 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners, thanks to all of you, including Carmine Bailey, Vince Power, Rodrigo Smith-Sapata, and three new patrons that we've got since yesterday's show, Molly, Douglas, and Roz. Welcome, new patrons! On this episode of DTNS, a non-Apple VR expert weighs in on the Vision Pro, Google continues to pull away from search, but at what cost. And let's talk about a U.S. TikTok ban. Is that actually happening? This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, March 14th, 2024. From Studio Animal House, I'm Sarah Lane. From Columbus, Ohio, I'm Rob Dunlily. From Deep in the Heart of Texas, I'm Justin Robert Young. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. We have got a jam-packed show for everyone, and if you're eating a tamale while you're listening to the show, at any hour of the day, no matter where you are, we consider that a plus. If not, well, you know, maybe next time. Alright, let's start with a quick heads. Microsoft's new single version of Teams for both work and personal accounts is currently in testing, letting users switch between multiple tenants and personal or work account types. It's due to be rolled out to commercial users in April, and will include an account switcher accessible from the profile section. In a blog post, Microsoft said users consistently prefer a singles team app that allows you to easily access and switch between personal and work accounts. Proton, the privacy-focused mail, calendar, online storage, and password manager announced today that its desktop mail app for Windows and Mac OS is out of beta and now available to all of its paid users. Proton is releasing its Linux app in beta. If you don't currently pay for Proton mail, you can try it out for two weeks. Otherwise, the mail plus plan costs $4 a month if it's not for a year. Proton Unlimited is $10 per month with a year plan that includes 500 gigabytes of storage, Proton Drive, Pass, and VPN. OpenAICTO Mira Murati says that the company's text to video generator called Sora, S-O-R-A, will be available as soon as a few months from now and is gearing up to incorporate sound as well. Sora is currently capable of generating hyper-realistic scenes based on a text prompt, which was first shown off in February. When the Wall Street Journal asked Murati what data is used to train Sora, she said, I'm not going to go into the details of the data that was used, but it was publicly available or licensed data. Murati also said she isn't sure if Sora uses videos from YouTube, Facebook, or Instagram, but she did confirm that Sora does use content from Shutterstock, which Open AI has a partnership with. Murati announced it will shudder its journalism tool, CrowdTangle, used by academics to study the flow of content on Facebook and Instagram, including conspiracy theories and fake news. Meta's new content library tool will replace CrowdTangle, but will be limited to academics and non-profit researchers. Meta claims that Content Library is a tool built in response to the European Union's Digital Markets Act, but appears to be a watered-down version of CrowdTangle, one that for-profit news organizations cannot use. Amazon is releasing a new generative AI feature to let sellers make product pages by copy-pasting a link with information about that product from another site. The goal, if you're Amazon of the AI-generated product, is to complete written descriptions, images, help sellers reduce the time it takes to bring that product over into Amazon's marketplace from wherever it was before. Sellers must be the owner or the rights-holder or have the license to use those links contents, otherwise Amazon might take legal action if it finds that the seller misrepresented their ownership of the website. Pretty cut-and-dry here. The feature is rolling out now and will be available to US sellers in the coming weeks. All right, Rob, let's talk about how people feel about the Vision Pro about a month in now. Absolutely. So Hugo Barra, a former VP of Android and head of Meta's phased-out, Oculus headset brand, has some thoughts about Apple's Vision Pro liking in it to an over-engineered dev kit that ships with more sensors than is necessary to deliver Apple's intended experience. Barra oversaw the Oculus team in 2017 after it was acquired by Facebook. He noticed that while the Vision Pro is an impressive device with six tracking cameras, two pass-through cameras, two dev sensors, and four eye tracking cameras, it's over-specking and characteristic of a V1 product where its creator wants to ensure that it survives the hardest test early users will no doubt want to put the product through. Now, if you, myself included, because I got one behind me in the next room, almost nobody thinks that the Vision Pro version one is going to be the final product. For example, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reports that Apple is working on multiple new Apple Vision models, exploring both a lower cost version. That would be obviously a treat for some people because $3,500 is a real price barrier for a lot of folks. Also, a second gen version, a lower cost version could eliminate something like the iSight feature or the M-series chip using more affordable components that maybe people are okay with, which speaks to Barra saying they went overboard with this. There are specs in here that are very impressive, but are they really working for the consumer? Well, again, whether it's a developer or consumer product is a subject of much debate, but Barra also thinks that Apple has made the Vision Pro experience intentionally blurry in order to hide pixelation artifacts and make graphics appear smoother. He says that's a clever move, but the design decision made significant motion blur and image quality issues that render pass through mode unusable for longer periods. Justin, some folks say love the Pro. Love the experience. It's heavy. It's maybe too much for me. I think that's what Barra is going for here, but where do you land on the whole Vision 1 being too good out of the gate? Speaking as somebody, and it will caveat that I have not used the Vision Pro. However, I have certainly ingested as many opinions about it, not only from professionals, but also friends of mine that have purchased it. It appears that it is a minimum viable product for what Apple wants in this space, and that is demonstrating that they can bring this level of experience to a best-in-class place that nobody has been able to touch thus far. That being said, I do think that the opinions of Mr. Barra here are pretty head-on. Specifically, I would say that there are design decisions that are made in here that are a little puzzling as soon as they decided to have the battery be an external device connected, of course, by a supple woven cable, still one of my funniest Apple-isms of all time, that they should have put some of the compute on there. They should have taken some kind of weight off that headset, because that, no matter what, have the best experience you can possibly have. The average person can only really have about a half hour's worth of it at max, because it begins to wear on your head. And if what they want you to do is have these very immersive, lengthy experiences, watch a whole sports game, watch a whole movie, do work with it for a nine-to-five job, or at least as much as you'd be looking at your MacBook, that headset needs to be lighter. And until that happens, until you can seriously expect people to wear it for three-plus hours, then I have a hard time believing someone's going to drop 3K on the next version. Well, and they're lucky to wear it for three-plus hours with the battery life, as it is anyway. But yeah, I'm with you on that. I have been trying out the Vision Pro in a variety of scenarios, you know, because by care and also because I'm also doing Apple Vision Show with Eileen Rivera. We record live on Mondays. Please check it out. But it's not that heavy. However, I am also used to wearing a quest. I had the Quest 1, the Quest 2, I've got the Quest Pro. The Vision Pro is heavier. It's not significantly heavier on my face. Your mileage may vary, of course. I think that's why Apple went through, you know, all these leaps and bounds to figure out, you know, how it attaches to your head, go into an Apple store, have somebody, you know, help, you know, make sure that you get, you know, the right strap for your face. The battery pack is where I just, I'm like, you're kidding me. You know, at this point, can we not just have something that doesn't have to, you know, the battery pack itself is, I mean, it's like a big brick. I mean, it's not a huge brick. I mean, you can put it in a pocket, but like, not with like everything that you're wearing, it's asking a lot. I mean, yes, you're not tethered to a PC. That would be worse. But to be tethered to a large battery pack when you have other headsets that don't need that and have like pretty decent battery life, that's a tough sell. Rob, where are you on this? So I actually got to play with a Vision Pro for about 15 minutes, about a week, a week and a half ago, a buddy of mine who actually is a developer and his company got one to work on. I happened to be headed at home and I went over his house and, you know, put it on. So the first thing you notice is what everyone has said. It is really heavy. But one of the things he said to me was that, so it's what he thought the device would be. He thought that Apple would put out a version one device, put everything in the world in it, and then give it to people like him and his company to figure out what to do with it, report back to Apple. Here's the changes that you need to make. And when I think back to what Apple said initially about the device, that kind of lines up, you know, they see this as a version 1.0 and something else will come later. So, you know, even though I don't have one, I'm not terribly upset with it, but it is really heavy. And one of the things that he told me in order for him to wear it for more than half hour, 45 minutes at a time, he literally has to like lay or lean back on a couch where he just has something to support in his head to take the pressure off of his neck. So that is absolutely something that Apple's going to have to address. Indeed. You know, Tom Merritt asked me the other day, like, what are you using it for the most, you know, just, you know, in the early days. And I said media consumption. I do not consume the Oscars standing in, you know, in the middle of my living room. I'm on my couch, got a pillow behind me. It's all good. If I were to be standing or walking around, that would be very different. And I think a lot of people are sort of like, but the use case is supposed to be that we can walk around, you know, or stand or, you know, go about life AR, right? And, you know, people are finding that that's still pretty, pretty difficult. I got a solution. $300 Apple branded neck braces. Beautiful. Yeah. And, and like in a variety of colors, right? Sure. To our home is one, you know, you know, if somebody wants to be fancy, we're fine. So guys, let's change gears a little bit and let's, let's talk about search because search, as we know, it is changing. And it's being changed by generative AI that first entered into our lexicon when chat GBT launched back on November 30th of 2022. Not even a year and a half later. However, AI is everywhere. Google launches artificial intelligence powered search engine or search generative experience in beta last May, sending publishers scrambling to prepare for significant disruption and organic search traffic with potential declines ranging from 20 to 60% according to experts. Mark McCollum, executive vice president of innovation at Raptive estimates that with the current SGE and it's only going to get better at revenue loss could amount to as much as 2 billion annually across the publishing industry. So Justin, the bulk of Google's revenue comes from search. So is it safe to assume that Google won't eat his own lunch with the coming sea change from search to SGE? Well, you know, what do you think is, is Google going on to survive this? And more importantly, will the advertisers survive this? To say that Google makes the bulk of its money on advertising is like saying that the bulk of your driving is fueled by gasoline. Like it is what Google does. Well, tell that to the EV users. But yeah, we get the comparison. They're an ad sales company. And they have been an ad sales company from the moment that they realize that they had a 100% margin product that they could sell as many times as they wanted. It is totally cornered the market and reshaped the concept of advertising. Google has revolutionized this space. So yes, they do need to understand that what they do in pivoting away from that, anything that will take down their search activity takes down their ability to sell these ads, which makes them less money. They need to understand that that was decaying anyway. And this this sea change is happening. They can't be without a boat. So yes, they need to be concerned. And they hope that they are going to be able to make up for this revenue that they will be surviving in the future when search revenue is not what it was anyway, regardless of whether or not they're in the game that they need to be into the membership world and the API world, specifically both with their with their LLM. What I would say is what about their current world of rolling out their LLMs makes us think that they will be competent in that phase of it because they certainly haven't been competent in the rollout, despite the fact that they have nothing but data, nothing but talent, nothing but money. They should be a leading player, if not the leading player, and they have made unforced error after unforced error. I mean, call me naive and very much am sometimes when it comes to what Google is doing behind the scenes with search. But if, okay, let's say, the old way of doing things is I type in orange cat into Google search and Google search gives me the results that it thinks I'm probably looking for. And there are sponsored results as well. And I might click on one of those and somebody makes some money as a result. With AI search, the idea is that the whole model is better trained to understand what I was going for initially, but that doesn't stop advertisers from still saying, hey, this is an interesting topic that you might like more of. I don't know that advertisers are screwed over in the sense. Maybe I'm not getting it, but I feel like if you can, I don't know, make sure that you're changing with the times. And I know not every advertiser has a really great relationship with Google to know exactly what to do, but this feels like just more of the same to me. So I think one of the issues is that the scenario that you lay out, you go to your search engine, you search for something, and then you get results and you start clicking links. And many of those results could be paid. So every time you click that link, the advertiser is paying a little bit of money to have you click it, Google is making a little money because you have clicked it. The change now with these chatbots basically is that you type in your question and it just delivers the answer. There's really nothing for you to click on. So I would hope that Google is working on something that in that interface, there are going to be clickable links or there's going to be ads that you can click on where they will ultimately be able to continue to generate revenue. And there will also be a place for advertisers to get traffic to their actual website. Instead of just getting the answer, I want to go ahead and click on and go through to the gap. I want to click on and go through to the GM dealership. I want to click on and go on through to the cell phone manufacturer that I was interested in. And I think that that's what Google absolutely has to get right. And to Justin's point, there's nothing that they've been doing in this realm that makes me think that they're going to be any better at that than they are with what they have been already. So it's concerning. I guess there's a lot that has to do with what you're searching for, right? Like, yeah, if you're like, call the car dealership, I need to take my car in on Saturday. When do they have appointments? It's like, well, you know, what's search going to do for you? Sarah, like, you also have to understand how this process works in terms of how you buy advertising. You buy AdWords. Literally, you are typing in what you are selling and what you are, sorry, what you are searching for, what people are searching for and what your ad is going to be against it. So for example, Weezer just announced a tour. I'm a huge Weezer fan because I'm a man of a certain age. And I really want tickets for when they come to Austin. I'm searching Weezer tour Austin and ticket resellers are going to have on, they're going to buy tickets or buy the search words for Weezer tour Austin. It's an understood and incredibly lucrative and powerful relationship between anybody off the street who wants to buy ads and the biggest place where people spend time and are actively searching for something. You've taken that away when it comes to these LLMs because you're typing in a block of text or maybe you're asking it to summarize something. There's a billion different uses for it. And so you've diluted the point in which you know somebody is looking for something and it's not as easy for you to know exactly what you are going to find or how you're going to get in front of the person that you need to get in front of. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. How do you sell the thing you want to sell to that person when they don't really need you anymore? I'm going to that tour. By the way, it's going to be great. Oh, I'm jealous. Love Weezer. Yeah. The blue album whole way. It's going to be awesome. Well, folks have a thought about something on the show, but don't know our email address. Here it is. Email us at feedback that daily tech news show dot com. All right. Yesterday in our quick hits, we reported that a bipartisan bill compelling bite dance to sell TikTok past the US House of Representatives on Wednesday. The bill still needs to clear the Senate. If it does, President Biden said last Friday, he would sign the bill into law, but we knew Justin was going to be on the show today. So we kept the conversation to right now. What's fun is that there are other details since we last talked about this former US Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin now says he's putting together a consortium to try to buy TikTok. There is no way that the Chinese government would ever let a US company own something like this in China. He added this is something that should be owned by US businesses. Now, Justin, a lot of things, a lot of balls in the air here. Yes. First, does this bill get passed through the Senate? And if it doesn't, does the idea of forcing the sale of TikTok have any legs anymore? Okay. So if we're going to start at the Senate, I'm upgrading it from maybe to maybe. That's the official diagnosis on whether or not it's going to get passed through the Senate. Sort of a 50-50? Yeah. Yeah. It went from a little bit like 60-40. Now we're at 50-50 and it's changing very, very quickly. But let's take a step back and really just walk through this because I think a lot of people might be confusing. It is a confusing situation compared to the peril that TikTok's been in the past. So back toward the end of the Trump administration, there was executive actions looking to have TikToks either divest from its parent company ByteDance or to move its data to an American provider. That happened. And TikTok started working through a subsidiary to store all of their American data with Oracle. It's called Project Texas. If you have followed any of this, it's what the CEO of TikTok consistently refers to whenever he is talking with people from the Senate or the House, because that was supposed to settle this. What this bill says is that TikTok must be divested from ByteDance. And if they don't divest from ByteDance, they will be essentially banned from the internet by way of delisting from app stores and internet service providers not being able to process their traffic and Oracle not being able to work with them in terms of hosting their data. What happened earlier this week after a meeting with the members of the House and the intelligence community wherein reportedly there was a presentation showing that there are algorithmic boosts to stories and issues that divide America. And specifically the issue that was reportedly shown to them with enough evidence to get everybody moving in the same direction at the same time was that the Israel Hamas situation past October 7th was something that was algorithmically boosted beyond what it would normally be if it were just regular traffic, this according to reports. That gets this bill flying through the House. And what you need to understand if you don't follow politics is that this has been a very, very, very partisan body specifically over the last two years. There's not a lot at all that the Republicans and the Democrats agree on. Heck, there's not a lot that Democrats and Democrats agree on or Republicans and Republicans agree on in the House. This exploding through is notable because it doesn't really happen. It wasn't unanimous, but considering how fractious they've been, it was something to keep an eye on. So now it goes to the Senate. The Senate needs to pass by 60 votes. The Democrats have a one or the Democrats have control of the chamber. That means that essentially this bill is now in Democratic hands. The President of the United States, who is also a Democrat, has said, put this bill on my desk and I'll sign it. Normally, if you have a lot of momentum for a bill out of the House and the President says, pass this bill, give me this bill, I'll sign it. And he's going to say, yeah, it's going to go. That would happen. So the fact that it has not is notable. And the fact that Chuck Schumer, the speaker of that, sorry, the Senate majority leader, has not moved it forward considering he's been a huge China hawk for a very, very long time, longer than our modern understanding of it is. He's always been very, very aggressive toward China. He has not moved this forward. Makes me think something is coming up the works and whether it be that the White House doesn't actually want to sign this, but they want to say they sign it, whether or not there are elements of the Senate, which is very distrustful of the House and they might not like this bill. So they want to rewrite their own bill and go through the process of reconciling that with the House's bill. All of this is in motion right now. But what is for sure is we've never been closer to TikTok being banned in America than we are right now. Justin, you said last week when we talked about this that, you know, what does bite dance do at this point? Because they actually put out a plea to its users on the platform where it's like, Hey, contact your Congress person. Let them know that, you know, this is about to go down and people reacted. So one of the things that I would say maybe that is working in bite dances favor is that they have upset pretty much everybody on TikTok. Now, here's the thing. People are upset for the wrong reason. I don't think that a lot of people understand why the United States is thinking about pulling this out of China. They're trying to make comparisons to what is happening with Facebook or what happens on Instagram and things like that. And this really has nothing to do with that. This has everything to do with that we really are not filling China right now as, you know, you know, government to government. And we know that they wouldn't let us run this app there. We don't want that running here, particularly with all the data that, you know, that, you know, that potentially get supposed to be going through project tests, but potentially all the data that could be going right into Beijing. So that is really a problem for the United States. And I can't call it. It looks like the CEO of bite dance is like, All right, let's let's let's let's go ahead and pump some money into lobbying right fast and see if we can't get folks that are right now in Congress that are particularly in the Senate to hold up and say, Well, what about this? And what about that? And money often tends to do those things. So it's going to be a really interesting Well, and there are members of Congress who are because was that there? There are members of Congress who have been, you know, very vocal, like this is not a good idea. You know, not that it isn't a good idea, but like this particular bill is not a good idea. It's rushed. It's, you know, it's not in the great interest of, you know, the American people, et cetera, et cetera, which, you know, also lends to a lot of confusion, especially when something is a, you know, nonpartisan, as you mentioned, Justin, Bill, he fairly across the board. Yeah. So a few things. Number one, the great and powerful Tom Merritt was on my program politics, politics, politics on Wednesday, discussing this exact issue before the vote came through in the house. And he made a point that I very much agree with. I think this is less about data than it is about culture. Because if we were worried about Chinese owned companies that have massive install bases on American phones that have permission to all the same things that TikTok asked permission for, then we'd be banning a lot of mobile games that are not currently at issue right now. What is at issue is culture. And the fact that an algorithm that is programmed in, in that has ties to mainland China and mainland China has said will not be licensed or sold. That's something that happened during the first push here that algorithm is a outsized part of our current culture. The fact that that is, that that is happening is really what has made this a code read situation for Congress in my opinion. Well, I have a feeling that this story will not end anytime soon. We will definitely see what happens in the Senate with bite dance slash TikTok. But thank you, Justin, for getting us up to speed on where we are at this point and let folks know where they can keep up with other political stuff that you follow when you're not with us. Well, if you want to listen to that conversation with Tom, then you can go ahead and do that on politics, politics, politics. It was our Wednesday episode. Did Donald Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene save TikTok? Because by the way, it's another funny element of this is that it has united disparate interests like the vague Ramoshwamy, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Donald Trump and the squad. Look at that strange bedfellows. So thanks to you, Justin Robert Young. And thanks to our patrons who should stick around for the extended show, Good Day Internet. The right to repair is gaining steam. We will talk about the latest advances in the U S and what that means for manufacturers. Just a reminder, we do the show live and you can catch it live Monday through Friday at 4pm Eastern, 200 UTC. And you can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. Thanks to everybody who's with us every day. We're back doing it all again tomorrow. Stay with us.