Brian McCullough (0:04)

Welcome to the TechMe Ride Home for Wednesday, November 13, 2024. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, the Guessing game on who the new tech regulators will be for the new administration. What is Amazon Hall? Why has Blue sky suddenly seen a flurry of activity? More on Apple's smart home ambitions and more on why AI seems to be hitting a wall lately. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Sources tell the FT that Gail Slater, a top aide to J.D. vance, and Mark Meader, a former enforcer at the DOJ's antitrust unit and the FTC, are the frontrunners to lead the FTC. These are the new regulators, Perhaps quote Some on Wall street have expressed worries that Slater and Meter may be partial to the tough enforcement stance spearheaded by progressive officials appointed by US President Joe Biden, FTC chair Lina Khan and Jonathan Kantor, head of the DOJ's antitrust division, which has been embraced by a new generation of MAGA populists. With Vance at its vanguard, either Slater or Meter are unlikely to disappoint dealmakers hoping for a radical change from the Biden administration, which has cracked down on anti competitive conduct across the economy and taken on big tech giants such as Google, Apple and Amazon in a bid to reverse what it says have been years of lax enforcement. Vance, who has pledged to prioritize the working man over Wall street, could seek to preserve part of Khan's legacy despite criticism from dealmakers who have labeled her anti business, said people following the selection process. The vice president elect has praised Khan for, quote, doing a pretty good job and said Google should be broken up for the doj. Trump's transition team might opt for a more traditional antitrust approach that predated Khan and Cantor, these people said, in an effort to balance opposing wings of the Republican Party over deal making. The leading contenders to head the DOJ's antitrust division are Alex Oculiar, William Renner and Barry Negro, three antitrust lawyers who who previously worked with McCann Dalharim when he headed the unit. During Trump's first administration under Del Rahim, the DOJ brought high profile cases against Google, AT&T and T Mobile and was seen as operating within the more establishment antitrust view that companies growth can be tolerated so long as consumers are not harmed, a paradigm rejected by Khan and Cantor. Trump's transition team is consulting Delrahim to choose contenders for top antitrust jobs, according to a person close to the transition team. Slater and Vance are also playing crucial roles in the decision making. Slater, who previously worked at the FTC for a decade was well positioned to get whatever she wants, said someone familiar with the matter. An Oxford educated lawyer, she was an advisor to Julie Brill, a former FTC commissioner appointed by Barack Obama, the former Democratic president End Quote Amazon has launched Amazon Haul, a storefront on its app that promises crazy low prices on a range of items to compete with the likes of Temu and shein. Quoting CNBC, shoppers can buy $1 eyelash curlers and oven gloves or a $3 nail dryer. The company is offering free shipping on orders over $25, or a $3.99 shipping fee on orders below that threshold. Amazon is betting shoppers will wait longer for products in exchange for rock bottom prices. The company noted that most purchases made in Amazon Haul will be delivered in under two weeks, although shipping times may vary and are dependent on a customer's delivery location. That's a shift for Amazon, which has partly cemented its dominance in e commerce by offering faster delivery speeds than its compet competitors. The company upended the online shopping world when it first offered free two day delivery, and it's been speeding up delivery times since then. Amazon now offers same or next day delivery and in some parts of the US it promises delivery within a few hours of an order being placed with Amazon Haul. The company is responding to the rise of Temu Shein and TikTok Shop, which all have ties to China, the world's second largest economy. The platforms have rapidly gained popularity in the US over the past few years by hooking deal hungry shoppers with their low prices on clothing, makeup, home goods and other items. Amazon is able to offer low prices through its its Hull storefront by importing each item directly from manufacturers in China, similar to how Temu and Shein's business models operate to manage costs, the company says it won't accept returns on Items that are $3 or less, end quote. So I once told you that I would help monitor whether or not there was a Twitter diaspora, at least for the purposes of this show, that is. Has tech chatter moved to other places? Well, I gotta tell you, there's been a ton of activity on Blue Sk late and indeed the New York Times says that Blue sky has gained more than 1 million users in the last week since the U.S. election, mostly in the U.S. the UK and Canada now has 14.7 million users in total. Now what I'm going to quote you from is looking at this through a political lens, but let me get back to the tech community angle after I'm done reading this quote, we're seeing increased activity levels across all different forms of engagement, a spokesperson said in an email. Blue sky, which began in 2019 as a project by the former Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, is among several challengers that have each experienced bursts of momentum since Mr. Musk's acquisition of Twitter in 2022 and subsequent rebranding of it. The accounts created on Blue sky this week, many of which are left leaning, shared cat videos alongside their hopes that the platform might offer a reprieve from the misinformation and hateful speech that have swirled on X since Mr. Musk's takeover. New or freshly active users on the platform include celebrities, the rapper Flavor Flav, the author John Green, Democratic political figures, Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez of New York, Chastain Buttigieg, husband of Pete Buttigieg, the transportation secretary and media personalities Mehdi Hassan and Molly Zhang. Fast hello less hateful world, mark Cuban, the billionaire, and Kamala Harris surrogate, posted on Tuesday. Blue sky gained its first wave of high profile users last spring and switched from being invitation only to open to the public in February. It now has 14.7 million users, the company said. That is still far fewer than Threads, Meta's competitor to X, which this month reported that it had reached 275 million monthly active users. A Meta spokesperson declined to share whether that number had changed post election. There has been a, quote, feeling of momentum on Blue sky since the election, said Shannon C. McGregor, an associate professor at the Hussman School of Journalism and Media at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Many of the people leaving X are disappointed by the outcome of the election, she said, and now associate the platform with Mr. Musk's support of Mr. Trump. Others are frustrated by the type of content that seems to be rising to the top of their feeds. Blue sky users are doing their best to welcome the flurry of new arrivals. Many are posting welcome messages, introductions or starter packs, lists of accounts that might appeal to someone based on their locations or interests. Yes, about that last bit. From what I've been seeing, the tech community is not so much fleeing X for political reasons as much as they are fleeing Threads for product reasons. Folks have been complaining for months that the way the Threads algorithm works, folks can't get as much reach or discussion going as they used to on Twitter. Folks are saying that Threads is focusing on creating an anod community that doesn't lend itself to vigorous debate, and people are feeling like bluesky is offering something closer to what Twitter used to be. I am RyanMc over there, not MCC. For some reason I got BrianMc when I signed up. Oh well, follow me over there. I might start posting there more soon. But also check the bottom link in the show Notes One of the techmeme editors put together a starter pack of folks to follow the folks that we follow to monitor the tech chatter. If you use that starter pack, you should be following most of the tech folks that I'm following. This episode is brought to you by Incogni. 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The product, codenamed J490, will also spotlight the new Apple Intelligence AI platform, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the work is confidential. Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook is betting that the product can make Apple a force in the smart home segment, where the company has trailed behind Alphabet and Amazon in recent years. He has made the device a priority for the company's engineering and design departments and is pushing to get it to market after more than three years of development. The device has a roughly 6 inch screen and looks like a square iPad. It's about the size of two iPhones, side by side with a thick edge around the display. There's also a camera at the top front, a rechargeable built in battery and internal speakers. Apple plans to offer it in silver and black options. The product has a touch interface that looks like a blend of the Apple Watch operating system and the iPhone's recently launched standby mode. But the company expects most people to use their voice to interact with the device, relying on the Siri Digital Assistant and Apple Intelligence. The hardware was designed around App Intents, a system that lets AI precisely control applications and tasks, which is set to debut in the coming months. The product will be marketed as a way to control home appliances, chat with Siri and hold intercom Sessions via Apple's FaceTime software. It will also be loaded with Apple apps, including ones for web browsing, listening to news updates and playing music. Users will be able to access their notes and calendar information, and the device can turn into a slideshow display for their photos, a first for Apple. The device will compete with Amazon's Echo show and Echo Hub smart displays, as well as Google's Nest Hub. It's also reminiscent of Meta's Portal, a failed video conferencing device from the Social media giant Apple is already planning a more expansive follow up version with a robotic limb that can move the screen around. Apple plans to market that technology as a home companion with an AI personality. The higher end product could be priced at as much as $1,000 depending on the components it uses, the people said. The display only device will be far less than that, approaching the cost of competitors products. The Echo Show 8 priced at $150 while the Echo Hub is $180. The Nest Hub Max costs $230. Apple has designed different attachments for the device, including ones that affix the screens onto walls like a classic home security panel. There will be bases with additional speakers that can be placed in the kitchen, on a nightstand or on a desk. Apple imagines the FaceTime feature being used while cooking or for video conferencing during work meetings. A person familiar with its development said the product is designed to bring Siri and Apple intelligence to life in a way that hasn't happened before. End quote. And finally, more on AI hitting the proverbial wall if you will. Quoting Bloomberg Again, OpenAI was on the cusp of a milestone. The startup finished an initial round of training in September for a massive new artificial intelligence model that it hoped would significantly surpass prior versions of the technology behind ChatGPT and move closer to its goal of powerful AI that outperforms humans. But the model, known internally as Orion, did not hit the company's desired performance, according to two people familiar with the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss company matters. As of late summer, for example, Orion fell short when trying to answer coding questions that it hadn't been trained on, the people said. Overall, Orion is so far not considered to be as big a step up from OpenAI's existing models as GPT4 was from GPT 3.5, the system that originally powered the company's flagship chatbot. The people OpenAI isn't alone in hitting stumbling blocks recently. After years of pushing out increasingly sophisticated AI products at a breakneck pace, three of the leading AI companies are now seeing diminishing returns from their costly efforts to build newer models. At Alphabet's Google, an upcoming iteration of its Gemini software is not living up to internal expectations, according to three people with knowledge of the matter. Anthropic, meanwhile, has seen the timetable slip for the release of its long awaited Claude model called 3.5 Opus. The companies are facing several challenges. It's become increasing increasingly difficult to find new, untapped sources of high quality human made training data that can be used to build more advanced AI systems. Orion's unsatisfactory coding performance was due in part to the lack of sufficient coding data to train on, two people said. At the same time, even modest improvements may not be enough to justify the tremendous costs associated with building and operating new models or to live up to the expectations that come with branding a product as a major upgrade. There is plenty of potential to make these models better. OpenAI has been putting Orion through a months long process offering referred to as post training, according to one of the people. That procedure, which is routine before a company releases new AI software publicly, includes incorporating human feedback to improve responses and refining the tone for how the model should interact with users, among other things. But Orion is still not at the level OpenAI would want in order to release it to users, and the company is unlikely to roll out the system until early next year, one person said. These issues challenge the gospel that has taken hold in Silicon Valley in recent years, particularly since OpenAI released ChatGPT two years ago. Much of the tech has bet on so called scaling laws that say more computing power, data and larger models will inevitably pave the way for greater leaps forward in the power of AI. The recent setbacks also raise doubts about the heavy investment in AI and the feasibility of reaching an overarching goal these companies are aggressively pursuing. Artificial general intelligence. The term typically refers to hypothetical AI systems that would match or exceed humans on many intellectual tasks. The Chief executives of OpenAI and Anthropic have recently said AGI may only be several years away. The AGI bubble is bursting a little bit, said Margaret Mitchell, chief ethics scientist at AI startup Hugging Face. It's become clear, she said, that different training approaches may be needed to make AI models work really well on a variety of tasks, an idea a number of experts in artificial intelligence echoed to Bloomberg News. Still, AI companies continue to pursue a more is better playbook in their quest to build products that approach the level of human intelligence. Tech firms are increasing the amount of computing powered data and time they use to train new models and driving up costs in the process. Amodai of Anthropic has said companies will spend $100 million to train a bleeding edge model this year, and that amount will hit $100 billion in the coming years. This conundrum has come into focus in recent months inside Silicon Valley. In March, Anthropic released a set of three new models and said the most powerful option, called Claude Opus, outperformed OpenAI's GPT4 and Google's Gemini systems on key benchmarks such as graduate level reasoning and coding. Over the next few months, Anthropic pushed out updates to the other two cloud cloud models, but not Opus. That was the one everyone was excited about, said Simon Willison, an independent AI researcher. By October, Willison and other industry watchers noticed that wording related to 3.5 opus, including an indication that it would arrive later this year and was coming soon, was removed from some pages on the company's website. Similar to its competitors, Anthropic has been facing challenges behind the scenes to develop 3.5 opus, according to two people familiar with the matter. After training it, anthropic found 3.5 opus performed better on evaluations than the older version, but not by as much as it should, given the size of the model and how costly it was to build and run, one of the people said. End quote. As mentioned, the Rad History podcast this week is out. It's about the history of the Rubik's Cube, which this month turned 50 years old. Give that a listen. Enjoy. Talk to you to.