 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners. And that's you. You're listening to me. Maybe you're Kelly Cook. Hi, Kelly. Scott Hepburn. What's up, Scott? Jeff Wilkes. Hey, Jeff, or our new patron, Kaisuke. Hey, welcome new patron. On this episode of DTNS, Google unveils its best bet for AI dominance called Gemini, why Twitch is leaving Korea and why GTA 6 probably won't come to the PC until like 2026. Sorry. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, December 6th, 2023 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Secret Bunker, I'm Sarah Lane. And SLC, I'm Scott Johnson. And I'm in my house. I'm the show's producer, Roger Cheng. Oh, not to be Secret Bunker for long, Sarah Lane. True story, Tom Merritt. I'm exciting. I'm going to I'm going to be Secret Bunker for the next few shows. And when I change the name, you'll know things are dead. You know, she's out of the bunker, as they say. Sounds like a metaphor, but it's not. No, it's truly me getting out of a garage that I've been in for quite some time now. Yeah, someone let her out soon, they will. All right, let's start with the quick hits. Apple confirmed that foreign governments served it with confidential orders to disclose the details of push notifications. Now, Apple does run a separate push notification using different credential services than iMessage, and that one is not encrypted. Google uses a similar setup with Firebase Cloud Messaging and is alleged to also have handed over notification data to governments. Apple was forbidden from making the request public, but both Apple and Google's compliance was made public after a request from US Senator Ron Wyden. I find it very co-incident that yesterday we learned how that notification system worked, thanks to Beeper Mini. And then this happens the next day. Yeah, yeah, maybe. Co-incident means that they two things happened at the same time. That's all it means. AMD announced a new line of its own AI accelerator chips, the MI 300. AMD CEO Lisa Sue predicts the market for accelerator chips could reach as high as $400 million or more in the next four years. That's double the estimate she gave in August. AMD's MI 300 has 2.4 times as much memory and 1.6 times as much memory bandwidth as Nvidia's H100. These are these are the chips that people want to use in data centers to run AI. AMD claims it's better than Nvidia at inference, which is the process of running an AI model after it's trained. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman sources say that Apple is working on multiple new iPad and Mac models and upgrades for early next year. This would reportedly include two sizes for the iPad Air plus an OLED iPad Pro and an M3 MacBook Air. The iPad line in particular is kind of interesting and probably needs a refresh. 2023 is the first year in the product's history when no new versions, even incremental, were announced. We'll get to Gemini, the new Google model in just a little bit. But it appears Memo got the Memo. Meta got the Memo and wanted a little press of its own. Company launched a standalone, generative AI tool for the web called Imagine with Meta. Now, you do need to log in with a Meta log in. You could use a Facebook log in. But once you do, it lets users create images by describing them in natural language. It's powered by Meta's existing EMU image generation model and can create high res images from text prompts free for users in the United States. And you get four images per prompt. Google announced new features for the Pixel 8 Pro today, including something called Video Boost, which Google says in a blog post. Uploads your videos to the cloud where our computational photography models adjust color, lighting, stabilization and greening us. Night Sight, also part of Video Boost uses AI to apply noise reduction to videos recorded at night or in low light conditions. So you see rich detail and color. A new balanced portrait light mode in Google Photos also helps eliminate harsh shadows and photo on blur helps sharp sharpened photos with human and pet faces, maybe if they're on the move type thing. But those are different, not humans with pet faces. No, no, we were not there yet. Yeah, so close. Despite delays in some part of the announcement and we'll get to that. Also delays in in-person demos. Google went ahead and launched its new large language model Gemini. There are three versions, Sarah. And indeed there are, in fact, on daily tech headlines on Monday, the rumors were that Gemini was maybe going to be delayed. And some things still perhaps part of that delay. But boy, did we get a big announcement today. So let's start with Gemini Ultra, the first model to outperform humans in an MMLU that stands for Massive Multitask Language Understanding Test. Then there's Gemini Pro. Google claims this outperforms GPT 3.5. But it didn't offer comparisons to GPT4. Gemini Pro will now power the barge at bot. That lives inside Chrome, basically. And Google search generative experience. Customers can license Gemini Pro to use in their own applications starting on December 13th. And then finally, we have Gemini Nano. This is designed to be a smaller and more efficient system that can run locally on machines. Android developers can use Gemini Nano in their apps. Pixel 8 Pro users will also get nano-powered features on compatible phones. And then early next year, Google says it will launch bird advanced. That's powered by Gemini Ultra. Google published a technical white paper on Gemini. Didn't release a parameter count. But yeah, you got a lot of people buzzing about this today. I would argue this announcement is less than it appears. And here's why. Yes, it's coming to Android with two features. One of which can only be used in WhatsApp. Yes, Gemini Ultra outperformed humans in MMLU. It also outperformed OpenAI in 28 of 30 tests and not by much. Also, the Android developer edition of this isn't quite out yet. Also, Ultra is delayed until next year. Basically, I'm going with what MIT Technology Review also noticed, which is these are advancements, but they're not advancements by much. Where it is better than OpenAI, it's not better by a significantly large amount. And it feels like already Google has got us to talking about these generative models as evolutionary, not revolutionary. Yeah, also, it's just kind of finally seeing them play catch up. And maybe they just caught up like we knew they were already kind of scrambling a little bit. OpenAI's advancements in the field preceded their own. Got a little ahead of the game and this just feels like Google's like, all right, now we're on par and we can show you some evidence that we're actually better, but they're small ways, ways that, I mean, honestly, Chad GPT and OpenAI could remedy that pretty quick. They're probably already on to whatever 4.5 or five is going to be. And that will make Bard seem slow again. And then Bard will catch up like that is the I think that's where we're at now. Everybody's got their model and now they're going to fight for dominance in very incremental slow ways. Yeah, the whole sort of like the big companies all have their models is not surprising. And, you know, here we are, right? I think what what is significant about this is six months ago, you know, people were like, gosh, Google and Apple were just, you know, blindsided by OpenAI, you know, they, you know, not that they weren't working on models that rival something like Chad GPT, but they just weren't ahead of it. They were catching up. Apple maybe cares about that last because that's how Apple works. Google, on the other hand, you know, you can only imagine all the engineers within Google being like, no, we've been doing this for so long. You know, we have something really great. It's just that, you know, we got scooped a little bit and now everyone thinks that we have to catch up to this other certain model that gets all the press. Now, you know, I don't know. I mean, I haven't spoken to anybody who's working on this within Google specifically, but I feel like this is one of these things where you probably if you've been working on this for some time within Google, it's like a womp, womp. Yeah, yeah, we're catching up, but we were already there. We just weren't ready to release something that wasn't ready. Yeah, but that's also called being behind. That's another way of saying that, you know, if you weren't ready then and somebody else was ready and they went ahead and granted open AI wasn't expecting Chad GPT to take off as fast as it did. Yeah, right. I mean, it was a year ago that they released Chad GPT just a year and it is crazy how it has changed people's perceptions, how it has dominated the conversations, how it, you know, whole conferences and whole industries are trying to figure out how to use these kind of generative models now. So I do feel like this is the announcement Google would have wanted to make on its own terms and it feels like it has to make it now. This is why they were playing catch up is so they could come to you with Gemini in a way they felt comfortable. And I think it's very telling that they went ahead and stuck to this date to announce big parts of it, even though the most impressive part, the part that is competitive with GPT for isn't coming until next year. It is the multimodal thing. One of Google's big advantages is that all their models are trained multimodal, whereas open AI has Dolly separated from Chad GPT from GPT for and Google doesn't do that. But none of the barred stuff that's here now is multimodal yet. You can't do it all yet. So we're still waiting. We're still waiting for Google to show us the thing that's going to knock our socks off. And I do feel like we're coming to the top of the curve for open AI and Google. Google was just caught. They were thrown off their timeline. Well, Google also announced its next tensor processing unit, which it uses to train models. These running data centers and companies like Salesforce and Litrix have already started using the TPU V five P chips on a rental basis. A V five P pod, get it, P pod, collects 8,960 chips with a 4800 gigabit per second per chip interconnect. Google claims you'll get 459 teraflops of 16 bit floating point performance that can train models faster and more cost effectively than V four chips and at least faster than V five E chips. If you're an interested developer, you'll need to discuss availability with Google. All right. You might have noticed the news that Twitch is going to pull out of South Korea starting February 27th, 2024. And they said it's because it's too expensive. They said they tried experimenting with peer to peer delivery of video, even reducing streams to 720p, but it just didn't save them enough money. They were losing money. And so because they say the inter-operation fees are 10 times more expensive than in most other countries, they're just going to stop. Twitch isn't talking about how much consumers pay. It's talking about the fact that it has to pay to send its streams to users. This is a policy that only exists in Korea. Other regions have been talking about it, including the EU, but Korea is the only one that made it the law. It's called Sending Party Network Pays, SPNP. So you pay your ISP to get traffic. And then the ISP can also charge Twitch to send the traffic to you. You may recall Comcast trying to get Netflix to do something like that in the US several years back. Well, in Korea, it's the law. Seems crazy to me. Yeah, I mean, like, let's let's do the math here. I, let's say I'm in South Korea. I, as a consumer, want Twitch content. I'm paying my ISP for that content. But then Twitch also has to pay the ISP for the same content. Aren't they getting paid double? Yes, but they're also paying each other. So they're also paying double for being an ISP. This is this is really messed up. In 2016, South Korea introduced SAPNP for ISPs to charge fees for data traffic they received from each other. Usually this is done on an unregulated basis, which is what's called peering. It's a whole thing, but usually you can sort of balance it out, right? Like, well, I send you this much data. You send me this much data and we call it somewhat even. CDNs, ISP transit providers are largely unregulated, not in Korea. So the ISPs having to do this with each other decided to try to extend the policy to large content providers to kind of make up for the money that they have to pay to each other. So they tried to go to Facebook, Google, Netflix, etc. Regulators have allowed them to charge domestically. And in fact, the Korean National Assembly is considering further legislation to make it mandatory for all companies foreign and domestic to pay. Netflix has taken this to court. They've lost on the, you know, objection to having to pay. They're still fighting in court over how much. But Amazon's Twitch clearly looked at this and said, yeah, we know it's the largest eSports market in the world and we're Twitch, but it's just too expensive. The the the wand doesn't add up. So we're out of here. Yeah, that's the part that hits me the hardest is for all intents and purposes, eSports had its birthplace in South Korea. That's where things really took off. In particular, with Starcraft 1 and Starcraft Brood War, the expansion to one, that game was not just a big deal for people to watch, it became kind of their national sport. And so this is a bigger deal than people think. If there's another way to get it there, there may be other services that can beat with Twitch and they're all super stoked now because, A, maybe they're fine with the law and B, they they're going to get a big uptick in viewers. But as an international service that kind of services everybody in multiple languages and territories, Twitch is still sort of king when it comes to streaming games. Now, eSports haven't quite been what they used to be, even in Korea. There's a little bit of a dip. That being said, though, this does feel like it might be something that would put if there's going to be pressure applied, this is one of them because this is a big deal over there, a bigger deal than it is here in terms of eSports coverage. So if this if this makes them at least question the way this thing is working or revisited, I don't know how the government works in South Korea when it comes to amending laws or that sort of thing. But that's my hope is that this kind of pressure from them and hopefully others will will make that happen. And in Google's case, who owns YouTube, they're just not paying. They're supposed to, but they're not. And so far, South Korea, I think in Tom's words this morning, was hasn't called their bluff. I don't know what that ends up meaning, but they have a significant streaming presence there as well as regular old VOD video. And one would think with Twitch pulling out, a lot of this would head to YouTube, therefore Google. Now, will Google have that kind of pressure and will they pull out? That stuff starts happening. You have like a domino effect. A lot of it's going to head to Naver and domestic stuff. They might some of it might go to YouTube and it might focus it on Google, like you say. But this benefits domestic companies who have other deals that take off the pressure. But it's not benefiting consumers. Korea used to be, you know, top of the charts with broadband because the policy for running broadband was rather neutral. It said anybody can get poll access. Anybody can run fiber into apartments. And so apartment buildings there will often have multiple fiber providers with separate lines running into the building. And that's how they got their amazing speeds, which is one of the reasons they became a big eSports powerhouse. Now they're paying higher mobile data and service fees. Traffic latency has increased from 120 milliseconds in 2018 to 160 milliseconds in 2020. And transit fees, which is how much you pay to get your content into the bigger networks are eight times higher in Korea than in European network hubs like Frankfurt and London. Whereas in the rest of Asia, they have been falling like by 20 percent over the last few years. Yeah, I guess that's my bottom line is this is going to is a step back. Like, well, like it or not, I don't see the only way that I see this getting better is they either amend it or chuck it. And chuck it would be nice because then the rest of the world will pay attention to this and go, oh, yeah, it looks like they're going the opposite way. They're considering legislation to make it worse to make it permanent, to make it apply to Google. Huge error, huge mistake. I mean, you'll you'll come back in a year on DTNS and and we'll either be it'll be worse or they'll have fixed this. But there is no middle ground, I don't think. Yeah. Well, if you have a thought about something on the show, but you don't know our email address, let me fix that right now. It's feedback at DailyTechNewsShow.com. All right. When Rockstar announced Grand Theft Auto 6's 2025 release date, lots of people were very excited. But Rockstar only mentioned the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and S. This led to some speculation by PC gamer that a PC port of the anticipated game wouldn't necessarily come until 2026. This has drawn the ire of PC gamers across the world who are obviously pumped about the game. So it raises the question, Scott, why do some PC ports come so much later than the console versions? Obviously, finances are, you know, part of it. But, you know, what else? Well, in their case, it's almost a special case. Rockstar with the GTA series is basically printing printing money at this point. And by that, I mean mostly that GTA 5 became a platform, not just a single game. For those that don't remember, that original game came out late 2012 ahead of the release of I'm sorry, 2013, but ahead of the release of the new consoles that would also come out later that year. They then made versions. So we're talking, by the way, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, just to give you some perspective. Then five was ported to the new consoles. Great, everybody was stoked. We still had to wait another year or so to get the PC version. It's the PC version that gets all the mods, all the special love from the community, all the crazy RP streams, like the craziness that is GTA Online in particular. All really came to fruition after the PC port of the game. I now think this is their process. I think that they know that they have a license to print money. Remember that they have sold to date just shy of 200 million copies of Grand Theft Auto 5. And sometimes that's to the same people because here's how it goes. This is in such demand. People will go out and buy an Xbox or go out and buy a PlayStation just to play this game at launch and play it early. Even if they're PC purists, they will do this. And a year later, when it comes out on PC, very few of them will have been patient. Most of them will have played it on console and now repurchase that game on PC. And they will have another round of insane sales for that game, which fives never left the top 10 worldwide sales charts. It's never left since the day it happened. Does that coincide with Playstations also being sold? You know, not necessarily, not one to one or anything, but if you it definitely increases those, it's not like I'm not suggesting that they're in cahoots with Microsoft or Sony. I don't think that's true. But I do think it benefits Microsoft and Sony to know that for a while there, for a good year at least, this is going to be hard to get on PCs. And the PC market has grown so substantially in recent years that it does seem crazy not to have a simultaneous release on that platform along with these consoles. But I think that coming later means the long tail with mods online, etc., is much deeper and longer than consoles at launch. Again, they did this with five. Why wouldn't they do it again with six? They have this other added benefit to it. Everyone likes to work on closed systems because you have less bugs, less issues, way easier to test, this sort of thing. And those are two closed console systems, meaning they're not a PC where everyone's got a different configuration with AMD chips, Intel chips. This guy isn't a Nvidia card and so on. So they have those closed systems that have for less issues in Q&A before you launch. And they did the exact same thing again with Red Dead Redemption 2. Their last game came out in 2018 on the PlayStation and came out, let's see, was a full year later before we got it on on PC. I think they're just this is their new pattern and they can do this because of who they are. If you're an indie dev or you're somebody else out there, you might even go the opposite direction. You release on PC first, you can afford it. It's faster. It's right. You know, and then you get people talking about it. We love the game. And then, yeah, yeah. Right. But I think these guys have they have a pattern that's worked for them every time. And there is no reason to believe that this game isn't poised to be the biggest selling game in a decade when it hits. I've no doubt about that. And it will sell more at launch than it did for a for a long for it for its launch and a bit time after that with the last generation of game that being five. It's that kind of anticipation we're talking about. This will outsell any movies that year, music that year, books that year, any other kind of media that year, nearly combined will make less money than GTA six. They control this narrative and this narrative is them saying, console first, let's bleed that for as long as we can. And then PC after that, and then we get our long tail and then we're still making money from this game 10 years later, which is literally what they're doing now with five. They make so much money and that game is 10 years old. Plus I think we're about to see that entire process happen again. And they know what they have to do this time to make six a platform and it won't just be a little fluky like five was because five had its flukes. It was like, whoa, we didn't expect this to happen or we didn't think GTA online would be this big. Now they know. And I think they are very calculating on how they they plan to get six into people's hands. But it's a different world than it was with GTA five. Are there any risks to them trying to repeat it? The things do move a little faster these days than they did back then. I think they feel safe in that the current generation of consoles still makes sense. If this was the next generation after that, I think you'd have more questions because who knows what that looks like. We're already looking at a much more digital first physical media last services like Game Pass. These sorts of things are way more prominent. In fact, literally have existed since 2013 where they didn't exist. So it is a different market, for sure, moving forward. But but are are they safe for now with this plan? Yes. And I also think it'll be a little accelerated. The fact that it'll be a year later on PC is better than it was for five. Five was a couple, two, three years. Before we got it on got it in PC's hands. And they'll just continue to make money hand over fist forever, probably into the next generation of consoles as well, where they'll make updated versions of the game and resell those like they do now with five and they will just make so much money that at some point they'll become their own government and we will be told into them. They have the right to a six improvement district in a vice city. That's right. I mean, I've been trying to sort of compare this to I don't know, something that, you know, you know, for a non gamer would be like this is, you know, a Star Wars movie level thing. That's a good way to put it. Sure. They can they can say we're going to offer this in three theaters across the United States and people will go and and they'll complain. But they're still going to go. Kind of. I mean, that's sort of silly. But yeah, Star Wars actually did. We're only going to release this on VHS back of the day. And then later they released it on DVD. And then later they released it on Blu-ray. So it's kind of the same idea of like we don't have to give you everything right away because it builds up anticipation. Right. You know, and sort of, you know, people are, you know, we're mad. But like, we still really like the game. So we're just going to deal. That's all I'm saying is there in the unique position to do this more than any other big publisher developer right now. And they are in unique rarefied space. I hope I hope that that PC version is as great as it can be. And it probably will be five was great is great. We'll just all have to be a little patient. I understand that people are mad, but just a little recent history will tell you that this is not unusual. And you should probably expect this from them. Yeah, just channel that anger into playing GTA six. That's what rock star games. Let the hate flow through you. Exactly. All right, let's check out the mailbag. OK, so exactly as we hoped, because we asked for it yesterday, talking about log video, logarithmic video, Colin wrote in. Colin is a filmmaker and said, you can think of log as a way of storing video that's more suited for post manipulation with the same compressor wrapper. So if you're not planning to color correct your video, you probably don't want to use log. It isn't better. Generally, a camera's sensor produces a range of brightness data from the world and then applies a standard curve to it to make it look natural to the eye within the range of brightness in your compressed file. Storing in log, the camera doesn't perform that curve. It leaves an image that looks flat or washed out to the eye, but it doesn't make decisions for you about which portions of the captured data is important. You can think of log as a step between normal and raw. It doesn't use any more space than normal video, but it uses the space to preserve as much information as possible. So Colin says, why log? Well, the eye perceives brightness logarithmically, which is why the unit that we use to describe light stops is logarithmic. If you open up your lens one stop, you allow in twice as much light. Two stops, four times, brighter areas are a lot brighter than dimmer areas within an image, meaning that you can preserve data more evenly by using more of your data in the darker areas of that image. When filmmakers shoot in log, we still deliver a final image that resembles what you would get with normal video, but we've controlled how that curve is applied creatively. That's great to get. I mean, that's consistent with what you explained to me yesterday, Sarah, but it's good to get the added perspective from from somebody who works in this. And it does help me understand logarithmic actually, just explaining stops that way helps me understand the stops. Yeah, yeah. I mean, even when I was explaining it yesterday, I was like, I get this, but I know a lot of people, you know, if you're not kind of familiar with, you know, sort of the, you know, old school camera speak, sometimes you, you know, something might be missed in translation. But yeah, I really, really appreciate that, Colin. Appreciate you writing in and yeah, everybody, everybody who writes in always appreciated to get a little bit more context of who's using this and why. Michael wrote in regards to our Beeper mini story, talking about, you know, the the gap between people who use Android and people who use iOS on messaging said, I had to buy my high school daughter and iPhone last year due to I message compatibility. The two main issues were the lack of ability to add and remove people from group messages and photo and video sharing. She was left out of group messages because of the ad remove issue. And the photos her friends shared with her were all degraded quality, both significant problems for a high school girl in 2023. No one cared for my alternative solutions. Oh, my God. Hey, you know, high school girls, shout out to high school girls. I was one once. But we all, you know, in our minds, sure. But but yeah, the, you know, the whole bubble thing, I think sometimes people get a little, I don't know, like the whole sort of like, how much does color matter gets a little convoluted? It's like it's more of just, you know, being part of a tribe. And, you know, when when you're in high school, that is pretty important. Yeah. And techno much pointing out in our chat. Android Faithful had the CEO of Beeper on this week. So if you haven't checked out Android Faithful yet, and you want to get it right from the person's mouth, I will not call them a horse. Then check out Android. Would be cool if they were a horse. But yes, I mean, yeah, it'd be great if a horse ran a company. But it's not true in this case. Right, right. Scott Johnson, also not a horse, but it would be fine if you were. Let folks know where they can keep up with your latest. Well, I haven't called the horses rear end, but I won't say by you. Anyway, there's a lot going on around. There's a lot going around on the network right now. One of the things in particular is gaming related. Funny enough, Thursday night, that's tomorrow night at, I believe, four, no, five, yeah, we're going to start at five, five p.m. The show actually starts at five thirty. We're starting our coverage of the video game awards. And as people know, it's not just awards. It's a bunch of other announcements, trailers, all kinds of fun stuff. That sounds interesting to you. Come join me and Bo and John, the guys on core and watch us do it. We're going to make it a podcast as well. That'll be up on the show feed. So for more details and for some live fun, check it out. Frogpants.com slash core patrons. The show does not end for you. If you support the show directly, we give you some more show to say thanks. The extended show, Good Day Internet Today will be discussing Hulu moving into Disney Plus, putting Fargo right there next to the Apple dumpling gang. How will parents react? We'll find out from one parent, Scott Johnson. Just a reminder, though, we are live Monday through Friday. You can catch DTNS at 4 p.m. Eastern 2100 UTC Monday through Friday. Find out more at daily technewshow.com slash live. We're back doing it all again tomorrow with Justin Robert Young joining us. Tufty then. This show is part of the Frogpants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. The Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.