 Daily Tech News show is made possible by you listening right now. Just by listening, you help or you might back us on Patreon like that. Charlie, dude, Justin Zellers, Pepper Geesey or brand new patrons, Ernesto, Andrew and Dana. Everybody welcome in Ernesto. On this episode of DTNS, a way to have an AI companion to play video games with not just against inception attacks in VR and Scott Johnson continues to follow how Microsoft is benefiting from keeping its promise of being cross-platform. Who would have guessed? This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, March 13th in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Nair from Studio Animal House. Yeah, that's my name. I'm Sarah Lane from Salt Lake City. I'm Scott Johnson and I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. I realized that I just didn't say the year. It's 2024. Everyone's like, you know, I don't know what year it is until Tom says because you didn't do that. I was like, where am I? I know, right? It threw everything off. I'm so sorry. It's OK, Tom. I forgive you. Just don't do it again. Panic and run to the quick hits. A bipartisan bill over the sale of TikTok passed the US House of Representatives on Wednesday. The measure would force a sale of TikTok, maybe, from parent company Bydance within 180 days or potentially face a nationwide TikTok ban in the US. The bill still needs to clear the Senate. If it does, President Joe Biden said last Friday he would already sign the bill into law last week. The House Energy and Commerce Committee voted 50 to zero to advance the bill. So I had a lot of support following an intelligence briefing about the risks of foreign adversary controlled apps and giving the bill momentum. This thing's going to die in the Senate. And if you want to know more about why I think that go get my newsletter on Substack, I explained it all there. But just that's that's what I think. That's what I think is happening. Justin Robert Young is going to talk more about this tomorrow, so stay tuned for that. European Union's Parliament approved the EU AI Act on Wednesday, an act designed to make it hard for me to say the name of the act EU AI Act. This is the first major set of regulatory ground rules meant to govern AI with the technology currently available separated into categories of risk. So there's unacceptable. Those are just flat out banned. And then the rest of them are high, medium and low as far as their hazards are a concern. European Council will still need to offer an endorsement of the European Council is made up of one representative from each country, but that is expected to happen at a meeting that's happening April 10th. So then once it's published, it becomes law 20 days after it's published. And that's expected to happen by the end of May, early June. EU Commissioner for Internet Market Terry Bretton posted on X Europe is now a global standard setter in AI. Epic has asked a US judge to hold Apple in contempt of court for violating an injunction issued in September of 2021, requiring app makers to be allowed to provide links and buttons to direct consumers to alternate means of payment. We've been doing this for a while. Epic takes issue with the rules around how they can mention these alternative means and Apple's insistence that it should get a 27 percent cut of any revenue generated by those links and buttons Apple has until April 3rd to respond. Yeah, so this is not the EU stuff with Epic and Apple. It has nothing to do with that. This just likes to pick fights with Apple, I think those two. Microsoft's co-pilot for security chat bot has a new pricing model ahead of going public on April 1st. Yeah, just do March 31st or April 2nd. People, come on, the company first introduced a preview of co-pilot for security last March, designed to help cybersecurity professionals understand critical issues. Microsoft says it will use a consumption based model charging four dollars per security compute unit, given that the types of prompts and summaries will vary dramatically in size, depending on who the customer is and the type of workload. The BBC will begin streaming its news channel BBC News on some connected TV and fast, meaning free ad supported streaming platforms like Samsung TV Plus, Zumo, Sling TV, Plex, Vizio and Pluto TV, with other partners reportedly also in the mix, BBC News will still be offered by pay TV providers like Charter, Comcast and Direct TV, obviously in the U.S. AMC Networks is the BBC's partner in BBC America's joint venture and is also handling distribution and advertising sales. Yeah, this is this is confusing because BBC America is an AMC Networks thing. BBC News is a BBC thing and they're both separate channels on cable, but now BBC News is going to be free. Do I have this? Do I have that right? It's going to be free on certain free ad supported streaming platforms. Yes, if they if the Dodgers leave leave Spectrum Sportsnet LA and go somewhere that you don't need Direct TV now to get them because BBC News was the other thing change in the Merit Rivera household indeed. All right, so let's talk about VR and scary stuff. A team of researchers at the University of Chicago said that they figured out a way to hack into MetaQuest headsets without the user of that quest knowing dubbed an inception attack that lets the researcher in this case control the users VR environment, steal information, control interactions between users, but all traps that user, so to speak, inside a VR app designed to look like the full VR system. Now, if you're not familiar with VR systems, you know, they don't all work exactly the same. But yes, you could be tricked into thinking, oh, yeah, I'm at my home screen type thing. The study was first reported by the MIT Technology Review, hasn't been peer reviewed so early days here, but the attack apparently requires an attacker to be on the same Wi-Fi network as that quest user with the headset also in developer mode, you might say, well, I'm not a developer. This would never apply to me. People put their quest into developer mode for a variety of reasons to get different apps, third party stores, that kind of thing. Then at that point, if this all happens, malware could be installed onto the headset home screen, looking identical to your original screen. You don't notice yet you're controlled by the researchers in this case. So you're telling me that VR headsets are as vulnerable to outside attacks as every other device we own. I very much have kind of the upshot of this. But I think there's something to this, right, Scott? Because when we're in VR, I think we are all guilty of not thinking about things the same way we do when we're like on our laptop or phone. Oh, 100 percent. And we don't we don't I think we're not quite used to the idea of calling these things just, you know, computing devices, which is what they are. They have very specialized use cases, but they're still computing devices. To me, the the comparison is a good one when you talk about EVs versus regular gas vehicles, we put them up into the higher tier of, oh, my gosh, did you hear what happened to this thing? They're still sort of new and, you know, we haven't had it around forever. So I think there's a lot of freak out about that. But as usual, I see this as a positive thing. In fact, I don't know, I kind of can credit you years ago for pulling me off the ledge a few times on some stuff where researchers or a university or even the companies themselves find some massive weakness. They let everybody know about it. They document it. Like, this is what we want. There's always going to be holes, right? Yeah, yeah, I would much rather have this than me and developer mode going, oh, no, why am I suddenly losing all my information or whatever, you know, whatever they're going to take or do or mess with me? I would much rather have this happen. I bet met is happy to some degree, whether they want to admit it or not, that this happened in this way so that they can take care of it and patch up. Yeah, patch it. Right. Yeah. So it's no different than our phones and our computers before that. And and everything else that's got a bunch of microchips in it. We're always going to have this in the better. The sooner we know from the good guys that something's wrong, the better we're all going to be. I mean, the study is very involved. You know, it's a long read, but a good one. And we have the link to that in our show notes. But, you know, essentially it's it's kind of like, oh, well, if anybody is fairly tech savvy, which I think everybody here is, you know, we at least are, you know, hyper aware that, you know, something feels weird, it might be weird, right? You know, there's a weird email. Seems like it's from my bank. Is it, you know, that kind of stuff. This feels like the same idea, you know, where it's like the the MIT review had posted like what the researchers had said. Like, here's a situation where, you know, Sarah and Tom are, you know, we've decided to join each other in VR. Maybe we're playing Topgolf, whatever we're doing, you know, but all of a sudden Sarah has a hard time connecting. And she's sort of like, that's weird, Tom. How are you doing on that side? Tom's fine. And the entire situation is, you know, in the sense that somebody has taken over Sarah's home screen. And now she and Tom don't talk well together. And, you know, it's all very confusing. But what's happening is, you know, data being stolen. Yeah, I mean, even more de ferris would be if you don't notice that Sarah's headset has been taken over. And then you start talking to her the way you normally would, where I just give Sarah my passwords freely every day, you know, like, like I always do. Right. But you know, I could say something sensitive that I wouldn't mind Sarah knowing and then not realizing I'm not talking to Sarah anymore. I thought one of the most significant parts of this study was that there was a visible glitch when they performed the attack. Only 37 percent of the people in the study even noticed the glitch and of the like 27 participants, only one of them thought that it was not just a problem with VR. We are so used to VR just being a little janky that most people who even noticed the glitch were like, yeah, it's just VR being VR. Right. So I think the best thing about this study is this study makes us all remember like, oh, right, this is an Android device on my head. So it's just as vulnerable as any other Android device. Sure. And also the other thing, the side note to that is it is listening. It is projecting. It has got cameras and it's on the internet. Like all of these things are like any other computing device with those features. We should, you know, we should think about this at least. Yeah, attention. Here's a good story, not a not a scary story to balance things out. DeepMind's scalable, instructable, multi-world agent or CIMA, S-I-M-A, has been trained to play 3D games like a human would and act on your instructions so you can play with it and tell it like, hey, you know, go farm those boulders over there or whatever you're doing. The key was that they trained it on actual human gameplay, not on the on the game's code. So training data included gameplay from multiple games. Valheim, No Man's Sky, Goat Simulator were all involved in this. The developers approved with they gave their consent. And the model can use its training to play games it was not trained on. Interestingly, the in-game vocabulary that it can understand is limited, but it does very well because the instructions that we use are limited. The scientists at DeepMind published a map of several dozen actions that CIMA can perform that can be combined to encompass around 600 basic skills, and that covers most of what everybody does in a game. They're still working on making it do even more complex things, but the model can combine actions in multiple ways to be a pretty decent co-op player. And in fact, scientists think that because the model is trying to imitate human gameplay, it's seen instead of trying to maximize for a reward, which is what we usually do, like when we train an algorithm to be great at StarCraft, it actually looks at the code and is trying to reach a reward. This one was trained to imitate. And because of that, it takes more risks and it tries new things more often, which helps it learn unfamiliar games faster and even produces some emergent behaviors. So I think there's something in here about a very significant advance in algorithms that we figured out how to encourage emergent behavior by not strictly putting a reward in front of the algorithm. I think that is significant to this. But also this is kind of a fun tool for video game makers as they start to improve this to allow you to play with a virtual character in a way that NPCs just can't do now. Yeah, this is the machine learning I'm the most excited about whenever I hear about it. And this is really great news for a lot of us who I'll use a modern example. Right now there is a game that is just taking the world by storm and everybody's playing it. And that game is held divers to on PC and PlayStation. And that game game is huge. They had all kinds of server issues. That's always a good sign that you've got an overloaded players and want to play your game. The thing about that game is it is purely a co-op experience and a very chaotic one with things like friendly fire turned on. And you can accidentally kill your teammates very easily in the game. In fact, you might call it a feature. My biggest problem with that game is it's best with friends. You can play with bots, but they're terrible. And when your friends aren't online, what are you going to do? Well, then you've got to play with some rando people you don't know. And that is always a mixed bag. I love the idea that these these these AI MPC co-op companions could be advanced enough that they would learn not only to play based on what I do, but based on what other players have done, other player data, maybe even let that scale, depending on difficulty, because there is a I think a nine, nine level difficulty scale in that game that you can go, you know, you can fluctuate between and me being able to rely on that being that fun, random moment. Oh, my gosh, I didn't see that coming kind of thing. You get out of playing with your friends. But because they're not online, I can still go on and play and get that experience for the most part. Like it's been a dream forever for co-op play. We've talked about this for decades. This is the first real sniff I've had of what might be real. And thank you for the sniff. We had a little little foley work over there. But the point is, you know, let me play my co-op shooters, my co-op games that require some level of humanity. And let's mimic that in a way that actually feels right. It isn't repetitive or isn't, you know, pattern based or any of that. Now you're talking like that's very exciting for me as a player. I mean, I guess that would be my question. Not doing a lot of gaming myself is, you know, could the AI version of like, you know, the crew be, you know, fun and different every time. Because if it wasn't fun and different every time, you'd be like, well, you know, I mean, we're not really replacing humans here. Or, you know, even if you didn't like the humans you were playing with before, it's sort of like, no, it's just, you know, we're we're cheating in a sense. Yeah, you kind of you kind of you're talking about a thing that I hadn't even considered, but this is an important thing. You know, the article here or the study or the, you know, the research is mostly going to say, well, playing with AI instead of against it or whatever. But I think the principle applies to whether it's against it with it, two people, two regular people against an AI, like all of these scenarios are improved by this kind of thinking, this kind of this kind of machine learning and this kind of training. And so when you're talking about playing the crew, Sarah, which is a racing game for those out there that don't know, it makes a lot of sense that not only could it could I have a better experience doing cooperative things with a AI that I can't find people for. Or when I'm racing against a computer like we've done forever, that might be a markedly better experience with this data. I'm actually really stoked about it. I think it'll be based on what what they say different every time seems absolutely possible. That's one of the biggest advances here. Forget the gameplay. The fact that you can have more emergent behaviors by by producing an algorithm that imitates and therefore takes more risks, I think that's again, I know I said it before, but I think that's really interesting. I think that is something to pay close attention to because that can be applied outside of games too and everybody's trying to get generalized AI that has emergent behaviors. So I think that's really important that in the game situation makes it different, makes it able to be different every time. Whether or not that's fun or not is a whole different situation. Right? Like what if it just starts going off rando? Right now, it only does what you tell it to do. So it's probably not going to be that fun. It's kind of it's going to be more like a lackey, but they are trying to get it to be able to do more complex things and do things on its own more. Yeah. And you may even as a player want to set it to be those sorts of things. Like I want this to be a nervous player. I want this to be a player who panics get rough. Like you could you could have little bits of that and that could really shape it into a real, you know, human behaving AI. So yeah, sign me up. I'm ready to beta test this. Let's go. I wanted to have no sense of direction like me. Yeah, Bob X will call it. And yeah, Bob X. They are well, folks, if you want to stay up to date in the fast moving world of artificial intelligence and get more stories like these, you got to check out AI named this show each week. Tristan Jutra and Teja Kastodi cut through the hype and the doom saying and keep you informed about the latest news in the world of AI in a way you can use. Catch it at AI named this show dot com. Back in February, Microsoft announced it was bringing over four Xbox exclusive titles to other platforms, Sea of Thieves, Grounded, Pentamint, HiFi Rush. On Monday, pre-orders for the premium edition of Four Sea of Thieves was the top seller for the Sony's PS5, beating other highly anticipated games like the new Elden Ring. Although the title has moved down a few spots since, obviously, still got a lot of attention, still listed in the top five bestselling pre-orders. Now, Scott, now, Microsoft's strategy of focusing on getting games into as many players' hands as possible might be validated here. What are your thoughts? I think it is validating. It's early, though, so I don't think we I don't think Microsoft or anyone else can call this a slam dunk yet, but the bet was the bet they were making was that people who are going to buy their games on other platforms, in particular, the PS5 is already a thing that's available on PCs. So that wasn't a, you know, there's no stretch there, really. The only place that doesn't have a game like Sea of Thieves is the switch and it's just not powerful enough to do it. But in this case, we're talking about their neighbor system, the PlayStation 5, and it exceeded expectations in terms of pre-sales for both, I think, Microsoft, Sony and players. I don't think any of us expected it to be quite this high. And this game has been around for a while. This launched on the Xbox One before Series XS and PS5s were even announced. This game has been out that long. But it is known to be an incredible experience. It's made by Rare, one of the most venerable developers of all time. Microsoft now owns them and has for quite some time. And the fact that this is the game showing the most potential and slash promise as a pre-order is not that surprising given the quality of the game. But what it does tell me is the bet was a safe one, meaning a significant bump was going to happen when you offer great games on other people's platforms. And they already sort of learned this on PC. It does very well on PC, Steam in particular. It's a very high selling game, highly rated game over there. And based on these initial numbers, I think they can count on this moving forward if they end up moving Halo Infinite and its multiplayer component, if they end up moving some of their bigger titles coming up like, oh, gosh, the follow up to various games whose names escape me right now. But Microsoft's upcoming big launch title or big titles that are coming, including Starfield, which is already out on Xbox and PC, I think these games, despite tribalism and everybody saying nay, are going to do really well on the competing platform because those people currently have not had access to those games. It's the same thing would happen if Xbox suddenly had some exclusive PlayStation games, it truly would be some of the highest selling software. If Event Horizon Zero Dawn or Horizon Forbidden West was suddenly on Xbox Series X, I promise you that would have great pre-sales and sales. I think it's just proving out this point that Microsoft's counting on in the future, which is for Sony like this or not, I don't know. But it is that platforms will matter much, much less. What you play on, whatever you have, will matter much, much more. And throw into that streaming, throw into that low latency, all these other things, it all supports this idea that it's not going to matter what plastic you have under your TV, it will matter what service you have and or what games you're buying and downloading. So I do think this at least initially supports Microsoft's plan, which they've had for quite a while and and it's going really well. The only place it isn't going well is, you know, the severe tribal stuff that happens between PlayStation and Xbox. There's still a lot of fighting about this. Ignore all that. Let me just look at the numbers and see where things are headed. I think it's going well. The one thing I think will probably end up coming out of this, though, is like a little secondary effect. It will be Sony more quickly because they're already doing this to some degree, but more quickly moving their titles to multi platforms. It may not be Xbox and it certainly probably won't be during this this console generation, if I had to bet, but they will get stuff to PC quicker. They are doing that now, but they're taking forever. They take a year or more, sometimes well more to get a popular title from their console onto onto the PlayStation. And in some cases, we're still getting PlayStation for conversions to PC and not even PS5 exclusive stuff. So they're their exceptions. But the point is like Sony, I think, will feel that this is good for them, too. And they the quicker they get it in front of more people and in more hands, the less will think that exclusives are the only way to survive the video game world. And perhaps it's really just down to where your games are and how good those games are. Yeah, it's very, very forward looking. If Microsoft is right, you want to have people like your games because in the future, the platform won't matter as much like the fact that you want people to use Microsoft Office, whether they're using an Android device or a Chrome OS device or a Mac OS device, obviously a Windows device. And this this feels very similar to putting Office on the Mac, you know, like Sony is going to be much more resistant to putting its software elsewhere, but it will. Same way that Apple puts Apple music on Android, right? When it feels like it's really important, it'll do it. I think that we're moving towards that. You're right. But I think it'll always be a little more reluctant to do it than Microsoft, which is realizing, oh, you know, we're making our money off the services and so we want people to want the services, which are either the games or the service you play your game on. Yeah. And the nice thing is they don't have to worry about investing in those services. They are the services. So they've got all the background they need. They have Azure for days and they don't need, you know, if anything, they should be more worried about Amazon getting their crap together. So far, they kind of haven't. But if Amazon really ever kind of put two and two together, yeah, they've got a real competitor there. And Sony uses Azure. So if Microsoft can get Sony to do a game streaming service successfully, it makes Microsoft money, too. Yeah, I agree. It's going to be fun to watch. All right. Another thing that's fun to watch are emails coming in to our mail bag. Indeed. Anon Jr. wrote in, you'd be surprised where some tech ends up. Anon Jr. is referencing our conversation about medical, VR, AR, Spatial Reality Tech from our conversation yesterday. He says, when I worked for a hospital, we had to play a series of bed alarms based on the Xbox Connect. Traditional bed alarms alerted when they were no longer since the patient's weight, which often failed if you had a really small or light patient. The new ones use a sensor array of the connect to tell the patient was moving alert and a nurse practitioner or some other nurse who could speak to them through the connect. It also allowed one person to more efficiently monitor several patients who were only at moderate fall risk while they were sleeping. Oh, I love the fact that Connect had so many lives. And Anon Jr. I'm curious, like, are they still using them in any cases? And if they replaced them, what did they replace them with? Yeah, that's wild to me. Holy cow. I know, yeah. And then Peter before in our discord said as one of the developers on the Striker My Mako app, which we have referred to in the same story yesterday about using the Apple Vision Pro in surgical situations. Peter said it's pronounced Mako like the shark. I can say the goal is more than just assisting during the inter during the operation. It also helps the surgeon plan the surgery before the procedure pre-op and tracks statistics over the surgeon's many operations. Thank you, Peter. It's fun to have one of the developers in the chat. Appreciate that. Absolutely. We also got a lot of feedback and we we'd like to highlight feedback when we get it. Joe wrote in a quick note on the discussion related to handheld gaming devices like Steam Deck. Tom and Shannon Morse were talking about this on Monday. Joe says maybe I'm the only one, but it seems like the discussion focused on the possible negatives instead of the positives. Two hour of high end graphics gaming is great. The Windows 11 device ROG ally as has great graphics and the fact that you can dock it and use it as a PC, also a huge plus. Not just limited to gaming, certainly has its quirks. Steam Deck is also great, but more like a Nintendo switch and how user friendly it can be. Well, I'm sorry, it sounded negative to you, Joe. I thought Shannon was pretty positive about why she loved them. But we were, you know, trying to show some of the downsides to some holes. Yeah, yeah. That's all part of the part of the part of the process. Yeah, I appreciate the sort of the idea of like, you know, two hours may sound like not a lot, but it's enough for Joe. So that's cool. Thank you, Joe. Well, thanks to everybody who writes in feedback at Daily Technewshow.com is where to keep those emails coming in. Scott Johnson, you keep coming to our show because you make it better. Why? Why you keep coming here? No, no, you do. That's an order. But in the meantime, let folks know where they can keep up with your latest. All right. Well, I started a little show on Mondays with my daughter, Carter, who is, you know, getting older now. She graduated in video games. She's a lot smarter than me in a lot of ways. She's an artist, really fun person to talk to. So we decided to start a little show together just for funsies. Well, it kind of took off and went crazy. And we get more feedback per inch on that show than I do almost anything else I do lately. And I don't know why. But for whatever reason, there's some magic there. I just thought people might want to check it out. It's over at frogpants.com Monday. It's called the Monday show and should at this point be everywhere you get your podcast. So go give it a search and check it out. Ah, yeah. Cross generation talk, man. That's hot. Good stuff. Yeah. Patrons, stick around for the extended show, Good Day Internet. Yesterday, we talked about the idea of a new platform definition for video content, things like YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, even even Snapchat. Snapchat. Thank you all in the same category. We'll Spotify announced Tuesday. It's adding music videos a little late to the game, but they're doing it in a very interesting way. Stick around. Indeed, they are a reminder. We do the show live. We're doing it live right now. Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern, twenty hundred UTC. You can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. Join us if you can. We're always on demand. Otherwise, we will be back tomorrow with the latest twists in TikTok politics because they won't stop. But Justin and Barbara Young joining us. The DTNS Family Podcasts. Helping each other understand. The Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.