 Daily Tech News show is made possible by you, the listener. Thanks, you, Kirk Stephenson, Miranda Janell, that Charlie Dude, and everybody, welcome new patrons, Sean, Lars, and Ry! Welcome! On this episode of DTNS Streaming Services, Want Your Money, how would you like to fork it over? Plus, YouTube wags the finger at open AI, and can we ever trust Google again? Probably not. Tasia's gonna tell us why. This is the Daily Tech News for Friday, April 5th, 2024, in Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Animal House, I'm Sarah Lane. Drawing the top tech stories in Cleveland, I'm Len Peralta. I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. And joining us, YouTuber and host of AI, I name the show, as well as talk techie-to-me podcasts, Tasia Kastodi! How's it going? Hi, gang! How is everybody? I'm good, thank you for asking. Yeah. It hailed today in Los Angeles earlier. It did? I didn't see that. At least in my neighborhood. Oh, yeah. It was like, it was crazy. I was like, it's raining, it's hailing, and now it's sunny. I don't know. Well, hailing frequencies are open in Los Angeles, apparently. All right, let's start with the quick hits. Reuters sources say Tesla no longer plans to make the Model 2 a more affordable sedan EV expected to be in the $25,000 range. The sources also said that Tesla will focus more on bringing a fully autonomous car to market that could be used as a robo-taxi. Samsung projects its operating profit for Q1 will rise 931% over last year. That's the kind of thing you get from a startup that's been in business two years. That's wild. It's thanks to memory chip prices. Samsung, if you didn't know, is the world's largest maker of DRAM for computers and phones. And memory prices dropped last year because there was a lot of excess inventory as demand for consumer electronics fell. But demand for data center building related to AI services is helping turn that trend around. Samsung may also expand more in the United States. CNBC sources say it plans to double its investment in plants in Taylor, Texas, and elsewhere near Austin to $44 billion. Samsung will also receive subsidies from the U.S. government through the CHIPS Act as part of that expansion. Mass production at the first of those facilities is expected to begin sometime next year. Or this year, sorry, sometime this year. A California warn notice that's required of large companies laying off large numbers of people indicates that Apple notified 614 employees on March 28 that they would be laid off as of May 27. The notice didn't specify which departments the employees worked in, but their locations were often in smaller satellite offices where secret research projects are more often carried out, indicating maybe that is where the bulk of the layoffs are going to come from. That backs up the guess that these folks are at least some of them working on Apple's CarTech project, Project Titan, that has reportedly been shut down. That project reportedly had about 2,000 people working on it overall. Wired has an article about a former TikTok employee named Zen Goziker, who says he met with members of the U.S. Congress to share concerns about TikTok's data practices after he stopped working there. Goziker also claims to be the source behind articles critical of the data practices at Project Texas, which is run by USDS and handles all the TikTok data in the U.S. separately from TikTok and its parent company ByteDance. Wired's Louise Marsalis considers many of the claims improbable, but they may have shaped current U.S. government views of the company. The northern German federal state of Schleswig-Holstein has completed a pilot project and decided to convert its government offices from using Windows and Office to using Linux and Libra Office. The state operates about 30,000 computers and hopes to prevent the flow of public data from possibly being sent to third countries. I want to apologize. It was Louise Matsakis who wrote that Wired article, not Marsalis. That's my fault. Also, yes, we also know there was an earthquake in New York, so, you know, not just hail in Los Angeles. Everything's a little wild. All right, let's start with Disney. Disney CEO Bob Iger told CNBC that the company will begin its password sharing crackdown in June. The crackdown will start in a few countries, in a few markets, before expanding to all Disney subscribers in September. So that's not just Disney Plus, that's Hulu and ESPN Plus, Hotstar, et cetera. Disney implemented specific rules about sharing passwords outside of the household. New subscribers were subject to them starting January 25th and the terms changed for everybody on March 14th. When Disney Plus detects password sharing, it's going to prompt the user to get their own subscription. Account holders will also have an option to add a member from outside the house for an additional fee. Disney has not announced what that fee is going to be yet. Not coincidentally, Iger believes Disney streaming business will be profitable by the end of the year. Streaming companies are moving from acquiring users to figuring out how to make streaming businesses work. There's also stories out today about Roku putting ads on anything coming into an HDMI port on a Roku TV. Paramount trying to sell you shirts during the CMT Music Awards. Teja as a viewer, how does this make you feel? Well first I can just picture Paramount and what that's going to look like. I'm just picturing like a live infomercial. There's an armoire on the stage now. And it's like you too can have this brought to you by it drives me baddie. Like you guys even notice, let's talk about old school TV for a second, but when they do very awkward product placement and you're like this is clearly or watch a reality show anything to do with anything and it's like let's bring up the Expedia app. And it's like oh come on guys. So I feel like this is all just where it's going and we're going to have to get used to it. But if I may, it wasn't that long ago. It seems like because you know what is time? I'm sure it was long ago. Remember when Netflix tweeted out all those years ago? What was it? Like love is sharing a password? Oh yeah. Yeah and you know HBO during the you know hide of game of thrones had said you know at one time yeah you know it just means our shows are popular. We're cool with it. With the torrenting right? Not directly saying torrenting, but we knew what they meant right? Yeah, yeah. Well it's just getting to the point now where like people are getting ticked because we're already paying for a service. So like a lot of these services that are adding even if it's not in the show like adding ads in some capacity whether that's like a visual ad or ad break we're getting irritated because it's like we're already paying more money every year by the way because you have the price every year and now we're getting like ad tiers and people that are already paying for something are like well wait what am I really paying for then if this is no longer like structured to be on demand because you know a lot of them have already shifted even that model of like how they're delivering the content again and I'm like is this just like are we going back in a circle? What's happening? I really can't fault Disney or any company for saying hey we're going to crack down on password sharing. You know it's unfortunate if that happens to be something that you're benefitting from and now it's like it doesn't work anymore. I remember the first time I ever had access to YouTube TV a friend of mine had it and he lived in a different state he lived in Arizona. I lived in California and it worked until it didn't and I was like bummer alright I'll just get it myself because I felt like the service was worth the money you know but I was going to ride that wave as long as I could. I don't fault companies for saying hey you know we want to keep track of our subscriber numbers we want to make as much money as possible but you're going to run the risk of a lot of people dropping off for that reason. Not only because now they have to pay but just because now they have to have the difficult conversation with themselves of like what am I really paying for to your point that's like you know at the end of the month I might drop Disney I don't really care about it that much well and you should right if it gets to that point you should drop it that's how the message is sent a lot of people say they'll cancel things because they're grumbly about it and they don't like that has been the stats is that people are actually increasing the number of subscriptions they have but they are being choosier about it so they're cancelling and adding in greater numbers and I think that makes sense because we're in the position now where companies have stopped making things really cheap to acquire customers and are starting to try to consolidate their business and that means you as a customer also should to consolidate your business and decide okay which of these are actually worth the money that I'm paying I think a lot of these other ideas are all in the execution right if the CMT Music Awards has somebody wearing like a pretty awesome shirt and it's really easy on your app to be like oh I can buy that shirt that's not bad if they pull out an armoire and go like hey everybody check out then yes no that is awful maybe you like the armoire but my point isn't that the armoire is good or bad it's how they do it if it fits into the flow of things great right if they're interrupting the music awards to explain an armoire then maybe that's not so good and if it's in your face constantly like if the host have to be like remember frequency you can do this and it's like enough like we're here watching awards brought to you by Expedia listen every Apple TV Plus show with the exception of the new Lincoln show because that would make no sense but you know everybody on those shows you know is using Apple products and I'm like I got it not a big deal I notice it but I don't feel like it's like ruining the plotline in any other way so there are times where you're like using Apple wallet to get into the theater yeah oh that booth boy was he ahead of his time but yeah there are times where you're like okay maybe it's a little egregious but whatever you know you can look past it and there are other times like you said Tasia where you're like oh come on you know this is getting a little ridiculous now let me quickly check Wayfair oh really okay cool I'll just watch this ad now this integrated ad that's what the Roku one bothers me the most because it's putting an ad on something that's from someone else right you can have your Apple TV plugged in pause your Apple TV show your Lincoln show and then Roku puts an ad up that better work right that better not show up when I'm just trying to navigate the home screen and stuff like that so that one's that one seems dicier to me they'll have some kinks to figure out probably some kinks to figure out our next story falls right into that category so back in March OpenAI CTO Mira Muradi would not confirm whether or not the company's SORA model that creates a video from text prompts was trained on any data from YouTube or Instagram or Facebook either didn't know or couldn't confirm YouTube CEO Neil Mohan now tells Bloomberg that if SORA did use YouTube data it didn't have permission to do that and it would be a clear violation of YouTube's terms of use those terms don't allow for transcripts or video to be downloaded without creator permission Mohan said Google's Gemini abides by those rules no of course that is a Google company so that's a little bit different but says only Gemini only is training on YouTube data where the creators have licensed contract and given permission Now Teja these are big companies starting to question each other's data collection policies so what do you think is next as far as how enforcement will play out Well they're first going to have to prove it which I'm still luck Well and OpenAI has been sort of famously tight lipped about how their data is collected based on certain models that they've been training And I think that's why this became one of the reasons because now we're in this realm of neither confirm nor deny means probably it probably happens and it's probably happening is what we're all making this assumption So they're going to claim on their end that it's whatever fares under the fair use act or whatever it falls under the fair use act which you know clearly for a company because as you guys know and I've talked a lot about before YouTube and I'm sure a lot of the other companies has a lot of issues when it comes to even things like where all their traffic comes from and they just have a blanket policy like well it's up to the creator to control traffic when they're controlled by one of the biggest tech companies in the world so what do you mean like if you can't figure out where your traffic is coming from so that's why I just say good luck proving it because how can they possibly do it so like as far as enforcement let's say because you know Sundar pinch I came out yesterday and said basically how he wants to use AI to help with regulation and enforceability and stuff and it's like well how and then how is that going to impact the end user as well because how are we supposed to trust now these algorithms that things aren't getting flagged inappropriately or like there's just so many different implications now that I just think this is like such a new world that they're waiting into and they don't even have the answers because I don't think there are no that's the thing like how do you prove that it's like do you guys remember when the New York Times was like hey we figured out you're scraping our content open AI well how do they figure it out they basically tricked chat GPT and like kept problem kept kept feeding it all these different paragraphs from the same articles until it finally gave it what they wanted which I would have to right leave me alone stop pestering but it's that exact thing of how how else do you prove this so what's YouTube going to do and like YouTube and their Gemini thing I think is also kind of a bit of it we need to be skeptical about what they're saying because like now with advanced they're letting people connect their accounts and stuff and not just that but now other users can go on Gemini advance and say like pull out information directly from a YouTube video without somebody having to go watch that YouTube video so there's also things like that in terms of content creators on any of these platforms need to be aware of it's no longer even just your data but it's like your views where the traffic is coming from there's just so many layers to it you guys there I would say in in the most dramatic outcome of something like this scenario and this could happen between a lot of companies but let's say you know it's you know open AI slash Microsoft versus YouTube slash Google in this situation they could go to court let's say YouTube wins open AI they're asked to disclose that they did do this which is against YouTube's terms of service again this is hypothetical I'm not saying this is happening but let's say it does okay well then open AI would have to disclose a lot more information than they want anybody to know about what their models are trained on and how their models are getting smarter over time and then let's say you know a judge or jury says all right well you have to just get all the YouTube stuff out of there well now it gets interesting because open AI can say well we did okay we did but you know the model does the model you know revert back to v1 when it's on v12 well yeah what does it mean to say get all the stuff out of there because that's not how these models work the model is a relational database of learned connections that doesn't include any of YouTube's you know stuff so kind of the damage is done you can't you can't pull something out that's not actually there it's the fact that it was used to trade it that it seems to be what bothers people it's interesting the Wall Street Journal asked if because Marathi said we used public available data and license data and Wall Street Journal says does that include YouTube Instagram and Facebook and Marathi is like I don't know I'll check went back and confirmed that licensed material included content from Shutterstock which kind of left unanswered the question of okay but does it include YouTube Instagram and Facebook and I wonder if that story kind of blowing up into like oh it looks like open AI open AI might be using YouTube stuff becomes something that YouTube doesn't want other companies to think is true so it's less about we're going to sue open AI and more about we need to make a public statement that if they were doing that that would not be okay so don't anybody else get any ideas bingo on on the subject of AI because we have a lot of those in shows these days Meta says that starting in May it's going to expand the content it labels as made by AI by looking at industry standard AI image indicators or when users just identify their content as AI generated on their own. Meta's vice president of content policy Monica Bickert wrote that the company will only remove AI generated material if it violates our policies against voter interference, bullying and harassment, violence and incitement or any other policy in our community standards. Yeah and that is in response to the oversight board recommendation they actually went farther than the oversight board had even recommended. Alright from AI to TikTok this week's top 5 is out it's 60 seconds long doesn't take you much time to get informed on a cool thing that I have broken down into the top 5 things you need to know about technology and this week's is things you probably didn't know about TikTok. You can catch it at daily tech news show on TikTok itself DTNS pics DTNS PIX on Instagram and at youtube.com daily tech news show. Tuesday April 2nd Google podcasts finally sunset in the United States later this summer it's sunsetting everywhere. The website followed in a suit later in the week with podcast.google.com shutting down April 4th here in the U.S. The site will allow users access to a settings page where they can move subscriptions over to YouTube music Google's official replacement for the podcasting service or download an opml file that you can use with third party podcasting apps that export functionality will remain until everything is done on July 30th Tasia it seems like you were pretty invested in Google podcasts what are you going to do now? I liked Google podcasts it did one thing and one thing very well that was organize and play podcasts that's all I wanted from an app I was always between kind of that and stitcher guys RIP to another one if we may but right now I actually just made a YouTube video on it too I have finally made a switch you guys to another app because I'm on I you know I have multiple devices one Android one's iPhone and on iPhone can I just tell you Apple podcasts she's not cutting it it's not great especially when you come from like a Google podcast or a stitcher so I liked overcast a lot specifically the feature to share clips up to a minute of a voice or video clip how great is that and then you can share that out so like someone else can listen to that podcast if you're like hey you should listen to this but I have decided but a goodie pocket casts does it get better than pocket casts the UI is so good and can I tell you why and I'm probably not going to use the right terminology but you know when you go to tap on like an image the image of the podcast and sometimes some of these apps don't bring you to like that podcast page with all the episode list I just want to go to the podcast page with the episode list I just like scrolling back through episodes it's weird and pocket cast is so great for this it's so easy to use I don't think it's weird at all I do that too and Apple podcast which I do use it's just I don't know I know I have many other third party options but I'm just kind of using Apple podcast these days but that is the number one thing that drives me absolutely baddie is you know I'll kind of be like oh this episode is playing but you know I haven't listened to this podcast and if you know like maybe a couple weeks or you know maybe it's a daily show type thing I just want to go to the show page and that's always very hard to do yes you tap on it and then it opens the freaking episode and you're like nooo or you're trying to yeah like it's it does drive me crazy the UI does so pocket cast that's a good reminder I know a lot of folks who listen to DTNS are pocket cast fans as well yeah me too I use pocket cast because I can sync it across my pixel fold and my iPhone right so that I can pick up where I left off which is pretty pretty great Android, iOS, it's also very easy to import yeah export import all there so okay so you found a home that isn't YouTube music from podcasts which is what Google wanted you to do David Pierce from the Verge wrote a piece about Google podcast shutdown being part of what he calls the Google cycle and that the repeated killing of services like Google podcast which by the way used to be in Google music before it was then kicked back out is making David Pierce more resentful and less trustful of Google's current and any future products now some people may say late to the party David Pierce but Tasia how do you feel about this yeah I loved his piece but that was my first reaction was this this is what makes you lose faith in Google like this is classic Google playbook let's throw everything at the wall see what sticks and then we're just going to move stuff to the Google graveyard it's it's such a classic move that I just think this is the one where he's hanging his hat on like this is it to me like this is the final straw do you guys can we please take a moment Google Reader RIP was one of the best things in the world this is way before pocket way before any other you know feedly whatever I loved Google Reader I added to the list of dead Google products Aloe, Duo Google Plus Hangouts Hangouts on Air so it's just really funny that this was it but I do agree with his sentiment in that you know the usability of like podcast discovery first of all on YouTube is a complete joke and he brought up a really good thing in the article which it could have been great right like if you you know they've been pushing so much on YouTube which is like a whole other argument we could talk about on a different different day but say you discover something in shorts to be able to tap through easily if that would have been a feature to tap through and subscribe on Google podcast like they could have made this marriage work so well and instead Google's done this thing where they want to funnel everything onto YouTube and they want YouTube to be all things to all people and I cannot stand when platforms do that you can do one thing and do it really really well and just kill at that game that they had done for so many years because you start to confuddle what the service actually was and beyond like searchability I mean if you guys actually think about it podcasts on YouTube is really just a playlist like that's all it is they haven't done anything with it it's a playlist so back when all those articles broke and they're like podcasts now on YouTube no it's not it's you have a video like you normally would into a playlist so it's kind of this really messy way of doing it but he's completely right as to why it all comes back to the money because ad revenue and they're like if we can stick ads on videos and that's more lucrative than our podcast app over here then that's what we're going to do users be darned unfortunately and y'all know how I feel about the ad revenue situation because YouTube's still taking mine so I feel like there's two big things that Google is keeps missing and one is they don't stick with good things long enough right they tend to just decide well it's not the success that searches or Gmail so kill it and I think they are guilty of that sometimes I think they get a bad rap for killing some things I'm like yeah that wasn't that popular Google wave as fun as it was nobody used right but there's some on the edge like Google plus and there's some like Google podcast that I think we're doing well the second thing I would add is why not transition it instead of kill it I think a lot of times they just close stuff instead of merging what if you just took Google podcast and renamed it YouTube podcast to begin and say like hey we've got a YouTube music app we've got a YouTube studio app now we've got a YouTube podcast app that's such a simple thing it makes so much sense and then you could still integrate podcast into YouTube to be like well hey if you're in the main YouTube app you can get it there too just like you can with music and with YouTube TV and everything else but if you want to experience it outside we'll still let you do that there's lots of options for them to transition maybe mine is not the right one but there are better ways than just like oh yeah no we're going to kill that now too and renaming it oh go ahead Teja, sorry yeah I was just saying that's what Google loves to play with naming conventions too how many times do they rename things so that would have been right up their alley yeah Google play music Google podcast YouTube music there was something before podcasts were in Google music too and I don't remember what it was off the top of my head but I remember when podcasts came to Google music then they got spun back out because Google music became YouTube music they didn't rename Google music YouTube music they built a whole new app one of my biggest pet peeves is when a service calls itself music but you're supposed to know that podcasts live inside now if you know then you're not going to be mad forever because you're like okay now I know but it's really just it's a terrible user experience it's like how podcasts used to be bundled into iTunes in the Apple ecosystem you can still access podcasts that way but there's a podcast app now and an Apple music app and that's the way it should have been it's just that we didn't use to have podcasts gosh we've been doing this a well Google get with the program it's a cultural thing I'd be curious to know from other users on the user standpoint because YouTube will only share so much data I want to know how all of this is affecting the YouTube platform because it's one thing from a creator's end and what I can complain about you know what I mean and say this is why I don't like it but from the user end very curious to see are people actually doing this I get it in terms of like visual podcasts like I've there's one podcast I subscribe to that I actually watch it but it's because it's an actual visual I mean so even though it's podcast it's a YouTube video but the rest all my podcasts I listen on dedicated podcast apps so that's what I'm just curious to see like is this really working for YouTube in terms of the revenue and is it working for the users is everybody going there for podcasts I don't know anecdotally it doesn't sound like it most of the people I've talked to who are moving off Google podcasts are moving to overcast or pocket casts or something like that so alright before we get out of here today let's check out the mail bag what do we got Sarah let's do it Scott wrote in about our conversation in Good Day Internet yesterday about the limitations of AI image generation Scott says one of the issues I've had is trying to describe different actors in an image example trying to get a red head and a brunette in an image resulting in two red heads or two brunettes or a red headed person and a gray wolf ended up with a red wolf this might not even be an image set for training but just being able to parse identifying features from the prompt and implying them to each figure I haven't used Google's generator but this is based off my experience with other AI image tools yeah this was in response to the discussion that was kicked off by was it Metas Lama that was only making everyone Asian it was having a hard time with different races it wouldn't make anyone Asian and then yeah it had other problems following on that I gotta say Scott the red wolf does sound cool but yes if you want a red head a human and a gray wolf you don't want a red wolf yeah I think this is a parameter issue when it can't handle those two things that is what I've been told anyway and then there's filters and tuning to try to make it do better things cause it to have issues like it did yesterday alright there is so much fodder in this show for Len Peralta to draw today I'm very curious what he decided to illustrate Len what did you do you know doesn't the the term google cycle sound like a podcast like a good podcast like you know with a guy who has a kind of an NPR smooth NPR voice welcome to google cycle yeah welcome to the final episode of google cycle the podcast where we discuss the lifespan of google initiatives I thought you said ghoul cycle well you know google loves to kill its children and this is sort of the image that I had here you really went for it you know he is sponsored by he is sponsored by Total Wine though so that's so yeah this image google cycle which shows a very you know kind of cool podcaster dude there ready to get his fate you can actually get this right now at my Patreon patreon.com forward slash Len where you can back me and everybody gets it now you're not just to be at the DTNS lover level to get it or you can go to my old online store lennpraltestore.com you can get it right there on the front page or you can go ahead and just don't even get it hire me for something commission google podcast google podcast eternal sleep brought to you by purple mattress purple mattress on Expedia thank you so much also Teja Custody such a pleasure to have you on the show as always let folks know what they can keep up with your work you can head on over to my youtube channel it's just at Teja Custody I'm at Teja Custody on all the things friend of the show Tristan Zutra and I for AI named this show new episodes every Friday we try our very best to dive in to the realm of AI there's a lot you have a lot of material I'll give you that the panic just put it that way every episode's a panic folks go go find out what they're doing today AI named this show dot com patrons stick around for the extended show good day internet it's Friday and time for a very pertinent quiz Roger outdid himself with a quiz specifically about Google's launched and killed off products can you remember them all before we do stick around just a reminder we do DTNS live Monday through Friday at 4pm eastern that's 2100 UTC and you can find out more about joining us live at dailytechnewshow.com we'll be back on Monday with Chris Ashley joining us have a wonderful weekend everyone this week's episodes of dailytech new show were created by the following people host producer and writer Tom Merritt host producer and writer Sarah Lane executive producer and Booker Roger Chang producer writer and co-host Rob Dunwood video producer and twitch producer Joe Kuntz technical producer Anthony Lemos Spanish language host writer and producer Dan Campos science correspondent Dr. Nicky Kuntz social media producer and moderator Zoe Detterding our mods beatmaster W. Scottis one bio cow captain Kipper Steve Guadirama Paul Reese Matthew J. Stevens a.k.a. Gadget Virtuoso and JD Galloway mod and video hosting by Dan Christensen music and art provided by Martin Bell Dan Looters Mustafa A. A. Cast and Len Peralta live art performed by Len Peralta a cast ad support from Tatiana Matias Patreon support creators for this week's shows include Justin Robert Young Scott Johnson and Patrick Norton our guest this week was Tasia Custody and thanks to all the patrons who make the show possible this show is part of the frog pants network get more at frogpants.com Diamond Club hope you have enjoyed this program.