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Brian McCullough
Welcome to the TechMe Ride Home for Friday, April 4th, 2025. I'm Brian McCullough. Today it looks like intel and TSMC might be about to do some sort of rescue tie up. Why is OpenAI making ChatGPT plus free for college students? Midjourney hustles to try to stay in the AI image generating race and of course the weekend long Read Suggestions here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Sources are telling the information that intel and TSMC have reached a preliminary agreement to form a joint venture that will operate Intel's chip making facilities. TSMC will reportedly take a 20% stake quote intel and other US semiconductor companies will hold the majority of the shares in the proposed joint venture, which would include at least some of Intel's existing chip foundries, said the two people. In exchange for the 20% stake, TSMC has discussed sharing some of its chip making methods with intel and training intel personnel to use them instead of funding its stake with capital. One of the people said it isn't clear how the rest of the new entity would be funded. The deliberations are ongoing and no final agreement has been reached, the two people said. There's still resistance from some intel executives concerned that the deal would cause widespread layoffs at the company while subsuming its own chip making technology. According to two intel employees. There may be resistance within TSMC as well. Two weeks ago, Paul Liu, a board member at tsmc, publicly denied reports that the company was considering acquiring Intel's struggling foundry business, Digitimes Asia reported. The Trump administration initiated the Intel TSMC talks in an effort to revitalize intel, said the two people. Trump, who previously accused Taiwan of stealing away the US Chip industry, is keen to bring advanced manufacturing, including chip making, back to the US The Intel TSMC deal negotiations took place while TSMC was fending off another problem In Washington, the U.S. department of Commerce has been probing whether the Taiwanese company violated US Export rules by making advanced chips for China's Huawei Technologies. Tsmc, the world's largest chip maker, counts Apple and Nvidia as its top two customers. It uses American chip making intellectual property, which means it has to comply with U.S. export regulations. White House and Commerce officials have been pressing TSMC and Intel to strike a deal to resolve the long running crisis at intel, one of the most iconic US Technology firms. Commerce officials who have facilitated the negotiations support the tentative deal, said the two people who have been involved in some of the end QUOTE OpenAI is making ChatGPT+ free for college students in the US and Canada until the end of May 2025, intensifying competition with Anthropic in the higher education market. Quoting Bloomberg the offer gives millions of students free access to OpenAI's $20 per month premium service just as they prepare for final exams, providing capabilities like GPT4O, OpenAI's most advanced large language model, image generation, voice interaction, and advanced research tools that aren't available in the free version. The timing reveals a strategic chess move in the AI industry's battle for the education market. Just 24 hours earlier, Anthropic unveiled Claude for Education, featuring a specialized learning mode that uses Socratic questioning to guide students through problems rather than providing direct answers. Anthropic simultaneously announced partnerships with Northeastern University, London School of Economics, and Champlain College to provide campus wide access. This rapid sequence of announcements echoes the browser wars of the 1990s, when Netscape and Internet Explorer fought for dominance by offering free software to capture user loyalty early. Today's AI companies clearly recognize that capturing students attention now could translate into workplace adoption later. Students who integrate ChatGPT or Claude into their academic workflows today will likely advocate for these same tools in their future professional environments, potentially influencing enterprise decisions worth billions in recurring revenue. The education market represents a crucial battleground for AI companies. According to OpenAI, over one third of US adults aged 18 to 24 already use ChatGPT, with approximately 25% of their queries related to academic work. For students, the free premium access delivers substantial benefits. ChatGPT offers significantly higher message limits, priority access during peak usage times, and exclusive features like Deep Research, which can analyze academic papers, synthesize information from multiple sources, and generate comprehensive reports. The Deep Research feature transforms how students approach academic writing and literature reviews. Unlike traditional search engines that simply return documents, Deep Research can can identify conceptual relationships across sources, analyze methodological differences between studies, and highlight competing interpretations of data. This capability dramatically accelerates the research process while potentially deepening students understanding of complex scholarly conversations. OpenAI's approach differs markedly from Anthropics, while CLAUDE for Education emphasizes critical thinking through its learning mode, OpenAI provides unrestricted access to its most powerful tools, betting that exposure to advanced capabilities will cement student loyalty. This philosophical divide reflects two competing visions of AI's educational role. Anthropic positions CLAUDE as a learning partner that develops student skills, while OpenAI offers ChatGPT as a productivity multiplier that empowers students to accomplish more. End quote. Sources are telling the times that the EU is preparing to penalize X this summer for allegedly breaking the digital Services act, including a fine that sources say could be more than $1 billion quote. The penalties are set to include a fine and demands for product changes, said the people, who declined to be identified discussing an ongoing investigation. These are expected to be announced this summer and would be the first issued under a new EU law intended to force social media companies to police their services, they said. European authorities have been weighing how large a fine to issue X as they consider the risks of further antagonizing Mr. Trump amid wider transatlantic disputes over trade tariffs and the war in Ukraine. The fine could surpass 1 billion dol, one person said, as regulators seek to make an example of X to deter other companies from violating the law, the Digital Services Act. EU officials said their investigation into X was progressing independently from tariff negotiations after Mr. Trump announced major new levies this week. The Investigation began in 2023 and regulators last year issued a preliminary ruling that X had violated the law. The European Union and X could still reach a settlement if the company agrees to changes that satisfy regulators concerns, the official said. X also faces a second EU investigation that is broader and that could lead to penalties. In that investigation, two people said. EU officials are building a case that X's hands off approach to policing user generated content has made it a hub of illegal hate speech, disinformation and other material that is viewed as undercutting democracy across the 27 nation bloc. We have always enforced and will continue to enforce our laws fairly and without discrimination toward all companies operating in the EU in full compliance with global rules, a spokesman for the European Commission, the bloc's executive branch, said in a statement on Thursday, declining to comment specifically on X. On Friday, the commission said it is not preparing a fine of more than $1 billion. There is no proposal on a fine on the table, said Thomas Regnier, a spokesman. Last year, European regulators concluded that X was violating the law by refusing to provide data to outside researchers, making it difficult to measure how disinformation and other harmful material spread on the service. The authorities also believe X has failed to provide adequate transparency about advertisers or to verify the authenticity of users who pay to have a verified account, making the platform more vulnerable to abuse and for interference, end quote. You think maybe they've been feeling the heat these last few weeks? Midjourney has debuted V7 into Alpha, its first new AI image model in nearly a year with a totally different architecture. This, of course, comes a week after OpenAI's new image generator blew the roof off things. Quoting TechCrunch, Midjourneys is not a Ghibli optimized model, though, at least not officially, but it nonetheless can generate aesthetically pleasing works, at least to this reporter's dilettante eye. To use it, you'll first have to rate around 200 images to build a Midjourney personalization profile. If you haven't already, this profile tunes the model to your individual visual preferences. V7 is Midjourney's first model to have personalization switched on by default. Once you've done that, you'll be able to turn V7 on or off on Midjourney's website. And if you're a member of Midjourney's Discord server on its Discord chatbot in the web app, you quickly select the model from the drop down menu next to the version label. Midjourney CEO David Holtz described V7 as a totally different architecture in a post on X. V7 is much smarter with text prompts, holtz continued in an announcement on Discord. Image prompts look fantastic. Image quality is noticeably higher with beautiful textures and bodies. Hands and objects of all kinds have significantly better coherence on all details. V7 is available in two flavors, Turbo Costlier to run and relax, and powers a new tool called Draft Mode that renders images at 10x the speed and half the cost of the standard mode. Draft images are of lower quality than standard mode images, but they can be enhanced and re rendered with a click. A number of standard Mid Journey features aren't available yet for V7, according to Holtz, including image upscaling and retexturing. Those will arrive in the near future, he said, possibly within two months. This is an entirely new model with unique strengths and probably a few weaknesses, holtz wrote on Discord. We want to learn from you what it's good at and bad at, but definitely keep in mind it may require different styles of prompting, so play around a bit. I am not going to report on the TikTok the minute by minute the up and down of the stock market this morning, but a reminder that TikTok as an issue is still going on in the background. This weekend, President Trump reiterated he's open to tariff relief for China if it approves the sale of TikTok's US operations. The app faces an April 5th divestment deadline, as you'll recall. Quoting Bloomberg, Trump said they were very close to a deal. I think that maybe China will call and say, well, we're upset with the tariffs and maybe they want to get something a little bit in order to get TikTok approved Trump said, while cautioning he had no knowledge that Beijing would seek that approach. End quote. Welcome to the future of data privacy with Incogni in today's tech driven world, protecting your personal information from data brokers is more crucial than ever. Incogni is here to ensure your data remains private and secure. This service is designed to help protect your personal data from data brokers who collect, aggregate and sell it. 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Is this really a techn technology that is on the verge of becoming a reality or is this like self driving cars, something that will always be just around the corner? Artificial intelligence is already driving cars, writing essays and even writing computer code. Now humanoids machines built to look like humans and powered by AI are posed to move into our homes so they can help with the daily chores. Mr. Bornich is a chief executive and founder of a startup called 1X. Before the end of the year, his company hopes to put his robot, Neo, into more than 100 homes in Silicon Valley and elsewhere. His startup is among the dozens of companies planning to sell humanoids and get them into both homes and businesses. Investors have poured $7.2 billion into more than 50 startups since 2015, according to PitchBook, a research firm that tracks the tech industry. The humanoid frenzy reached a new peak last year, when investments topped $1.6 billion. And that did not include the billions that Elon Musk and Tesla, his electric car company, are pumping into Optimus, a humanoid they began building in 2021. Entrepreneurs like Mr. Bornich and Mr. Musk believe humanoids will one day do much of the physical work that is now handled by people, including household chores like wiping counters and emptying dishwashers, warehouse jobs like sorting packages and factory labor like building cars on an assembly line. Simpler robots, small robotic arms and autonomous carts, for instance, have long shared the workload inside warehouses and factories. Now companies are betting that machines can tackle a wider range of tasks by mimicking the ways that people walk, bend, twist, reach, grip and generally get things done. Because homes, offices and warehouses are already built for humans, these companies argue, humanoids are better equipped to navigate the world than any other robot. The push toward humanoid labor has been building for years, fueled by advances in both robotic hardware and AI technologies that allow robots to rapidly learn new skills. But these humanoids are still a bit of a mirage. End quote. Then quoting from A bit later in the piece, I watched Neo load a washing machine, squatting gingerly to lift clothes from a laundry basket. And as Mr. Bornich and I chatted outside the kitchen, the robot started wiping the counters. All this was done via remote control. Even when controlled by humans, Neo might drop a cup or struggle to find the right angle as it tries to toss an empty bottle into a garbage can under a sink. Though humanoids have improved by leaps and bounds over the past decade, they are still not as nimble as humans. Neo, for instance, cannot raise its arms above its head. For the uninitiated, Neo can also feel a little creepy. Like anything else that seems partially human and partially not, talking to it is particularly strange, given that you are really talking to a remote technician. It's like talking to a ventriloquist dummy. There are actually lots of videos of the robots in the piece So I suggest clicking through to read that then from the Verge there's long been a sort of niche movement to have a minimalist phone, something that isn't quite so hyperactive and overwhelming in your life. We saw this impulse in things like the Humane Pin to not great effect, but the Verge has a review of the $599 Light Phone 3, which David Pearce suggests is getting close to nailing this minimalist formula. Note it's a smarter phone than the previous light phones, but it's still not a smartphone. It has no app store, no social media, no web browser, none of the things we do on our phones all day. That is, of course, the whole point. Light envisions the device as either a no frills nights and weekends complement to your smartphone, or a whole replacement for anyone looking for much less screen time. More recently, it has caught on as a device for kids. A school in Massachusetts made news a few years ago by banning smartphones and giving students light phones instead. The Light Phone 3 comes tantalizingly close to being my ideal minimalist phone without getting quite there. Part of the problem is that the phone's not quite finished. Its NFC sensor, video chat feature and fingerprint reader aren't yet active, all of which would add some useful new possibilities to the device. Light is working on integrations that will go a long way towards fully satisfying my own list of essential phone things too. And there are a few interface and usability things that make it hard to live the light life. Life phones have always been nicely designed, but the newest model is my favorite yet. The all black everything Design makes the Phone 3 feel a little light, something a spy might carry, and the sharp edged boxiness kind of makes it feel like a weapon. It weighs 124 grams and is 12 millimeters thick. Basically imagine you put a case on an iPhone 16, chop the whole thing in two right above the volume buttons and the bottom bit is a light phone that might not be helpful. I really like the way the Phone 3 looks, though. The top edge does dig into my ear a little when I'm on long calls. Instead of a small, slow, refreshing E ink screen that sticks out against the big bezels, this one has a 3.92-inch 1080 x 1240AMOLED pan that blends really nicely into the devices. Still, pretty big bezels. This is probably the biggest hardware upgrade on the phone, Light CEO Kai Wei Tang tells me. The slow and blocky E ink screen was previously the number one reason people bailed on their Light phone. The AMOLED is much more responsive to scrolling and swiping and in particular is much more pleasant to type on. Still, I was surprised how quickly I adapted to most of life with the light phone. It took about a day to stop instinctively swiping to get to a home screen and instead hit the button on the side to switch tools or just turn the screen off. I spent 20 minutes subscribing to all my podcasts and the phone three became the thing I tote from room to room blaring the rewatchables. I didn't even try to switch away from iMessage and WhatsApp. To be honest. I just sent some SMS and did the rest of my texting from my computer. All my reading, YouTubing and mindless scrolling were shunted to another device too, in this case mostly an iPad. My best advice for the light phone is to wait. The company has a terrific track record for maintaining and improving its devices, and I have every confidence that it will eventually turn on the NFC chip and add a digital watch wallet, simplify login and payment with the fingerprint reader, add video chat with the front facing camera and build the integrations like Lyft and Spotify. It is promised, but the Verge's long standing policy is to review only what's in the box and for now the phone is unfinished. End quote. I've got a weekend bonus episode this weekend that is long overdue. It's long past time on this show we talked to an actual lawyer about the legality of the whole AI issue, especially in light of the whole studio Ghibli thing. So I did that. I had an actual AI intellectual property and copyright lawyer walk me through all the issues and details on this. It's a great, really enlightening discussion. Enjoy that. Talk to you on Monday.