 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by you, the listener. Thanks to you, Pat, Degracier, Daniels, and Irwin Sturr. Coming up on DTNS is a call to pause AI research reasonable? A law aimed at TikTok could hit end-to-end encryption. And why does Italy hate mammoth meatballs? This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, March 29th, 2023 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. In Salt Lake City, I am Scott Johnson. And the show's producer, Roger Chang. And joining us co-host of Brad and Will Made a Tech Pod is The Will. Will Smith, welcome back. Hey, thanks for having me, everybody. I appreciate it. Thank you for being here. Let's start today's festivities with the quick hits. Apple announced its 34th annual Worldwide Developers Conference, aka WWDC, will be held Monday, June 5th to Friday, June 9th. As it's been the past few years, WWDC 2023 will be a mostly online event open to all developers at no cost. The company is also planning an in-person special event for certain developers and students on June 5th at the Apple Park Campus. Windows central sources say Microsoft began work on a project called Core PC. It's a modular and customizable variant of Windows. It would let Microsoft configure different editions of the operating system with different levels of support for things like legacy Win32 apps, legacy features, compatibility. This would also let Microsoft ship a version of Windows that completely strips out legacy support, which would be ideal for doing things like competing with Chrome OS. Microsoft is also working on a version that is silicon optimized to vertically focus on hardware with an emphasis on AI capabilities. Company reportedly hopes to have Core PC ready sometime in 2024. Google announced a new perspectives carousel that will show insights from a range of journalists, experts, and other relevant voices under top stories in search, for example, showing tweets and sub-stack posts below news articles about the Oscars. This will roll out soon in the US for English language search. The company also announced it will roll out extreme heat alerts in search over the coming months, partnering with the Global Heat Health Information Network. As early as this year, Nokia plans to launch a 4G LTE network on the moon. I'm not joking. They're going to use a Nova Sea lunar lander launched on a SpaceX rocket and establish an LTE connection between the lander and a solar powered rover. This will demonstrate the ability of the network to work, and then it could be used on NASA's Artemis manned moon missions. The hardware still needs to be validated so the launch could be delayed to 2024, but it's going to happen and those missions, which I guess manned is an old fashioned word that are going to have men and women, will be able to have a nice T-Mobile connection. They will be personed. They will be personed. And they will have internet access. Good stuff. The US District Court for the Northern District of California issued a subpoena for information on the user called free speech enthusiast who posted Twitter's source code to GitHub in early January. GitHub removed the code last Friday in response to a DMCA request from Twitter and now has until April 3rd to provide names, addresses, telephone numbers, email addresses, social media profile data, anything, including an IP address for users associated with free speech enthusiast accounts. GitHub was also ordered to provide that same info for any user who downloaded or modified the data. GitHub may challenge the order. And thank you to S. Kelly 2909 in our chat. Crude is the appropriate word, C-R-E-W-E-D. That's what NASA uses. Yes. A crew is on board the mission. Thank you very much, S. Kelly. All right, let's talk a little more about, we got some follow-ups on TikTok. Yeah, we do. So a video and sharing app called Lemon 8, that's L-E-M-O-N and the number 8, has climbed into the top 10 on the US app store's overall rankings this week, described as a lifestyle community app with a similar look to Instagram. Now, don't worry if you haven't heard of it, because Data AI says, this is the first time that Lemon 8 cracked the top 200 in the US since it launched in March of 2020, kind of under the radar until fairly recently. Gizmodo notes that Lemon 8 is listed as owned by a Singapore-based company called Helophilia, but past reports have found that Bite Dance is in fact Lemon 8's parent company. So while a potential TikTok ban may loom, is this a way around it? Yeah, could Bite Dance just promote these other smaller apps that nobody remembered they had? Maybe not. At least not if the restrict act passes. Now, yesterday we mentioned the restrict act as the leading contender to be a bill that could be used to ban TikTok, but we didn't talk as much about it yesterday because we were focused on explaining what was going on with TikTok itself. So it's worth taking the time today since we have this Lemon 8 story to note the breadth of the restrict act. It is very widely applicable. It doesn't mention TikTok specifically. In fact, it gives the US Secretary of Commerce the authority to take any mitigation measure. Now it lays out a bunch of examples, but it also says and any other kind of mitigation measure against any risk by a covered transaction that poses an undue or unacceptable risk to the national security of the United States. So if somebody can make an argument it's a risk to national security, you can mitigate against it, including banning it. If it's a covered transaction, a covered transaction is one in which a foreign adversary or an entity subject to the jurisdiction of a foreign adversary has an interest. Foreign adversaries named in the bill and they could be changed or added to over time, but the ones named in the bill include Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Russia and Venezuela under President Maduro. So for any reason deemed to be a threat to national security, any company which does business in Russia, which is Google, Apple, Microsoft, could conceivably be made to do almost anything with their tech. And of course that applies to China, too, where even more businesses do business. I feel like this makes me nervous, Will, because you could see a route and I know it's not intended to do this, but you could see a route where someone says, yeah, iMessage shouldn't be end to end encrypted and we're going to use the restrict act to stop them from doing that because they do business in China and therefore they have to give us a back door to end an encryption for national security reasons. Yeah, I think that's the big issue with the legislation as far as I understand it is that it's just entirely too open-ended. It concentrates power in the executive branch, which as we've all learned over the last few years, maybe is not a great idea as based on the outcomes of past elections. And it's the open-ended nature and kind of the fact that honestly the problems with TikTok could be solved if we just had an actual data, anti-data collection law like has happened in the EU with GDPR and it kind of happened in California a few years ago. I was looking at the details of this act or this proposed act and the one thing that threw me because my initial response was, hey, if they ban TikTok, they end up banning it and it goes through, a whole bunch of kids are going to learn how to use VPNs for the first time. And I was kind of joking about it. Wow, VPNs get you around anything, but there is language in this thing that is like hardcore anti-VPN. Not necessarily saying VPNs are outlawed, but if you use a VPN and knowingly use it to get attached to this or anything else that they deem a security risk and have banned huge fines. Then you yourself may be a security risk. Yeah, you are subject to gigantic fines, long amounts of time in jail, like a real gnarly look at the underbelly of what it takes to use a VPN if you're trying to get around these rules and that stuff is a little scary, a little too much. I mean, I guess I wonder, we're talking about Lemonade, for example, on the show today. Never heard of it, even though it's been around since 2020. Do a bunch of people who are TikTok users and lovers who, I don't know, in a future, not far away from now, no longer are able to use TikTok, just jump over to Lemonade? And if so, how long does it take for this cycle to repeat itself? Well, yeah, I mean, that's what happened in India, right? They started with a small number of apps, including TikTok, but they ended with more than 200. So, yeah, Lemonade's not going to be a strategy for that. If this ends up banning TikTok, they're going to ban everything else by dances associated with anything else that has a trace to China as well. It's interesting that it Lemonade looks like it's just a company in Singapore, so maybe it could skate by somehow on paperwork? I don't know. We're talking about the fact that they're not really skating by. So, yeah. Yeah, but where's the proof? I think it's a little nebulous, so you could see them doing other things where they have paper companies with relationships, etc. It's going to get like that, and you're going to have other ways to get around those rules. One side note, that app would need a serious overhaul. I've used that app, and Lemonade is not TikTok, even close to it. It is a lot closer to you. No, it's not meant to be, yeah. It's more like Instagram eight years ago, is really what it's like. They don't even have a really good video system in there. It actually sounds like a pretty good app. Maybe. That's a decent point. So, yeah, that's the other thing, because I think people end up going to shorts and reels, and then shorts and reels also scramble a bit because they have a lot of repurposed TikTok accounts. That's exactly what happened in India. There were a few startups that got a little bit of traction, but most everybody went to YouTube and Instagram. Well, earlier this week, Ubisoft pulled out of E3 after Nintendo and Microsoft both said they would not be at the physical show either. You might recall, just last month, Ubisoft was the first major company to publicly commit to E3, but then announced it will instead hold an Ubisoft forward live event on June 12th in Los Angeles. Now Sega and Tencent have both announced they don't plan to officially participate in E3 either. Organizer ReadPop says the full roster of exhibitors will be announced in the lead-up to the expo. E3 is going to take place June 13th through the 16th and is the event's first physical show at the LA Convention Center in four years, so it's a big deal that they're back in person. It's also changed hosting hands from the Entertainment Software Association to what Sarah just mentioned, ReadPop, which also puts on PAX, EGX, the Star Wars Celebration. So it's safe to say a lot of things about E3 are going to be different this year, but is it really that different that these companies aren't involved? I know everybody's making a big deal about it, but did we forget in four years that companies often hold events outside of big conventions? Microsoft does that at CES, has done it for years. I'm curious how big of a deal this is, really. Scott, what's your read on E3? Well, for me, you kind of described it, and I'll put the blame at Nintendo's feet. They years and years ago decided to stop exhibiting or not necessarily exhibiting, but stopped doing keynotes and sort of joining in on the usual E3 business and started doing directs. And it turns out, in some ways, that was a prophetic move and everybody else is doing that now as well. And I think when they are now being asked, hey, do you want to come spend, literally for these companies, some of the millions of dollars on exhibiting here and doing your sage presentation here, or would you rather control everything about it, do videos of your own, choose your own dates, do your own thing? They're choosing the latter, and I don't think I blame them. E3 no longer is a place where you, that's the only place you're going to get your word out. The internet is where you get your word out and you will easily get your word out with one state of play from Sony or Microsoft saying one thing about Starfield or Nintendo doing a direct, the whole world stops, we all listen to the gaming world anyway, and we're not that fussed that we don't have E3 as the one time a year that it happens. Plus you look at Pax, plus you look at the Game Awards, you look at all these other events, GDC kind of takes care of the developers and DICE sort of does that as well. So what are you left with? What are you actually exhibiting there? And I'm not sure they know. This kind of reminds me of when Apple pulled out of Macworld and everyone was like, wow, Macworld, I mean, Macworld RIP, but Macworld continued on for some time. After Apple said, eh, we're just not going to be officially part of this, we're still talking about Apple at the event. And I wonder if E3 still benefits from all of the news and forthcoming announcements from these major players that don't have a booth at E3 but still are going to sort of propel the conversation. I mean, there's two things to remember here about E3, right? E3 has been dying for as long as I can remember now. We've been talking about E3 dying for like 10, 15 years at this point. So it got real small for a little bit, then it got big again and then the coronavirus and everybody was like, why do we even have E3 anymore? So it's been in a perpetual state of flux ever since gaming became a mainstream hobby that everybody participates in. In the 90s, it made sense to have these huge events where millions of people, hundreds of thousands of people came and there were opportunities for the national news people to come and do a package about the hot new trend in video games. We don't need that anymore. Everybody's playing. Everybody's playing, whether it's match threes on your phone or Halo or Destiny or whatever, everybody plays games. So people know about games. We're good. Yeah. And also, what we do want is we want community, right? And that's happening. That's happening maybe in other areas. That's maybe the one place the ESA and E3 missed the boat is not counting on that being the future. I think that's why they hired Read Pop, isn't it? Yeah, yeah, for sure. It's too big for Indies and it's too small for the mainstream, for people that are already established. Nintendo doesn't need anything to get breath through the wild information out. We're all there, lined up ready to go. So it's a weird place to be. I hope that they've shifted to be more consumer-focused like PAX and EGX and that kind of stuff rather than an industry event because I think the space for that as an industry event has kind of gone away. Well, folks, if you like these kinds of conversations, we'd like you to submit ideas for them. What do you want to hear us talk about? Let us know on our subreddit. You can submit stories and vote on them at DailyTechNewsShow.Reddit.com. The Future of Life Institute published an open letter asking for a pause in training AI systems that are more powerful than GPT-4. The letter said, quote, powerful AI systems should be developed only once. We are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable, end quote. The letter also called for a voluntary pause but said governments should step in if it's not enacted quickly. The letter goes on to describe the need to develop AI governance systems, including independent review and oversight systems, saying we can now enjoy an AI summer in which we reap the rewards and engineer these systems for the clear benefit of all and give society a chance to adapt. More than a thousand people have signed the letter but keep in mind that anyone is allowed to sign it. You can just type your name in. And apparently, at one point, someone had typed in Altman's name and they had to remove it. But the first names on the list are legit. The first two names are computer scientist Yashua Benjio, who was instrumental in hiring the team that started open AI, by the way. He teaches at the University of Montreal. Stuart Russell from UC Berkeley is the second signatory. The next two names are the ones getting all the attention, Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak. Other notable signers include former U.S. presidential candidate Andrew Yang, stability AI's founder and CEO, Emid Mostak, and co-founders of the Center for Humane Technology, Tristan Harris and Alza Roskin, as well as a couple of engineers from Google and Meta sprinkled in there. However, nobody from open AI, nobody even from Anthropic, which spun out of open AI to build a safer chatbot, has signed the letter. I think the letter is reasonable. I've seen so many people shred it, including folks in our chat room right now. Keep in mind, they aren't saying stop all development on AI. They're saying take six months before you start working on the next version, like GPT-5. And Altman actually told the Wall Street Journal today, we haven't started work on GPT-5. He said you're preaching to the choir. So I don't actually think what's in this letter is that unreasonable. It's saying let's take a pause before we move to the next stage and all agree on guardrails. That would be perfectly reasonable if it wasn't such a one-sided list of people who are not the people developing this. It's not Google. It's not Facebook. It's not open AI. And it's not DeepMind or any of the other developers in here. So it seems like an emotional fight. And that's how people are treating it. When I read the text of it, it doesn't seem as crazy. Do you agree, folks? Let's start with you, Will. I mean, I've spent a fair amount of time using GPT-4. And the big problem with it right now is it's kind of like the early, like the mid-90s, early 2000s internet, right? It's in the extreme mansplaining phase. So it is able to give a believable, really enthusiastic defense of whatever you ask it. It will explain stuff. It will be completely wrong in the important details, both minor and major or everything it describes. And as a result, you can get some really convincing information that is 100% untrue, which is I think one of the dangers here. If people use this like they use search results, they're going to, people are going to have dead. Bad things are going to happen to people. It's going to take people's jobs. It's going to replace it with bad information. And I don't see a downside to taking a pause, except for that, like you said, half of the world isn't going to pause and the other half will. And then that half that pauses is six months or whatever behind it. But again, the other half is saying, like, I don't even know why we need this letter. We paused. We haven't started work on the next version of it anyway. What I don't like is that they're fighting about it. To me, it's like, yeah, you should just all have come together and agreed on it. Why does it have to be this threatening open letter? Well, and I think that that's the thing about this that is implied is that GPT-567, whatever it is, is going to harm us because we don't understand it well enough. Let's stick with GPT-4 and let's really get our heads around it and figure out when the system works, when it doesn't, how it helps us, when it's dangerous, or threatens humanity because that's the overall type thing here. It's like, robots will take over. We're not going to be able to stay on top of it and everything is going to go to, you know, where. So I don't really feel like the letter is in the wrong, but just being eviscerated online by a lot of really smart people saying, it's too late. We're already doing this. Like, what are we talking about? That's the part that really frustrates me. The letter isn't asking us to stop doing what we're already doing. The letter is saying, before you do the next one, before you make it better, before you do GPT-5, which you haven't started working on, let's all agree on the rules of the road to have some systems to oversee things, to make sure that we can tell if it is going off the rails and stop it from doing that. I don't think that's unreasonable. No, it's not unreasonable to ask, but here's where I think the problem is, none of the people actually making this stuff are agreeing with the letter and people who aren't directly involved are the ones telling them to, which smells a lot like eventually you're going to get that sort of thing from governments. You're going to get that from other regulatory bodies. So if it was me and I was in the AI world, I was a founder and a huge investor in open AI or any of these companies, I would want me and everyone like me to come together and figure out your own solution of self-regulation, start figuring out what those issues are, those questions are, those problems are, make that a priority. You've got the money, you can hire the talent, make that a priority before somebody else makes the priority for you. And that way, you will just avoid a ton of these headaches. You make it very independent and transparent. You do it the way they tried to do the ESRB back in the nineties with video games. Talked about it on TMS with Tom a little bit today. You can go listen to that if you want to hear detail. But point is, do you want to control your destiny? The best way to do it is get out in front of it so that others aren't telling you how to do it. And that genie's out of the bottle for sure. But I think we can, I don't know, we can make sure that genie's well-dressed and behaves itself. But doesn't that just introduce the whole sort of like, will you, Scott and I and Tom and Will all agree that this is the best way to proceed forward? What about all the other people who have access to the same tools who don't agree? So, I mean, I think the thing that is confusing and difficult about this topic for me personally is that it's advancing so fast right now that it's hard to keep up with what it's good and bad at, right? And if it continues increasing in this pace, like what was the gap between GPT-3 and GPT-4? It was like six months or something, right? Yeah, it was incredibly short and very quick. Less than a month. Oh no, no, it was much longer than that. But it was a gap between the introduction of chat GPT and GPT-4. Oh, I see what you're saying. Yeah. I'm honestly, I'm more concerned, I'm less concerned about OpenAI because we can see what they're doing, they're posting their stuff publicly, we can all log in and try it out and see how it works and what it's good at. The thing that scares me is what the companies that aren't sharing their work and aren't showing their work are doing. And are we, is OpenAI the cutting edge or are they lagging behind everybody else? And we don't really, nobody's in the place to know because nobody shares their information. Well, and that's what this letter is calling for. I think the only problem with this letter is that it's not consensus building. It's got Elon Musk who, depending on who you believe, got kicked out of OpenAI because he wanted to take over and they didn't want him to. That's what business insiders sources say or semaphores sources say that too. So it feels like it's a fight that's being picked over something that everyone should agree on. To me, it's uncontroversial to say, hey, GPT-4, man, it's moving really fast. This is really weird. We don't even know what all the fallout of that is yet. Maybe we should come up with a framework for safely moving into GPT-5 rather than doing what we did with technology all through the 2000s and 2010s, which was just for try stuff and then see how it affected the world. I think that's a reasonable statement. It's just maybe not the right messengers to bring it. Well, I don't know how hungry everybody is on this panel. Pretty hungry. Well, good, Tom. You may or may not like this next story, then. An Australia company called Val says it has used a combination of woolly mammoth DNA and African elephant DNA to create a lab-grown woolly mammoth meatball. Now, you might say, how does it taste? No one knows. Certain safety measures have to be in place before any of us can taste it. And if Italy has its way, we won't taste it ever. Italy's Prime Minister, Georgia Maloney, is among those who have backed a bill in the country that would ban lab-produced meat and other foods like lab-produced fish, synthetic milk, stuff that you sometimes see on counters, depending on where you live, presumably also would ban woolly mammoth meatballs in order to protect the Italian agriculture industry. If the bill passes, breaking the ban could mean fines of up to 60,000 euros. Ooh. I mean, did they have to choose? Did they have to call it a meatball? Because I think that fired up the Italians, you know? Well, actually, we are putting these stories together. The Italians aren't targeting the meatball. The Italians are basically saying, listen, we do food. This is what we do. The Italians are saying anti-lab-grown meats. Yeah, meatball or otherwise. Okay, but can I be the first to say I would totally eat this meatball? No problem, let's go. I'm ready. Are you sure? This is a protein that has not existed in nature for millennia. Yeah, I would eat it. Yeah, me and Sarah have been. I'm a little, honestly, I'm a little stopped by the elephant DNA. I don't know if I feel like it's... You're more worried about the elephant. To build a taste for elephant flesh when they're so endangered. But it's lab-grown, Will. It's lab-grown. Tastes like elephant. No elephants were harmed in the making of this meatball. Once Musk gets the first taste of his lab-grown elephant meatball, he's going to be like, I want to see if it tastes like the real thing, Sarah. And that's how it all ends. It's bad news for the elephants. Also, Italy's fight to lose a battle because Europe's going to pass a legislation that says you can do lab-grown meat because they're going to be pressured to do so for animal cruelty reasons, and then Italy's going to have to go along. So, you know... Well, and also the carbon footprint of lab-grown meat should theoretically be a lot lower than growing your... It's quite likely that it could be. And if it is, then there's another point in its favor. I too am very curious what the mammoth meatball tastes like, but that's a press stunt. They're never going to make these meatballs for people to eat. You know, we're eating, you know, impossible meat. We're doing lab-grown chicken nuggets. Bring on the woolly meatball. The woolly mammoth meatball is going to end up in a museum in the Netherlands, by the way. That's not... I'm not joking. That's actually what it's... Nobody's going to eat it. It's just going to be preserved for science. We made it. My prediction is that stuff's going to taste exactly like venison. It's going to be like deer meat. Oh, that's too gamey for me. Well, I'm telling you, these mastodon balls... Y'all can have my point. Not a mastodon. Not a mastodon, sorry. We've been through this. Yeah, we've been through this. Not a megalodon. None of that. All right. Not a big megalodon meatball. Not a big dinosaur shark either. All right, let's check out the mail bag. Let's do it. So, Mattia had some thoughts on text-to-speech tools, which we talk about on the show regularly, and who they can help. Mattia says text-to-speech tools are not just helpful for classic screen readers' users. Those with lower no vision, but they're also helpful for people with dyslexia or those learning to read a new language. An AI-powered tool that can do dynamic reading based on the context, like a professional audiobook reader, would be great. Text-to-speech devices are monotone. They pose difficulties if you have some level of attention deficit disorder, say, or are dealing with a very dry subject. This is a great point. Thank you, Mattia. This is relating to the idea of having AI create audiobooks that we talked about earlier this week. A nice point. Thank you, Mattia, for writing in. And thank you, Will Smith, for being here. Before we get out of here, let folks know what you're up to these days. We're just over at the tech pod, techpod.content.town, Brad and I post a podcast every week. I think last week was the mail bag. The week before that, we talked about a whole technology. Look, we talked about the MS-DOS icon from Windows 95 for a long time. I'm just going to say, you've just touched the hearts of many people in the Dictionist audience. Yeah. Remember that? That's awesome. Why did it look like that? Who knows? Well, Will, so glad to have you on the show today. Also, thanks to you, Scott Johnson, for being with us. Let folks know where they can keep up with you. Sure. I always love being on with Will because it gets me excited about video games. And if you're excited about video games, then you might like my show, Core, which airs on Thursdays. We go deep into the big issues of the day and the little games we're playing and everything in between. It's a big, long show that just talks about your favorite hobby. So if you're into that, go check it out. Core, wherever you get your podcast, or you can find us at frogpants.com slash core. Well, thanks to both of you for being with us. Also, a very special thanks to Who Is David? We don't know, but we sure love having you as one of our top lifetime supporters for DTNS. Thank you for all the years of support. Who is David? Who is David? David's our best friend. David's our boss. That's right. That's who David is. David is also a patron and so gets to stick around for the extended show, Good Day Internet. This is not only a tease to Good Day Internet, it's also a bit of a content warning because we're going to extend that lab-grown meat question to the idea of human. So if you're curious about that, what we think about that, stick around for Good Day Internet. You can catch our show live Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern, 200 UTC. We'd love to have you join us live. If you can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live, we will be back doing it all again tomorrow with Justin Rubber Young joining us. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Simon Club hopes you have enjoyed this brover.