 Daily Tech News show is made possible by you, the listener. Thanks to all of you. That includes Hi-Tech Oki, Chris Zaragoza, Jim Hart, and Matt Misner. On this episode of DTNS, the real reasons Epic and Apple are fighting again. Open AI responds to Elon Musk's lawsuit and what Microsoft revealed about the future of consoles. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, March 6, 2024 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Animal House, I'm Sarah Lane. In Salt Lake City, I'm Scott Johnson. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. So you've settled on Animal House. That's the studio name. Seems that's the studio name. It is an animal house here. I am also an animal because we're all part of the kingdom. So, yeah, yeah. Not a fun guy. I'm not a fun guy. I'm fun, but not a fun guy. Yeah, but also you're an animal. I'm just curious if you'll ever want to do a toga. No, toga party. I would be delighted. Yeah. Once the weather warms up, I might have to. Yeah, definitely not. All right. We got we have a lot of explaining to do for you people. That's what we're here to do so that you don't have to plow through all of the fighting and bickering out there. We're going to explain all this stuff to you. So let's start with the Quick Kits. TikTok introduced an invite only beta in 2023 called the Creativity Program, which let creators monetize video longer than 60 seconds as a way to help them make more money. That went away, but TikTok now says the program will be resurrected called Creator Rewards, encouraging longer form habits, even like shooting in horizontal mode. TikTok is also adding more options for longer but not necessarily live streamed content like charging fans for exclusive content and benefits, selling perks like badges, emotes, and subscriber only chats. I can only imagine what TikTok has been going for here. Hopefully they've been going for continuing to do business in the United States because the US presidential administration is backing a bipartisan bill. Hey, look at that. The White House and both parties in Congress all agree that they should ban TikTok in the United States or they gave them an alternative. We'll either ban you TikTok or Bite Dance, the parent company, can sell TikTok to someone to operate it in the US. Otherwise, they're going to tell operators of web hosts and it was web hosts and app stores, but it wasn't exactly web hosts. Anyway, they're gonna say you cannot distribute TikTok in the United States. Bill set for a markup Thursday in the House Energy and Commerce Committee. If it gets through a classified hearing with officials from the FBI, Justice Department, and Office of the Director of National Intelligence, there's a lot going on here. So our politics guy, Justin Robert Young, is gonna talk about it a little bit more tomorrow. Indeed. More than 100 AI researchers have signed an open letter aimed at companies developing AI, open AI, meta, anthropic, Google, mid-journey, all part of this, calling on them to allow researchers to better investigative access into their systems. The researchers argue current restrictions that are designed to keep bad actors from abusing AI systems, which is good on its own, is keeping researchers who are trying to do good from testing tools that a lot of us now have access to. The researchers are asking for a legal and technical safe harbor during testing to investigate what works and what still needs work. An accompanying policy proposal co-authored by some of the signatories of this note does note that there is progression, for example, open AI, updated its terms to protect academic safety research, though the letter claims some ambiguity remains. Yeah, security researchers have been fighting similar battles over the years, some of which they've won. So I imagine they could help give some advice on this. Meta is making WhatsApp and Messenger interoperable with third-party messaging services as we come up on that March 7th deadline to comply with the European Union's Digital Markets Act. Meta now says it will ask third parties to use the signal protocol, which both Messenger and WhatsApp currently use for encryption unless the developer is able to demonstrate another option offers the same security guarantees. Seems reasonable. Apple released iOS and iPad OS 17.4 with a host of changes, including prompting you EU users rather to use a default browser, instead of Safari just being the default choice that can be changed later. It was always able to be changed, but it was always the default app. Now, Apple's podcast app has automatic transcriptions if directly published to Apple's podcast catalog with chapter notes included, which is kind of nice. Transcripts are available in English, French, German, and Spanish. We also have some new emoji, including a lime slice, a person using a wheelchair, among others. But in the EU specifically, due to new DMA rules, alternative app marketplaces are now allowed by Apple. However, the company says it's going to geo-restrict you if you happen to be away from home. If you live in an EU-designated country you say you live in for too long. It doesn't say exactly how long long is, but long enough. Apple says geo-location will happen on device and your exact location is not being tracked and not shared with Apple servers. So basically they didn't tell us how long, but if you leave the EU you don't lose access to your third-party stuff immediately. I would guess something like a 30-day thing. Like okay, yeah, like if you're on vacation, this is, you know, you can't be docked for that. If you're away from home for, you know, more than 30 days, I would suspect. Well, you don't know if it's 30 days. We don't know. No, no, no, I'm literally just, I'm just spitballing that something like that might be a flag. Yeah, all right, and that are the quick kids. OpenAI published a letter, open letter on Tuesday that can be read by anybody in response to Elon Musk's legal claims against OpenAI that OpenAI reneged on its official and initial nonprofit mission to help humanity. That's what Musk says you were supposed to do when I was part of this company, which I'm no longer part of. It, Musk says OpenAI has now pivoted to a for-profit company instead that benefits itself and Microsoft, because Microsoft and OpenAI obviously work very closely together. Musk was a founder, no longer has a board seat, but still is a current investor. OpenAI says that Musk wanted to merge with Tesla or give Musk broader control of the company overall back in the day and has published some emails illustrating as such. In its rebuttal, OpenAI says, Musk said that back starting in 2016 that OpenAI really shouldn't be as open about sharing its research as it had been in the past up until that point, because that could overly benefit competitors and Google was listed as a company that needed to be watched. Basically, OpenAI is saying Musk says that we've closed things down. We've become a whole for-profit company which was never something that he would have ever invested in in the future. However, we have some receipts that show that he wanted us to do things differently, particularly looking at Google as a competitor that was going to get a leg up over OpenAI if OpenAI didn't lock things down. All right, let's get a few things out of the way right up the top. OpenAI's blog post is not part of its court case. There are two things going on here. Elon Musk is suing OpenAI for breach of contract which will be a very difficult case to win because he's got to prove that the founder's agreement is somehow a contract with him and that somehow OpenAI breached it. And the accusations are because they created a for-profit subsidiary that they've broken their promise about not being for profit even though OpenAI remains a nonprofit and that is totally normal. If that sounds weird to you, it's just because you haven't encountered this. Mozilla does this. Mozilla is a nonprofit foundation, operates Firefox, but there is a for-profit subsidiary of Mozilla that operates as well. So it's gonna be a long road for Musk to try to prove this. A lot of people think that he's just messing with OpenAI by filing this lawsuit. Now, we also have the public spat and that's what Sarah was just telling us about which is, well, he said this, but guess what, I have an email where he was a hypocrite and he said that and that really doesn't impact the court case at all. This is all just trying to get us to join in and cheer for one billionaire or another. Well, it seems to me that that is 100% correct. I also feel very strongly and I'd love to be told different here, but it seems to me that it would be negligent on the part of OpenAI to not want to be more protective of their systems, their methods, their trade secrets, whether or not they should have stuck to some original thing about being for the betterment of humanity and never for profit. That's maybe a moral thing that maybe should be talked about and maybe that should color the way we think of OpenAI, but if I am a company and I am now trying to find ways to be profitable, I wanna be able to have some protection of the stuff I do and I don't think that that's that that's that crazy. Yeah, and OpenAI's charter does talk about being open within reason. Again, that leaves a lot of room for interpretation of like where responsible and you have lots of documentation of OpenAI saying, we don't think it's safe to put this out in the open. And in fact, if you go listen to the episode and know a little more that I did on OpenAI, you'll note that they stopped open sourcing things before they started the for profit company. GPT-2 on February 14th, 2019 was the first model that was not open source, March 11th, 2019, that created the for profit subsidiary. Now, those are close and they obviously knew they were gonna do the for profit subsidiaries. You could still argue it's maybe just greedy and doing it for the money, but most of the documentation shows that they were also doing it for safety. So I think the argument is, well, what percentage of their decision is greedy and what percentage of their decision is safety? I think they should be more open. I look at what Meta does. I look at what Apple does. I look at what Anthropic does and stable diffusion. And I'm like, OpenAI could be more open. It's gonna be fine, but it's not like what they're doing. It's literally in their name too. So I understand that as this thing began, it had a much more open idea around it. But like other stuff, I mean, remember, Google's don't be evil thing that went away, because you can't help but be a little evil when you're that big. This isn't exactly- Don't be too evil wasn't a good solution. Exactly, this isn't quite the same as that. I mean, it's a real- Don't be evil unless you're really big. This is definitely a direction change for them, but in light of how competitive, I mean, part of me just feels like OpenAI was maybe in a bit of a naive position early. Like a lot of this, like most companies probably were, they weren't really sure where this was gonna go or how quickly it would be adopted or how seismic it would be in tech. And it has been all of those things. And I could totally see OpenAI going to, we gotta scramble and figure out what the heck we're doing with our future. You know, also, go ahead, Tom. No, real quickly, they thought they could be fully open and then Google came along with the transformer, which is, by the way, the T in GPT, and they realized we need money to compete with Google. Google has all of these servers and all this compute power and transformers are hungry for compute power. We need money to do that. So if we're gonna fulfill our mission of protecting humanity from the negatives of AI, we have to continue to be able to keep pace with Google and to do that, we need more money. That makes sense. Yep. Well, Xbox Streamed its 2024 partner preview this morning. The event highlighted third party announced new games and revealed new gameplay footage for titles coming to the console and Windows PC. And Scott, you pay attention to this. It might sound like it was a pretty mundane announcement, but a lot of folks had their eyes on this in particular. Why was that? Well, part of it is a huge part of it is because Microsoft has been in a weird rumor mill slash controversy cycle lately. Some of that came from statements from their own people saying we're more interested in services than consoles. People are taking a lot of that stuff, which we talked about on previous Wednesdays, a lot of that stuff to mean that they're getting out of the Xbox console business and going to focus on game services. And then there was this whole thing with them putting their games, some of their exclusive, we're previously exclusive games on PlayStation 5 and Nintendo platforms and maybe even more in the future. These are all controversial ideas. They're all interesting shifts. And I think a lot of people thought all of that meant that today's presentation might include maybe some details, some plans, some of those games going third party, maybe they were gonna get out in front of a camera and maybe address some of this directly. They did none of that today. They talked about a bunch of really cool looking games which will come to have a point where or why this matters in a minute. But they showed a lot. We're not gonna talk about all of it, but there are some big ones like this unknown nine. The Awakening game looks really neat. The Sinking City 2 is highly anticipated. Final Fantasy 14 used to be a PlayStation 5 console exclusive as well as PC. That is now coming on the 21st of this month to Xbox platform. So they even talked about a little bit of a third party shift there. Frostpunk 2, another good example. Great lineup shown today. A bunch of stuff we didn't know about a few that we did. But my big takeaway was everybody thought this is gonna be about these rumors, these problems, supposed problems or this upheaval. And Microsoft's like, no, we're just here to talk about all these games we have coming. We've invested a ton in third party relationships and in our own first party studios. And now that's all coming to fruition. We're starting to see the results of those things. And here they are. And we're gonna do it in 30 minutes. And guess what? We'll probably do a bunch of these per year. And we're making games. And you should subscribe to Game Pass because you'll be able to play these games wherever you play them. Like it really is that simple. I feel like Microsoft just said- It was like an upbeat and short announcement. Yeah. And it was very much them sort of just creating this tunnel of cut it out. I mean, they don't say this overtly, but it's like, okay, you can all be yapping around the periphery all you want. We are literally on track for what we have been planning all this time. We are doing it and here's what we're making. So, hey gamers, you wanna play some games? Here's some games. No controversy, no rumors, no layoffs, no nothing. Just, well, no talk about the layoffs, there were layoffs. But just here's straight ahead our plan for Game Pass and our plan for the Xbox brand. And that plan is what it has always been, which is here are a bunch of games coming. See you in a couple of months for each of these. And also we'll see you soon for another one of these. Well, we'll talk about even more games that are coming. And I think that's Xbox from now on. That's what we hear. I mean, besides the overly positive news about new games, hey gamers, we got new games coming. Was there anything that you particularly thought Microsoft should have addressed? Not really, because they kind of already have, even though I thought that their podcast they did with Phil Spencer was a little tepid and controlled and they didn't really, I don't know, that didn't really reveal much. It was kind of a big nothing. I do think transparency from Microsoft and Sony and Nintendo is a good thing when it comes to the relationship with the players. But like we were just talking about with OpenAI and others, they don't always want to be so transparent. They kind of want to just execute the plans they've been secretly working on at their headquarters for all these months and years. And so I don't know what I would have wanted to pry out of them specifically. It would have been cool to hear about, well, which of their other games that haven't been confirmed yet might be on their way to competing consoles, just so we kind of know. But this isn't the place for that. There's probably another event for that. Instead, this event was funny because there were two or three of these titles that were previously Sony exclusives that are now coming to Xbox, which is a complete flip around from what everybody expected the talk to be about. So my overall takeaway is this is Microsoft and this is Xbox and this is what we're gonna hear from now on, they're not gonna get down in the trenches with all the infighting and the brand warfare. They're just, that is not going to be their plan. It's weird to think that a normal announcement is shocking somehow, but it kind of was in this particular case, wasn't it? Yeah, for sure. Well, there you go, folks. Sorry to disappoint or I'm sure Microsoft is sorry to disappoint you with, you know, with some great game announcements. That's right. How could they? How dare they? You know, the other thing in your life that you probably need is Android. A lot of y'all are always telling us, why do you always talk about Apple? By the way, all the Apple people say, why do you always talk about Android? But if you're on the Android side of that fence, then listen to Android Faithful every week. Ron Richards, Wen Tweedow, Michelle Ramon and Jason Howell bringing you the latest Android news and information. They had a great show yesterday. They'll have a great show next Tuesday. You can catch it live on our YouTube and Twitch channels, 8 p.m. Eastern, 5 p.m. Pacific on Tuesday, youtube.com slash daily tech news show or subscribe to the feed at androidfaithful.com. All right, everyone, get your bingo cards out because you may or may not have thought that Apple might terminate Epic's developer account again. It did, spoiler alert, thwarting its plans to bring a third-party app store to iOS in Europe. Now under the DMA, Digital Markets Act, Apple has to allow third parties to offer app stores separate from Apple's own. But the fight with Epic has some more details going on. So let's go it through step-by-step. Tom, how did this start? Yeah, let's all remember 2020. The only thing that happened in 2020 was Epic and Apple began fighting, right? That's what 2020 is best known for. But no, it was when Apple took issue with the fact that Epic started listing an alternative payment option in Fortnite for iOS. They just did it. They didn't get approval from Apple. It wasn't a change of policy. And so Apple kicked Fortnite out of the app store and said, no, you aren't allowed to do that. And they went so far as to revoke Epic's developer account. Epic and Apple sued each other in the United States. That's now very famous. Apple won on most of the counts, certainly all the counts that matter for what we're talking about today. And during the trial, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney testified that his company deliberately violated its developer agreement to make a point that this was unfair. Now that fact is going to be important in a minute. In the meantime, since that trial happened and that decision was put forth, Europe passed the Digital Markets Act, which Sarah just mentioned, which among other things requires Apple to allow third-party app stores. Now you might say, okay, well, everything's kosher, right? Not so much. Epic planned to offer a third-party app store, all good. But that alone is not the cause of the trouble between Epic and Apple that rages to this day. It's how Apple is allowing third-party app stores that Epic takes issue with, right? Yeah, exactly. On January 25th, Apple announced the terms of its compliance with the DMA. There's a lot to it, but the important parts for Epic were, according to Tim Sweeney, that Apple was charging a 50-cent per copy core processing fee if an app passed more than a million installs within the European Union. Something that Fortnite is likely to do. So Epic was definitely gonna have to pay that. And Apple was also going to require a bunch of other paperwork, like letters of credit and stuff, though today it actually modified some of the letters of credit and corporation stuff and said it wouldn't do that. Okay, so we know Epic's CEO who has been a very vocal critic of Apple's policies for some time now, Tim Sweeney, called the plan, quote, a devious new instance of malicious compliance. It said, he also said it was on a legal anti-competitive scheme rife with new junk fees on downloads and new Apple taxes on payments they don't process. Okay, political speak here, but he still applied for a new developer account under Epic's Swedish subsidiary, which Apple has approved. What went wrong? Yeah, they did approve it until they unapproved it. On February 23rd, Apple's head of the app store, Phil Shiller, you may have seen him in the Apple announcements, sent an email to Sweeney, which Sweeney has made public so we can take a look at it, saying that he hoped that Tim was well. I hope you're well. Saw the comments about the junk fees in the Apple taxes. And I was just wondering if you planned to try to violate the terms of your development agreement this time around. Here's Shiller's exact words. Your colorful criticism of our DMA compliance plan coupled with Epic's past practice of intentionally violating contractual provisions with which it disagrees strongly suggests that Epic Sweden does not intend to follow the rules. So Shiller asked for written assurances and said, please tell us why we should trust Epic this time. Now, within three hours, Sweeney wrote a paragraph back to Phil, just a paragraph and said that, quote, Epic and its subsidiaries are acting in good faith and will comply with all the terms of current and future agreements with Apple and will gladly provide Apple with any specific further assurances on the topic that you'd like. Thank you very much. Press set. Hope you are well. Okay, so short but sweet. Rebuttal here, why did Apple object? Yeah, so you might say like, well, he said that he wouldn't do it. That's the problem. A week later on March 2nd, Apple's lawyer sent Epic a memo writing that Sweeney's response to Shiller was, quote, wholly insufficient and not credible. It boiled down to an unsupported trust us. History shows, however, that Epic is verifiably untrustworthy, hence the request for meaningful commitments and the minimal assurances in Mr. Sweeney's curt response are swiftly undercut by a litany of public attacks on Apple's policies, compliance plan and business model. And then they link to a February 26th Twitter post and referred to the two companies ongoing court case in Australia. There's a similar Epic Apple case in Australia to the one that was in the US that's still being litigated. And then that memo finished with the notification that Apple terminated Epic Sweden's developer account. Oh, man. Oh, man. I mean, this is tech theater at its best. Scott, knowing all of this, hearing all of this, what's latest? Who are you going with? Well, that's hard to say. I don't know. Dad, they're fighting. I'm going with, you know what I'm going with? I'm going with this might be good in the long run for policy slash, you know, what companies should or shouldn't do in terms of their policy when it comes to this sort of thing. There's no doubt that Apple has a return to what we used to call the walled garden, AOLs of the world, that sort of thing. And they've done it pretty deftly over a bunch of years since 2008 and call it the App Store and it's worked for them. And they get a lot of extra money out of it, a lot of money. And so I understand Sweeney's position. I understand Epic's position and why they want to cut back on that. The truth is though, they also make a ton of money in their own ways. I think that this probably is not going to end well for either Apple or Epic. Someone's going to have to compromise or both are going to have to compromise, whether it's legally or just officially or whatever they're going to do to make it work. Or by order of a judge. By order of a judge, exactly. And no one's going to want to do it. Or when forced. Or when forced to. But here's the thing that Tim Sweeney, the creator of the original Unreal Engine and the creator of Unreal and Unreal Tournament, he has an opportunity here to do the funniest thing ever. He should bring a Phil Shiller skin to the game of Fortnite. Oh no. And just put it in. Don't even ask. Don't even get permission. Really? They should just bring Phil Shiller in. Everybody can buy the Phil Shiller skin. They make a little extra money on the Phil Shiller skin. I'm telling you, it would be amazing and there's nothing that should stop him. I don't think, well, maybe Phil Shiller. Phil Shiller could sue for use of his likeness, don't you think? That's true. Philip Shilhar will be the name of the character and we're all good. But anyway, that's obviously a silly idea. Because we're not petty people here. And we would have to do such things. I think that makes the problem worse. Yeah, it probably does. I guess what I'm saying is I don't know what gamers will ultimately, like, will gamers actually benefit from this ultimately? I don't know. Shilfiller, I'm sorry. Shilfiller. I like that. It's pretty good. That's a good one. I'd like to see it so whenever this is over and said and done with that gamers aren't the ones just standing there going, OK, can we please just play our game on your platform? Because that part has been a real bummer. Yeah, yeah. No, exactly. Well, and that's what always happens with cases that drag out years and years, such as this is the end user is sort of like, oh, can I not do this thing right now? Oh, somebody has decided to, I don't know, open a new investigation or push back against the company that sued it. If you follow the stuff, then you know, but a lot of people don't. Yeah, who snubbed who at the Christmas party here? That's what this feels like. It's like, these two get along in so many other ways and have in the past. If they had a healthy relationship, Phil sends a like, hey, you're not going to do this again, are you? And even if Tim sends a curt response, Apple should respond with it like, that's not good enough. I need you to do more. Rather than waiting a week for him to say something kind of benign, he just said, you know, Apple's leadership really has a decision to make. Like it wasn't the worst thing he's ever written. And they're like, and look at that horrible thing you wrote on Twitter. We're getting rid of your developer account. This isn't how you handle it. This isn't how people who want to come to an agreement handle it. Yeah. It's very unfortunate to see. However, what's not unfortunate is the fact that we have the greatest audience in the world and they write to us in a mailbag. Indeed. So we had a conversation yesterday on EV batteries, how they act in cold weather, and why sometimes you can't get a great charge. Really good conversation. Thanks to all of you who wrote in. One from TJ wrote, living in what used to be cold and snowy Minnesota, I guess, I don't know. Now it's not. TJ says, I have decades of experience with cold cars in winter. My buddy has a Tesla vehicle. They do actually heat the battery itself in the winter. He would mention that part of this charge was going to heating the battery. I never quite understood why until now. Electric engine block heaters actually heat the engine block and that transfers the heat into the motor oil so it's less vicious and allows the engine to turn over easier. Modern motor oils now flow easier in cold weather so this is much less a thing. But still exists in places like Winnipeg where many public parking lots still have outlets for block heaters. So that last is about diesel engines needing the block heaters, not about the electric vehicles, which is a different thing. Chip in Boston wrote in and said, all EVs have a coolant loop running through the battery, kind of like a liquid cooled PC. That coolant loop also runs through a heater and cooling core, which allows the battery to be warmed in the winter or cooled in the summer. Now, Chip, other people wrote in and said it's not all, that some of the older ones didn't have that, but maybe all the modern ones do. Most EVs have a preconditioning feature where you can manually or on a schedule, tell the car to prepare the battery and or cabin for a drive. The idea is you would do this while the car's plugged in so you use house power instead of battery power. This makes the car more efficient while driving, thus giving you more range. For example, my Mustang Mach-E has up to two scheduled departure times I can set each day. I have those set for when I'm going to work and when I'm going home. Depending on the temp outside, the car will precondition the battery and cabin so it's ready by the time I have set. Usually when I do that, I can see my range increase from 10% to 15% because the battery pack is so big, it can retain this preconditioning for hours. So you don't need to do it every time you drive or even right before you drive. This is most useful if you're going on a road trip and want to maximize your range. A lot of people pointed out it's a heat pump like Tesla uses a heat pump for this so it's energy efficient. And Alison Sheridan texted me this morning and said not only does it do the preconditioning for the heating, it actually cools it if you're in a hot situation in the summer. It goes both ways. I just want to thank everyone. I feel like that's something we should have got right on yesterday's show, but everyone was so kind in their responses to be like, oh, they actually have that. Let me explain it to you. So thanks everybody for that. I really appreciate that. Indeed, yeah. It's always nice to get a lot of good feedback and please keep those emails or however you get ahold of us feedback coming because it really makes our show better. Thank you in advance. Also thanks to you, Scott Johnson for being with us today. What would you like to tell folks about? Well, so two things. My sister lives in the Twin Cities and she says there's been like no winter this year so that's what he's talking about. It's very weird. It's like no one understands why. Number two, I do a show called Core on Thursdays. It's all about video games and what we didn't talk about today with the Microsoft stuff was the games themselves. Well, if you want to hear what those were and some of those surprises we're gonna dig deep into those tomorrow evening on that show. So check it out. Go sub today wherever you get your podcasts or you can find it at frogpants.com slash core. Patrons stick around for the extended show Good Day Internet find out what happens when an AI engineer currently working at Microsoft still working at Microsoft stops being polite and starts getting real and telling everybody senators and the FTC and CNBC there's something wrong with co-pilot designer. Oh, I mean, if that's not a promo, I don't know what is but just a reminder, we do this show live and you can catch it live Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern 2100 UTC. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We'll be back talking about a bill that would force Bite Dance to sell TikTok tomorrow with Justin Robert Young because he's gonna know. Talk to you then. Understand. Simon Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.