 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners. Thanks to all of you, including Brandon Brooks, Hector Bones, Tim Ashman, and our new patron Tudor. Welcome, Tudor. On this episode of DTNS, what to make of Twitter's rebranding as X. Flip phones are about to be big again. And open AI Sam Altman wants to save the world through cryptocurrency. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, July 24th, 2023 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt from Petaluma. I'm Megan Maroney from deep in the heart of Texas. I'm Justin Robert Young and the show's producer, Roger Chen. Welcome to Mondays, Megan. They're Megan Mondays now. Oh, double M. Yes, Megan Mondays. Thank you for welcoming me. I feel welcomed. You sound. How are you feeling? How are you feeling? You ready? I am ready. I have a bit, a little bit of a scratchy throat still, but not like last week when you had. Oh, yeah. No, last week you were, you were fighting it. It sounds, sounds much better. I'm glad you're feeling better. Thank you. Let us start with some medicinal quick hits. Bing's AI Chatbot has only been available in the Bing app or the Microsoft Edge browser until now, but that's all changed. It is available in Chrome, Firefox and Safari. I wasn't able to make a show up in Opera. So it doesn't seem to be available on all Chromium based browsers yet, but prompts on the non-Microsoft browsers are different than on Edge. You're limited to 2,000 words as opposed to 4,000 and conversations reset after five turns instead of 43. Spotify hasn't raised its main plan prices since 2011. And that streak is over. In the U.S., Spotify Duo goes up $2 to $15 a month. Everything else in the U.S. went up $1. Spotify Premium is now $11 a month. Family is $17 and student is $6. In the UK, everything gets a pound, a one pound increase, except the student plan, which stays the same. And in France, an individual plan goes up a euro to 11 euros. Duo goes up two euros to 15 euros. Family plan now costs 18 euros and a student plan will cost six euros. Existing subscribers, exactly. Très bien, Spotify. Obviously, that's the only French phrase I know. Existing subscribers get a one month grace period before the new pricing takes effect. Sakura Blue. Also, quick correction. I said 43 turns, 30 turns on Microsoft Edge for the one person who cared. Yeah, I care. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reports in his power on newsletter that Apple is working on a delivery option for anybody who wants to buy a product while shopping at a physical Apple store but have it sent to their house. This will possibly start in August. You could do this on your phone just on your own, but there's going to be a way to do it not on your phone. Gurman also says Apple is considering raising the price of the next iPhone pros, the regular iPhones, the lower end models would stay the same price. And he also said Apple expects to ship close to the same number of iPhones this year as last year, which would be kind of a win in a declining smartphone market. The chat GPT official app is now listed in the Google Play Store. You can choose to have it install as soon as it's available. Open AI says the app will arrive later this week. I did it. I said install and now I'm waiting. The Linux Foundation announced plans for the Ultra Ethernet Consortium, the UEC. Now, this won't redo Ethernet. The consortium includes companies like AMD, Arista, Broadcom, Cisco, Intel, Meta, Microsoft and others. The group hopes to develop the Ethernet standard to improve efficiency. So this isn't about speed. This is about efficiency as networking workloads have been increasing. Let's talk save in the world. Open AI CEO Sam Altman's cryptocurrency project, the Worldcoin Foundation is rolling out its services worldwide, except in the United States. Kind of. Worldcoin is meant to provide identity validation with a focus on, in their words, distinguishing humans from AI online. It also aims to increase economic opportunity and foster democracy. You can download the Worldcoin app in the App Store, even if you're in the US. Then it'll ask you where you are and you can schedule a visit to a nearby location that has what they call Worldcoin orbs. These are little iris scanners that you go to link your iris to your account and that creates a verified identity for you. That way you prove you're not a bot. You you a person went to the store and linked up your identity. Now, despite not technically on paper being available to people in the US, not meant for people in the US, there are orbs available at co-working spaces in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Miami, as well as places outside the US. There are orbs available in 35 cities across 20 countries. During its beta, which it's been doing before today's big worldwide launch, it was giving new users 25 tokens just for signing up. It says it has signed up more than 2 million individuals across 30 countries. Justin, I don't think a lot of people realize this was a thing Altman had before he became famous for open AI. What do you make of this? I think that this is very famous because Sam Altman did open AI because like you pointed out, this is something that was there before. It got X amount of press and I believe it was covered here on DTNS. But that was at the height of the cryptocurrency craze. Obviously, the cryptocurrency craze has cooled. And now open AI is one of the most famous companies in the world of tech. And so a plan that involves Sam Altman is going to get a lot of attention. I don't particularly have a lot of high hopes for world coins. Saving said world, but God bless. Megan, it does feel like it's a little bit of like an old-fashioned two-year-old crypto idea in a way. It does. Yeah. I mean, it kind of reminds me of like 2019 when Facebook had its own coin. Remember that that disappeared? I think that was 2019. I signed up too. I downloaded the app and I even made an appointment to get my scanned by an orb and in San Francisco. Did you make an appointment in LA? I have not made an appointment yet because because I'm in LA, it's like an hour and a half away, right? Right. So I want to wait until it's like a 30 minutes away, which will be a different time of day. Also, Tom's apathy to the suffering of the world is palpable. Also, I don't care about the world. That's true. I know. Or are you just protecting your idols? Also, no, I am following the rules. It says on the website, world coin tokens are not intended to be available to individuals or companies who are residences of or located, incorporated or have a registered agent in the US or other restricted territories. I just want to get that orb on my eyeballs. That's all I want. You just want that sweet orb. I mean, I think it is solving like seriously, I think it is solving. It is an attempt to solve a legitimate problem, which is crypto. The crypto world is full of scams. It's very hard. I mean, everything that we were promised about it is the problem is that we don't know who people are. Like the anonymity of it is is a challenge. So I even say maltman says, you know, I admit that having to scan your eyeballs is a little creepy. But also, I mean, I want a way to tell the difference between me and a robot. I mean, yeah, like you don't. I mean, you don't know if I'm a robot right now. Do you? How would you know? That's a very good point. Yeah, it's true. Yeah. I mean, Tom, you would have to revisit whatever compensation has happened now that Megan's a full timer if she's a robot. That's a thing. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I will say Sam Altman is now a more respected voice in terms of automation and bots post open AI. And I do think that there is if you are a crypto long hauler and I know many are then trying to figure out what lessons were learned from the first boom and bust is critical. If part of that was that you didn't know who your stakeholders were and that you were looking at rampant pump and dump stuff beyond just influencers, but also by way of bots and stuff like that. Then this is a step forward. I don't know if this is the solution, though. Yeah, I look at this and I see, yes, it's got Altman. He has some credibility behind it. It's got a very interesting way of verifying identity by tying tying iris to a blockchain related identity. And that gets me what I think that's the big thing missing here is like. And what can I do with that? Because these sort of fagories about democracy and economics are very similar to other cryptocurrencies that are like step one, get our cryptocurrency step two, question mark, step three profit. Right. So I I've yet to see more from world coin than other similar operations about the practicalities of how this is going to work. What one last thing here before we move on. Sam Altman is not compensated at the level that a lot of other CEOs are for open AI. And despite the fact that they are explosive right now, there is not the same financial incentive for Altman to just kind of like understand. OK, I got here now I'm rich. So I am curious to anything else that he does outside of it because that will likely be the place where he's able to cash in a gigantic chunk of change. Yeah, because that looped money will only last for so long. I know you can only wear so many double popped collars. Samsung's Unpacked launch event takes place this Wednesday, July 26th. They are expected to talk about the two new foldables mostly Galaxy Z Fold 5, Galaxy Z Flip 5. The Flip 5 will reportedly have a much bigger cover display. That's the display you see when the device is folded. It's also expected to support a full keyboard, have more widgets and possibly even full app support on the cover display as well. And that brings us to Allison Johnson's article on the verge called the flip phones are having a moment and all eyes are on Samsung now. Why flips and not larger foldables? That's my question. The Galaxy Fold is not likely to get significant improvements other than maybe being thinner, like we'll get a better hinge. The Honor Magic and the Google Pixel Fold also already have those. Instead, Johnson focuses on flip style phones. These are similar to the old flip phones that we all remember. They unfold into a modern smartphone size rather than a tablet size. And up until now, the outer screen when folded on these smaller models was about as capable as a smart watch. The Motorola Razer Flip changed that with a more capable cover screen. Looks like Samsung is about to do the same. And with the phone being below a thousand dollars, if Samsung keeps it there, it's something more people can afford. What do you think, Justin, is Johnson right? Is this the moment of the flip? I think I am not the target demo, particularly for for that, as at least it appears based on their marketing that Samsung is targeting this to Gen Z and below. The concept of a smaller phone that folds out and has larger features is attractive. I wonder, though, where this entire genre goes. Obviously, there is a market for it. And Samsung really, really, really wants to plant their flag there because it is something that, you know, let's say Apple has not dared to come near yet. So I wonder about it at a thousand. I think it screams this is a great phone that you get comped when you sign on to your new cell phone provider in that range or in the 500 and above range. But then again, it's been a while since I bought a phone that's not an iPhone. So maybe this is just normal. Yeah, I feel like this is probably getting to be pretty normal. I think you're right about the flip really targeting a younger audience. Every Korean drama I see almost all of them are Samsung sponsored, you know, product placement wise, and they all use the flip. I rarely see someone using the Galaxy Fold because the flip looks cool and you can pop it in a purse and you can pop it in a pocket. And it's it is the the handy phone that you can sell to anyone, partly because the price is under a thousand dollars and partly because it's smaller, right? And so you can sell that as an advantage where the folds, even the Pixel Fold and the Honor are still kind of big. So I feel like what we should see from Samsung is a much more capable razor flip like flip. I think these are probably going to be the more popular foldables as we go forward. If Samsung really wants to shake up this market, they sell this thing for like seven hundred, eight hundred dollars. Just take a loss on it and just really capture things. I don't expect them to do that, though. Yeah. Sorry, go ahead. I was just going to I was going to say that I think the flip phone is like really just branding, right? Because I mean, I think flip is their new word for foldable because foldable like seems uncool and no one's like, you know, really hit that market and everyone, you know, everyone does not feel like they need a foldable phone. But flip phone has that like nostalgia to it. Like again, it's not directed at us. It's directed at Gen Z. And the idea of like a world before you had the Internet on your phone also, like a flip phone, I mean, that's not what these phones are. But like, that's what a flip phone was. It was like you could call people and maybe you could take a tiny picture of someone and send them a text if you had a lot of time. But, you know, they're just foldable phone. Well, yeah, I do think that there is a meaningful difference in terms of use case for the foldable versus the flip. The fold is something where it's almost a competitor to an, you know, a tablet or an iPad is a competitor to those and being able to run multiple apps. So it feels a little bit more computer desktopy. That's that's what Samsung is going for with that. That is a higher end device and you're probably going to be paying in in the, you know, 15 and up range for a device like this. This is more of a give it to your kid device. It looks cool. And Tom, to your point, I think that we've materially lost something in movies and television since we've moved away from a flip phone. That is something that that you dramatically can represent. A call has ended that that our character doesn't like by them snapping the phone down or a cool guy kind of like running it across their face. So it kind of just like folds down by itself. There's a lot of dramatic acting capability with with with a flip phone that does not exist for a flat tablet. How about an extended antenna? Like, you remember that now we're talking. Like a totally unnecessary antenna to activate 5G. You're on LTE to pull that thing out. Having used the Pixel Fold for a couple of weeks now, I have to say, I am sold on foldable. There are kinks that need to be worked out, not the least of which is the price. But the ability to just use it as a phone and candy bar style when I want and then say, oh, you know what? I really want to see this on a bigger screen and then just unfold it and start using the bigger screen. And you've got a small tablet form factor. This this is going to be the way it's just a matter of when Apple does it. Once Apple does it, then then everybody will say that they want it. Yeah. And then everybody who owns it now, the five years where it's to be a person is very angry and I've had foldables for years. Yeah, exactly. Folks, if you have a thought about something on the show, but you didn't know our email address, let me fix that right now. Here it is. Email us feedback at daily tech news show dot com. Yeah. Micro blogging is seemingly anybody's game these days, specifically because I'm forced to call it micro blogging and not just Twitter. Instagram made a big splash by launching threads. It's now in the process of seeing if it can hold on to that big initial audience. Today, TikTok entered the competition launching a text option alongside photo and video. Now, it's a little more tumbler than Twitter, I suppose, let's add stickers and music and background colors. But why do so many companies feel they can get a piece of that Twitter action? Well, because Twitter's parents company X keeps doing things just like this that I wish we didn't have to talk about. But sadly, we do have to talk about it over the weekend. X chairman Elon Musk announced that the company would bid adieu to the Twitter brand and gradually all birds saying goodbye to all birds, not all birds, but all birds. Monday, Twitter bird logos began being replaced by a new interim X logo. X dot com now redirects to Twitter dot com as well. Twitter CEO Linda Jacarino posted that X is the future state of unlimited interactivity centered in audio, video, messaging, payments, banking, creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services and opportunities powered by AI. X will connect us all in ways we are just beginning to imagine. Yeah, there was a longer version of that set as a memo as well. But it's a very, very lofty. As with all Twitter changes, a mastodon influx has begun. Mastodon has gone from 30,000 monthly active users back in September to a peak of two and a half million in November after Elon Musk took over Twitter. It had declined back down to 1.7 million, still up from 30,000 quite a bit at the beginning of this month. But they're saying it's back up around 2.1 million as of today. No word on how threads in Blue Sky are doing. Justin, what should we make of Twitter rebranding as X? Before we get to all that, let me just say that one of the last times that I was on this show, I pre-bought my what is happening with threads, what went wrong with your tickets. I'm feeling very good about my investment. Let's talk about this. So it's hard to get into this without bumping into the very, very personal feelings that people have about Elon Musk as a human and as an entity in their lives. He sort of clouds out all of this. But if we are to attempt to strip that out and look at this plainly, it is clear that he spent $44 billion on a company that had a hard time making money and that had far outstripped its capacity to make money with its staffing and was looking to generate ad sales based on real estate that they would create through engagement. That was never going to be a $44 billion company and Elon, after trying to wrestle for a discount, wound up having to pay that because that was what he offered initially. He needs to figure out a way to make this profitable. And he's said from the very beginning that this was going to be the idea that this would be the everything app, a similar to WeChat in China, everything app. Do I think that that's what America wants? That when America closes its eyes, it sees the gossamer outline of an everything app that it desperately needs? No, I don't, but that's his plan to do it. And I think he's going to start with something that goes back to his roots and that's payments, online payments. He made his money with PayPal and I think he sees community as a way that he could have people put money on this platform and every time that you send it hither and yon, they collect some portion of it. And if he can make that attractive to people, if he can put it into places for which you actively want to send money to your friends, then that alone would probably put it on better financial footing and sure financial footing than Twitter's old business model. That being said, if he's going to abandon the ubiquitous branding of Twitter, Tom, can we petition here for DT and a style guide? Can we just refer to micro blogging as Twitter now that there's master of Twitter and there's X Twitter, like we could just diversize Twitter to me. I mean, he's not going to use it. We all want like they're just old tweets now. They're all twitters. Yeah, that I tweeted on threads. I was using Twitter. Which one? Blue sky. Yeah, OK, yeah, it's like, yeah, it's like people in the Midwest. Like, oh, like I was having Coke. What kind of Coke Pepsi? Like they because everything's Coke. That's a Southern thing. That's not a that's not a Midwest thing. Oh, what? We say popper. It is Texas. I'm a I'm a I'm a I'm a East Coastal it is. I don't care. So is there anything like that that still exists? Like, I mean, obviously like Band-Aids or like, I mean, you know, all those companies still Tevo. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Well, I mean, do you? I mean, you're you're branded an old person. If you say like, I'm going to see. Yeah, nobody uses Tevo anymore. You're going to just record it. I don't know. I don't want to believe that it's true, but I also didn't believe that I was going to lose my blue check, which was my badge of honor to the world. And that seems to be true. So I I don't know. It's yeah, I don't want to. I don't want to super up. The only thing the only things I'll say to the thing to the folks I've been I've been seeing comment on this is everyone overestimates how angry people stay. People like how who would ever trust X with their with their financial information? If they provide a compelling app platform, which is a big question is Justin just mentioned, people will trust them. Do we are talking about Samsung having a big phone announcement this Wednesday? Remember in 2016 when several people were like, Samsung's done for those note fires or no one's going to buy a Samsung phone anymore. Not only did they buy Samsung phones, but the note survived for many, many years after that. People forget very quickly if the product is good, that could happen with X. I'm not saying it's guaranteed, especially if Musk gets tired and goes back over to SpaceX and Tesla and Jacarino's running the thing and it becomes less of a regular, let's surprise everybody with a weird half bank to roll out of a logo situation. Yeah, but can we just say this? I do find it fascinating that what is otherwise just a conversation about a branding pivot and adding on new features to an already popular app turns into this psychodrama of Elon Musk. Like it is insane to me that we have to dive into not Elon Musk's psyche, but what everybody has modeled Elon Musk's psyche in their own heads to even talk about this kind of stuff. Yeah, it's partly the personality he's cultivated, right? But it's also partly the way he goes about doing things. Even now with Linda Jacarino in charge, if she had said, guess what? In two weeks, we're changing the branding, we're gonna, I know you're gonna miss the bird, we're gonna have to ascend off of the bird, but it's gonna be called X, it's gonna be great. This would have gone down much differently than midnight tweets on Saturday. Give me your X logos, right? Like there's a way to roll this out that minimizes the drama, but Musk tends to do it to maximize the drama. And one might say that is a feature, not a bug in terms of being able to make sure that he gets his version of it out, even if it is just repeated in SpongeBob upper case and lower case from his adoring public. But I would say if Jacarino did that, there's just as much of a world in my head where she gets tarred and feathered as being a puppet and an idiot and blah, blah, blah, blah. Like- Certainly, but I don't think you have the huge, as huge of a house on fire reaction. Yeah, that being said, I do think that this is, by all accounts, the end of an era for the Twitter brand. What the Twitter brand has lived and been a huge part of the media world, the politics world, whatever happens past now, it is on X time, fly away, sweet bird. May I see you on the other side? For many years, I resisted saying tweet. I just said post, post on Twitter. Why? I think I'm going back. I just thought it sounded silly. I got over it, but I think I'm going back. Post on- You don't wanna call them Xs? That's what Elon said. I don't wanna call them Skeets or Xs or Toots or any of it. Oh, it's- Yeah, post is good. Just, it's a post. I guess all my Xs will live in Texas as long as I- As long as you're there. Yeah, if they locally store them. All right, let's check out the mail bag. All right, let's. So this comes from Thor. He says, just wanted to mention a useful tool I've been using lately called find.com. That's P-H-I-N-B. It's an LLM powered search engine focused on developers. It seems to be made by a small startup and they're actively experimenting with using chat GPT or their own model. There is some small text at the beginning of each response that says what model they're using to generate the answer. Currently their search acts more like an AI agent that prompts itself to get to the goal you set in the initial prompt and asks you for the user for input when it needs clarification. It's free and requires no registration. So I say, give it a shot if you haven't yet. That's what Thor says. I'm not endorsing it, but I'm gonna try it. Have it make that small script that you've never taken the time to write yourself. So using the APIs of the various models and then mixing and matching to see what it can give you is a very interesting and meta not Facebook but just the word meta way of doing things. Or personal search enabled assistant for programmers. Yeah, so you get the best of all possible models when you use this. That's kind of cool, thanks Thor. Yeah, the piano joke, like I tried to use FIND to program and I couldn't. But I couldn't, you know, it was the piano joke. I didn't know how to program before. You know, thank you, John. Yes, you're welcome. When did you? I can't play the violin either. There's another joke about a violin that I can't remember. What I can remember is to thank Justin Robert Young for being here, Mr. Justin Robert Young, my friend. What do you got going on these days that involves me and is coming in September? We are hard at work on the next season of Know a Little More since a dog and pony show came on board to help with the show. We've had a really, really good time. You can go back and listen to the episodes from last season. But this year or this fall, rather, we're going to have a bit of a theme. And I'm very excited because we are getting drafts of it now and it sounds awesome. You guys are really going to want to see it. Just go ahead and follow Know a Little More wherever you listen to podcasts. I was very excited at the final cut of episode one, which goes up first week of September. And so I sent it to a friend of mine to preview. And then I saw that our editor, Amos, was so excited that he just tweeted how excited he was about it. Like, we didn't ask him to do that. He was just like, couldn't help himself. No, yeah, we had just finalized the first episode of the next season and it did sound great. And I don't know, I'm thrilled. Yeah, so go get yourself prepped at knowalittlemore.com. Patrons, stick around for the extended show, which will include more half jokes about pianos and programming for me. It's a good day internet. We're going to talk about how the brother of the founder of failed cryptocurrency company, FTX, wanted to buy a country just to make genetically enhanced humans. You know, same old story as you do, genetically enhanced. That's not a half joke either. That's literally the story. That's a full story. You can also catch the show live Monday through Friday for PM Eastern, 20 hundred UTC. Find out more about that at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We're coming back tomorrow explaining what soccer legend Lionel Messi's exclusive deal with Major League Soccer means for Apple TV, plus Charlotte Henry is joining us then. Talk to you tomorrow. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Simon Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.