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Brian McCullough
Welcome to the Tech Meme. Write home for Wednesday, April 30, 2025. I'm Brian McCullough. Today Meta has launched a standalone competitor to ChatGPT. But is ChatGPT bending too far backwards in an attempt to please you? Even OpenAI thinks so. Waymo and Toyota cut a deal and concerns about sovereign tech stacks rear their head again. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Foreign has launched a direct ChatGPT competitor, and of course it has social stuff built in. The Meta AI app is a standalone app featuring a Discover feed where users can see AI interactions that friends have chosen to share. Quoting the Verge, Meta's standalone ChatGPT competitor is mostly what you'd expect from an AI assistant. You can type or talk with it, generate images and get real time web results. The biggest new idea in the Meta AI app is its Discover feed, which adds an AI twist to social media. Here you'll see a feed of interactions with Meta AI that other people, including your friends on Instagram and Facebook, have opted to share on a prompt by prompt basis. You can like, comment on, share or remix these shared AI posts into your own. The idea is to demystify AI and show people what they can do with it, meta's VP of product, Connor Hayes, tells me. It may seem obvious that Meta is the first to add a social component to its AI assistant. It definitely won't be the last, though. Across the industry, AI, chatbots and social media are converging. Elon Musk's X has already integrated closely with Grok. OpenAI, meanwhile, is planning to add a social feed to ChatGPT. The Meta AI app puts voice mode at the forefront. An opt in beta version makes Meta's AI voice more conversational, like ChatGPT's advanced voice mode, though Meta's version currently lacks access to information from the web. So far, most people have experienced Meta AI through its takeover of parts of Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp. Meta expects the majority of its usage to continue coming from places like the search bar on Instagram. Hayes says that the chatbot has reached almost 1 billion users this way, though he acknowledges that a standalone app is the most intuitive way to interact with an AI assistant. End quote and quoting cnbc, the event comes as Meta hosts its inaugural llamacon developer event at its Menlo Park, California headquarters for its Llama family of AI models. Investors are on the lookout for signs that Meta's AI investments are having an immediate business impact. In January, the company announced plans to spend as much as $65 billion this year to expand its AI infrastructure. End quote. Yes, llamacon met his first ever AI developer event. Zuck hosted Satya Nadella on stage, where he said that 20 to 30% of code in Microsoft's repositories was AI written. Quoting TechCrunch, Nadella gave the figure after Zuckerberg asked roughly how much of Microsoft code is AI generated today. The Microsoft CEO said the company was seeing mixed results in AI generated code across different languages, with more progress in PY and less in C. Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott previously said he expects 95% of all code to be AI generated by 2030. When Nadella threw the question back at Zuckerberg, the Meta CEO said he didn't know how much of Meta's code is being generated by AI. Other Headlines Meta debuted the Llama API for fine tuning and evaluating the performance of its Llama models, available in limited preview with pricing yet to be announced and this quoting wired the end to end encrypted communications app WhatsApp, used by roughly 3 billion people around the world, will roll out cloud based AI capabilities in the coming weeks that are designed to preserve WhatsApp's defining security and privacy guarantees while offering users access to message summarization and composition tools. Meta has been incorporating generative AI features across its services that are built on its open source large language model. Llama and WhatsApp already incorporates a light blue circle that gives users access to the Meta AI assistant, but many users have balk at this addition given that interactions with the AI assistant aren't shielded from Meta the way end to end encrypted WhatsApp chats are. The new feature, dubbed Private Processing, is meant to address these concerns with what the company says is a carefully architected and purpose built platform devoted to processing data for AI tasks without the information being accessible to Meta, WhatsApp or any other party. While initial reviews by researchers of the scheme's integrity have been positive, some note that the move towards AI features could ultimately put WhatsApp on a slippery slope. End to end encrypted communication are only accessible to the sender and receiver or the people in a group chat. The service provider, in this case WhatsApp and its parent company Meta, is boxed out by design and can't access users messages or calls. This setup is incompatible with typical generative AI platforms that run large language models on cloud servers and need access to users, requests and data for processing. The goal of private processing is to create an alternate framework through which the privacy and security guarantees of end to end. Encrypted communication can be upheld while incorporating AI. Users have to opt in to using WhatsApp AI features, and they can also prevent people they're chatting with from using the AI features in shared communications. By turning on a new WhatsApp control known as Advanced Chat Privacy, when the setting is on, you can block others from exporting chats, auto downloading media to their phone, and using messages for AI features, WhatsApp wrote in a blog post last week. Like disappearing messages, anyone in a chat can turn Advanced Chat Privacy on and off, which is recorded for all to see, so participants just need to be mindful of any adjustments. Private Processing is built with special hardware that isolates sensitive data in a trusted execution environment, a siloed, locked down region of a processor. The system is built to process and retain data for the minimum amount of time possible, and is designed to grind to a halt and send alerts if it detects any tampering or adjustments. Have you heard the stories going around about the latest OpenAI models being too, well, obsequious? Like basically they kind of flatter you. Kiss your butt a bit well. OpenAI says GPT4.O's latest update is now 100% rolled back for free ChatGPT users and is rolling back for paid users in a bid to fix the model's sycophancy. Quoting TechCrunch we started rolling back the latest update to GPT 4.0 last night, Sam Altman wrote in a post on x. It's now 100% rollback for free ChatGPT users and will update again when it's finished for paid users, hopefully later today. We're working on additional fixes to model personality and we'll share more in the coming days. Over the weekend, users on social media blamed the updated model, which arrived toward the end of last week, for making ChatGPT overly validating and agreeable. It quickly became a meme. Users posted screenshots of ChatGPT applauding all sorts of problematic, dangerous decisions and ideas. On Sunday, Altman acknowledged the problem and said that OpenAI would work on Fix's ASAP and would share its learnings at some point. End quote. I keep flagging these stories because I feel like we might wake up someday soon and find ourselves already in a post self driving world. Waymo and Toyota have announced a preliminary partnership aiming to develop an autonomous vehicle platform and enhance next generation personally owned vehicles. Quoting cnbc the companies will explore how to leverage Waymo's autonomous technology and Toyota's vehicle expertise to enhance next generation personally owned vehicles, the two companies announced. The company said they aim to use the partnership to more quickly develop driver assistance and autonomous vehicle technologies for personal vehicles. Toyota is the world's largest automaker by sales. Waymo Co CEO Takedra Mawakana said the strategic partnership could also result in the Google owned company incorporating Toyota's vehicles into our ride hailing fleet. The Toyota tie up is the latest automotive partnership for Waymo. The self driving company has previously worked with automakers such as Jaguar, Land Rover, Stellantis predecessor, Fiat Chrysler, Daimler Trucks, Mercedes Benz parent Daimler Hyundai Motor and China's Geely. The partnerships, many of which touted long term tie ups, largely resulted in automakers producing modified vehicles for testing or for Waymo to use in its fleets. The partnership with Toyota will not affect Waymo's plans to deploy Hyundai and Geely vehicles through the Waymo One Ride hailing service in the future, a spokesman for the Alphabet owned company told CNBC. Waymo is now serving 250,000 paid rides per week, up from 200,000 in February before Waymo opened in Austin and expanded in the San Francisco Bay area in March. Waymo is already running its commercial driverless ride hailing services in the San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix and Austin regions. End quote ever wonder what ChatGPT and Claude are actually doing with your conversations? Have you ever even stopped to think about that? We all know Alexa listens to us and recommends products based on our conversations. Meta retargets us based on our browsing and engagement history. But now, in this new AI era, there's a new privacy problem to consider. Think about what we tell these AI platforms. Our thoughts, our dreams, sensitive questions, business ideas, et cetera. They take all this information, tie it to your identity, and then sell it to various third parties and governments. ChatGPT literally has the former director of the NSA sitting on their board right now. That's why I've started using Venice AI, who is sponsoring today's podcast. Venice AI is a generative AI platform that is private and permissionless. They utilize leading open source AI models to deliver text, code and image generation to your web browser. There's no downloads, no installations of anything. Venice AI doesn't spy on you or censor the AI messages are encrypted and your conversation history is stored only in your browser. This is a cause I can get behind. If you want to get behind it too, and you want to use AI without fear of handing over your most intimate thoughts to a corporation or the government, you can get 20% off a pro plan using my link by going to Venice AI Techmeme and using code Techmeme that is Venice AI Techmeme and code Techmeme. 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Robinhood Financial LLC Member SIPC Gold membership is offered by Robinhood Gold LLC have you noticed the quality of Google Play apps getting better? According to app figures, Google Play now hosts around 1.8 million Android apps, down 47% from the 3.4 million at the start of 2024. This is likely due to raising minimum quality requirements back in July of last year, quoting TechCrunch. From the start of 2024 to the present, the Android app Marketplace went from hosting about 3.4 million apps worldwide to just around 1.8 million, according to a new analysis by app intelligence provider App Figures. That's a decline of about 47%, representing a significant purge of the apps that have been available to Android users globally. The decline is not part of some larger global trend, the firm also notes. During the same period, Apple's iOS app store went from hosting 1.6 million apps to now just around 1.6 apps, for instance, a slight increase In Google's case, the decline in apps could be a relief for Android device owners who have had to sort through Scammy, Spammy and otherwise poor quality apps to find the best ones to install. The reduction could also help developers who have had to fight for visibility over the years. Google Play's less stringent requirements for app review have led to the marketplace being overrun with lower quality apps. While Apple continues to enforce strict app review measures before publication, Google often relies on automated checks combined with malware scans to speed up up the app review process. It tends to have a shorter app review period as a result of its lighter touch in terms of human review. In July 2024, though, Google announced it would raise the minimum quality requirements for apps, which may have impacted the number of available Play Store app listings. Instead of only banning broken apps that crashed, wouldn't install or run properly, the company said it would begin banning apps that demonstrated limited functionality and content that included static apps without app specific features such as text only apps or PDF file apps. It also included apps that provided little, like those that only offered a single wallpaper. Additionally, Google banned apps that were designed to do nothing or have no function, which may have been tests or other abandoned developer efforts. Reached for comment, Google confirmed that its new policies were factors here, which also included an expanded set of verification requirements, required app testing for new personal developer accounts, and expanded human reviews to check for apps that try to deceive or defraud users. In addition, the company pointed to other 2024 investments in AI for threat detection, stronger privacy, improved developer tools and more. As a result, Google prevented 2.36 million policy violating apps from being published on its Play Store and banned more than 158,000 developer accounts that had attempted to publish harmful apps, it said. One factor Google didn't cite was the new trader status rule enforced by the EU as of this February, which began requiring developers to share their names and addresses in the apps listing. Those who failed to do so would see their apps removed from EU app stores. It's worth pointing out that Apple also began requiring trader status information in February and did not see a decline in available apps as a result, end quote. I do want to note that Amazon walked back that rumor of showing tariffs in shopping results. Unclear what happened here, but CNN had sources that said President Trump called Jeff Bezos on Tuesday morning to complain about reports that Amazon was adding tariff prices to list. For its part, Amazon says Amazon hall quote considered the idea of listing import charges on certain products, but quote, this was never a consideration for the main Amazon site. So was it, as we discussed, not wanting to catch the ire of the administration, which seemed to happen immediately, I don't know on the rest of the world, possibly decoupling from Silicon Valley front on the whole sovereign tech stack front, Politico says that the EU's draft international digital strategy, set for a release on June 4, acknowledges that decoupling from US tech is unrealistic and instead calls for strategic alliances. Tech competitiveness is an economic and security imperative for all aspiring to durable wealth and stability, says a draft version dated April 9. Yet when it comes to dominant players such as the US Decoupling is unrealistic and cooperation will remain significant across the technological value chain, the draft says. It cites China as well as Japan, South Korea and India as countries with which collaboration will also be essential. The pitch for strategic tech alliances with like minded countries to team up on research and generate greater business opportunities for the bloc's companies comes in stark contrast to growing calls for a move toward protectionism. For Europe, business as usual is no option, wrote Marjat Shockey, a former Dutch liberal member of the European Parliament who is a leading voice on tech called on the block to end its debilitating dependence on American tech groups and take concrete steps to shield itself from the growing dangers of this new tech fueled geopolitical landscape. In Brussels, the idea of a Eurostack, an ambitious industrial plan to break free from US Tech dominance, is gaining steam, with key lawmakers throwing their weight behind the proposal. The draft strategy backs international engagement on critical technologies such as quantum and chips, as the growing complexity of semiconductor supply chains and geopolitical uncertainty necessitate a tailored country specific approach. The EU has been scrambling to fix, among other things, a risky reliance on China for low tech chips. But remember, one of the key things I worry about here with a sovereign tech movement is that a big tech American platform, say, could no longer assume a singular global market. It would have to consider multiple sort of walled off markets and in the worst case scenario that might even mean losing access to markets. I'm thinking of someone like say Microsoft losing access to say the European market market. Well, Microsoft President Brad Smith says his company would take the US Government to court if necessary to protect European customers access to its services. Quoting the ft Brad Smith, Microsoft's president, said European leaders were shocked when the Trump administration temporarily suspended military and intelligence support to Ukraine. The cloud computing and software giant on Wednesday responded with new commitments to European governments about quote, continuity of access, quote we as a company need to be a source of digital stability during a period of geopolitical volatility, said Smith, who is also Microsoft's vice chair and top lawyer. Microsoft's new pledge includes five digital commitments to Europe. The big tech group said it would contest any government order to cease cloud services to European customers, including through the courts. It also promised to have its cloud computing service in the continent overseen by a European board of directors and operating under European law. The company is planning to boost its European cloud and artificial intelligence operations by increasing its data center capacity in Europe by 40% over the next two years, expanding operations in 16 countries. It expected to spend tens of billions of dollars a year on European data centers, Smith said amid recent speculation that the company was pulling back on some of these investments. The Seattle based company is the first large American tech business to proactively try to reassure European customers amid escalating trade tensions and calls for more European tech sovereignty, including demands to exclude American companies from public contracts. President Trump has fueled anxiety among European governments and companies over privacy and data access and even prompted concerns that the US could suspend or block the operations of American tech companies in Europe. Smith said a suspension was unlikely. Quote, there is a strong consensus in Washington that wants to see American digital technology flow to Europe, end quote. But he acknowledged the topic had been on the mind of European leaders, especially after Trump's temporary suspension of military and intelligence support to Kiev. They asked themselves about how they're getting their defense and security protection more broadly, smith said. I think it's therefore important for us to make clear that Europe can count on us, end quote. Nothing more for you today. Talk to you tomorrow.
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