 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners. Thanks to all of you, including Pepper Geesey, Carmine Bailey, Vince Power and new patron, Adam, everybody. Welcome in, Adam. Yay. On this episode of DBS, is there anything left to talk about besides Sam Altman being fired by open AI? Yes. The CEO of Cruz quit and there's a connection there to open AI. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, November 20th, 2023 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt from the Atlanta area. I am Nika Modford and I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. We're just going to put this out right here at the top of the show. By the time you listen to this, everything in open AI may have changed or nothing may have happened. We don't we don't know. Do we, Nika? It's the gamble. Yeah, it's it's we're going to give you our best analysis on what has actually happened that that won't change the past probably probably won't change and and and give you our best estimate of what's happening based on what we know at the time of recording. But this is definitely a moving situation. Nevertheless, we shall start with the quick ones. This just out of the Epic versus Google trial, Google's head of global partnerships, Don Harrison confirmed that Spotify paid nothing zero percent commission when users chose to buy subscriptions through Spotify's own system and four percent if they used Google system, which is much less than the standard 15 percent that other app store developers pay. Harrison said that Spotify's popularity was enough to justify a bespoke deal and then Google confirmed that a small number of developers that invest more directly in Android and Google Play have different service fees than other developers. Google did not name who those other developers are. In his power on newsletter, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman says Apple's Vision Pro headset may not get a January launch after all. Gurman says the Vision Pro is likely to launch in March now. Gurman also says Apple is still working out some of the little kinks and details with final device testing reportedly underway. Also, the Vision Pro is set for a US launch with the gradual rollout to other countries afterward. Also, Gurman reports that Apple is working on a cellular modem to integrate into its system on a chip with the aim of offering Mac Loptops with cellular data capabilities. I like that one. I hope that one ends up panning out. Yeah. If you heard us talk last week about nothing being able to support iMessage, well, that's not happening anymore. Nothing has pulled nothing chats from the Google Play store. The company had announced Thursday that the app, which is powered by Sunbird, would let nothing users receive Apple iMessages on their nothing Android phones. The Sunbird works by logging you into a Mac mini in the cloud or something similar and then forwarding your messages to the app. However, critics noted that this provided a security risk because you're putting your log in in someone else's machine. And nine to five Google even did a tear down or noted that there was a tear down indicating that the end to end encryption was an end to end. It didn't cover the entire journey that left some messages available in plain text. Nothing stated on X that it was, quote, delaying the launch until further notice to work with Sunbird to fix several bugs. I wonder what happened to call them to pull this. Tinder is redesigning its profile page to appeal to Gen Z users. Isn't everybody features include conversation starters, quizzes, tags and a dark mode. Conversation starter prompts include the key to my heart is first item on my bucket list is and to truth and a lie. Tech crunch notes competing app hinge. It uses similar prompts. Why I ran an article Saturday that was just this past Saturday saying that Gen Z users have been leaving the dating apps and Axios generation lab holes found that 79 percent of college students do not use dating apps regularly to me, which is no surprise. Oh, yeah, that's a lucrative market and growing market that they need to recapture. Finally, scientists at Lanzhou University in China published a paper in the journal Science Advances describing a prototype for an implantable wireless energy device. The biodegradable device can receive and store energy to power bioelectric systems, things like sensors for monitoring your health or small devices that deliver drugs in particular amounts. The devices improve on existing implantable power sources that are usually single use. These can be used multiple times over a longer period of time. The new device uses a magnesium coil to charge when a power transmitter is placed on the skin above the implant and then the power is stored in a module made of zinc supercapacitors. The amounts of zinc and magnesium are below the daily intake recommendations for people. So when they get reabsorbed in the body, they're just used as nutrients. Tests in rats worked for up to 10 days and the device fully dissolved into their bodies within two months. All right, let's let's talk about the other firing. Sam Altman, leaving open AI, I wasn't the only drama at the top of an AI related company this weekend. Kyle Vogt, V-O-G-T, resigned as CEO of Cruise. Cruise is the company he co-founded and then sold to GM. He had been working in charge of Cruise under GM. His co-founder, Dan Kahn, has also resigned. Executive Vice President of Engineering at Cruise, Mo Elshinawi, will take over as president and CEO or CTO. Cruise had, as you know, suffered numerous setbacks recently. We've talked about a lot of these on the show. Last month, the California Department of Motor Vehicles suspended its permit so that it was not allowed to operate autonomous vehicles without safety drivers. The DMV said Cruise withheld seven seconds of video regarding an October 2 incident where a pedestrian was struck by a cruise vehicle. Cruise said that they provided all the video that was requested. There's a little dispute about that. But in addition to losing that permit to operate without safety drivers, Cruise paused all of its driverless testing, whether it was in California or not. Also of note, Kyle Vogt co-founded Twitch along with Emmett Shear. And we're going to get to that in a little bit. But Emmett Shear is the new CEO of Open AI, and he just took that job today. So it could be just coincidence, I don't know. But but, Nika, explain your connection to this story and what you think of it. So I write when the cruise was being bought by General Motors and onboard it. I actually worked with some of the cruise folks to at that time I was doing back in development for HR systems. So getting those folks, you know, integrated into our system, you know, knowing the tech stack as related to getting them onto HR. And at this time, it was they were still in a garage, you know, getting, you know, they had just this partnership. Yeah, it was just joint venture. And at the time, that was really something surprising because usually Jim is a huge company, they buy things, they envelope them and they keep going. But this was more of a joint venture, more of a partnership. And it wasn't a full buy. So, you know, that's my kind of little disclaimer that I do have, you know, some level of inner working knowledge from crews and the relationship to GM based on my, you know, past employment. I think this is an interesting concept, the way that this kind of all played out. It seems as if it was something that was likely already in the works and possibly kind of moved up. But I think with the issues that have been going on with crews, it to me, it was the obvious next step because there are some significant issues while significant progress has been made from what the last eight, seven or so years ago. When crews really came onto the scene, it's still a long way to go and it's still significant issues. And, you know, just looking forward as to where crews is expected to go and, you know, GM getting their, you know, return on investment. I think, you know, some some some critical things had to happen. And I think it's starting with the exit of the the founder and CEO as well as the other co-founder as well. Because, again, as you noted, and I know that you guys have been talking about it, the the issues, particularly in California, are quite significant. Yeah. And in contrast to the other story, we're going to talk about here in a second, the public messages from vote and from GM were all very polite. They were all very nice. They were all vote sent a note to the employees saying like, you guys are great. Hang in there. Keep fighting. You're going to do this. There was nothing. There was no sense of bitterness at all. And likewise, the GM press release was very complimentary and said, he has done such a great job for us and brought us such a long way. We wish him nothing but the best in the future. This feels more like vote probably wanted to go. And there was there were so many things that they could lay at his feet with these recent missteps that that for investors, it was going to be a good look anyway. So, yeah, whether there are hard feelings, sometimes there are hard feelings behind the scenes and these play out nicely in the press. That may be, but it doesn't it doesn't appear to be that. However, that is not true of what seems to have happened at Open AI. There were some complimentary things said about Sam Altman and such, and we'll get to those. But but there's obviously a lot more going on behind the scenes in that one. So let's let's talk about that here in a second. First, though, if you have feedback about anything that gets brought up on the show, you know, if you have some inside information about what's happened at an open AI, get in touch with the DTNs audience on the socials at DTNs show on X, formerly Twitter, also DTNs show on Mastodon at MSTDN.Social daily tech news show on Tiktok and DTNs pics, DTNs P I X on Instagram and France. Previously on Open AI. Well, it was a wild weekend, but let's let's try to recap everyone. We heard about it right before the show on DTNs. So they mentioned Sam Altman getting fired at the very beginning of the show. Here's everything that we know has happened. And these are the facts. Open AI's board announced late Friday that it fired CEO Sam Altman over not being, quote, consistently candid in his communications. A source later told Wall Street Journal that no single incident led to the dismissal. The statement had said that Greg Bropman would stay on, but he didn't. He quit. Mira Murati was named on Friday as interim CEO. She's the CTO of Open AI. And Altman is well known for having multiple projects underway at once. Worldcoin. We've talked about Worldcoin, a prominent example. That's it's it's his cryptocurrency identity verification project. It's not the only one. So coming up with a project that you could argue had conflict of interest wouldn't have been hard. Reports began to come out that board member and co-founder Ilya Sutskiver and board member and Cora CEO Adam DiAngelo were likely the driving forces behind Altman's ouster. But all four other board members, besides Brockman and Altman, voted to get rid of him. It was suspected that it might have been over disagreements regarding safety and profit, but later the safety concern was denied. Leading profit, we'll get to that. Altman went to Open AI Sunday, like when he went to the building with a guest pass that he posted on on X to negotiate his return. But it broke down over his demand to have the entire board replaced. Apparently it was it was more about whether there would be an apology and things like that. But but for whatever reason, it broke down. Open AI then named former Twitch CEO Emmett Shear, the guy who co-founded Twitch along with a few other people, including Dan Vote, formerly of Cruz. Emmett Shear is now the new CEO of Open AI. Shear said he would hire an independent investigator to look into the firing of Altman. Then Microsoft Sachin Adela announced Microsoft had hired Altman, Brockman and several other Open AI leaders for a new AI research team. Though some sources are saying that's in a holding pattern because we're still waiting to find out what's actually going to happen at Open AI because on Monday, Ilya Sutskover, one of those board members who voted to get rid of Sam and who had previously been saying, yeah, it's a sad day, but we had to do it, wrote, I deeply regret my participation in the board's actions. I never intended to harm Open AI. I love everything we've built together and I will do everything I can to reunite the company. Well, now we got one more board vote and we've got a tie. Altman replied to that post with three heart emojis. So apparently those two are mending their fences. And then, coincidentally, on Monday, Adam D'Angelo, one of the other board members of Open AI, announced that his company, Cora's AI effort, Po, was launching user-created bots supporting Claude and ChatGPT as a base. Remember user-created bots were something that was a big hit when at Open AI's developer days. Then, and we're going to get to discussing this, I promise. There's just a lot to work through here. The Wall Street Journal reported that more than 500 of Open AI's 770 or so employees said they would leave the company to go work at a new Microsoft division under Sam Altman unless Altman was brought back to Open AI. And they said in the letter that Microsoft assured them they'd all get positions. The employees signed the letter and among the employees who signed the letter were board member Ilya Sutskiver and CTO and former temporary CEO, Mira Muradi. Altman has most recently posted, we are all going to work together some way or other, which the verge says means the fight is continuing. Altman may be trying to flip two more of those board members to vote his way and overturn the decision to dismiss him and remove the existing board. So those board members would be the aforementioned Adam DiAngelo of Cora, as well as Tasha McCauley, who works at RAND as a senior management scientist and Helen Toner, who's a director at a Washington nonprofit. So board member intrigue, for sure, and loads of unexpected sudden behavior, flipping of alliances. It's Game of Thrones inside of Open AI. Nika, what did you make of this from when you heard it and watching it play out over the weekend? The limited series on Netflix is going to be amazing. That's what my wife said originally. She's like, I saw someone who said Aaron Sorkin better get to work on the script right away. I mean, succession, AI, open AI edition. Yep, because it was just really you could watch the fallout at real time and it was just like one minute, it's one thing that I mean, it just it was pretty amazing to watch. I'm sure all the non tech folks are like, what? What are they talking about? I don't know. I'm confused. But just to see any time you get over 60 percent, almost 65 percent of your employees to threaten to quit unless the leader is reinstated. I mean, to me, that was the biggest kind of like wow moment to get that many people to agree that this is our this is our guy. And this is the person that we want to work for. And if you don't bring him back, we're going to leave. So it's one of those things where I think Microsoft had to act quickly, open eye, open AI, the lead, the remaining leadership and the new leadership, they had to, you know, get this done. Like we said over a weekend, because when the markets opened, they didn't want they didn't want this to tank. Because there are a lot of investors who get really spooked when it comes to this type of thing, because it's like the company is in turmoil. Like what are we going to do? What is our return? What is our investment looking like? And they had, I think they had to move really quickly to try and stop some of the bleed and stop some of the panic. And to me, Nadella, he's the winner. Either way, this goes. He's making out like a bandit. Whether he gets all these new folks to come over to Microsoft to work for Altman or whether, you know, they get Altman back at open AI. He's he's pretty much in the sweet spot. So he's kind of winning on either side of this. Yeah, it's it's important to understand. And we have we have an episode of No A Little More on open AI that explains how the company is is organized. That that episode obviously needs an update after this weekend. But there are two main components to open AI. There's a nonprofit organization that the board runs. And that's the board we're talking about. When we talk about Sootscouver and when we talk about DeAngelo and all of them, they are on the board of open AI, the nonprofit company that company fully owns or majority owns a for profit company called Open AI Global LLC. And what's interesting about this entire situation is that Open AI's board is not under the control of shareholders of Open AI Global LLC. Those board members are beholden to public interest. The Charter of Open AI is a public benefit nonprofit. It's a 501 3C company and it's charged with developing AI consistent with a benefit for humanity. Whereas the for profit company can make a profit. However, it's profit capped. So Microsoft has invested in the for profit company. But there's a limit to how much money it can make back. Now, granted, it's a it's a big limit. They can make a lot of money back. But there is a cap on how much they can make back. That's important to understand as to why the board members can get away with voting against the interest of a major investor like Microsoft, because they're not beholden to Microsoft. It also explains why there could be a rift between and this is one of the theories that was put out by a lot of people over the weekend between people who believe that Open AI has been moving too fast, either to pursue profits or to pursue artificial generalized intelligence in an unsafe manner. Sutskiver has been much more cautious about how fast they should develop Open AI than Altman has. And so some people thought, well, maybe that's the split. And maybe it was because Sutskiver did vote to get rid of him. But apparently, Sutskiver had a change of mind and was like, well, my gap isn't that big and has swung back Altman's way. So I think then you look at the other board members to see, well, who else might benefit from Altman being gone? It's hard to see too much from the member who is at Rand. It's hard to see too much from the member that is at the Washington nonprofit, which leaves Adam D'Angelo, who has a competing product in Po at Cora. And the reason he can be on the board is because it's a nonprofit. And so, you know, he doesn't have a vested interest in the shares of Open AI Global LLC. Anyway, your guess is good in mind, whether it was D'Angelo or anybody else. But if you want to understand the dynamics behind it, that's important to know. And it also seems to me that I was seeing somewhere that the for-profit board is on Altman's side. It's the nonprofit. Well, it's not even the full board at this point now. It's only a few members of the board. Three to three. Yeah. Yeah. Who are. Yeah. So it's one of those things where I think the original intent of the way they set this up, the for-profit side and the nonprofit side, I think it was admirable because we've all been hearing about ethical AI. How was this data being used? How is it being stored? We want to make sure it doesn't get too out of hand and be detrimental. So the the intent behind the way they set it up is, like I said, is admirable and understandable. But I don't think they put in all the necessary precautions to govern it, right? Because you've given all of the control to the nonprofit side. And so everybody else is just kind of, you know, working the room to try and make sure that the nonprofit board members are are happy or, you know, or at least content as to not really mess up the flow of the for-profit side, which is, you know, where the money comes from. Yeah. And I think that's an important point. I think that's a really important point is that Microsoft has a very solid license to open AI's technology. And Microsoft has played this perfectly, as you mentioned earlier, Nika, in saying, hey, we're still happy to support open AI. They've said that all along the way. But that profit motive, because it's capped and because the board is not related to the profit motive, it encourages people to find another way to benefit from this technology. And one of those other ways could be, and I'm not saying this is what happened to force this kind of situation to happen so that you then get all of the talent. Sam Altman and everybody else, those 500 other employees under Microsoft, you still have the license to open AI technology. And Microsoft can now make as much money as they want off of the talent because it's not part of the capped profit company. And they don't lose anything. In fact, like you said, they have nothing to do but gain. I don't think that's Microsoft's end game, because it does look like Microsoft is continuing to press to get Altman back at open AI, because I think that's what Altman wants. And they don't want to ruin their relationship with him. But they very clearly are using their licensing position and their 49 percent ownership as leverage to say, look, if you want to keep Altman out, then we're going to basically take everything from open AI, global LLC and develop it in house, which down the road could turn open AI into just a licensing company and nothing else. Yeah, just a shell of what they once were, because we all know, you know, Altman has been the face of open AI and the brains behind the operation, so to speak, along, of course, with the other talent. But he is the most notable face that goes along with open AI. And if, like I said, you know, Microsoft wins either way. But if they can get those 500 people, that 65 percent of open AI over under their umbrella, give Sam his team back, give him, you know, free reign to, you know, run this research group and make a boatload of money without any type of hindrance. I mean, honestly, that might be the best thing for Microsoft, but they're, you know, making sure they play this very diplomatic, diplomatically, depending on, you know, which side of the coin this comes off of. And what I do, I do kind of feel bad for what's his name, Eugene. What's his last name, the interim CEO, he's coming into this, you know, when the fire hose is still going, it's still a five alarm fire. And he's trying to, you know, settle the the employees that are there trying to hold onto them and not, you know, see them all sprint towards Microsoft because you're cutting your workforce down to, you know, 30 some odd percent of what you have left. And the people that are leaving are likely your most senior, your most involved talent. So he really has, you know, quite the task before him in addition to all of the PR stuff. And then what if they bring Sam back? What does this leave this guy? Because he left Twitch, you know, just what nine or so months ago. I mean, left in March. Yeah. His name is Emmett Shear. Emmett, he left Twitch in March. Yeah. Image. You're not Eugene. Sorry about that. But yeah. And it's they brought this guy. He's been at that. I read his statement on Twitter, you know, he had a child. This is his baby's like nine months and he's basically come out of his, you know, I'm going to relax and be with my family time to come back into this type of, you know, stressful, unknown, ever-evolving situation. And if open AI agrees to Altman's demands and brings him back as CEO, what does it leave him? What does it leave the stat? I mean, it's what's his motivation for taking this very uncertain position so quickly and and is there any connection to vote leaving leaving Cruz the day before? Shear goes back to the Y Combinator group, which also is where Sam Altman came from. So it's not impossible. I mean, they certainly know each other, but it's not impossible that there's some other connection going back there. Yeah, it is a it is a story of Silicon Valley intrigue that not even all the players in Silicon Valley know exactly what's going on at this point. But like I said, by the time you listen to this, there probably will be more shoes have dropped and we will we will continue to try to keep up on that and update the story again on the next show once we get the details. All right, before we go, let's check out the mailbag. Matt writes, hello, DTNS. I've probably owned around 10 cars since I started driving at 16 and all of them have been manuals, meaning manual transmissions. He's writing in response to our story on Friday with Tim Stevens about the electric vehicle that acts like it has a manual even though electric vehicles don't need manual transmissions. Matt says all of them were slow, boring and definitely not enthusiast cars unless you're the Hello Road YouTube channel think 1988 Chevy Nova. The manual transmission added a bit of fun to my otherwise boring cars. The manual also meant nearly all my friends couldn't borrow my car. And now that I live in an area with high car thefts, my manual car is less likely to get stolen. I'm hoping my next car is fully electric, but I'm really going to miss my manual transmissions. Great show. Give Otis the dog a boop for me. Best Matt. Thank you, Matt. You ever drive manual transmission? I kind of miss it. I, my dad tried to teach me and it just wasn't clicking. Yeah, it's a lot of effort. And, um, I was like, I told him, I was like, you know what, I think I'm okay on this, uh, I appreciate your effort, but, um, I think I'm just going to stick with automatic. Thank you. About a 1992 Saturn that was a manual transmission and just kind of like, well, I guess I need to learn because I bought this car and figured it out. Uh, Nika, thank you so much for hanging out today. If folks want to find out what else you got going on, where should they go? You can find me at tech savvy diva on pretty much all of your social media outlets. You can also check me out, um, on snobbo westcast, which is my podcast that I host with another contributor to DTNS Terrence gains. You can go over to snobbo westcast.com to find out all the information about our show. Indeed patrons, stick around for the extended show. Good day internet. Maybe we'll talk a little more, uh, about those Gurman rumors, but likely we're just going to keep refreshing the feeds and, and sharing our theories about what's happening at open AI in a little more open ended fashion. So, uh, thank you patrons and stick around for that. You can also catch the show live Monday through Friday, four PM Eastern 2100 UTC, find out more at daily tech news show.com slash live and come back tomorrow for more updates on the open AI saga. As well as our home theater holiday buyers guide with Robert Herron. Talk to you then. This show is part of the frog pants network. Get more at frogpants.com. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.