 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners, thanks to all of you, including Erwin Ster, Ken Hayes, and Philip Shane. Coming up on DTNS, Apple has new chips and a new way of announcing them, plus Microsoft unleashes its open AI advantage into the cloud, and why the young folks these days seem to love a flip-flop. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, January 17th, 2023 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. From lovely Cleveland, Ohio, I'm Mitch Trafalino. From the Atlanta area, I'm Nika Montport. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Ah, my friends, welcome back. It's good to have you all. Nika, good to see you. Happy New Year. Happy New Year. It's great to be back. You may notice that Nika, co-host of SnobOS by guest, who is often on DTNS after Apple announcements, is on today after an Apple announcement that we didn't know was coming. So all we can assume, Nika, is that Apple saw you were going to be on the show and quickly made an announcement. I agree. I concur. That's exactly what happened. It's science. Science. You can't argue. Follow the science, people. All right, let's start with the quick hits. Twitter finally broke the silence, not the science, but the silence over why third-party apps are no longer working with Twitter's API, or at least a lot of them aren't. A post on the company Twitter account on Twitter says, Twitter is enforcing its long-standing API rules that may result in some apps not working. That's it. That's all they said. Many third-party Twitter clients started having widespread problems accessing Twitter last Thursday. Twitter did not publicly clarify what rules were at issue. A lot of the third-party app makers say they haven't clarified it privately either. There are a few apps out there that have continued to work. They apparently are following whatever those rules are. Albatross and the iOS version of Phoenix, FENIX, are two examples that The Verge gave of those. Roblox announced daily active users rose 18% on the year in December to 61.5 million users. Average revenue per user stayed flat, but the increased users should be enough to raise estimated revenue by between 17 and 20%, probably because users went up 18%. Roblox makes money by selling Robux in the game, and it's one of the closest existing platforms to what maybe could be considered a metaverse someday. New term, I know. It's my best bet on what actually becomes a metaverse. Roblox, maybe Minecraft, but I'm betting on Roblox. 9to5Google passed on a report from Android developer Kubo Wojciowski who found references to a location tracker under development by Google by its Nest team, internally referred to as GroGoo. If I explained what GroGoo was, that'd be a spoiler for those of you who haven't seen the Mandalorian. This would support Bluetooth low energy as well as ultra-wideband modules that are found on recent pixel devices. No word on any release timeframe. But in other Google Bluetooth news, Google also released a tool to unlock your Stadia controller so that it can work as a Bluetooth device instead of being locked to Wi-Fi. If you want to do that to your Stadia controller, go to stadia.google.com slash controller in Chrome, and you'll be able to use that unlocker. Google says it will continue to support that tool until December 31st this year, so you want to get it unlocked before then. Stadia shuts down at midnight Wednesday, January 18th. Good night, sweet prince. Well, if you're making some tech, you're going to need some rare earth metals more than likely. They're key to just a lot of tech. They're used in things for magnets, for hard drives, at wind turbines, part of camera lenses, a key component there. Vehicle batteries and TV screens makes access to them pretty important. Currently, the EU contains no active mines for these metals, with 98% coming from China. That may change, though, after over 1 million tons of rare earth metal deposits were discovered in Arctic Sweden. While a large deposit for Europe, considering it had no active mines, the US estimates the world currently holds about 120 million ton in reserves in rare earth metals. L-CAD mining company CEO Jan Mostrum cautioned these deposits may take 10 to 15 years to get to market. The lawsuits over machine-generated art are officially underway. Getty Images, the juggernaut, has announced it has commenced legal proceedings in the High Court of Justice in London against stability AI. You may know them as the creators of the Text to Image Engine Stable Diffusion. The accusation is copyright violation, no fair dealing defense involved. Stability AI uses an open source data set so you can see what images it has trained on. In a similar vein, a group of artists filed a US Federal Class Action lawsuit in San Francisco against not only stability AI, but mid-journey and deviant art as well. This suit alleges a violation of the United States Digital Millennium Copyright Act, as well as allegations of unlawful competition and violating the right of publicity. These charges center around these systems' ability to request an output in the style of existing artists without permission. The law firm filing the suit, Joseph Severi, filed a similar suit against GitHub last year, alleging that its co-pilot AI programming tool also violated copyright for using code to train on that is copyright protected. And that is a look at the quick hits. We're going to talk a little bit more about Microsoft and co-pilot and AI in a bit, but let's start with this new Apple stuff, Rich. Yeah, Apple announced two new computer chips Tuesday built on a 5-nanometer process. The M2 Pro offers 10 or 12 CPU cores and up to 19 GPU cores. The M2 Max offers 12 CPU cores and up to 38 GPU cores, as well as up to 96 gigabytes of unified memory that's up from 64 on the previous M1 Max. Multi-threaded CPU performance is 20% faster than the M1 Pro and M1 Max. Both chips include Apple's next-generation 16-core neural engine and are more power efficient than their predecessors. And you can buy some stuff that runs on them. The new chips are going to show up as a chip refresh in Apple's 14 and 16-inch MacBook Pros. So they will both now come with the M2 Pro and M2 Max chips. Both of these MacBook Pros will support Wi-Fi 6E and include HDMI 2.1 ports with support for an external 8K display. The 14-inch MacBook Pro starts at $1,999 and the 16-inch one at $2,499 with a paltry 256 gigabytes of starting storage. You're going to want to increase that. I mean, Apple's going to upsell, come on. They're up to 8 terabytes, so you got plenty of room to spend more. That's the benefit. They're giving you a lot of latitude. I really appreciate that flexibility. Apple also gave some love and updated the Mac Mini to come with either the M2 or M2 Pro. The M2 Pro model of the Mac Mini adds two additional Thunderbolt 4 ports for a total of four. The base M2 Mini starts at $599, $100 less than the M1 previous version and the Mac Mini M2 Pro model starts at $1,299. And this now makes with this refresh the Mac Pro the only Apple computer sold with an Intel chip instead of Apple Silicon. All models are available to order now and will start shipping January 24th. Alright, this is really just a chip refresh. It's made a little more exciting though because instead of old Intel chip refreshes we're hearing about new chips from Apple at the same time as the refresh. Keep in mind in the past if this were to happen Intel would have already announced the new chips a little earlier and Apple would just be updating the lines to include them. So you'd be like, ah, the new MacBooks come with a different Intel chip and HDMI 2.1. So this is a little more exciting and there's another new wrinkle here rather than a live event to introduce the new chips and the new models of the MacBook Pro and Mac Mini. Apple just posted an 18 minute video. Haslamar Wilson and Brian Tong in it, which is kind of fun but it's similar to what Apple would have done during the lockdowns when they didn't have people coming to an announcement but it's shorter. It's only 18 minutes and they didn't stream it live. They didn't make an event out of it. They just posted it. Nika, I'm curious if you think this is like a new strategy for Apple are they going to just put videos? They're like, oh, we got good at making these pre-produced videos or were they going to do something else and this was a part of it and they changed plans or are they just reserving live events for bigger products? What do you think? I think it's kind of twofold. I think coming into a new year, I think particularly before I think the end of last year we got a press release of some new hardware. So I think instead of doing the typical, we're just going to drop a blurb on the website. I think they realized that they did get really good at producing events and this is a way to get the information out there. So use their snazzy studios and fancy dude ads or whatever you want to call it to produce a show and I think for this particularly, this is not on cycle for a typical Apple event. This is the beginning of January. We weren't expecting really anything new this early and I think it's a way to let's go ahead and use the knowledge that we've gained from the last two or three years for producing these events. Let's go ahead and get this out there. It's not a major release, but it is hardware, so it is important. So let's give it a little razzle-dazzle for a hardware release where we don't have to do a full on production and save our full on productions for our typical cycle when I think we may have a lot more to see from Apple this year. Yeah. I mean, part of it is also that I feel like there, I mean, Apple is always good about tuning it so horn, whatever is new, but also that I feel like the optics of this, you know, kind of missing that Q4 date that they've hit for like over a dozen years for a new max and that kind of stuff. These were expected and kind of famously reported as late. Again, Apple doesn't necessarily care about that and they'll say it's going to be the greatest thing ever of all time. But, you know, we haven't seen a new manufacturing process for any of these chips. We're seeing pretty much modest performance gains when at least according to Apple's own estimates, basically we added 20% more cores so you get 20% more performance. I feel like a lot of the way this is being presented is this is, if you were going to buy a MacBook, now you get one with the new chip and the pricing stays relatively the same. The biggest one is the Mac mini, which I feel like has gotten even the least, you know, up for a fairly low key refresh has gotten kind of the least coverage, at least from what I was saying. Yeah. Yeah. I wholeheartedly agree. I definitely think it's one of those things where it's a minor upgrade. If you're in the market now was the time to buy it. You get the latest and the greatest. But again, especially with the mini, I am probably going to get one of the new minis because I have one of the original minis. So it's one of those things where it still works perfectly fine. But I mean, I love my M1 Pro. So if I can get an M2 with that kind of power in my mini, then, you know, at this point, why not? But I definitely think it's a calculated strategy on trying it this way. So I think we'll see more of it. There's a couple of scenarios could have led to this. One is they were preparing this for the fall and the chips weren't going to make it in time because of all the disruption to chip making, especially in China. So they decided to just keep all of that production value and put out a separate video. Could also be that they were planning to do it as part of the AR headset that they were thinking they were going to announce early this year. Then they decided not to announce it early this year. So they pulled it out. But whether that's why or not, I do feel like Apple is going to look at this and say, hey, like you said earlier, we got we got good at doing this. It makes for a compelling video. People will watch it. Let's test. Let's see how many people will watch it. And if enough people are watching this and the message got out there, you probably will see this happen more often. Because even when they had people come, they did pre-produced elements of that. So this is now just part of their regular way of doing things. Yep, wholeheartedly agree. All right. Minority of the UK's ruling conservative party has caused the majority of that party to agree to amend its online safety bill. So in other words, some parts of the conservative party wanted something that the rest of it didn't, but they got them to agree to what they wanted anyway. 50 conservative MPs introduced an amendment that would subject tech company managers to criminal penalties, including prison. The amendment is going to be withdrawn in exchange for a more carefully worded version of that same amendment to be added. Yeah, the bill requires managers of sites that include user-generated content to take, quote, proportionate measures to stop children from seeing harmful material. Examples include things like age verification, content takedowns, and parental controls. The bill makes the managers criminally liable if they fail to provide regulator of-com with information. So before it was going to be a 10% fine on the yearly revenue blah, blah, blah, blah, the new wording, which is yet to be finalized, will impose the possibility of criminal penalties including prison sentences of up to two years. Culture Secretary Michelle Donilon reassured the press that the new wording will apply criminal penalties to senior managers that, quote, have consented or connived in ignoring enforceable requirements risking serious harm to children, but would not affect, and we'll go back to quoting again, those who have acted in good faith to comply in a proportionate way. The Wikimedia Foundation's Rebecca McKinnon said that the bill should not be applied to Wikipedia in the same way that's being applied to social media. McKinnon points out that the EU Digital Services Act differentiates between companies with centralized moderation done by employees and Wikipedia-style moderation run by volunteers. McKinnon worries that, as written, the bill might require Wikipedia staff to intervene in article edits, which they do not normally do. Now, this is not a show about the inner workings of the UK parliamentary system, but one aspect of this is that the amendment isn't there. The bill has been sent to the House of Lords, which is the upper house, which usually doesn't have any effect, and that they did that so they have time to add the amendment. The Lords, the hereditary peerage, will add the amendment, and then it will come back, and at that point we'll actually know what it actually says. But for now, there's a lot of like, oh, don't worry, we'll be sensible about how we apply this. Nika, no one ever worries about that. The government is always sensible, right? They are always sensible. They always make everything so easy for people to manage, and they make it even easier to read through these bills and these acts to understand exactly what's going on. Yeah, I think the British people should be very comforted by those statements. Yeah, I mean, definitely the tone of the coverage that I was reading about this is that phrase, right? Good faith. It seems to be like, okay, this headline seems like if you work for a tech company, maybe this legislation might cause a lot of issues, right? It might open up a lot of liability to people that ordinarily would not have that, and that definitely seems to be the takeaway that whether this is written very specifically in the law with this language or this goes to OFCOM and this comes down to their enforcement of this, we're going to be definitely relying on this. If you are trying in some way, people aren't going to jail presumably. Some version of this online safety bill has been in the work for decades, and they keep running into problems with people wanting it to be stronger, tech companies wanted it to be weaker, and other folks like Wikipedia saying this is going to have unintended consequences if you don't write it carefully. I do like that they are giving it extra time to word the amendment properly. I'm very curious how they're going to word it in a way that doesn't leave open a lot of loopholes. And I think Wikipedia is right to stand up and say, hey, wait a minute, we are run by volunteers. We're not the problem you're trying to solve with a centralized platform. And the EU Digital Services Act did a great job of acknowledging that. Maybe you could do that, and it doesn't seem like the UK is doing that, but who knows, maybe the amendment will. Yeah, and I'm surprised we haven't seen Reddit or Discord or something like that, that are analogous with large user bases, but a ton of volunteer moderation also kind of come in with that. Admittedly, again, this has been in process for a really long time, and various versions of this have been circulated for some time. So I'm sure they've been on record at some point saying like, boo, but you know, it is surprising like that Wikimedia is the first one kind of out the gate with some seemingly some reasonable criticism here. Alright, folks, if you have a thought about something on the show that you want to email us about, well, let me give you that email address. We love to hear your insights. We have a lot of folks in our audience who work in various industries and have a view on this stuff that no one else helps has. And so it helps for us to share those insights with each other. You can email us feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. Back in 2020, Microsoft invested $1 billion in open AI, and as a result of that investment also was able to negotiate an exclusive business license to use GPT-3. And I think the license allows for them to continue to use new versions as GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 will eventually come out. We're seeing the fruits of that investment and that deal today. That includes tools based on the GPT-3.5 large language model, including Image Generator Dal E2, Text Generator Chat GPT, and Code Generator GPT-3.5 Codex. Since November 2021, Microsoft has been testing offering open AI tools like GTP-3.5 Codex and Dal E on Azure, which is Microsoft's Enterprise Cloud Service. While the test is over, Microsoft announced on Monday that Azure Open AI Service is now generally available to businesses. In practice, what this means is that many Microsoft Azure customers can implement open AI tools into their products using Azure-based services that includes Codex, Dal E2, and soon Chat GPT. You might ask, what would that mean? Yeah, good question. The Verge used examples like having a company that handles support tickets. They could use Azure Chat GPT, for instance, to work with that. Improving an online store search results. Much easier problem to solve and you can go less wrong when you're just talking about your online store instead of the entire Internet. Microsoft also uses these themselves. Azure Open AI powers GitHub co-pilot that we mentioned earlier in the show. That's a tool that suggests lines of code inside code editors for $10 a month. It uses GPT-3 to generate formula and expressions in PowerBuy. It uses Dal E2 to generate art in Microsoft Designer. And there are reports that we've talked about before on the show that it would like to integrate Chat GPT into Bing search results, as well as bring AI features into Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and Outlook. Microsoft does not plan to stop there, do they? Not at all. At a World Economic Forum event, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said the company plans to incorporate AI tools like Chat GPT into all of its products, as well as making them available through Azure, which is pretty huge. Nadella also said Microsoft plans to quickly commercialize tools available from Open AI. And Nadella didn't quite say this, but there are sources saying Microsoft plans to increase its investment in Open AI to 49% So, I have been jazzed on this. Like the more I have been thinking about this news, like for years, kind of the inside joke in tech is like whenever we see someone get acquired, right? We joke, oh, it's like they paid 23 Instagrams for this. You know, Microsoft wants to buy Activision for 78 Instagrams because they paid a billion dollars for Instagram back in the day. Microsoft got an exclusive license to open AI for an investment of a billion dollars. And what fascinates me about this is like talking about that Activision Blizzard deal, which is going through all this regulatory scrutiny, Microsoft is seeing for itself a search-level opportunity with AI. Like very clearly, the fact that they're putting this on everything, all their golden goose, the fact that they're aggressively rolling this out all across Azure. They're going to be putting it into, they are putting it into office, and they're going to be expanding it all throughout kind of their whole products week where they're making all of their money. It's very important for them. They see this as like a foundational shift that they want to be extremely early on, and they got it for a billion dollars. For me, that's a lot. For Microsoft, it's not. And they got it seemingly with no regulatory scrutiny might be one of the slickest moves that I have ever seen because like the big deal here for enterprises here is this is all going to work within your Azure Council, right? You don't have to integrate OpenAI's weird API. You don't have to worry about if they have the infrastructure setup, if you're a Fortune 100 company or a Fortune 50 company or something like that to handle the load that you're going to be putting on it. It's Microsoft Azure. They're going to be able to handle whatever workload you throw in it. And it works with all of your existing cloud tooling that you already have on there. And they're doing it super early as a way to not just add value to existing Azure customers, but to AWS or people that might be thinking about investing more in AWS, investing more into Google Cloud. To me, this is like the 3D chess pieces all lined up the more I was reading about this story today. This really is a game changer and they, they meaning Microsoft are really setting themselves up to be the innovator, the forerunner in this space. And I think we will see, you know, a little bit further down the line, how big of a coup this is that they were able to get this for quote unquote so little money. Yeah. And even that 49% the number being thrown around we'll see if it's accurate is $10 billion. So it's still not a ridiculous amount of money again compared to like Activision Blizzard and that sort of thing. Yeah, and the just I'm sorry like every time I think about like it boggles my mind that the level to which they're doing this now Microsoft also has been early on a lot of things like Microsoft is really great at being early about things turning the next big thing is not so much. Windows Mobile was super early for a smartphone, but they were super early in investing in tablets didn't turn out didn't work out so well for him so like I'm not saying this is guaranteed to be success. Yeah, it just seems that these technologies have reached a certain level maturity and there's certain a lot of hype around them, and Microsoft is is integrating the very thoughtful ways like just the idea of like you could have marketing GPT you they already are doing exchange GPT like, and it just all works with all your existing tooling to me is just like, I'm like this is to me this is one of the first times other than just saying services where I've seen like what Microsoft wants to do with their cloud direction now that Windows Server revenue is you know kind of very slowly going on that along decline that that Windows as an OS is no longer a thing that they not just like we have we're doing cloud like this to me is I see what they are doing. Well, such an Adela avoided the problem that Facebook and Google did not, which is investing all of your own money to create the thing. Such an Adela said, who does the best AI. Oh, it's not us. It's open AI. Not that we're not pretty good at it we are but they're better. Let's use theirs like it. It's, it's a really savvy way to look and maximize your opportunities. I looked at the business and said, what are we best at cloud? Well, let's base our future on Azure then and not spend a lot of time trying to ring pennies out of Windows anymore. These those are both, you know, very perspicacious decisions. So yeah, I don't know. I'm curious, Nika. Maybe we'll talk about this on good day internet like as a developer of this sort of thing gets your wheels turning. It does because honestly, you know, kind of like rich every time you think a little bit more about it you think of the potential and the possibilities. And what I can say is Microsoft has proven that they are risk takers they are they are willing to take risks on certain technology sometimes it plants out Windows phone. It's sometimes it does it. So it's one of those things where I think with this they really did hit the mark and the the capability the possibilities of of using this really does expand their business and expands the the tool that the customer base is going to be able to use. So I think it's a win-win all around. Well, something else that's a win-win is finding use for old tech by Gen Z. That's because they're not content with just looking for your cassettes in your junk drawer, maybe an old digital camera. No, they've come for another piece of retro check the humble flip phone CNN businesses. Rami Shah Marouf wrote up a piece about the increasing presence of flip phones among this younger set. Apparently some folks are just leaving the smartphone at home in favor of a flip phone when they go out for a night on the town, let's them disconnect and acts as a conversation starter. If you're baffled by this, it seems like HMD Global that owns the Nokia or that operates the Nokia brand is also kind of baffled to their head of marketing said, we attribute the shift to many smartphone users beginning to recognize they are spending too much time glued to their devices and having a strong desire to disconnect and be fully present to improve their quality of social connections. Well, there's no data in this CNN article. I kept looking for like, you know, the rise of flip phones nearly data they had was on Samsung's bendable screen flip. Which is, yeah, that's a stretch for a flip. It's not quite the same thing. But so anecdotal evidence. If you are a old school 90s era flip phone user now Gen Z or otherwise email us feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com. Speaking of which, let's Oh, sorry, Dika, what were you going to? Oh, no, I was just going to say, I to me, I think the the head of marketing is really stretching this. I just think the kids think is trendy. Yeah. And I think it is. Yeah, it's trendy. We'll see how long that trend lasts. All right, let's check out our mailbag Friday. We chatted with Bodie about the dangers of increasing vehicle weights. Roger wrote the word pedestrians in our producer chat while we were having that discussion. I didn't see it until near the end of the discussion. So we didn't address it on the show. I just made some snarky comment about pedestrians also getting heavier. But lots of you actually wrote in about this exact same thing. You were in one mind with Roger. Matt said he's actually been hit by a car five times, which would make it top of mind. He's thankfully walked away every time. David asserted that vehicles getting heavier is bad for walkability. Mattia said the heavier the vehicle the higher the chance of biker pedestrian deaths even at lower speed. Ryan said he was disappointed in us. I'm sorry, Ryan. We have not found a good peer reviewed study on weight and pedestrian injuries. Roger and I both looked around. Roger found a lot of stuff related to SUVs and serious injuries. Though some of that is related to SUVs having a higher center of gravity and their propensity to roll rather than just the weight alone. It does stand a reason that heavier vehicles would take longer to break. That could be offset by better improved brakes, though. That's why you want to see a study about this sort of thing. So if you have a link to a peer reviewed study directly linking weight to pedestrian injuries with vehicles, please send it our way. And of course, we'll include the SUV related studies that Roger found in our show notes. Yes. Thank you for all of the emails. And thank you to Nika Montford for being on the show. Fantastic. Nika, where can people find more of your amazingness on cyberspace? You can find me at TechSavvyDiva on all of the platforms that's at TechSavvyDiva. You can also check me out on Snobble Westcast, which is my podcast with an Apple Focus. Actually, we're going to probably be talking a lot about going a little bit deeper into the announcement this week. So you can definitely check us out. We're at Snobble Westcast on all the social media sites as well. Thank you. Thank you, Nika. I'm looking forward to hearing you and Terrence talking about these. I'm looking forward to that. Should be fun. Well, thanks also to our brand new bosses, Michael, Tom, Ed, and Stephen, who just started backing us on Patreon. Thanks, Michael. Thanks, Tom. Thanks, Ed. Thanks, Stephen. Hey, one for every day of the long weekend. That's wonderful. Thank you, folks, for helping us out at patreon.com. You now get to stick around for the extended show, Good Day Internet. I'm going to ask Nika a few more questions about this OpenAI stuff. You can also catch the show live Monday through Friday, 4 p.m. Eastern 2100 UTC. Find out more at DailyTechNewsShow.com. Back tomorrow with Scott Johnson. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. 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