Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
Speaker 1: and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonavan Strickland.
Speaker 1: I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcast Send. How the
Speaker 1: tech are you? It's time for the tech news for
Speaker 1: the week ending on Friday, June seventh, twenty twenty four.
Speaker 1: You know, there have been a couple of products that
Speaker 1: hit the market recently that really aim to either augment
Speaker 1: or outright replace smartphones. And these products initially generated a
Speaker 1: decent amount of buzz, but upon actual release, the reception
Speaker 1: hasn't been universally positive. So one of these was the
Speaker 1: Rabbit R one and maybe you've seen one of these,
Speaker 1: maybe you haven't. It's a little orange do hickey. Let's
Speaker 1: got some interesting user interface features on it, and it
Speaker 1: got some folks excited back at CES early this year,
Speaker 1: but media outlets like The Verge brought reality crashing down
Speaker 1: on the R one with headlines like Rabbit R one
Speaker 1: review nothing to see here by David Pierce. Another device
Speaker 1: that has also seen critical dismissal is the Humane AI pen.
Speaker 1: So I thought it would start this episode with a
Speaker 1: quick compare and contrast of these two products, paired with
Speaker 1: some commentary about where we are with AI when it
Speaker 1: comes to incorporating it into consumer goods. So first up
Speaker 1: the Rabbit R one. So this device wasn't intended to
Speaker 1: be a replacement for a smartphone, even though a lot
Speaker 1: of people were talking about it like that, because for
Speaker 1: one thing, you can't make calls on an R one.
Speaker 1: You were supposed to be able to set up your
Speaker 1: various apps on this device, like to connect to your
Speaker 1: various accounts, things like ride hailing apps and delivery services
Speaker 1: and ticket apps, that kind of thing. And then the
Speaker 1: idea was you could give a complex command to the
Speaker 1: R one and it would take care of, you know,
Speaker 1: pretty much all the rest. So you could say something like,
Speaker 1: in an ideal situation, maybe you tell the R one
Speaker 1: that you need a car to take you Tier hotel
Speaker 1: from the airport. You've flown into a new city. You're
Speaker 1: using the R one to call a an uber or
Speaker 1: lift or something to pick you up from the airport,
Speaker 1: take it Tier a hotel. Also to go ahead and
Speaker 1: place an order for a pizza place you learned about
Speaker 1: that's going to be near your hotel, so that can
Speaker 1: be delivered, so you get that shortly after you've checked in,
Speaker 1: and that you also want to buy a couple of
Speaker 1: seats to a sporting event that's happening down the street
Speaker 1: from the hotel. But according to reviews like the one
Speaker 1: in The Verge, the reality was that R one was
Speaker 1: not nearly so versatile or useful, and it had issues
Speaker 1: with a lot of stuff, including delivering accurate weather forecasts.
Speaker 1: You know, sometimes the R one would pin your location
Speaker 1: to being a place that was like thousands of miles away,
Speaker 1: and the image recognition that was built into the device
Speaker 1: also left a lot to be desired. R one could
Speaker 1: frequently misidentify stuff that you were pointing it at, and
Speaker 1: that's not really useful either if you need to know, like, hey,
Speaker 1: is this safe for me to eat? Or whatever it
Speaker 1: may be. And while the price tag of one hundred
Speaker 1: and ninety nine dollars wasn't as crazy as you know,
Speaker 1: like the cost of an Apple Vision Pro, two hundred
Speaker 1: bucks is still a lot to pay for a gadget
Speaker 1: that doesn't work very well. Then you have the humane
Speaker 1: aipen that's a wearable smart device. Although smart might be
Speaker 1: generous a going to hey, hey, look it's David Pierce
Speaker 1: of the Verge again who David Pierce had a rough
Speaker 1: like April slash early May reviewing these kinds of devices.
Speaker 1: But back in April, Pierce said that the Humane aipen
Speaker 1: was quote not even close end quote to what was promised.
Speaker 1: So this is a pin you wear it like it's
Speaker 1: like a little Lavalier microphone or something. It doesn't have
Speaker 1: a screen on the device, but it did have or
Speaker 1: does have a little projection laser, so you can hold
Speaker 1: your hand out and it will project a little interactive
Speaker 1: menu on your hand and you can, you know, use
Speaker 1: touch it's not really touch like, it's it's gesture commands
Speaker 1: to be able to tell it what you want to do.
Speaker 1: So if you were playing a music track, you could
Speaker 1: do that to change the volume, that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1: You could also interact with it through voice commands, and
Speaker 1: it was supposed to lead fore you from the shackles
Speaker 1: of your smartphone, so that you didn't have to have
Speaker 1: your head down looking at a screen. You could be
Speaker 1: keeping your phone in your pocket walking around using this
Speaker 1: device to do the stuff that you would typically whip
Speaker 1: your phone out to do, and you'd still have your
Speaker 1: phone on you, so you could use that if you
Speaker 1: needed to and the problem is it just didn't work
Speaker 1: very well. It cost six hundred ninety nine dollars and
Speaker 1: has an ongoing twenty four dollars subscription fee so that
Speaker 1: you can use the cellular network, which is Tea Mobile,
Speaker 1: by the way, in order for this thing to work.
Speaker 1: And Pierce was pretty brutal in his review. He essentially
Speaker 1: said it was a totally broken device. Now, the New
Speaker 1: York Times reports that Humane has quietly been looking around
Speaker 1: for a potential buy for the company, and allegedly one
Speaker 1: of those entities they've looked at is HP. I recommend
Speaker 1: that article in the New York Times, by the way,
Speaker 1: it's titled this is going to be painful How a
Speaker 1: Bold AI device flopped. Anyway, I think the R one
Speaker 1: and the Humane aipen both help illustrate why we're not
Speaker 1: really at a spot where AI is useful enough to
Speaker 1: be the primary interface for a consumer product just yet.
Speaker 1: Not saying that AI isn't impressive, not saying that there
Speaker 1: hasn't been a ton of incredible work done in that field,
Speaker 1: but it's not fully baked. And when you're talking about
Speaker 1: really expensive consumer gadgets that end up not being reliable
Speaker 1: or useful, that's a problem, right, Like you would kind
Speaker 1: of want to see it continue to go through development
Speaker 1: for a while, maybe have some limited beta testing and
Speaker 1: go that route before releasing a full consumer product that
Speaker 1: could potentially scuttle an entire company. Now, it's not just
Speaker 1: consumer electronics that are struggling with AI, of course. Late
Speaker 1: last week, Google reportedly eased off a little bit with
Speaker 1: its AI Overviews tool. That's the feature that uses AI
Speaker 1: to provide summaries and answers to queries in a web search,
Speaker 1: with the idea being that if the AI can answer
Speaker 1: whatever your question is, then you don't have to do
Speaker 1: all that pesky clicking through to a reputable source to
Speaker 1: dig through you know, edited and vetted information, which I mean,
Speaker 1: I guess I can understand that a bit in some cases,
Speaker 1: because goodness knows. I hate the trend that websites will
Speaker 1: bury the lead of a story three cores of the
Speaker 1: way down a page in order to serve you more ads,
Speaker 1: so that you have to scroll past a lot more
Speaker 1: ads before you get to what it is you're looking for.
Speaker 1: I see that in a lot of like pop culture
Speaker 1: news sites, where like the first five paragraphs are like
Speaker 1: Star Wars originally came out in the nineteen seventies, like
Speaker 1: I know this, I just want to know what the
Speaker 1: next project is or goodness knows recipes. That's been a
Speaker 1: problem for years, right, recipe sites do this all the time. Anyway.
Speaker 1: The New York Times tested some searches last Friday and
Speaker 1: found that overview AI was only popping up about once
Speaker 1: in every six queries or so. So why is that? Well?
Speaker 1: The conclusion that Nico Grant of The New York Times
Speaker 1: arrived at is the answers provided by overview AI are
Speaker 1: not always reliable or even safe. This is nothing new.
Speaker 1: If you've been following news about generative AI for a while,
Speaker 1: of course, I mean you likely know AI can hallucinate
Speaker 1: or confabulate, or you just make stuff up. In other words,
Speaker 1: that's not a good thing, particularly when you're using it
Speaker 1: to augment search, and in some cases it can lead
Speaker 1: to huge problems if the AI is recommending stuff that
Speaker 1: just isn't safe. Google is continuing to develop the tool,
Speaker 1: and the company has started to build in some protections
Speaker 1: around certain categories of queries, such as stuff relating to
Speaker 1: health matters. I'm honestly surprised at how aggressive companies like
Speaker 1: open Ai and Google have been when it comes to
Speaker 1: pushing these AI models out to the public, simply because
Speaker 1: when things go wrong, they can go spectacularly wrong. But
Speaker 1: I guess if you snooze, you lose. Over the years,
Speaker 1: I've mentioned a lot of threats that AI poses, from
Speaker 1: potentially taking work away from well just about everyone, to
Speaker 1: the science fiction disaster scenario of a malevolent AI determined
Speaker 1: to wipe out humanity. That last one is still well
Speaker 1: within the realm of science fiction. Thankfully, we're not at that.
Speaker 1: We haven't been putting AI in charge of potentially devastating weaponry,
Speaker 1: for example, so hopefully we continue that trend. But one
Speaker 1: threat AI definitely poses relates to electricity and resources. AI
Speaker 1: requires a lot of power to operate, and with more
Speaker 1: AI companies launching and then the big AI companies growing rapidly,
Speaker 1: this means that any large entity that's serious about being
Speaker 1: a definitive AI company has to start to think about
Speaker 1: where is that juice going to come from. Over at
Speaker 1: open Ai, that seems to include a company called Helium,
Speaker 1: which aims to use nuclear fusion to generate electricity. That's
Speaker 1: an amazing goal. Nuclear fusion would truly transform our world.
Speaker 1: But it's a goal that's not currently viable. We've only
Speaker 1: had a couple of cases where a fusion reaction even
Speaker 1: produced more electricity than it took to start the reaction
Speaker 1: in the first place, and when you take a real
Speaker 1: step back and you consider the whole picture, we're still
Speaker 1: not really there yet. So forging a deal with Helion
Speaker 1: seems a tad premature since fusion is not yet a
Speaker 1: viable method for power generation here on Earth. So why
Speaker 1: would open Ai consider making such a deal. Well, one
Speaker 1: factor that could have something to do with it is
Speaker 1: that Sam Altman, who is the CEO of open Ai,
Speaker 1: also happens to be the chairman of Helium's board of directors,
Speaker 1: and he has nearly four hundred million dollars invested in
Speaker 1: the company. Now, to be fair to mister Altman, he
Speaker 1: has said that he has recused himself from these negotiations.
Speaker 1: That's a good thing, because it sounds like there's more
Speaker 1: than just the potential for a conflict of interest here
Speaker 1: when the head of your very power thirsty company also
Speaker 1: has hundreds of millions of dollars invested in a startup
Speaker 1: power company, and then those two companies start to chat
Speaker 1: with each other, Obviously, eyebrows will naturally rise as a result.
Speaker 1: I'm actually kind of reminded of the story of We Work,
Speaker 1: in which the CEO of that company would end up
Speaker 1: leasing properties he personally owned to the company he ran
Speaker 1: as CEO, which seemed shady to me then, and it
Speaker 1: seems kind of shady to me now. But then, I
Speaker 1: guess it's all academic at the moment, since Helium is
Speaker 1: not currently generating electricity through fusion, and open ai reportedly
Speaker 1: doesn't even have any data centers of its own. Instead
Speaker 1: it relies on Microsoft's platforms. But still, it's a thing
Speaker 1: that makes me go, hmm, Okay, before I make any
Speaker 1: more references to outdated nineties music, we're gonna take a
Speaker 1: quick break to thank our sponsors. We're back, so next up.
Speaker 1: A watchdog group in the European Union is calling on
Speaker 1: regulators to pass an order that would force Meta to
Speaker 1: stop harvesting user data for the purposes of training AI
Speaker 1: without first seeking user consent. Now, you might have heard
Speaker 1: me talk about how Meta's policy on Instagram allows the
Speaker 1: company to train AI models on user data without asking
Speaker 1: permission first. In fact, you cannot opt out of that
Speaker 1: if you are anywhere other than the European Union. But
Speaker 1: the EU is different, right, you know, the EU has
Speaker 1: these these laws in place that require companies to give
Speaker 1: people more options. So in the EU, users would get
Speaker 1: a little pop up about the matter to opt out
Speaker 1: of it, and that was only if they actually read
Speaker 1: the thing and saw the little hypertext link that would
Speaker 1: let them go to a form where they could opt out.
Speaker 1: The whole process was complicated and, in my opinion, misleading. Anyway,
Speaker 1: it seems like Meta has purposefully designed a system to
Speaker 1: discourage people from opting out. And from Meta's perspective, I
Speaker 1: get it because training AI is hard. You need a
Speaker 1: lot of material to train your AI, and Meta has
Speaker 1: access to a treasure trove of user generated content, and
Speaker 1: it sure is a hassle to have to secure permission
Speaker 1: from each user in order to use all their stuff.
Speaker 1: A Meta spokesperson responded to the Watchdog by saying that
Speaker 1: Meta quote complies with privacy laws and our approach is
Speaker 1: consistent with how other tech companies are developing and improving
Speaker 1: their AI experiences in Europe. End quote. Now, I'm not
Speaker 1: sure that last bit is going to be that much
Speaker 1: helpful because I suspect watchdog organizations are equally concerned about
Speaker 1: these other tech companies. I don't think they just have
Speaker 1: it out for Meta. The watchdog group argues that Meta
Speaker 1: has failed to comply with EU law that an opt
Speaker 1: out form is not the same thing as an opt
Speaker 1: in form, which is absolutely true. It's one thing to
Speaker 1: skip over opting out. It's another one. You're asking point
Speaker 1: blank do you consent to this? Because I need you
Speaker 1: to indicate you do by clicking this box, and then
Speaker 1: if you click the box, well then that's on you. Anyway,
Speaker 1: I'm sure this story will continue to develop, so I'll
Speaker 1: keep an eye on it. The US Department of Justice
Speaker 1: and the Federal Trade Commission, or FTC, are opening investigations
Speaker 1: into three large tech companies in the AI space. Those
Speaker 1: are open Ai, Microsoft, and Nvidia, and the investigations are
Speaker 1: of an anti trust nature, you know, looking into monopolies
Speaker 1: and such. Broadly, the concern is that Microsoft, Open Ai,
Speaker 1: and Nvidia have dominant positions in the AI space and
Speaker 1: perhaps have used that position to disadvantage would be competitors. Reportedly,
Speaker 1: the Department of Justice will investigate in Nvidia, while the
Speaker 1: FTC will actually look into Microsoft and Open AI. This
Speaker 1: follows on the heels of other anti trust investigations into
Speaker 1: big tech like Meta, Amazon, and Google, and those investigations
Speaker 1: spawned various lawsuits, and now it looks it's like the
Speaker 1: era of regulators attempting to check the power of these
Speaker 1: tech companies is at least continuing for the moment. This
Speaker 1: is an election year, so who knows how long that
Speaker 1: will last. We'll have to see. Thomas Clayburn of the
Speaker 1: Register reported this week that Microsoft was laying off another
Speaker 1: one thousand or so employees, which seemed like a slap
Speaker 1: in the face after the company's CEO just told shareholders
Speaker 1: in April that Microsoft had experienced a record third quarter.
Speaker 1: You know, hey, y'all, we're doing better than we ever
Speaker 1: have in the third quarter, so let's celebrate by laying
Speaker 1: off people across the company. Clayburn reported that Microsoft reorganized
Speaker 1: its mixed reality division this week, and that these cuts
Speaker 1: wouldn't necessarily concentrate on just one division or department, but
Speaker 1: instead would come across the entire company. One potential reason
Speaker 1: for the cuts is that Microsoft is obviously making a
Speaker 1: huge investment in AI, and when a company spends a
Speaker 1: lot of money that company often looks at other places
Speaker 1: where it can cut costs, and one surefire way to
Speaker 1: cut costs, at least in the short term, is to
Speaker 1: reduce the headcount. A bit can be a brutal business, y'all.
Speaker 1: Matt Burgess of Wired has a great article titled the
Speaker 1: Snowflake attack may be turning into one of the largest
Speaker 1: data breaches ever. Since I did a pair of episodes
Speaker 1: this week about largest data breaches in US history, I
Speaker 1: thought it was good to include this news item today.
Speaker 1: So Snowflake is a cloud storage firm mostly catering to
Speaker 1: other businesses. Reportedly, the Ticketmaster data breach is, when you
Speaker 1: get down to it, a Snowflake data breach, as Ticketmaster
Speaker 1: uses Snowflake to host enormous databases like lots of other companies.
Speaker 1: And that's Burgess's point. While only a couple of companies
Speaker 1: have recently acknowledged they've experienced a data breach, and while
Speaker 1: Snowflake reps have said only a quote unquote limited number
Speaker 1: of customer accounts were accessed, the potential for truly massive
Speaker 1: data breaches is daunting. Burgess rights that hackers are claiming
Speaker 1: to possess millions of records belonging to other Snowflake customers,
Speaker 1: which includes big companies like Advance Autoparts and Quote Wizard,
Speaker 1: which is a subsidiary of Lending Tree. Not everything is
Speaker 1: confirmed yet, but it should certainly raise more concerns about
Speaker 1: the issue. And this is one of the huge risks
Speaker 1: of cloud computing and storage because as cloud companies grow
Speaker 1: and attract larger customers, they become ever more tempting targets
Speaker 1: for hackers. It's a constant battle between security experts and
Speaker 1: hackers to keep those systems safe. And vulnerabilities are really
Speaker 1: just an employee who gives away too much information due
Speaker 1: to social engineering can really put everything at risk. Anyway,
Speaker 1: I highly recommend the article if you want to learn
Speaker 1: more about how the hackers targeted Snowflake in the first place.
Speaker 1: Reuter's reports that the startup Archer Aviation says the Federal
Speaker 1: Aviation Administration or FAA here in the US has given
Speaker 1: the company a certificate that will allow Archer Aviation to
Speaker 1: begin commercial operations. So what does Archer Aviation do. Well,
Speaker 1: it's an electric air taxi company, so it's got a
Speaker 1: vertical takeoff and landing electric vehicle that looks a lot
Speaker 1: like a huge drone. It's called Midnight, and it's a
Speaker 1: piloted aircraft, and it's meant to provide transportation in densely
Speaker 1: populated urban areas by conveniently popping up over all that
Speaker 1: congestion and whisking passengers to whatever destination they're going to.
Speaker 1: So a lot of these companies are focusing on a
Speaker 1: business model that would take passengers from like a downtown
Speaker 1: location to the closest airport. Archer Aviation is now the
Speaker 1: second air taxi company in the US to get such
Speaker 1: a certificate from the FAA. However, Reuters also points out
Speaker 1: that the FAA has yet to actually certify the Midnight
Speaker 1: Aircraft itself, which will have to happen before the FAA
Speaker 1: can say, yeah, this aircraft meets our standards. Okay, I
Speaker 1: got a couple of space news stories to wrap things up.
Speaker 1: First up, after several delays and some malfunctions, a fully
Speaker 1: crude Boeing star Liner spacecraft has docked with the International
Speaker 1: Space Station this week for the first time with a
Speaker 1: crew aboard. That is, Previous attempts to launch a Starliner
Speaker 1: with a crew inside it were scuttled after some problems
Speaker 1: cropped up. This trip had its own share of technical issues,
Speaker 1: mostly stemming from the helium lys but helium is non toxic,
Speaker 1: it's not flammable, it's not combustible. So despite some issues
Speaker 1: with those leaks, the decision was made to go ahead
Speaker 1: with the mission. It's been a really long journey for
Speaker 1: the Boeing Starliner that Boeing has been developing this spacecraft
Speaker 1: for like a decade, and it's good news for NASA.
Speaker 1: NASA always wants to have options when it comes to
Speaker 1: spacecraft to go to various locations. Obviously, Boeing will have
Speaker 1: to address any issues that were revealed during this operation,
Speaker 1: but so far you should be able to call this
Speaker 1: one a successful test. Meanwhile, at SpaceX, that company launched
Speaker 1: a Starship rocket yesterday and completed a successful test to
Speaker 1: take the upper stage into orbit. Before it returned back
Speaker 1: to Earth, it climbed to one hundred and thirty miles altitude.
Speaker 1: The booster for the launch vehicle, after it separated from
Speaker 1: the upper stage, came back down and landed in the
Speaker 1: Gulf of Mexico. The upper stage would return and land
Speaker 1: in the Indian Ocean. There were some technical issues during
Speaker 1: the launch. It wasn't perfect. Upon re entry. The upper
Speaker 1: stage lost some tie and also suffered some other damage,
Speaker 1: but the general goal of testing the vehicle and having
Speaker 1: both stages retrievable worked out. The SpaceX Starship is part
Speaker 1: of the long term SpaceX plan that includes the lofty
Speaker 1: goal of taking human astronauts to Mars one day, and
Speaker 1: there's still a ton to do before that can become
Speaker 1: a reality, but still pretty cool, space News. That's it
Speaker 1: for the Tech News this week on Friday, June seventh,
Speaker 1: twenty twenty four. I hope all of you out there
Speaker 1: are well, and I'll talk to you again really soon.
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