Brian McCullough (0:04)

Welcome to the Tech Meme Ride home for Wednesday, February 19th, 2025. I'm Brian McCullough. Today Apple has announced the new iPhone 16e. I've got all the details for you. The humane AI pin is definitively dead and HP is acquiring the ashes. Yet another potentially big new AI player and why? Some ByteDance investors kind of don't care if TikTok US gets split off. In fact, they might even prefer it. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. New iPhone it's the iPhone 16e. This is Apple's new lower end phone starting at $599. It's got an A18 chip, a 48 megapixel camera, Apple Intelligence, and the first Apple designed 5G cellular modem, the C1. All of this is available for pre order Friday and shipping February 28th. This is a new design for the lower end iPhone. Say goodbye finally to the home button. Quoting 9to5Mac the iPhone 16e features a 6.1-inch OLED display with a notch. There's also Face ID support integrated into that notch. You'll find a USB C port at the bottom for charging and data transfer. The device also features the action button instead of the classic mute switch. In terms of performance, the iPhone 16e is powered by the latest A18 chip. Apple says the six core CPU is up to 80% faster than the A13 Bionic chip on the iPhone 11. There's also a four core CPU and a 16 core Neural Engine. Apple says the neural engine is optimized for large generative models and run machine learning models up to six times faster than a 13 bionic. On the back of the iPhone 16e, you'll find a single 48 megapixel fusion camera with an integrated 2x telephoto option. By default, the iPhone 16e will take high resolution 24 megapixel photos, but you can also choose to take 48 megapixel images. The integrated 2x telephoto option lets you zoom in and retain that high resolution image quality without having a second dedicated physical camera. There's also support for HDR portrait mode and night mode. As for battery life, Apple calls it the best battery life ever on a 6.1-inch iPhone lasting up to 6 hours longer than an iPhone 11 and up to 12 hours longer than all generations of iPhone SE. As for that modem, the C1 chip, this is Apple's first step in ending its reliance on Qualcomm's 5G modems. Quoting the Verge, Apple says the chip contributes to the 16e's battery life. The company says the phone's internal design is optimized to support a larger battery, giving it up to 26 hours of video playback. The C1 starting in the 16e makes sense. The 599 device is now the cheapest way to get one of Apple's thin bezel phones with Apple Intelligence. If this inaugural outing for the chip doesn't end up being great, people may chalk it up to this being a more affordable phone and Quoting Reuters Modem chips are hard to make because they must be compatible with hundreds of carriers in scores of countries. Only a handful of companies around the world, including Samsung, MediaTek and Huawei, have successfully created one. For years, Apple outsourced modems from Qualcomm, the world's biggest supplier of the chips. Qualcomm chips also power Android gadgets and Windows laptops that compete with Apple Devices Devices Apple fought a protracted legal battle with Qualcomm, but ultimately settled and signed new supply agreements with it in 2019 after alternative suppliers such as intel failed to deliver a viable alternative. But Apple is now confident it has created an advanced chip that will form the basis of a modem platform Apple will use for years to come. End quote the Humane AI pin is officially dead Humane says AI pins online features will stop working on February 28, when all customer data will be deleted and it will refund some customers. Quoting in gadget AI hardware startup Humane has given its users just 10 days notice that their pins will be disconnected. In a note to its customers, the company said AI pins will continue to function normally until 12pm Pacific Time on February 28th. On that date, users will lose access to essentially all of their devices features, including but not limited to calling messaging, AI queries and cloud access. The FAQ does note that you'll still be able to check on your battery life, though. Humane is encouraging its users to download any stored data before February 28, as it plans on permanently deleting all remaining customer data at the same time as switching off its servers. The company says it will refund customers who are still within the 90 day return window so long as they submit by February 27th. It also notes that users who opted to wait for a replacement for the devices combo fire hazard and charge case will now be refunded the portion of their original purchase price that was allocated to the charge case in the original recall note. That amount was $149 if ordered separately or $129 if ordered as part of the complete system bundle. End quote so sad. End to a sorry saga, but what of Humane? Well, HP plans to acquire their assets for $116 million, wind down Humane's AI pinned business and add Humane's team, including its founders, as an AI focused division. Quoting Bloomberg Humane's team, including founders Imran Chaudhry and Bethany Buongiorno, will form a new division at HP to help integrate artificial int into the company's personal computers, printers and connected conference rooms, said Tan Tran, who leads HP's AI initiatives. Chaudhry and Buongiorno were design and software engineers at Apple before founding the startup in April 2024. Humane launched a much hyped wearable device meant to allow users to access AI models, calls and texts via voice or gesture. The startup pitched the AI pin as an eventual smartphone replacement, but the device met a cascade of negative reviews, reports of glitches and a quality issue that led to a risk of fire. The San Francisco based startup had raised over $230 million and counted backers such as Salesforce Chief Executive Officer Marc Benioff. Humane had been looking for a buyer for the business as early as May 2024, when it sought a price of752.1 billion dollars. A few months ago, Humane backed away from its hardware focus, instead rebranding around what it called Cosmos, an AI operating system for a slew of devices in the home and on the go. The software, the company said, had a new type of architecture built around AI agents. HP could use this underlying technology to help power its own devices. Quoting Gurgly Oros on Twitter this might be unpopular to say, but this is a very good save by Humane's leadership. Humane raised $230 million, which sounds like much, but hardware is expensive. It had a product launch that was unfortunately a massive flop, now sold for $116 million and most employees keep their jobs. Quoting Seth Miller on Bluesky Call it an aqua hire, I suppose, but still, why would you pay that much to get those founders on board? They did not understand the demand, the challenges to develop the product, nor the potential capabilities of the efforts. End quote and quoting Casey Newton I look forward to HP's forthcoming line of wearable printers that require a monthly data plan subscription and can't understand what you're saying. End quote Sources say Niantic is in talks to sell its games unit to Saudi Arabia controlled Scopely for around three and a half billion dollars. The deal would include Pokemon, Go and mobile games. Quoting Bloomberg Any agreement would involve the Pokemon title as well as other mobile games, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because the discussions are private. There's no assurance an agreement will be reached. The Pokemon Go game was a global phenomenon, but the company had trouble duplicating its runaway success and cut staff and canceled some titles in development in 2022 and 2023. Its Harry Potter Wizards Unite game shut down in 2022. Representatives of Niantic and Scopely declined to comment. Scopely is owned by Savvy Games Group, a subsidiary of Saudi Arabia Fund. Niantic was spun out of Alphabet's Google in 2015. Its chief executive officer and founder John Hanke, worked in satellite mapping before leading Google's geoproduct division. Pokemon Go encouraged players to walk around their neighborhood with an interactive map to find the popular Nintendo characters. The San Francisco based company makes other products, including tools to help Capture and share 3D scans of real world locations. Data generated through its apps have contributed to a large geospatial model, the company announced in November. That model will use large SC machine learning to understand a scene and connect it to millions of other scenes globally. Mobile game maker Scopely was acquired for $4.9 billion two years ago by Savvy Games. In 2024, Savvy chief executive Officer Brian Ward told Bloomberg News that the company planned to add a genre leading mobile title to its roster through Scopely, the tip of the spear for its mobile investment. Ready to optimize your nutrition this year, Factor has chef made gourmet meals that make eating well easy. They're dietitian approved and ready to heat and eat in two minutes so you can fuel right and feel great no matter what life throws at you. I told you this is my wife's daily lunch solution. She's got these factors in the office and boom. No leaving work to find a bite to eat. Factor arrives fresh and fully prepared, perfect for any active, busy lifestyle. 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To get your 20% off just text Techmeme to 64,000 Text Techmeme to 64,000 that's T E C H M E M E to 64,000. Message and date rates may apply. See terms for details and Another potentially big new AI player on the scene, former OpenAI CTO Mira Muradi has announced Thinking Machines Lab, a new AI startup that she's leading with Barrett Zoff as CTO and John Shulman as chief scientist. Their goal? Developing a framework for human interaction with AI. Instead of focusing solely on making fully autonomous AI systems, we are excited to build multimodal systems that work with people collaboratively, the company said in a blog post announcing itself to the world. While current system systems excel at programming and mathematics, we're building AI that can adapt to the full spectrum of human expertise and enable a broader spectrum of applications. The scientific community's understanding of frontier AI systems lags behind rapidly advancing capabilities. Knowledge of how these systems are trained is concentrated within the top research labs, limiting both the public discourse on AI and people's abilities to use AI effectively. Despite their potential, these systems remain difficult for people to customize to their specific needs and values. The post concluded, quoting Axios other startups founded by former OpenAI executives, from more mature AI firms like Anthropic to other just out of the gate startups like Ilyas Eskever's Safe Superintelligence have more single mindedly dedicated themselves to creating AI that's more powerful than humans. Thinking Machines Lab says it has about 30 employees, including a number of Mirati's former OpenAI colleagues. Murati is CEO, Barrett Zoff is CTO and John Schulman is chief scientist. Zoff left OpenAI in September. Shulman departed OpenAI in August for Anthropic and said earlier this month he was leaving Anthropic for a new opportunity. Murati isn't disclosing a timeline or specifics on Thinking Machine's first product, nor any details on funding, though the company is confident in its abilities to raise the money it needs. End quoting TechCrunch Marathi came to OpenAI in 2018 as VP of Applied AI and Partnerships. After being promoted to CTO in 2022, she led the company's work on ChatGPT, the text to Image AI Dall E, and the code generating system Codex, which powered early vers of GitHub's Copilot programming assistant. Marathi was briefly OpenAI's interim CEO after CEO Sam Altman's abrupt firing. Altman has described her as a close ally. For months, rumors have flown of Murati hiring high profile AI researchers and staffers for an AI venture. Thinking Machine Lab's blog lists 29 employees from OpenAI, Character AI and Google DeepMind, among other top firms. Thinking Machines Lab is actively hiring machine learning scientists and engineers, as well as a research program manager, per the company's post. At one point, Murati was said to be in talks to raise a over $100 million from unnamed VC firms. The blog didn't confirm or deny this. Before OpenAI, Murati spent three years at Tesla as a senior product manager of the Model X, the automaker's crossover suv, during which Tesla released early versions of Autopilot, its AI enabled driver assistance software. She also was VP of Product and engineering at Leap Motion, a startup building hand and finger tracking motion sensors for PCs. End quote. This is something that I've thought about before. Some US ByteDance investors argue that they don't need US TikTok for success as China, which accounts for 80% of ByteDance's revenue, is the real driving force. Quoting Bloomberg, some of these American shareholders argue that while a ban will take a near term toll on their stakes. ByteDance's China business is the real driving force behind the lofty valuation and eventual payday. That's because roughly 80% of Beijing based ByteDance's revenue comes from and products like Douyin, a TikTok lookalike specifically for the Chinese market. And while TikTok boasts 170 million users in the US the app has been downloaded some 5 billion times across other markets around the world, according to app intelligence firm Sensor Tower, meaning it can continue to operate in several important countries no matter what happens in the U.S. any resolution for TikTok in the U.S. even a ban, would also clear a major roadblock for ByteDance if it ever decides to pursue an IPO, a long rumored outcome for the tech giant that would be virtually impossible with a looming US Shutdown hanging over the company's head on private secondary markets, ByteDance is trading at a huge discount to what it's really worth. That's because we don't know what's going to happen with TikTok, said Greg Martin, managing director at Rainmaker securities, which facilitates trades in private tech companies including ByteDance. He acknowledged that losing TikTok us a piece of the business that's nowhere close to reaching its potential is nobody's preference. But the value of bytedance could go up immeasurably once this is sorted out, he said. Even if it means TikTok going away. End quote. Finally today, Crunchbase has launched AI tools to predict where startups are heading, including funding, acquisitions and IPOs, based on its 17 years of startup data. Quoting the Journal, Crunchbase's new direction was one of necessity. When OpenAI's ChatGPT launched in late 2022, the moment sparked a crisis. What is the role of a database company like Crunchbase when chatbots can trawl the web for similar data and provide similar answers? If you deal historical facts, once the AI absorbs it, it doesn't need you anymore, McConnell said. Historical data companies are already dead. Like other startups that have been challenged by the emergence of generative AI, Crunchbase needed to pivot at a leadership meeting convened to discuss its future. McConnell said the team decided it could make predictions using its most valuable asset, the proprietary data generated by the startup's 80 million users. That data isn't the public information on a company's profile. It's all of the data Crunchbase doesn't expose to its users, such as when company profiles have who edits them and what they're editing. If a startup's employee makes edits to a company's profile and is searching for investor profiles. Plus, there's a spike in investor interest in that startup's profile. Those are the kinds of signals Crunchbase's AI uses to indicate the startup is about to raise funding, McConnell said. Each startup has thousands of potential signals, like those pointing to whether they might be about to fundraise, be acquired or make a play for an initial public offering. McConnell said public AI platforms don't have access to that customer Usage data. He it the crown jewels of Crunchbase's assets. Based on Crunchbase's own testing, its fundraising predictions are up to 95% accurate. Last year, the company predicted that AI startup anthropic had a 74% probability of raising cash. Anthropic raised $2 billion in January. Last October, Crunchbase predicted that the startup Coda, maker of a productivity platform, would be acquired with a 93% probability. The company was bought by Grammarly, maker of an AI based writing assistant, two months later. What's much harder to predict is when startups shut down, McConnell said. The company's accuracy rate for startups that fold is below 50%, he said, because companies can survive for a long time even with slowed growth. End quote. Okay, bunch of links to share with you today. First up, if you check the bottom of the show notes, you'll see a link to the livestream recording of the 2000th episode spectacular that we have planned for this Thursday night, tomorrow night at 8:00pm Eastern, 5:00pm Pacific Time. I encourage you all to tune in and join us and to raise your hand and ask a question on camera. What I'd like to do is have it be mostly questions about recent tech news and the like, but you can also ask questions about the show, about me, about the process of the show. Key thing to note, you need to be on a laptop or desktop computer to be able to be brought on stage and ask your questions. Live mobile won't cut it. And yes again we're recording the video. So if you do want to ask a question, know that this will be out there for posterity. And then the very last link is to the AI Engineer Summit. It's taking place here in New York City starting tomorrow. It is put on by our friend swix. There are still a few tickets available and I will be there starting Friday. So if you're listening to this show right now and you're going to attend, hit me up@briantechmeme.com so that we can find each other at the summit and buddy up up. Talk to you soon.