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Hey everybody. As I mentioned yesterday, this is another taste of the omnibus episodes that we do on the paid feed where you can just listen to everything that happened this week in one single episode as you're walking your dog, going to the gym or whatever in about an hour and 15 minutes. If you subscribe at Tech Supercast Tech, you can get this without ads. Every week there will be ads on what you're about to listen to and also you get ad free versions of every daily episode. So if this is interesting to you, subscribe at Tech Supercast Tech. This is the omnibus episode for the Techmeme Ride Home podcast for the week of March 3, 2025. Well might we get that US government national crypto Reserve after all, President Trump has named Bitcoin, Ethereum, xrp, Solana and Cardano as assets to be included in a strategic US crypto reserve, causing significant price surges across crypto. Quoting CoinDesk. Notably, Trump did not initially mention Bitcoin or Ethereum, the two largest cryptocurrencies by market capitalization, in his statement, but he later clarified that the reserve would include these assets as well. Trump made the announcements on Truth Social, his social media platform. A US Crypto reserve will elevate this critical industry after years of corrupt attacks by the Biden administration, which is why my Executive Order on Digital Assets directed the Presidential Working Group to move forward on a crypto strategic reserve that includes xrp, Sol and ada, trump stated, I will make sure the US Is the crypto capital of the world. We are making America great again. Following Trump's initial announcement, xrp, Seoul and ADA experienced significant price surges. The price of ADA soared by more than 63% within two hours after the President's post, while Solana increased by 23% and XRP by 32%. While fans of XRP, Ada and Solana celebrated the news, some Bitcoin and ETH fans initially responded with a mixture of disappointment and surprise. Around an hour after his initial post, the President clarified that BTC and ETH as other available cryptocurrencies, will be at the heart of the reserve, end quote and quoting cnbc, Trump is hosting the first White House Crypto Summit on Friday, and investors will be watching closely for more clues about the direction of the reserve plans. This is the first time Trump has specified his support for a crypto reserve versus a stockpile. While the former assumes actively buying crypto in regular installments, a stockpile would simply not sell any of the crypto currently held by the US Government, much of the industry had a lukewarm response to the language. In addition to the order specifying a stockpile over a reserve, use of the term digital assets suggested it could include other cryptocurrencies. However, many in the crypto community feel strongly that a crypto reserve should only hold Bitcoin, as it's the most battle tested and decentralized of the crypto networks. The inclusion of other coins could also invite the government to pick winners and losers in the crypto market, they say. End quote. More Presidential Announcements this is being announced as we speak, quoting the Journal Taiwan semiconductor manufacturing intends to invest $100 billion in chip manufacturing plants in the US over the next four years under a plan expected to be announced later Monday by President Trump, according to people familiar with the matter. The investment would be used to build out cutting edge chipmaking facilities. Such an expansion would advance a long pursued U.S. goal to regrow the domestic semiconductor industry after manufacturing fled largely to Asian countries in recent decades. Tsmc, the world's largest contract chip manufacturer, set down routes in Arizona in 2020 when it said it would build a chip factory there for $12 billion. Its ambitions for the site have expanded rapidly since, with two more factories on the same site and a total investment of $65 billion. The company's began mass production late last year. TSMC's announcement comes after years of deliberation regarding the future of semiconductor manufacturing in the US and the global tech sector. The company currently builds its most advanced chip making facilities only on its home soil, Taiwan. The chips it produces are critical for powering everything from the latest artificial intelligence systems to smartphones. Since the Biden administration, the US has expressed concerns about TSMC's near monopoly on advanced chip manufacturing and has been urging the company to relocate more of its cutting edge production, including advanced chip packaging facilities, to the U.S. advanced chip packaging is particularly critical for AI related chips as it enhances performance by integrating multiple semiconductor components, reducing size, improving power efficiency and ensuring faster data transfer, key factors for AI applications. The US has supported TSMC's growth through 2022's Chips act, which earmarked tens of billions of dollars in grants to domestic chip manufacturing. TSMC was awarded up to $6.6 billion of grants and has recently begun to receive federal money from the program. Generous tax credits have also boosted chip making projects in the U.S. we're pleased to have an opportun with the President and look forward to discussing our shared vision for innovation and growth in the semiconductor industry, as well as exploring ways to bolster the technology sector along with our customers, tsmc said in a statement. End quote Google has demoed some new Gemini features, including Screen Share, to let users ask questions based on their phone, screen and video search. Coming later this month, quoting TechCrunch at the Mobile World Congress MWC 2025 in Barcelona, the company showed off a new Screen Share feature, which lets users share what's on their phone screen with Gemini and ask questions about the pictures. As an example, the company showed a video of a user shopping for a pair of baggy jeans and asking Gemini what other clothing would pair well with it. As for the video search feature, Google had teased it at Google I O last year. The feature lets you take a video and ask Gemini questions about it as you're filming and quoting Android Central Project Astro was first shown off at Google I O last year, where a woman is seen interacting with her surroundings through her phone, asking the assistant about various objects placed on a table, or even creating iterations about a golden retriever. It was fascinating to see how Gemini Live has pushed the boundaries of the mere Google search beyond just looking for something online. Now anyone could simply use Circle to search on their devices to look up something they spotted within a different app. With Project Astro, Google wants to make finding things easier not just on your phone, but out in the world as well. There have been some rumors recently on how Gemini will be replacing Google Assistant in the future. A deep dive into the latest beta version of the Google app revealed that hey Google could be replaced with hey Gemini. Now, with Google showing off Gemini's live video and screen sharing, this change could be coming sooner than we anticipated. The company stated it will start rolling out the above multimodal features to Gemini Advanced subscribers as part of the Google One AI Premium plan on Android devices. While the company didn't specify exactly when we can see it on our devices, it did say later this month, so we're hoping it could arrive in the next monthly update. End quote. Lots of bosses are like, hey, you need to come back to the office. You need to work extra hours in order for this company or this project to succeed. But Sergey Brin took it a step forward, telling workers that Google could reach AGI if employees worked harder and were in the office more, saying 60 hours a week is the sweet spot of productivity, quoting the Times. I recommend being in the office at least every weekday, he wrote in a memo posted internally on Wednesday evening that was viewed by the New York Times. The notes highlighted Mr. Brin's belief that AGI, a long sought goal in computing, could be within reach and it shed more light on how he believes Google could achieve that technological leap. Competition has accelerated immensely and the final race to AGI is afoot, he wrote. I think we have all the ingredients to win this race, but we are going to have to turbocharge our efforts. He highlighted the need for Google's employees to use more of its AI for coding, saying the AIs improving itself would lead to AGI. He also called on employees working on Gemini to be the most efficient coders and AI scientists in the world. By using our own AI, more companies have ordered employees back to the office full time to improve productivity. In September, Amazon said its corporate employees must return to the office five days a week starting in 2025. AT&T, JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs have also reversed hybrid work policies End quote and quoting the Verge While his note was intended for a small audience of AI researchers at DeepMind and not all of Google, it's still remarkable in a couple of ways. For one, it came from Brin, who technically has no formal role these days besides being a board member and not Demise Hassibas who run Google DeepMind. As some employees have pointed out to me, there's also irony in Brin recommending that employees work 12 hour days when he and co founder Larry Page arguably left Google rudderless when they retired in 2019, just before this AI boom cycle began in earnest. Finally, it's telling that Brin, who attended President Donald Trump's inauguration with CEO Sundar Pichai, is now using his power to seemingly push for removing Gemini's guardrails. End quote Green shoots As folks like to say, green shoots. In terms of hot startups getting back to their previously hot valuations, New York based corporate payments startup Ramp hit a $13 billion valuation and a $150 million share sale to GIC, Stripes, Thrive and others, up from $7.65 billion in April 2024. Quoting the FT, the leap in valuation to $13 billion puts Ramp among the most highly valued US startups outside of a handful of artificial intelligence companies such as OpenAI. It follows rapid growth powered by an increase card transactions and bill payments. But Eric Gliman, RAMP's co founder and chief executive, emphasized that it had benefited from using AI across the company. It is not possible to use Ramp without using AI, he said, adding that the technology had quickly moved from simple chatbots into being deeply integrated in every part of the business. Expenses that do themselves, books that do themselves, money that finds higher yield. End quote we're living in a world where computers can talk and think and reason, and finance is really about reasoning, making sure your capital has more value each month, he said. RAMP's valuation hit 8.1 billion doll in 2022, but dropped to $5.8 billion a year later as higher interest rates hit consumer spending, factors that also hit rival fintech companies such as Stripe and Klarna. Fintech obviously went through volatility given the wild swings in rates and spending across businesses and consumers, said Karim Zakai, a partner at Thrive Capital who led the firm's investment into Ramp. Businesses that took share before the downturn continued to take share, but customer spending was down. Now the market has turned around and they are accelerating, he added, according to a person with knowledge of the company's finances. RAMP's annualized revenue, a metric often used by fast growing startups that multiplies the current month's revenue by 12, is 700 million. That figures up from 300 million in August 2023. The company is processing $55 billion in payments on an annualized basis, compared with 10 billion at the beginning of 2023. RAMP's aim is to become a platform offering corporate customers a range of services rather than a single product, according to Gliman. End quote. Finally today, I saved the Mark Gurman Apple scoop Monday to the end because he has a really interesting look at what he calls Apple's AI crisis, as some in Apple's AI division believe that a true conversational LLM Siri won't be ready until iOS 20 at best in 2027. Quoting Mark and Bloomberg with Apple Intelligence, the company was already trailing ChatGPT, Google's Gemini and Microsoft's Copilot. But it still had the to respond with something fun, conversational, well integrated and useful. And Apple seemed to be moving in that direction when it unveiled the technology last June, describing it as AI for the rest of us. But Apple couldn't pull it off. The system doesn't come close to matching the competition, and a miss in this area could have potentially devastating consequences for the company. AI promises to be a pervasive part of all our lives and change the way we interact with devices, communicate and get stuff done. An AI created emoji feature isn't going to cut it, not while Apple's rivals are showing off fully conversational and personalized assistants that are eerily similar to human beings. Case in point, Amazon's Alexa, which was announced this past week. It's essentially a version of ChatGPT's voice mode, with knowledge of who you are, who the people in your life are your interests and the context of your home and surrounding environment. The next version of Siri will be a test of whether Apple can mount a comeback. The software will likely be released in May, a full 11 months after it was introduced. The current iOS 18 version of Siri essentially has two brains one that operates the legacy Siri commands like timers and making calls, and another that handles more advanced queries. The latter capability will be able to tap user data and already is used to not get confused when people change their requests mid command. In order to get Apple Intelligence out the door as part of iOS 18, the company didn't have time to meld the two systems together. That means the software doesn't work as smoothly as it could for iOS 19. Apple's plan is to merge both systems together and roll out a new Siri architecture. I expect this to be introduced as early as Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference in June of this year, with launch by spring 2026 as part of iOS 19.4. The new system, dubbed LLM Siri internally, was supposed to also introduce a more conversational approach in the same release, but that is now running behind as well and won't be unveiled in June before Apple can go full throttle on development of that Siri, which is supposed to finally work more like ChatGPT and the new Alexa. Apple will need to get the underlying system fixed, and that won't be easy. That's why people within Apple's AI division now believe that a true, modernized, conversational version of Siri won't reach consumers until iOS 20 at best in 2027. That would mean Apple is half a decade late to the game, an even bleaker timeline than many of us imagined. On top of that, Apple's rivals aren't standing still given the speed at which they're operating now. Imagine where OpenAI and Google will be in two years. That's not to mention the AI startups cropping up every few weeks. Everything I've Heard suggests that iOS 19 will not include any significant consumer facing changes to Apple Intelligence. A big reason for that is the amount of time Apple is still spending working to get the features announced last year out the door. It's challenging to move on to next year's release before this year's operating system updates have rolled out to customers. That's left Apple at a make or break point. Clearly, the company isn't moving fast enough internally to create the underlying AI technology it needs to keep up with the competition, and that suggests a change is required. People involved in Apple's AI work, say its foundational and large language models, the basis for its homegrown AI features, are reaching their limits. There also have been problems with rivals poaching talent and what they deem to be ineffective leadership. The company is hoping its models ultimately get more capable, but getting its hands on enough chips has been another challenge. There's been an industry wide scramble to get AI accelerators, mostly from Nvidia, to train software. That's probably one reason the company is ramping up production of its own AI servers and has its chips team working on new solutions. The rest of the industry has scooped up much of the capacity, according to multiple employees. Once Apple realized it needed more resources after being caught off guard by ChatGPT, it was too late to get enough. Moreover, the AI industry is advancing so quickly that the team's work is often obsolete by the time it's ready to unveil, employees say. Apple management believes that despite being a laggard in AI, the company isn't in danger of losing its user base. Tightened integration of hardware, software and services, its strength in in house chips and software user interfaces still give Apple an edge, executives argue. While that's all true, AI is so disruptive that it's creating entirely new ecosystems and technology around it that puts Apple's model in jeopardy. AI is a once in a generation technology. Apple probably still has time to turn things around, but that window is closing fast. End quote. We officially have it the first IPO of the AI era. CoreWeave, which provides cloud based GPUs, has filed for an IPO on the NASDAQ under the symbol CRWV and says it generated $1.9 billion in revenue in 2024, up 737% year on year. To be clear, this isn't an AI company in the way that OpenAI is. They basically help AI companies get the chips they need to make the AI. Quoting Investors Business Daily New Jersey based Core Weave rents cloud computing power with Nvidia chips to AI developers. The company has seen a big jump in sales as companies race to train AI models. Core Weave's revenue grew more than 700% year over year to $1.9 billion in 2024, according to its IPO prospectus filing. The company post Net loss of $863 million for 2024. The company has not yet listed the number of shares or price it will target in the listing. Bloomberg reported last week that coreweave's IPO filing was imminent, with the company likely to seek a valuation of more than $35 billion. CoreWeave raised private funding in November at a reported valuation of $23 billion worth, pointing out that 77% of their revenue is coming from just two customers, with 62% coming from just one of them, Microsoft. But they apparently have a pipeline of over $15 billion in coming contracts. Quoting CNBC Originally known as Atlantic Crypto, the company got its start in 2017 by offering infrastructure for mining the Ethereum cryptocurrency. After digital currency prices fell, the company bought up additional graphics processing units, or GPUs, and changed its name to CoreWeave, with an increasing focus on graphics rendering and artificial intelligence. At the end of 2024, CoreWeave's 32 data centers housed over 250,000 Nvidia GPUs with using the previous generation Hopper architecture, according to the filing. Running data centers full of GPUs requires considerable energy. CoreWeave had 360 megawatts in active power and a total of 1.3 gigawatts had been contracted, the filing said. CoreWeave gained popularity after OpenAI released ChatGPT in late 2022 because the company could quickly provide GPUs to businesses in need. Microsoft, whose Azure Cloud unit has supplied computing power to OpenAI, started working with Coreweave in 2023 to meet OpenAI. End quote. Even if you think it's a bit overhyped, AI is suddenly everywhere from self driving cars to molecular medicine to business efficiency. If it's not in your industry yet, it's coming fast. But AI needs a lot of speed and computing power, so how do you compete without costs spiraling out of control? 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That's incogni.com ridehome Also in AI news, Anthropic raised a $3.5 billion Series E led by Lightspeed, at a $61.5 billion valuation, according to a source. Its annual revenue run rate has grown by 30% in 2025 from around $1 billion in late 2024, quoting Bloomberg. The latest deal for the maker of large language models best known for its chatbot named Claude, was led by Lightspeed Venture partners, which contributed $1 billion, said Anthropic. Other investors who participated in the Series E deal include General Catalyst, Jane street and Fidelity Management and Research company, according to an Anthropic statement. Existing investors, including Menlo Ventures and Bessemer Venture Partners, also backed the company in the latest round. The company said anthropic, founded in 2021 by former employees of OpenAI, has positioned itself as a reliable safety conscious that users can trust. The company was originally planning to raise $2 billion in the latest financing, but ended up raising more than anticipated in an oversubscribed round, people familiar with the discussions previously told Bloomberg. The new funding will fuel anthropic's competition with OpenAI, which is currently in talks for an even larger $300 billion valuation. Both deals underscore Silicon Valley investors continued enthusiasm for funneling big sums to leading AI firms, despite the recent entrants of smaller companies like China's Deep Seq, which claim to develop similar technology more cheaply. Anthropic says that it will use the capital the next generation of its AI systems, expand its computing capacity and further its research efforts, including in safety related areas. The company also said it plans to accelerate its expansion in Asia and Europe. This investment fuels our development of more intelligent and capable AI systems that expand what humans can achieve while deepening our understanding of how these systems work, anthropic Chief Financial Officer Krishna Rao said in a statement. These capabilities are driving remarkable outcomes for our customers as our business and consumer usage continues to grow rapidly. End quote the round follows additional investments from two major tech companies who had previously previously backed anthropic. Amazon invested $4 billion in the company in November, and Alphabet's Google invested $1 billion in January. Anthropic is also helping power Amazon's new AI version of its Alexa Assistant Alexa End quote Apple has released updated 11 inch and 13 inch iPad airs with an M3 chip and unveiled a new $269 plus magic keyboard with a larger built in trackpad. Quoting the verb, the new Air is primarily a spec bump over last year's device. It has an upgraded M3 chip and of course supports Apple Intelligence. It's not Apple's most modern chip. That would be the M4, but Apple says it's twice as fast as the M1 powered air and the A14 bionic powered air. Those are older devices and Apple's comparisons notably don't include last year's model. It comes in four colors, 11 and 13 inch models and starts at 599 for the smaller model and 799 for the larger. There's also a new Magic Keyboard attachment, $269 for the smaller model, $319 for the larger, which includes the extra row of function keys and larger trackpad you could previously only get on the Pro. End quote. But wait, there's more. We now have an 11th generation iPad, the entry level device adding an A16 bionic chip and now starting at 128 gigabytes of storage for the base model, with options up to 256 gigabytes and 512 gigabytes for the same $349 starting price. Quoting Macrum. It is available in blue, pink, yellow and silver and continues to start at $349. Customers can pre order the new iPad starting today with Launch scheduled for March 12. Quoting Apple itself, the A16 chip provides a jump in performance for everyday tasks and experiences in IPADOs while still providing all day battery life. Compared to the previous generation, the updated iPad with A16 is nearly 30% faster. In fact, compared to iPad with A13, bionic users will see up to a 50% improvement in overall performance and A16 makes the updated iPad up to six times faster than the best selling Android tablet. End quote Uber has launched Waymo rides in Austin, Texas, operating within a 37 square mile area including Hyde park and downtown. Quoting the Verge, the former rivals have joined forces in the hopes of accelerating the transition to autonomous vehicles. And as of today, any Austin resident with a desire to take a trip in a fully driver robo taxi can open up their Uber app and hail away. But of course, there are some limitations. Waymo only operates within a 37 square mile area in Austin, which includes Hyde park, downtown, Montopolis and other popular destinations, according to the company. So the trip will need to originate and end within that service area in order to qualify for Waymo. It also doesn't operate on highways yet, so the route will only comprise local streets. Another thing to consider simply calling an Uber in Waymo's geofence doesn't guarantee a robotaxi will show up. Waymo spokesperson Chris Bonelli declined to share the of the company's fleet in Austin, but acknowledged that it was small at launch while smaller at start. The fleet will grow to hundreds of vehicles over time, benelli said. End quote now last they revealed these numbers. In August of last year, Waymo had a fleet of about 700 vehicles to service their existing San Francisco, Phoenix and Los Angeles areas. So maybe we can extrapolate several dozen vehicles for Austin. I don't know. Quoting a gadget Unlike the Waymo One service offered to riders in San Francisco and Los Angeles, interested Austin riders will get a chance to ride in a Waymo just by ordering an Uber Uber Green, Uber Comfort or Uber Comfort Electric Ride. Similar to how things are handled in Phoenix. You're not guaranteed to receive a Waymo when you do order one of those rides, but Uber says you can increase your chances of receiving one by changing your ride preferences in the app. Upfront prices remain the same whether you get a Waymo or not, though if you do end up in a Robotaxi, you won't be prompted to tip. You can use the Uber app to unlock the Waymo, open its trunk and start your ride to and and quoting TechCrunch the structure of the Waymo on Uber service forecasts how each company envisions its role in the nascent autonomous vehicle industry. Under the arrangement, Waymo will be responsible for vehicle testing, roadside assistance, and certain aspects of rider support. Uber will manage the fleet services such as vehicle cleaning, maintenance, inspections, charging and depot operations through a company called Move Cars, which is rebranded to Evomo. In 2021, Uber acquired a 30% minority interest in the European company Move Cars, not to be mistaken with Move, which Coincident is managing Waymo's AV fleet in Phoenix. Uber has partnered with 14 autonomous vehicle companies that cover ride hailing, delivery and trucking, a handful of which are operating commercially. In December, Uber launched robo taxi rides with Weride in Abu Dhabi. The company also has commercial deals with sidewalk delivery bot companies Avride, Kartaken and Serve Robotics End Quote Some other hardware for you today Nothing unveiled the $379 phone, 3A and $459 3A Pro, both with 6.77-inch displays, Snapdragon 7S Gen 3 and new AI tools to help organize files shipping this month. Quoting The Verge, the 3A and 3A Pro are mainly differentiated by their cameras, which you'll notice just by glancing at the two devices. The 3A Pro's prominent round camera housing includes a 3x periscope telephoto lens. The 3A offers a standard 2x zoom, but both phones include a 50 megapixel 1.8 main camera and an 8 megapixel ultra wide. The telephoto cameras on each use a 50 megapixel sensor for a lossless crop zoom, 4x for the 3A and 6x for the 3A Pro. They're big phones, each with a 6.77-inch display, and the 3A Pro feels especially chunky with the protruding camera housing. Both use Nut Nothing's striking translucent back panel design for a bold look, which balances an awkward camera bump on the 3A Pro. When I started using the phone, I felt like my fingers were constantly bumping against the housing, but I've adjusted to it after a few days and dig its pop socket esque functionality. The phones come with Snapdragon 7S Gen 3 chipsets, 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, which is generous for the mid range class. They ship with Android 15 and nothing is promising. Three years of OS updates and six years of security patches a decent if not the best software policy for a budget phone. They're being offered in the US through Nothing's beta program. The Glyph interface and LED light strips are still present, but Nothing seems to be shifting its efforts towards software features. Something called the Essential Space is a new place to save screenshots, voice memos and images. Like Google's Pixel screenshots app, it answers the eternal question, what do I do with this thing? Is your photo gallery cluttered with pictures of stuff you want to remember? Do you wish you had somewhere to keep all those inspiration photos for your bathroom makeover. Do you yearn for a place to put the information in an email? You keep searching your inbox for every time you need it. Then you get what the Essential Space is all about. You save stuff there. It uses AI to pull out relevant bits of information, and it helps organize what would otherwise be left floating around your phone somewhere. Using the Essential Key to add things to the Essential Space took a little adjustment. It's right where I'm used to the power button sitting, so I kept pressing it unintentionally. A single press will capture a screenshot, and a double tap opens the app so you can browse through your collections. This feels backwards for reasons I can't quite explain, but I've mostly gotten used to it. Nitpicking aside, I think nothing is onto something. I added screenshots of travel information for an upcoming flight that are otherwise spread across emails and apps. The Essential Space keeps it in one tidy spot and is good at pulling key timing and dates from the screen grabs. It'll even make a little to do list for you. It didn't quite get everything right about my connecting flight, but I think that's because the date wasn't visible in both screenshots. The software seems to do a decent job when it has complete information to work with. Finally, today, remember the Xbox Kinect? Briefly, around the year 2010 or so, it seemed to be the hot new technology. Then it drifted a bit and was actually discontinued in 2017. Well, the Guardian points out that the Kinect technology has lived on actually finding applications beyond gaming, including interactive art, pornography and ghost hunting. Quote the Kinect's technology was soon eclipsed by freely available open source sensors and more advanced motion sensing devices. But since Microsoft ceased manufacture of the Kinect line in 2017, the little camera has enjoyed a spirited and not entirely untroubled afterlife. It has watched over the Korean Demilitarized zone and worked on topography and patient alignment in CT scanners. Reports have emerged of it being used in airport baggage hauls as a security camera in Newark Liberty International Airport's Terminal C. United Airlines declined to comment on this, and even to gamify training for the US Military, it's been attached to drones, rescue bots, and even found a brief application in pornography. I'm not sure anyone had a firm vision of what interact interactive sex involving the Kinect would be, says Kyle Machlus, founder of Buttplug I.O. and another member of the Open Connect team. The camera was deployed mostly as an over complex controller for 3D sex games, fulfilling most of a futurist marketing role than anything the actual consumer uses, michaela says. In that role, it was successful. It attracted a flurry of attention and threats from Microsoft to somehow ban porn. Involving it was an interesting experiment, but it turned out that the addition of a novelty device was not a turn on for many porn users. Besides, as Mecalis says, when the camera malfunctions, it looks pretty horrible. Unreliability is of less concern for ghost hunters, who thrive on the ambiguity of aging technology and who have rebranded the Kinect as the SLS Structured Light Sensor Camera. They deploy its body tracking to find figures the naked eye cannot see. Ghost hunters are thrilled by the Kinect's habit of seeing bodies that aren't really there, believing that these skeletal stick figures are representations of disembodied spirits. The paranormal investigation industry doesn't care much about false positives so long as those false positives can be perceived as paranormal, which is just as well, says John Wood, a freelance science performer who has a show devoted to examining ghost hunting technology. It's quite normal for ghost hunters to be filming themselves in the dark with infrared cameras and torches. You're bathing the scene with IR light while using a sensor that measures a specific pattern of infrared dots, he says. Given that Kinect is designed specifically to recognize the human body in any data it receives, it would be stranger if the Kinect didn't pick up anomalous figures. In this context, there's a certain poetry in the Kinect living on among those searching for proof of life after death. In the right hands, the camera is still going strong. Theo Watson points me in the direction of Connected Worlds, an exhibit that has run in the New York hall of Science since 2015. Of the many Kinect devices that power the installations, only two have had to be replaced in the decade since it opened, and one of those was only a few weeks ago. Watson started stockpiling the device when Microsoft ceased production. Half the projects on the website wouldn't exist without the Kinect, he says. If we had this camera for another decade, we would still not run out of things to do with it, end quote. A US judge has denied Elon Musk's effort to halt OpenAI's for profit shift, saying Elon failed to meet the burden of proof. But the judge did let other aspects of the suit proceed. Quoting Bloomberg, US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers wrote in her order that she wants to resolve Musk's claims quickly, given, quote, the public interest at stake and potential for harm if a conversion contrary to law occurred. Rogers said she will hold an expedited trial solely on the core claim that OpenAI's conversion plan is unlawful and potentially the interrelated contract based claims, end quote. The timing is significant because OpenAI is already in talks to win approval for its conversion from officials in Delaware and California, a process that's expected to be complex. We're pleased the court has offered an expedited trial on the core claims driving this case, which in its words, present urgent issues in the public's interest, mark Tobarov, Musk's lawyer, said in an email. We intend to accept the court's offer, end quote. So this sort of seems like an initial setback for Elon's efforts. OpenAI is not immediately frozen in its tracks, but given that we have been told the earliest this trial would happen would be late 2026 or 2027. Even the fact that this is getting expedited is probably positive for Elon. He'll have his day in court, and sooner rather than later hey freelancers. We know what your days look like. You juggle clients, deadlines and that endless to do list. But when it comes to tax time, let's face it, the stress is real. That's why I'm here to talk about FreshBooks, the cloud accounting software designed to make the hard part easy. With FreshBooks, you'll save time and get peace of mind. 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His remarks were met with applause in a chamber passed the Chips and Science act less than three years ago. Vice President J.D. vance, whose home state of Ohio won a massive intel project thanks to the law, stood up to show his support for its revocation. The CHIPS act is among the most significant US Forays into industrial policy in more than a generation. It set aside $39 billion in grants, plus loans and 25% tax breaks to revitalize American semiconductor manufacturing, as well as $11 billion for chip research and development. The aim was to reduce reliance on Asia for electronic components that power everything from smartphones to massive data centers. Trump, however, has consistently derided a program he regards as a waste of government funds, arguing tariffs would achieve the same outcome while filling coffers. Republicans have also indicated that they want to repeal what they see as social provisions of the CHIPS act that could involve eliminating laborer friendly relations or environmental requirements. Officials on both sides of the aisle have touted the CHIPS act as crucial to US national and economic security, and Trump could have a hard time getting congressional support to repeal it. Dozens of GOP lawmakers voted for the measure, and many Red districts projects have won factories or other projects supported by the law. More product Unveilings from Apple this morning, Apple updated the Mac Studio with an M4 Max chip starting at $1999 plus and an M3 Ultra starting at $3999 plus with up to 32 cores, including 24 performance cores shipping from March 12. Quoting the Verge, Apple says the M4 Max Max Studio is up to 3.5 times faster than the original M1 Max version, with a 14 to 16 core CPU and 32 to 40 core GPU. Like the M4 Max MacBook Pro, this version of the Studio starts with 36 gigabytes of RAM, up from 32 gigabytes in the M2 model, and can be had with as much as 128 gigabytes, a bump from the 96 gigabyte ceiling of the M2 Max Studio. Like its outgoing predecessor, it starts with 52612 gigabytes of SSD storage, but can go as high as 8 terabytes. Meanwhile, the Mac Studio with an M3 Ultra chip sounds like it's going to scream. It gets up to 32 cores, 24 of which are performance cores, something Apple notes is 50% more than any previous Ultra chip. The GPU has a base 60 core configuration that maxes out at 80 cores, and Apple says it has a 32 core neural engine for machine learning and AI applications. The M3 Ultra version of the Studio Studio has 96 gigabytes of RAM to start, but it can go up to a gobsmacking 512 gigabytes of RAM, enough to run some of the largest local AI models locally. Finally, you can bump the base 1 terabyte internal storage to as high as 16 terabytes, end quote. But wait, there's more. Apple updated the $999 13 inch and 1199 $15 inch MacBook Airs with an M4 chip offering a 10 core CPU and an 8 core GPU and a blue color option shipping from March 12th. But speaking of chips again, say hello to the M3 Ultra. Built from two 3 nanometer M3 Max chips, offering Thunderbolt 5, a new Ultra Fusion packaging architecture an 80 core GPU and up to 512 gigabytes of memory. Quoting Tom's hardware in a demo, I saw the M3 Ultra Run Cinema 4D, where an artist wanted to spread foliage around the landscape. Using LM Studio, they created a Python script to scatter the assets, pasted it into Cinema 4D and it was done. What could have taken a day took just minutes. From there they were able to open Maxon Redshift to see a high quality preview with hardware ray tracing. In addition, I saw but did not play an early demo of Cyberpunk 2077 which is coming this year for Max, running on the hardware locked at 60 frames per second thanks to V sync on the monitor with full ray tracing Remember Digg, arguably the first social network of the Web 2.0 era to break through? If you don't remember Digg, you might only know that it was the social network that Reddit dethroned. Reddit is what Digg was trying to be, but thanks to a bad redesign, its community decamped to Reddit en masse and the rest is history. Well, Digg founder Kevin Rose has repurchased Digg, the site he founded in 2004 with plans to resurrect it as a competitor to Reddit. Ironically, with help from Reddit co founder Alexis Ohanian, the two former rivals have joined forces to reimagine what a community focused platform could be in today's fractured social media landscape. The partnership represents a surprising twist in their shared history. Back in 2005, Ohanian had identified Digg as the enemy when he and Steve Huffman launched Reddit. While Digg initially thrived, raising millions in funding and fielding acquisition offers from companies like Google, it eventually faltered following an unpopular redesign. Users abandoned the platform and in 2012, Digg was sold off in pieces while Rose departed. But quoting the Verge, Rose and a group of what he calls brainstorming partners, which included Ohanian, design and product exec Justin Mazel, and even folks like Blogger and Twitter co founder EV Williams, started to talk about whether AI might be able to help them build a better social platform. I would call Alexis up and we would chat, rose says, and we'd be like, hey, what if, what if, what if? And a lot of those things started giving us both butterflies in the stomach situation where you're like, oh, this could be cool, this could be really cool. The new Dig will initially launch as an invitation only mobile focused platform. In the coming weeks, Rose and Ohanian have raised funding from their respective venture firms, True Ventures and 776 and assembled a small team of engineers and designers. Mazo will serve as CEO, with Rose as board chair and Ohanian joining the board. The revamped platform will leverage AI to enhance user experience and moderation, potentially offering features like translating discussions into fictional languages and reducing spam and harassment. Most crucially, they plan to prioritize empowering moderators with better tools, an area both entrepreneurs believe has been neglected in social media. What we never focused on is the back end, ohanian reflected. But it's the back end that really, really matters. Rose acknowledges the initial reaction may be muted, with some viewing it as merely nostalgic. However, he believes Diggs nimbleness will be advantageous against larger, slower moving competitors. We won't have everything we want dig to be on day one, rose said. But a year from now, we will be having a very different conversation, end quote. There have been so many stories recently of this crypto company that was being investigated, but the investigation has been called off. That crypto company facing regulatory scrutiny, but it's been called off. So I'm just going to use this as a placeholder for all of that. Yuga Labs, creator of the Bored Ape Yacht Club nft, says the US securities and Exchange Commission has closed its investigation into the company without taking enforcement action, adding NFTs are not secure. So officially now, meme coins are not securities and NFTs are not securities either. According to Crypt, Yuga Labs had been under sec scrutiny since 2022 over whether its NFT offerings and Apecoin token distribution violated federal securities laws. The company welcomed the decision, calling it a huge win for the NFT industry. The company also labeled the move as a boon for all creators pushing our ecosystem forward. NFTs are not securities, it said. The floor price for Bored Apes on The NFT marketplace OpenSea jumped 3.8% on Monday, from 13.39 ETH to a local peak of 13.9 ETH. Still, bored apes, once championed by celebrities as status symbols and part of a broader cultural movement, have seen their value decline sharply. The floor price, which peaked at 153.7 ETH nearly three years ago during the last crypto bull run, has dropped by about 91%, according to CoinGecko data. So given this changed regulatory environment, can bigger fish get off the hook? I guess it's worth a try, isn't it? Sources tell Bloomberg that Google representatives asked DOJ officials in a meeting last week to back away from a push to break up the company, citing national security concerns. The biden administration in November had called for Google to sell its Chrome web browser and make other changes to its business, including an end to billions of dollars in exclusivity payments to companies, including Apple. Although Google has previously pushed back on the Biden era plan, the recent discuss may preview aspects of the company's approach to the case as it continues under the Trump administration. A federal judge has set to rule on how Google must change its practices following hearings scheduled for next month. Both sides are due to file their final proposals to the judge by Friday. Google's argument isn't new, and it has previously raised these concerns in public in response to antitrust pressure from regulators and lawmakers. But the company is re upping the issue in discussions with officials at the department under Trump because the case is in its second stage, known as the remedy phase, during which the court can impose sweeping changes on Google's business. After the Justice Department proposed its remedy in November, Kent Walker, Google's chief legal officer, said in a blog post that the department was pursuing a radical interventionist agenda that would harm Americans and America's global technology leadership. In a separate post in January unrelated to the department's case, Walker highlighted the company's work with the government in using artificial intelligence to police cybersecurity threats. During their meeting last week, company representatives argued that Google's critical Importance to the U.S. economy and national security requires a softer touch, according to the people. They didn't raise specific threats from the DOJ proposed changes, the people said. End quote. When you think about businesses whose sales are skyrocketing, like Feastables by MrBeast or Thrive Cosmetics or Silicon Valley's Weekend Uniform Supplier Cotopoxi. Sure, you think about an innovative product, a progressive brand and button down marketing. 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Right now, Tonal is offering our listeners $200 off your Tonal purchase with promo code RIDE that's Tonal.com and use promo code RIDE for $200 off your purchase that's Tonal.com promo code RIDE for $200 OFF finally today, let me tell you about Sesame AI because apparently their speech model demo has many users expressing astonishment at its realism, with some testers reporting emotional connections to the voice assistant, quoting Ars Technica. I tried the demo and it was genuinely startling how human it felt, wrote one Hacker News user who tested the system. I'm almost a bit worried I will start feeling emotionally attached to a voice assistant with this level of human like sound. In late February, Sesame released a demo for the company's new conversational speech model, or csm, that appears to cross over what many consider the uncanny valley of AI generated speech speech, with some testers reporting emotional connections to the male or female voice assistant, Miles and Maya. In our own evaluation, we spoke with the male voice for about 28 minutes, talking about life in general and how it decides what is right or wrong. Based on its training data, the synthesized voice was expressive and dynamic, imitating breath sounds, chuckles, interruptions, and even sometimes stumbling over words and correcting itself. These imperfections are intentional. At Sesame, our goal is to achieve voice presence, the magical quality that makes spoken interactions feel real, understood and valued, writes the company in a blog post. We are creating conversational partners that do not just process requests, they engage in genuine dialogue that builds confidence and trust over time. In doing so, we hope to realize the untapped potential of voice as the ultimate interface for instruction and understanding, end quote. Another example, a demonstration video on Reddit, shows a simulated argument between a boss and an embezzling employee, where it's apparently difficult to distinguish the human from the AI. The system achieves its realism through two collaborative AI models based on meta' llama architecture. Rather than using the traditional two stage approach of many text to speech systems, Sesame's CSM integrates processing into a single stage multimodal transformer that jointly handles text and audio tokens. Their largest model uses 8.3 billion parameters and was trained on approximately 1 million hours of primarily English audio. In blind tests without context, human evaluators showed no clear preference between CSM generated speech and actual human recordings. However, with conversational context, evaluators still preferred real human speech, indicating remaining gaps in full contextual speech generation. Sesame AI acknowledged current limitations on hacker news, noting the system is still too eager and often inappropriate in its tone, prosody and pacing with issues in conversational flow. Today we're firmly in the valley, but we're optimistic we can climb out, they wrote. The technology has evoked strong responses. One Reddit user wrote, this is the first time I've experienced something that made me definitely feel like we have arrived. The first time I've had a real, genuine conversation with something I felt was real. Many describe the experience as jaw dropping or mind blowing. Others find it unsuitable settling. Mark Hackman, senior editor at PC World, reported feeling freaked out after his interaction with Sesame, noting how the AI's voice eerily resembled someone from his past. Some users have compared it favorably to OpenAI's advanced voice mode for ChatGPT, particularly appreciating Sesame's willingness to roleplay confrontational scenarios that ChatGPT refuses. Despite its technical impressiveness, such advancements carry significant risks for deception and fraud. The ability to generate convincingly human like interactive speech could supercharge voice phishing scams, allowing criminals to impersonate families, members, colleagues or authority figures with unprecedented realism, Sesame plans to open source key components under an Apache 2.0 license. Their roadmap includes scaling up model size, increasing dataset volume, expanding language Support to over 20 languages, and developing fully duplex models for more natural conversations. On the tech IPO watch, things are starting to shake loose. Case number one Klarna is set to file for a $1 billion plus IPO as soon as next week. Quoting Bloomberg, the payments business aims to price the APO in early April, the people said, asking not to be identified as the information isn't public. Klarna is targeting a valuation of more than $15 billion in the new York Stock Exchange listing, the people said. Klarna is best known for its offering of Buy Now, Pay later loans, which typically allow users to make a purchase and split their payments into equal interest free installments. The company has amassed 85 million customers around the world and 600,000 retail partners. Klarna has seen estimates of its valuation fluctuate wild in recent years. The figure reached a high of $45.6 billion in a funding round in 2021, only to plunge to $6.7 billion in around the following year. Analysts last year gave it an implied valuation of around $14.6 billion, based on shareholder Chrysalis Investment's estimate of the worth of its stake, Chief Executive Officer Sebastian Szmiatowski said last month. The firm known for its Buy Now, Pay later offerings is exploring an expansion into the cryptocurrency market. He posted I Give up on social media platform X on February 8, saying Klarna will embrace crypto. Klarna was founded 20 years ago in Stockholm, Sweden, but in 2023 it began setting up a new UK holding company as part of its preparatory work for an eventual public offering. The company has since refocused ahead of the planned ipo, shedding businesses, focusing on payment partners and investing in artificial intelligence. In recent months, Klarna agreed to divest its checkout payments business for about $520 million, while it also snapped up Laybuy, a provider of Buy Now, Pay later services in New Zealand. And now, case number two, the Times says Discord is in early talks with bankers about a potential IPO that could come as soon as later this year. Discord was last valued by investors in 2021 at around $15 billion. QUOTE Discord was founded by Jason Citron and Stanislav Vishnevsky, two tech workers who originally came together to build a video games studio. After releasing their first title, the two hit upon the idea of Discord after they had difficulty communicating with each other online while playing a game. They released the first version of Discord on desktop computers and smartphones in May 2015. Gamers embrace the platform, which allows people to chat over text, voice and video calls inside the app for free. Discord also saw a boom in use during the early days of the pandemic. The company held acquisition talks with Microsoft in 2021 for a reported $10 billion, though no deal materialized. More than 200 million people use Discord every month, with 93% of them using the app to play games. The money Through a freemium model in which people can use the apps for free and pay subscription fees for upgraded features like custom emojis and higher quality voice and video chat. Discord does not rely on traditional advertising to generate revenue. In recent years, Discord has tried to expand its appeal, embracing influencers, musicians and other figures who have created their own Discord chat rooms for their fans to gather and form online communities. End quote here's another one Alibaba has released qwq 32B, an open source reasoning model on hugging face and model scope, claiming performance similar to deep seq R1 with lower compute needs. Quoting VentureBeat Quenteam, a division of Chinese e commerce giant Alibaba developing its growing family of open source Qin large language models, has introduced qwq 32B, a new 32 billion parameter reasoning model designed to improve performance on complex problem solving tasks through reinforcement learning or rl. QWQ short for Quen with Questions, was first introduced by Alibaba in November 2024 as an open source reasoning model aimed at competing with OpenAI's 01 preview. Traditional instruction tuned models often struggle with difficult reasoning tasks, but the QEN team's research suggests that RL can significantly improve a model's ability to solve complex problems. Qwq 32B builds on this idea by implementing a multi stage RL training approach to enhance model mathematical reasoning, coding proficiency and general problem solving. For example, while deep seq R1 operates with 671 billion parameters with 37 billion activated, QW Q32B achieves comparable performance with a much smaller Footprint, typically requiring 24 gigabytes of VRAM on a GPU, Nvidia's H1 hundreds have 80 gigabytes compared to more than 1500 gigabytes of VRAM for running the full deep seat R1.16 Nvidia A100 GPUs highlighting the official efficiency of QEN's RL approach for enterprise leaders including CEOs, CTOs, IT leaders, team managers and AI application developers, QW Q32B represents a potential shift in how AI can support business decision making and technical innovation. With its RL driven reasoning capabilities, the model can provide more accurate, structured and context aware insights, making it valuable for use cases such as automated data analysis, strategic planning, software development and intelligence. Intelligent automation companies looking to deploy AI solutions for complex problem solving, coding assistance, financial modeling or customer service Automation may find qwq 32B's efficiency an attractive option. Additionally, its open weight availability allows organizations to fine tune and customize the model for domain specific applications without proprietary restrictions, making it a flexible choice for enterprise AI strategies. The fact that it comes from a Chinese E commerce giant may raise some security and bias concerns for some non Chinese users, especially when using the QEN chat interface. But as with DeepSeek R1, the fact that the model is available on hugging face for download and offline usage and fine tuning or retraining suggests that these can be overcome fairly easily and it is a viable alternative to deepseek R1. End Quote Meanwhile, talk about going up market the Information system says OpenAI told some investors about plans for new agents that would be serious level in lots of different ways, including price quote. OpenAI executives said it plans to sell low end agents at a cost of $2,000 per month to high income knowledge workers, mid tier agents for software development costing possibly $10,000 a month, and high end agents acting as PhD level research agents, which could cost $20,000 per month, according to the person who's spoken with executives. In the long run, Open expects 20 to 25% of the company's revenue to come from agent products, the person said. Our past reporting has given hints about each of these types of agents. OpenAI recently demonstrated ChatGPT's ability to sort through and rank sales leads, an example of the sort of high income knowledge worker work its models can handle. In January, we broke news that OpenAI has been working on a coding assistant product targeting senior software engineers and explained the types of tasks it might do. That sounds like the mid tier agent OpenAI does discussed with investors. In November, we reported how researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have been using OpenAI's O1 model to solve questions related to nuclear fusion. Presumably that reflects a PhD level of intelligence, or something close to it. How to price AI applications is still a work in progress across the industry. Some companies are stuffing AI features into app bundles like Workspace and Office365 and increasing the price, while others are charging for AI features only when they solve a task. Meanwhile, Devin, the coding tool created by startup Cognition, costs around $500 a month for a coding agent similar to what OpenAI hopes to launch. As a reminder, OpenAI's most expensive subscription tier today ChatGPT Pro, costs $200 a month and was growing nicely as of several weeks ago. But ChatGPT Pro isn't technically an agent the way the PhD level research agent or coding agent would be. Though buying the subscription does give you access to OpenAI's web browsing operator agent, it stands to reason that customers would be willing a lot more for AI that effectively does the work of a $200,000 per year software engineer or to speed up important medical research. Such potential customers are probably getting a great deal with pro, which could be the reason that tier is still unprofitable. End quote. This episode is brought to you by iqbar, our exclusive snack sponsor. 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That's Techmeme to 64,000. Message and data rates may apply. See Terms for details. As a small business owner, you don't have the luxury of clocking out early. Your business is on your mind 24 7, so when you're hiring, you need a partner that grinds just as hard as you do. That hiring partner is LinkedIn Jobs. When you clock out, LinkedIn clocks in. LinkedIn makes it easy to post your job for free. Share it with your network and get qualified candidates that you can manage all in one place. In 25 years of doing business, I've never needed anything other than LinkedIn to do my hiring. LinkedIn's new feature can even help you write job descriptions and then quickly get your job in front of the right people with deep candidate insights. Either post your job for free or pay to promote promoted jobs. Get three times more qualified applicants at the end of the day, the most important thing to your small business is the quality of candidates. And with LinkedIn you can and feel confident that you're getting the best. Based on LinkedIn data, 72% of SMBs using LinkedIn say that LinkedIn helps them find high quality candidates. To find out why more than 2.5 million small businesses use LinkedIn for hiring today, find your next great hire on LinkedIn. Post your job for free at LinkedIn.com ride that's LinkedIn.com ride to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply. Google is rolling out an experimental AI mode in Google Search designed to let users ask complex multi part questions to Google One AI premium subscribers right now. Quoting TechCrunch, Google is launching a new AI mode experimental feature in search that looks to take on popular services like Perplexity AI and OpenAI's ChatGPT search. The tech giant announced on Wednesday that the new mode is designed to allow users to ask complex multi part questions and follow ups to dig deeper on a topic directly within Google Search. The feature uses a custom version of Gemini 2.0 and is particularly helpful for questions that need further exploration and comparisons thanks to advanced reasoning, thinking and multimodal capabilities. For instance, you could ask what's the difference in sleep tracking features between a smart ring, smartwatch and tracking mat? AI mode can then give you a detailed comparison of what each product offers, along with links to articles that it's pulling the information from. You could then ask a follow up question such as what happens to your heart rate during deep sleep to continue your search. Google says that in the past it would have taken multiple queries to compare detailed options or explore a new concept through traditional searches. With AI mode, you can access web content but also tap into real time sources like the knowledge graph, info about the real world and shopping data for billions of products. End quote. Now related to that, a new Tollbit analysis of 160 websites on their content licensing platform has found that AI search engines drive 96 less referral traffic to websites than traditional Google search. All right, for the umpteenth time, we've got rumors of a foldable iPhone, but this one is from Ming Chi Kuo and this has an actual timeline associated with it. So we have the opportunity for some actual verifiable claim chatter, as Gruber likes to call it. Quoting Mac rumors, Apple's first foldable iPhone should arrive around the end of 2026 or early 2027 with a book style design and a premium price tag of over $2,000, according to analyst Ming Chi Kuo. In a report today, Kuo outlines his expectations for the device, noting that it will have an approximately 7.8 inch crease free inner display and a 5.5 inch outer display matching a rumor from last month. Kuo says that the foldable iPhone will measure between 9 and 9.5 millimeters when folded and around 4 4.5 to 4.8 millimeters when unfolded. It will feature a titanium alloy casing with a hinge made of stainless steel and titanium alloy and it will have a dual lens rear camera with a front facing camera for both folded and unfolded states. Notably, Kuo says that the phone will forego face ID authentication instead using a touch ID side button as a means to save precious internal space. It will also be positioned as a true AI driven phone with the larger screen allowing for a better multitasking AI experience. With premium pricing above $2,000 and perhaps even above $2,500, Kuo believes the foldable iPhone will tap into Apple's loyal fan base, some of whom will view it as a must have device if its quality meets expectations. Kuo says Apple is aiming to finalize the specs of its first foldable iPhone during the second quarter of this year and officially kick off the project in the third quarter. Mass production is reportedly planned for the fourth quarter of 2026, so we could perhaps see a launch late next year or early 2027. A second generation model is said to be in the pipeline later, End quote and actually Apple folks, I've got some good news for you. Those just announced M4 MacBook Airs support two monitors of up to 6K resolution each, plus the built in display simultaneously, thereby addressing a noticeable limitation of previous models. Quoting Apple Insider While the previous M3 model featured support for two monitors, it was only possible to use both both when the MacBook Air's lid was closed. So while users gained the wider screen real estate of two external monitors, they lost the use of their MacBook Air internal display. Now the M4 MacBook Air supports two monitors of up to 6K resolution each, plus the built in 3.6 inch or 15.3 inch screen. That 6K resolution is also an improvement. The previous model did support two external monitors, but only one could be 6K. The other could be driven at up to 5K resolution at 60Hz. Either screen could be run at 4K resolution at 144 44Hz end quote. Finally today I missed this, but you YouTube heads out there. You've got a new cheaper option that is actually pretty compelling if you spend even a half dozen hours or so a month watching YouTube. Quoting TechCrunch YouTube on Wednesday announced a new premium subscription tier called Premium Light, which will allow users to watch most videos ad free for $7. With YouTube Lite, customers will be able to watch videos across verticals like gaming, fashion, beauty, cooking, news and more ad free, but will be shown ads on music content and music videos as an entry level subscription. The new tier won't offer several benefits of the full YouTube Premium $13.99 per month subscription like downloads, background play or the ability to watch music videos ad free, the expansion serves as a way for YouTube to generate more revenue from subscriptions, which could help fuel creators businesses. The new light tier may the most sense for younger viewers who have largely replaced TV time with watching online videos on sites like YouTube and TikTok. It will also make watching videos on the big screen in the living room more appealing as there will be fewer interrupting ads. YouTube recently said that the majority of its viewing in the US Is now taking place on televisions, which has surpassed mobile devices and desktops. End quote yes, speaking of the subscription play, YouTube says YouTube Music and YouTube Premium now have more than 125 million subscribers globally. Quoting music business worldwide. The platform, which also operates the TikTok rival shorts, has surpassed the significant milestone of 125 million paid YouTube music and premium subscribers worldwide. Including trials, the Milestone means that YouTube has added more than 25 million subscribers over the past 12 months, which works out to slightly over 2 million subs per month on average since its last subscriber announcement of 100 million in February 2024. A question the entire music business will likely be asking today is how does you YouTube subscriber growth compared to that of the world's largest subscription music streaming platform, Spotify? In the 12 months to the end of December, Spotify added 27 million net paying subscribers to reach 263 million paying users. YouTube's latest subscriber update was revealed by YouTube's global head of music, Lyra Cohen, in a letter to the Music Industry Today, March 5th, celebrating the subscriber milestone and the platform's 20th anniversary this year, YouTube celebrates its 20th anniversary, wrote Cohen from a simple video we've grown into the largest music stage in the world, reaching over 100 countries in 80 languages. We've accomplished so much together over the last 20 years, but if you think we're slowing down, you're dead wrong. In the letter, Cohen said that 125 million paid subscribers is an incredible milestone that many laughed off as impossible when we first launched. He added, this momentum is critical to our goal of becoming the number one contributor of revenue to the industry, and we won't stop until we get there. YouTube last announced in September 2022 that it had paid music rights holders over $6 billion in the 12 months to the end of June 2022 else in today's letter, Cohen explained how YouTube is feeding its subscriptions funnel by expanding the platform's premium lite pilot to US users. A Brazilian judge has given Apple 90 days to allow sideloading on iOS in Brazil, saying the limitations imposed by Apple on developers could deter new competition. As ever with these things, the question you have to ask is is this a big enough market for Apple to feel compelled to comply? Quoting 9 to 5 Mac in November 2024, the Brazilian antitrust regulator CAID ruled that Apple can no longer prevent developers from selling content and distributing apps outside the App Store in Brazil. The company would have 20 days to comply with Brazil's antitrust legislation, otherwise it would be fined more than $40,000 a day. Unsurprisingly, Apple appealed the decision, and a judge ruled that the injunction was unnecessary, giving the company more time to discuss the case. At the time, Apple said request to implement changes to the App Store wasn't urgent and that it would also affect the company's business. Last month, Apple had to face a public hearing in Brazil concerning the case, but now Judge Pablo Zwinga has ordered that Apple will have to implement the required changes in Brazil within the next three months. The judge states that despite Apple's claim, the company has already complied with similar obligations in other countries without demonstrating a significant impact or irreparable damage to its business model. The antitrust investigation against Apple began after Latin American e commerce giant MercadoLibre accused Apple of forcing developers offering digital goods or services in their apps to use Apple's own payment system. Other companies, such as Match, which owns Tinder and Epic Games, have also filed complaints against Apple with the Brazilian regulator. An Apple spokesperson told Velour Economico that the company believes in vibrant and competitive markets and that it faces competition in all segments and jurisdictions where the company operates, reinforcing its commitment to its users. Apple believes the changes will harm the privacy and security of iOS users and says it will appeal the decision, end quote. It has happened. President Trump has signed an executive order to establish a strategic Bitcoin reserve and a digital asset stockpile using BTC and other digital assets forfeited in criminal or civil cases. Quoting Cointelegraph. Additionally, a March 6 fact sheet from the White House said the order also establishes a US Digital asset stockpile, which crypto czar David Sachs said would be made up of cryptocurrencies other than Bitcoin. Goldman Sachs said the Bitcoin reserve was a digital Fort Knox for the cryptocurrency and the US Wouldn't sell any Bitcoin put in the reserve. It will be kept as a store of value, he added. The White House said that Bitcoin owned by the Treasury Department would cede the Reserve, and other federal agencies will evaluate their legal authority to transfer any Bitcoin they own into the Reserve, it added. The treasury and Commerce secretaries would make budget neutral strategies for buying more Bitcoin for the Reserve, provided that those strategies impose no incremental costs on American taxpayers. As for the digital asset, stockpile, Sachs said its purpose is the responsible stewardship of the government's digital assets under the Treasury Department. Notably, he added that the government wouldn't buy additional cryptocurrencies for the stockpile beyond those obtained through forfeiture proceedings. And the treasury secretary may determine strategies for responsible stewardship, including potential sales from the stockpile. Arkham intelligence Data shows the US government doesn't hold any XRP, Sol or ADA among the $18.28 billion worth of crypto under its its largest holding is 198,109 Bitcoin, worth $17.87 billion. Its ETH holdings are worth 119 million, the third largest holding behind $122 million worth of the Stablecoin tether. End quote. Interesting raise because it continues to highlight how defense startups are all the rage. San Diego based Shield AI raised $240 million from L3Harris, A16Z and others at a $5.3 billion valuation to develop its Hive Mind autonomous vehicle platform. Quoting Bloomberg, variations of Shield AI's Hive Mind software can pilot autonomous vehicles as well as help companies build their own autonomous drones, robots and other systems. Shield AI is most famous for its drone, called V Bat, capable of vertical takeoff and landing. One is prominently displayed in its San Diego offices. But going forward, the company wants to be known known for its software. This next phase is really about working with the small and medium businesses that want to operate autonomous hardware across air, land or sea, shield AI co founder Brandon Tseng said, we spent a decade and $1 billion plus building this. Shield AI was founded by Tseng, a former Navy SEAL, and his brother Ryan Tsang, an engineer and former technical lead at Qualcomm who is now the startup's chief executive officer. Shield AI is one of dozens of defense startups to emerge in recent years. With enthusiastic backing from venture capitalists, investors have poured record amount into AI, space, weapons and other defense technologies, hoping the Pentagon will increase its tech spending as modern warfare evolves. Shield AI's Hive Mind software aims to make it easier for more developers and businesses to create autonomous hardware. The company's tools can also help pilot autonomous vehicles ranging from one way, attack drones to F16s and support swarming operations. Shield says its software can allow vehicles to execute complex missions autonomously, including when GPS and capture communications are jammed. Brandon Tsang said interest from investors, including defense contractors and VCs, has recently surged, adding that the company turned down massive checks and that the current round was oversubscribed. Physical AI is the next thing and we are mobilized against it, he said. SHIELD AI aspires to service the autonomous needs for the defense sector. Like Palantir Services, its intelligence needs end quote and now a next level moment from ATT 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 at and T5G 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. AT&T5G requires a compatible plan and device coverage not available everywhere. Learn more@att.com this is technically not an interesting raise because he doesn't really need outside money, but sources say Google founder Larry Page has formed a new company, dynatomics, to use LLMs to create highly optimized designs for various objects and then have a factory build them. Quote the stealth company is run by Chris Anderson, these people said. Anderson was previously the chief technology officer of another Page backed company, Kitty Hawk, an ambitious project to build small electric airplanes, potentially revolutionizing how people get around cities. The company shut down in 2022amid failed prototypes and regulatory concerns. Anderson did not respond to a request for comment and Page could not be reached for comment. Page has remained largely outside day to day operations at Google's parent Alphabet, where he is still on the board and the most powerful shareholder. His Google co founder Sergey Brin, on the other hand, has been going into the office to work on the development of Gemini, Google's large language models. Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are increasingly interested using AI models to build physical things. Arcade is one such company using AI to design jewelry. End quote and confirmation of what Chris and I discussed on the 2000th episode spectacular. Yes, a lot of the hot AI startups right now fit what we called our AI varietals thesis, quoting Bloomberg. Not long ago, Silicon Valley was dismissive of startups like Harvey, while OpenAI developed cutting edge artificial intelligence models with the potential to shake up almost every industry. Harvey had a more modest goal, building software that makes OpenAI's technology more useful for lawyers. The market's perception of companies like us was that they're GPT wrappers, said Harvey Chief Executive Officer Winston Weinberg, referencing a derisive term used to suggest the repackaging of OpenAI's models. If investors were going to put money into something, he added, it needed to be into OpenAI or anthropic. Today, so called AI wrappers are all the rage. Step into any venture capital office in Silicon Valley and you'll hear an investors buzzing about startups that offer AI chatbots, research tools and other software applications for coding, clinicians and customer service, all built at least in part on the backs of large language models created by other leading AI developers. These startups are seeing revenue and valuations grow at a fast clip, often while spending a fraction of the amount that top AI model developers do on chips, data centers and talent. Harvey, founded in 2022, surpassed $50 million in annual recurring revenue in December, while said likewise Any Sphere, the startup behind the popular code editing tool Cursor, has hit $100 million in annual recurring revenue, according to people familiar with the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss private information. Any Sphere did not respond to a request for comment. Michael Magnano, a partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, likens this moment in AI to the original smartphone app boom nearly two decades ago. Just like after the iPhone launch, there were millions of new mobile apps, said Mignano, an investor in the AI notation service Granola, which uses technology from OpenAI and Anthropic. Now, with AI and LLMs, there will be millions of new AI products. Investors are eager to put their money into these services. Harvey raised a $300 million round earlier this year, led by Sequoia at a $3 billion valuation. Any Sphere raised a $105 million round led by Thrive Capital and Andreessen Horowitz in January, valuing it at $2.5 billion. And VC demand is so high that founders like Varun Mohan say the conventional fundraising process isn't something we have to do. Mohan's company, Codium, which also offers an AI tool for coders, is currently raising money at a valuation near $3 billion in a round led by Kleiner Perkins, according to a person familiar with the matter. Certainly VC appetite remains strong for OpenAI and Anthropic, as evidenced by their recent mega rounds. But backing these richly valued companies is getting too costly for some firms. Investors have also begun to question the wisdom of AI companies pouring billions into develop developing models. In the wake of Deepseek, a Chinese UPSTART that claims to have built a competitive option for just $5.6 million. Several notable model makers have shifted away from the race to build more advanced AI systems or been partially absorbed by big tech firms, raising fears of more consolidation to come. At this point, it's very clear that the apps are definitely the best place to invest because that is where the revenue is, that is where the customers are, said Jesse Zhang, CEO of Decagong, a startup that builds AI customer support agents, in part by using models from OpenAI and Anthropic. The mod will get better and better and cheaper, he added, and the apps will benefit the most from these improvements. Perhaps no company embodies the promise of the AI app era like any Sphere. Founded in 2022 by four friends who met at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and had little more than intern level job experience, AnySphere has seen soaring growth for its AI powered code editor cursor. AnySphere's investors claim it's the fastest growing software startup of all time, a title previously held by Wiz, a cloud security company that reached $100 million in annual recur recurring revenue in only 18 months. Anysphere hit that in just 12 months, according to people familiar with the matter. Leaning on a mix of LLMs from other providers, Anysphere has built a coding tool that developers say saves them time, and it's won a cult following of engineers and tech elites willing to pay for the service. Coinbase Global CEO Brian Armstrong wrote on X that 100% of his company's coders use cursor, end quote. That was a bit of a long read, so let's do this properly in this week's weekend Long Read suggestions. First up, a look at McDonald's new tech initiatives, including the use of edge computing to predict equipment breakdowns and computer vision to ensure order accuracy. Quoting the Journal, McDonald's tapped Google Cloud in late 2023 to bring more computing power to each of its restaurants, giving them the ability to process and analyze data on site. The setup, known as edge computing, can be a faster, cheaper option than sending data to the cloud, especially in more far flung locations with less reliable cloud connections, said Brian Rice, the burger giant's chief information officer. Edge computing will enable applications like predicting when kitchen equipment such as fryers and its notorious McFlurry ice cream machines is likely to break down, Rice said. The burger chain said its suppliers have begun installing sensors on kitchen equipment that will feed data to the edge computing system and give franchises a real time view into how their restaurants are operating. AI can then analyze that data for early signs of maintenance problems. McDonald's is also exploring the use of computer vision, the form of AI behind facial recognition in store mounted cameras to determine whether orders are accurate before they're handed to customers, he said. If we can proactively address those issues before they occur, that's going to mean smoother operations in the future, rice added. Additionally, the ability to tap edge computing will power voice AI at the drive thru, a capability McDonald's is also working with Google's cloud computing arm to explore, Rice said. The company has been experimenting with voice activated drive thrus and robotic deep fryers since 2019 and ended its partnership with IBM to test automated order tracking at the Drive thru in 2024. Edge computing will also help McDonald's restaurant managers oversee their in store operations. The burger giant is looking to create a generative AI virtual manager, Rice said, which handles administrative tasks such as shift scheduling on managers behalf. Fast food giant Yum Brands, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell have also explored similar capabilities and we mentioned it earlier this week. So from Variety, a look at YouTube's origins, its growth and its domination as the platform turns 20 years old, including an interview with CEO Neil Moen, who is nearing 10 years years at the company quote when YouTube was incorporated in February 2005 by three former PayPal employees, Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karam, the startup was housed in Hurley's garage in Menlo Park, California. The very first video was uploaded April 23, 2005 by Karam, entitled Me at the Zoo. It was a 19 second clip he shot in front of the elephant exhibit at the San Diego Zoo. The founders actually launched the platform as a site for video dating, but after one week not a single person has uploaded any videos, so they pivoted to promoting YouTube as a general purpose video sharing platform. It was a long shot idea as it wasn't clear at the time whether the Internet could support video delivery at scale, said Roloff Botha, managing partner at Sequoia Capital, the Menlo park based venture capital firm that has backed some of Silicon Valley's most world beating startups. Botha led Sequoia's total investment of $8.5 million in YouTube. The three entrepreneurs were scrappy and smart, he says, explaining why he made the bet on the fledgling service. The site was usable in a way that others were not. Two decades later, the platform is a massive fire hose that sprays out every kind of content imaginable, watched by an estimated 2.44 billion monthly users in 2024, according to researcher emarketer. There are vlogs, how to videos, comedy sketches, music videos, news segments, talk shows, product reviews, video game playthroughs, life hacks, animated shows, podcasts, TV clips, full movies and movie trailers, stunts, pranks and challenges. More than 500 hours are uploaded to YouTube every minute. It's the number two most visited site in the world, behind only google.com and the second biggest search engine after Google. Worldwide, users watch on average, more than 1 billion hours of YouTube content on TVs every day, according to the company. In the US, TVs recently surpassed phones and tablets as YouTube's number one viewing device, according to Nielsen. For two years running, Americans have spent more time watching YouTube on their TV sets than any other streamer, including Netflix, Disney and Amazon prime video. In 2024, YouTube generated global ad revenue of $36.15 billion, up an impressive 15% for the 12 months that ended September 2024, YouTube's subscription revenue topped $15 billion that was generated by YouTube TV, the biggest Internet delivered live TV service in the US with 8 million plus customers YouTube Premium, which provides ad free videos and other perks, and YouTube Music Premium, a music only streaming service. This week, it announced that it now has more than 120 million subscribers for YouTube Music and premium services, up from 100 million a year ago as a standalone entity. Apart from Google, YouTube would be worth more than $400 billion, Wall street analyst firm Moffett Nathanson has estimated more than Disney, Comcast, Warner Brothers, Discovery and Paramount Global combined. End quote.