Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey therein Welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the tech are you. It's time for the tech news for Tuesday, November twenty first, twenty twenty three. And first up, of course, we have some updates to the open ai situation. Now. If you want to hear what led to open AI's board of directors to fire CEO Sam Altman last Friday, check out yesterday's Tech Stuff episode. I did a full episode kind of about what led to that event and what is happening in the aftermath. But I do have a couple of new bits to add to that. First up, According to The Verge, Sam Altman is still seeking reinstatement as open ai CEO. Yesterday I talked about how Altman claimed he would never wear a guest badge to open AI's headquarters again. He did it once in order to return to negotiate for his potential return to the company. Once the board of directors said whoop, see those negotiations went nowhere. So then he reportedly joined Microsoft and he will be named CEO of an advanced AI division within Microsoft, or maybe a spinoff company, But apparently that's just one likely scenario, and the ink has not yet been put to paper on that deal, so it's not a certainty that he will be part of Microsoft. There is another possibility that should the board members who voted Altman out step down, Alman would return to the company as CEO, but that was the main sticking point in the negotiations over the weekend. However, since then, one board member, Elia Sutzkiver, has come forward to express his regret for taking part in the whole thing and said it was a mistake and that he now sides with Altman, which means there are just two members left on the open AI board of Directors who would have to change their opinion, and there's tremendous pressure on them to do it and to step down. Not only do you have the pr nightmare of going through perhaps what has been the worst CEO firing in recent history, but you've also got an angry corporate partner in the form of Microsoft, and you've got the threat of perhaps hundreds of employees leaving the company in solidarity with the ousted CEO. So refusing to step down could mean open ai would be set back years because of this. But then the reported reason that this board fired Altman in the first place was that they were concerned he was pushing hard to develop and deploy AI tools without really giving proper regard to safety, and that's the whole reason open aa Eye exists in the first place. So this could be a case where those board members decide they have to go down with the ship that what does it mean to have an organization ostensibly dedicated to developing AI in an ethical and safe way if you don't do that? Or perhaps the threat to open ai has actually been overstated, Maybe it's not really in such a precarious position. Maybe the organization will be fine after passing through, you know, a period of turmoil that's unavoidable. Meanwhile, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has said in an interview on CNBC and also with Bloomberg that its clear open ai quote has to change around the governance end quote, perhaps hinting someone from Microsoft should also sit on the board of directors for open Ai. After all, Microsoft has committed to investing ten billion dollars into open ai and already has sent a few billion of those to the company. The chaos at open Ai has had some odd rippling effects as well. For example, when word got out that Microsoft was apparently hiring both Sam Altman and former open Ai president Greg Brockman, the company sought stock price increase. In fact, Microsoft's stock value rose to three hundred and seventy seven dollars forty four cents per share yesterday. That is the highest closing stock price in Microsoft history. It's pretty wild to me that a couple of executives coming over from another company could be enough to boost stock prices like that. Also, in a similar move, when word Firse got out that open ai had fired Altman last Friday, Microsoft sought stock price dip by one point seven percent. I think this really shows how people feel AI is a critically important technology. I'm still not convinced that very many of them actually understand artificial intelligence, but then I'm not getting rich off the stock market, so what do I know. Then you have the various companies that are champion at the bit to get their hands on the talent at open Ai. Hundreds of open ai staff, some of the most knowledgeable people in the discipline of artificial intelligence, have indicated a willingness to leave the company if Altman doesn't return as CEO. And one company that has expressed interest in hiring that talent that may feel like a change of scenery is merited is Salesforce. CEO Marc Benioff posted on x the platform formerly known as Twitter and a company that we'll be talking a lot about later in this episode, said that quote, Salesforce will match any open Ai researcher who has tendered their resignation full cash and equity, ote to immediately join our salesforce Einstein Trusted Ai research team under Silvio Sevres. So that's end quote, by the way. So that's another big threat that's facing open Ai. There are other companies that recognize the value of the knowledge held by their staff, right, That's one of the big things that open ai has. Before they came out with chat GPT, you could argue that the most valued asset of open ai was its talent. There were people who were taking jobs at open Ai. They could have made more money somewhere else, but they took it at open ai because it meant working with the best people and on a very challenging goal. So obviously there are a lot of companies that would really love to be able to bring those folks on board to their own teams, and they're already coming forward with offers should those people decide to leave open AI. So again, immense pressure on the board of directors over at Open AI. According to an article by Rob Thubrunn of tech Spot or Thubron, I'm not certain how to say your last name, Rob, don't know you, but I like your work anyway. According to this article, more than half of tech workers view AI as being overrated and overhyped now. This in turn, comes from a survey that a company called Retool conducted. So Retool puts out this survey and asks various tech workers to evaluate how AI is treated how it's viewed in the tech sphere. Now, the simple size is not particularly large. Retool surveyed around fifteen hundred tech professionals across the industry. Everyone from programmers to designers to executives, like pretty much every kind of role that's in tech was represented in this survey. According to the survey, only twenty three percent of the respondents felt as though AI is more or less fairly assessed in the industry as a whole. That the attitude and hype, or maybe hype is the wrong word because that has a negative connotation, but the treatment of AI is appropriate, that it's the right level. However, fifty one point six percent of them feel that AI is overrated and perhaps overhyped. This also means, by the way, that about twenty five percent of the respondents actually feel that AI is underrated. So keep that in mind, and it seems like the type of job you have in tech has a big influence on how you view artificial intelligence. Executives seem more inclined to say AI was either rated fairly or was actually underrated. And as Rob points out, well, yeah, of course executives think that because they're looking at artificial intelligence largely as a cost benefit analysis, and they're salivating over the thought of replacing all those expensive human drones with more economical AI powered algorithms, So of course they think that it's as important, if not more important, than the way the industry treats it. Meanwhile, the folks who actually have to interact with AI on a daily basis in order to do their work. Now, the people who are using AI to do stuff like write code, for example, they were far more likely to call AI overrated. Presumably that's because so much of their time has to be spent checking for errors and correcting them and that sort of thing. So with the sample size of fifteen hundred people, I'm not sure we can actually draw any sweeping conclusions from this survey. And again, it's a survey that's talking about people's opinions toward AI. It's not like it's a metric that actually measures AI itself, but rather our perception of artificial intelligence. I would say that the survey indicates it's probably a good idea to pay attention to the people who are working directly with the artificial intelligence powered tools, because if your staff is indicating that the AI is actually making their jobs more frustrating or inefficient, that is worth paying attention to. Otherwise, the leaders might find that they have committed to a solution that is actually a problem. And I don't think we're careening toward a world of automation and that we'll never be able to turn back and once we turn that corner, it's all downhill from there. I don't think that's the case. I do think that a lot of companies need to be careful in how they implement AI if they don't want to rush into an expensive and complicated mess I think that there are ways to incorporate AI that can have a direct benefit to both the overall company and to the employees who are making use of the AI. I think there are legitimate, good uses for this technology, but I also think it's very easy to implement it willy nilly, and to do so in a way that ends up being counterproductive. And that's what companies really need to be careful about. All Right, we're going to take a quick break. When we come back, I got a whole lot of news about everybody's favorite social network platform, X, But first let's thank our sponsors. Okay, we're back. And I mentioned before the break that we would be talking about X today, So here goes. First up, the company has filed a lawsuit against a media watchdog group called Media Matters. The group had previously published a report indicating that ads could appear next to objectionable material such as extremist and racist messaging, including antisemitic messaging. That obviously is something that does not go over well with advertisers as they are trying to promote and protect their brands, and last week, several major advertisers left X after Elon Musk indicated support for a conspiracy theory promoted by anti Semitic groups and white supremacists. So clearly it must have been Media Matters that was the real problem, not the fact that the owner of the company was elevating this messaging. You know. Anyway, some big names in in companies had halted all advertising on X. They include media companies like Paramount, Disney, NBC, Universal, Warner Brothers, Discovery. They include telecommunications companies like Comcast and tech companies like Apple, among many many other companies. And the thought is that their departure is probably going to prompt other companies to follow suit. Now, x's complaint against Media Matters is that Media Matters supposedly manufactured the images it showed in its report by creating a test account on X and then just refreshing the view over and over, like following some specific accounts that were posting problematic stuff and then just hitting refresh until they started to get ads to appear next to some of these entries. And so what X is saying is that this is not representative of the typical experience on X. Most people on X would never see this thing at all. Media Matters had to game the system in order to get these sorts of results. That's what X is arguing personally. I mean, that might be a legitimate argument that Media Matters perhaps kind of orchestrated this so it would appear this way. However, you still have the issue of the owner of the company promoting these messages, which whether whether Media Matters orchestrated anything is still an issue. Media Matters, by the way, says that they disagree with X's accusations and that they are willing to go to court and to prove that their methodology was legitimate. So so far there's no one backing down from this fight. Musk continues to behave in a way that is really alarming to advertisers, and that means that X is going to have a problem no matter what any watch dog group says. You don't even need watchdog groups to bring these matters to attend if you've got the owner of the company doing these sorts of things, because that is so newsworthy that you know that's going to be brought to attention and be put in the spotlight, whether whether there's a watchdog group dedicated to it or not. On a semi related note, I deactivated my own account on X. I had not been checking it regularly for weeks, so I decided it was just time to walk away. Part of it is that I don't want to be on a platform where a fundamentally important person on there is promoting things that can cause direct harm to others. So my apologies to anyone who's trying to use X to get in touch with me. It no longer will work. But let's talk about X some more, because of course we're not done yet. Tech Crunch reports that the mass exodus of advertisers, which really happened last week, is likely to have a pretty darn hefty impact to x's bottom line. You got to remember, ninety percent of X's revenue came from advertising, and when a bunch of advertisers leave, it means the company is going to have a lot of trouble bringing in revenue. They had already seen some drastic drops in revenue in the wake of Elon Musk purchasing the company last year, so this was already an issue before last week. In fact, analysts from Insider Intelligence estimated that X was going to see a fifty four point four percent decline in ad business year over year, but now that's likely to be an even more dramatic decline. Linda Yakarino, the CEO of X, has said that data will show X is actually dedicated toward fighting misinformation and racism, including anti Semitism, and that they will prove that in fact, the company has been working hard on this, despite the fact that Elon Musk famously dismissed almost the entirety of the content moderation departments within Twitter when he purchased the company. Reportedly, several advertisers have actually urged Yakarinos to step down as CEO, going so far as to suggest that she is potentially causing irreparable damage to her own reputation by serving as CEO of X, Like they're essentially saying, you're better than this. You need to get away from this company. It is toxic and it is bringing you down with it. Yakarino so far has rejected these calls. I think she's going to continue to find it challenging to champion X's policies while the owner continues to promote content that appears to contradict her. So that's a mess anyway. That's the update on x let's now switch over to YouTube for a moment. Amir Siddicky of Android Authority posted an article titled YouTube is reportedly slowing down videos for Firefox users. So essentially the story says that folks who are using non Chrome browsers, primarily Firefox and Microsoft Edge, have reported that when they try to launch a video on YouTube, they're encountering a delay in playback, and it's a delay that lasts several seconds, like five seconds. But if they close out that browser and open up Chrome and go to YouTube, they can try and load that same video and there's no delay. Now that is troubling. It could indicate that Google is purposefully throttling performance on non Chrome browsers in an effort to coax folks to use Chrome instead. Now, this is preferential treatment that could be seen as anti competitive. In fact, I think, especially in the current climate in the United States, it would automatically be listed as being anti competitive behavior. And considering that Google is currently in the hot seat for that sort of thing, that's not good. It definitely is not in line with the concept of net neutrality. But YouTube has responded to this report and has claimed that it really doesn't have anything to do with which browser someone's using. That is immaterial according to Google. Instead, what's happening, YouTube says is that it is putting in delays for people who are using browsers that have ad blocker extensions activated on them. So it's a way to fight ad blocking. The statement says, quote users who have ad blockers installed may experience suboptimal viewing, regardless of the browser they are using. End quote. I don't doubt that Google is using this approach to discourage ad blockers, as the company has taken a pretty hardline stance against ad blockers this year in particular. But I'm curious to see if that's as far as this goes, because the stories that were being shared seem to suggest that Chrome users were getting a better experience. Now, maybe it was that they had ad blockers installed on their non Chrome browsers, but for whatever reason, they had not installed ad blockers on Chrome. Maybe it's that Google has been rolling out this feature to affect non Chrome browsers first, like they are designing YouTube so that it can detect the presence of ad blockers on each browser, and Chrome just hasn't been rolled out yet And that eventually, no matter what browser you're using, you're going to have this issue. That might be true, but it still kind of smacks of being anti competitive to me to because again, Chrome gets preferential treatment. If your perception is that, oh well, as long as I'm on Chrome it's better, I might as well just use Chrome, that's an issue. If it's not just legit a natural advance of Chrome. If the system is being gamed on the back end, that's bad. So we'll have to wait and see if more developments happen in this story, because again, Google is currently in the hot seat with the US government when it comes to anti competitive behaviors, and there's a real threat that the government will demand Google break apart into different pieces as a result of this. Whether it actually gets to that point, I don't know. I personally kind of doubt it, simply because the last time we saw something this big happen, the US government ultimately reversed its decision to break apart a big tech company. In that case, it was Microsoft. So not that it's impossible, but it hasn't happened in a very long time, so I would be surprised if it went that far. But we'll have to see. All right, We're going to take another quick break. When we come back, I've got a couple more stories I want to talk about. Okay, now, let's have a quick story about Nothing. This is not a Seinfeld reference. It's nothing like that. We're talking about the Nothing Company, the makers of the Nothing Phone. That's a smartphone. It runs on Android. It had a lot of hype when it was first launching. There were all these kind of hopes that the Nothing Phone was going to be a really awesome flagship Android phone with really cool features like these glyphs that light up on the back of the phone indicating whether you got a text message versus an incoming call or whatever. But so far, the Nothing Phone has fallen. I think it's fair to say it's fallen short of expectations since the original announcement for the project. But this story specifically has to do with an app that Nothing put its name on. Nothing launched an app called Nothing Chats, and this app claimed it could, among other things, let Android users get a taste of the promised land. That is, if the promised land is made up of blue chat bubbles in Apple's I message. All right, so I've talked about this a little bit recently, mostly because I find it all really exasperating. But there's this perception among certain iPhone owners, particularly here in the United States, that people who use other types of phones, you know, non iPhones, are the dirty, unwashed masses who lack sophistication and intelligence, and they should be ostracized and ridiculed and shunned. And the dead giveaway if it's not just looking at what the phone is when they're holding it, is that when you are messaging with them and you're using an iPhone, so you're an eye message, their messages show up in little green bubbles rather than little blue bubbles. So iPhone users all get blue bubbles, but an Android user, they are completely restricted to green, and they should be shunned. I guess I don't know. I'm an Android user who doesn't really I don't care about any of this stuff. I don't care if anyone makes fun of me for the type of phone I use, because if that's the kind of person they are, then they're not worthy of me being worried about them. They're beneath my concern, is what I'm saying. So yes, I have my own issues of superiority. But I do understand that other people care a lot about this stuff, and they care about it so much that they will go out of their way to make folks feel inferior about not having an iPhone. And that is just lame. I mean, you know, I get that, Like, especially like school kids and stuff, they'll always find ways where they define a group and they define outsiders to the group. Like that's just kind of how it goes. But it's lame, y'all. Anyway. Nothing claimed that the nothing chats app would let Android users appear to be iPhone users in I Message conversations, that their texts would appear in little blue bubbles. It turned out that nothing Chats was actually a reskin of a different app called the Sunbird app, and installing the app would prompt Android users to submit their Apple username and password, and then the app would reportedly log into I Message on the behalf of the Android user and kind of act like a middleman. And supposedly it was going to include end to end encryption, except folks discovered that Sunbird was not protecting this information at all. This is a huge, huge security and privacy problem. So again, the app claimed that it was incorporating into enn encryption. It wasn't. Sunbird was logging and storing messages in plane text in multiple places, not just in one location, which makes it doubly vulnerable, right because that means hackers have multiple targets they could look at in order to get access to Lane text messaging. Researchers show it was possible for a hacker to infiltrate a message server and to read the messages sent via this app, which is actually the opposite of what end to end encryption is supposed to do. And the apps are no longer in the store. They disappeared after just a day. But the whole thing indicates that both Sunbird and Nothing have not taken proper steps to actually be serious about security and privacy, not even a little bit. Now. If you want to learn more about this, I recommend Ron Amadeo's article in Ours Tetnica. It is titled Nothing's I Message app was a security catastrophe taken down in twenty four hours. Now. Our last story is that the test launch of the SpaceX Starship vehicle once again ended in an explosion. So back in April, SpaceX first held a test launch of the next generation spacecraft, which includes the Starship spacecraft and the super Heavy the launch vehicle, and a few minutes after takeoff, like four minutes after the first test mission took off, there was a big explosion and then SpaceX chose to self destruct the vehicle as a result of this, so four minutes after lift off, everything went boom. This time this past weekend, the vehicle made it further than it had in April, but it's still encountered issues. So after the super Heavy first stage booster separated from the rest of the vehicle, the booster exploded over the Gulf of Mexico. Now, the Starship stage continued in its trajectory initially anyway, but then SpaceX mission control lost contact with the vehicle. The best estimation was that the Starship stage initiated an automatic flight termination, which is another way of saying it self destructed. Mission control was unsure why the vehicle had actually initiated that. The failure happened at around eight minutes into the test, so four minutes longer than what happened back in April, and it had also reached an altitude of ninety one miles, which means by every definition, it reached space the US, by the way, defines the edge of space as an altitude of fifty miles, whereas the international standard is the Karman line, which is at sixty two miles of altitude. Either way, the starship got all the way up to space because it was up ninety one miles in altitude. The test is not a total failure. It is easy to call things that when stuff blows up, but even when things go wrong, that means there's an opportunity to learn more and to learn what you need to do differently and how to design things so that they're more reliable. It does mean that there's going to have to be more tests, obviously, to reach a point where the technology can be demonstrated to be reliable and safe and consistently working in good order. So that's an issue. It is kind of a setback. It's not a failure, but I'm sure it's something that SpaceX was not super pleased to see because you know, they had already seen one of these explode back in April. So we'll have to see what happens moving forward. At In the meantime, you know, you've got NASA. It's really kind of keeping an eye on what's going on with SpaceX, while NASA is readying up for the Artemis program to continue, which ultimately is going to send astronauts back to the Moon. Clearly, for that to happen, there need to be access to reliable launch vehicles capable of sending a spacecraft as far out as the Moon. So we'll see how things continue from here. But that's it. That's the news for November twenty first, twenty twenty three. Just a heads up for all of y'all. This week in the United States, it's Thanksgiving, which means we'll be off for the second half of the week. I'll have some a rerun to play in place of Thursday's episode, so I just want to give you a heads up for that, but we should be back the following week. Coming up, I'm going to be going on a vacation in early December, so we'll probably have some reruns then as well, And then of course we have the Christmas holidays at the end that'll also have an impact on the show, but then everything will be back to what passes for normal on this wacky, zany show called tech Stuff. I hope you are all well. I hope those of you in the US who are about to celebrate Thanksgiving, have a wonderful holiday, and I will talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey therein Welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the tech are you. It's time for the tech news for Tuesday, November twenty first, twenty twenty three. And first up, of course, we have some updates to the open ai situation. Now. If you want to hear what led to open AI's board of directors to fire CEO Sam Altman last Friday, check out yesterday's Tech Stuff episode. I did a full episode kind of about what led to that event and what is happening in the aftermath. But I do have a couple of new bits to add to that. First up, According to The Verge, Sam Altman is still seeking reinstatement as open ai CEO. Yesterday I talked about how Altman claimed he would never wear a guest badge to open AI's headquarters again. He did it once in order to return to negotiate for his potential return to the company. Once the board of directors said whoop, see those negotiations went nowhere. So then he reportedly joined Microsoft and he will be named CEO of an advanced AI division within Microsoft, or maybe a spinoff company, But apparently that's just one likely scenario, and the ink has not yet been put to paper on that deal, so it's not a certainty that he will be part of Microsoft. There is another possibility that should the board members who voted Altman out step down, Alman would return to the company as CEO, but that was the main sticking point in the negotiations over the weekend. However, since then, one board member, Elia Sutzkiver, has come forward to express his regret for taking part in the whole thing and said it was a mistake and that he now sides with Altman, which means there are just two members left on the open AI board of Directors who would have to change their opinion, and there's tremendous pressure on them to do it and to step down. Not only do you have the pr nightmare of going through perhaps what has been the worst CEO firing in recent history, but you've also got an angry corporate partner in the form of Microsoft, and you've got the threat of perhaps hundreds of employees leaving the company in solidarity with the ousted CEO. So refusing to step down could mean open ai would be set back years because of this. But then the reported reason that this board fired Altman in the first place was that they were concerned he was pushing hard to develop and deploy AI tools without really giving proper regard to safety, and that's the whole reason open aa Eye exists in the first place. So this could be a case where those board members decide they have to go down with the ship that what does it mean to have an organization ostensibly dedicated to developing AI in an ethical and safe way if you don't do that? Or perhaps the threat to open ai has actually been overstated, Maybe it's not really in such a precarious position. Maybe the organization will be fine after passing through, you know, a period of turmoil that's unavoidable. Meanwhile, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has said in an interview on CNBC and also with Bloomberg that its clear open ai quote has to change around the governance end quote, perhaps hinting someone from Microsoft should also sit on the board of directors for open Ai. After all, Microsoft has committed to investing ten billion dollars into open ai and already has sent a few billion of those to the company. The chaos at open Ai has had some odd rippling effects as well. For example, when word got out that Microsoft was apparently hiring both Sam Altman and former open Ai president Greg Brockman, the company sought stock price increase. In fact, Microsoft's stock value rose to three hundred and seventy seven dollars forty four cents per share yesterday. That is the highest closing stock price in Microsoft history. It's pretty wild to me that a couple of executives coming over from another company could be enough to boost stock prices like that. Also, in a similar move, when word Firse got out that open ai had fired Altman last Friday, Microsoft sought stock price dip by one point seven percent. I think this really shows how people feel AI is a critically important technology. I'm still not convinced that very many of them actually understand artificial intelligence, but then I'm not getting rich off the stock market, so what do I know. Then you have the various companies that are champion at the bit to get their hands on the talent at open Ai. Hundreds of open ai staff, some of the most knowledgeable people in the discipline of artificial intelligence, have indicated a willingness to leave the company if Altman doesn't return as CEO. And one company that has expressed interest in hiring that talent that may feel like a change of scenery is merited is Salesforce. CEO Marc Benioff posted on x the platform formerly known as Twitter and a company that we'll be talking a lot about later in this episode, said that quote, Salesforce will match any open Ai researcher who has tendered their resignation full cash and equity, ote to immediately join our salesforce Einstein Trusted Ai research team under Silvio Sevres. So that's end quote, by the way. So that's another big threat that's facing open Ai. There are other companies that recognize the value of the knowledge held by their staff, right, That's one of the big things that open ai has. Before they came out with chat GPT, you could argue that the most valued asset of open ai was its talent. There were people who were taking jobs at open Ai. They could have made more money somewhere else, but they took it at open ai because it meant working with the best people and on a very challenging goal. So obviously there are a lot of companies that would really love to be able to bring those folks on board to their own teams, and they're already coming forward with offers should those people decide to leave open AI. So again, immense pressure on the board of directors over at Open AI. According to an article by Rob Thubrunn of tech Spot or Thubron, I'm not certain how to say your last name, Rob, don't know you, but I like your work anyway. According to this article, more than half of tech workers view AI as being overrated and overhyped now. This in turn, comes from a survey that a company called Retool conducted. So Retool puts out this survey and asks various tech workers to evaluate how AI is treated how it's viewed in the tech sphere. Now, the simple size is not particularly large. Retool surveyed around fifteen hundred tech professionals across the industry. Everyone from programmers to designers to executives, like pretty much every kind of role that's in tech was represented in this survey. According to the survey, only twenty three percent of the respondents felt as though AI is more or less fairly assessed in the industry as a whole. That the attitude and hype, or maybe hype is the wrong word because that has a negative connotation, but the treatment of AI is appropriate, that it's the right level. However, fifty one point six percent of them feel that AI is overrated and perhaps overhyped. This also means, by the way, that about twenty five percent of the respondents actually feel that AI is underrated. So keep that in mind, and it seems like the type of job you have in tech has a big influence on how you view artificial intelligence. Executives seem more inclined to say AI was either rated fairly or was actually underrated. And as Rob points out, well, yeah, of course executives think that because they're looking at artificial intelligence largely as a cost benefit analysis, and they're salivating over the thought of replacing all those expensive human drones with more economical AI powered algorithms, So of course they think that it's as important, if not more important, than the way the industry treats it. Meanwhile, the folks who actually have to interact with AI on a daily basis in order to do their work. Now, the people who are using AI to do stuff like write code, for example, they were far more likely to call AI overrated. Presumably that's because so much of their time has to be spent checking for errors and correcting them and that sort of thing. So with the sample size of fifteen hundred people, I'm not sure we can actually draw any sweeping conclusions from this survey. And again, it's a survey that's talking about people's opinions toward AI. It's not like it's a metric that actually measures AI itself, but rather our perception of artificial intelligence. I would say that the survey indicates it's probably a good idea to pay attention to the people who are working directly with the artificial intelligence powered tools, because if your staff is indicating that the AI is actually making their jobs more frustrating or inefficient, that is worth paying attention to. Otherwise, the leaders might find that they have committed to a solution that is actually a problem. And I don't think we're careening toward a world of automation and that we'll never be able to turn back and once we turn that corner, it's all downhill from there. I don't think that's the case. I do think that a lot of companies need to be careful in how they implement AI if they don't want to rush into an expensive and complicated mess I think that there are ways to incorporate AI that can have a direct benefit to both the overall company and to the employees who are making use of the AI. I think there are legitimate, good uses for this technology, but I also think it's very easy to implement it willy nilly, and to do so in a way that ends up being counterproductive. And that's what companies really need to be careful about. All Right, we're going to take a quick break. When we come back, I got a whole lot of news about everybody's favorite social network platform, X, But first let's thank our sponsors. Okay, we're back. And I mentioned before the break that we would be talking about X today, So here goes. First up, the company has filed a lawsuit against a media watchdog group called Media Matters. The group had previously published a report indicating that ads could appear next to objectionable material such as extremist and racist messaging, including antisemitic messaging. That obviously is something that does not go over well with advertisers as they are trying to promote and protect their brands, and last week, several major advertisers left X after Elon Musk indicated support for a conspiracy theory promoted by anti Semitic groups and white supremacists. So clearly it must have been Media Matters that was the real problem, not the fact that the owner of the company was elevating this messaging. You know. Anyway, some big names in in companies had halted all advertising on X. They include media companies like Paramount, Disney, NBC, Universal, Warner Brothers, Discovery. They include telecommunications companies like Comcast and tech companies like Apple, among many many other companies. And the thought is that their departure is probably going to prompt other companies to follow suit. Now, x's complaint against Media Matters is that Media Matters supposedly manufactured the images it showed in its report by creating a test account on X and then just refreshing the view over and over, like following some specific accounts that were posting problematic stuff and then just hitting refresh until they started to get ads to appear next to some of these entries. And so what X is saying is that this is not representative of the typical experience on X. Most people on X would never see this thing at all. Media Matters had to game the system in order to get these sorts of results. That's what X is arguing personally. I mean, that might be a legitimate argument that Media Matters perhaps kind of orchestrated this so it would appear this way. However, you still have the issue of the owner of the company promoting these messages, which whether whether Media Matters orchestrated anything is still an issue. Media Matters, by the way, says that they disagree with X's accusations and that they are willing to go to court and to prove that their methodology was legitimate. So so far there's no one backing down from this fight. Musk continues to behave in a way that is really alarming to advertisers, and that means that X is going to have a problem no matter what any watch dog group says. You don't even need watchdog groups to bring these matters to attend if you've got the owner of the company doing these sorts of things, because that is so newsworthy that you know that's going to be brought to attention and be put in the spotlight, whether whether there's a watchdog group dedicated to it or not. On a semi related note, I deactivated my own account on X. I had not been checking it regularly for weeks, so I decided it was just time to walk away. Part of it is that I don't want to be on a platform where a fundamentally important person on there is promoting things that can cause direct harm to others. So my apologies to anyone who's trying to use X to get in touch with me. It no longer will work. But let's talk about X some more, because of course we're not done yet. Tech Crunch reports that the mass exodus of advertisers, which really happened last week, is likely to have a pretty darn hefty impact to x's bottom line. You got to remember, ninety percent of X's revenue came from advertising, and when a bunch of advertisers leave, it means the company is going to have a lot of trouble bringing in revenue. They had already seen some drastic drops in revenue in the wake of Elon Musk purchasing the company last year, so this was already an issue before last week. In fact, analysts from Insider Intelligence estimated that X was going to see a fifty four point four percent decline in ad business year over year, but now that's likely to be an even more dramatic decline. Linda Yakarino, the CEO of X, has said that data will show X is actually dedicated toward fighting misinformation and racism, including anti Semitism, and that they will prove that in fact, the company has been working hard on this, despite the fact that Elon Musk famously dismissed almost the entirety of the content moderation departments within Twitter when he purchased the company. Reportedly, several advertisers have actually urged Yakarinos to step down as CEO, going so far as to suggest that she is potentially causing irreparable damage to her own reputation by serving as CEO of X, Like they're essentially saying, you're better than this. You need to get away from this company. It is toxic and it is bringing you down with it. Yakarino so far has rejected these calls. I think she's going to continue to find it challenging to champion X's policies while the owner continues to promote content that appears to contradict her. So that's a mess anyway. That's the update on x let's now switch over to YouTube for a moment. Amir Siddicky of Android Authority posted an article titled YouTube is reportedly slowing down videos for Firefox users. So essentially the story says that folks who are using non Chrome browsers, primarily Firefox and Microsoft Edge, have reported that when they try to launch a video on YouTube, they're encountering a delay in playback, and it's a delay that lasts several seconds, like five seconds. But if they close out that browser and open up Chrome and go to YouTube, they can try and load that same video and there's no delay. Now that is troubling. It could indicate that Google is purposefully throttling performance on non Chrome browsers in an effort to coax folks to use Chrome instead. Now, this is preferential treatment that could be seen as anti competitive. In fact, I think, especially in the current climate in the United States, it would automatically be listed as being anti competitive behavior. And considering that Google is currently in the hot seat for that sort of thing, that's not good. It definitely is not in line with the concept of net neutrality. But YouTube has responded to this report and has claimed that it really doesn't have anything to do with which browser someone's using. That is immaterial according to Google. Instead, what's happening, YouTube says is that it is putting in delays for people who are using browsers that have ad blocker extensions activated on them. So it's a way to fight ad blocking. The statement says, quote users who have ad blockers installed may experience suboptimal viewing, regardless of the browser they are using. End quote. I don't doubt that Google is using this approach to discourage ad blockers, as the company has taken a pretty hardline stance against ad blockers this year in particular. But I'm curious to see if that's as far as this goes, because the stories that were being shared seem to suggest that Chrome users were getting a better experience. Now, maybe it was that they had ad blockers installed on their non Chrome browsers, but for whatever reason, they had not installed ad blockers on Chrome. Maybe it's that Google has been rolling out this feature to affect non Chrome browsers first, like they are designing YouTube so that it can detect the presence of ad blockers on each browser, and Chrome just hasn't been rolled out yet And that eventually, no matter what browser you're using, you're going to have this issue. That might be true, but it still kind of smacks of being anti competitive to me to because again, Chrome gets preferential treatment. If your perception is that, oh well, as long as I'm on Chrome it's better, I might as well just use Chrome, that's an issue. If it's not just legit a natural advance of Chrome. If the system is being gamed on the back end, that's bad. So we'll have to wait and see if more developments happen in this story, because again, Google is currently in the hot seat with the US government when it comes to anti competitive behaviors, and there's a real threat that the government will demand Google break apart into different pieces as a result of this. Whether it actually gets to that point, I don't know. I personally kind of doubt it, simply because the last time we saw something this big happen, the US government ultimately reversed its decision to break apart a big tech company. In that case, it was Microsoft. So not that it's impossible, but it hasn't happened in a very long time, so I would be surprised if it went that far. But we'll have to see. All right, We're going to take another quick break. When we come back, I've got a couple more stories I want to talk about. Okay, now, let's have a quick story about Nothing. This is not a Seinfeld reference. It's nothing like that. We're talking about the Nothing Company, the makers of the Nothing Phone. That's a smartphone. It runs on Android. It had a lot of hype when it was first launching. There were all these kind of hopes that the Nothing Phone was going to be a really awesome flagship Android phone with really cool features like these glyphs that light up on the back of the phone indicating whether you got a text message versus an incoming call or whatever. But so far, the Nothing Phone has fallen. I think it's fair to say it's fallen short of expectations since the original announcement for the project. But this story specifically has to do with an app that Nothing put its name on. Nothing launched an app called Nothing Chats, and this app claimed it could, among other things, let Android users get a taste of the promised land. That is, if the promised land is made up of blue chat bubbles in Apple's I message. All right, so I've talked about this a little bit recently, mostly because I find it all really exasperating. But there's this perception among certain iPhone owners, particularly here in the United States, that people who use other types of phones, you know, non iPhones, are the dirty, unwashed masses who lack sophistication and intelligence, and they should be ostracized and ridiculed and shunned. And the dead giveaway if it's not just looking at what the phone is when they're holding it, is that when you are messaging with them and you're using an iPhone, so you're an eye message, their messages show up in little green bubbles rather than little blue bubbles. So iPhone users all get blue bubbles, but an Android user, they are completely restricted to green, and they should be shunned. I guess I don't know. I'm an Android user who doesn't really I don't care about any of this stuff. I don't care if anyone makes fun of me for the type of phone I use, because if that's the kind of person they are, then they're not worthy of me being worried about them. They're beneath my concern, is what I'm saying. So yes, I have my own issues of superiority. But I do understand that other people care a lot about this stuff, and they care about it so much that they will go out of their way to make folks feel inferior about not having an iPhone. And that is just lame. I mean, you know, I get that, Like, especially like school kids and stuff, they'll always find ways where they define a group and they define outsiders to the group. Like that's just kind of how it goes. But it's lame, y'all. Anyway. Nothing claimed that the nothing chats app would let Android users appear to be iPhone users in I Message conversations, that their texts would appear in little blue bubbles. It turned out that nothing Chats was actually a reskin of a different app called the Sunbird app, and installing the app would prompt Android users to submit their Apple username and password, and then the app would reportedly log into I Message on the behalf of the Android user and kind of act like a middleman. And supposedly it was going to include end to end encryption, except folks discovered that Sunbird was not protecting this information at all. This is a huge, huge security and privacy problem. So again, the app claimed that it was incorporating into enn encryption. It wasn't. Sunbird was logging and storing messages in plane text in multiple places, not just in one location, which makes it doubly vulnerable, right because that means hackers have multiple targets they could look at in order to get access to Lane text messaging. Researchers show it was possible for a hacker to infiltrate a message server and to read the messages sent via this app, which is actually the opposite of what end to end encryption is supposed to do. And the apps are no longer in the store. They disappeared after just a day. But the whole thing indicates that both Sunbird and Nothing have not taken proper steps to actually be serious about security and privacy, not even a little bit. Now. If you want to learn more about this, I recommend Ron Amadeo's article in Ours Tetnica. It is titled Nothing's I Message app was a security catastrophe taken down in twenty four hours. Now. Our last story is that the test launch of the SpaceX Starship vehicle once again ended in an explosion. So back in April, SpaceX first held a test launch of the next generation spacecraft, which includes the Starship spacecraft and the super Heavy the launch vehicle, and a few minutes after takeoff, like four minutes after the first test mission took off, there was a big explosion and then SpaceX chose to self destruct the vehicle as a result of this, so four minutes after lift off, everything went boom. This time this past weekend, the vehicle made it further than it had in April, but it's still encountered issues. So after the super Heavy first stage booster separated from the rest of the vehicle, the booster exploded over the Gulf of Mexico. Now, the Starship stage continued in its trajectory initially anyway, but then SpaceX mission control lost contact with the vehicle. The best estimation was that the Starship stage initiated an automatic flight termination, which is another way of saying it self destructed. Mission control was unsure why the vehicle had actually initiated that. The failure happened at around eight minutes into the test, so four minutes longer than what happened back in April, and it had also reached an altitude of ninety one miles, which means by every definition, it reached space the US, by the way, defines the edge of space as an altitude of fifty miles, whereas the international standard is the Karman line, which is at sixty two miles of altitude. Either way, the starship got all the way up to space because it was up ninety one miles in altitude. The test is not a total failure. It is easy to call things that when stuff blows up, but even when things go wrong, that means there's an opportunity to learn more and to learn what you need to do differently and how to design things so that they're more reliable. It does mean that there's going to have to be more tests, obviously, to reach a point where the technology can be demonstrated to be reliable and safe and consistently working in good order. So that's an issue. It is kind of a setback. It's not a failure, but I'm sure it's something that SpaceX was not super pleased to see because you know, they had already seen one of these explode back in April. So we'll have to see what happens moving forward. At In the meantime, you know, you've got NASA. It's really kind of keeping an eye on what's going on with SpaceX, while NASA is readying up for the Artemis program to continue, which ultimately is going to send astronauts back to the Moon. Clearly, for that to happen, there need to be access to reliable launch vehicles capable of sending a spacecraft as far out as the Moon. So we'll see how things continue from here. But that's it. That's the news for November twenty first, twenty twenty three. Just a heads up for all of y'all. This week in the United States, it's Thanksgiving, which means we'll be off for the second half of the week. I'll have some a rerun to play in place of Thursday's episode, so I just want to give you a heads up for that, but we should be back the following week. Coming up, I'm going to be going on a vacation in early December, so we'll probably have some reruns then as well, And then of course we have the Christmas holidays at the end that'll also have an impact on the show, but then everything will be back to what passes for normal on this wacky, zany show called tech Stuff. I hope you are all well. I hope those of you in the US who are about to celebrate Thanksgiving, have a wonderful holiday, and I will talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.