 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners, thanks to all of you, including Miranda Janell, Justin Zellers, Pepper Geesey, and our lifetime supporter, Johannes. Thank you for being with us for so long. On this episode of DTNS, TikTok comes to the Vision Pro, but is that enough? Are we finally in a post-web crawling world and can meta really control political content or at least the stuff that you read on its platforms? This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, February 15, 2024 from Studio Animal House. I'm Sarah Lane. From Columbus, Ohio, I'm Rob Dunwood. From Deep in the Heart of Texas, I'm Justin Robert Young. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Oh, do we have a show for you all? We're going to talk about, well, Vision Pro stuff. We're going to talk about politics. We're going to talk about how the web has worked for a long time, but maybe won't work anymore. But first, let's start with some quick hits. YouTube announced a remix option to incorporate a music video into a YouTube short. This is going to let users pull from a very big library of music videos, which YouTube can claim is probably the biggest online, but also follows Universal Music Group pulling its song catalog from TikTok a couple of weeks ago. TikTok and YouTube shorts are kind of going out at these days. Now, within shorts, you can choose a collab tool. So the music video and your own video would be side by side. There's a green screen tool that lets you put a music video as the background to your short. The cut tool lets you take a five-second clip of a music video and add it to your short. And the sound tool just lets you use the sound from a music video for your own short entirely. Google is launching Gemini 1.5 today and making it available to developers and enterprise users through Google Vertex's AI and AI Studio with a full consumer rollout coming soon. Google is making on Gemini as both a business tool and personal assistant. Gemini 1.5 Pro is the general-purpose model with the new context window for much larger queries with up to one million tokens compared to 128,000 for OpenAI's GPT-4 and 32,000 for current Gemini Pro. The old information sources say that OpenAI is working on a web search product, partly powered by Microsoft Bing, and aimed squarely at rivaling Google Search. You might say, well, that's kind of big news. Not today, people. OpenAI announced a new text-to-video research project called SORA, S-O-R-A, which is available to some creators and security experts who will red team it for safety vulnerabilities. Now, SORA uses a version of the Fusion model that's used by Dali and GPT-4, generating a video by starting off with one that looks like static noise and then gradually transforming it to make it a very, very realistic finished product. It can reportedly produce up to 60-second video clips, although, if you go to openai.com slash SORA, none of those presentation clips were quite that long. They were impressive, though. Amazon researchers announced that they trained the largest ever text-to-speech model, big adaptive streamable TTS with emergent abilities, or base TTS for short, which they claim contains emergent qualities that help speak even complex sentences naturally. The largest version of the model uses 100,000 hours of public domain speech, 90% of which is English, the remainder in German, Dutch, and Spanish. Chinese automaker BYD, which today I learned, stands for Build Your Dreams. Didn't know that before. It's building a factory in Mexico to help sell more vehicles in the United States and keep prices lower, obviously, because we share our border. BYD is Tesla's biggest rival, with China as its biggest market. It sold 1.4 million hybrids and 1.6 million BEVs in 2023, and it's also in stages of construction in Thailand, Hungary, and Brazil. Alright, Rob, let's talk about what's up with the Vision Pro, good and bad. Can you guys believe that the Vision Pro's only been out for two weeks, because tomorrow, Friday, February 16, they'll have been out for 14 days after the official launch of the Vision Pro, and some early adopters of the $3,500 mixed reality headset say they've decided to return them for a full refund. Complaints include that the Vision Pro was too heavy, causes eye strain and triggers motion sickness and headaches, but mostly people say the Vision Pro doesn't offer enough productivity or app experiences relative to the price. Many have returned their Vision Pro to say that they'd be willing to try a second edition if it offers more comfort and more application support, or even would be willing to repurchase a refurbished unit for a discount. Oh, but then, Rob, they're going to miss TikTok's native Vision Pro app, which was announced and launched today. TikTok talked about it last month, so this wasn't a huge surprise, but today is the day. The interface, which I've tried, because I've got a Vision Pro here in my studio, looks like the iOS counterpart. I'm going to assume the Android app counterpart as well, so it's kind of full screen. You're flipping between anybody that you're following or anything on the for you experience, but it's all kind of right there. It has a vertically oriented player for videos. You've got like, comment, favorite, and share buttons. That's pretty standard. And then creator profiles are visible on a pane on the right, which is taking advantage of the field that you wouldn't get if you were looking at a mobile device. It's also different than the web experience, though. Netflix and YouTube previously opted out of their iPad apps, running the Vision Pro. They said, we're not doing native Vision OS apps, but we don't even want to opt into the iPad app experience, although YouTube recently confirmed it is working on a Vision Pro app. It's at least on its roadmap. I will tell y'all that TikTok on an Apple Vision Pro is terrifying. And it is because one of the things that the Vision Pro does I think the best is immersive video. So, you know, if you're watching a movie, I think people have can dock it for lots of reasons. Vision Pro being heavy, that's true. Ice train, definitely. Headaches, haven't had any of those, but everybody's different. I also think it's a little bit of like a learning curve where your body just gets used to it after a while. But TikTok, specifically, and maybe it's just because of the videos that are served up to me, to have that in an immersive experience is like oh, I could sit here for the next four to five hours. No problem. And have some fun, but also it's pretty, it's, I mean immersive is not even the right word what this is. It's like TikTok in your brain rather than in front of you somewhere on a screen. And I don't know if that's good or bad. I guess it depends on how much you like the platform. Go ahead, Justin. Yeah, I mean, I think as far as TikTok goes it does seem like we're in some kind of clockwork orange reality where TikTok is beamed directly into your brain considering how addictive it is. There are no credits to TikTok if you have ever been on the platform. The infinite scroll is the feature, not a bug. But what I'm fascinated by is this story of people saying, okay, I'm going to return the Vision Pro for a full refund because it doesn't seem like people are particularly upset with the product. They're more upset with the price. And that is something that was obviously a barrier going in and impulse buyers who might have said, I trust Apple. My belief in this company is so much that I'm willing to outlay a high-end laptop's worth of money to buy it we're left wanting. And that's something that I find fascinating considering I'm a huge Apple fan. This is very much in my wheelhouse. I'm very excited to try this product and yet because I am a new MacBook away from my own life cycle of products I haven't got it. So I think there's a couple of things that are happening right now. I think a lot of people who are returning it, that was always a plan. You have folks who they haven't reached the Marquess Brownlee yet to where Apple sends them one and they can test it out. They have to go purchase it and test it out along with everybody else who purchases it. So I think that a lot of people returning is, okay, two weeks I had two weeks. Let's go ahead and send this back. I do believe, however, that quite a few folks who purchased it with the full intention of keeping the device have decided that, okay, I've had it for two weeks almost what else can I do? And if you know, so I have talked to two people in death about their experience with this and they say that the video, Sarah you are co-signing this that it is so immersive there's nothing they've ever seen like it and if that is your use case if that is what you want, if you are on planes or trains where you can wear this thing all the time and just watch video after video after video then this is your device. But when it gets to okay, what else do I do with it? It's kind of, they're at a loss for okay, I'm not sure what else I'm supposed to do because I'm not going to talk to people with this thing going. I'm not going to have people over to the house and they're watching the TV and I'm watching it in my headset. It's just kind of a thing of where, you know, if I'm working on my MacBook and a cool except for after 90 minutes my neck starts to hurt. So I think that there is some validity to the concerns of people who are returning it and just until your point, it is absolutely, it's just really expensive. I mean this thing is a it is a high-end MacBook at that price. I am sort of casually in the market for a new television right now. I listen to everything that Robert Aaron ever tells me about which television to buy and of course the best ones are sort of in this price range for the size that I would be looking for. You know, 75 inch type thing. So I think like okay, with the Vision Pro in let's say a family setting right you've got a guest bedroom type thing that is something that somebody can watch a bunch of content on for roughly the same price as a really nice television. Okay, I mean a little bit of a stretch but if that was all it did, if you had the money, I think it would be worth it. What most people don't have is the money or they don't think that it's worth it and it's also, you know, it comes with all of this, well it's not really meant to be used by the whole family. In fact, you can't do it that way. You have to keep wiping it and setting up new new accounts because everybody's eyes are different, right? And the eye tracking is a huge part of this. But yeah, it's a tough sell. It really is. And the whole TikTok coming to Vision Pro, YouTube will eventually, by the way you can access a lot of things using the Safari browser on the Vision Pro using Vision OS just like you could on any mobile device. So it's not as if you have all this like blacked out part of the internet that you can't access, but it's tough. And I will say, I've never had the eye strain problem, which I never really had with the MetaQuest either. I've had some sort of like, oh, it's a little smudgy type thing, you know, where you have to clean your glasses. I think that's pretty par for course. But I did after watching TikTok for a while this morning, and maybe it's just because my brain felt extremely fried because I watched too many Get Ready With Me videos. I felt a little eye strain. Headache, not so much, but eye strain, yes. One last thing on this going out. I am shocked that Apple didn't have something like Tilt Brush, which was a really huge moment for a lot of these immersive VR apps where you could do a thing that you had never really done before and use 3D space in the way that those apps did. Something like that for Apple Vision to just like have a killer thing that you could do immediately would have went a long way to get people over that to become. So let's change gears a little bit and let's talk about something completely unrelated to the Vision Pro. Robots.Tex files. So there's an interesting article on the Verge which essentially is asking if it's time to move beyond Robots.Tex for determining what can and cannot be crawled on the Internet. Robots.Tex is a text-based file sitting at the root of most websites that purely on goodwill for the past three decades has determined what could and cannot be crawled, primarily directing search engines on how they can scan websites for search. The article goes into detail about how Robots.Tex works, why it came about, and why there wasn't or how there was an unofficial agreement. I'll let you crawl my content if you let me get some of your traffic. But with the onsite of data-hungry LLMs, that agreement really isn't working much anymore. Scrupulous AI companies flowered ignore Robots.Tex at Google document and LLMs rarely send traffic back to websites. So my question for you guys is it time to move on from the nearly 30 years old Robots.Tex file? Sounds that way. I have not, I mean I understand Robots.Tex works, but I hadn't really thought about the fact that this is all just a lot of, you know, handshake goodwill, you know, let's do each other a solid, everybody wins type of, you know, the sort of back end of the internet that some people work on all the time, but many people never think about it because they're not writing code and not publishing websites. The idea that AI is like, no, don't care, that's, you know, you're not going to take us to court over this. I'm surprised it didn't happen a long time ago really. Look, no trespassing signs are great when you are only dealing with the people in your neighborhood. No trespassing signs are not great when you are talking about aerial photography for an entire county. And that's what we're looking at in the difference between search engines and LLMs. Is there a method by which people should be able to say that if I am publicly available on the internet, you should not be able to train your AI on my content in a perfect world. Yes, you should be able to enforce also. Yes, I think that this is just a reality of when technology moves forward. I mean, how would that be enforced even if everyone agreed or at least, you know, people who how is it enforceable? I was in enforceable to have somebody not take satellite or aerial photographs of your property. It's hard. Right. You can take them to court afterwards. Yeah. Stop them from doing it. I think that copyright lawyers are involved in a big way in this and figure, OK, what can we enforce based off the laws that we already have? And then you'll start to see lobbyists in trying to get lawmakers to make new laws. But the big deal here is that as we said earlier, there was a there was a handshake. There was an unwritten rule that you just follow this. Just be a good citizen. But also if you scan my website, if you crawl my content for your search engine, when that's what's not happening with these LLMs, they scan your content and they train their AI. And the goal for the AI company is that you never have to go to a search engine. They are in essence the search engine. They get the advertising dollars. They get the money from people who have pro accounts. They are ultimately going to profit off of other entities content. And that's where everyone has such a big problem with these days. The reality of this is that the market is still in the deadwood-tacota territory times of the internet. And it's hard to think of that in our perspective because many of us have been around here for decades, right? But at the same time, it takes time for civilization to build on top of something that was very, very rough land before we started settling it. And the fact that we are still dealing with essentially gentlemen's agreements on stuff like this that are billion-dollar industries means that when something that supersedes that comes along, we have to understand that there's just going to be a different way of going about it. At a certain point, the big boys are going to move in. I mean, I guess that or you know, laws get rewritten so that the internet... There were no laws before. So it's like, you know, we've got to look at laws and see if anything apply. But this is not just for the LMS. The developers are saying, how can we get past RobotsTex? You've actually got content creators that are saying now that we would like some more detailed controls over what is controlled and how it's actually used. Because RobotsTex is basically you can or you cannot. There's not a lot of gray area in that. And Google a few years back, they made an effort that didn't really go anywhere about the Robots Exclusion Protocol, an official formalized standard. And I think we're starting to get a little bit more eyeballs on it because it's like, okay, can we create a standard that determines how you pull data? Is that data something that you can charge for? Is it data that has to be free? Do you have to pay us for it? I think that they're trying to figure out how all this works because now a lot of dollars are involved. So what do you want to hear us talk about on the show? One way to let us know is in our subreddit submit stories and vote on them over at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. Meta's head of Instagram and threads, Adam Massari, announced in a series of posts that both platforms would clamp down on political content. He said, Meta wants to avoid proactively amplifying political content from accounts you don't follow. Massari added that the company wants to avoid recommending political content and that our goal is to preserve the ability for people to choose to interact with political content while respecting each person's appetite for it. The Indian newspaper, The Hindu, also notes that around half the world's population has elections this year, so kind of a big year for political content including the US presidential election which Justin, I know you're following quite closely. Yeah, the Hindu added concern that the flow of misinformation will increase as the funding diminishes. So what do we think Meta's play is here? Well, Meta's play is to try to not be the center of something that affects an election and I don't know whether or not they are going to succeed. The reality of this is that they want to stay off the radar of governments that regulate them. Most recently Mark Zuckerberg was called before Congress amongst a lot of different social media companies and for various different reasons that we actually covered on this show, he had to get up and apologize to activists that were behind him. In this case, not about anything political but about whether or not Instagram does harm to young people, specifically young girls. They want to avoid that and I think the theory of the case for them is that the more we amplify political content the more that people who are in politics will be incentivized to criticize us. I'm here to tell them that this is never going to stop. There will be something that is a political that will get through their filters and they will eventually have to deal with it. This is about how we interact with each other in social media, not about whether or not a certain political thing is being pushed forward more than something else, although certainly those debates rage. I look at this and I see what meta is trying to do and it makes sense at the service when you hear the words that they're saying that we're going to keep people from seeing political content but what comes to mind for me is that that's all cool and so I started to think about well who determines what content is political. So clearly when we're talking about elections and politicians and stuff like that, well that's political content but what is it when you just have someone who says something like well I have to sign a form to allow my child to hear a book written by someone that's African-American in their school because of how the school system is. That's probably political but is it really were they really making a political statement or were they just asking a question to talk about something that their kid is going through at school and I don't trust meta or anyone for that matter to get those kind of conversations right so I just want to see how bad at this are they going to be. Yeah it does seem to me that threads whether it's posturing or all very deliberate trying to roll out the social network in stages with features being added but not right out of the gate threads was pretty bare bones and still is if you compare it to something like X or a lot of other social networks even those owned by meta this feels like it for the community who's like is threads the place for me and I'm talking about threads specifically not Facebook or Instagram then if you're like well we kind of keep politics out of it over here on threads people go oh okay I like that I don't want this stuff amplified that I either don't agree with or is bad information or what have you that all sounds great but I think just in the point you're making is how can you have a social network that is that behaves this way where you would not see stuff that you don't agree with and how does it scale really I mean let's be honest that's what I mean for in threads case they're essentially ceding the concept of news to X if this is their actual way that they look to do it because especially in a year like 2024 that is what news is if you're going to look at the amount of the most trafficked headlines by the end of the year I'm going to guarantee you that probably the top 20 are going to be in some level related to politics either tangentially or directly so you are saying to the service that you are looking to replace congratulations we're not competing with your killer feature for which I'm sure X is thrilled but that's because threads isn't what matters for meta Facebook is what matters for meta Instagram is what matters for meta advertising it's what matters for meta and lack of regulation or malicious regulation but I do want to talk to Rob's point real quick because it is an extraordinarily thorny issue what I've always said when it comes to content moderation it is a hashtag hell portal hashtag portal to hell you are always going to be wrong no matter what and you brought up a great analogy in terms of the issues with schools and public library something that the story that you're referencing was in Miami Dade County where they are complying with a state Florida law that the state says they didn't need to go as far as they did with the reason why is because you have a public resource that anybody who is tangentially involved with it can file a complaint on that creates an extraordinarily messy situation where a common area is restricted in a lot of ways that many people don't agree with if you're then going to take a top down approach to something like that it gets even messier on a private area and if you are not doing it from the community out and instead doing it from the admin level down I think the social media area that we have seen has shown boy is there a billion ways to go wrong and almost no ways to go right so separately from the information reports that met is cutting back on funding to news organizations that fact check post on whatsapp while simultaneously rolling out new features to allow larger groups on the platform so we just want to mention that that's kind of a kind of a weird thing that they're going to move more in the whatsapp but they're going to moderate whatsapp less at the same time while they're saying they're going to do all this moderation in threads big election year alright let's see what's in the mail back today curious about which places you can fly to from any airport you might say well what you know if I go to I don't know Phoenix or whatever where am I going to get Chris Christensen has a great tool for you this is Chris Christensen from amateur traveler with another tech in travel minute this resource today is not necessarily a must have but it is a fun resource and it's flightconnections.com if you go to flightconnections.com and you put in an airport you can see all the different places that you can fly to from that airport on a beautiful map and if you put in two cities you can see all the routes in between those two airports and I find it useful to just get an idea of what kind of flights might be available to get for instance from here to Casablanca which I'm flying to in April or from Marrakesh back to San Francisco and so it's a fun tool flightconnections.com and this is Chris Christensen from amateur traveler oh man I want to go to Marrakesh that sounds really cool but yes this is I've actually used this I don't know if y'all have before but it sometimes is a good just sort of like if I get to this airport maybe I'm trying to save a little bit of money by using various airlines to get somewhere it's very helpful it looks like the map that on the back of the the little flyer that I used to busy myself with before smartphones where you just show you everywhere that the airline flew it's awesome I still do that I just look at it look at all the places I could go what else we got in the mail bag Rob so Rob and that's Rob with 1B that's not me Rodion I loved hearing about tech services in Africa tech news is so US based and as a US resident I really hear about these types of international topics I would love to hear more like this a few times a month I know I might be hard to I know it might be hard to find and present well but I really like the showmax topic thank you for great coverage so yeah that's about how Netflix is not killing it in the continent of Africa like we like it is kind of everywhere else not as much as showmaxes Amazon a distant third yeah we talked about that on the show yesterday and Rob thank you for noting that because we do try to keep the show as international as we can because we know that people are listening worldwide and watching at times and yeah thanks for that good stuff keeps us on our toes thanks to you Justin Robert Young for being with us today what's going on in your world baby we got a lot of stuff politically the primary calendar heats back up next week and I will be down in South Carolina for it so follow politics politics politics back on the campaign trail next week and patrons stick around for the extended show good day internet we'll talk about New York City's lawsuit against tic-tac medicine and YouTube for the sake of the children oh we got to save the children we also have to save you from not watching the show live or listening if you want to because it happens at Monday through Friday 4 p.m. Eastern 2100 UTC you can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live we're back tomorrow talking about past keys what's good what's bad and what's in between with Patrick Norton joining us talk to you then the DTNS family of podcasts helping each other understand Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this brover