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Brian McCullough
Foreign welcome to the TechMe Bryant Hub for Tuesday, April 8, 2025. I'm Brian McCullough. Today oh, it looks like the tech price hikes are already starting. People are accusing Meta of doing some weird things with those latest AI models. Shopify tells workers that they need to embrace AI for everything. Is AI killing web traffic? And how AI is being used to automatically create sequels for books. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Well, mea culpa because it's happening faster than I was led to believe. Framework the seller of those modular Framework series of laptops is pausing sales of its six lowest priced laptops in the US Saying the models would sell at a loss due to the 10% tariff that went into effect on April 5th. Quoting Ars Technica. The affected models will be removed from Frameworks online store for now, and there's no word on when buyers can expect them to come back. We priced our laptops when tariffs on imports from Taiwan were 0%. The company responded to a post asking why it was pausing sales at a 10% tariff. We would have to sell the lowest end SKUs at a loss. Other consumer goods makers have performed the same calculations and taken the same actions, though most have not been open about it, Framework said Nintendo also paused US orders for its upcoming Switch 2 console last week after the tariffs were announced for right now, Framework sales Pause affects at least two specific laptop configurations. As of April 1, Framework was selling pre built versions of those laptops for $999 and $899 respectively. Without those options, the cheapest versions of those laptops start at $1,399 and $1,499. There's no word on whether those configurations will come back at a higher price or if they're gone for good. Pre orders for the upcoming Ryzen AI version of the Framework laptop 13 still start at 1,099 bucks. We will continue to provide updates when we have them read Framework had no additional information to share when contacted for comment about timing or whether other products would be affected. We will continue to provide updates as we have them, reads the company's statement. End quote. Sources also say that Micron has told US customers that it plans to impose a surcharge on some products like SSDs, from April 9 to account for President Trump's tariffs. Quoting Reuters, the company notified its customers in a letter that while Trump's announcement last week exempted semiconductors, which account for part of Micron's portfolio, the tariffs applied to memory modules and solid state drives or SSDs, the sources said. Those products, used to store data in various products from cars to laptops and data center servers, would now be subject to a surcharge, they said. Micron's overseas manufacturing sites are largely based in Asia, including China, Taiwan, Japan, Malaysia and Singapore. An executive at an Asian NAND module manufacturer said they were taking a similar approach to Micron to tell US Customers they had to figure out the tariffs themselves. If they don't want to bear the taxes, we cannot ship the products, the person said, declining to be named as they were not permitted to speak to the media. With this kind of tax rate, no company can generously say I'll take on the burden, end quote. Sources say Apple plans to send more iPhones to the US from India to offset the China tariffs, but the situation is too uncertain to upend other supply chain investments for now. Quoting the Journal before tariffs were announced, Apple was on pace to make about 25 million iPhones in India this year, said bank of America analyst Wasmi Mohan. Normally, around 10 million of those would supply the local Indian market. If Apple were to redirect all India made iPhones to the US it could meet about 50% of American demand for the device this year, he said. Apple has been working to increase its India iPhone production for years. The tariff on Chinese goods could add about $300 to the current $550 hardware cost to Apple of an iPhone 16 Pro that currently retails for $1,100, according to tech Insights. Apple could limit the damage by importing phones from India, where the tariff is about half as high. Vietnam, which has become a hub for making AirPods, the Apple Watch and iPads, received a tariff of 46% under Trump's plan, nearly as high as China's. But Trump suggested in a social media post Friday after speaking to Vietnam's leader that he might offer a better deal, end quote. And I've noticed this next bit myself, non tech folks in my life are suddenly asking me if they should upgrade their computers now and how to future proof them for several years if necessary. Looks like I'm not alone. Apple store employees say the past few days have felt like the busy holiday season as the threat of tariffs and potential price hikes sparked a shopping frenzy. Quoting Bloomberg, one employee said their store was slammed with people panic buying phones. Almost every customer asked me if prices were going to go up soon, said the worker, who asked not to be identified because they weren't authorized to speak publicly. Though stores didn't necessarily see the kind of lines that come with an iPhone launch. The atmosphere was like the busy holiday season, employees said. People are just rushing in and worried and asking questions, one said, adding that the company hasn't provided guidance to stores on how to handle such inquiries. The frenzy has translated to more purchases. Apple's US Retail stores saw higher sales over this past weekend than in prior years in at least some major markets, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. An Apple spokesperson declined to comment. End quote Some weird doings in AI Land Lmarena says it is updating its leaderboard policies after a Llama 4 Maverick version, which meta said in fine print is not public, secured the number two spot on the charts. Quoting the Verge, the new Maverick model quickly secured the number two spot on LM arena, the AI benchmark site where humans compare outputs from different systems and vote on the best one. In Meta's press release, the company highlighted Maverick's Elo score of 1417, which placed it above OpenAI's 4.0 and just under Gemini 2.5 Pro. A higher Elo score means the model wins more often in the arena when going head to head with competitors. The achievement seemed to position Meta's openweight Llama 4 as a serious challenger to the state of the art closed models from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google. Then AI researchers digging through Meta's documentation discovered something unusual in fine print. Meta acknowledges that the version of Maverick tested on LM arena isn't the same as what's available to the public. According to Meta's own materials, it deployed an experimental chat version of Maverick to LM arena that was specifically optimized for conversationality, TechCrunch first reported. While what Meta did with Maverick isn't explicitly against LM Arena's rules, the site has shared concerns about gaming the system and taken steps to prevent overfitting and benchmark leakage. When companies can submit specifically tuned versions of their models for testing while releasing different versions to the public, benchmark rankings like LM arena become less meaningful as indicators of real world performance. Shortly after Meta released Maverick and Scout, the AI community started talking about a rumor that Meta had also trained its Llama 4 models to perform better on benchmarks while hiding their real limitations. VP of Generative AI at Meta, Ahmad Al Dale addressed the accusations in a post on X We've also heard claims that we trained on test sets. That's simply not true, and we would never do that. Our best understanding is that the variable quality people are seeing is due to needing to stabilize implementations. Some also noticed that Llama 4 was released at an odd time Saturday doesn't tend to be when big AI news drops. After someone on Threads asked why Llama 4 was released over the weekend, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg replied, that's when it was ready. It's a very confusing release. Generally, says Simon Willison, who closely follows and documents AI models. The model score that we got there is completely worthless to me. I can't even use the model that they got a high score on. End quote In a memo, Shopify CEO Toby Lutke told workers that using AI is now a fundamental expectation and that teams asking for more resources must first show why AI can't do the job instead quoting cnbc. What would this area look like if autonomous AI agents were already part of the team? Lutke wrote in the memo, which was sent to employees last month. This question can lead to really fun discussions and projects. Lutke also said there's a fundamental expectation across Shopify that employees embrace AI in their daily work, saying it has been a multiplier of productivity for those who have used it. I've seen many of these people approach implausible tasks, ones we wouldn't even have chosen to tackle before, with reflexive and brilliant usage of AI to get 100x the work done, lutke wrote. The company, which sells web based software that helps online retailers manage sales and run their operations, will factor AI usage into performance reviews, he added. Shopify's total headcount fell to 8,100 at the end of December from 8,300 a year earlier, according to its latest annual filing. The Canadian company eliminated 14% of its workforce in 2022 and 20% the following year. At an investor event last month hosted by Morgan Stanley, Shopify CFO Jeff Hofmeister said the company can keep Headcount relatively flat, though employee related costs could vary due to salary differences. He noted that a higher comp high end AI engineer can lift compensation costs even if Headcount is staying the same end qu Ever feel overwhelmed trying to manage your web hosting while juggling a million other tasks? Even if tech isn't your thing, Kinsta's managed WordPress hosting is a relief. Their expert team handles it all. They've bundled up all the essentials to make sites stress free with speeds that'll wow your visitors, security that never sleeps, and a dashboard so intuitive you'll wonder why everything isn't this easy. And when you hit a snag, you'll Talk to real humans. 24 7, 360365 Actual people who get it, not AI chatbots Trust me, I had a hosting issue recently with resumewriters.com and I know that good actual human support is a godsend. Kinsta doesn't just host WordPress websites. They deliver blazing speed, ironclad security and reliability. Worried about moving, they'll migrate your entire website for free and you've got a 30 day money back guarantee. And when it comes to security, Kinsta is in a league of their own. They're one of the few WordPress hosting providers who back their promises with multiple enterprise certifications. Tired of being your own website support team? Switch your hosting to Kinsta and get your first month free. And don't worry about the move, they'll handle the whole transition for you. No tech expertise required. Just visit kinsta.com Brian to get started. That's K-I-N-S-T A.com B R I-A N as a small business owner, you don't have the luxury of clocking out early because your business is on your mind 247 so when you're hiring, you need a partner that grinds just as hard as you do. And 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 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 feel confident that you're getting the best. Based on LinkedIn data, 72% of small and medium businesses using LinkedIn say that LinkedIn helps them find high quality candidates. 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. Publishers say website site traffic has plummeted since Google rolled out AI overview Sources say Google acknowledged the drop in an October 2024 publisher meeting, quoting Bloomberg In March 2024, website owner Morgan McBride was posing for photos in her half renovated kitchen for a Google Ad celebrating the ways the search giant had helped her family's business grow. But by the time the ad ran about a month later, traffic from Google had fallen more than 70%, McBride said. Charleston crafted, which features guides on do it Yourself home improvement projects, had weathered algorithm changes and updates in the past. This time it didn't. McBride suspected people were getting more of their renovation advice from the artificial intelligence Answers at the top of Google Search the now ubiquitous AI generated answers and the way Google has changed its search algorithm to support them have caused traffic to independent websites to plummet, according to Bloomberg interviews with 25 publishers and people who work with them. That's disrupting a delicate, symbiotic relationship that's existed for years. If businesses create good content Google sends them traffic, many of the publishers said they have to either shut down or reinvent their distribution strategy, a cycle experts say could eventually degrade the quality of information Google can access for its search results and to feed its AI answers, which have still at times contained inaccuracies that have made them a poor substitute for publishers. Content for home renovation questions Google's AI may give advice that's unsafe or simply inaccurate, such as recommending specific products that don't exist, McBride said. Google denied that the rollout of AI overviews had harmed websites traffic, saying it was misleading to make generalizations about the causes of declining traffic based on individual examples. A spokesperson added that traffic can fluctuate for a number of reasons, including seasonal demand, users interest and regular algorithmic updates to search. But the traffic drops have been widely felt across the web and have spanned topics fashion and lifestyle, travel, DIY and home design and cooking, according to Bloomberg's interviews and data from web analytics firm SimilarWeb, which analyzed traffic to a sampling of small to mid sized websites in each of these categories over the past two years. It's possible that AI overviews were a factor, said SimilarWeb, which carried out the research in Bloomberg's request. Behind closed doors, the company has acknowledged the toll on publishers, even inviting a group of about 20 website creators to its Mountain View, California headquarters for conversations with employees in the search division. Last October, Google representatives apologized to the web creators and said their sites represented exactly the kind of helpful content that the company wanted to surface in search, according to creators who were in attendance. But Googlers also said they couldn't give any guarantees that their websites would recover because the search product had fundamentally changed in the AI era, multiple attendees said. Some creators say Google has recently made so many changes to search coincid with its testing of AI powered features and an effort to rid its results of AI generated spam that it has choked traffic to independent websites in favor of forums like Reddit and Quora as well as larger media brands. I don't understand how Google thinks this is sustainable, said Jake Bulley, founder of the that Fit Friend, which reviews training shoes. If you drive away all enthusiasts and small publishers, then we're going to be overrun by spam and the few players who can afford to pay to play and finally today, say hello to Ink It, a publishing platform that uses AI to create sequels and spin offs of authors original work with minimal human input, thereby raising quality concerns. Quoting Bloomberg Businessweek, Manjari Sharma started publishing installments of her novel on Wattpad's free platform, titling it Fat Keely after it was done. Seven months later she also put it on free platform called Ink it, based in Berlin. In both places the novel attracted lots of readers and rapturous comments, punctuation be damned. I absolutely love this story. And before long, Ink it was proposing that she move the novel from its free platform to its premium subscription based platform, Galatea, where Sharma would receive a share of sales. She agreed and her novel, renamed Keely, took off again. In early 2024, she learned ink it wanted to turn it into a series. This time there was a catch. Sharma recalls being told that she was welcome to write the next books if she could get them done within few weeks. Otherwise, Ink it would hire a ghostwriter to do it, though her name would still be on the COVID and she'd still get royalty payments. Sharma had no real choice. Her contract with inkit gave it the right to do just about anything it wanted with Keeley, including coming up with sequels. Plus, her life had gotten busy in the years since she first drafted the novel. She'd gotten a master's degree in mathematics and started an internship in artificial intelligence at the Royal bank of Scotland. She accepted the ghostwriting offer. The second and third books came out on Galate in close succession a few years after the first. This time, some readers were underwhelmed. Imo, it is poorly written, has a different vibe completely, and just doesn't go in any direction that I would have expected, one person commented. For inqit, this was a manifestation of its vision, a decade in the making, to use technology to discover unknown authors and turn their creative output into revenue. The platform began in the mid 2010s as a friendly place for anyone to share their writing. Over the years, though, its ambitions expanded as IT bet that technology could help it extract significant value from a catchy narrative premise, especially with the advent of AI technologies that could generate text and images. On the company's free platform inkit, amateur writers still share their stories lots of romance, often spiced with werewolves, vampires or billionaires. The company offers to publish the most successful stories on galatee, which costs $69.99 for an annual subscription. From there, Ink it can create sequels and spin offs while also adapting stories for other formats such as Galatee TV, also $69.99 a year, with or without the author's involvement. For some popular novels, including the Keighley series, it also produces print editions. Writers receive a small share of the revenue attributed to their stories. For most, it's well below what they'd make with a traditional publisher. But then, finding a traditional publisher requires connections that Ink it authors tend not to have. Sharma understood that inkit chose titles for Galate by relying on in house software that tracked readership metrics. What she didn't fully grasp when inkit began serializing Keely was that its employees were using large language models AI technologies trained on human authored text and capable of generating their own in the writing and editing process. Since then, AI has only become more prominent at Ink it, to the point that staff is heavily using AI to iterate on the stories, chief Executive Officer Ali Albazaz said in an interview. Inkit relies on AI for tasks such as copy editing manuscripts and suggesting plot developments, as well as producing translations, audiobook narration and covers. Freelancers hired to edit and ghostwrite novels also aren't barred from using LLMs for their text. All of that allows Inkit to employ remarkably few editorial employees, whom it prefers to call content employees. Galate's catalog of titles from some 400 authors is overseen by just one head of editorial and five story intelligence analysts, plus the stable of freelancers. Even some traditional players are cautiously opening up to AI. Holt's Brink Publishing Group has funded an AI startup called Chapter. The world's biggest and second biggest consumer publishers, Penguin Random House and HarperCollins publishers have made internal versions of ChatGPT available to their employees for brainstorming and other purposes, though neither company has used it to produce or edit text and books. While Penguin Random House doesn't allow AI companies to use its authors books to train their models, HarperCollins struck a deal last year with an unnamed technology company to provide texts for that purpose if the authors give permission and receive compensation. HarperCollins CEO Brian Murray has also mused about the prospect of a talking book that would let readers converse with the AI driven replica of an author for even these tentative explorations. The publishers have been widely lambasted by authors, including some they've published. End quote. Nothing more for you today. Talk to you tomorrow.
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Monster.com
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