 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners, thanks to all of you, including Brandon Brooks, Hector Bones, Dan Crofton, and Derek Silva. On this episode of DTNS, Google leans into generative search. Where is Microsoft going with co-pilot? And who's donating all that money towards AI safety? This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, March 28, 2024. From Studio Redwood adjacent, 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, boy, do we have a good show for y'all. The news just kept coming today. Doesn't always happen in March. But it did today. So let's start with a quick heads. FTX cryptocurrency founder, Sam Bankman Fried was sentenced to 25 years in prison by US District District Judge Lewis Kaplan on Thursday for stealing $8 billion from FTX customers. That is what the court decided. Kaplan rejected Bankman Fried's defense claim that FTX customers did not actually lose money and accused him of lying during his trial testimony. The sentencing follows a jury finding Bankman Fried guilty on seven fraud and conspiracy counts back in November. For the first time, Anthropics, Claude III, Opus, LLM, bested GPT-4 on chatbot arena, the popular crowdsource leaderboard used by AI researchers to gauge the relative capabilities of AI language models. For the first time, the best available models, Opus for Advanced Task, Haiku for cost and efficiency, are from a vendor that is not open AI independent AI researcher Simon Willison told ARS Technica. Swedish gaming conglomerate Embracer Group acquired game developer Gearbox Interactive three years ago at a $1.3 billion valuation. On Wednesday, Embracer announced it had entered into an agreement to sell Gearbox, maker of the popular Borderlands franchise to Rockstar parent company take two for $460 million. That is a big cut off of the top take two will acquire a full ownership over the Borderlands including Tina's Waterlands, Homeworld, Risk of Rain, Brothers in Arms and Duke Nukem franchises in the steel and it's expected to be finalized by June of this year. Oregon Governor Tina Kotek signed one of the strongest U.S. right to repair bills SB 1596 in the law. It passed the state legislator several weeks ago by a nearly three to one margin. SB 1596 will take effect next year and requires device manufacturers to allow consumers and independent electronics businesses to purchase the necessary parts and equipment required to make their own device repairs. Similar laws have been introduced in Minnesota and California. Exputer published a series of apparently images of the white Xbox Series X showing a disc free system with the same design overall on the exterior as the existing black Xbox Series X. It also has a robot white coating that Microsoft uses on the similar and less expensive Xbox Series S. Exputer says the new Series X will have some new internal component upgrades such as heat sink upgrades and will cost fifty to one hundred dollars less than the current four hundred ninety nine dollar retail price and could ship the summer as early as June. All right. Let's talk a little bit about how Google is going to make all of our travel plans better at least you know if you're if you're if you're in the search labs program. So the company announced it's starting to roll out an update to its search generative experience S. G. E. that is what Google is using alongside search for for some folks who opt into the program and qualify to kind of figure out how generative models might be part of their search experience going forward. Now this lets users pull ideas from the web previous reviews photos other details that people have submitted to Google for places around the world if they might be wanting to go to one of these locales. So an example a user saying plan a trip to Philadelphia. That's all about history. You would get a sample itinerary that includes attractions restaurants maybe an overview of options for flights and hotels divided by times of day. Now this sounds really great in theory right. I happen to be you know qualifying to to play around with search generative. And so I I I put in a query earlier of like tell me what a romantic weekend in Paris would look like. And it was like go to the Eiffel Tower go to the Louvre which if you are not familiar you know very very big museum in the city. You know I was sort of like OK. All right. So you know it's not it's not like going crazy as far as like hiring somebody to give me like a like a really interesting romantic you know weekend in Paris. But I wanted to ask you Justin and and Rob you know what what what you think about you know where Google is going with this. Well I think a couple of things. I don't look at this for where it is today. I look at it for where it might be in two years in three years. And to me just being able to pull your phone out or go in front of your computer and just ask it a very conversational question like that and get answers back that actually approximate what you were looking for is kind of impressive. Now my gut tells me that Google probably should be further along with this than what they are seeing you know seeing how what their competitors can do. But they dominate search and this is where people probably are going to first think to ask these types of questions. So I'm excited I would say to see how this just evolves in the time because I think that you know that you're going to see iteration after iteration very very quickly and in a year 18 months two years from now this will be quite good to where you can get some you know pretty specific information about a locale that you might be. A couple thoughts here. Number one a few months ago I briefly worked with open AI to talk to educators about how they were using chat GPT. This was leading up to the first fall semester that chat GPT would have been in existence. And one of the things that a teacher in South Africa told me was that field trip itineraries was a really big deal because one of the advantages of chat GPT for was that it knew how far things were you would be able to plan out a bus ride and it would recommend X Y or Z that you'd be able to go to. Now Sarah I do think knowing how this technology works you probably picked a not great of exactly category that romance is something that is obviously personal to many people and things that are described as romantic in various different places that they are pulling the information might not quantify it in the best possible way. But if you do want like the examples that they said history food especially if you name a certain kind of category you're probably going to be able to get pretty good stuff because what Google has along with all the money and talent in the world in terms of AI is data. And that's what this leverages is all of this previously available data. One last thing on this it is a replication of what you would normally search for with Google. So normally you would say the best historical tour is a Philadelphia and there would be a blog post that was written about it at some point between you know the birth of the internet on TripAdvisor. I'm saying well I didn't think it was great you know or you know and and half the time you don't even know how many of those reviews are real because those have been games sure you know long long before. But now Google is the product right Google is not bringing you to the product Google is the product right whether or not they'll be able to monetize it in the same kind of way we'll see. But I do think this is a great merging of what should be natural talents. Well so yeah go ahead Rob. Yeah it's like as I said earlier I think the technology itself is pretty cool it's like it's but we're so early but you know always harking back to can I talk to my phone can I talk to my computer like Jordy talks to the Star Trek you know you know to the enterprise computer. And I think that that's kind of where we're getting to to where you can just have a conversation and it kind of knows based off of the prompts it gets from the words you say to it how to actually respond back to you and overall I just think that that's that that is technology that we haven't seen before that's that is a that is a different way to search for stuff. Yes 100 percent. All right Rob tell us more about Microsoft and buttons. So yes so earlier this week Intel shared some of Microsoft requirements for OEMs to build an AIPC and one of the main ones was that an AIPC must have a co-pilot key. Another requirement is a neural processing unit or MPU. This means that some brand new laptops like ASUS's new ROG Zephyrus which has an MPU but not a dedicated co-pilot key don't meet don't meet Microsoft standards for an AIPC. But do meet Intel's. It's kind of you know kind of you know and it's all kind of confusing co-pilot key right now is just a user mappable button that defaults to Microsoft's co-pilot LLM no differently than Microsoft's old office button defaulting the office. Co-pilot doesn't currently require an MPU although later this year Windows 11 version 24 H2 is expected to introduce several new AI features including an AI Explorer which should work like an advanced version of co-pilot running locally. AI Explorer won't require a dedicated co-pilot key though to launch it but it will require an MPU. Still it's all kind of confusing. So Justin my question for you is that do we think that the co-pilot is anything other than just marketing tactics by Microsoft to try to get folks to buy new hardware. Part of this is really really so thrilling to me because it reminds me so much of the times in technology where I was the most excited because there were genuinely really really interesting things happening. And I would say the birth of the Internet and the birth of smartphones would probably be the two biggest ones. This is not among the most exciting things but they are indicators that very exciting things are afoot because there is a race to branding that obviously Microsoft has an inside track on. Their investment in open AI has taken the company to a totally different phase. They are very much leaning on AI as something that will be a branding differentiator for them but this is a little ridiculous right now. We have no idea if AI PC is even a term that will be used in two years although certainly AI will be a part of PCs for a very very long time to come. But they're trying to stake things out so their branded machines are the things that say the thing essentially in my mind. I think half the term will be used. I think in the future we'll be calling these things PCs. Yeah. The thing that we've called them forever. We'll call them PCs. And here's the funny thing is that you know it does not take a week or two for an OEM to build a laptop. That is something that they literally work on for years. You know that there's laptops coming out today but they've already almost finished design for laptops that are coming out a year from today. So the fact that you have a company like Asus who has built a PC that should meet all the requirements for an AI PC. I'm doing the air quotes for folks who cannot see me right now. But because they didn't know that Microsoft was going to say you know a month and a half ago. Oh you need to put a button on there that maps to our stuff in the cloud. There was no reason for them to do that. So for them to be left out is kind of is really kind of disingenuous which is why Intel is like yeah you can call it that. We will agree to it. But we're still going to call the things that have the actual hardware required to do AI type things. We're going to call those AI PCs as well. Yeah. I mean a lot of this feels like semantics. You know it's like OK you know give us a co-pilot button. You know all it does is map to something that you know the the computer could do otherwise. It seems pretty silly. But yes like you said Rob earlier the branding of this the marketing of this would you know that might work for a lot of folks. I'm just not sure that we're in a world where you know like the you know you know Microsoft Windows 95 you know start a button you know that kind of stuff really works anymore. Well let me let me make this differentiation. The button is silly. The making the button the thing is silly. Yeah. The idea of locally run AI that I do think will be a market differentiator. We're all coming up on taxis and then while I don't think that it would be advisable for you to upload your entire year's worth of expenditures to chat GPT-4 to do your taxes you probably could. And when we look at things that we would want to do with AI but we don't want to do into a public portal there's a lot of stuff. And I would say among the things that we care the most about like banking and finance that will be very very well used on local AI stuff. So I do think that there is a market differentiator for stuff like that either on PC or I would not be shocked within the next 12 months we see standalone devices that do stuff like this. Yeah. Just it doesn't make sense to have a mappable button that today does nothing other than you know it's no different than hitting F-12 if you've mapped it to something. Yeah. I've got a stream deck in front of me. I could it's it's the action button on my iPhone currently which I have set up to chat GPT. Yeah. That's that's kind of it's just kind of silly. But the hardware having the you know having the processor having the MPU those things that absolutely makes sense. And I don't think anybody would argue that but but a mappable button Microsoft that is that's what it takes to make you know make your PC a you know an I PC along with the other stuff. It's kind of it's kind of kind of ridiculous. Well y'all if you have that feedback about anything that gets brought up on this show you have a variety of ways you can get in touch with us. DTNS is very social. We are DTNS show on X formerly Twitter. Mastodon at MSTDN dot social Daily Tech News show on TikTok and also DTNS pics on Instagram and threads. Politico has a story about a cryptocurrency tycoon who donated a half billion dollars to the Future of Life Institute sometimes known as FLI. Nonprofit focused on extreme risks from transformative technologies, especially advanced artificial intelligence. The group has only two dozen employees. Thereabouts spread between the U.S. and Europe offices and use its funding to support AI safety researchers and on organizations including several that are advised advising the NISD U.S. AI Safety Institute and the UK's AI Safety Institute. In 2023, the FLI submitted an EU transparency filing where where it the valued was of Shiba Inu coins at 603 million euros or 651 million U.S. dollars. The Future of Life Institute plans to start three to five new organizations per year in its goal to steer AI and other transformative technologies towards benefiting life and away from extremes, extreme large scale risk. Justin, what do you make of the FLI and is it a new chapter in the growing debate over AI regulation? I don't know if it's a new chapter. I do know that it is a fascinating escalation of a conversation that is happening within AI circles and it is a sign that not only is technology very much going to be a larger and larger part of our DC based politics, but they are starting to play the game of the DC politics world. Let's start with the AI stuff first. Guys, how much are you familiar with the concept of A cell versus D cell? Not at all. I've heard of it about 20 minutes ago. OK, during our pre-show meeting. So this is a broad and philosophical debate amongst AI people, people in the community, people who are enthusiasts, people who work in AI. In fact, it was partly the reason why a lot of the people left open AI to go and form anthropic, which Claude now, a very, very capable model, is ranking ahead. Exactly. A or sorry, D cells. Let's start there. Are people for whom believe that AI is a very, very powerful technology and we need to be going slower with AI development because the catastrophic risks that it proposes up to and including any and all things that could happen with what is referred to as AGI, the idea that this is a thing that would think for itself are too grave. And once the genie gets out of the bottle, we'll never be able to put it back. A cell people are people who believe that we should be pushing things further and faster because AI is a net benefit to the world. And the faster we put it in everybody's hands, the faster we have a better, more beneficial life for everybody on earth. Well, some of these debates have been the fault lines for Sam Altman being kicked out of his own company, Open AI. There are things that happen on the internet constantly. And now we see not a little bit of money, not a moderate amount of money, a lot, lot of money that goes into an organization in DC with the explicit desire to affect public policy with it on the decelerationist side. And that absolutely is what the Future of Life Institute is doing. So if we understand that this is a decelerationist thing and we understand what they want, which is probably laws that would hamstring companies from developing AI. What we have to understand next is exactly how much money is being spent, because at this point, the 600 million dollars that are in this company or in this organization that has 12 employees is about on par with the Brookings Institute, which has largely dealt the shaped conversation around public policy in America since the early 1900s and the American Civil Liberties Union, which is among one of the most influential organizations that there are. So if we think that the current technology conversations that are happening in the halls of government are front of mind now, TikTok, Apple, two big ones that we've covered here a lot over the last few weeks, just get ready. AI is starting out as a far more better funded topic than any of those that came before. OK, so let's sorry, Rob, real quick. Let's go back to, you know, this donor. I mean, do we have information about where the donor came from, you know, what the donors you know, ideas might be being part of this? We don't, but we do know that he is almost assuredly somebody who believes that AI technology needs to be slowed down and that if we go too fast, the world will be over. There is there were some real cyberguide. A lot of people, right? Yes, no, there are folks who are truly worried that we're going to die net. I mean, yes, yes, that is. And when you think about it, when you think about AI in movies, about 80 percent of the time, it is just horrible for people. It is horrible for usually AI is trying to take us out because they've determined that we're just not worth it. So there are folks clearly the benefactor behind this six hundred three million or, you know, six hundred three million euro, six hundred fifty one million dollar, you know, advanced to F.L.I. thinks that way. Oh, without a doubt, without a doubt. Now, let's let's separate a little bit of the AI stuff because although, you know, if we're going to stay on politics, reportedly Joe Biden became very, very concerned about AI after he saw the most recent Mission Impossible movie. I do think that there's not a joke, folks. There's there's a lot of allegories that we have used for machines in fiction from the very, very beginning. You know, you can really go back to a Frankenstein to look at the the technophobic elements of our fiction because we are afraid that the, you know, figurative children of humanity will eventually turn against us with AI. It is a technology just like any other, but there are a lot of ways that you can hook into fears of how it will affect people. You could say either in the cyberdyne Skynet system that it will be or the how 9000 from a space Odyssey, that it will be a machine that deems humanity to be the problem and will therefore look to eliminate it. Or you can go a little bit more spreadsheet and say, well, if you make the concept of labor, something that you can scale infinitely, then no human will have a job. We will have mass unemployment in there that will create gigantic unrest for which will over topple all society and culture. Again, these are these are these are serious conversations that are happening. Yeah. And again, $600 million that comes into advanced thoughts like this are it's not a pittance. This is this is as big as the money gets in DC. Remember, DC is not Silicon Valley. It's not Las Vegas. You don't just see billionaires walking around. This is a town in which several hundred million dollars makes you the person. Yeah, I was just going to say, you know, being a tech show, we're talking billions of dollars so regularly that we're 651 million. That's this is a lot of money. It's like, yeah, you could give everybody $2 in the United States. It's still have money left over. That's that's the kind of money that we're talking about. So it is a lot. And then, as you said, when you when you think about like the ACLU, they don't have this amount of money and we hear about them darn near weekly in the news. Yes. Yes. Lookings Institute, as you said, since the early 1900s, they have absolutely driven foreign policy. Clearly it's for the United States, but really it's for the world. We have determined how Earth is shaped based off of what that organization does. They don't have this kind of money or close to it. So there's, you know, they can do a lot. And it's just 12 people right now. Something tells me it's going to be more than 12 relatively soon. Well, and if you are, I wonder where they are modeling their organization because what they are looking to do is spin off into a lot of little organizations. For example, the once Koch brothers now just Koch brother singular, who is you know, Americans for prosperity is one of the one of their biggest organizations. But the joke amongst that organization is they call themselves the coctopus because there's a billion different little organizations that all do different stuff all designed to drive certain policies forward. Some of it on the public policy side. So you were talking to lawmakers and people in government, some of it to the public. And I would imagine that whoever is running this is going to be looking to do any and all. And with that amount of cash, they got the runway to do it. Well, sounds like this conversation with AI will be ongoing as it has been pretty much every day since since technology began. But in the meantime, let's check out the mailbag. Dan writes in as a subscriber to both Disney and Hulu. We're talking about Hulu being part of Disney Plus on yesterday's show. Dan says I'm a fan of combining both in one app. I just want to watch what I want to watch. I hate finding which show or which app the show is on. So having both of these in the same place makes me happy. In essence, I'm saying I want cable again. Oh, no, no, never again. I'm with you again. The more that I mean, YouTube TV, which I subscribe to is is my it's cable. That's what it is. I mean, it's different. It works somewhat differently. But it is. It's like, I'm just in for that thing again. You're paying another bundle, but, you know, you have freedom to watch it in different places. There's technological upgrades, cloud DVR. There's a lot of good stuff to it. It was a meaningful move forward. But yeah, the bundle is coming back. Yeah. And it's still probably a little less than what cable was. The cable is cheap now because they're trying to compute. You're still saving some money. Yeah. But you're still saving a little bit of money. So thank you, you know, Dan for sending that in. And we also want to thank you, Jerry, for, you know, showing up and doing what you do on the show every week. Why don't you tell folks how they can get at you and where they can find you? Indeed, friends, politics, politics, politics. Wherever you get your podcast is where you need to go. If you want to keep up with all the comings and goings of the political world on this week's shows, we have Dave Leventhal, the money man to talk about small dollar donations, tech angle there as a lot of it is app based. And we have a progressive organizer to talk about how they are focusing their messaging. It's all on the PX3 program wherever you find your podcast. Well, patrons, we're so glad that you find your podcast here. Stick around for the extended show. Good day, internet. We're going to talk a little bit more about that whole Sam Bankman Freed's 25 year sentencing for trading fdx crypto exchange customers or fraughting them rather. And also Justin like showgun so much. You can also catch the show live Monday through Friday at four p.m. Easter and twenty hundred ETC find out more at daily tech news show dot com four slash live will be back tomorrow talking about China versus the U.S. and A.I. metrics with Andrea Jones Roy. The DTNS family of podcasts helping each other understand. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.