 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners, thanks to all of you, including Philip Shane, Paul Boyer, Brad, and Neil Wilson. On this episode of DTNS, Tristan from AI Named The Show runs down the open AI chatbots developers are making, where you can find them, and are they any good? Plus, Microsoft wants to make a third-party mobile game store, and why remote work is here to stay. This is the Daily Tech News for Friday, December 1st, 2023. In Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. Happy December, everybody, from Studio Garage Partet. I'm Sir Lane. Drawing the top tech stories. In Cleveland, I'm Len Peralta. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Joining us, the host of AI Named The Show and Momentus podcast, Tristan Shutra. Welcome back. Happy to be here. How is it December already? Wait, you know what? We're gonna say that every month. That's what I said on November 1st, and October 1st, and September 1st. And they just keep coming. It's crazy, yeah. Yeah, it's only been a year and a day since the public launch of ChatGPP. If things don't change at this rate, it's going to be January 1st pretty soon. If you don't watch out, it's true. Alright, let's get to the quick hits. Back in May, the U.S. State of Montana enacted SB 419. That's a law that would prevent app stores from offering the TikTok app to customers in the state. Now, the law is set to go into effect in January, but on Thursday, Judge Dolland Malloy, Donald Malloy, rather, granted a request for a preliminary injunction, which would rent the law from going into effect until a case against it can be heard. The judge ruled that the law appears to be too broad and overly affects citizens' rights to free speech out of proportion with the state's governmental interests. Financial Times reports that X is continuing to invest in attracting advertising from small businesses, as larger advertisers are reportedly withdrawing from the platform, and the hope would be to attract enough volume to make up the difference. FT notes that X will need to build out a more sophisticated self-service platform to increase those kinds of clients. Telegram rolled out new features for channels, including custom emojis and better channel discovery. You can also now repost stories on your own channels and pages and get improved channel stats. Telegram also extended its voice to text transcription feature for free users, with a limit of two transcriptions per week. Valve released Steam Link for the Meta Quest 2, Quest 3, and Quest Pro headsets. If you want to use it, you'll need a PC running Steam with a wired connection to your router and then run the game. Your headset needs to be on the same 5 GHz Wi-Fi network as that router, and then, if you got all that, you can run your VR games on Steam and play them on the Steam Link app on your Quest headset. In less fun Steam news, it is dropping support for macOS 10.13 and 10.14, that's High Sierra and Mojave, starting February 15th. Mojave is five years old and it was the last one to do 32-bit games. A week after its acquisition of VMware Broadcom filed notices indicating it plans to lay off more than 2100 employees on January 26th. Insider reports that its sources say Broadcom is also reviewing options for two business units of VMware as well. Alright, the other big news of the day is from Phil Spencer, yapping his lips at the CCXP Comics and Entertainment Convention in Brazil Thursday. Phil Spencer is the CEO of Microsoft Gaming and confirmed in an interview that Microsoft is talking to partners about launching an Xbox mobile store. Spencer implied it's coming soon. Here's a somewhat cryptic statement. I don't think this is multiple years anyway. I think it's sooner than that. So that means one year rather than, I'm not sure. I mean, anything more than one is multiple years. Yeah, exactly. That's the way I'm reading it. The Verge reported earlier this week on court documents in that epic case that showed Activision Blizzard had plans to launch an app. Sorry, this was not in the epic case. This was in the Activision Blizzard case, of course. It showed that Activision Blizzard had plans to launch an app store of its own on Android but opted for a better ad deal with Google instead. That is the part that has to do with the epic case. Anyway, Microsoft has said in filings that it wanted to acquire Activision Blizzard in order to build out mobile gaming. Activision Blizzard owns mobile games like Candy Crush, along with mobile versions of its big franchises like Warcraft and Call of Duty. But as Amazon can tell them, launching a third party app store, not as easy as it sounds. I mean, you can do it on Android, but then you got to teach everybody how to side load it. And you can't even do it on Apple, though EU laws might force them to allow it. It looks like they may. It's definitely not there yet. I'm sort of wondering if this was... You mentioned Phil Spencer, you know, yapping his lips. And is this really the place to announce something that obviously is going to get a lot of attention? Maybe it is. Maybe this is a tactic. Maybe similar things have been launched at CCXP in the past. But it feels sort of odd for this to be the place where you're hearing about something that obviously affects not only the companies involved but their users as well. Yeah, and just to make sure everybody has the context. The news isn't that Microsoft wants to do a mobile store. They've been out there in the public for a while. What Spencer did was say the sort of weird timeline of like, I don't think it's multiple years. I think it's sooner than that. He said, I think so he could be wrong. Roger, you played lots of games. What do you think of this? It sounds like they just want to kind of set the field for a possible introduction. I think a lot of this kind of is dependent on how quickly they can integrate Activision Blizzard into the Microsoft Xbox framework of how they do things. And, you know, it's very interesting because, you know, for as much knocking as Netflix gets for having their game ventures be mobile only, I mean, having a mobile footprint seems to be where they want to go because Microsoft, I mean, moving forward, they don't necessarily want to be tied down to hardware. They just want eyeballs. And if those eyeballs can be achieved through mobile, especially in countries where Xboxes are very expensive and those games are very expensive, having specifically a streaming way to play a lot of those games at a much reduced rate to get more eyeballs would be a win. Yeah, well, and to be clear, we're talking about a download store, not necessarily a streaming store, but it could be. You know, we don't really know. Well, that's the thing. It's very vague. This whole mobile store is very vague. There's really no specifics as to whether or not it's streaming or if it's download only or if it's a combination of the two. It feels like they're trying to, they've stuck their big toe in the water and they're going to see, you know, how cold or warm the water is before they, you know, jump the rest of the body in. I would push back a little bit on the eyeballs thing, too, because the filings that Microsoft made indicated that half of Activision's Blizzard's revenues in the first half of 22 came from mobile gaming. So there's a money interest on top of the eyeballs there. There's coins on those eyes, is all I'm saying. Yes. It seems to me that we know that this has been in the works for a number of years and Spencer himself is saying that they're trying to position themselves for the next 10, 20, 30 years even. And so they're definitely playing the long game here. And what it reminds me a little bit of the current political situation in the United States where you have what everyone assumes are going to be the two main candidates for, you know, the two main political parties. I always say Android. But there are people whether, you know, who are kind of the second tier who are still having debates. Some of them are governors who are going out there having debates with each other. Microsoft is Nikki Haley. And they're just waiting for the other shoe to drop the other shoe being the EU. Right. If the EU comes down hard on Apple, like they've been done with the USBC and all the other things that we've talked about the EU loves to EU. So Xbox and Microsoft, they want to be ready for when that happens. So they've got their store ready to go. They've got their full complement of assets from what they've got previously, what they have from Activision Blizzard. And let's roll because, you know, every epic would be scrambling. Apple won, you know, is won the last case with Epic, but, you know, that'll probably go into appeal and whatnot. But if the EU makes it happen, then do you think this question is, is Apple really going to make it an EU only thing where you can have third-party app stores? Or are they going to relent and make it so that becomes a global thing just because it's less hassle? I mean, that's TBD, but Europe itself is still, you know, a sizable market. So I think just Microsoft wants to be ready to pull the trigger should Apple get compelled to open up its platform to third-party app stores. Just like certain political hopefuls are ready to jump should, you know, one of the two main contenders drop out for age-related reasons or crime-related reasons. And this brings it back to Sarah's point, which is that could be why Microsoft made this sort of weird choice to talk about this at the CCXP because they want to drop a little bit of pressure on Apple in the EU's case. The Apple is trying to fight back against being classified as something that has to open up to a third party. They're trying to make their arguments that they don't qualify for those parts of the act. And so now the EU can point to like, well, Microsoft's out there saying they want to do a third-party game store, you know, and that could be another piece of the puzzle there. Can I throw in a chaos element? Sure. Yes. Well, Sacha Nadella in the last few weeks had mentioned one of his great regrets was killing Windows mobile phones. Yeah. And what if Windows mobile to make some kind of comeback powered by the last box store? I don't think these are on the same track. You never know. You never know. Bring back the Lumia, please. That would be a first ball. We need a third player for those Microsoft people who are trying to straddle ecosystems, either with Google or with Apple. That would answer this if you're like, wait, what are they going to do? There's no third-party mobile on end, but they'd have to create a market. Xbox wants to have a mobile store on as many platforms. And of course, Spencer even said, like, we want this on Apple. We want this on Android. It's just a matter of how he's going to get that done. I would have suggested like the X phone, but you know what? X is being overused these days. Oh, everyone's on Q now, so. Yeah, right. Well, everyone's also trying to figure out whether or not they have to go back to the office. The mandate to go back to the office, often seen as BTO for workers who've gotten used to working from home has flatlined. Now, at least that's what Nick Bloom, who's an economics professor at Stanford University, who studies workplace trends, is saying. In fact, he looked at some numbers, checked a lot of studies, and he declared in a post on X that the return to the workplace is dead. Yeah, so here's a little background. As of May 2020, the survey of working arrangements and attitudes estimated that 61.5% of paid, full workdays were from home. That's May 2020, of course, right? That's at the height of the lockdown. By 2022, you might guess that number fell by about half, indicating people were returning to physical offices somewhere, either because they wanted to or they had to. RTO, by the way, not BTO. Bloom told CNBC that the share of paid work from home days has been totally flat this year, hovering around 28%. You might say, well, maybe this is still part of an ongoing downward trend of working from home. But Bloom says this number is still four times greater than the 7% of remote workers pre-pandemic. Not a lot of people, I mean, certainly a lot of people, but not a lot of people in the grand scheme of workers pre-pandemic were working from home. Bloom also notes data from CASEL, CASEL with a K, noting the numbers of employee office swipe-ins, which not every office has them, but larger offices do, shows that office occupancy in the 10 largest US metro areas also flat, hovering around 50% in 2023, essentially meaning the people who were going to get back into the car and go back to the office have already done so. And now we're in a new normal with some people doing that and some people not going to do that. Yeah, so the idea that this is going to turn around in 2025 and remote work will start increasing again is fascinating to me. The argument is that in 2024, we are likely to experience an economic slowdown. It may or may not qualify as a recession, but that will tighten the labor market if that happens. And one of the arguments for remote work has been it has persisted because the labor market is so loose that someone can look at a job and say, you know what, if you're going to make me go into the office, then I'm going to go find a remote job that has plenty of jobs to choose from. If that labor market tight tightens up, then a lot more people will have to settle for a job that makes them go into an office. And again, I just want to throw this out here right now because some of you are already saying it to your phones or your radios. We're only talking about jobs that can be done from home. We understand that you can't be a security guard on a construction site from home, at least not yet. So this conversation is only about jobs that can be done from home. I think are going to suffer from this because people will have fewer choices. However, the counterbalancing factor here is that companies are starting to learn that it costs less to have their workers remote. And so if you have a economic downturn or possibly a recession, they may want to save that money and not make them go back into the office. And then the idea is that technological improvements will continue and make it easier to work from home. It'll make remote work productivity go up. And that's why in 2025, they think it will start to see it rise. Well, and how many times in the past have all of us maybe read, I don't know, say on LinkedIn or something, there's a job description where you go, gosh, that's totally me, but it's in Singapore. I can't move to Singapore. If there are skilled workers who are the best people for the job who can for some reason make it work remotely, and that just wasn't an option before unless you were in the correct metro area, that helps companies a lot. I know that there's the argument that people say, well, companies have multi-year leases for these very expensive buildings, let's say. What is Apple going to do with the Cupertino one infinite loop campus? If no one's coming back to it, think of how much, how expensive that is to run. Well, okay, well, Apple's a bad example because they're probably not leasing that from somebody else. But many other companies, you hear about sub leases, yes. But also, if work is being done well, no matter where everybody is, and you can cut costs by, I don't know, not having the lights on 24 hours a day, not stocking the cafeteria with stuff, not paying certain people to be there to work in the cafeteria, for example. Not running the HVAC, that's why CNET shut down between Christmas and New Year's because they could just reduce building operations enough to save money. There you go. It's like, I get where if someone says, but we had this great idea and it was supposed to be this way and now it isn't anymore. I don't know how it would be, it would be hard to let that go. I know not every company is grappling with that necessarily, but I think there's a lot of this like, but it's better in person. And sometimes it is, but sometimes it isn't. Well, like Tom alluded to, it really depends on the type of work it is, the type of business you've got. And a lot of my friends and colleagues are kind of in information work or marketing and all sorts of stuff where it doesn't really matter where you are. A lot of software developers. Right now, most of them seem to be in this hybrid thing that kind of landed on going into the office two or three days a week because a lot of the workplaces are still wanting to see their employees once in a while, which I get. There's a lot of interesting dynamics that happen and opportunities that are afforded to those who actually show up to the office because especially if executives are there, they like to see people. And if you're getting more FaceTime with executives, you know, management, et cetera, et cetera, it may behoove you to be in the office a little more often. So there may end up being some inequities that arise because you've got some people, whether by choice, by preference, or by circumstance, are able to be at the office more. They may somehow get more opportunities by being there. So there's a few things that may be changing with work culture, including things like sick days, like how many people, like when you're sick, I don't know about you, but even pre-COVID, I would still work. And maybe it's because I've got a personality defect, but I still would work, you know, a bit, maybe not as much. But nowadays, well, if you're working from home and now anyhow, and you're sick, well, I mean, are you really sick? And maybe you should check in any ways. Is it possible for people to take pure sick days and fully disconnect? I think we need to navigate what the expectations are because there's always going to be a certain class, a certain generation of managers that are skeptical of remote work and, you know, all the things that surround it. Another thing with our company, we've been around for 14 years, Limestone Learning, we design online training, which is done by people, you know, remotely, wherever, but all our team was virtual. We have all contractors and we've had a distributed workforce the whole time. Just before COVID, we got actual office space because it was required, exactly. It was required for certain high security government, federal government contracts. We literally got it like September 2019. It's like, oh man, we still have that space because apparently we're bad with money, but it's great for meetings and whatnot. But there is something to be said for certain types of gatherings, like brainstorming sessions. It all depends on how you're wired as well. Yeah, I don't think anyone's arguing that remote work must win and all work should be remote. And I don't think anyone's even arguing that hybrid should go away. In fact, we're not arguing about which is better here. The story is that it looks like we have hit the bottom and returned to work and that remote work is turning out in practice to be beneficial and companies are learning, like, okay, we know what the downsides are, but we know what the upsides are and maybe the upsides are outweighing the downsides. And there are things we can do like having special events, you know, bringing people into the office from time to time to kind of balance out the downsides. That's what the numbers are saying from the 10,000 feet look. At least that's what this guy from Stanford is saying. There's a quick, a couple other economic implications for all this, as Sarah alluded to, the commercial real estate, the leases, prices, there's probably going to be some downward pressure on those. Maybe you'll see some converted into residential eventually if there's going to be only 30% or 60% utilized. But then there's, again, you, Tom had mentioned what's the strength of the job market. A couple years ago, when we were in the middle of COVID, Facebook started telling people, well, you know, we were paying you salary X because you were having to pay San Francisco real estate or rental prices. Now that you're working remotely, you could be in Wyoming for all we care, maybe you don't get that kind of premium. I know somebody who works at Metta who had that absolute conundrum. It's not, you might be in Wyoming. It's, oh, if you're in Wyoming, we're going to pay you a Wyoming salary because it's a different cost of living. That saves companies money as well. So they're more likely to want to support that. And of course there's going to be pushback, especially if people have moved to remote places and they're not going to want to take a cut. I think that's temporary. There's the temporary situation where people move during lockdowns with the understanding they'd keep their salary. And then you have to juggle that. As they hire new people, it won't be as much of a deal because you'll say, oh, this is a remote job. We're going to pay your salary based on where you are. And you'll know that guy's wide open going in. They've set the table, especially since they laid off 10,000 people last year. I just always think of myself not totally included in this because I actually, I used to enjoy going to the office, although I haven't gone to an office regularly since 2017 before I joined DTNS. And only sporadically since then, but everyone knows that coworker who kind of keeps to themselves. They don't have to be part of a lot of meetings. They do great work. Maybe they bring their own lunch and don't even, they just kind of come and go and hello, bye. And it's like, that's the great example of a person where I'm like, how can you argue that they need to come into the office? I mean, unless they just like to be sort of introverted, but still be around people. There's, there's so many examples of that. And that's why I feel like these numbers are healthy. Let's re, let's rethink who needs to collaborate in person and who does not or who doesn't need to do it five days a week. All right, folks, don't forget we have a YouTube channel, youtube.com slash daily tech news show. We do a top five show there along with Android faithful and a bunch of other stuff. If you would like to check it out this week's top five is tips to help you do tech support for your family as you head into the holidays. Last month, open AI announced GPT's little chat agents that developers can use on their platforms. They were supposed to launch a store in November, then maybe December, but they just announced that the GPT chatbot store will be delayed until next year because quote, unexpected things have been keeping us busy. I wonder what they're talking about. I have no idea. How could it be Sam Alden getting fired and rehired? I have no idea, but that doesn't mean you can't find some GPT's to try. Tristan, you and Teja have been following the rise of all these custom chatbots on AI named the show. What can you tell us about them? Well, it's since the public debuts of image generation platforms like mid-journey, stable diffusion in Dolly and then the launch last year of chat GPT and other large language models, prompt engineering has emerged as a key skill over the last couple of years, but we are not all born prompt engineers and we're definitely not born coders, manipulating the GPT APIs. So what OpenAI has done is allowed us to create these custom GPTs within a no-code environment by basically having a little conversation with the default chatbot for creating these sorts of things. So just to set the table, there are already tens of thousands of custom GPTs that people have made already. I tried one on insurance, like getting insurance advice. It wasn't bad, but then what I did, if you want to test how good some of these are, just try regular chat GPT and compare your answers. I found that my regular chat GPT with my custom instructions that I have, that I stole from Seth Godin, actually gave me more structured and relevant information in that particular case. But then there are all sorts of wild and wacky GPTs available out there. Some are useful, like newsletter creators, SEO assistance, search engine optimization for your website, code debuggers, and then there are some where you want to have a chat with Gaius Julius Caesar, or maybe some of the Stoics, or a Sun Tzu in the art of war. Michael Scott from the office. You can have a conversation with him. One of my current favorites is actually one of the ones developed by OpenAI themselves. It's one of the ones they demoed and it's called StickerWiz. And you could actually create stickers by having a conversation with it. So obviously it's using Dali. And so I just threw a few descriptions of our dog and our previous cats over the time. So we got Levi and Simon and Stella and Stanley. It would be clear. You're not asking for each one of these stickers like you would in Dali. Like make me a sticker. You're just chatting? Exactly. And you don't have to create this in this style with dramatic lighting and this. So the whole point with these custom GPTs when they're built is they set the table. It's kind of like how you can do custom instructions for all your chats. Now it's custom instructions on a sort of bot by bot basis, a GPT by GPT basis. So you don't have to keep reiterating the same things over and over again. And especially when you've got sophisticated queries, it can get really annoying and you're having to copy and paste things in there to get the sort of answers you want. So with this case with StickerWiz, you don't have to say create me a sticker of blah, blah, blah. It already has that built into its brain that what a sticker might look like. Because it's purpose built. Exactly. I get why that's a great example of why these are better than just using chat GPT because I know a lot of people are like, well, why can't I just use the existing tools for that? So these are streamlined. They're faster. They're more efficient. They're better at what they are purporting to do. And I know that there's another benefit of being able to use your own data if you want to build one for your own system. But if we're waiting for that store to come for us to explore these, how do we find them until then? Well, there are, of course, since this got announced in early November, there's been tons of directories have popped up. And that's part of the challenges waiting through. There's no single one has really emerged as the place to go. A couple of the worth checking out. There's one called allgptes.com, which is a pretty simple and clean interface. It's got filters because there's a lot. You can filter by categories because you've got thousands that you're potentially waiting through. Another good one is called gptsdev.com. It's more visual. It shows the custom icons for each of them. So to help you browse around. And it has the filters too, including those that are trending. I've yet to find one that's got reviews. I think once you start to see some that have ratings and reviews that will help. I think there's going to be a lot of fallout, a lot of attrition in this space eventually. But it's a wild west days. This isn't even a month since this happened. It's gotten to the point now where custom gpts have been made to help you find custom gpts. Custom gpt, of course. So there's gpt shopkeeper. There's gpt finder. And so you can load those in to your sidebar and then say, find me a gpt that does X. And it will do it for you. And to your point, Tom, I think where the real power is, I mean, this is fun to try other peoples. But the coolest part is being able to create your own for personal or business purposes. So you may have discussed in the past you can load up your company policies, your HR policies and just have a conversation. Oh, I've been working here for three years. How many sick days do I get? Or how many vacation days do I get? And just having an actual smart chat bot for a change rather than having to wade through folders and files to find specific policies or bugging your HR manager. You could set up writing styles for different modes of communication based on your brand standards. So what's the style for social media? What's the style for press releases and whatnot? And have the gpt help you with those sorts of things. So there's no code. You're just having a conversation. And the better it's designed, the more information you give at the outset, the better your output will be ultimately. So that whole gigo garbage in garbage out. So basically when you want to set one up, you just simply have a conversation with the gbt builder, explain what you want the gbt to accomplish. And then it'll ask you a series of questions that will help your idea materialize. And it's not set in stone. You can go and refine it later. And those refinements will apply to all future chats, not past ones of course. And then there's a little preview section, a little playground where you can test it out as you're developing it. Well folks, if you want to keep up on this, the best way is to follow Tristan and listen to him and Tasia talk about this at AI named this show. Real quickly before we wrap up today's show, Len Peralta has been illustrating exactly what we've just been talking about. Len, tell us about your drawing. You know, I've been doing this show, as long with you for a decade. And I've drawn a lot of stuff. And I can't believe I have not drawn this before. This image is exactly the way that I was, as you listen, you talk about it. This, I kind of fits well with chat, GPT and GPTs and developers. This is the angry girlfriend. Distracted boyfriend. Distracted boyfriend. Thank you. Distracted boyfriend. Yes. You know what, I was reading about it and it's the exact same thing that I thought would be perfect for this discussion. So yeah, if you're collecting these images of the distracted boyfriend, you can go to my Patreon, patreon.com forward slash Len. You can get that immediately by backing me at the DTNES lover level. Or you can go to my online store, LenPeraltaStore.com, where that is available for purchase, as well as custom-drawn holiday cards. Bring them to me. I've got an open queue and I can draw something special for your birthday. Not for Christmas. Not AI generated, by the way. Not they do. And for your birthday. Yeah. Get that custom bespoke human-drawn art from LenPeralta, please. Tristan Jutra, also such a pleasure to have you. Tom mentioned AI named the show, but let folks know where they can keep up with the rest of your work. You can also find me at momentus.tv and limestonelearning.com. And of course, Taysha and I are at ainamedhesshow.com. Patrons, stick around for the extended show Good Day Internet. We have another round of Who Am I? On Friday, we're going to try to guess the identity of a person before the final clue is given. It's a fun time. Please join us. Just a reminder, our show is live Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern. That is 2100 UTC and you can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We hope you have a wonderful weekend. We're back on Monday with the best Android phone picks coming from none other than Ayaz Akhtar. He knows his stuff. This week's episodes of Daily Tech New Show were created by the following people, host producer and writer Tom Merritt, host producer and writer Sarah Lane, executive producer and Booker Roger Chang, producer, writer and co-host Rob Dunwood, video producer and Twitch producer Joe Kuntz, technical producer Anthony Lamos, Spanish language host, writer and producer Dan Campos, science correspondent Dr. Nicky Ackermanns, social media producer and moderator Zoe Detterding. Our mods, Beatmaster, W. Scottus-1, BioCow, Captain Gipper, Steve Rotorama, Paul Reese, Matthew J. Stevens, a.k.a. Gadget Virtuoso and J.D. Galloway. Modern video hosting by Dan Christensen, music and art provided by Martin Bell, Dan Looters, Mustafa A, Acast and Len Peralta. Live art performed by Len Peralta. Acast adds support from Tatiana Matias, Patreon support from Tom McNeil. Contributors for this week's shows included Shannon Morse, Patrick Dorton, Scott Johnson, Justin Robert Young and Chris Christensen. And our guest this week was Tristan Zutra. Thanks to all the patrons who make the show possible.