 This 10th year of Daily Tech News Show is made possible by its listeners. Thanks to all of you, including Bjorn Andre, Jeff Wilkes and Paley Glendale. Coming up on DTNS, how augmented reality makes Super Nintendo World come alive, clearing up some misconceptions around Microsoft and Open AI, and are podcasts dead again? This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, January 23rd, 2023 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. Also from Los Angeles, I'm Lamar Wilson. And I'm technical producer Anthony Lemos. Oh my friends, did you hear you can't buy Windows 10 after January 31st? Hurry up, get out there, stock up. Buy here all your Windows 10. Don't worry, it'll still be supported until 2025. Let's get to the quick hits. Back in October, the Competition Commission of India fined Google $161.9 million for anti-competitive practices on Android. It also mandated changes to the Google Play Store. Now, Google attempted to challenge these in court. However, the Supreme Court of India declined Google's request to block these changes. As a result, India will require the Google Play Store to host third party app stores as of January 26th. The ruling also prevents Google from requiring manufacturers to pre-install games on Android devices to receive Play Store access and also requires Google to allow Play Store access on forked Android versions. Also out of India today, the country's Ministry of Information and Broadcasting ordered Twitter, YouTube, and other social platforms to block multiple videos showing the first episode of the 2002 BBC documentary, India, the Modi Question, which covered religious riots in Prime Minister Narendra Modi's home state of Gujarat. Ministry advisor Kaunshan Gupta said that YouTube and Twitter complied with the takedown order. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman sources told him some more info about what to expect from Apple's Mixed Reality headset. He has a good track record on this stuff, so it's kind of worth paying attention to. It would be a standalone device, have an interface similar to an iPhone or an iPad, as well as being able to be used as an external display for a Mac. You'd also be able to use Mac, iPhone, or iPad device keyboards to enter text, kind of like you do with an Apple TV. Supposedly Apple has talked to Disney as well as Dolby and some other unnamed partners about bringing some VR content to the platform. It would have iron hand tracking and support gestures, so you could like squeeze a thumb and forefinger to interact. A watch like Crown apparently will let you switch between augmented reality and virtual reality, so you can see the world around you or have it blocked out. It also may render realistic avatars if both FaceTime collars are wearing the reality headset, and the battery pack will be an external piece meant to be put in a pocket and connect to the headset by wire. That's the only part of this that I'm like, that does not sound like Apple to do something like that, but all right. The device may yet, according to Gurman, be revealed this spring and then go on sale in the autumn. Alphabet announced plans to cut 12,000 jobs and it looks like those will largely put Google's area 120 incubator on the chopping block, at least part of it. Google plans to graduate three area 120 projects into Google businesses this year, with Bloomberg sources saying that virtually all of their jobs in the unit would be cut. As part of its job cuts, Microsoft eliminated the entire team for its mixed reality toolkit and its VR workspace project, AltSpace VR. As a result, AltSpace VR will shutter on March 10th. And another tech layoff news, because we have a lot of it lately, Spotify said it will cut 6% of its workforce impacting about 600 jobs. CEO Daniel X said that the cuts were needed to, in part, being too ambitious in investing ahead of our revenue growth. Meta expanded its partnership with the NBA and WNBA to offer 52 live games on its quest headsets, as well as a selection of WNBA, NBA G League and NBA 2K League games. Five games will be broadcast in immersive 180 degree monoscopic VR through the stadium platform. It's stadium because you spell it with an X. All games can also be viewed at the dedicated NBA arena if you're in Meta's Horizon Worlds. Part of the expansion will also bring NBA licensed apparel to the Avatar store. That's virtual apparel for your avatar. That's coming in the next few weeks. In other Meta news, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said messenger users will start being notified that conversations can be upgraded to end to end encryption over the next few months. Encrypted chats will include link previews, custom emoji and themes. The Wall Street Journal reports that Wells Fargo, Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, and four other banks began working on a new digital wallet that will let shoppers pay at online checkouts with linked credit and debit cards. The wallet would be managed by Zell, operator early warning services, and operates separately from Zell. Sources say the banks see this as a PayPal and Apple Wallet competitor, letting them keep control of customer relationships. Details are still being ironed out, but it seems likely it will involve consumers typing in an email at a checkout page, expected to roll out in the second half of this year, with banks hoping to enable $150 million debit and credit cards for use when it launches. Wow, pay with an email, how very PayPal circa 2002. Alright, let's talk a little bit about Microsoft and OpenAI. A lot of news today about Microsoft investing yet again in OpenAI, and a lot of it slightly off the mark, repeating some misunderstood nuances of the story, so we thought we'd take a step back and put this all in context for everybody. Microsoft first invested in OpenAI in July 2019 at that time, Microsoft became OpenAI's exclusive cloud provider through Microsoft Azure. It has been the exclusive cloud provider to OpenAI ever since. This is one half of a misunderstanding over exclusivity. It gets thrown around. Half of the exclusivity refers to this. Microsoft invested again a second time in OpenAI in 2021, and on Monday, OpenAI announced a third multi-year, multi-billion-dollar investment from Microsoft. With this new deal, Azure will power all OpenAI workloads across API's researcher and products, and now we will turn, Sarah, to the issue of OpenAI being a profit or non-profit company, if I've heard both. Yeah, so OpenAI Incorporated is a non-profit company, but it owns OpenAI LP, which is a capped profit company. That means in each round of investment, investors are limited on how much they can recoup on their investment. For instance, OpenAI says its first round of funders were limited to getting no more than 100 times their investment in returns. OpenAI says on its website, quote, we expect this multiple to be lower for future rounds, end quote. There's no official announcement about the latest round, but one proposal detailed by Semaphore had Microsoft getting 49% of the company, other investments, other investors, coastal ventures, Infosys, for example, 49% collectively, and then OpenAI retaining just 2%. But it's unclear if that's what ended up happening or not, because nobody has said so. Given that Microsoft is a public company, we'll probably better understand their investment by their next earnings report because they have to talk about this stuff. Okay, so we said that Azure was the exclusive cloud provider, and that's part of the exclusivity confusion. So let's talk about the other half. Yes, so they are an exclusive cloud provider. OpenAI co-founder and CEO, Sam Altman, told TechCrunch last month that the deal with Microsoft is not exclusive. He wasn't talking about the cloud part. He's talking about people being able to make products using OpenAI technology. Here's where I think it gets confusing. Microsoft licenses some of OpenAI's intellectual property, which Microsoft can then sell to partners. That includes a license to GPT-3's underlying code. Other companies can use GPT-3. Microsoft doesn't have an exclusive on that. Microsoft has a license to the underlying code. So OpenAI can sell access to its own API of GPT-3 and other products. What Microsoft got, it seems, is the right to modify the code for GPT-3 and then put it in its own products, basically do whatever it wants with it. It can use the code from GPT-3 to build Microsoft models that OpenAI doesn't have. For example, in 2021, Microsoft launched Azure OpenAI Service, an enterprise-level offering that includes GPT-3 and then enterprise stuff like security compliance, governance, other enterprise features. OpenAI can go build its own software products. It also has a license to the thing it made, I guess, by default, and it can make its own services license its technology to other companies. For instance, mid-January, it started a wait list for chat GPT professional, the Verge, reporting on Monday that some users have got their access and reporting that it cost them around $42 a month. So Microsoft can build their own things in a way that nobody else can, but other companies, including OpenAI itself, can use GPT-3 and other products like chat GPT and Dolly in other ways. I think you did a great job explaining this because prior to this, I had no idea what's going on. I still, just based on my limited knowledge, don't really understand what OpenAI is. Obviously, the open must mean open source. I'm guessing it's just open source technology. I think in the beginning, myself and maybe some others thought that, well, if it's open, it has to be free. So why is Microsoft putting money in this? Why are they benefiting from this? Why are they selling products based on this? Why are they exclusive at all? But the reality is more nuanced. They are allowed to make money on it, but how much? Because they're a nonprofit. But part of it is they can make a profit to a point. So it's still confusing to me, but I think you did a way better job of breaking this down than when we started. I think what's interesting to me is Microsoft saying, okay, well, we have bought the license to do this underlying code. So OpenAI can still be used by all sorts of companies, but we might be able to modify the code based on what we think is the best path forward, which would then change our version of this product. And based on how well we do that, we can charge people what we think is fair. Yeah. I think a lot of people thought that OpenAI would go the open source route, and it did not. And I think a lot of people are confused by the weird corporate structure, which I think Mozilla also uses of a nonprofit company owning a for-profit company. Yeah. And then it gets extra confusing. It's like, okay, there's two OpenAIs. There's the non-profit OpenAI. That one just owns the for-profit OpenAI. And it owns 2% after this, if you believe semaphore. But then there's also the fact that it's capped profit, no cap. It's capped. You can only make so much money as an investor, which is a way, I think, for them to try to stay true to the original idea was not so much open source as it was making AI in a way that is beneficial for society. And so it's about the reason they didn't go open source in those early days is they said, well, we wanted to be better stewards of this. We only want to release things when we think that there are good guidelines on how to use it properly. And that's why they're dragging their heels on things like GPT-4. They're like, we could release GPT-4 right now, but we don't think it's ready. We don't think we have the proper guidelines in place. Real quick, I guess this is super similar to Android and Google in a sense of control and enhancing it to make it better. No, it's not a great analogy. Just because Android, the open source project is independent of Google in a way that OpenAI, the for-profit company, is not independent of OpenAI, the nonprofit company. You corrected me so elegantly. Thank you. No, not really. That's why we're here. We're talking it through. Speaking of talking through things, the rise, the professionalization, the death, the comeback, and the possible irrelevance of podcasts have been greatly exaggerated over the years. As we do this podcast right now, we understand the irony here, but one thing we know for sure is that being locked at home during a pandemic was great motivation for a lot of people to say, you know what, I should start that podcast I've been thinking about for a while. According to data from Listen Notes, 2020 saw over a 200% increase in new shows compared to 2019, but now that we have data for 2022, we're seeing an interesting trend. Boy, do I have some data for you. So data for last year shows that new podcast creation has fallen off a cliff. The number of new podcasts launched dropped 70% in 2022 compared to the year before, and down 800,000 shows compared to the high at 2020. Now first, this might appear to just be a return to slower growth that we saw in a podcast pre-pandemic, but 2022 saw 219,178 new podcasts down 35% since from 2019, but it's not all gloom and doom. 2022 saw 26.1 million new podcast episodes published up 44% from 2019. So our podcast dying, Tom, or did a lot of people just realize there could be a lot of work? Not as easy as it looks, people. Yeah, I think podcasts are always dying. That's the joke, right? Any of us who've been doing this as long as we have, because Sarah and I have both been doing it for more than 10 years, going back to like 2004, 2005, knows that podcasts have been declared dead many, many times and then never dead. And I don't think they're dead this time. I think what might be different about this time around is that you did finally maybe reach the saturation point where new shows could no longer find an audience, where it was just really hard to make a new audience happen. And you had a larger percentage of shows being started by businesses versus someone who's doing it personally. So a lot of shows, my longest running show, East Meets West, that I do with Roger is just something we enjoy doing. But most shows started during the pandemic were probably from Spotify or some other company wanting to make money. And they realized, oh, it's hard to get discovered because there's so many out there. So I think we hit that limit. What is interesting to me is that the number of episodes seems to have outperformed the number of shows, if you compare it to pre-pandemic, which says to me that the shows that are lasting have found an audience and that audience is sticking around and we're not seeing pod fading from those shows, which I think is really interesting. I mean, so much of this just reminds me of, okay, open up HBO Max. You've got some hit shows and you got some shows that, I don't know, aren't landing as well as the network would like. That is very much like podcasts, even though we're not all necessarily part of one single network. I mean, first of all, making a podcast is hard. And many people who say, you know, I have a lot of things to say end up going, huh, there's a lot of background stuff that I did not realize was part of the deal. You know, if you can't hire somebody to be your engineer, you got to do it yourself. And that's just not for everybody. It's kind of like when we're talking about the things that people were doing during the pandemic because they had time on their hands, it's like, I don't know, I made a lot of banana bread. Am I going to open up a bakery? No. But I mean, why not try? I think there were probably a lot of people who said, you know, let's give this a try. We can't all open bakeries. And that's sort of, you know, it's the same thing with podcast stuff is you can have a great idea. You can have, you know, a heart in the right place. But yeah, there are so many podcasts out there. I mean, I love podcasts, but I only listen to, I don't know, five on a very, very regular basis because, you know, my attention is finite. Listen, I'm so, I'm first, I'm glad you said that, sir. I'm like, I'm so glad people were able to find their creativity and have a voice. I think a lot of people are marginalized, just did not have a voice podcast have been great for that. However, more people are discovering that there are other places to have your voice, such as, you know, the rise of the vertical video where there's on Reels, Facebook, Instagram, excuse me, Facebook, TikTok, or YouTube shorts, they're just other avenues to have your voice. And the barrier of entry, Sarah is a lot easier on TikTok than it is making a podcast, for sure. Yeah. Well, folks, we thought you'd be interested to this because you're listening to a podcast. We, of course, have more thoughts on this because we're creators. So Patrons, stick around after the show. If you, if you want to hear more on Good Day Internet, and if you have a thought about why you think this is happening with podcasting or questions about Microsoft Open AI or anything else, email us feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. Super Nintendo World opened at Universal Studios Hollywood, or it will open at Universal Studios Hollywood Friday, February 17th. This is a smaller version of the one already open at Universal Studios Japan. It only has one main attraction, really, one big ride, Mario Kart Bowser's Challenge. Future versions of Super Nintendo World are coming to Universal's Epic Universe Park in Orlando, Florida and Universal Studios Singapore, both expected in 2025. But Lamar and I both were able to attend a technical rehearsal because my wife works for a company owned by NBC, and NBC being part of the same company as Universal was given the employees a chance to go try it out. There were a few rough edges because, you know, they're still rehearsing. But Lamar, I thought it would be interesting to folks on this show to hear about the augmented reality that is in the Mario Kart ride itself. Because I'll be honest, I was a little skeptical of how well it worked would work. The idea is you put on a headset when you're on the ride, and you're going to see things through that that you would not see if you didn't have that headset on while you're on a kart that's on a track. How did you, how did you find that? So you saw, it's a week and later I found out you knew walking and this was going to be AR. I did not. I thought we were going to get an actual kart and drive around like a go kart. And it wasn't until we got up to the door and they did a presentation, the pre-presentation, I'm like, AR. Oh, that just sounds awful. And I gotta say, Tom, honestly, it was anything but it was, we later I found a Nintendo made their own AR. But once you put that over your, you know, like, you know, you're on a theme park ride. But I really felt like I was hitting people's carts with my shells. I really felt like I was earning those coins that I was seeing pop up on the screen. And it looked and felt really good. Like it felt solid. I don't really have any complaints on it, to be honest. I think they nailed the experience. The best I feel like I don't know what better you can do with a theme park ride. What do you think? Because maybe VR? Yeah, no, I thought this was really interesting. Chief Creative Officer for Universal Creative Terry Coop told Theme Park Insider a while back that they invented this AR. Because I was nosing around trying to be like, wow, did they use HoloLens? Did they get something from somebody else? Was it, you know, was it Quest? Was it, I don't know, Magic Leap? What was it? They said they created their own. I still bet they sourced some parts and technology from somewhere else, but they built it on a game engine. And I would assume that's going to be a Nintendo game engine. And what I found in reality is that you put this thing on, you start rolling forward, you feel like you're on a theme park ride. And the idea is that you have a controller that is your steering wheel. When the arrow comes up in front of you to turn right or left, you have to turn right or left. If everybody in the car, and there's four people in the car, turn right at the same time, you turn better. And it's going to score you more points in the game. You also can press some buttons to shoot turtles. And there are things you can look at. And as you look at them, you see a little dot that's targeting and the turtle shells will, you know, fly out and hit things. And I saw turtle shells hitting things, but it wasn't until halfway through the ride where I realized, Hey, this is actually working. Like when we all turn, I feel us turn more, you know, it's still on a track, but we are having effect. And I would sometimes stop my turtle shells and realize like, Oh, that stream of turtle shells right there, stop. That was me. And I, and so I actually was seeing myself hit things and all of that. It, if it was a real game, it felt like a real game that I was moving through. Yeah, it absolutely did. It also felt like 90 minutes of standing. Yeah, get there for two minutes a game for two minutes. Yeah. Yeah. No, I was impressed. I definitely want to do it again. Uh, as, as I lean, uh, told me in the text, uh, single, single rider next time. Yeah, yeah. The single rider line was like 10 minutes. We, we, we were all in a group together. Uh, and it took an hour and a half, but you're, you know, your mileage may vary. Obviously this is coming to Orlando at some point in 2025. They're going to get the Yoshi ride as well too. Uh, but I think what's interesting is if, if I do go back and try this again, uh, they're going to have new content because it's got on a game engine. So they can push updates the way they would to a normal video game. They can also swap out the hardware. So they made the hardware modular. I probably wouldn't notice anything about that anytime soon, but they said as AR and VR technology gets better, they will be able to go in and take out pieces of the ride and put in new technology to keep pace so that you're not saying like, Hey, my, my quest too is better than this. Yeah. Another cool piece of technology that's optional, uh, for using a park is a $40 wristband that uses NFC technology, similar to the Amiibo that didn't make the little, little characters that you can put on the game pad to get new coins or extra things in the game. So what you would do is you, you'll wear this type of, uh, uh, wristband and they have little stations around there where you can, you'll scan it, get some, get coins. And then you get to take those coins back to your Nintendo, uh, device and, and, and upload them using, you know, the Amiibo technology to, to use in game. I thought that was pretty, you know, fascinating. I would have loved that they gave these out complimentary, but they're 40 bucks. And I, I got, I got. You got all of them is what? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They have, they have one of each, one, one of each guide. Yeah. So no, it is the Hollywood version of this is smaller than the one in Japan. And, and really there's the Mario Kart ride. There's one other ride that you walk through and you collect coins that's AR as well. And then the rest of it is outside collecting coins, uh, hitting the loot boxes and, and the, the pow boxes. And, and there's a, there's a game where you can go around and you can, you can actually, uh, you, you can actually collect, you can level up. Uh, you can play a little game outside. Uh, it is very immersive and it's very pretty. And it does make you feel like you're inside of a Nintendo. Yeah. I, yeah. I thought the, like I said, the park was a little smaller than I expected, but I had no time that I feel like, oh man, I waited all this time. Now it, it, there's so many details we can't even go to in the show. Maybe we'll talk about afterwards, but there's so many little details that make this just an immersive experience. And, uh, um, and then again, just the technology that was involved just made it, made it a excellent experience for, for everybody involved in, you know, who goes to check it out. So we'll check it out. Well Lamar, speaking of experiences, you are a chess player, correct? I have played chess. Yes. No, I, I, I also used to coach, I used to coach kids playing chess too. So yeah. Well, you might already be familiar with the story, but if anybody isn't, it's a good one. On January 1st, the site chess.com introduced a new chess plane bot called Mittens. You might say, who's Mittens? Well, Mittens has an avatar of kind of a cute little kitten. Uh, you know, it looks like Mittens. However, Mittens is ruthless. Mittens was designed to not just be world-class opponents, but also use grueling tax tactics to do so, utilizing painstaking positional battles. Mittens is ruthless. It also makes kind of weird things by referencing ominous quotes from the likes of Robert Oppenheimer and Friedrich Nietzsche. Playing against Mittens has become a phenomenon for the site though, because Mittens is so hard to beat. On track to serve more than 850 million games in January alone. That's 40% more than any month in chess.com's history. So listen, they, uh, they have other cats with different chess ratings, anger cats, scaredy cats. They have a grumpy cat. They all have different personalities in it. They have lower ratings. They get you in, get you in the door. Oh, I'm beating all these cats. No problem. Listen, I usually do this to warmuponchess.com. And then I saw Mittens with the one rating, like one, that has to be an error. So I'm like, well, I beat all these other cats. I'll, you know, no, no, Mittens not only beat me, but trash talk to me. Like just talk mess the whole time. And I'm just like, what's going on? Well, what happened? We weren't just having a good time on Chess.com. I mean, to be fair, that is very catlike of Mittens. It's very catlike. Yeah. They're just devious, but I love cats. So, uh, I will be, I'll still will be going back. But Mittens mesmerizes you. See, because you, you're like, no, no, no, I need to go back and try again, try again. But it's been beating like world, you know, phenomenal chess, uh, phenomenal chess players, and they're just stumped at this engine. So I've had fun with it. And I hope others try it out too. I know that the, the, uh, the model, the, the learning model behind this is really good, but also that gambit, luring you in with a cute cat picture to distract you. Oh yeah. That's genius. Well, thanks to you, Lamar Wilson, not only for playing chess, but also for being with us here today. Uh, let folks know where they can keep up with your latest. Yeah. If you, I just put a video today on, uh, all around the internet, but specifically on YouTube, if you want to watch it there, that, uh, documents in about 50 seconds, uh, our, our trip yesterday at the Nintendo world. So, uh, and, and Tom is then in the video very, very quickly, but, but, uh, I'm, again, I'm very grateful to you and, uh, Ali for letting me go there and be able to document that experience to put on my channel. So if you'd like to see my videos on any kind of lifestyle, technology, uh, pop culture stuff, uh, check me out. Uh, I'm Lamar Wilson.com. Uh, you can check me out anywhere, uh, that you feel comfortable. So thank you. We also have some brand new bosses we got over the weekend. We've got Stanford, we've got Tina, we've got James, and we've got Quaid. They all just started backing us on Patreon. So a big thank you to you, Stanford, Tina, James, and Quaid. Good to have you with us. Indeed. Good, good crew. Ah, welcome. And, uh, come on in. Have a seat. This is very uncomfortable. Yeah, let us know what you think. Let's play chess. Speaking of patrons, do stick around for our extended show, Good Day Internet. We have a lot of fun on that. We will talk about all the things. You can also, uh, check out DTNS. We are live Monday through Friday at 4pm Eastern, 2100 UTC. If you want to join us live, we'd love to have you find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We are back tomorrow talking chat, GPT in resumes and cover letters with Megan Maroney joining us. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frogpants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. I hope you have enjoyed this program.