 Coming up on DTNS, food delivery not doing so well as you might have thought it would. Autonomous cars have challenges without real people to drive fast and why an AI can't get a patent. This is the Daily Tech News for, I'm going to call it Wednesday, April 29th, 2020. It's my sister's birthday. Happy birthday, Meg. I'm in Los Angeles and I'm Tom Merritt. And I'm at Studio Redwood and I'm Sarah Lane. I'm in Salt Lake City and I'm Scott Johnson. And on this Wednesday, I'm the show's producer, Roger Cagg. Folks, we were just having a spirited debate about whether there is such a thing as savory cake. We also quoted a lot of Whitney Houston. That's on Good Day Internet. Get the expanded show. Become a member at patreon.com.dtns. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Apple and Google are delivering the first version of their exposure notification API to selected developers working on apps for public health organizations. After this test round, the API is expected to be released broadly in mid-May. The updates come in the beta of Apple's Xcode 11.5 and iOS 13.5 and Google's Play Services in Android Developer Studio. Apple and Google will release a sample code on Friday. Working together. Google made its enterprise video conferencing service, Google Meet, available for free to anyone with a Google account. Meetings can have up to 100 participants. After September 30th, Google may limit free meetings to 60 minutes. The free version does not offer phone-in options. Google Meet will also be integrated into Gmail. Apple added COVID-19 test sites to its Apple Maps in the United States. Make it easier for you to find them if you use Apple Maps. Also updated its Mobility Trends site, which offers data on how people are moving around in order to assist local governments with lockdown policy. The update includes improved regionalization, like state and province-level search, and more cities available to review. Google launched Shoelace back in 2019 as a way for people to find group activities with other people in the area who shared interests. If you're like, I've never even heard of it, it was only available on iOS in New York City. But Google has decided to shut down Shoelace instead of expanding it as of May 12th. Samsung declined to give an annual forecast due to its uncertainty over the economic climate. As a result, its memory chip sales will be strong due to PC and server sales, but smartphones and TVs may not sell as well. Due to a possible dip in consumer spending right now, Samsung's operating profit rose 3% and quarter one on strong chip sales. That's keeping the roundup of earnings going. Spotify reported positive net income of $1 million, a rise of 31% for paid users, 32% for ad-supported free users. Listening patterns have also changed. Spotify says every day now looks like the weekend. We call that blurs day, Spotify. More earnings. LG reported a 21.1% operating profit increase over last year and its highest Q1 profit margins ever at 7.4%. LG saw strong sales of home appliances and TVs. Smartphone sales, though, fell 34%. LG plans to control production and marketing costs to guard against decreased demand for the rest of the year. Alright, we quickly mentioned the alphabet earnings yesterday, but we got more details now. Tell us about it, Scott. Alright, Alphabet reported quarter one revenue up 13% and net income up 1.5%. Those are good numbers. Profit was affected by a slowdown in ad revenue in March. YouTube rose 33% to $4 billion and cloud revenue rose 55% to $2.8 billion. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pachai said, Video conferencing service Google Meet has been growing at 3 million new users per day. That's up from 2 million last month. Alphabet's other bets all in its non-Google companies lost 1.1 billion. Alphabet expects quarter two to be difficult due to its advertising business. Yeah, the advertising outlook for Google is not great, but this indicates it's only one month of the quarter with the lockdown effect. It indicates that the effect might not be as bad as people thought, at least in March, but everybody, every earnings report is saying, but just don't get too excited. We really don't know how Q2 is going to shape up and it sounds like Google is no exception to that. Yeah, I mean, it was Netflix recently saying, things are going to look bad. Don't say we didn't warn you. And I think, especially a company the size of Alphabet with so many offshoots, it's interesting. Something like Meet. It's like, all right, let's bake this into something that's way more easy for users to find and use because they are using it already. Let's make it a free product. Like lots of other Google products that just become daily parts of people's lives, all smart stuff. But yeah, the advertising revenue is the big question mark. All this stuff about Google Meet and then letting everybody, whether the Google account use it and all of that got me to wondering, have any of us used it yet or tried it or messed with it? I have, but I was using it. You know, I don't know if... Here's the problem. I was using it and it said Meet. Meet in the URL, but I might have been using Hangouts. Because Google has made such a hash of everything because Google Meet is different from Hangouts video. Anyway, it didn't work very well for me when I used it. But I think it's smart to make Meet free for everybody. If let's assume the enterprise version of Meet is better than Hangouts and if you can get people to be using it for free, they're more likely to suggest it for their workplace. And then the workplace will pay for it. Yeah, it's also good for them to... I don't know. I mean, all this talk about people in Zoom and Zoom kind of getting the branding that it never had before and then suddenly has... These other companies are probably anxious to get their products in front of people. It kind of drives me crazy in a way. And I know it's, you know, we follow the stuff more than the average person, but when someone uses Zoom, the way that they use Kleenex, right? Or it's like, it's a brand name for a term of a platform kind of thing. I'm like, you know, you have like 10 other comparable options to Zoom, right? Not saying you shouldn't use it, but it's not your only choice here. And it must really bum, like, Microsoft out that people aren't using Skype like the Kleenex term anymore. Or at least they're not as much as they were. Yeah, that's a good point. They're starting to use Zoom that way, yeah. And the bright spot here for Alphabet is cloud revenue rising 55% at a time when they need to have momentum because more people are using the cloud for all kinds of things. Meet is a great way to market that to get people into G Suite, which is their cloud service. Two more earnings reports, and then we're done. Microsoft reported revenue right before the show up 15% year-over-year, $1.40 earnings per share, beating analyst expectations, Azure, Microsoft's cloud service grew 59% year-over-year, Office 365 commercial income grew 25%, LinkedIn grew 21%, Xbox Service and Search were all flat. And Microsoft noted that there is minimal COVID-19 impact on its Q1 results. So it expects if there is going to be an impact that will happen in Q2, and we may hear on their earnings call what that impact would be. Facebook also announced that in Q1 it brought in $17.74 billion up almost 18% from the same quarter in 2019. Facebook now says it has 2.99 billion monthly users across its family of apps up from 2.89 billion last quarter. The company claims it's stabilizing after seeing an initial steep decrease in advertising revenue in March due to COVID-19. So they're the first one to say, like, we think we might have reached bottom. They're not saying what that bottom is yet, though. Well, in other Facebook news, Facebook has open sourced a chat bot called Blender that it claims can talk about pretty much anything. Blender was trained on 1.5 billion publicly available Reddit conversations. Just a laugh at that. It was then refined with additional datasets for conversations that contain emotion, information-dense conversations, like the one you'd have with an expert, and conversations between people who have distinct personas for their personality. So two people who might have different opinions or different ways of speaking. The model is so big it needs two chips to run. Facebook claims that Blender is more engaging and more human than Google's meanabot, which was launched in January, and Blender fooled human evaluators 49% of the time. So almost half the time into thinking that conversations were human. We're happening in a human-like way, especially if the conversations were kept short. Sometimes there are giveaways when it goes on and on. For example, Blender also occasionally makes up facts since it uses correlations rather than a knowledge base. So it might tell you something that just isn't true because it's kind of heard it from other people. Yeah, so I mean, this is a big achievement because you can train a good chat bot to have conversational skills for a very specific purpose, right? And you see that in business a lot. As soon as you stray outside of its specific purpose, it's like, I don't know what to say to you. Voice assistants are trying to be more general, but they're just not very good at it. You still have to know how to say the thing you want it to do. So this is a promising advance to be saying we have a general-purpose conversational chat bot that could understand you. I want to read from the, you tell me which is the human and which is the AI. Just a couple things. Hi, how are you today? I'm good. How are you? Do you have a favorite food? Mine's lobster. Doing well. My favorite food is cake. I just bought one because I got promoted at work. Congratulations on the promotion. What kind of work do you do? I work in software. Thanks so much. I just want to make my parents proud. I'm an engineer. I mean, it's, that could be human. Which one's human and which one's the bot? There was one human and one bot in that. I think the one that liked lobster was the bot. Scott? I'm going to agree with her. I think it's the lobster. That is the giveaway, right? It's like bringing up lobster was a little weird. But also I just want to make my parents proud was a little weird, but that was the human. So some humans really do want to do that. But this is the big, the big ultimate thing we keep wanting. No, we want to have natural conversations. I was watching something, I was watching a movie in the West world or something the other day. And in movies anymore, when somebody's talking to their home system that's doing all the stuff for them, turning off lights and doing other things, their conversations are always kind of hushed and garbled. And they're kind of like, please turn that off. And then the TV turns off. The thing intuitively knows you can kind of mumble it. You don't have to say it clearly. We're not there yet, but I can't wait for that. I want them to hear me and I want to talk back to my devices in a way that is no different than people. And I can say it slowly or quietly or as I turn and the Doppler effect of my voice going that direction doesn't confuse it. That dad is the ultimate goal. Just feels like a step in that direction. Well, and just especially since there's so much like telemedicine, for example, I keep trying to get an optometry appointment with Kaiser and it's like not happening. It's not essential as far as Kaiser is concerned. They have bigger fish to fry. Totally get that. But if something like this were to get me pretty close to a certain point where I could get some answers, this is a great thing because I could kind of explain like a human the way I would talk to a doctor and you don't necessarily have to have somebody sitting by a phone somewhere to, you know, ingest my information and try to get me to their appropriate place. Okay, one more test. I can't resist. All right. Number one, what are some of your favorite bands? Number two, I like Modest Mouse and the Smashing Pumpkins. Number one, I love the Smashing Pumpkins. I saw them in concert a few years ago. Number two, what's your favorite Smashing Pumpkin song? Mine is today. Number one, today is a great song. My favorite song of theirs is Geek USA. Number two, that's an amazing track too. You have great tastes. Number one, thank you. Number two is the bot. Yeah, two. How did you know? I don't. I just feel it. I have a feeling too. That was pretty close. That was a much closer though. Yeah, there was something about you have great taste where I'm like, that's just like a throwaway thing that sounded like a robot. Oh, no. You have great taste was the human. Oh, well, okay. You got a wrong one. Oh, that was a person. I got that wrong too. I was like, the robot was buttering us up. So obvious. No, that was a person. Just a really polite person. The bot-like Geek USA, the human-like today. All right. U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has rejected two patents where the A.I. system, DABUS, D-A-B-U-S, was listed as the inventor. Davis's creator, Steven Thale, said that the system came up with a design for interlocking food containers and a rhythm for a hard to ignore warning light on its own. And so he felt it would be inaccurate to list himself as the inventor. And U.S. Patent Law says an inventor has to be an individual, not a corporation, and an A.I. is not either one. So in this ruling, the U.S. PTO said the inventor had to be a natural person. Now, this really may be appealed, but I get what Steven Thale's saying. He's like, I didn't create this. The A.I. created it. It is a novel. Otherwise, it would be patentable. It's a patentable idea. But the idea came out of the A.I., but I also get what the Patent Office is saying, which is like, yeah, but the A.I. isn't self-aware. It can't imagine things. Yeah. And it can't therefore own a patent. It can't defend a patent. I mean, if Steven Thale was like, but I didn't make it smart to the point where it made me these tools that worked for me, then yeah, then you get into these complicated, all right, so who gets credit? It's like the end of a popular movie. It's like, well, Steven Thale gets credit for something, but because at least he leveraged the capability that was there, but yeah, who gets credit for making A.I. that ended up making something that was patentable? So yeah, what happens when I take Steven Thale's A.I. and I press go and it makes a new thing and I patent it. Do I get credit for that? Because I press go or does Steven Thale get it? Because he made the A.I.? Well, see now this made me think of a new argument before the show because I've all morning, since I talked to Tom on TMS about this issue, it's been driving me crazy, the kind of example I want to use, and I think I may have finally found it. All right. I'm thinking of original art here. So if he created the A.I., wrote the learning algorithm that then became this A.I., then he's got that piece in it, but then the A.I. does something and that's cool. And maybe something the A.I. comes up with has its own subset of creative consciousness, if you want to call it that for lack of a better term. And so it's sort of responsible for that, but it's just iteration. It's like anything else. Who do we give original credit for for the first working mouse on a computer? Well, we can give it to so-and-so on who's and such, but we can also say the best mouse was made by Logitech, or the best bullet ball version was made by Microsoft, or you know what I mean? Like we're kind of iterating down. The question is who gets credit for it, and that's still the question, but that's how it feels to me. It's an original art thing. This guy does deserve ultimate credit because he made the A.I., but then what the A.I. does without him is up to the A.I. If I buy his A.I., and it creates a design for me, and I patent that, does he hold the patent on it? See, I don't see that. Yeah, because it's like a person can hold multiple patents. Sure. Can an A.I. own the patents that it created, even though it was created by a single person, and maybe it wasn't. Maybe it was created by 10 people, and like five of them worked way harder on it than the other five. And you could, you could theoretically divide up the patent among multiple inventors and say, oh, these are the people who invented it. Sure. Sure. Well, the World Intellectual Property Organization is working on this exact issue because once A.I. is self-aware, this will get easier because then we can just give A.I. rights, I suppose. But until then, you need a new category for A.I. created designs. Let's talk about Uber. Their longest-serving executive CTO, Thuan Pam, is leaving the company according to an SEC filing. The information source says Uber is considering layoffs that could affect up to 20% of its 27,000 employees. That is a lot. Uber has said its ride-hailing business has fallen by 70%, and the information reports food delivery has not made up the difference. Uber rival Lyft said in an SEC filing that they will end up laying off 982 employees, about 17% of its workforce. Lyft will also furlough 288 employees and reduce salaries by 10% for other employees for a 12-week period. Executives at Lyft will take a 20% to 30% pay cut. UK Food Delivery Service Deliveroo says it will cut more than 350 of its staff, around 15%. That's of its global workforce in Europe, the Middle East and Asia. Deliveroo blames the impact of the virus, which has caused many restaurants to close down altogether and customers to cook rather than order delivery. Yeah, I don't think any of us are surprised that ride-hailing is down, right? But I think a lot of folks thought that restaurant delivery would be the saving grace or at least help make it up. And it's not. Look at Deliveroo, that is their business. They don't have another business and they're having to lay off people because it turns out people are buying groceries and grocery delivery is doing okay, but folks for whatever reason just don't want to get something that's made by somebody else right now. I think there's a little feeling of control over making it yourself. There's a whole psychology consideration here and I don't really have the answer, but I am definitely, I mean, I am a food delivery aficionado. If there is such a thing, I mean, I love food delivery. It's like, I want this thing. I can get it. You pay a premium. If you're okay with that, then you've got your ramen in 30 to 45 minutes. But ever since we've been in shelter in place and in some cases quarantine mode, I have been like baking up a storm and making complicated recipes. Do I have to do that? No, but I am because somehow, you know, I have decided that I don't want to be sitting around and I need to stay busy and so I need to do more busy work. So it means grocery delivery is still really important to me. I either have to go put a mask on or I get it delivered to me. So the ingredient part of it, I can see being on the rise for all these people who all of a sudden decided to get creative in the kitchen, but it's not necessary in most cases. It just kind of became this trend. Yeah. It's weird. And we were talking in pre-show about the pivot that Uber and Lyft can't really make branding-wise or otherwise. I mean, there is Uber Eats and so that's the thing that existed and had some mind share. But I don't think of either of them when I think, oh, I sure hope Lyft and Uber figure out a way to bring me my food or to do other services that we could benefit from and that they could then, therefore, keep their businesses alive with. I just don't think of it. Like that's not what I think of them as. I think of them as a ride-hailing service and there's no way people are going to be sitting around each other's cars during a time like this. So I don't know. I don't know what the answer for them is. I mean, obviously, they're all having the scale back. We're reporting those numbers now, but there's real concern for this in every other corner of the gig economy right now. Yeah. And people save money when they buy their own groceries and cook themselves, which is also a huge consideration when there are so many people out of work. Folks, if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, subscribe to DailyTechHeadlines.com. Ford today announced it's delaying its plans to launch an autonomous vehicle service to 2022 and they're not the first autonomous company to delay things or take cars off the road. Venture Beats Kyle Wiggins has an article talking about the challenges faced by autonomous car makers due to shelter and place orders. Back in March, Uber, Cruz, Aurora, Argo AI, and Lyft all suspended real-world testing. Waymo not only suspended real-world testing but paused a commercial service it had going on in Arizona, including driverless cars that didn't have humans in them. That means autonomous cars aren't getting real-world experience. So the companies are doing a lot of simulations to try to make up for that. The data collected while driving around on real roads with real other drivers and pedestrians and bicyclists is usually how you train and improve the algorithms because you're collecting all that data from LiDAR sensors, cameras, radar, inertial measurement units, odometry, etc. So there are some very interesting ways to try to improve driverless cars while using the real-world data they have without adding to it. Real-world driving exposes cars to things like dirty stop signs, strange audio, visual data. So they've been simulating that. It also includes creating centimeter-level maps of roads, building, vegetation, and other static objects. So a lot of these companies are using images of roadways to improve the maps in the simulations. There are a lot of challenges here. There's a reality gap. The real world is not inaccurate, is not accurate. So you can accurately simulate the road and rain and all kinds of things, but did you simulate how a tire behaves at high speeds? That might be missing. There are so many things to simulate. You just can't get every single one of them. So the edge cases are what's going to suffer. Resources cost a little more. If you're trying to simulate as many things as possible, that means extra compute time. If you're not able to get that real-world data and use that to fall back on, you have to run in the cloud more often, and that costs money. Reproducibility, even the best simulators, can contain non-deterministic elements and lack of new data. If you can't drive, you have to work with what you have. You also don't have the testing of sensor failure. You don't know how good light or sensors last or when they fail or what conditions cause them to fail if you don't have real-world testing. And then there's the human element. There's an AI that worked great in the lab but didn't get implemented well because lighting conditions and human behavior got in the way. That happens here. You can't train your fleet operators in how people are going to behave with autonomous cars if they're not out there with humans monitoring them and riding in them. So the VentureBeat article does a great job of breaking down the hundreds of thousands of hours of simulation being done by Aurora and Cruise and Waymo. And then there's the lift where a senior computer engineer mounted one of their simulation servers with eight graphics card in her bedroom with four desk fans keeping it cool. That way they could keep it running during the lockdown. Another lift engineer built an electrolytic corrosion setup in their garage with a Raspberry Pi and circuit boards they got on eBay. And another lift engineer converted a backyard cricket pitch into a LiDAR sensor rage and applied street signs to help calibrate new sensors so they could get a little bit of real-world data into these simulations. But yeah, if you don't have real people to go out and drive around and if you're not allowed to take your cars out on the test track anyway because people aren't allowed to work in those situations right now you've got simulations. So the question is are the benefits of being able to run simulations more often because that's all they can do. They can devote more time to it and all their engineers to make the simulations as good as possible going to be enough to let them make progress until the point where they can get back on the road. Well, to me it feels like a genuine delay. Like this is really going to push things because it tries, they might be as ingenuity minded as they are being over at Lyft and other places to try to fill up the gap. It's just, I feel like it's too big of a gap. They need real-world testing again. And I can't help but think of previous conversations, Tom, that you and I in particular have had both here and on Current Geek and other places about how 2020 was the year. Do you remember all that talk? Like this was the year. Turns out it was the year but not for what we thought it was going to be the year. No, it's not. And it was always the year for these things. It was like we're going to finally see autonomous cars being driven here and here and here and we're going to see these things come through because the companies were saying that and the engineers and scientists behind it all were saying that nobody foresaw this other thing but it just feels like everything's going to have to get shoved. And so maybe 2021 is the new year or maybe 2022 is more likely the realistic year but I can't help but think of that in the midst of all this because these were the things that were coming to fruition and now they're all stalled out. Well, and the autonomous car conversation is already complicated. Autonomous car gets into an accident and it's like, well the person that was the safety driver was looking at their phone or the robots aren't ready yet. This is mayhem. All of this stuff is we're in that kind of bridge period where it's like well it will get worked out for the most part but we're not there yet so we're in this whole testing stage you take humans out of it and everyone goes like but isn't the whole point autonomous cars so that the humans don't have to be involved we're all going to be safer. Yeah, we weren't ready yet though. We were getting there and now we've stalled. I don't think we've stalled as much as you might fear because simulations are very important Uber is a great point. You bring up the death that was related to an Uber autonomous car and how Uber shut down its actual real-world driving and because of that it's been upping its simulation tools for two years to the point that the company is now using over 2 million miles of sensor logs augmented with simulations to accomplish the vast majority of its training and validation anyway and claims that the test track was just being used to validate our models so validation will have to wait a few months but Uber doesn't feel like it's that far behind. I don't know. You can join our Discord. I was trying to think of something witty but it just sort of frustrated more than anything. You could join our Discord. You got an Uber story, autonomous car story, maybe something about Waymo, maybe something about food delivery. Anything you'd like to chat about you can chat with your peers, DTNS peers by linking to a Patreon account at patreon.com. Let's check out the mailbag. Oh, let's. We got some good news actually and Amos who says I am ecstatic to announce that the GDI folding team has cracked into the top 1% of teams worldwide. We're now more than 80 volunteers strong and have run nearly 4,000 simulation places just outside the top 2,000 out of a quarter million teams. It seems like every day I get somebody emailing me asking me for the number for the good day internet folding at home team trying to crack some information about COVID-19. So I created a redirect at www.globaleteknewshow.com slash folding is where you will go to find the information if you would like to join the good day internet folding team. Thank you Amos for setting that up. Excellent. And shout out to patrons at our master and our grandmaster levels including Steve Ayadarola, Michael Aikins and Chris Allen. Also thanks to Scott Johnson. Scott, you're a busy man. Tell us everything. Well, I'll tell you one thing. Everything would take too long, but the one thing I'm going to tell you about is myself and my daughter who is also in college right now for an art degree have decided to do for the entire month of May. We're going to do free art classes for kids. So if you come to my stream or come to my stream page rather over on Twitch, which is twitch.tv slash frog pants or more importantly go to frogpants.com slash art classes and you'll learn all about it art class rather you'll learn all about what we're going to do and it's easy to find out what you need to bring how long we're going to do it. We're going to put it all up on YouTube when we're done. Great activities sort of describe you don't need much really just crayons and paper pens and paper pencils that sort of stuff and we're going to teach some basics and core concepts in some drawing stuff, some cartoon stuff going to have a way for you as parents to give your kids something cool and constructive to do for the next five weeks on a Saturday if that helps great and also there's no limit if you're 80 and you want to be there and learn how to draw some of this stuff you're welcome to be there. Anyway the details are over at frogpants.com slash art class and it starts this Saturday at 1 p.m. mountains so we look forward to seeing a bunch of you there. Yeah you could learn to draw like Carter Johnson. Yeah she's very good. Hey folks so we'd like to share the love because the idea here is like if you've got a little money and you spend it on somebody who needs something because they're out of work that helps you then that helps them and then they can spend that money on somebody else and that keeps the economy going and Frost wanted you to know about a thing she's doing to help knitters if you like knitting and I know a bunch of you do yarn and fiber festivals have of course been canceled and they're a major source of income for many makers and a source of learning and socializing for knitters, crocheters, spinners and weavers the online international fiber festival will run from May 1st to the 8th each day participants can visit a different country known for their wool production or knitting traditions all from the comfort of your own Wi-Fi. There will be a fiber craft classes in the morning history and culture experience in the afternoon a menu for a regional dinner that you can make from ingredients from your local grocery store and a one to two hour evening event as well so just like a real conference this has all been organized from what is available online. You do need a membership to myblueprint.com to attend but they do offer free trials if you just want to try it out for more information go to oiff.familypodcasts.com and of course you can support us at any level at any time dailytechnewshow.com Our e-mail address is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com and if you'd like to join us live we are live Monday through Friday at 4.30 p.m. eastern that's 20 30 UTC and you can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. Dr. Marl with Justin Robert Young talk to you then this show is part of the frog pants network get more at frogpants.com the club hopes you have enjoyed this program