 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners. Thanks to all of you. That includes Reed Fishler. You know who you are. Larry Bailey. You too. Michelle Surge. You're the best. And new patrons. Welcome Osama and T.S. Bob. On this episode of DTNS, Getty Images plays it safe with AI. iFixit tears down the new iPhone. We'll tell you what they found inside. And you can now talk to chat GPT with your voice and it'll talk right back to you. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, September 25th, 2023 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And somewhere around your nation's capital, right to your backyard, your boy Chris Ashley. And the show's produced, sir Roger J. Chris, you said your nation's capital, but what if someone's in like Belgium? Well, you know what? Chris, let's pretend you're right. Your favorite nation. No, no, I can't even say that. Yeah, I have to fix it. I forget. No, it's good to have you Chris Ashley. Welcome back again. It's awesome. Thank you. Thank you. It is. It's free preview week by the way. Yeah, this is awesome. It's a perfect week so everybody can see what kind of foolishness goes on in here. Now I was telling you earlier, I wish people could see more people should see the foolishness that goes on in the background. You guys got to see this awesomeness that is this show. Well, thank you, man. I appreciate that. Let's get right onto the quick hits. If you're wondering, hey, who's providing the AI for those Amazon upgrades to the smart assistant that we mentioned last week? Well, sounds like it's at least in part anthropic makers of the Claude chatbot. Amazon is going to take a $1.25 billion minority stake in anthropic with an option to increase that to $4 billion if they want. Google also has an investment in anthropic, so it's not like Amazon's slowly going to take it over, at least not without Google cooperating. Anthropic will use AWS as its cloud provider, including AWS Tranium and Inferentia chips for running its models, and AWS customers will get access to anthropics models. And while those guys are investing outside, Huawei has decided to invest inside and created its own 5G chip in response to restrictions on 5G equipment and technology by the US. But a launch event Monday, the company did not mention the 5G chip on the Mate 60 Pro phone in which it ships. Huawei did announce a sedan, a high-end SUV, electric cars, new wireless earbuds, a smartwatch, a tablet, and more. Yeah, it was a big old announcement for them, but no mention of that 5G. I'm going to talk about it. Imagine the world. Sorry. They just blew my mind that they, those are some really cool things to announce, and everybody's upset that they didn't announce a chip. Yeah, yeah, yeah, electric cars, whatever. Metas Connect conference is coming this Wednesday, and the Wall Street Journal says it has seen some internal chats indicating that one of the announcements will be Gen AI personas, like Generation AI, like Gen Z, but AI. Anyway, their chat bots geared toward engaging the youths. One of them is apparently a sassy robot inspired by Bender from the TV show Futurama. Does this sound cringy? I don't know. We'll find out Wednesday, I guess. Well, hopefully, Pegatron has the same resilience as Meta because they've announced that they've canceled all three shifts at its plants in Tamil Nadu due to a fire. Pegatron makes iPhones for Apple and told Rooters it did not expect any significant financial or operational impact. That's good. It's good that it said that, but yeah, if there's a little delay in shipping, yeah, I wonder how they pull that off. Maybe it's insurance. Yeah, or maybe it wasn't as bad as it looked, and they're just being overcautious. Who knows? Speaking of India, Bloomberg sources say India will loosen planned restrictions on imports of laptops, tablets, and other hardware to give companies time to prepare for those restrictions. Remember, they were going to require you to make most of your laptops in India and then have to get a license if you're going to import them. They're loosening that up. Companies now just need to register with an import management system starting November 1st, but they won't have to limit the imports yet. As companies begin manufacturing more devices inside India, then India says the limits will slowly kick in, again, according to these sources. All right, so we talked a while back on DTNS about Getty Images saying it would not use AI in any of its products until it understood the legal risks. Apparently they have finished figuring out the legal risks and Getty Images worked out the details for generative AI by Getty Images. They're partnering with Nvidia on this. It is trained exclusively on Getty's library of licensed photos. That's meant to prevent questions of copyright that exist on models trained on data taken from the open internet. Getty's like, we have the rights to all this stuff, so there's no question that we have the rights. We're not trained on anything else, but that also means the Getty model was trained on a more limited dataset. Now, understand that photos created with the tool will not be included in stock content libraries from Getty Images or iStock, and Getty will pay creators if it uses their images to train its model, sharing revenue generated from the tool. The tool also actively prevents you from naming actual people in its prompts later this year. Getty will add the ability for customers to add their own data to the model to generate images in their brand style. This is similar to what Adobe has been doing with Firefly where they trained it on their own licensed images from Creative Suite and Creative Cloud. Microsoft recently announced it's going to foot any copyright legal bills for its clients, even though they're using open AI's products which were trained on the open internet. Everybody's taking a different approach to this, but Getty's taking one of the more conservative ones. I wonder what you think of the trade-off here, Chris, because on the one hand, it sounds like they're leaning towards being ethical, saying we're not ethical, but also avoiding lawsuits. We're not going to risk violating someone's copyright and have to test fair use in this totally new arena of legal questions, but it also means that you won't be able to do as much with this tool because it's limited to that data set. I think this is one of the best examples in tech at least of threading the needle I've seen in a while, because I think this is like a really good position to put themselves in. They really kind of short up themselves from being sued. They also announced before anybody had questions about it that they will take care of anybody whose images are leveraged in this endeavor, and they provide a service that a lot of people could benefit from. I mean, I don't see any wrong in this, and even if the limited nature or data points, the reality is this is still pretty limited in general, as far as how good the images work or look, and so far it seems like these images have improved over the previous time, so I think this is actually a really good start. Yeah, I hadn't thought about it that way. Because it's limited, it actually might be better at what it does. I know the Verge took it for a test run and said it did seem really good at creating stock photo-like images. They did one with a ballerina in there, and they said, yeah, didn't have six arms and six legs. It looked like a stock image ballerina. They said the illustrations weren't as good. The photo-realistic stuff was good. The illustration stuff didn't work as well for them, but maybe that's why Getty wants to let you add your own data to the model, so you could say, hey, we own this logo. Please train on that, and then we can manipulate that and work on illustrations and stuff. But yeah, maybe this will be better for its purpose. Yeah, and the thing is I have to admit, I never really appreciated this service to begin with. I never thought it was a big deal, like who cares? But I tell you what's made me come around on this is just playing Starfield. This game is massive, massive, massive game. What I'm noticing is quite a few characters NPCs look alike, and I'm like, how awesome would they have benefited from being able to use this just to give us some more variation? Now, I'm not blaming them. It's a massive game. You have a lot of characters, but I could just see the potential on something like this. Remember, we've always talked about movies and stuff like this, but yeah, I would have really loved to see a little bit more variation in a lot of the character images in this game. Yeah, and I think you're right that Getty is smart here to say, look, what people use this for is stock images. And even if our data set is limited to stock images, well, that's what our tool is for. We don't need our AI to be able to make other things to come up with other uses. We're not trying to be open AI. We're not trying to be an innovative edge case. We're just trying to make our stock image thing better. And so if we can train it on stock images so it makes great stock images, well, it may be better at that than ChatGPT or not ChatGPT Dolly, because it's more specifically trained and it exposes them to less legal risk. And, you know, we'll see what the checks look like, but they're paying the artist whose images were used to train this. So theoretically, everybody wins here. Yeah. And we should not understate the fact that they said they're not going to use generated images to train on because somebody has the same paranoia as I have the computer taken over. Yeah, we still don't know how much this is going to cost. You will get a perpetual worldwide unlimited right to the image just like you would if you do a royalty free image. So that's nice. You get the maximal rights out of this. And they're going to have an API so you can integrate it in the workflow. So yeah, once we know how much it is, and it won't be cheap because it's getty, but hopefully it's reasonable. Yeah, yeah, I think it'll be good. All right, folks with every new Apple iPhone comes a new I fix it tear down where we find out a little bit about what's inside that iPhone get an assessment of repair ability. Here are some of the findings. The 15 pro has the Qualcomm Snapdragon X 75 gene modem in it. We had heard that Apple was not using its own modem tech yet. And this confirms that the Snapdragon X 70 uses little AI to improve speed and latency. And apparently this modem delivers a lot of people have already done speed tests and found that it is faster on the same 5G network as a 14 because of the modem. Also a tiny bit bigger battery 4,422 milliamp hour battery confirmed by I fix it. And it keeps something called the mid frame from the iPhone 14. The mid frame is a frame inside the phone that allows you to open the phone from either side front or back and access the components basically the components are mounted to the mid frame. You could also think of it as a central chassis I fix it refers to it that way as well. The only downside here is the 15 pro has it, but the components are all on the display side. So if you remove the screen to replace the battery which you would have to do with the 15 pro don't have to do that with the regular 15 just the 15 pro you're it's a trickier operation. If you screw up a little when you're removing the glass you're less likely to make any kind of permanent damage than if you mess with the screen. But I fix it still gives him credit like the fact that you can come at it from either side is still an improvement. The big ding on this is parts pairing parts pairing is something that's not new they did this with the 14 as well but it means you need to buy your parts from Apple or they will not have all the functionality that a part should have you not only have to buy the part from Apple you also have to verify your repair through Apple technical support and because of that some repairs just don't work some do but some don't unless you're getting that part from Apple I fix it took the LiDAR sensor out of an iPhone 15 pro so this wasn't like some weird third party cheap part they took it out of an iPhone 15 pro put it in another iPhone 15 pro and the camera app kept crashing because that LiDAR sensor was not properly paired it was all a software problem not a hardware problem so the upshot is the iPhone is easier to repair than it used to be but software makes that ease contingent on involving Apple in your repairs for parts and verification so I fix it says we would give it a 7 out of 10 which is a really high repairability score it's much more modular even the microphone is now modular but because you have to go through Apple for so many things to make stuff work they're giving it a 4 out of 10 Chris yeah the one thing I wanted to do is make sure people pay attention to why these type of breakdowns are important because you really want to understand a can you get your phone fixed or are you stuck you know turning it in and getting another phone be are you getting what you pay for you know so I think sometimes people may hear these type of I fix the articles but never really actually appreciate why it's important that what these guys do so I just wanted to take a second and put that out of there yeah if if you have Apple care and you're never going to take your phone to be fixed anywhere but an Apple store none of this matters to you this matters to the people who either want to fix it themselves and there's a lot of you out there who want to do that or you want to be have the option to go to a third party because it's it's more convenient maybe you don't have an Apple store close to you or it's cheaper because you just need a display swapped out or something yeah out of warranty all of those things come into play there so yeah um so now let's talk about the substance of this I you know I I don't want I don't think people should write out of the gate beat Apple up for some of the design decisions here because unfortunately I fix it doesn't know and I wish they would kind of be up more just kind of make that a little bit more obvious is like you know why they may have went this way why they didn't you know did they ask why the guys went this way versus not that way um you know on the on the face of it yeah it definitely sounds like maybe an added step to put in there to kind of corner the repair market um that would be an obvious and you'd be naive not to think at least have that in your mind but who knows maybe there's a uh you know Apple has a reputation to protect you know and so if there are people out there fixing these phones or and then you know putting in janky parts and then selling them people aren't gonna say hey janky part dealer uh you broke my phone they're going to go blame Apple for that so it's kind of a catch 22 when it comes to some of this stuff especially when you have a brand as big as there is to protect at this point so um I just yeah yeah go ahead no no I was just gonna say I I fix it does uh refer to the fact that they think what Apple's doing with the parts pairing is saying well you won't possibly uh make your repair to the precision we require uh if you don't use our parts and go through our validation system and I fix it's like you know what not every repair needs to be as precise as the factory right yeah it's very Apple to be like yeah but it won't be perfect we need to keep it make make it perfect uh and you know it doesn't always have to be it just needs to work right yeah and you know a lot of us have that same uh threshold it's like uh building a cutting board and building a house this is like yeah big difference two different two different colors yeah talking from experience right there yeah uh yeah I I I feel like uh I feel like I fix it does a pretty good job of of of giving Apple the benefit of the doubt here and and giving them kudos and saying like hey look uh that men frame on the 15 pro may be a lot of the components on the display side but it could be because that camera is so thick and we get right there just nine trade-offs and stuff yeah I yeah I just wanted to yeah I like their reviews I I tend to peek at them a lot and uh you know but I guess I just get paranoid in today's world where everything gets hyperbolic and once it's written and redone then all of a sudden it's like you know gets blown out of proportion uh sometimes and many people may pick this up second hand as opposed to looking at the original right up from them in the first place yeah for sure because I fix it's very uh calm in its assessment but somebody exactly they'll pick the piece for the headline so yeah well folks uh if you got something to tell us about if you're like hey here's something that could help you understand a little more about this topic or that topic because you happen to work in that area you got experience in that area we love to hear from you uh you can get in touch with us on so many platforms uh we are at dtns show on x also on mastodon we're at the mstdn.social platform at daily tech news show on tiktok and dtns pics on instagram and threads look us up wherever find social media is exchanged open ai launched a new version of chat gpt that you can prompt by speaking and it'll talk back to you in a good way open ai is rolling out a new text to speech model in its ios and android apps that created human like audio from just text and a few seconds of sample speech and it's actually very natural sounding uh they give you five different voices another new feature lets everyone upload a picture and ask chat gpt questions related to it for instance take a shot of a broken faucet and ask how do i fix this or some food ingredients and ask what can i make you can use a drawing tool to help make the query clear like circling a part of the image uh for example the new features are coming to paying chat gpt users first uh you you should see it over the next two weeks if you pay for the service everybody else all you freeloaders like me uh will get it soon after according to the company open ai is using the whisper model for this it provides text to speech and partnerships to in fact spotify is planning to make some use of this to translate podcasts into other languages so they'll be using a model to do the translation of a podcast and then using this text to speech to keep the unique sound of podcaster voices now again open ai is not letting just everybody do this uh but they're working directly with spotify on particular uh podcasts to do this this this is uh this is what everybody wanted when when they got tired of of chat gpt's when you know when they got over the newness of chat gpt was like why can't i just talk to it well now you can right and i the one thing that stood out to me the most is is this a precursor to all the phone manufacturers just saying okay we're done with our own assistant uh it this is going to be the next thing for us uh a la my my baby girl cortana is gone now so it just it just makes sense to me to to you know expand this yeah yeah i think a lot of people were wondering if this would replace amazon it would replace google voice would replace syrie uh when you think about it though amazon's partnering with anthropic right we heard about that in the quick hit so uh amazon's you going to do this but they're going to do it with a different company uh google has its own right they have barred and and all of their own large language models so they're also doing it with google assistant just on their own apple being apple secretly reportedly has their own large language models being developed it doesn't sound like they've bought anyone specific but they they have bought smaller companies in the past so they've cobbled something together uh that leaves microsoft which is the one using open ai's products yeah and it and it makes me think that the reason you lost cortana chris is because they knew this was in the pipeline and they're like well we don't need to do that anymore we're going to have this right which would make perfect sense um if they rename it to cortana uh extra points for you bring her back but uh you know the use cases they presented here also make sense and i i think uh i find it be pretty good uh for you know for cooks in the kitchen that uh maybe you're feeling uninspired why not you know grab a bunch of stuff and say what can i make with this um on the flip side i hope it's you know it's an honest thing and saying no your ingredients are trash there's nothing you can make but uh yeah no that use case is awesome i i've used image search i've definitely seen something that looked like the most killer wasp on earth so you know i would definitely like hey chat gpt am i in danger with this image um you know if this thing gets me am i am i finished yeah yeah um i i i was thinking search and and recognition and stuff like that and i was glad joanna stern brought up these other examples that you mentioned you know like hey this hose is is hosed right how do i fix it right uh you know again uh you do want to have a little more confidence in the veracity of the advice that the the large language model is giving you uh but if it can say like oh yeah i know what that here's here's the part you need here's a video that'll walk you through how to fix it or or i can just walk you through how to fix it here are the steps yeah i i think that's great and it is it is interesting that open ai is pitching this as uh chat gpt can now hear talk and see because it can see the images yeah and i could definitely see uh opportunity even when rod and i are doing some woodworking sometimes you know we've fully switched over uh to away from the uh imperial and we went metric because it is that much it is just way simpler and i started too late in life to go figure out what five sixteenths and all of that foolishness looks like um and we were building a table here a workbench and and we needed specific specifications for it because we were mimicking one that already existed and we asked a serian she struggled now to be fair bar did find the answer for the dimensions of the top but you know being able to you know take something like that and then go a little further and say okay now what should my cuts be you know accounting for you know thickness and material these are the things that kind of resonate to me as as far as uh something like this uh goes well uh before before we wrap this up uh joe did record a little bit of what joanna stern demonstrated on the wall street journal so let's let's listen to that because i think it is impressive how natural it sounds it was it was about how we can talk to each other now that's a compelling topic the evolution of ai and its ability to communicate in more conversational ways has changed how people interact with technology it's not just about getting information anymore it's about engagement conversation and sometimes even companionship so that the first voice was joanna's case you didn't know uh she also sounds very natural because as i've met her she's a real human uh but that that second voice that's pretty natural yeah that was pretty good a little something that that tips me off knowing but maybe if i didn't know i wouldn't recognize it i don't know yeah i agree well nasa's seven-year osiris rex mission has returned to earth it landed sunday carrying a bunch of rocks and dust from a near-earth asteroid called benu uh yeah for the first time we sent a robot out to an asteroid to scoop up some dirt and bring it back capsule touchdown in the desert at the department of defense's utah test and training range with around 250 grams of material nasa says it contains some of the oldest rocks in our solar system and they're going to use that to help scientists understand just what things look like in the solar system you know four and a half billion years ago whether organic material necessary for life appears elsewhere is it common elsewhere in the solar system and we also may be able to tell if the water on earth originated on asteroids like benu because that's one theory is that asteroids carrying water crashed into earth and created the oceans here and if the ions are the same in any water they find in this dirt on from benu then that would be a pointer towards that being true yeah i just got one question i need them to figure out all the materials that are on that planet because i want to know what i can craft when it comes if i land there and farm some materials can i craft a nice spaceship or something out of it now this is really really cool where are you getting this idea from chris i just i wonder yeah i'm all joking aside uh the inspiration for the video games is the is the the real idea of going to an asteroid and mining it to you know to help either bring materials back to earth or create things in space so that you don't have to spend the money to launch them into space not to mention if they find some type of material that can benefit you know cell phones or something like that and we don't have to you know go into some of these crazy areas and you know just take up every piece of resources in these areas i'm you know i'm all for these type of things yeah yeah and if they find some unobtainium out there you know i mean why not yeah do know do know all right let's check out the mailbag on our bonus show for patrons which in free preview week you're all getting this week last week we looked at old tech news lineups from 10 years ago we noticed a reference to text stops in new york places for people to pull over and safely text now we wondered 10 years later whether those are still here and matt has a confirmation for us matt wrote in while i don't have a picture handy i can assure you the text stop areas still do exist in new york it's an inside joke with my wife and i that whoever is driving the other one will say something like huh and can you pull over in two miles i need the text uh mike's gonna try to grab a picture of it the next time he goes by you i don't know if you've ever been driving up in new york and seen these yourself chris i have not driven up since these were created i've had driven to new york many times but of course yeah but i haven't seen uh not not since these type of things uh been created spend it's been some time since i've been up there it's all i wonder if it looks like a you know the sitting weight at the airport yeah i think they were already like they were rest stops and pullouts and and things like that that they just kind of added a sign like here's a place where you can pull out and text stop and text stop and text yeah uh we had a great discussion the other day about subtitles as well in our expanded show on friday uh and mary an uh dr mary angary wrote in and said i've attached a paper here showing that subtitles help most of us in a wide variety of situations my own experience is like tom's i feel as though subtitles are attention magnets and i miss some of what i would otherwise see or hear but i'm not sure if the actual data match up with what that with that feeling or if it's just a feeling subtitles have a dark side to my lab just submitted a paper in which we rapidly made people think they had learned some danish and could apply it to various situations just by showing them subtitles so so the paper she did showed people the video in danish with english subtitles and then showed some people the video in danish without the subtitles uh and then compared whether people thought they were better at understanding danish and then tested them on it turns out the people who saw the subtitles thought they were better at understanding danish but they weren't hilarious that is that is a great little quick study to see see how arrogant people are i read something uh well chris my friend is great at having you along i had to talk about the stuff to help people understand technology better uh what have you got going on i know you you made some illusions to cutting boards and meat and again recipes earlier tell us about barbecue and tech yes barbecue and tech season five is still going on real strong folks come check us out if you want to learn how to become a backyard pit master we kind of walk you through like the basics of smoking and just how do your backyard forget all the technical stuff that you hear like on these uh these big pit masters using if we're just telling you how to do it in your backyard and give your friend something good to eat fantastic makes me hungry every time i hear an episode and i try never to miss an episode so you folks should check it as well bbqandtech.com as i mentioned a couple of times it's free preview week all this week we're giving everyone access to the good day internet extended show so stick around for gdi we're going to discuss the washington post guide to phone call etiquette it's more than just you should text before calling voicemails are dead people we're going to talk about that and more uh not just for patrons though for everyone whether you're at patreon.com slash dts or not you can also catch the show live monday through friday four p.m eastern twenty hundred utc find out more about that at dailytechnewshow.com slash live back tomorrow with john c devorak as our guests talk to you then this show is part of the frog pants network get more at frogpants.com