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- [00:05]
Brian McCullough
Welcome to the Tech Meme Ride home for Friday, December 13, 2024. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, okay, what if AI models are really the new OS for everything, but also smart glasses and a Vision Pro competitor? I'll explain. Could Notebook LM become a fully fledged product, seemingly the leader in the clubhouse and the race to create the next AI paradigm beyond the Transformer model and of course, the weekend long reach? Suggestions? Here's what you missed today in the world of tech Something Something New Product category enabled by AI Google yesterday unveiled Android xr, a mixed reality OS for headsets and smart glasses, with Gemini built in and plans a 2025 debut for this with a piece of hardware from Samsung called Project Muhan, which is a headset. This is Victoria Song's hands on report of all of that, quoting the Verge it's an ordinary Tuesday. I'm wearing what look like ordinary glasses in a room surrounded by Google and Samsung representatives. One of them steps in front of me and starts speaking in Spanish. I don't speak Spanish. Hovering in midair, I can see her words being translated into English subtitles. Reading them, I can see she's describing what I'm seeing in real time. I mumble an expletive. Everyone laughs. This is my first experience with Android xr, a new mixed reality OS designed for headsets and smart glasses like like the prototypes I'm wearing. It's Google's big bet to power a new generation of augmented reality devices that embody our wildest dreams of what smart glasses can be. Google wants everyone to know the time is finally right for xr, and it's pointing to Gemini as its North Star. Adding Gemini enables multimodal AI and natural language. Things it says will make interactions with your environment richer. In a demo, Google had me prompt Gemini to name the title of a yellow book sitting behind me on a shelf. I briefly glanced at it earlier, but had hadn't taken a photo. Gemini took a second and then offered up an answer. I whipped around to check it was correct. On top of that, the platform will work with any mobile and tablet app from the Play Store out of the box. Today's launch is aimed at developers so they can start building out experiences. The average person won't be able to buy anything running Android XR right Now, but in 2025, Samsung will be launching its long rumored XR headset. Dubbed Project Korean for Infinity, the headset will be the first consumer product to ship with Android xr. Technically, it's running the same software as the glasses I tried But Project Muhan will also be capable of VR and immersive content, stuff that wouldn't be suited to a pair of smart glasses. It's essentially a showcase for everything that could be possible. Hence why Google is going with xr, a catch all term that stands for extended reality and encompasses ar, VR and mixed reality. Trying on Muhan, it seems a bit like the Vision Pro, but unlike that, the light seal is optional so you can choose to let the world bleed in. It's lightweight and doesn't pinch my face too tightly. My ponytail easily slots through the top, and later I'm thankful that I don't have to redo my hair. At first the resolution doesn't feel quite as sharp as the Vision Pro until the headset automatically calibrates to my pupillary distance. It's at this point when I start feeling deja vu. I'm walked through pinching to select items and how to tap the side to bring up the app launcher. There's an eye calibration process that feels awfully similar to the Vision Pros. If I want, I can retreat into an immersive Mode to watch YouTube and Google TV on a distant mountain. I can open apps, resize them, and place them at various points around the room. I've done this all before. This just happens to be Google flavored. I want to ask how do you expect to stand out? I don't get the chance to answer before I'm told. Gemini in the Moohan headset, I can say, take me to JYP Entertainment in Seoul and it will automatically open Google Maps and show me that building. If my windows get cluttered, I can ask it to reorganize them. I don't have to lift a finger while wearing the prototype glasses. I watch and listen as Gemini summarizes a long, rambling text message to the main point. Can you buy lemon, ginger and olive oil from the store? I was able to naturally switch from speaking in English to asking in Japanese what the weather is in New York and get the answer spoken and written in Japanese. It's not just interactions with Gemini that linger in my mind either. It's how experiences can be built on top of them. I asked Gemini how to get somewhere and saw, turn by turn directions. When I looked down, the text morphed into a zoomable map of my surroundings. It's very easy to imagine myself using something like that in real life, but as cool as all that is, headsets can be a hard sell to the average person. Personally, I'm more enamored with the Glasses demo, but those have no concrete timeline. Google made the prototypes, but it's focusing on working with other partners to bring hardware to market. There are still cultural cues that have to be established with either form factor. Outside of Gemini, there has to be a robust ecosystem of apps and experiences for the average person, not just early adopters. It's not going to be a singular product, it's Android, says Sharam Ezadi, Google's VP of AR and xr, noting that Google has a three pronged strategy for Android xr. Laying the groundwork with devs is one element, Gemini's conversational experience is another, and the third is the idea that no one device is the future of xr. Headsets, for example, may just be episodic devices you use for entertainment. Glasses could supplement phones and smartwatches for discrete notifications and looking up information. The way I see it, these devices don't replace one another. You'll use these devices throughout your day, and if there's consistency with Gemini and generative AI experiences across these form factors, people will get more comfortable with wearing computers on their faces. That's the on ramp to get more immersive devices, says inside. So a Vision Pro like device coming soon from Samsung, but hints that all of this can be baked into anything. Lighter things as well. Mark Gurman also had a hands on with Project Muhan and he says it was lighter and more comfortable to wear than Apple's Vision Pro and Android XR is highly reminiscent of Vision os, but he would say that, wouldn't he? Google has rolled out Notebook LM plus, an enterprise version of NotebookLM with added controls for access and data management. A bit more on that in a little bit, but hey, that little novelty experiment, maybe it could become some sort of a real product, no? But also what more could it be? Because Google also announced interactive audio overviews in NotebookLM, an experimental feature that lets users talk to the AI hosts of the overviews, those AI, I guess podcasts that they create. Quoting the Verge the ability to actually talk with Notebook LM seems like a potentially useful way to learn more about what you've collected in the app. But Google cautions that it's an experimental feature and that hosts may also pause awkwardly before responding, or occasionally introduce inaccuracies. So it may not be a totally polished experience to start. In addition to the interactive audio overviews, Google is introducing a new interface for NotebookLM that organizes things into three areas a sources panel for your information, a chat panel to talk with an AI chatbot about the sources and a studio panel that lets you make things like audio overviews and study guides. I think it looks nice. Google is announcing a NotebookLM subscription to NotebookLM. The subscription will give you five times more audio overviews. Notebooks and sources per notebook let you customize the style and tone of your notebook. Responses let you make shared team notebooks let you offer additional privacy and security. Google says the subscription is available today for businesses, schools and universities and organizations, and enterprise customers. It will be added to Google One AI premium in early 2025. Google is also launching Agents Space, a platform for custom AI agents for enterprises. AgentSpace can provide conversational assistance, answer complex questions, make proactive suggestions, and take actions based on your company's unique information. Google says it also has connectors for apps like Microsoft, SharePoint, Jira and ServiceNow. Let's keep going with Google because remember that reported breakthrough in quantum computing from this week? What's the biggest fear of quantum computing actually coming to reality that we've discussed in the past? Quoting the Verge Experts believe that one day quantum computers could make today's systems of encryption utterly obsolete. But Google tells the Verge its new breakthrough Willow chip is nowhere near ready for that. The Willow chip is not capable of breaking modern cryptography, google Quantum AI director and COO Charina Chow tells the Verge. A so called crypto analytically relevant quantum computer, or croq CROC could jeopardize civilian and military communications, undermines supervisory and control systems for critical infrastructure, and defeat security protocols for most Internet based financial transactions. The White house warned in 2022 ordering that U.S. agencies must transition to new systems to mitigate that risk by 2035. But Willow is not a croc, according to Google. While the company does claim it can solve a computing challenge in five minutes that would take the world's fastest supercomputer 10 septillion years. Google has only produced 105 physical qubits worth of that computing power and suggests they would need millions to literally crack the codes. Estimates are that we're at least 10 years out from breaking RSA and that around 4 million physical qubits would be required to do this, chao writes. She says Willow doesn't change that timeline at all. And though Chinese researchers have repeatedly claimed to discover new ways to break RSA encryption with much smaller quantum computers, ones with just a few hundreds or thousands of qubits, security experts have repeatedly been skeptical. Google is one of the many companies preparing to defend against the potential threat of broken encryption with post quantum cryptography, or pqc. Ever since the Edward Snowden leaks revealed that spy agencies like the NSA were quietly funding code breaking quantum computer research. A few years back, we wrote about how the National Institute of Standards and Technology created a competition to develop quantum safe cryptography standards back in 2016. This August, NIST released three finalized algorithms and its standards for integrating them into products and systems, and plans to select one or two more by the end of the year. The Rand Corporation, a think tank famous for advising on US national security in the past, suggested in 2023 in an editorial that the moment an RSA breaking quantum computer exists, it'll trigger a worldwide rush to defend against it. As soon as the existence of the CROC becomes public knowledge or is even considered plausible and the threat becomes concrete, most vulnerable organizations will immediately move to upgrade all their communication systems to post quantum cryptography.
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- [11:45]
Brian McCullough
To stay up to date on the.
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- [12:00]
Brian McCullough
It'S also available as a podcast.
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Brian McCullough
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Brian McCullough
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- [13:48]
Brian McCullough
From the is there something beyond the transformer model file? Liquid AI, which is building AI systems powered by liquid neural Networks, raised a $250 million Series A led by AMD at a $2.3 billion valuation following a $46.6 million seed liquid neural Networks what's this now quoting Bloomberg Founded in 2023 by a group of AI researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the startup is building a novel technology called Liquid foundation models that instead uses mathematical techniques discovered by studying the architecture of a worm's brain. By focusing on an organism, specifically a small nematode worm called I'm not going to pronounce that, that's just 1 millimeter long with far fewer neurons than the human brain, Liquid AI said it's able to build an system that is more flexible. Its systems also require less data and computing power than the conventional transformer based models that underpin chatbots and other popular AI tools, the company said. Two years after ChatGPT's release kicked off a frenzy around generative AI, there's a growing debate about whether top developers are hitting a wall in building more advanced artificial intelligence systems that justify the tremendous cost. A key part of Liquid AI's pitch is effectively that its technology can do more with less. The startup said its models are better suited to run on devices red, reducing the need for costly data centers. Liquid also claims a text based version of its AI system outperforms some leading alternatives of similar size on various benchmarks. Liquid AI has quickly attracted attention from academia and business leaders. Of all the companies trying the non transformer architectures, I believe Liquid AI is the front runner, shopify Chief Technology Officer Mikhail Parakin wrote on X this summer. Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas also posted about the promise of the model. Time for the weekend Long Reach Suggestions first up, Kevin Roos outlined something that I've seen personally as well. Sure, the masses use ChatGPT, but Anthropic's Claude has become the chatbot of choice for AI industry insiders who say its responses feel more creative and empathetic and less gratingly robotic. Quoting the Times to the people who love it, Claude just feels different, more creative and empathetic, less gratingly robotic. Its outputs, they say, are like the responses a smart, attentive human would give and less like the generic prose generated by other chatbots. As a result, Claude is quickly becoming a social sidekick for AI insiders and maybe a preview of what's coming for the rest of us as powerful synthetic characters become more enmeshed in our daily lives. More and more of my friends are using Claude for emotional processing and thinking through relationship challenges, said Jeffrey Latish, an AI safety researcher at Palisade Research. Asked what made Claude different than other chatbots, Mr. Latish said that Claude seemed more insightful and good at helping people spot patterns and blind spots. The analogy I use is a highly liked, respected traveler, said Dr. Amanda Askill, a researcher and philosopher at Anthropic who is in charge of fine tuning Claude's character. Claude is interacting with lots of different people around the world and has to do so without pandering and adopting the values of the person it's talking with. A problem with many AI models, Dr. Askell said, is that they tend to act sycophantic, telling users what they want to hear and rarely challenging them or pushing back on their ideas, even when those ideas are wrong or potentially harmful. With Claude, she said, the goal was to create an AI character that would be helpful with most requests but would also challenge users when necessary. What is the kind of person you can disagree with, but you come away thinking this is a good person? She said. These are the sorts of traits we want Claude to have. Claude is still miles behind ChatGPT when it comes to mainstream awareness. It lacks features found in other chatbots, such as a voice chat mode and the ability to generate images or search the Internet for up to date information. And some AI makers speculate that Claude's popularity is a passing fad, or that it's only popular among AI hipsters who want to brag about the obscure chatbot they're into. But given how many things that start in San Francisco eventually spread to the rest of the world, Claude's warm embrace could also be a preview of things to come and from rest of world A reminder to US listeners the rest of the whole world. The whole world runs on WhatsApp. So a deep dive into how it got that way. WhatsApp is the world's most widely used messaging app. The company says it has 2 billion daily users daily. Those users send more than 100 billion messages every day in 60 languages across 180 countries. Some 400 million of those users are in India, WhatsApp's biggest market, followed by another 120 million in Brazil. WhatsApp initially achieved that global dominance in large part by doing just one thing very well enabling cheap, private and reliable messaging on almost any phone almost anywhere in the world. But in the decade Since Meta acquired WhatsApp for an eye watering $22 billion in 2014, the app has been transformed from a narrowly focused, utilitarian tool into a sort of everything app. In countries like India, Brazil, Mexico and Indonesia, WhatsApp is now also a place for scheduling doctor's appointments and conducting real estate deals and buying ceramic ducks. In Brazil, the beauty juggernaut L'Oreal now makes an average of 25% of its online direct to consumer sales on WhatsApp. The shift has been driven by money. WhatsApp has never been much of a money maker. While Meta makes billions off mining people's personal data to sell more ads, WhatsApp WhatsApp is an encrypted app whose founders once very publicly swore off advertising altogether. Lately, however, WhatsApp has been aggressively luring big businesses to its suite of paid messaging products for businesses and openly flirting with the possibility of introducing ads in the not too distant Future. True to Meta's appetite for voracious expansion, WhatsApp's goal is nothing short of getting every business in the world on the platform, Meta's head of product for business messaging told Rest of World this might be the latest I've put a show out in years where I didn't wait for some sort of news to happen or something to cover. Hopefully this weekend will allow my voice to recover. This is why it's late. But also I've learned my lesson from pre announcing things that end up not happening right. I did record an episode of the Newsworthy Podcast this week where I did a rundown of the Top stories of 2024 in the world of tech. Figure you'd like to hear that, since I haven't had time to do something similar here. So if they get me the audio of that episode, I will post it as a bonus episode this weekend. If not I won't. Maybe next weekend. We shall see. Talk to you on Monday.