 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners thanks to all of you including James C. Smith, Miranda Janell, Justin Zellers and our new patrons Kevin and Tim. On this episode of DTNS, Why Matter is probably five years away from making your smart home life truly easy. How Cleveland will make its internet cheap and fast and everybody's coming for open AI. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, October 23, 2023 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. From Deep in the Heart of Texas. I'm Justin Robert Young. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Oh, everybody's making, are you making arm-based chips, Justin? Because everybody's making arm-based chips these days. You want to know what? I was about to do it and then I had to come on and do the show, but hopefully soon. Yeah, AMD's doing it. Apple does it. Microsoft wants everybody to do it. And Reuters sources say NVIDIA is designing arm-based CPUs that run Windows. CPUs. Not GPUs. NVIDIA make an arm-based CPUs. Well, let's see what else is in the quick hits. IP addresses. You need them if you want the traffic to get to the right place, but they could also be used to track you. Between Chrome 119 and Chrome 225, though, Google is going to test offering users IP proxies so that the traffic gets to them, but the tracking is useless because the proxy could be used for anybody. The test will start with US users and only be used with Google's own domains because they say they don't use IP addresses for tracking, so they don't care. And they want to test them on their own domains just to make sure everything's working first. Eventually, the feature will be expanded to include domains known to use IP address tracking. Proxy IPs will be chosen that roughly relate to your location as well so you won't fall afoul of any geo restrictions. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman sources indicate that Apple may indeed introduce a new 24-inch Mac as early as October 30th. Gurman calls it a Mac-centered launch event, but it's unclear if this means a live streamed announcement or just an announcement. Gurman also said that we might get minor chip upgrades to the 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pros and possibly a refreshed 13-inch MacBook Air. Configurations on all these models have shipping dates in November as of now. Apple took the unusual step of delaying its quarterly earnings reports into November, something that they've done before to accommodate late October product announcements. I guess it doesn't matter if they do a live streamed announcement or not. They do stuff's coming, but I'm kind of fascinated with whether they're actually going to do that or not. I think it's also just fascinating to see what the current meta of what rates an in-person announcement, what's a live streamed announcement, and what is in the Nintendo Direct era just, I don't know, upload a YouTube video. Yeah, just drop it. Excel, Microsoft Excel has a feature that automatically converts your cell info to dates when it thinks you're entering a date. The only way you could get around this till now was to format that cell differently, and that might not always hold in various exports and imports and this and that. So in 2020, this was causing scientists to rework how they named genes because some of the names of genes, and I think we even talked about this on DTS, would convert to dates. For example, there's a gene called membrane-associated ring CH type finger 1. They used to abbreviate it MARCH1, but of course, Excel would turn that into one MARCH, you know, like a date. So they changed the name to be MARCHF1 to have just to avoid Excel converting it. Well, finally, last week, Microsoft pushed a fix for Excel on Windows and Mac OS. There's now a checkbox for convert continuous letters and numbers to a date that you can uncheck to say, don't do that. No word on if they're going to change any of those gene names back there. PlayStation announced that Spider-Man 2 sold 2.5 million copies in its first 24 hours, making it the fastest selling PlayStation Studios game ever. God of War, Ragnarok sold 5.1 million in sales in its first week, which at the time was the fastest selling first party Sony title. So at this rate, Spider-Man 2 is the first major third party released to be available on the PS5 and not the PS4. Well, next time you take a long time to patch some software, just be glad you're not NASA and then you'll feel faster. The organization just sent a patch to Voyager 2. Voyager 2 is 12 billion miles away. So the patch takes 18 hours to get to it and then 18 hours for them to tell if it got it. Last year, Voyager 1 somehow flipped into an incorrect mode and began sending some random data. So NASA mitigated the issue and created a patch. But before it pushes it to Voyager 1, it wants to test it on Voyager 2 because Voyager 2 is closer to Earth. Voyager 2 also experienced an issue you may remember when some commands inadvertently caused its antenna to get two degrees out of alignment and they were able to fix that by essentially shouting at it and getting it back. But that was different than this. This patch is for something else. Both of these probes have been in operation for 46 years. Now that is commitment to support. Yeah. Yeah. Take that, Android. I know. NASA provides 46 years of software updates. Nationalized Android. All right. Let's talk matter. Matter is one of those things you're going to keep hearing will solve all your smart home problems someday. But you're going to wonder why it's taken so long. And a lot of people already are saying it's a failure. A lot of people are going to continue to think it's a failure until one day when everything's matter compliant and nobody even questions. It's just a standard and you get excited about new versions of the updates because that's what happened with Bluetooth. If you remember far enough back, people were talking, will Bluetooth really catch on? Our manufacturer is going to adopt Bluetooth. Is it the wireless protocol? And these days, nobody wonders if headphones are going to support Bluetooth. They just get excited when there's new Bluetooth features that come to your headphones. So matter. What the heck is it? Tom, I'm very glad you asked. Matter is an open source software layer standard for communicating between smart home devices that's supposed to be supported by all major players. Its goal is when you buy a smart home device as long as it's matter compliant, you install it and it works. It works with all your other smart home devices, no matter who made them, including Apple, Google, Amazon and Samsung. It goes along with Thread, which is the networking protocol for sending messages. Matter can use Thread, Wi-Fi or Ethernet. Yeah. Okay. So the news today is that matter 1.2 is here. This is one year. Yeah. One year after the official launch of matter, we are already up to 1.2. 1.2 adds support for refrigerators, robot vacuums, smoke alarms, carbon monoxide alarms, air quality sensors of other sorts, air purifiers, air conditioners, fans, washing machines and dishwashers. This is a big expansion from the launch a year ago, which did door locks and light bulbs. You're getting I think about 20 categories now that are supported. The basic feature set now includes start and stop, change the mode and some basic notifications. Some categories support more features like vacuums, you can do remote start, fans, you can do movement controls like oscillations and angles. So you should be able to control a matter compliant robot vacuum from Apple Home now. That was a sticking point for some robot vacuum owners. You would not need to set up an app for each appliance that is matter compliant. You buy a dishwasher that's matter and you've got any matter compliant hub like an Echo or an Apple HomePod or a Google Nest, something like that. You don't have to go and get the LG app and set it up. It just it'll work with your system. That's the promise of matter. Also, this new update adds ecosystem to ecosystem, which if you have two of these hubs, let's say you have a HomePod and a Google Nest, before now, if you change the name on one, it wouldn't necessarily translate to the other with ecosystem to ecosystem in 1.2. If you change the name to kitchen light on one, it'll eventually change it on the other one. Now, here's the downside. Everybody supports matter. Everybody's on board to develop matter. All the big ones, all the ones Justin mentioned, Google, Samsung, Apple, Amazon, all the major appliance manufacturers, LG, Samsung and everybody, they're all on board. But that doesn't mean that they've added the support to every one of their products. There's a difference between saying, yes, we are developing for matter. And yes, we've actually pushed the software update that will add the matter support to the product. Each device decides when it will update to matter 1.2. And with this update, nobody is committing to a date. Now, there's been a few companies say we'll do it soon. But that's the closest we've gotten to any kind of promise. Some people gave vaguer like, yes, yes, it's in development sort of answers. Devices that support matter 1.2 aren't expected to start showing up until 2024. So we also don't even have big ones in here. Cameras are not in 1.2, ovens are not in 1.2. So Justin, I hear a lot of people get upset and say like, matter was supposed to make everything easy and it doesn't, it's a flop. Well, here's the reality of the hill that it's trying to climb. It doesn't succeed until it's completed pretty much 100% of the goal that you would want. It is an audacious promise to say that you are going to be a layer of communication between not only a lot of companies that don't have a tremendous amount of good feelings toward each other, but also are trying to sell things that when you're talking about dishwashers, you might only buy once. And in the world of internet of things devices, if you can anchor somebody with one expensive purchase, then you are more likely to buy some of your more affordable purchases. But that being said, I would agree that if matter is not at the point where it's ubiquitous, then it has certainly not succeeded. I don't know if I would go so far as to say failed. The other side of that coin is it hasn't succeeded until it gets to be Bluetooth. Yeah, exactly. Like I think we are in the situation where we've made a lot of progress because the Echo supports it, the HomePod supports it, the Nest supports it, etc. SmartThings supports it. But all the device makers are looking at development and updates into their existing product lines as a cost. So there are things like TVs that have got it in the pipeline and now it's rolling. But if you're a dishwasher maker, you're like, is it worth the cost to support it yet? I want to support it when everyone else is supporting it. And I don't want to be left behind, but I don't necessarily want to splash out on that money immediately. I might want to save that money, especially in this economy, right? So there's a lot of eyeballing each other, waiting for everyone to jump in the pool. And I think we need a few more matter feature updates and product categories supported that will then cause a few manufacturers to take a flyer because they want to use that to market. And then that will cause everyone else to get in. But it might be five years for it to work through the system. Yeah. I think there's a cultural element to this, too, that you're going to have to see a consumer demand for it just works. I'm excited that it just works. Devices being marketed as that matter compliant. It's a reason to buy this thing that earns that corner of the marketplace. Yeah. And then once that starts to happen, then the ones that aren't matter compliant stop selling as well because the people who are helping you at the Home Depot go, well, that one, which one do you have at home? See, this one's matter. So you can just buy it and no, but that one. Yeah. And I don't think that considering everybody's already bought in, I don't think you're going to get a ton of holdouts, per se, but it does show a reason why you are going to outlay it, outlay the money to support it is because you're going to sell more. And that is the key. All of these manufacturers are in part of the alliance. All of them are supporting the standard. Yes. It's just, well, but I don't know if I want to spend the money to be the first one to put it on my device. There's a little stand off going on. Tector reports on another effort in the US for a city to bring increased connectivity in the face of powerful broadband monopolies. Cleveland. Cleveland has been labeled worst connected city in the US as recently as 2020, but it's turning things around. And to continue to improve the city is working with a company called sci fi networks, not S Y F Y, not a C I F I, it's S I F I sci fi or SIFI will spend $500 million to build an open access fiber network at no cost to the Cleveland taxpayer. The city will pave the way sometimes literally to make it easy for sci fi to roll this out, you know, the permits, any kind of easing of the wheels, that kind of stuff. And then sci fi makes its money back by leasing access to ISPs. They're requiring and agreeing to open that network and say anybody can run an ISP. We're just maintaining the fiber network. Such projects have been done before in lots of places around the world. They tend to lower the cost for ISP market entry, which increases competition and lowers consumer prices. Now, in a city the size of Cleveland, you can expect opposition and probably lawsuits from at least AT&T and maybe Cox cable. Those are the two big ISPs in Cleveland. And Cleveland will hope that sci fi is competent. It's it's doing this in other cities, but it actually hasn't finished anywhere else. So we really need to see that they know what they're doing. We're not saying they don't, but you know, it's yet to be proved. So not just the rollout, but the management of the network. However, it's another example of the desire for improved broadband, pushing back against the resistance of these entrenched companies. This is one of those uniquely American problems. I don't know of another country that has the same kind of confluence of local regulations, local rule and what has eventually in the world of being able to dig cable lines. That's where a lot of these conflicts really stem from was the boom of cable in the seventies and eighties for telecom companies to give themselves soft oligopolies throughout our 50 states. And what this is, is an attempt to break that to say, okay, we are going to give somebody the ability to create a lot of different competitors because you'll be able to sell your product over top of this infrastructure. It's very interesting. I do think it's going to get sued. I wouldn't be shocked if the lawsuits win, but there is no question that the second the careful oligopolies are disrupted prices come down for consumers in this market here, Austin, Texas, it only took about a month for Google Fiber to be in this market for AT&T to offer a competitive fiber service for around the same price. And I don't think that that was a that was in any way a coincidence. Yeah. And if you're wondering, folks, the lawsuits aren't, you know, like, I think it should be illegal for anyone else to run internet. It's usually something around poll access, something is or or the right of way to dig up a street. Now, the city manages the right of way. They provide the permits. And I think that's part of what Cleveland is offering here is like, we'll we'll speed up your access. Maybe AT&T can do a lawsuit that says it's Cleveland is unfairly speeding up access. They might take that tactic. More likely they would take a tactic of saying it is unsafe to give this company poll access because we already have our wires here and they should notify us and they try to put a bunch of speed bumps and obstacles in the way. Other countries don't run into this as often because they have a national standard. I know in Korea and Japan, particularly the location of some of the fastest internet on the planet, if not the fastest internet on the planet, the country says everybody can run as many lines as they want. So you often will have apartment buildings in those countries where there are five fiber providers that are running lines. Now you may say that sounds redundant and wasteful, but it means you have like true competition for high speed broadband. And that's usually one of the arguments against doing it the way Cleveland's doing it, where you're just granting a monopoly to one company to run the lines and open the access. Chatnuga, Tennessee, on the other hand, did that. They had a company build and roll out the fiber and they've had gigabit internet for 10 years or maybe more. So it can work. And also part of the reason why America is an interesting case is because we do have a tremendous strata between very dense cities and rural areas. And yeah, so it's hard to create a national policy, right? Yeah. And because it costs, I mean, like the infrastructure costs, that's what a lot of these, if you're going to steal me on the argument from the villainous telecoms, their argument is we spend a ton of money making sure that we get access to far flung reaches of America. If we only did the most profitable things, then we would be in fewer places. And so that's why we very fiercely protect our rights to go X, Y, or Z with our lawyers and our lobbying. Well, folks, if you got thoughts on this, I know several of you do, send us your thoughts over the social networks. We are at DTNS show on X. We are at DTNS show at mstdn.social on Mastodon. We're at Daily Tech News Show on TikTok. We are DTNS pics PIX on Instagram and on threads. Bunch of AI stories out today, all pointing in an interesting direction, running through some of them. TechCrunch reports Apple recently upped the number of job postings it has related to generative models. The descriptions include things like developer support. So using AI to help code, customer support, chatbots and things, making models work locally on a device, something that's important for Apple. Mark Gurman sources say Apple plans to spend a billion dollars a year on developing generative models for things like coding, creating music playlists for you, completing text in pages and things like that. CNN has a story about the promise of generative models in video games. We've talked about NPCs using conversational chatbots to kind of spice things up when they talk to you. Open worlds can be generated with generative models as well. There's some less covered ground in the CNN story too, like player personalization and customization, as well as plain old help for the developers who are creating the software for the games. And a Bloomberg story adds on to the video game conversation saying generative tools might lower the costs of making a AAA game by as much as 15%. And that would benefit the bigger platforms. Now, follow me here. Microsoft and Sony might benefit the most from this because as the barrier to entry lowers, as it gets cheaper to create a AAA title, more companies are going to do it. And so smaller game companies are going to suffer more from that direct competition than the big ones do. Now it's clear that companies feel that generative models are real business that can win over customers at lower costs. So the conventional wisdom has been that there will be a fight amongst companies like OpenAI, Meta, Anthropic, and Google to provide the tools. This could be similar to the competition for cloud services. And on that point of cloud services, I did want to note this tech crunch article today. A company called ZenML, where the ML is machine learning, is developing an open source model to make AI development modular and local to your company. So it can combine a bunch of tools for models suited particularly to your company's needs. It uses the concept of pipelines and can connect a lot of open source tools and resources wherever they are. You've got them local, you've got them on-prem, you've got cloud services. It can pipe them all together and make a model specific to you that doesn't cost as much as using OpenAI's API. ZenML offers the system open source on GitHub, and then they make their money by providing support and offering things like a cloud version for you if you don't have the ability to do that yourself and you want to. All of that without relying entirely on one API. So the thing I pulled out of this is that the video games is more about using the tools, but the Apple thing and the ZenML thing particularly are that there is lots of room for people to come at OpenAI because everyone knows that OpenAI just has the early advantage, not a permanent advantage, and then it's costly to do things at the scale that OpenAI is doing. It's extraordinarily costly. Let me go to the Apple thing first. I do believe that they are the sleeping giant in this field. I don't think that anybody could have the impact on the AI space, at least as we understand it now with primarily LLMs that are capturing the fascination of the world. Nobody has the hardware install. Nobody has the money that Apple has. I mean, we are at a point now where if you saw at one of these Apple keynotes, Sam Altman make another trip on a keynote stage, maybe this time with three collars, real heads know, that that would make Siri a million times better tomorrow. I think that it could radically change and reshape how we understand and interact with our phones and Apple owning all of that hardware technology and the relationship with the customer, I think would matter a lot. It seems like they are going to go in-house with it. I think it's a smart move. Will they be able to do it? That's a larger question. Yeah. It's not like they've just started developing it. They've been developing this sort of thing for a while. They're ramping up. I think that is more significant than starting. It's that they have been developing something because they thought it might be interesting. Now they've decided it's interesting. Now they've decided it's a product and it's something that they can use. That's typical Apple. Apple didn't bring the iPad to the market first. They didn't even bring the smartphone to the market first. No. They waited to identify when they thought it was real and then poured a bunch of resources into it to bring it. Now it doesn't always work. They've been doing that with automated cars, autonomous cars for years and have not brought a product yet. I'm not saying they won't, but that's one that hasn't yet borne fruit. I do think, I know there's at least two of you who think AI is still a fad. I do think it is not a fad, that it is a useful thing. Like anything that's popular, there's a lot of people claiming it can do things that it can't, but it can do a lot of things and Apple knows that. Look, and I think part of it is for them, the shifting of machine learning being something that they're interested in and where we are right now with LLMs and the projection of what they can be because there's been machine learning on these phones for a long time. There's a reason why it knows all the faces of the people that I talk to the most and it will recommend photos of them. There's a reason why that is done well because they have quantified how that is going to elicit the most excitement out of me. That's different than the idea of interacting with your phone in a more intimate way that has access to information that you wouldn't want to upload to the internet. That's the promise of a fully integrated LLM with Apple's suite of things. When you look at stuff where for whatever we're going to say about Apple Pro Vision is going to be, physical interaction with things is not going to be easy or not as easy as it will be with a keyboard or with a phone in tapping onto the screen. They're going to want more and better voice interaction and that's the promise of where we are right now with stuff like chat GPT. Apple has machine learning chips already built in. They built into the processor. They have the power to do a lot of things on device. Large language models have shown that when properly trained, they can do some really impressive stuff with that data set. A lot of the hallucinations and the negative things are because models like chat GPT-3 were trained on everything. They mimic and can use everything that they were trained on. If Apple comes and says, hey, we've got a large language model that was trained on you and you alone on your device and it's not in the cloud and so it's going to be an expert on you. It may not be able to tell you who won the 1976 World Series, but it will be able to tell you when you need to leave to go to your appointment accurately instead of the guests you get from calendar right now. It will be able to alert you to things that you didn't know you needed to know because it's analyzing everything that it knows about you. When's the last time that, did I leave my brother on read because he texted me six days ago, but it knows it's my brother and it knows, oh, you should probably text him back. Don't leave him hanging. Yeah. These are all the things that Apple has a tremendous advantage towards and I have wondered when they are going to put their chips in the middle of the table and say, either through a partnership or through an acquisition or through their own development, what they're going to do right now, we have seen that they are serious. I do not feel like this is the last story we are going to hear about where they want to go with LLM specifically. All right. We got one last thing here from Dan Campos who hosts Noticias de Tecnología Express, our Spanish language technology program, the Gray Market. Gray Market is a great source for getting a discount on like a name brand phone. You're just giving up your warranty. You're giving up support, but shoppers in Mexico have found some of their Gray Market purchased phones. Just don't work anymore. And Dan Campos explains. In Mexico, over the past few weeks, brands like OPPO and Motorola have been sending notifications to cell phone users who bought imported phones from third party sellers. Additionally, Samsung has initiated phone blocking while also offering a 30% discount coupon for purchasing a new phone from an official seller. While this campaign aimed to alert users about the potential incompatibility of phones imported from other markets, such as China or the United States, with Mexico's networks, it ultimately ended up penalizing the end users. Last week, the Federal Communications Institute issued a statement condemning the blocking of phones. Following this, Motorola released a statement indicating that they will begin blocking theirs, while Samsung is still considering their next steps. Motorola has explained that the decision to block gray phones steamed from internal studies revealing that the gray market was causing a 70% reduction in potential sales for the brand in the phone market. For more information about this, check the latest Noticias de Tecnología Express. Back to you, amigos. Thank you so much, Dan Campos. And real quickly, I'm gonna... Muchas gracias. Muchas gracias, Dan. Danilo. Bodi was among the people who pointed out that beyond the cyber truck Tesla's next thing is also an affordable EV coming sometime after the factory in Mexico has been built. And Bodi also wanted to note, among other people, that Elon's comment about we dug our own grave with the cyber truck in context of the earnings call was more as sort of a joke. There were laughs, which you don't usually hear on an earnings call. Bodi doesn't think Tesla is feeling immediate pressure from other EV makers. He agreed with a lot of the points that were made on the Friday show. But he wanted to point out, Tesla reported that the average build price for all four Tesla models is $37,500. So even with the price cuts, they still have some margin to play with. And they really want people to spend $12,000 on their unfinished, full self-driving products. But the biggest thing that Bodi noted is like, Tesla sold 325,291 EVs in the US. The number two EV seller was Chevy with 34,943. So they are still ahead. Even if they had a rougher quarter, they're still far ahead. Thank you to Justin Robert Young, my friend. What's going on? Well, Tom, you have a podcast that I work on and it's called Know a Little More. And I gotta say that these episodes that have come out over the last few weeks have been among my favorite. Head on over there right now. We are wrapping around to the final episodes about the mother of all demos, the trailblazing demonstration for which technologies debuted and then took decades to make it in to the marketplace. Probably the most tortured path was for collaborative editing. And that episode is coming up soon. Yeah. This week, I think would be a great time to get in on Know a Little More because from episode one to the one that's coming out this week is a complete overview of what DeG Engelbart demonstrated in 1968 and how we're just now within the past several years, seeing the fruition of all that stuff. It's a fun story. And Justin, thank you for helping me tell it in a better way. Well, we do our best. Indeed. All right, patrons, stick around for the extended show, Good Day Internet. Justin wants to talk about the state of content moderation on the internet. Wish me luck. You may think this is a horrible time to be talking about that, but Justin wants to make the argument that this is actually the best time to be talking about that. You can also catch the show live Monday through Friday, 4 p.m. Eastern, 2800 UTC. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live back tomorrow talking artificial wombs with Emily Newitz. See you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. 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