Brian McCullough (0:04)

Welcome to the TechMe Ride Home for Tuesday, December 10th, 2024. I'm Brian McCullough. Today you can now buy a car on Amazon. A new AI unicorn doing something with AI I hadn't heard about before. New AI enhanced smart glasses. Microsoft says it has a new data center design that uses zero water. And if you were able to use Sora yesterday, what was it like? Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Say hello to Amazon Autos, which lets US users buy a Hyundai with plans to add dealerships and other manufacturers in 2025. In other words, Amazon is finally breaching the final frontier in retail sales cars. Quoting Wired Assuming you want a new Hyundai specifically, you can now buy the car on Amazon. The Korean automaker is the only manufacturer working with Amazon Autos, though Amazon says it will rol pun almost certainly intended services with additional dealerships and manufacturers in 2025. The marketplace lets buyers search nearby Hyundai dealerships for their ideal vehicle configuration, picking everything from trim to interior features. Shoppers can estimate trade in values through Amazon's third party valuation tool and choose between full payment or financing options. Though rates aren't standardized, the platform streamlines paperwork with E signatures and lets buyers schedule dealer pickup while featuring Amazon's signature elements like user reviews and that familiar add to cart button. Yes, you can add a $66,000 Ioniq 5 to the same cart as your toilet paper. I guess the service comes with limitations, though. No shipping dealership pickup is required. New Hyundai's only no used inventory yet and availability restricted to 48 states, which excludes Alaska and Hawaii. Amazon isn't actually selling the cars directly they're facilitating deals between buyers and dealerships, navigating around US Regulations that prevent prevent direct retail car sales. But this actually plays into how cars are increasingly sold and maybe even increasingly thought of these days, where vehicles are essentially computers on wheels and brands like Tesla and Rivian already sell direct to consumers online. While some dealers remain skeptical about Amazon's long term success here, the tech giant is betting that simplifying the traditional dealership experience will be enough to capture market share their value proposition eliminating the dreaded haggling process through a streamlined digital marketpl place. The U.S. commerce Department has finalized more than $6.1 billion for memory chipmaker Micron to fund its New York and Idaho factory projects, one of the largest Chips act subsidies and probably the biggest one beyond Intel. Quoting Reuters the Commerce Department and Micron have also agreed to preliminary terms for an additional investment of $275 million to expand the Chipmakers facility in Manassas, Virginia which primarily manufactures chips sol in the automotive, networking and industrial markets. The additional investment will help ensure a critical technology relied upon by our defense industry, automotive sector and national security community, the White House said. End quote End quoting the Washington Post. The grant is designated for the construction of two chip factories in Clay, New York and Boise, Idaho, as well as an expansion of an existing facility in Manassas, Virginia. Biden administration officials in recent weeks have been locking in grants under the 2022 Chips and Science act, which allocated tens of billions of dollars to build chip manufacturing FAC in the United States. Previous grants finalized over the past several weeks include $11 billion for intel and $6.6 billion for Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. During the election campaign, President Elect Trump criticized the grant program and said he prefers to promote US Chip manufacturing by levying tariffs on semiconductor imports. End quote I've got an interesting raise for you because it's an angle to AI I haven't heard of before. Speak is an AI language learning startup. It uses AI to teach English by focusing on speaking, not gamification, and it has now raised $78 million, led by Accel at a $1 billion valuation, taking its total funding to $162 million. Quoting Bloomberg while competitors like Rosetta Stone and Duolingo have dominated the language learning market for years, Speak is betting that it can use help make people more fluent in a new tongue. Instead of trying to gamify the learning process, the startup focuses on developing authentic speaking abilities. With Speak's app, users can practice a new language by communicating verbally with an AI system. The San Francisco based company's speech recognition model adapts to users accents, allowing the app to offer real time feedback. Historically, the only way to actually become fluent is to hire a human teacher or tutor, co Founder and Chief Technology Officer Andrew Su said in an interview. Until the past few years, the technology just hadn't existed to build an AI or software based conversational partner. Speak has a subscription based revenue model with a premium service starting at $20 per month. Chief Executive Officer Connor Zwick said the company is approaching profitability and had revenue in the eight figures. While the consumer market has historically been its focus, Speak also has an enterprise offering that's been gaining traction, Zwick said. Many companies around the world pay for their employees to learn English and we've seen eight of the top 10 largest employ in Korea pick up Speak for business, he said. End quote. But it is interesting that this is a consumer AI play, not a model Play not a use AI to do accounting or law or whatever play According to PitchBook, even though enterprise AI startups raised $16.4 billion this year, AI companies focusing on consumers have raised only half that. So interesting trendspotting perhaps. Speaking of trends, you know I've been banging the drum about how smart glasses seem to be the product category on the up. More sign of this as Solos has debuted the Airgo Vision, a camera equipped pair of smart glasses featuring visual recognition powered by OpenAI's GPT 4.0. Available now starting from $299. Quoting the Verge Solos camera equipped smart glasses have arrived to provide some much needed competition against Meta's Ray Bans. The Ergo Vision is available now starting at 200, the same price as the Ray Ban. Meta Eyewear tech and features integration with OpenAI's GPT 4.0 AI model to identify and answer questions about the people, objects and text seen by the camera. This allows the Ergo Vision to do things like translate text into different languages, provide directions to nearby locations or landmarks, and give the wearer more information about what they're looking at. Solos says the glasses can also be integrated with other AI models like Google Gemini and Anthropic's Claude, something the company previously teased when it announced the Ergo Vision in June. One thing we promised to deliver on was allowing consumers to have control over their experience with AI and smart technology, particularly with privacy options in mind, solo's co founder Kenneth Fan said in the announcement. That's why we developed frames that can easily be changed to decide when and where a camera may be appropriate without sacrificing any of the fun features. Similar to Meta's Ray Ban collaboration, Ergo's Vision device enables on demand photo capture. The innovative design places the battery and touch controls within USB C rechargeable hinges while offering a modular approach. Users can swap between camera equipped and standard frames, effectively transforming the device into an audio only wearable when desired. Ergo's pricing strategy reflects this flexibility with standalone frames available at $149 or a privacy focused bundle combining both camera and regular frames for $349. Design conscious users can choose between seven colorways and two distinct styles, the bold square framed Krypton 1 with pronounced nose pads or the more streamlined Krypton 2. I'm also noting that once again this is showing that AI itself might be the enabling factor for this new product category all by itself. No wonder we hear those rumors of Sam Altman wanting to get into hardware with the likes of Jony I've I use Shopify with my 25 year old business resumeywriters.com, but so does Thrive Cosmetics and Silicon Valley's weekend uniform supplier Coat Epoxy an often overlooked secret to successful businesses is often actually the business behind the business making, selling and for shoppers buying. Simple. For millions of businesses, that business is Shopify. Nobody does selling better than Shopify, home of the number one checkout on the planet. Also the not so secret secret shop pay that boosts conversions up to 50%, meaning way less carts going abandoned. If you're into growing your business, your commerce platform better be ready to sell wherever your customers are scrolling or scrolling on the web, in your store, in their feed and everywhere in between. 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Microsoft spent more than $50 billion on capital expenditures in the fiscal year ended June 30, the vast majority related to data center construction. Fueled by demand for artificial intelligence services, it plan to top that figure in the current year, requiring rapidly rising amounts of energy to run the networks and water to cool equipment. Many of the latest facilities are going up in hot, dry areas like Arizona and Texas, making it even more critical to find ways to conserve water. Microsoft's existing data centers will continue to use a mix of older technologies, but new projects in Phoenix and Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin will begin using the zero water designs in 2026. Data Center Dynamics All Microsoft data centers designed from August 2024 will use the new design expected to come online from late 2027. By adopting chip level cooling solutions, we can deliver precise temperature control without water evaporation. Steve Solomon, VP of data center infrastructure engineering at Microsoft, said these new liquid cooling technologies recycle water through a closed loop. Once the system is filled during construction, it will continually circulate water between the servers and chillers to dissipate heat without requiring a fresh water supply, solomon added. The shift to the next generation data centers is expected to help reduce our WUE to near zero for each data center employing zero water evaporation. Moving from evaporative systems to mechanical cooling is expected to increase the power usage effectiveness of the data center design. However, our latest chip level cooling systems will allow us to utilize warmer temperatures for cooling than previous generations of IT hardware, which enables us to mitigate the power use with high efficiency economizing chillers with elevated water temperatures, solomon said. There is also expected to be a nominal increase in data center power usage as a result. However, the company said that it was working on other innovations to provide more targeted cooling and reduce power usage. In mockups posted to GitHub, BlueSky is teasing BlueSky plus a $72 per year or $8 per month subscription offering profile customizations, higher video upload limits and more. This has been rumored for a while, along with May someday also running ads, but maybe this is a stopgap to forestall that eventuality. Quoting TechCrunch, though, the company warns on GitHub that the list here is a user interface mockup only and the paid features could very well change ahead of the launch. There's reason to believe that at least some of these are under consideration for BlueSky's premium subscription. When earlier discussing its subscription model this past fall, bluesky said in a blog post it would offer premium features like higher video quality uploads or profile customizations like colors and avatar frames. Both of these features are now included in the user interface interface mockup of the subscription currently known as bluesky. In addition, the placeholder text in the mockup indicates bluesky could be considering other paid features like custom app icons, a bluesky profile badge, inline post translations, post analytics, and bookmark folders, a feature set that could rival X. Of most interest is that bluesky could be weighing offering verification profile badges as part of its subscription, unless that feature is also only placeholder text, as opposed to an idea bluesky is developing. However, the company recently spoke about its plans for verification and how the open nature of its network could make its system work a lot differently than paid verification on X and Meta's platforms. While that may be true, it would be interesting if bluesky still decided to put its verification tools behind a paywall of sorts. The mockup also shows pricing of $8 per month or $72 per year for BlueSky plus, but that is not final either. The user interface mockup was spotted by bluesky user ariexyz, whose post about the finding ended up seeing hundreds of likes, quotes and reposts on the emerging social network, which now has 24.7 million user users. BlueSky software engineer Dan Abramov, who previously worked on React and Redux at Meta, responded in the thread to caution bluesky users that the list of features shown in the UI mockup doesn't necessarily match what will be released. Some of these features are likely to make it, but please don't take this as an actual list of planned features, he wrote in his reply on bluesky. We'll announce the actual list when more work is done. Abramov also clarified that the coming soon label means nothing, as it's just a test of UI treatment for upcoming features. Finally today apparently everyone rushed to try Sora yesterday, so much so that users were encountering this message. Sora account creation is temporarily unavailable. We're currently experiencing heavy traffic and have temporarily disabled Sora account creation. If you've never logged into Sora before, please check back again soon. So it seems like the system was a bit overwhelmed by all the attention, but given that this was the big news of the week, how about a review? What was it like to actually use Sora if you were actually able to do so? Quoting Tom's Guy My first prompt was a video of me writing for Tom's Guide. Although this prompt was about as boring as I could get, I chose it on purpose. I wanted to see what type of creative liberty Sora would come up with in an effort to determine what mistakes it might make. My plan worked. In this video, you can see the person is typing but missing the keyboard completely, almost as if they are tapping their laptop nervously for inspiration. This prompt was a huge success and demonstrates what I wrote about earlier regarding Sora not understanding physics in general. This makes sense because physics requires some understanding of the way objects respond to one another. Similar to LLM's hallucinations, Sora's video models struggle to put together videos with the movement of the objects. Photorealistic feature videos are a dead giveaway that the video was made with AI. I also prompted it with a chef preparing a colorful vegetable stir fry in a modern kitchen. This prompt assesses Sora's capability to portray human activities, culinary details, and indoor environments. This was a very realistic video, yet it still had some flaws. For example, the chef was mixing veggies with a full uncover cut pepper in the bowl. Steam was rising from the bowl, but it was on the counter, not on the stove. Maybe the veggies are that hot. Veggies aside, the chef's motions, facial expression and details were very lifelike, leaving me wowed. Then I simply prompted Video Remix I found a video of a bird on a porch and decided to remix it by asking Sora to add a cat to the video. I wanted to evaluate the remix features. While seeing Sora's strengths and limitations, I noticed Sora went ahead and named the prompt Mysterious Cabin Encounter. I'm definitely in awe of Sora's ability to create landscapes and creatures, but I was surprised that Sora did not actually include a cat in the video. Instead, it took the creative liberty to make the cabin visitor a mystery as the title suggested. Overall, I was generally impressed. I've used other video generators that have stunned me with similar results. However, other generators take much longer to generate. Sora created the videos quickly. In less than five minutes, my prompt was turned into a fairly realistic three to five second video. The site was easy to use and all the features and what they did were clear, especially after watching them demoed today. I did find it a little tricky to navigate back home after a video was created. I ended up just using the back arrows to get back to home and create a new prompt. As was mentioned in the demo today, users should not log on to Sora thinking they are going to create a full motion picture. Even when using the storyboard feature, the videos are seconds long. The ability to edit the prompt and remix videos that other users have created is pretty cool. I was intrigued by the different prompts others used, particularly the simplicity of prompts that generated fascinating videos. I am excited to play around more with Sora, but I know those 50 prompts will go very quickly. I'LL have to choose my prompts wisely and end quote. I guess you wouldn't have to be very eagle eared to hear my voice deteriorate over the course of this recording. Like you can tell which of the segments I recorded towards the end Day three of the cold has been the worst one yet as you can hear. Hopefully I'll have improved some by tomorrow. Talk to you then.