 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners thanks to all of you including Howard Yermish, John Atwood, Pat, and our brand new patrons helping us get to the goal Robert and Grizzlepaw. On this episode of Daily Tech News Show Paul McCartney isn't scared of AI in fact he's using it to make one last Beatles song plus Netflix gets into live sports by making race car drivers golf. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday June 13th, Festa 2023 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from a studio possibly under the sea, I'm Sarah Lane. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Jim. Did you see Little Mermaid recently, perhaps? Yeah, just, you know, you never know where, where I might be. It's a studio with no name. Podcasting Tech News. Let's stop that and start with the quick hits. In a series of spec teasers, Nothing, the company, revealed that the Nothing Phone 2 will launch on July 11th and will include a Snapdragon 8 plus Gen 1 chipset and also a bigger battery. The Phone 2 also looks to continue the Glyph notification lights. You might remember that we're on the back of the Phone 1 when it launched. The official announcement is set for 11 a.m. Eastern Time July 11th at nothing.tech. This will be the first Nothing Phone to fully launch in the U.S. Nothing from Nothing on July 11th. AMD launched the commercial versions of its Ryzen 7000 series. They just had Pro and some extra layers of security and remote management functions, things not needed by your average consumer. They're good for the enterprise workplace. They also included in the Ryzen Pro series, dedicated AI processing, aka neural processing units. Therat.com notes that the mobile Ryzen Pro 7040 series is the first x86 platform to incorporate an NPU. That means your workplace laptop will be able to support AI intensive applications like Windows Copilot also puts AMD positioning itself against Nvidia a little bit. The U.S. FTC Federal Trade Commission filed a request to make sure that Microsoft cannot indeed inquire Activision Blizzard before its antitrust court case begins on August 2nd. Microsoft and Activision's deal deadline is July 18th and Microsoft is on the hook for a $3 billion termination fee if that deadline is not met. The FTC told the court that it needed a preliminary injunction, quote, because Microsoft and Activision may have represented that they may consummate the proposed acquisition at any time, end quote. If the FTC has granted the injunction and restraining order, then Microsoft intends to appeal. This is going to go on for some time. Yeah, it definitely is. I'm interesting what's gonna happen on July 18th. Wall Street Journal obtained a memo sent to employees Monday from new Twitter CEO Linda Jacarino who said the company is on a mission to become the world's most accurate real-time information source and quote to drive civilization forward through the unfiltered exchange of information and open dialogue about the things that matter most to us, you know, like the Denver Nuggets. Jacarino also said people have to believe in the vision for Twitter 2.0 for it to succeed. It's like fairies. You kind of believe she posted the same sentiment in some public tweets as well, in case you'd like to look at them yourself. YouTube wants to make its YouTube partner program more accessible. It announced specifically it's dropping the threshold to 500 subscribers down from 1000. Creators must now have had three public uploads in the last 90 days and either 3000 watch hours in the past year. That's down from 4k or 3 million shorts views in the last 90 days. That's down from 10 million. The new terms apply to creators in the US, the UK, Canada, Taiwan and South Korea. The company says it'll roll out to other countries that support the partner program at a later date. But the company is also expanding its shopping affiliate pilot to more creators in the US. So those with more than 20,000 subscribers can earn commissions by tagging products in their videos and their shorts. All right, let's talk about Netflix getting into sports. Wall Street Journal sources say Netflix is in talks to livestream its first sporting event, golf, played by Formula 1 race car drivers in Las Vegas. It is so specific. Yeah, let's back up a little bit. Netflix has a couple of successful sports documentary series, Drive to Survive, very popular about Formula 1 racing, kind of follows racers throughout a season, and Full Swing, which follows pro golfers. And Netflix, as you may know, is also trying out live events. So there was the very successful streaming of Chris Rock's comedy show in Baltimore and the totally not successful not streaming of the reunion episode of Love is Blind. And of course, Netflix is contracted to stream the Screen Actors Guild Awards. They did that with someone this last time and they'll be doing it on their own in 2024. A lot of folks have speculated that Netflix might get into sports the way that Apple TV, Peacock and Amazon have, but live sports rights are insanely expensive. And Netflix has said it would want more control of a league if it's going to spend that much. In fact, they even talked about maybe buying the World Surf League in order to live stream surfing. So instead, it's taking two sports that has a relationship with golf and racing and creating an entirely new event as a very cautious way of dipping its toe into live sports. I guess so. I guess it's cautious. I mean, I know some, I'm not really a golf person, and I'm definitely not a Formula One person. So I pulled some people this morning. How do you feel about this? Is it fun? And they were sort of like, well, what is a reality show? I mean, kind of. You know what it reminds me of? Do you remember the Battle of the Network stars like in the 70s and early 80s where they would get celebrities to come on and do like rowing and track? Well, and this kicked off, I don't know. I mean, a series of like, you know, to the death type of stuff, like you want to watch people that you care about that are, you know, either sports stars, reality stars, or both do like crazy things, you know, and that's fun. I think that Netflix is. This is that without the crazy things. It's just golf. Well, I mean, I don't know. Formula One racers, who knows how they'll be a golf. But yeah, this feels like, yes, as you said, dipping the toe into the situation. You know, Netflix is, as you said, you know, it is extremely expensive to get rights to, you know, livestream any sports. This is sort of a, you know, like, almost like a like a cutesy little ha ha type thing. That's how I see it. But again, I am not the target audience. This is not something that I'm interested in watching. I might enjoy watching it later. And I'll, you know, I'll check it out. But but no, this is not the same as saying, oh, we're going to stream the masters next year. Yeah, that that would be something entirely different. This is like streaming the Love is Blind reunion show. It's something you don't have to do. So there's lower stakes if it fails. And it's with Love is Blind reunion show. It absolutely failed. Now, they learned a lot from that. And that was the point of doing it was like, they learned like, Oh, it was this configuration error. This is a way for them to say like, you know what, we've got relationships with these two sports, we can do this without having to acquire any new rights. It'll be of interest to an endemic audience who watch these two series. So yeah, is this going to be Netflix's way of doing sports? No, is it a low risk way to test some live streaming and kind of sharpen their chops on doing live sports, maybe demonstrate to somebody that they could do this? Definitely. Yeah, yeah. Maybe they're going to try to get the new United Live PGA tour to do some Netflix stuff. And this shows they can do golf. I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. You know, if anybody has really, you know, I don't know, very, very strong thoughts on this, do let us know feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. Formula one is something that I know has has become extremely popular over the last couple of years, you know, celeb, you know, celebs everywhere at formula one, whether they're driving or not, golf has always been that way. So yeah, something that mashes the two, you know, let let us know, you know, where where we're falling short of understanding why this is great for Netflix. Or is this just again a way for Netflix to say, okay, we did a comedy show, reality reunion, let's do some sports stuff. Let's try it out. No, I don't think it's bad. I'm not trying to say it's bad for Netflix. It's just certainly not bad. It's a it's a safe space for them to try. There you go. Well, hopefully a safe space is autonomous driving. We're still trying to figure out how that works. Thanks to Uli Digg for tipping us off on this one in our discord. So the story is the University of Iowa's driving safety research Institute has been testing an automated shuttle in rural Iowa roads for the last couple of years. Maybe if you live in Iowa, you know about it. A lot of people probably don't. The team has been collecting data on a particular amount of challenges in rural areas. Those include a lack of lane markers or limited site distance or changing road surfaces or maybe animals crossing, slow moving vehicles and others. Yeah, Uli Digg lives in in Iowa and was saying I had not heard about this either until it was on a local news channels website. And all of the stuff I experienced when I was driving around in southern Illinois when I was back home a couple of weeks ago, you know dogs run out into the road in front of a farm. Sometimes cows walk out into the road in front of a farm and other animals. The changing road surfaces, there might be lane markers for a while and then they just disappear and you're kind of have to eyeball it. There's some lanes where there's a truck coming this way and you're going that way and you both have to kind of pull off on the side and drive along the grass a little bit to get back past each other. Obviously slow moving vehicles, combines, other tractors, stuff like that. Like there are all kinds of challenges in rural areas beyond just the lack of a nice straight city grid system with lane markers. My sister's place has a big long gravel driveway that on some maps appears to be a road to people and they drive down it. And then she has to go, yeah, this is just our farm. There's nothing else down here. Turn around. Head on back. So I like UliDig was surprised to learn that there's an effort to kind of gather data on this stuff and that is the step towards making autonomous stuff work, right, is you got to gather that data to be able to train the models to be able to deal with all these unexpected situations. 100%. I mean, I am at my new bunker under the sea. I'm in a little more of a, we wouldn't call it urban area, we would call it a suburban area, but there are sidewalks around me, but there weren't for the last few years. So something like this definitely spoke to me. Animals crossing the highway happens all the time with some disastrous results, right? If autonomous vehicles could cut down on the quail family, meeting their maker type thing, that's great. Also, yeah, just the fact that there is limited visibility. The roads aren't always well paved. All that stuff matters. And on top of that, if you're in a more rural area and for some reason, you don't have access to your vehicle, either you don't have one or, you know, I don't know, something's gone wrong, the idea that this could, you know, at least help people get around a little bit more easily, I think is a very underserved or at least underrepresented in the media way of describing how this might all be a great thing in a few years. Yeah, one of these articles pointed out that you're talking about areas that don't have cab service, certainly don't have Uber service most of the time. Now, granted, you're going to have to get somebody to figure out how to bring these autonomous cars into a business model that works as well. But if it cuts down the cost and makes it easier, then yeah, that's something that can help someone who needs to get to the doctor or just needs to get go shopping, but, you know, is unable to drive on their own for whatever reason, could be health reasons, could be other reasons. So yeah, that that's important. And I think your point about the quails is well taken. I mean, I mentioned cows and dogs, but there's also deer crossing the road. That is another thing that causes accidents. You found the stat that the Governor's Highway Safety Association said 50% of all traffic fatalities in the US occur on rural roadways, despite only 19% of people in the US living in rural areas because it's just less controlled and more unexpected things happening. And it's not even, I mean, sure, sometimes people are going too fast or it's too late at night or whatever, but in a lot of cases, and I mean, I have felt this way, oh, my entire life, driving on roads that are not properly, well, when I say properly, not well lit in the way that I'm used to when I live in a city, driving through a city at night is get your wits about you, but it's not that hard. Rural areas way different. Yeah. You gotta, you gotta, you gotta, you gotta. I've forgotten to turn my headlights on in the city and had people flash me and like, oh, I was driving because there's so many streetlights and never done that in a rural area. Like you're not trying to be like crazy. Yeah. You're just I've never forgotten to turn on my headlights in a rural area because you know immediately. Hey, you can't see. All right, folks, we are trying to get Molly Wood on the show more often because you have asked for that. She's agreed to do it. Molly Fridays, once a month at least, but to have that happen, we need more patrons, 420 to go to reach our goal by June 29th. And if we reach that goal, we'll start the very next day, June 30th, with our first Molly Friday. So if you have signed up, thank you very much. If you haven't yet, now's the time. Sign up and make Molly Fridays happen at patreon.com slash D T N S. Let's do it. There have been a lot of final Beatles songs over the years. The Long and Winding Road was the last to chart from an album released while the band was still together. The end of Abbey Road was the last song on the last album, the band recorded together. I've always thought of George Harrison's all those years ago as kind of a last Beatles song because it has Paul and Ringo on the track and it was about John. But of course, free as a bird and real love were the last official releases by the band on the 1995 anthology CDs with all four members appearing, albeit posthumously for John. Now you're asking, Tom, that's great. You love the Beatles. Why are you talking about this? Thanks to AI, we have one final, final Beatles song coming. Oh boy. And you know, coming from a Beatles household, this one really spoke to me. And also thanks to Technomanche for submitting this in our subreddit this morning. Okay, so here's the story. Sir Paul McCartney told BBC Radio Force Today program that AI has helped finish production of a final, final Beatles song. McCartney didn't name the song specifically, but the BBC is speculating it may be from John Lennon's 1978 demo cassette of a song called Now and Then. Now, he recorded it originally in his apartment. It was on cassette, but it had a persistent buzz from parent electrical circuits when it was originally recorded, which made it kind of crappy. Yeah, George Harrison refused to continue when they tried it in 1995. He's like, this is not going to work. If anybody knows, it's the 60 cycle hum from the mains that apparently they had to get rid of. So in this interview that Sarah just mentioned, they asked Paul McCartney about AI. I think they were trying to get like, what do you think of these fake tracks out there? Are you worried about that? He expressed a little concern about that, but he noted that they used AI to isolate voices in the get back documentary that Peter Jackson did. Engineers at Jackson's Wingnut Films and computer scientist Paris Smaragdas of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, developed a neural network called MAL, M-A-L. McCartney said, when we came to make what will be the last Beatles record, just kind of dropping that bombshell in the middle of his answer about AI, it was a demo that John had that we worked on and we just finished it up. It'll be released this year. We were able to take John's voice and get it pure through this AI so that when we could mix the record as you normally would do, they separated John's voice from the guitar and that maybe that hum, if that's the track they were using. So McCartney said, it gives you some sort of leeway. I don't know about you, Sarah. When I first saw the headline of this this morning, I thought, oh, they're gonna deep fake John Lennon onto a new track, but that's not what they're doing. I thought the same thing. And real quick, just because this always confuses me every time there is a Grammy award show, a record usually means a single song, not an entire album. So we're talking about one single song here, not, you know, not an album. We assume he's talking about a single song. He actually didn't say, but yeah. He didn't. He didn't say. When you use the word record, technically that's what that means. Usually, yeah. If you're in the music industry to the level of Sir Paul, that that's what you would mean. I thought the same thing, especially because as I mentioned, I grew up in a Beatles household. My mom and dad, but my mom particularly, Lennon fan, you know, so the whole sort of like Paul McCartney is just kind of resurrect some song that never existed using AI. Blast for me. That is not what they're doing. Not from what has been described to us. In fact, it's actually a really, really cool way of using AI. Saying, listen, there was a recording of the song. This is something that by all accounts, Paul McCartney had had the rights to make with what he could. It was a bad recording, a bad, meaning it was technically, technically, it just, it just wasn't a clean recording. You know, they tried to play a run with it in the nineties, probably after that said, it just can't be salvaged, but there's something here. Well, now in this day and age, to be able to take out hum. And listen, this, you know, selfishly, I think like, oh, this, this could work for so many things that I do as a podcast producer, you know, where, you know, you listen back to something afterwards and go, oh man, this was so good. But it just, the audio is, is unsalvageable. Well, if it can be salvaged, I'm in. And I, I'm, I'm really, really interested to hear how this would work, especially because I was a huge, huge fan of get back the documentary. In fact, I watched it twice and it's really long, but I didn't realize how much they were isolating the audio in that documentary based on modern tools. It just wasn't a thing that they were telling you about. It just worked. And so if it works in the same way, in this respect, for a song that I've never heard before, oh, bring it on. Yeah, that's it. That same team that we mentioned just now, Smiragda of U of I and the folks at Wingnut, they worked on, they made get back. And the way McCartney put it is, what was it? He was able to extricate John's voice from a ropey little bit of cassette. So if you've ever seen that documentary or even just clips of that documentary, you probably didn't think about how, how clean that audio was, how easy it was to hear everyone, how modern it felt. That's not by mistake. That's because they processed it that way. I remember it, watching it because I, I'm just sort of riveted by, you know, behind the scenes video, the sort of things. But I remember going, wow, what a well preserved bunch of, you know, video reconstructed. But I didn't know that, you know, I just thought, oh, this was just something that was in somebody's basement all this time. And somebody finally cared enough to do it. This, you know, this is audio that's been, you know, not, you know, you're not making people say things that they weren't saying originally. This is not deep fake stuff. This is true cleanup of audio. And I think a lot of AI going forward, audio and video, you know, as far as preservation stuff, and, and just an old, old stuff that we care about, that just isn't in great shape. That is going to be a really, really cool area of this, where you can't deny that it should be here and should get better going forward. Yeah, this is a tool that is faking. It is faking the parts that you couldn't separate otherwise. You can't separate out that hum. You can't separate out, they use the same technology to do the remastering of Revolver in 2022. You can't separate out more than what's there, unless you recreate the parts that are missing. So you train the model to say, you can hear this vocal. And this is what a vocal sounds like. Now make that without the backing track. That's something you couldn't do before, but the model can recreate just the little parts that flesh that out and get rid of everything else, get rid of the other instruments, get rid of the buzz. And so this, that's what they're doing here. It's a good kind of faking because you're just restoring the parts you couldn't hear otherwise, not creating something new. Well, as somebody who spends a lot of time in audio, you know, like DAUs, trying to, you know, pull out weird buzzes and things like, you know, I don't, I don't know what the buzz from John London's apartment sounded like. But, you know, this is something that we've been doing for some time, just to make the final result more easily digestible and more appealing to you. So, you know, when it comes to that sort of thing, I'm all for it. Indeed. All right. Now, if we could just have free power for everyone in the world, Sarah, do you have any news on that? Yeah. Well, it depends on how big the world is for you, Tom, because this one's kind of big. The microwave array for power transfer low orbit experiment. If you're not familiar, it could also be known as Maple is an array of small and flexible microwave power transmitters and one of three instruments carried by the space solar power demonstration or SSPD-1 and has wirelessly beamed power through space. You might say power through space, where, how, what, why? Because it's directed energy towards earth for the first time, and that's getting us one step closer to tapping into let's say the sun's power from space to power things that we need on earth, our big island in the sky. Solar energy in space doesn't have to deal with limitations like day and night. We do have to do that on earth. If you have solar panels on your roof, you definitely think about that. But in space, even the earth's weather doesn't really matter. So, Maple sent energy from a transmitter to two separate receiver arrays, they're about a foot away, where then it was transformed into electricity powered LEDs. Then it beamed energy down to earth, where it was then detective on the roof of Gordon and Betty Moore laboratory of engineering on Caltech's campus in Pasadena, California. Yeah, so I know some people are very skeptical about this technology and whether it's necessary or worth the expense and all that, but this is a big step forward for the ability to have a solar and this has got a solar panel. So they are generating solar energy and they've now been able to put it on earth. Not a lot of energy, but it's a first step. The idea being as Sarah was just saying, you can just have these solar panels always facing towards the sun if they're high enough up in orbit. And so you can beam a lot more power than you could on earth where it has to wait for 12, you know, 12 hours to go around the backside. And clouds and all of that stuff. So this is a big step towards another potential. I'm not going to try to promise it's the thing that's going to solve the energy crisis, but it's one of the many possibilities to do that. So it's important to note that they successfully were able to direct with some focusing. They explained it in there. They use interference to make sure that they can focus the power just where they need it and literally sent power from a solar panel in space to the ground. So that's good news. It is. All right. Let's check out our mail bag. Let's do it. So lots of folks responded to our Reddit blackout story from yesterday. Speaking of responses, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman responded. He sent a memo to his staff saying that the blackout had not caused significant revenue impact and that like all blowups on Reddit, this one will pass as well. Now, I don't know. It might be a little early to say so, but that's what he said. Good luck, Steve. Meanwhile, in our discord, Wayne's wish that we had addressed the unreasonable cost of Reddit's API and our coverage on Monday. Wayne wrote, Tom said he didn't know if the price was unreasonable or not, which is fine if you don't dive into the details, but it is unreasonable. It's intentionally insanely high to kill these third parties. As a quick example, 50 million API calls to Reddit with a proposed pricing would cost $12,000. Currently, 50 million API calls to Imager cost $166. Yeah. No, I get what you're saying. I'm trying to find an unemotional, objective comparison though, and I'm not sure that Imager is it. Often when you see something that is this disparate like $12,000 versus $166, that's insane. There's something else going on that would make it not seem quite as ridiculous. So for example, Twitter charges $42,000 for 50 million requests, and Twitter is more comparable to Reddit in that you have lots of users doing multiple posts and reads. Imager might, you know, just have a lot more reads than posts. Maybe that's why it can be cheaper. I don't know. What I'm not trying to say, I know, and I'm not trying to say that Reddit is totally justified either. I'm just saying I haven't found a really good comparison to say like, okay, this is what that API should reasonably cost, and this is what Reddit is charging. That said, Steve Hoffman's memo was pretty tone deaf. It does seem like he's just like, yeah, this will go away. The peasants will stop complaining, and I don't think that's going to play very well. Oh man, I mean, you know, yeah, if it was like a subreddit or two, sure, but no, not, you know, you have a lot of people who are upset about this. The response, in my opinion, would have been different. So if there's a developer out there who's like, oh yeah, I can point you to the API that's equivalent to this, and no, it's not as ridiculous, but maybe Reddit's a little bit more, or maybe Reddit's right on target, whatever, let us know feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com. Now, if you're a patron, you get to stick around. We're going to talk some more tech. We're not done yet. Meta added text chats to Horizon Worlds. It's a VR chat room. Why exactly would you need text chat in a VR chat room? Well, I think we can explain it to you. Stick around. I think so too. Just a reminder, we're always on demand, but DailyTechNewShow is also live Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern. That's 200 UTC, and you can find out more at DailyTechNewShow.com slash live. We are back doing it all again tomorrow with Scott Johnson joining us. Talk to you then.