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- [00:05]
Brian McCullough
Welcome to the Tech Meme Ride home for Monday, November 18, 2024. I'm Brian McCullough. Today we have the nomination for the next FCC chair. More hype around smart glasses about that Jake Paul Mike Tyson fight on Netflix. Is YouTube now the king of the podcast ecosystem and a deeper dive on how AI is giving Wall Street a brand new window into the startup ecosystem? Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. President elect Donald Trump is nominating FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr as FCC chair, quoting Bloomberg. Carr has served at the agency since 2012, including as an advisor to a later chair, Ajit Pai, and has worked as its general counsel. Trump, during his first presidency, nominated Carr to serve as a commissioner in 2017. Commissioner Carr is a warrior for free speech and has fought against the regulatory law that has stifled Americans freedoms and held back our economy, trump said in a statement. In a statement after Trump's election victory, Haar highlighted his priorities, saying that the agency should have an important role to play reining in big tech, ensuring that broadcasters operate in the public interest and unleashing economic growth. He reiterated those points in a chapter for the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 manifesto. Seeking to influence policy in the second Trump administration, Carr recommended that the FCC limit the scope of section 230 of the Communications to crack down on what conservatives perceive as big tech content moderation abuses. Carr has aligned himself publicly with Elon Musk, traveling to Texas to attend a rocket launch for SpaceX, the billionaire space exploration company. Since joining the FCC, he has also advocated for it to be technology neutral when it allocates broadband subsidy funding, making more room for satellite providers to compete alongside wired Internet providers for federal broadband dollars. In a December 2023 interview with the podcast this Week in Startups, Carr suggested that a way to get Internet to areas that lack access is to subsid subsidize the cost of Musk's satellite Internet provider. You just cut everybody a coupon for $600, which is effectively the price of a Starlink dish. Mail that coupon to everybody and call it a day, carr said. Carr has also said video sharing platform TikTok, owned by Chinese company ByteDance, should be banned in the U.S. trump tried to ban TikTok through an executive order during his last presidency, but has now suggested he opposes a ban. End quote. I continue to bang the drum on this idea that smart glasses are a product category not several years out from now, but a category of right now or next year at least. Samsung apparently plans to release its smart glasses in Q3 2025. The glasses will be powered by Qualcomm's AR1 chipset and use Google's Gemini to handle AI tasks. Quoting 9to5Google research coming out of China from Wilson XR reveals a few new details regarding Samsung's upcoming XR glasses. The report, highlighted by Ukan Lozrev and Maill Business Newspaper reveals that Samsung is planning an initial production run of these smart glasses that would include 500,000 units and that they'd be released in Q3 2025. That's later than expected, but in line with what Samsung teased in October. The glasses will apparently be powered by Qualcomm's AR1 chipset, the same chip that's used in Ray Ban Meta smart glasses. The generation being used is not mentioned, but Qualcomm had already released AR2 in 2022. That's not the only spec the two devices share, as the report also claims Samsung's glasses will have a 12 megapixel camera and a 155 milliamp hour battery, the same give or take 1 milliamp hour as Ray Ban's glasses. In terms of weight, the glasses would weigh 5 grams, ever so slightly more than Ray Ban Meta. One of the big questions around Samsung's XR glasses has whether or not they'd have a display, and it seems this won't be the case based on this report to match the weight and battery size of Ray Ban Meta. While adding a display would be impressive to say the least, with this report revealing hardware specs, skipping all mention of a display strongly suggests this product simply won't be including one. However, we do get some indication of what these glasses will be capable of. Gemini would handle AI tasks alongside support for payment, QR code recognition, gesture recognition and human recognition functions. It's not entirely clear what what all of these features will do, but it suggests a product that's a bit more capable than Meta's offerings. Meta uses AI on its glasses to leverage the camera for multimodal analysis and answers and scan QR codes, set reminders, and Meta has teased translation features. The expectation is that we could at least get another tease of these before any full launch, much like Samsung did with the Galaxy Ring. Mark your calendars. There's a Galaxy S25 launch event expected in January. Netflix says 60 million households watched the Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson boxing bout live around the world, peaking at 65 million concurrent streams, thereby making it in all likelihood the single most watched television event of the year. Maybe the super bowl was technically bigger, at least domestically. And I guess it depends on how you count viewership of the Olympics. Though maybe we should also say how many people tried to watch as many people experienced extreme buffering and loss of audio as Troy Coverdale joked on Blue Sky, I mean, that many people watching a spinning wheel is pretty big. Quoting Bloomberg. We crashed the site, said Paul, 27 after claiming victory over the 58 year old Tyson. This is the biggest event Some of those viewers took to social media to vent their frustration over glitches in streaming the highly anticipated Showdown. More than 100,000 users reported network issues on on the Down Detector website throughout the live streaming, commenting on slow buffering and network issues. Even boxer Evander Holyfield was struggling to hear the host of the show when he was asked about his infamous fight with Tyson. The company's biggest live streaming event is part of its ambition to boost its fledgling advertising business. Netflix has been investing in its live event capabilities for mega spectacles like the boxing match. After earlier live streaming missteps such as the Love Is Blind reunion debacle, the platform ran a teaser for upcoming NFL games on Christmas Day during Friday's bout. End quote. This exchange on X was interesting. This is Peter Yared. I used to run tech for CBS which included streaming the Super Bowl. Core issue for Netflix is that they operate their own CDN content delivery network which is not built for live. They don't have the operating capacity and vendor relationships to do large scale live streaming. To which Srini Rajagopal responded, there is a different take. I heard from inside but cannot share. It's a forecasting issue. I'm sure they can handle bigger loads if they knew the magnitude of the traffic. To which Yarid responded, well, exactly. Since they run their own CDN that was initially built for edge caching, they have to make sure it can handle peak live load for upstream and downstream and for transcoding. They will get there. Well, I guess they have six weeks to figure that out. Don't want to piss off NFL fans for an event that is actually meaningful in a sporting sense. This isn't reflected in my audience numbers, but I can see how this is probably true nonetheless. In a new survey, 31% of US weekly podcast listeners said YouTube is their most used platform to listen to podcasts, surpassing Spotify at 27% and Apple Podcasts at 15%, quoting the Journal because these days we don't just listen to podcasts. Now we watch podcasts. It's a profound shift that suddenly has the world's audio giants battling for supremacy in the increasingly valuable world of video podcasts. It's becoming all about video, daniel X, Spotify's chief executive, told my colleague Ann Steele this week. The most improbable thing about how YouTube made the podcast market all about video is how swiftly it happened. Only four years ago, when it was less popular for podcasts than both Spotify and Apple, YouTube becoming a podcasting colossus sounded about as realist as Martin Scorsese releasing his next movie on TikTok. With billions of users around the world, YouTube has the kind of scale that other platforms can only dream about. In fact, it recently passed Netflix as the streamer with the most TV viewership in America, according to Nielsen data. And the company says 150 million people in the US now watch YouTube on their TVs every month, which means it has conquered the living rooms of nearly half the country. As it happens, five years ago is when YouTube began to detect that video podcasts were catching on. They really took off during the pandemic, when podcasters started started recording their zoom conversations and there was so much demand for human interaction that listeners actually watched them. Once it had several years of data about the stickiness of video podcasts, the company owned by Google decided to pour resources into this peculiar new format. We saw this trend organically emerging, said Tim Katz, YouTube's vice president of partnerships. And then we wanted to invest in it. For users, that meant making podcasts more prominent and much easier to discover on the platform. For creators, that meant rolling out podcast specific tools and showing how they could make real money turning their audio podcasts into to videos. Since YouTube pays them a share of the advertising revenue from their content, the cybersecurity industry has an effectiveness problem. Despite a growing list of technologies and vendors and record spending on tools, organizations worldwide continue to suffer disruptive and damaging cyber attacks. It's clear that simply purchasing another security tool will not solve the problem. To survive the modern threat environment, organizations need to address their cyber risk by implementing a properly fit, vigilant and continuously improving security operations model. Arctic Wolf provides managed security operations to thousands of organizations of all sizes and in practically all industries around the world. In their 2024 Security Operations Report, you'll gain insights gleaned from more than 253 trillion observations over 12 months across their install base. Gain essential expert guidance, discover security trends, and get a clear understanding of the evolving threat landscape in the Arctic Wolf 2024 Security Operations Report. Visit arcticwolf.comtechmeme to get your copy. That's arcticwolf.com techmeme feel like your finance software isn't cutting it? Want the latest and greatest in financial software to simplify spending, help you save time and keep you from getting trapped in busy work? Check out Ramp. RAMP is the corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your pocket. RAMP gives finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend. With ramp, you're able to issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions and automate expense reporting so you can stop wasting time. At the end of every month, Ramp's accounting software automatically collects receipts and categorizes your expenses in real time so you don't have to you'll never have to chase down a receipt again, and your employees will no longer spend hours submitting expense reports. The time you'll save each month on employee expenses will allow you to close your books eight times faster. RAMP saves you money Businesses that use Ramp save an average of 5% the first year and now get $250 when you join ramp, just go to ramp.com techmeme ramp.com Techmeme cards issued by Sutton bank member FDIC terms and conditions apply. Sources say that in recent months, Nvidia has asked its suppliers to change the design of server racks for Blackwell GPUs several times to overcome overheating problems. If Nvidia chips have some sort of capacity issues, that would be very concerning for the AI boom. Quoting the information, Nvidia already had to delay the production and delivery of the Blackwell GPUs by at least a quarter after running into design flaws in the chips. Both episodes highlight the difficult difficulties in its quest to meet high customer demand for its AI hardware. What makes the new server racks significant is that they combine 72 of Nvidia's AI chips, an extraordinarily high number. AI developers are hoping that would allow them to train larger AI models much faster. Major customers, including Microsoft Meta platforms and Elon Musk's Xai, enthusiastically greeted Nvidia's announcement in March about producing a 72 chip rack. Now, though, some big customers are concerned. While Nvidia often changes its server designs before launch, changes to the Blackwell racks have come late in the production process, according to several customers and suppliers. However, Nvidia may still be able to deliver the racks to customers by the end of the first half of next year, in line with its original schedule, and it hasn't notified customers of a delay. Some customers have received a small number of the 72 GPU servers on Sunday, after the publication of this story, Dell CEO Michael Dell posted on X that his company began shipping an undisclosed number of 70 chip racks to Coreweave, an Nvidia backed cloud computing provider. Still, customers and suppliers said the overheating problem has persisted when suppliers have tried to mass produce the racks. Two executives at large cloud providers that have ordered the new chips said they are concerned that such last minute difficulties might push back the timeline for when they can get their GPU clusters up and running next year. The executives say they need at least several weeks to test the system and iron out possible kinks, especially given the novel design and unprecedented complexity. Some customers, such as Microsoft, plan to customize their Blackwell racks by replacing some components to suit their data centers, but the final design is still dependent on elements Nvidia needs to finalize, according to someone who has been working on the design. But speaking of the cloud AI industrial complex, I have another story on how Wall street specifically is preparing to cash in on the AI boom. I find this angle fascinating because over the last 30 or 40 years Wall street has sort of been divorced from the tech boom in a way. Sure, when companies are preparing to go public and then do become public companies, big banks are there to help them do that and help them become big public going concerns. But for most of the founding and growth stage, it's VC money that does most of the financing and reaps most of the rewards. What this AI boom seems to be suggesting is that big banks can get in on the action in a big and mostly new way. Quoting Bloomberg While much of the speculative hype around AI has played out in the stock market so far and seen in chipmaker Nvidia's share price, the giddiness is spreading to the sober suits of debt finance and private equity analysis by Bloomberg News estimates at least $1 trillion of spending is needed for the data centers, electricity suppliers and communications networks that will power the attempt to deliver on AI's promise to transform everything from medicine to customer service, others reckon the total cost could be double that. Even Wall street skeptics on AI's ultimate money making potential, such as Goldman Sachs head of equity research Jim Covello, have said it's worth staying invested in those who provide the plumbing. The wealth of Silicon Valley's and Seattle's tech giants who want some of this capacity anyway for cloud storage and the like, offers a degree of comfort. Banks are racing to keep up with the burst of activity. JP Morgan Chase has set up a dedicated infrastructure team to corral its troops. According to a person with knowledge of the matter, as has Deutsche bank and others. One rival banker admits his firm is juggling so many data center deals that it doesn't have enough staff to cope with the workload. BlackRock's boss Larry Fink, told Bloomberg TV his firm will raise as much as $120 billion in debt linked to data centers after teaming up with Microsoft to bankroll the development of the buildings and energy infrastructure. Bankers and private lenders will be desperate for a slice of such deals. Nevertheless, even amid the AI delirium, there are notes of caution. Some point out that while private equity firms have a solid pedigree in real estate, done construction work at the epic scale and expense of some of these data centers, known as AI factories, in the lingo of Nvidia's founder and chief executive officer Jensen Huang, innovation is constantly upending technology, adding jeopardy to long term capital projects. And AIs acolytes still haven't dreamed up a killer app to match the widely successful e commerce and GPS location based upstarts of the Web 2.0 era. Even if they do, the tech industry's brightest minds are working to make the software and hardware more efficient to lessen the need for scale and power. There's a lot of reason for optimism, said Barclays Benjamin Fernandez, head of the bank's Esoterics ABS business, which works on bonds backed by non traditional assets such as data centers. But if for whatever reason, it doesn't take hold and people don't find a way to monetize this investment in AI that could potentially pose risks. End quote. Nothing more for you today. Talk to you tomorrow.
- [17:30]
AT&T Business
And now a next level moment from AT&T business. Say you've sent out a gigantic shipment of pillows and they need to be there in time for International Sleep day. You've got ATT 5G so you're fully confident, but the vendor isn't responding and International Sleep Day is tomorrow. Luckily, AT&T5G lets you deal with any issues with ease, so the pillows will get delivered and everyone can sleep soundly, especially you. ATT 5G requires a compatible plan and device 5G is not available everywhere. See att.com 5G for you for details.