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- [00:05]
Brian McCullough
Welcome to the Techmeme write home for Tuesday, July 29, 2025. I'm Brian McCullough. Today Sony says Tencent has ripped off one of their biggest games. Microsoft wants to get ahead of the whole AI browser thing. Are rate limits coming for AI usage as some people are using AI too much? Waymo is coming to Dallas and further proof of my thesis that smart glasses are the next big thing in tech hardware. It's what you missed today in the world of tech. Sony is suing Tencent for copyright and trademark infringement in California federal court, accusing the Chinese tech giant of ripping off its Horizon game series. Quoting Reuters, Sony said in a lawsuit filed on Friday that Tencent's upcoming Light of Motoram is a slavish clone of its games that copies several distinctive Horizon elements and threatens to confuse buyers. Spokespeople for Tencent and attorneys and spokespeople for Sony did not immediately respond to requests for comment. On Monday, Sony released the first game in the Horizon series, Horizon Zero dawn, on its PlayStation 4 in 2017. The games follow a red headed woman named Alloy as she navigates a post apocalyptic world populated by human tribes and robotic animals. Sony said in its complaint that it declined an offer from Tencent to collaborate on a new Horizon game last year. Tencent later announced Light of Motoram, which Sony said features identical gameplay, story themes and artistic elements to Horizon, as well as many other similarities and quoting Polygon filed on July 25, the lawsuit intends to block Tencent from releasing the game, which it argues violates Sony Interactive Entertainment's intellectual property, while also seeking $150,000 in statutory damages for each separate work in the Horizon series infringed. Notably, Sony alleges that Tencent approached them in 2024 through its Aurora studios with a proposal to work on a mobile hor Horizon spin off game, but the Japanese company declined. Tencent's pitch, according to the lawsuit proposed adding Eastern aesthetics and survival and crafting and pet taming as well as multiple multiplayer components to the Horizon series. The pitch deck included mockups of Eastern inspired designs and settings, including one of Alloy standing on the Great Wall of China, the suit alleges. The original trailer for Motoram features machines decked in white and blue, much like the enemies do in Horizon alongside Aboriginal. Like a tit with a techbent, the protagonists differ in that alloy Star of Horizon has long red hair, whereas the main character in Light of Motoram is a raven haired woman with a shorter haircut. But the costumes share some similarities, like the predominance of brown leather. Motoram's protagonist can also wear a helmet that makes her look even more like alloy, and Tencent is using that combination in its marketing materials. In the lawsuit, Sony requests that Tencent hand over all such marketing materials so that it can destroy them based on the trailer. Horizon's not the only arguable influence on Light of Motoram. At one point, we see the player character land on a beach in a glider, much like the one in the Legend of Breath of the Wild. There's also a vehicle that is reminiscent of Destiny 2's Sparrow bikes. And to be fair to Tencent, there are some differentiating ideas here, like co op base building and a focus on crafting. There's the obligatory chopping a tree footage you see in most modern survival games. But the affinity with Horizon is hard to ignore, as evidenced by fan remarks left on Light of Motorum's trailer when you lend your work to your school friend and tell him to copy it but change some things, jokes the top comment on the YouTube trailer. Sony taps into this public sentiment throughout the lawsuit, where it cites news articles and comments that call out the similarities as quote shameless and bash Tencent's game as Horizon zero originality, end quote. Microsoft's Edge web browser has added Copilot Mode, an experimental feature that tries to make browsing an agentic AI experience, even anticipating links to click quoting Windows Central. The new Copilot mode places Copilot at the heart of everything you do in the web browser. It oversees the address bar and new tab page, and is always one click away from being able to analyze a website or document you're looking at. Copilot in Edge is now also able to see across all your open tabs, offering contextual actions or suggestions based on your entire active browsing session and not just one particular tab. This enables capabilities such as comparing multiple tabs all at once. With Copilot, users can get started by heading to Microsoft.com edge aipoweredcopilotmode to enable the new Copilot mode for Microsoft Edge and say you don't like the new search experience. Just go into Edge Settings at Settings, then AI Innovations, then Copilot Mode, and you'll find a toggle to turn on and off the Copilot mode. The AI assistant will also soon be able to book reservations and manage errands on a webpage just by asking for it, using natural language and reducing your need to click around to get tasks done. Offering an agentic AI experience inside the Edge browser. You can even use natural language to find particular websites for Copilot to navigate to you on your behalf. If you don't know what website you're looking for exactly, you can just ask Copilot what it is you want to do, and Copilot will do its best to bring you a website that allows you to get that task done. It'll also be able to understand recent searches and automatically offer up related websites or videos that it thinks you might want to look at based on your browsing history and search results. Microsoft says Copilot Mode is available for free for a limited time, but doesn't give any specific details on what limited time means. Copilot Mode will likely require a Copilot Pro subscription to access once it's out of the experimental preview phase. Though Microsoft hasn't confirmed this, the company also stresses that Copilot Mode is built with responsible AI practices in mind and that the user is always in control of the data that is offered to Copilot. With Copilot Mode in Edge, your data is protected under Microsoft's trusted privacy standards that are built to keep your information safe, secure, and never shared without your permission. I think it's clear that Microsoft is attempting to get ahead of the competition with today's announcement. Generative AI tech firm Perplexity has already launched their own attempt at an AI powered Web browser, and OpenAI is rumored to be doing the same in the coming months with Microsoft. Microsoft getting its big AI browser update out now, that puts it ahead of the curve and allows the company to help set the narrative with this new category of web browsing. AI web browsers are going to be all the craze in the next couple of years, with the browser company also pivoting away from its ARC browser in favor of something new powered by AI. End quote. This is interesting and potentially a trend to watch for going forward. Anthropic apparently plans to debut new rate limits for Claude Pro and max beginning on August 28, likely curbing less than 5% of users, but saying it's doing this because some people run code quote continuously in the background, quoting TechCrunch. The new rate limits will go into effect August 28th for subscribers to Anthropic's $20 per month Pro plan as well as its 100 and $200 per month Max plans, the company said Monday in an email to subscribers and a post on X. Anthropic says its existing usage limits, which reset every five hours, will remain in place. The company is also introducing two new weekly rate limits that reset every seven days one is an overall usage limit, whereas the other is specific to Anthropic's most advanced AI model, Claude Opus 4. Anthropic says Max subscribers can purchase additional usage beyond what the rate limit provides at standard API rates. The announcement comes just weeks after Anthropic quietly introduced rate limits for Claude code. The company said at the time it was aware of the issues, but declined to elaborate further. While Anthropic's AI coding tool has been a hit with developers, the company seems to be having a difficult time serving it broadly. Anthropic's status page shows that Claude Code has experienced a partial or major outage at least seven times in the last month, perhaps because some power users seem to be running Claude Code nonstop. Claude Code has experienced unprecedented demand since launch, said Anthropic spokesperson Amy Rotherham in an email to TechCrunch about the weekly rate limits. Rotherham notes that most users won't notice a difference and that this limit will affect less than 5% of subscribers based on their current usage patterns. Anthropic tells TechCrunch that most pro users can expect 40 to 80 hours of Sonnet 4 through Claude code within their weekly rate limits. Subscribers to Anthropic's $100 per month Max plan can expect 140 to 280 hours of Sonnet 4 and 15 to 35 hours of Opus 4. And subscribers to Anthropic's $200 per month Max plan can expect 240 to 480 hours of Sonnet 4 and 24 to 40 hours of Opus 4. The company notes that usage may vary based on code base size and other factors. However, it's somewhat unclear how Anthropic is measuring usage here. Anthropic claims that the $200 max plan offers 20x more usage than the Pro Plan. The updated figures subscribers now get only about six times as many Claude code hours as Pro users. Anthropic has said before that it's very constrained when it comes to computational resources, which seems to be the case for most AI model providers today. Most AI companies are racing to bring new AI data centers online to meet the massive demands of serving and training their AI models. Several providers of AI coding tools are revisiting the pricing strategy around their products. In June, the company behind Cursor Anysphere changed the way it priced usage for its $20 per month pro plan to limit power users from abusing the plan. However, anysphere later apologized for poorly communicating those changes, leading to some users paying more than they expected. Another AI coding tool provider Replit made similar pricing changes in June as well. End quote. You know, it's weird. I use ChatGPT every day, but I often feel like I have this tendency to not feed it too much in terms of the prompt for fear of being rate limited. I guess I should stop worrying because it's not like I'm doing anything close to what these power users are doing. A second security breach at women's safety dating app T has exposed now more than 1.1 million user messages dating from early 2023 up to last week, many containing sensitive information quoting 404 Media despite T's initial statement that, quote, the incident involved a legacy data storage system containing information from over two years ago. The second issue impacting a separate database is much more recent, affecting messages up until last week, according to the researchers, findings that 404 Media verified. The researchers said they also found the ability to send a push notification to all of T's users. It's hard to overstate how sensitive this data is and how it could put T's users at risk if it fell into the wrong hands. When signing up, T encourages users to choose an anonymous screen name, but it was trivial for 404 Media to find the real world identities of some users given the nature of their messages, which T has led them to believe were private users could be easily found via their social media handles, phone numbers and real names that they shared in these chats. These conversations also frequently make damning accusations against people who are also named in the private messages and in some cases are easy to identify end quote and quoting Bleeping computer this database contains much more recent data ranging from 2023 to last week and reportedly includes messages discussing sensitive topics such as those about abortions, cheating husbands and two timing boyfriends. Kasra Rajaery, the researcher who discovered the new database, told 404 Media that any T user could access the stored user data using their own API key. According to 404 Media, it's possible to identify users based on social media profiles, phone numbers and other personal details revealed in the messages. What was meant to be a safe space for women has now become a tool to embarrass them with someone, even creating a Face Smash style site where visitors can rate the selfies exposed in the leaked data. T says they continue to work with third party cybersecurity experts to contain the incident and conduct an investigation into the attack. The app says that it also notified law enforcement who are assisting with the investigation. End quote.
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- [13:30]
Brian McCullough
Waymo plans to launch its Robotaxi service in Dallas in 2026 with Avis as the fleet partner, a first for them after thus far exclusively working with Uber in Austin and Atlanta. Quoting Bloomberg. Customers can order rides on Waymo's app, while Avis will provide car management services including infrastructure, vehicle readiness, maintenance and general depot operations, the company said Tuesday in a statement. The Dallas deal marks a multi year partnership that Waymo and Avis plan to expand to more cities over time, according to the statement. The announcement also underscores that Waymo and Uber are partners and rivals as robo taxi programs are introduced across the US in the five cities where Waymo vehicles are currently available, it offers rides via its app in Phoenix, San Francisco and Los Angeles while partnering with Uber in Phoenix, Austin and Atlanta. In the latter two markets where Waymo rides are only available on the Uber app, Waymo is utilizing fleet services with Uber backed partner for its planned Miami launch next year. Waymo is providing the service through its app, but using operations from Uber backed fleet management company Move. Dallas will be a competitive Robotaxi market with Uber and Lyft also planning to offer rides with their respective driverless technology partners. Uber is working with Austin based Avride for a launch later this year, while Lyft plans to offer them with intel spinoff mobileye as soon as next year. End quote. Man, hurry up and come to New York City you cowards. Finally today, another sign this market is getting real. Essilor Luxottica says sales of Ray Ban Meta smart glasses more than tripled year over year in the first half of 2025 and it expects a very fast ramp up of the new Oakley Metas. Quoting CNBC we are leading the transformation of glasses as the next computing platform, one where AI, sensory tech and data rich healthcare infrastructure will converge to empower humans and unlock our full potential, esselor luxottica CEO Francisco Maleri and Deputy CEO Paul Du Solient said in a joint statement. The success of Ray Ban Meta, the launch of Oakley Meta Performance AI glasses and the positive response to Nuance Audio are major milestones for us in this new frontier. In the earnings report, the company said that its new Oakley Meta smart glasses, unveiled in June, represents the latest product line to come from its partnership with the social media company. CNBC reported in June that Meta and luxottica plan to debut a Prada branded version of its smart glasses in the future. End quote. Well, how about A quick review of the Oakley Meta glasses and gadget says these new glasses build on the same formula as the Ray Ban models. They're stylish, with frames that are just enough tech to keep your phone in your pocket occasionally. Based on the bold Houston design, they offer upgrades like better battery life, improved video resolution and live AI features like translation and object recognition. But at 399 to $499, they're pricier than the Ray Ban versions. And not everyone will love the flashy look or oversized fit. While the core experience remains familiar, Engadget says these glasses hint at Meta's future ambitions for smart wearables, eventually heading toward full AR glasses with displays, even if they're not quite there yet. Just a heads up for you that at the end of the show on Thursday, I've got a big announcement to make. So big that I'm prepping you for it now. So prep yourself. Make sure to listen to the end of this show on Thursday for a huge POD announcement. Talk to you tomorrow.