talk about okay Well, we can you know many of us can work remotely Well, we're all working remotely now But folks who did not have to and now are forced to have you know come to the conclusion at sometimes Oh, this is actually better for me where this is easier than I thought it would be so as somebody who's been to the show many years in a row I Wonder how we'll feel disconnected if we do at all I had to add yet There are a lot of these smaller shows like I have a friend who's an electrical engineer and he talks about going to like I went to this optics show or this other thing here and there's stuff some consumer rate and some amazing stuff there that You might never see it a CES and so it might be kind of us and see if the shift is Covering smaller sort of industry sort of shows where it's not all about the LG booth, you know, right, right, you know Well, let's talk about nuclear fusion fusion is different than fission fission is the one that splits atoms and Releases radioactivity fusion combines atoms releasing a lot of energy with less radioactivity quite quite a small amount of radioactivity If you can get fusion to work the idea is you have an abundant source of energy with no carbon emissions using very small amounts of fuel No physical possibility of a meltdown and that just sounds better to a lot of people the world's biggest nuclear fusion project ITER ITER has entered its five-year assembly phase in St. Paul's a wall southern France ITER is a collaboration between 35 partner countries Including Switzerland the UK and the European Union which provide 45% of the funding as well as funding and other contributions from China India Japan South Korea Russia and the United States ITER will confine hot plasma in a structure called a tukamak to control fusion reactions If all goes on schedule it would go online December 2025 and produce 200 megawatts of power That's enough for about 200,000 homes or so. So essentially this is a very expensive proof of concept And the hope is that more affordable commercial designs could be made based on ITER But Andrews we were talking before the show. There are already a lot of commercial efforts happening as well right now Yeah, there's a there's a lot of other theories on how you could achieve sustainable fusion So there's a number of startups with different approaches, you know the the itar You know idea it's sort of like the DOE has been doing for years here It's one approach and we haven't been putting a lot of money at different sort of ways to do it And there's a lot of capital like Bill Gates is funding like at least one or two different ones And you've got I think some of the Google founders of doing that too So there's a lot of other efforts out there and that's what's exciting now It's the first time we're trying different approaches towards doing it because the tukamak design You know one of the original people worked on that Robert Buster later on went to say like no I don't I think this is a dead end Yeah, and it is an old design and not to say they shouldn't try it But I wouldn't put all my hopes on this being not only that this be the one that works But this being the only one that could work because there's a lot of efforts out there But it's interesting to keep an eye on and know that okay, would they're finally building it this they've been talking about this for a long time They've been doing the pre-work on it for a long time And so they're they're finally having parts show up and start to be assembled So it'll be interesting to keep an eye on it a Study by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology or NIST has found that wearing face masks that adequately cover the mouth And nose causes the error rate of many facial recognition algorithms to rise between five and fifty percent Black masks were more likely to cause errors than blue masks and the more of the nose covered by the mask the more the algorithm Struggled to correctly identify a face However, NIST's report only tested a type of facial recognition known as one-to-one matching where an algorithm Checks to see if a target's face matches the face on an ID like a passport often used at border control or airline boarding The study didn't examine the kind of facial recognition used to unlock phones They use depth sensors and NIST also didn't evaluate one to many algorithms Those are what's used in mass surveillance where a crowd is scanned to find matches with faces in a database already NIST plans to evaluate one-to-many systems later this year as well as algorithms designed to recognize mask wearers I mean if you look at this practically, I'm sure you could say like oh well at a border or boarding an airline I suppose you could ask someone to take their mask off briefly to be identified since it's one-to-one One-to-many is a whole different problem and and unlocking your phone That's meant to make sure it doesn't unlock unless it absolutely has the right face So that's a different problem, too There seem to be some some improvements in that where people can train it with their mask and it starts to work But the whole problem is you're missing half the data, right Andrew like from the nose down if you got a mask on You can't measure those points and compare them. You have to work around the eyes I'm writing this down masks make facial recognition difficult Algorithms for facial recognition I don't know if we've had any yet that were trained from nose up and that's one of things you'll find out that all of a sudden if you Start saying well, let's do a bunch of data sets where we train from from the nose up to the eyes You might we might be surprised all of a sudden the efficiency will go up So if you say yeah, we used an algorithm trained on the whole face Doesn't work when you can't see the whole face. That's shocking to nobody if you know It's going involved there There are some really cool next generation algorithms that are actually able to sort of recreate depth data even from you know Regular 2d cameras and stuff and I think that's going to be exciting to see what happens when you start creating depth data and doing that I think they're gonna get way more capable. So it's just I think it's a solvable thing. Yeah Absolutely, and I think this is the the motivation to solve it Right is and you're already seeing the earliest companies claiming to have solved it Whether they have or not which means, you know, we'll soon have workable Ways to solve this and if and if you didn't quite get it The reason you need depth sensing unlocking your phone is you don't want it to get fooled by a picture Whereas at the border when you're doing one-to-one you're using a picture. You're like there's a person I'm using a picture to match it. So you don't care about that that aspect That's why you don't use depth sensing in the one-to-one But all of this is going to get better and I think you think you're right This is this is just a study that says yep What we knew was difficult Sure is difficult and now let's let's start talking about how to fix it And I wouldn't if you're someone who's thinking like aha facial recognition is finally defeated I don't think this is in a Situation where that's the case. No, it needs to be reimagined at the very least We'll just go to barcodes on foreheads problem solved Yeah, I I think some people might have more of a problem with that than wearing a mask. I don't know face tats are in Tom That's true. You got to make it cool and then everybody will just do it See that Steven Shanklin has a great write-up on progressive web apps causing a conflict between Apple and Google progressive web apps or PWA are Basically websites that can be saved to your desktop or your home screen and work without a network and do app-like things Like synchronized data and deliver push notifications But web apps work in any browser no matter what operating system you use or at least they're meant to Google's fugu project is adding PWA capabilities to chromium which would then show up in microsoft edge opera brave google chrome and others But apple safari is not chromium based and on ios you can only use browsers based on safari's webkit engine So adding something to chromium doesn't make it work on ios or safari So pwa features only show up in safari or any ios browser even chrome on ios If apple adds the function to webkit and apple recently published 16 Web programming abilities it will not add to safari because of privacy and security concerns among the features apple doesn't support our notifications and prompts to install a pwa You can go in and tell the safari browser to install a pwa to your home screen as like like it's an app But you you have to do it They don't allow the website to prompt you to do that Also data sync and access to the file system are more restricted on safari because of security concerns So we're getting a little head budding here where The original iphone didn't have an app store because steve job said Web apps will be all you need. This is the fulfillment of that but apple Now pushing themselves as the more private and secure option and also operating in a fairly lucrative app store Is a little more resistant to allowing pwa's to be as robust As they are on the chromium engine Andrew does this surprise you? Well, I mean Yes, steve job said that but also he was looking at the point of having launched the iphone on the nightmare of trying to have an app Store at launch was so terrifying for him. He's like web apps are great. Love web apps pwa's become very powerful, but you know that the You know apple obviously wants to protect their ecosystem, but the other side of it is it's like there is that well Yeah, we should hot let you automatic notifications all these other stuff Apple worry. I think there's genuine security concerns there like you know legit sort of issues with that because you can do a lot of really powerful stuff in there, but You can also do a lot of powerful stuff in there So yeah, I I I look to I don't think google is being irresponsible by doing pwa But on the other hand, uh, they don't have as much of a laser like focus I look to microsoft as sort of the arbiter on this sort of thing But now they've sunk their uh, you know their their future into chromium on microsoft edge I think there certainly is a way to do pwa Secure and just like there is a way to do a native app secure So I I hopefully this will be a productive tension as I guess where I'm trying to go with that Yeah, I would say my I love google But often they will err on the wrong side when it comes to security You know, we saw that with either the google, you know home device that was sending your voice unsecured Whatever because they don't sell security as a service apple does and so That's why I like yeah, sure. They'll do it. I'm like, oopsie. Sorry, you know, what are you gonna do not? Not buy chrome. Oh wait, you don't pay for it. Anyway, sorry Yeah So and fire fox is another one to keep an eye on fire fox is also a little more restrictive in the kind of progressive web apps It allows in the desktop version of fire fox and and again, same thing They are pushing privacy and security as their product. So another one to look at to see okay Where might that line really be without any other kind of biases? Do you use any pwa? I'm sorry. Do you use any? I've never installed one I have a pwa for the financial times And for a game called gold digger that was released with the original iphone As a pwa and I've had it on ever sets. Those are the only two Hey folks, if you want to get all the tech headlines each day at about five minutes Be sure to subscribe to daily tech headlines.com On june 11th open ai released its first api in public beta leveraging open ai's GPT 3 model letting you train the model on any text and use that model and the api's general english training set for any natural language task Janelle shane of ai weirdness used it to simulate re-rate dogs There's a startup acquisition announcement generator that will quote generate a tone deaf announcement post crafted by a neural network trained on hundreds of breathless press releases But my favorite and i'm biased because he's my friend is andrew mains ai writer At ai writer app andrew. What is a i writer? So I started working with the api Several months ago Doing a lot of different stuff with it and I built out an app called ai channels app Which was a conversational sort of app where you could talk to different fictional characters and stuff And I knew releasing that was a bit further out So I just wanted to come up with an easy way for people to interact You know with virtual characters, etc via open ai's api So I created ai writer app and I went to open ai. I'm like, hey, I built this thing Uh, let me go through the process of releasing to the general public to let people use it and get feedback about it to find out What works what doesn't work, etc And so what you do is you just basically once you get access you just send an email to anybody you want You write dear I could write dear tom merit, you know, tell me the secrets of podcasting and Which I may do that right now And it will write you back and say hey from that person if if there's enough information about that person on the internet It will respond to you. And so you get you can get very lengthy responses I've had benjamin franklin write very lengthy, you know Responses to questions about you know being industrious, etc. So it feels very benjamin franklin. He was a link Yeah, yeah, so right back in the style. Yeah, and and what what I didn't realize until right before the show is that it does that Uh For any anybody like you you don't have to have pre trained your model on that person Uh, you you don't have a set of people that it's it's in the set Of people who are out there on the internet and if there's enough out there They'll write back which I think is is more fantastic than people could have realized Yeah, and that's because of the open ai their api It's trained on so much data so much historical data so much, you know stuff out there that For somebody like me to come in and make an app on top of it. It's very easy I just have to be able to ask it the right question and say this is the kind of response I want How good is it? Oh, sorry. Well, that's kind of the same question I was going to ask what what have you noticed are the you know the biggest drawbacks or where it It seems to flounder or even fail Well, you know the the like any text generator sort of model is that you know It will give you an answer No matter what so for instance if you ask a question of something like it's data set ends in october of 2019 So if you ask it, let's say what's covet 19 it'll give you an answer, but it won't be an accurate one It'll say it's like a swedish punk band or whatever So you you have to then you have to be mindful if you're right applications that are fact based to say Okay, I need to build a fact filter that understands what to do that So, you know, I built an app that would basically I figured out how to find out How competent it is on the response and if it had a low competence I could then go ask wikipedia and then say summarize this back to me and then do that And so that's what you're you're getting people to understand that think of it like A really really smart person who knows a lot of stuff that you can slip notes to under a door And you ask them to do things back and forth. It's not going to do straight computational stuff I mean, you could do some basic math and stuff, but if you ask it, you know What's 1000 times 5000 divided by whatever? It may or may not give you an answer But if you ask me, hey, what's a good equation for solving this problem or, you know Which weighs more a loaf of bread or an airplane? It won't tell you an airplane And so you have to sort of think a different mind what you have a different mindset Is it is it something that that you see having a Use, you know, because I think a lot of people look at this and go that's fun I can talk to the Hulk cool, but what can I use this for? So I for an example like with our friend Justin Young who works on doing political Commentary etc in history, you know, I did some examples writing to Richard Nixon asking him his points of view on stuff Or you could write to people and say, you know, hey, what do you recommend? And you can get book recommendations, you know from referencing people stuff You can ask Richard Feynman to explain to you how a quantum computer works and break it down on a simpler level And that's kind of the really exciting part is that you could write to people and say, what do you think about this? It's not really what they think, but it takes all the information out there to say Let's synthesize what would have been that response from that person And so, you know, I've had you know, I had the examples of like, you know, you know people the Jane Austin Book club fan, you know, or like, you know, like the fact responses There's other people have done similar stuff with this finding out that It gives you really good answers and it will give you historical context You asked Ben Franklin a question about something contemporary to his times He will make references to stuff that you may have even been aware of and you go, wow, that's legit By the way, virtual Tom Merrick gave me advice on the secret of podcasting And what did he say? Dear Andrew, if you want to get better at podcasting, here's what I do Talk to someone on your podcast you're nervous about, pick an editor or producer You know, then for every person on your podcast, listen to how that person speaks to their guests And then repeat the process a couple more times until you're okay talking to people I mean, not bad advice Right, it's, it's, I don't know if that's exactly what you would say, Tom But yeah, if I heard that advice, I'd be like, that's pretty smart The first few sentences, I was like, yeah, that's kind of what I did, so all right, yeah I was thinking when you were describing this that this is an excellent, and I'm certain This isn't the only use, but this is an excellent way to create more personal chatbots All right, you know, so if I, if I'm a Bank of America, you know, I could have Benjamin Franklin Be my, my customer assistance chatbot, right, like I could, you could pick personalities That you can then make people feel a little more confident talking to Because you're not just talking to faceless Joan or Pat or whatever You're, you're talking to somebody they're like, oh, I know that person You know, if it's a legal advice, you could have John Jay or some other historical person And it lends it a little more approachability and makes people maybe loosen up a little You can do things too, like if when people get API access, there's some tutorials and stuff And there's some videos, some of the videos are ones that I've made to help explain it And one of the things I show is how to make a sarcastic chatbot Or how to make, you know, one that has a sense of humor and stuff And how to give it more personality by providing examples So it doesn't have to be a famous person, you might, let's say you're a company You had an amazing customer service rep that was really good at de-escalating Keeping people calm, you can give them those examples of how to handle this And then all of a sudden your chatbot is way better at dealing with people Than feeling like a machine Yeah, yeah, no, I think that's really interesting One last thing before we get off this topic on the AI alignment forum Machine learning researcher Andy Jones suggested we may be in what they call An overhang for AI An overhang being when you have the ability for a transformative use of a technology But nobody's quite realized it yet The overhang ends when that transformative use arises And surprises everyone with its capability He thinks GPT-3 could be the trigger for those kinds of transformative uses What do you think? I think that if you've been following AI research for the last couple of years The rate at which you're getting new papers and new capabilities Far exceeds the number of people trying to make use of them And we're seeing examples now like speech synthesis has had In the last 18 months Lightyears and improvement The ability to replicate individual voices and stuff And what's going on there GPT-3 is an example of I've mentioned this before I went through and looked at all the things and GPT-2 came out and said Well, here's the problem. It can't do this and this It was able to do all those now And so there's a lot of great stuff before you get to what they talk about AGI Which is artificial general intelligence Which is like just talking to a person and be able to convince you that they are a person Which this could fool touring tests, by the way This is totally my opinion Your version of touring says that, I noticed Yeah, I've took all the examples from historical touring tests that it failed But like that version of it So that doesn't get into the utility of it So I think there's a lot of stuff out there right now that yes Absolutely, we're at this point where as more and more people You're looking at every day If you follow the open AI or you follow some of the other people Like Greg Brockman who's the CTO If you follow the stuff he's retweeting Of other people doing stuff You're seeing every day it's like Christmas If somebody come up with something new You know, there's people creating plugins for Figma To generate entire user interfaces They're trading racked code doing all kinds of stuff So I think so Taking a lot of shots That's how you hit Hey, thanks everybody who participates in our DTNS subreddit You can submit stories You could also vote on other stories So they rise to the top at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com Let's check out the mailbag Oh, let's We had a great conversation with Andy and Notco Who was our guest yesterday About, you know, the wide world of sports In the time of corona And Greg and Brian actually also Also both wrote in and said Fake crowds have been getting a lot of attention lately But fake sounds in live sports not new Pre-recorded and video game sounds Have been part of live sports broadcast for a decade Your chat with Andy about the virtual fans Reminded Greg that BBC Radio 4 did a show in 2011 Called The Sound of Sports Great backgrounder on how live sports and video games Are merging and influencing one another So it's been around for a while Greg says I also first heard the story Courtesy of the podcast 99% invisible Brian mentioned the same One of my favorite podcasts So I thank you for reminding me That there's an old podcast That I should listen to of 99PI Greg also says as an aside Since you mentioned them in yesterday's show I was involved in early experiments To add virtual down markers in NFL broadcasts It was a partnership between the NFL The technology developer and the Canadian broadcaster That I was with at the time We tried all sorts of things to test the tech And things that worked well in testing Would invariably go wrong when we were live on air But if you're going to mess up a live NFL broadcast Better to mess up in Canada Where only 5% of the audience will be upset Rather than the US Where the NFL takes on a religious importance Go BC Lions That's all I have to say Thanks for sharing that story, Greg Unlike hockey for them Yes, you would not test it with hockey Glowing pucks My goodness Oh, yeah, that's right Shout out to patrons at our master and grand master levels Including at Dan Dorado Hankins John Johnston And Chris Smith Also special thanks to Andrew Maine For being with us today Great information, Andrew You're obviously doing some really creative work Let folks know where they can keep up with it I'm on Twitter at Andrew Maine Or AndrewMaine.com That's M-A-Y-N-E And folks, you can support us at any level And get perks The best way to keep the show rolling To keep us coming Is to support us directly on Patreon You get a wider version of the show Or not You can choose to have just DTNS if you want And you can get special columns from Roger Live with it from Sarah Where she spends three months with technology Really putting it through its paces That's all available at Patreon.com Slash DTNS If you've got feedback for us We've got an email address to send it to Feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com And if you can join us live Please do Monday through Friday 4 30 p.m. Eastern 20 30 UTC You can find out more at DailyTechNewShow.com Slash Live Back tomorrow with Scott Johnson Talk to you then This show is part of the Frog Pants Network Get more at FrogPants.com Hope you have enjoyed this brover