Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey therein
Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm
Speaker 1: an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the tech
Speaker 1: are you. It's time for the tech news for Tuesday,
Speaker 1: November twenty first, twenty twenty three. And first up, of course,
Speaker 1: we have some updates to the open ai situation. Now.
Speaker 1: If you want to hear what led to open AI's
Speaker 1: board of directors to fire CEO Sam Altman last Friday,
Speaker 1: check out yesterday's Tech Stuff episode. I did a full
Speaker 1: episode kind of about what led to that event and
Speaker 1: what is happening in the aftermath. But I do have
Speaker 1: a couple of new bits to add to that. First up,
Speaker 1: According to The Verge, Sam Altman is still seeking reinstatement
Speaker 1: as open ai CEO. Yesterday I talked about how Altman
Speaker 1: claimed he would never wear a guest badge to open
Speaker 1: AI's headquarters again. He did it once in order to
Speaker 1: return to negotiate for his potential return to the company.
Speaker 1: Once the board of directors said whoop, see those negotiations
Speaker 1: went nowhere. So then he reportedly joined Microsoft and he
Speaker 1: will be named CEO of an advanced AI division within Microsoft,
Speaker 1: or maybe a spinoff company, But apparently that's just one
Speaker 1: likely scenario, and the ink has not yet been put
Speaker 1: to paper on that deal, so it's not a certainty
Speaker 1: that he will be part of Microsoft. There is another
Speaker 1: possibility that should the board members who voted Altman out
Speaker 1: step down, Alman would return to the company as CEO,
Speaker 1: but that was the main sticking point in the negotiations
Speaker 1: over the weekend. However, since then, one board member, Elia Sutzkiver,
Speaker 1: has come forward to express his regret for taking part
Speaker 1: in the whole thing and said it was a mistake
Speaker 1: and that he now sides with Altman, which means there
Speaker 1: are just two members left on the open AI board
Speaker 1: of Directors who would have to change their opinion, and
Speaker 1: there's tremendous pressure on them to do it and to
Speaker 1: step down. Not only do you have the pr nightmare
Speaker 1: of going through perhaps what has been the worst CEO
Speaker 1: firing in recent history, but you've also got an angry
Speaker 1: corporate partner in the form of Microsoft, and you've got
Speaker 1: the threat of perhaps hundreds of employees leaving the company
Speaker 1: in solidarity with the ousted CEO. So refusing to step
Speaker 1: down could mean open ai would be set back years
Speaker 1: because of this. But then the reported reason that this
Speaker 1: board fired Altman in the first place was that they
Speaker 1: were concerned he was pushing hard to develop and deploy
Speaker 1: AI tools without really giving proper regard to safety, and
Speaker 1: that's the whole reason open aa Eye exists in the
Speaker 1: first place. So this could be a case where those
Speaker 1: board members decide they have to go down with the
Speaker 1: ship that what does it mean to have an organization
Speaker 1: ostensibly dedicated to developing AI in an ethical and safe
Speaker 1: way if you don't do that? Or perhaps the threat
Speaker 1: to open ai has actually been overstated, Maybe it's not
Speaker 1: really in such a precarious position. Maybe the organization will
Speaker 1: be fine after passing through, you know, a period of
Speaker 1: turmoil that's unavoidable. Meanwhile, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has said
Speaker 1: in an interview on CNBC and also with Bloomberg that
Speaker 1: its clear open ai quote has to change around the
Speaker 1: governance end quote, perhaps hinting someone from Microsoft should also
Speaker 1: sit on the board of directors for open Ai. After all,
Speaker 1: Microsoft has committed to investing ten billion dollars into open
Speaker 1: ai and already has sent a few billion of those
Speaker 1: to the company. The chaos at open Ai has had
Speaker 1: some odd rippling effects as well. For example, when word
Speaker 1: got out that Microsoft was apparently hiring both Sam Altman
Speaker 1: and former open Ai president Greg Brockman, the company sought
Speaker 1: stock price increase. In fact, Microsoft's stock value rose to
Speaker 1: three hundred and seventy seven dollars forty four cents per
Speaker 1: share yesterday. That is the highest closing stock price in
Speaker 1: Microsoft history. It's pretty wild to me that a couple
Speaker 1: of executives coming over from another company could be enough
Speaker 1: to boost stock prices like that. Also, in a similar move,
Speaker 1: when word Firse got out that open ai had fired
Speaker 1: Altman last Friday, Microsoft sought stock price dip by one
Speaker 1: point seven percent. I think this really shows how people
Speaker 1: feel AI is a critically important technology. I'm still not
Speaker 1: convinced that very many of them actually understand artificial intelligence,
Speaker 1: but then I'm not getting rich off the stock market,
Speaker 1: so what do I know. Then you have the various
Speaker 1: companies that are champion at the bit to get their
Speaker 1: hands on the talent at open Ai. Hundreds of open
Speaker 1: ai staff, some of the most knowledgeable people in the
Speaker 1: discipline of artificial intelligence, have indicated a willingness to leave
Speaker 1: the company if Altman doesn't return as CEO. And one
Speaker 1: company that has expressed interest in hiring that talent that
Speaker 1: may feel like a change of scenery is merited is Salesforce.
Speaker 1: CEO Marc Benioff posted on x the platform formerly known
Speaker 1: as Twitter and a company that we'll be talking a
Speaker 1: lot about later in this episode, said that quote, Salesforce
Speaker 1: will match any open Ai researcher who has tendered their
Speaker 1: resignation full cash and equity, ote to immediately join our
Speaker 1: salesforce Einstein Trusted Ai research team under Silvio Sevres. So
Speaker 1: that's end quote, by the way. So that's another big
Speaker 1: threat that's facing open Ai. There are other companies that
Speaker 1: recognize the value of the knowledge held by their staff, right,
Speaker 1: That's one of the big things that open ai has.
Speaker 1: Before they came out with chat GPT, you could argue
Speaker 1: that the most valued asset of open ai was its talent.
Speaker 1: There were people who were taking jobs at open Ai.
Speaker 1: They could have made more money somewhere else, but they
Speaker 1: took it at open ai because it meant working with
Speaker 1: the best people and on a very challenging goal. So
Speaker 1: obviously there are a lot of companies that would really
Speaker 1: love to be able to bring those folks on board
Speaker 1: to their own teams, and they're already coming forward with
Speaker 1: offers should those people decide to leave open AI. So again,
Speaker 1: immense pressure on the board of directors over at Open AI.
Speaker 1: According to an article by Rob Thubrunn of tech Spot
Speaker 1: or Thubron, I'm not certain how to say your last name, Rob,
Speaker 1: don't know you, but I like your work anyway. According
Speaker 1: to this article, more than half of tech workers view
Speaker 1: AI as being overrated and overhyped now. This in turn,
Speaker 1: comes from a survey that a company called Retool conducted.
Speaker 1: So Retool puts out this survey and asks various tech
Speaker 1: workers to evaluate how AI is treated how it's viewed
Speaker 1: in the tech sphere. Now, the simple size is not
Speaker 1: particularly large. Retool surveyed around fifteen hundred tech professionals across
Speaker 1: the industry. Everyone from programmers to designers to executives, like
Speaker 1: pretty much every kind of role that's in tech was
Speaker 1: represented in this survey. According to the survey, only twenty
Speaker 1: three percent of the respondents felt as though AI is
Speaker 1: more or less fairly assessed in the industry as a whole.
Speaker 1: That the attitude and hype, or maybe hype is the
Speaker 1: wrong word because that has a negative connotation, but the
Speaker 1: treatment of AI is appropriate, that it's the right level. However,
Speaker 1: fifty one point six percent of them feel that AI
Speaker 1: is overrated and perhaps overhyped. This also means, by the way,
Speaker 1: that about twenty five percent of the respondents actually feel
Speaker 1: that AI is underrated. So keep that in mind, and
Speaker 1: it seems like the type of job you have in
Speaker 1: tech has a big influence on how you view artificial intelligence.
Speaker 1: Executives seem more inclined to say AI was either rated
Speaker 1: fairly or was actually underrated. And as Rob points out, well, yeah,
Speaker 1: of course executives think that because they're looking at artificial
Speaker 1: intelligence largely as a cost benefit analysis, and they're salivating
Speaker 1: over the thought of replacing all those expensive human drones
Speaker 1: with more economical AI powered algorithms, So of course they
Speaker 1: think that it's as important, if not more important, than
Speaker 1: the way the industry treats it. Meanwhile, the folks who
Speaker 1: actually have to interact with AI on a daily basis
Speaker 1: in order to do their work. Now, the people who
Speaker 1: are using AI to do stuff like write code, for example,
Speaker 1: they were far more likely to call AI overrated. Presumably
Speaker 1: that's because so much of their time has to be
Speaker 1: spent checking for errors and correcting them and that sort
Speaker 1: of thing. So with the sample size of fifteen hundred people,
Speaker 1: I'm not sure we can actually draw any sweeping conclusions
Speaker 1: from this survey. And again, it's a survey that's talking
Speaker 1: about people's opinions toward AI. It's not like it's a
Speaker 1: metric that actually measures AI itself, but rather our perception
Speaker 1: of artificial intelligence. I would say that the survey indicates
Speaker 1: it's probably a good idea to pay attention to the
Speaker 1: people who are working directly with the artificial intelligence powered tools,
Speaker 1: because if your staff is indicating that the AI is
Speaker 1: actually making their jobs more frustrating or inefficient, that is
Speaker 1: worth paying attention to. Otherwise, the leaders might find that
Speaker 1: they have committed to a solution that is actually a problem.
Speaker 1: And I don't think we're careening toward a world of
Speaker 1: automation and that we'll never be able to turn back
Speaker 1: and once we turn that corner, it's all downhill from there.
Speaker 1: I don't think that's the case. I do think that
Speaker 1: a lot of companies need to be careful in how
Speaker 1: they implement AI if they don't want to rush into
Speaker 1: an expensive and complicated mess I think that there are
Speaker 1: ways to incorporate AI that can have a direct benefit
Speaker 1: to both the overall company and to the employees who
Speaker 1: are making use of the AI. I think there are legitimate,
Speaker 1: good uses for this technology, but I also think it's
Speaker 1: very easy to implement it willy nilly, and to do
Speaker 1: so in a way that ends up being counterproductive. And
Speaker 1: that's what companies really need to be careful about. All Right,
Speaker 1: we're going to take a quick break. When we come back,
Speaker 1: I got a whole lot of news about everybody's favorite
Speaker 1: social network platform, X, But first let's thank our sponsors. Okay,
Speaker 1: we're back. And I mentioned before the break that we
Speaker 1: would be talking about X today, So here goes. First up,
Speaker 1: the company has filed a lawsuit against a media watchdog
Speaker 1: group called Media Matters. The group had previously published a
Speaker 1: report indicating that ads could appear next to objectionable material
Speaker 1: such as extremist and racist messaging, including antisemitic messaging. That
Speaker 1: obviously is something that does not go over well with
Speaker 1: advertisers as they are trying to promote and protect their brands,
Speaker 1: and last week, several major advertisers left X after Elon
Speaker 1: Musk indicated support for a conspiracy theory promoted by anti
Speaker 1: Semitic groups and white supremacists. So clearly it must have
Speaker 1: been Media Matters that was the real problem, not the
Speaker 1: fact that the owner of the company was elevating this messaging.
Speaker 1: You know. Anyway, some big names in in companies had
Speaker 1: halted all advertising on X. They include media companies like Paramount, Disney, NBC, Universal,
Speaker 1: Warner Brothers, Discovery. They include telecommunications companies like Comcast and
Speaker 1: tech companies like Apple, among many many other companies. And
Speaker 1: the thought is that their departure is probably going to
Speaker 1: prompt other companies to follow suit. Now, x's complaint against
Speaker 1: Media Matters is that Media Matters supposedly manufactured the images
Speaker 1: it showed in its report by creating a test account
Speaker 1: on X and then just refreshing the view over and over,
Speaker 1: like following some specific accounts that were posting problematic stuff
Speaker 1: and then just hitting refresh until they started to get
Speaker 1: ads to appear next to some of these entries. And
Speaker 1: so what X is saying is that this is not
Speaker 1: representative of the typical experience on X. Most people on
Speaker 1: X would never see this thing at all. Media Matters
Speaker 1: had to game the system in order to get these
Speaker 1: sorts of results. That's what X is arguing personally. I mean,
Speaker 1: that might be a legitimate argument that Media Matters perhaps
Speaker 1: kind of orchestrated this so it would appear this way. However,
Speaker 1: you still have the issue of the owner of the
Speaker 1: company promoting these messages, which whether whether Media Matters orchestrated
Speaker 1: anything is still an issue. Media Matters, by the way,
Speaker 1: says that they disagree with X's accusations and that they
Speaker 1: are willing to go to court and to prove that
Speaker 1: their methodology was legitimate. So so far there's no one
Speaker 1: backing down from this fight. Musk continues to behave in
Speaker 1: a way that is really alarming to advertisers, and that
Speaker 1: means that X is going to have a problem no
Speaker 1: matter what any watch dog group says. You don't even
Speaker 1: need watchdog groups to bring these matters to attend if
Speaker 1: you've got the owner of the company doing these sorts
Speaker 1: of things, because that is so newsworthy that you know
Speaker 1: that's going to be brought to attention and be put
Speaker 1: in the spotlight, whether whether there's a watchdog group dedicated
Speaker 1: to it or not. On a semi related note, I
Speaker 1: deactivated my own account on X. I had not been
Speaker 1: checking it regularly for weeks, so I decided it was
Speaker 1: just time to walk away. Part of it is that
Speaker 1: I don't want to be on a platform where a
Speaker 1: fundamentally important person on there is promoting things that can
Speaker 1: cause direct harm to others. So my apologies to anyone
Speaker 1: who's trying to use X to get in touch with me.
Speaker 1: It no longer will work. But let's talk about X
Speaker 1: some more, because of course we're not done yet. Tech
Speaker 1: Crunch reports that the mass exodus of advertisers, which really
Speaker 1: happened last week, is likely to have a pretty darn
Speaker 1: hefty impact to x's bottom line. You got to remember,
Speaker 1: ninety percent of X's revenue came from advertising, and when
Speaker 1: a bunch of advertisers leave, it means the company is
Speaker 1: going to have a lot of trouble bringing in revenue.
Speaker 1: They had already seen some drastic drops in revenue in
Speaker 1: the wake of Elon Musk purchasing the company last year,
Speaker 1: so this was already an issue before last week. In fact,
Speaker 1: analysts from Insider Intelligence estimated that X was going to
Speaker 1: see a fifty four point four percent decline in ad
Speaker 1: business year over year, but now that's likely to be
Speaker 1: an even more dramatic decline. Linda Yakarino, the CEO of X,
Speaker 1: has said that data will show X is actually dedicated
Speaker 1: toward fighting misinformation and racism, including anti Semitism, and that
Speaker 1: they will prove that in fact, the company has been
Speaker 1: working hard on this, despite the fact that Elon Musk
Speaker 1: famously dismissed almost the entirety of the content moderation departments
Speaker 1: within Twitter when he purchased the company. Reportedly, several advertisers
Speaker 1: have actually urged Yakarinos to step down as CEO, going
Speaker 1: so far as to suggest that she is potentially causing
Speaker 1: irreparable damage to her own reputation by serving as CEO
Speaker 1: of X, Like they're essentially saying, you're better than this.
Speaker 1: You need to get away from this company. It is
Speaker 1: toxic and it is bringing you down with it. Yakarino
Speaker 1: so far has rejected these calls. I think she's going
Speaker 1: to continue to find it challenging to champion X's policies
Speaker 1: while the owner continues to promote content that appears to
Speaker 1: contradict her. So that's a mess anyway. That's the update
Speaker 1: on x let's now switch over to YouTube for a moment.
Speaker 1: Amir Siddicky of Android Authority posted an article titled YouTube
Speaker 1: is reportedly slowing down videos for Firefox users. So essentially
Speaker 1: the story says that folks who are using non Chrome browsers,
Speaker 1: primarily Firefox and Microsoft Edge, have reported that when they
Speaker 1: try to launch a video on YouTube, they're encountering a
Speaker 1: delay in playback, and it's a delay that lasts several seconds,
Speaker 1: like five seconds. But if they close out that browser
Speaker 1: and open up Chrome and go to YouTube, they can
Speaker 1: try and load that same video and there's no delay.
Speaker 1: Now that is troubling. It could indicate that Google is
Speaker 1: purposefully throttling performance on non Chrome browsers in an effort
Speaker 1: to coax folks to use Chrome instead. Now, this is
Speaker 1: preferential treatment that could be seen as anti competitive. In fact,
Speaker 1: I think, especially in the current climate in the United States,
Speaker 1: it would automatically be listed as being anti competitive behavior.
Speaker 1: And considering that Google is currently in the hot seat
Speaker 1: for that sort of thing, that's not good. It definitely
Speaker 1: is not in line with the concept of net neutrality.
Speaker 1: But YouTube has responded to this report and has claimed
Speaker 1: that it really doesn't have anything to do with which
Speaker 1: browser someone's using. That is immaterial according to Google. Instead,
Speaker 1: what's happening, YouTube says is that it is putting in
Speaker 1: delays for people who are using browsers that have ad
Speaker 1: blocker extensions activated on them. So it's a way to
Speaker 1: fight ad blocking. The statement says, quote users who have
Speaker 1: ad blockers installed may experience suboptimal viewing, regardless of the
Speaker 1: browser they are using. End quote. I don't doubt that
Speaker 1: Google is using this approach to discourage ad blockers, as
Speaker 1: the company has taken a pretty hardline stance against ad
Speaker 1: blockers this year in particular. But I'm curious to see
Speaker 1: if that's as far as this goes, because the stories
Speaker 1: that were being shared seem to suggest that Chrome users
Speaker 1: were getting a better experience. Now, maybe it was that
Speaker 1: they had ad blockers installed on their non Chrome browsers,
Speaker 1: but for whatever reason, they had not installed ad blockers
Speaker 1: on Chrome. Maybe it's that Google has been rolling out
Speaker 1: this feature to affect non Chrome browsers first, like they
Speaker 1: are designing YouTube so that it can detect the presence
Speaker 1: of ad blockers on each browser, and Chrome just hasn't
Speaker 1: been rolled out yet And that eventually, no matter what
Speaker 1: browser you're using, you're going to have this issue. That
Speaker 1: might be true, but it still kind of smacks of
Speaker 1: being anti competitive to me to because again, Chrome gets
Speaker 1: preferential treatment. If your perception is that, oh well, as
Speaker 1: long as I'm on Chrome it's better, I might as
Speaker 1: well just use Chrome, that's an issue. If it's not
Speaker 1: just legit a natural advance of Chrome. If the system
Speaker 1: is being gamed on the back end, that's bad. So
Speaker 1: we'll have to wait and see if more developments happen
Speaker 1: in this story, because again, Google is currently in the
Speaker 1: hot seat with the US government when it comes to
Speaker 1: anti competitive behaviors, and there's a real threat that the
Speaker 1: government will demand Google break apart into different pieces as
Speaker 1: a result of this. Whether it actually gets to that point,
Speaker 1: I don't know. I personally kind of doubt it, simply
Speaker 1: because the last time we saw something this big happen,
Speaker 1: the US government ultimately reversed its decision to break apart
Speaker 1: a big tech company. In that case, it was Microsoft.
Speaker 1: So not that it's impossible, but it hasn't happened in
Speaker 1: a very long time, so I would be surprised if
Speaker 1: it went that far. But we'll have to see. All right,
Speaker 1: We're going to take another quick break. When we come back,
Speaker 1: I've got a couple more stories I want to talk about. Okay, now,
Speaker 1: let's have a quick story about Nothing. This is not
Speaker 1: a Seinfeld reference. It's nothing like that. We're talking about
Speaker 1: the Nothing Company, the makers of the Nothing Phone. That's
Speaker 1: a smartphone. It runs on Android. It had a lot
Speaker 1: of hype when it was first launching. There were all
Speaker 1: these kind of hopes that the Nothing Phone was going
Speaker 1: to be a really awesome flagship Android phone with really
Speaker 1: cool features like these glyphs that light up on the
Speaker 1: back of the phone indicating whether you got a text
Speaker 1: message versus an incoming call or whatever. But so far,
Speaker 1: the Nothing Phone has fallen. I think it's fair to
Speaker 1: say it's fallen short of expectations since the original announcement
Speaker 1: for the project. But this story specifically has to do
Speaker 1: with an app that Nothing put its name on. Nothing
Speaker 1: launched an app called Nothing Chats, and this app claimed
Speaker 1: it could, among other things, let Android users get a
Speaker 1: taste of the promised land. That is, if the promised
Speaker 1: land is made up of blue chat bubbles in Apple's
Speaker 1: I message. All right, so I've talked about this a
Speaker 1: little bit recently, mostly because I find it all really exasperating.
Speaker 1: But there's this perception among certain iPhone owners, particularly here
Speaker 1: in the United States, that people who use other types
Speaker 1: of phones, you know, non iPhones, are the dirty, unwashed
Speaker 1: masses who lack sophistication and intelligence, and they should be
Speaker 1: ostracized and ridiculed and shunned. And the dead giveaway if
Speaker 1: it's not just looking at what the phone is when
Speaker 1: they're holding it, is that when you are messaging with
Speaker 1: them and you're using an iPhone, so you're an eye message,
Speaker 1: their messages show up in little green bubbles rather than
Speaker 1: little blue bubbles. So iPhone users all get blue bubbles,
Speaker 1: but an Android user, they are completely restricted to green,
Speaker 1: and they should be shunned. I guess I don't know.
Speaker 1: I'm an Android user who doesn't really I don't care
Speaker 1: about any of this stuff. I don't care if anyone
Speaker 1: makes fun of me for the type of phone I use,
Speaker 1: because if that's the kind of person they are, then
Speaker 1: they're not worthy of me being worried about them. They're
Speaker 1: beneath my concern, is what I'm saying. So yes, I
Speaker 1: have my own issues of superiority. But I do understand
Speaker 1: that other people care a lot about this stuff, and
Speaker 1: they care about it so much that they will go
Speaker 1: out of their way to make folks feel inferior about
Speaker 1: not having an iPhone. And that is just lame. I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, I get that, Like, especially like school kids
Speaker 1: and stuff, they'll always find ways where they define a
Speaker 1: group and they define outsiders to the group. Like that's
Speaker 1: just kind of how it goes. But it's lame, y'all. Anyway.
Speaker 1: Nothing claimed that the nothing chats app would let Android
Speaker 1: users appear to be iPhone users in I Message conversations,
Speaker 1: that their texts would appear in little blue bubbles. It
Speaker 1: turned out that nothing Chats was actually a reskin of
Speaker 1: a different app called the Sunbird app, and installing the
Speaker 1: app would prompt Android users to submit their Apple username
Speaker 1: and password, and then the app would reportedly log into
Speaker 1: I Message on the behalf of the Android user and
Speaker 1: kind of act like a middleman. And supposedly it was
Speaker 1: going to include end to end encryption, except folks discovered
Speaker 1: that Sunbird was not protecting this information at all. This
Speaker 1: is a huge, huge security and privacy problem. So again,
Speaker 1: the app claimed that it was incorporating into enn encryption.
Speaker 1: It wasn't. Sunbird was logging and storing messages in plane
Speaker 1: text in multiple places, not just in one location, which
Speaker 1: makes it doubly vulnerable, right because that means hackers have
Speaker 1: multiple targets they could look at in order to get
Speaker 1: access to Lane text messaging. Researchers show it was possible
Speaker 1: for a hacker to infiltrate a message server and to
Speaker 1: read the messages sent via this app, which is actually
Speaker 1: the opposite of what end to end encryption is supposed
Speaker 1: to do. And the apps are no longer in the store.
Speaker 1: They disappeared after just a day. But the whole thing
Speaker 1: indicates that both Sunbird and Nothing have not taken proper
Speaker 1: steps to actually be serious about security and privacy, not
Speaker 1: even a little bit. Now. If you want to learn
Speaker 1: more about this, I recommend Ron Amadeo's article in Ours Tetnica.
Speaker 1: It is titled Nothing's I Message app was a security
Speaker 1: catastrophe taken down in twenty four hours. Now. Our last
Speaker 1: story is that the test launch of the SpaceX Starship
Speaker 1: vehicle once again ended in an explosion. So back in April,
Speaker 1: SpaceX first held a test launch of the next generation spacecraft,
Speaker 1: which includes the Starship spacecraft and the super Heavy the
Speaker 1: launch vehicle, and a few minutes after takeoff, like four
Speaker 1: minutes after the first test mission took off, there was
Speaker 1: a big explosion and then SpaceX chose to self destruct
Speaker 1: the vehicle as a result of this, so four minutes
Speaker 1: after lift off, everything went boom. This time this past weekend,
Speaker 1: the vehicle made it further than it had in April,
Speaker 1: but it's still encountered issues. So after the super Heavy
Speaker 1: first stage booster separated from the rest of the vehicle,
Speaker 1: the booster exploded over the Gulf of Mexico. Now, the
Speaker 1: Starship stage continued in its trajectory initially anyway, but then
Speaker 1: SpaceX mission control lost contact with the vehicle. The best
Speaker 1: estimation was that the Starship stage initiated an automatic flight termination,
Speaker 1: which is another way of saying it self destructed. Mission
Speaker 1: control was unsure why the vehicle had actually initiated that.
Speaker 1: The failure happened at around eight minutes into the test,
Speaker 1: so four minutes longer than what happened back in April,
Speaker 1: and it had also reached an altitude of ninety one miles,
Speaker 1: which means by every definition, it reached space the US,
Speaker 1: by the way, defines the edge of space as an
Speaker 1: altitude of fifty miles, whereas the international standard is the
Speaker 1: Karman line, which is at sixty two miles of altitude.
Speaker 1: Either way, the starship got all the way up to
Speaker 1: space because it was up ninety one miles in altitude.
Speaker 1: The test is not a total failure. It is easy
Speaker 1: to call things that when stuff blows up, but even
Speaker 1: when things go wrong, that means there's an opportunity to
Speaker 1: learn more and to learn what you need to do
Speaker 1: differently and how to design things so that they're more reliable.
Speaker 1: It does mean that there's going to have to be
Speaker 1: more tests, obviously, to reach a point where the technology
Speaker 1: can be demonstrated to be reliable and safe and consistently
Speaker 1: working in good order. So that's an issue. It is
Speaker 1: kind of a setback. It's not a failure, but I'm
Speaker 1: sure it's something that SpaceX was not super pleased to
Speaker 1: see because you know, they had already seen one of
Speaker 1: these explode back in April. So we'll have to see
Speaker 1: what happens moving forward. At In the meantime, you know,
Speaker 1: you've got NASA. It's really kind of keeping an eye
Speaker 1: on what's going on with SpaceX, while NASA is readying
Speaker 1: up for the Artemis program to continue, which ultimately is
Speaker 1: going to send astronauts back to the Moon. Clearly, for
Speaker 1: that to happen, there need to be access to reliable
Speaker 1: launch vehicles capable of sending a spacecraft as far out
Speaker 1: as the Moon. So we'll see how things continue from here.
Speaker 1: But that's it. That's the news for November twenty first,
Speaker 1: twenty twenty three. Just a heads up for all of y'all.
Speaker 1: This week in the United States, it's Thanksgiving, which means
Speaker 1: we'll be off for the second half of the week.
Speaker 1: I'll have some a rerun to play in place of
Speaker 1: Thursday's episode, so I just want to give you a
Speaker 1: heads up for that, but we should be back the
Speaker 1: following week. Coming up, I'm going to be going on
Speaker 1: a vacation in early December, so we'll probably have some
Speaker 1: reruns then as well, And then of course we have
Speaker 1: the Christmas holidays at the end that'll also have an
Speaker 1: impact on the show, but then everything will be back
Speaker 1: to what passes for normal on this wacky, zany show
Speaker 1: called tech Stuff. I hope you are all well. I
Speaker 1: hope those of you in the US who are about
Speaker 1: to celebrate Thanksgiving, have a wonderful holiday, and I will
Speaker 1: talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an
Speaker 1: iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.