Welcome to tex Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tex Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio. And how the tech are you? It is time for the tech news for Tuesday, February seven three and I'm late to the game on talking about this, but here in the United States, one of the big news stories at the end of last week was the discovery of and subsequent destruction of a Chinese made balloon that drifted across the United States West coast to East coast. US officials say the balloon was a spy vehicle. Chinese officials claim it was for science rather than surveillance. It's all a moot point now, because late last week the US military shot down the balloon off the coast of South Carolina. It's turned into a giant political matter here in the United States because conservatives are arguing that the President was indecisive and delayed too long before taking action. The president says he gave the order to shoot down the balloon as soon as the military deemed it would be safe to do so and would have the best chance of retrieving the balloons payload to make sure you know that, in fact, this is like an espionage device, and I'm sure we're gonna see both major parties here in the United States try to use this event to earn political points with their respective basis, and it's all very exhausting, so I ain't gonna give it any more air time. Like I don't object to incorporating politics into tech stories, because the two do have overlap. I mean, one affects the other and vice versa, but this is getting to a point where he gets so petty. It's just exhausting. However, what I will do is plan a future episode about spy balloons and their history, because that's actually really neat stuff. So we will do that and and avoid the kind of weird argumentative politics that we're hearing right now in the States. Last week, I also talked about how a lot of publicly traded tech companies here in the US we're holding earnings calls with their investors. On Thursday, we got the Triple A calls, that would be the Amazon, Alphabet and Apple earnings calls, and I suspected the call showed that these companies are facing some challenges to have investors a little concerned in some cases. Apple reported that it had a revenue drop, so not a loss. It didn't operate at a loss, just a drop in revenue. But this would be the first revenue drop for Apple in more than three years, and investors really don't like it when winning streaks are interrupted. Sales were down five percent quarter over well year over year for quarter four of two, and that was a larger drop than what analysts had predicted, and the fault was largely laid at the fee of China, specifically having manufacturing facilities in China shut down during COVID nineteen outbreaks, and considering the reported conditions of what it's like to work at one of these places, that all feels really gross to me. I don't think China has taken the right approach to handling COVID nineteen. But at the same time, it's really hard for me to say, ah, man, we weren't able to make as many do dads because the government was trying to stop the spread of a highly infectious disease. So I guess what I'm saying is that, ultimately I'm glad I'm not the one who has to make those kinds of decisions. Anyway, on top of the falling sales, Apple's profit fell by thirteen percent. Now again, Apple was still profitable, it just wasn't as profitable as it was this time last year. Apple did not indicate that it would be following the big tech trend of laying off thousands of employees, however, so that's good news for Apple employees. Amazon's news was even worse in that the company reported that you one three operating profit might turn out to be a big old goose egg a zero in other words, so no operating profit in the beginning of according to current estimations. Amazon executives have said that customers have been cutting way back on spending and that was causing a massive hit to Amazon's revenue, and that even the layoffs and downsizing in Amazon is not counteracting that that drop in customer purchases. And you know, we're talking about eighteen thousand jobs cut at this point in Amazon. One area where Amazon is doing okay is in its cloud computing services, where the company actually saw higher revenues than analysts had predicted. But yeah, the pandemic days of rampant online shopping have all really slowed down as people are being more frugal with their spending during this undefined economic downturn. But I call it a recession by an We have Alphabet, the parent company of Google and YouTube, and some other companies as well. Overall, the companies saw declines in both revenue and profit, which again is not a huge surprise because Alphabet draws the vast majority of its revenue from digital ads, and digital ad spending is down. In fact, according to Alphabet, the ad revenue fell by four percent in general and eight percent on platforms like YouTube and like Amazon. Alphabet has also slashed a lot of jobs twelve thousand in the case of Alphabet, So the call did not present a lot of surprises. None of these did, I would say, But yeah, kind of confirms stuff that we already either new or suspected. Other tech companies are also cutting back by eliminating more jobs. Dell Technologies recently revealed it will be laying off around five percent of its workforce. That would be more than six thousand, five hundred employees. So why, well, we all know why. It's the economic situation that again we don't have a word for. We just call it challenging. And while I hate seeing more tech employees face the possibility of being out of a job. I can't say that I'm really surprised by Dell's move. I mean, we all know that consumers have cut way back on spending in general, and that includes buying new computers. People are sticking with their devices longer rather than updating or replacing them, so the hardware cycle has changed a bit. This impacts companies like Dell big time. On top of that, Dell has seen some other competitors in the consumer PC space gain ground on them and get more competitive. So it's not just that Dell is selling fewer PCs. It's also that other companies are starting to catch up to Dell or to really be a competitive threat. So it's a double whammy. And Boeing is yet another company in tech that has announced it will be holding layoffs. The company said it plans to eliminate around two thousand jobs, primarily into part meants like human resources and finance, and then other departments like engineering and manufacturing are going to be protected. Boeing blends to outsource HR and finance roles to a company called Tata Consulting Services that is part of a larger conglomerate that is located in India. But unlike the other companies I mentioned so far, Boeing actually plans to grow its workforce this year. So last year Boeing hired on fifteen thousand new employees, so still a net gain even when you consider the two thousand layoffs coming up, and this year they plan on adding another ten thousand by the end of the year. So really this sounds more like Boeing is putting its eggs in the in the products and services basket with engineering and manufacturing, and that this move is more about shifting finance and human resources focused parts of the business to outsourced jobs. So it's really more like a reorg than anything else, at least as of right now. Now we're about to enter into the AI slash chat bought part of our episode, because that's been the big news so far in Tree. So we all know about chat gpt in the various concerns and criticisms and wild experiments that are related to it, and you likely know that Microsoft had previously invested a billion dollars in the company behind chat GPT called open Ai. At least you would know that if you listen to my episode about open Ai. Also Microsoft is going to invest a lot more in open Ai, up to around ten billion dollars according to at least some reports. Well later today, Microsoft is holding a press event. In fact, might have already happened by the time you are listening to this podcast. But since it hasn't happened yet as of when I'm writing the darn thing, the best I can do is talk about what people think is going to happen. That is that Microsoft is going to make an announcement that it's incorporating chat GPT into being search in some way. Now, Google yesterday, in a kind of panicked and rushed way, unveiled its own chat bought called Bard. We had already heard about Bard, but at the time I was talking about it was referenced as Apprentice Bard and it was only an internal tool. So Google has now already launched a closed and private beta for a select group of users to experiment with Bard, and plans to open this up further to a lot more people in the near future in the coming weeks, for example. So Google also plans a press event that will now happen tomorrow on Wednesday. So it looks like Microsoft and Google are facing off in the AI chat bought space, particularly with regard to how it could be interwoven with search. Now, I've already talked about how this approach could ultimately cause a whole lot of problems online, mainly through cutting off vital Internet traffic to various websites that depend upon search results to get visitors. But yeah, it looks like this fight is coming to us pretty quickly. The two chat bots will be based off different language models open aies g PT or generative pre train transformer is based off the transformer model that Google pioneered. Now, in this case, transformer doesn't refer to either a robot in disguise or a device that can step voltage up or down. Instead, a transformer in this sense is a machine learning model. Google introduced it in two thousand seventeen, and it's very popular model in machine learning applications. Google's language model is called Language Models for Dialogue Applications or land up. So you have GPT on one side and lambda on the other, things do get a little more muddeled. However, Google has invested several hundred million dollars in an AI company called Anthropic, which was founded by some folks who had formerly been researchers at open Ai. So both Microsoft and Google are launching AI powered tools that share some common DNA. I have a been invited to the beta for Google, so I haven't seen what that looks like yet, and the Microsoft event hasn't happened as the time I'm recording this, so I can't really comment on what these look like or how they perform. And I am sure that people at Google and Microsoft are already aware of the potential dangers this AI could pose to business practices. So I'm not talking about, you know, doomsday prophecies about AI destroying the world or anything. Instead, I'm talking about AI eliminating an advertising platform that Google has depended upon for most of its existence. I'm sure they have contingencies in mind. I just don't know what those happened to be, but it should be fascinating to see how this unfolds. Also, if it gets good enough, it'll put me out of a job. I mean, why would you listen to me when you can just have your tech questions answered by a super fast robot unless it's you know, from a Southern charm Okay, I I gotta take a break from being charming. We will be back after these messages. Okay, we're back, and we're actually back with another AI chat bought story. So the United States is not the only country that's obsessed with this idea. By Do, the enormous company in China, announced today that it has been testing a chat butt that it calls Ernie bot. There's no word of this chat bot has a roommate that's called bert Bot, but Ernie has been tested internally for some time, it seems, and these tests are scheduled to conclude sometime in March. Presumably at that point by Do will unveiled the chat bot into some sort of public facing phase where people will get a chance to use it outside of by Do itself. Ernie actually is an acronym. It stands for Enhanced Representation through Knowledge integrat SHILT, and it sounds like it has a lot of the same sort of features that we've seen in stuff like chat GPT as well as doll E, in that it is said to be able to generate text based on user prompts, so you can ask it questions and it will generate a response by drawing information from around you know, its databases, and it can also do things like create images based on prompts, so you could tell it to create a serene landscape with a windmill next to a river or something, and it would do it. I think it will only be a matter of time before someone creates a roundtable discussion session with these various chat bots all talking to each other and have them discuss some sort of topic like you know, which Nintendo game is the best, or how to achieve world peace or something like that. It's just a matter of time. Even if it's done as a parody, I expect we'll see it. In fact, I'm sure we'll see lots of parodies where people will purposefully create fake conversations between these different chat bots for comedic purposes, and yet they will not reveal that it's all fake, because that's the world we live in, where you can't tell that something satire because there's no indicator to let you know that, in fact, it is satire. It's just passed off as the truth, so it is, in other words, a lie. Yeah. I have thoughts about this. Now. I've got a couple of gaming stories to cover, both of which are a little rough. First up, Meta announced last week that it's going to sunset the VR game Echo VR coming this August. This game will having a relatively small player base, has received critical and popular acclaim, and the folks who do play it are said to be really loyal fans, so this announcement came as a disappointment. Meta explained that the reason behind the decision is that the company wants to create other games and VR experiences, and maintaining a game requires resources that the company would rather focus on new opportunities. Now that does make sense. Any online focused game is going to require ongoing support or it will eventually fail, and considering that the player base is down to the low ten thousands according to The Verge, you can understand why Meta would want to shift to something else that could potentially have a bigger impact. Even if revenue isn't a concern right now, it's bound to be at some point. Unfortunately, this kind of decision is also the sort of thing that can discourage adoption because buying into VR is expensive, The equipment is costly, and that's before you even start buying games for it. So if you're thinking about getting into VR, but then you hear that one of the more praised titles is getting shut down later this year, you might find yourself, you know, reviewing the situation, as Vegan would say. John Carmack, who until recently was a consultant for Meta on All Things VR, voiced his disappointment with this decision. He said that Meta is taking something away from the community and that never really goes over very well. And I agree with that. If you want to learn more about this, I recommend the article in The Verge titled Here's why Meta is shutting down Echo VR. The ViRGE also reports that Amazon is phasing out fifty three games and it's Luna cloud streaming service this month. So it's got this video game streaming service called Luna, and fifty three titles are going to leave in February over different dates. Back in December, Luna rotated out another forty titles. Amazon says the game strategy is to consistently switch out titles to keep the service fresh. That makes sense to a degree to me, but it does mean that gamers might find themselves focusing more on titles that are good for short sessions and don't involve long protracted storylines because you never know when that title is gonna go away. There's nothing like being halfway through saving the world and then finding out you can't access your game anymore, and what happens to a world y'all think of the world. Well, according to game Rant, Luna Plus has around a hundred ninety titles on its service, so fifty three games. That means we're looking at around a little more than a quarter of all the the game titles leaving the service this month. I'm curious how popular the services. I'll try to look into it. I'm thinking about doing an episode about the different cloud based gaming services out there and any information we have about how well they're performing. In some cases, we don't really have any information at all, but we've definitely come a long way since the Uyah. Finally, last week I talked about Nothing Forever. That's the AI generated Seinfeld episode simulator that was broadcasting on Twitch. It uses GPT to create the dialogue. Well, they had a real problem recently in that uh, the character Larry, the standing for Jerry Seinfeld, was doing his stand up and started spouting off transphobic and homophobic thoughts as part of his stand up routine. This should not have ever happened and twhich banned the channel for fourteen days as a result of It turns out the issue was that the GPT model they had been using, which was codenamed Da Vinci, had problems at some point, and the the model just stopped creating content, so you just had these empty rooms. So the team decided to roll back to an earlier version of GPT called CURI, and this one lacked the content moderation blinders that the Da Vinci model had, and so CURI was more lax and allowing problematic content to come through, and that's when we got the transphobic and homophobic content. So the creators say they do plan on coming back. They're going to put more content moderation features in place to prevent this sort of thing from happening, because obviously they don't want harmful content to come out from their little fun diversion. Uh, And that this was just a mistake based upon going to an earlier version of this language model. So it was really unfortunate. I'm glad that they're addressing it, and hopefully we don't see anything like this in the future. But it is one of the the downsides to AI that's pulling from across the internet to generate its content. All Right, that's it. That's the news for Tuesday, February seven three. Hope you're all well. I'm doing pretty well myself. If you would like to contact me with some future ideas for shows that I should do, you can do so on Twitter. The handle for the show is tech Stuff hs W, or if you prefer, you can download the I Heart Radio apps free to download, spree to use. You can type in tech stuff in a little search bar. It will navigate over to the tech stuff page and there you'll see a little microphone icon. If you click on that, you can leave a voice message up to thirty seconds in length and request your topic of choice and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to tex Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tex Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio. And how the tech are you? It is time for the tech news for Tuesday, February seven three and I'm late to the game on talking about this, but here in the United States, one of the big news stories at the end of last week was the discovery of and subsequent destruction of a Chinese made balloon that drifted across the United States West coast to East coast. US officials say the balloon was a spy vehicle. Chinese officials claim it was for science rather than surveillance. It's all a moot point now, because late last week the US military shot down the balloon off the coast of South Carolina. It's turned into a giant political matter here in the United States because conservatives are arguing that the President was indecisive and delayed too long before taking action. The president says he gave the order to shoot down the balloon as soon as the military deemed it would be safe to do so and would have the best chance of retrieving the balloons payload to make sure you know that, in fact, this is like an espionage device, and I'm sure we're gonna see both major parties here in the United States try to use this event to earn political points with their respective basis, and it's all very exhausting, so I ain't gonna give it any more air time. Like I don't object to incorporating politics into tech stories, because the two do have overlap. I mean, one affects the other and vice versa, but this is getting to a point where he gets so petty. It's just exhausting. However, what I will do is plan a future episode about spy balloons and their history, because that's actually really neat stuff. So we will do that and and avoid the kind of weird argumentative politics that we're hearing right now in the States. Last week, I also talked about how a lot of publicly traded tech companies here in the US we're holding earnings calls with their investors. On Thursday, we got the Triple A calls, that would be the Amazon, Alphabet and Apple earnings calls, and I suspected the call showed that these companies are facing some challenges to have investors a little concerned in some cases. Apple reported that it had a revenue drop, so not a loss. It didn't operate at a loss, just a drop in revenue. But this would be the first revenue drop for Apple in more than three years, and investors really don't like it when winning streaks are interrupted. Sales were down five percent quarter over well year over year for quarter four of two, and that was a larger drop than what analysts had predicted, and the fault was largely laid at the fee of China, specifically having manufacturing facilities in China shut down during COVID nineteen outbreaks, and considering the reported conditions of what it's like to work at one of these places, that all feels really gross to me. I don't think China has taken the right approach to handling COVID nineteen. But at the same time, it's really hard for me to say, ah, man, we weren't able to make as many do dads because the government was trying to stop the spread of a highly infectious disease. So I guess what I'm saying is that, ultimately I'm glad I'm not the one who has to make those kinds of decisions. Anyway, on top of the falling sales, Apple's profit fell by thirteen percent. Now again, Apple was still profitable, it just wasn't as profitable as it was this time last year. Apple did not indicate that it would be following the big tech trend of laying off thousands of employees, however, so that's good news for Apple employees. Amazon's news was even worse in that the company reported that you one three operating profit might turn out to be a big old goose egg a zero in other words, so no operating profit in the beginning of according to current estimations. Amazon executives have said that customers have been cutting way back on spending and that was causing a massive hit to Amazon's revenue, and that even the layoffs and downsizing in Amazon is not counteracting that that drop in customer purchases. And you know, we're talking about eighteen thousand jobs cut at this point in Amazon. One area where Amazon is doing okay is in its cloud computing services, where the company actually saw higher revenues than analysts had predicted. But yeah, the pandemic days of rampant online shopping have all really slowed down as people are being more frugal with their spending during this undefined economic downturn. But I call it a recession by an We have Alphabet, the parent company of Google and YouTube, and some other companies as well. Overall, the companies saw declines in both revenue and profit, which again is not a huge surprise because Alphabet draws the vast majority of its revenue from digital ads, and digital ad spending is down. In fact, according to Alphabet, the ad revenue fell by four percent in general and eight percent on platforms like YouTube and like Amazon. Alphabet has also slashed a lot of jobs twelve thousand in the case of Alphabet, So the call did not present a lot of surprises. None of these did, I would say, But yeah, kind of confirms stuff that we already either new or suspected. Other tech companies are also cutting back by eliminating more jobs. Dell Technologies recently revealed it will be laying off around five percent of its workforce. That would be more than six thousand, five hundred employees. So why, well, we all know why. It's the economic situation that again we don't have a word for. We just call it challenging. And while I hate seeing more tech employees face the possibility of being out of a job. I can't say that I'm really surprised by Dell's move. I mean, we all know that consumers have cut way back on spending in general, and that includes buying new computers. People are sticking with their devices longer rather than updating or replacing them, so the hardware cycle has changed a bit. This impacts companies like Dell big time. On top of that, Dell has seen some other competitors in the consumer PC space gain ground on them and get more competitive. So it's not just that Dell is selling fewer PCs. It's also that other companies are starting to catch up to Dell or to really be a competitive threat. So it's a double whammy. And Boeing is yet another company in tech that has announced it will be holding layoffs. The company said it plans to eliminate around two thousand jobs, primarily into part meants like human resources and finance, and then other departments like engineering and manufacturing are going to be protected. Boeing blends to outsource HR and finance roles to a company called Tata Consulting Services that is part of a larger conglomerate that is located in India. But unlike the other companies I mentioned so far, Boeing actually plans to grow its workforce this year. So last year Boeing hired on fifteen thousand new employees, so still a net gain even when you consider the two thousand layoffs coming up, and this year they plan on adding another ten thousand by the end of the year. So really this sounds more like Boeing is putting its eggs in the in the products and services basket with engineering and manufacturing, and that this move is more about shifting finance and human resources focused parts of the business to outsourced jobs. So it's really more like a reorg than anything else, at least as of right now. Now we're about to enter into the AI slash chat bought part of our episode, because that's been the big news so far in Tree. So we all know about chat gpt in the various concerns and criticisms and wild experiments that are related to it, and you likely know that Microsoft had previously invested a billion dollars in the company behind chat GPT called open Ai. At least you would know that if you listen to my episode about open Ai. Also Microsoft is going to invest a lot more in open Ai, up to around ten billion dollars according to at least some reports. Well later today, Microsoft is holding a press event. In fact, might have already happened by the time you are listening to this podcast. But since it hasn't happened yet as of when I'm writing the darn thing, the best I can do is talk about what people think is going to happen. That is that Microsoft is going to make an announcement that it's incorporating chat GPT into being search in some way. Now, Google yesterday, in a kind of panicked and rushed way, unveiled its own chat bought called Bard. We had already heard about Bard, but at the time I was talking about it was referenced as Apprentice Bard and it was only an internal tool. So Google has now already launched a closed and private beta for a select group of users to experiment with Bard, and plans to open this up further to a lot more people in the near future in the coming weeks, for example. So Google also plans a press event that will now happen tomorrow on Wednesday. So it looks like Microsoft and Google are facing off in the AI chat bought space, particularly with regard to how it could be interwoven with search. Now, I've already talked about how this approach could ultimately cause a whole lot of problems online, mainly through cutting off vital Internet traffic to various websites that depend upon search results to get visitors. But yeah, it looks like this fight is coming to us pretty quickly. The two chat bots will be based off different language models open aies g PT or generative pre train transformer is based off the transformer model that Google pioneered. Now, in this case, transformer doesn't refer to either a robot in disguise or a device that can step voltage up or down. Instead, a transformer in this sense is a machine learning model. Google introduced it in two thousand seventeen, and it's very popular model in machine learning applications. Google's language model is called Language Models for Dialogue Applications or land up. So you have GPT on one side and lambda on the other, things do get a little more muddeled. However, Google has invested several hundred million dollars in an AI company called Anthropic, which was founded by some folks who had formerly been researchers at open Ai. So both Microsoft and Google are launching AI powered tools that share some common DNA. I have a been invited to the beta for Google, so I haven't seen what that looks like yet, and the Microsoft event hasn't happened as the time I'm recording this, so I can't really comment on what these look like or how they perform. And I am sure that people at Google and Microsoft are already aware of the potential dangers this AI could pose to business practices. So I'm not talking about, you know, doomsday prophecies about AI destroying the world or anything. Instead, I'm talking about AI eliminating an advertising platform that Google has depended upon for most of its existence. I'm sure they have contingencies in mind. I just don't know what those happened to be, but it should be fascinating to see how this unfolds. Also, if it gets good enough, it'll put me out of a job. I mean, why would you listen to me when you can just have your tech questions answered by a super fast robot unless it's you know, from a Southern charm Okay, I I gotta take a break from being charming. We will be back after these messages. Okay, we're back, and we're actually back with another AI chat bought story. So the United States is not the only country that's obsessed with this idea. By Do, the enormous company in China, announced today that it has been testing a chat butt that it calls Ernie bot. There's no word of this chat bot has a roommate that's called bert Bot, but Ernie has been tested internally for some time, it seems, and these tests are scheduled to conclude sometime in March. Presumably at that point by Do will unveiled the chat bot into some sort of public facing phase where people will get a chance to use it outside of by Do itself. Ernie actually is an acronym. It stands for Enhanced Representation through Knowledge integrat SHILT, and it sounds like it has a lot of the same sort of features that we've seen in stuff like chat GPT as well as doll E, in that it is said to be able to generate text based on user prompts, so you can ask it questions and it will generate a response by drawing information from around you know, its databases, and it can also do things like create images based on prompts, so you could tell it to create a serene landscape with a windmill next to a river or something, and it would do it. I think it will only be a matter of time before someone creates a roundtable discussion session with these various chat bots all talking to each other and have them discuss some sort of topic like you know, which Nintendo game is the best, or how to achieve world peace or something like that. It's just a matter of time. Even if it's done as a parody, I expect we'll see it. In fact, I'm sure we'll see lots of parodies where people will purposefully create fake conversations between these different chat bots for comedic purposes, and yet they will not reveal that it's all fake, because that's the world we live in, where you can't tell that something satire because there's no indicator to let you know that, in fact, it is satire. It's just passed off as the truth, so it is, in other words, a lie. Yeah. I have thoughts about this. Now. I've got a couple of gaming stories to cover, both of which are a little rough. First up, Meta announced last week that it's going to sunset the VR game Echo VR coming this August. This game will having a relatively small player base, has received critical and popular acclaim, and the folks who do play it are said to be really loyal fans, so this announcement came as a disappointment. Meta explained that the reason behind the decision is that the company wants to create other games and VR experiences, and maintaining a game requires resources that the company would rather focus on new opportunities. Now that does make sense. Any online focused game is going to require ongoing support or it will eventually fail, and considering that the player base is down to the low ten thousands according to The Verge, you can understand why Meta would want to shift to something else that could potentially have a bigger impact. Even if revenue isn't a concern right now, it's bound to be at some point. Unfortunately, this kind of decision is also the sort of thing that can discourage adoption because buying into VR is expensive, The equipment is costly, and that's before you even start buying games for it. So if you're thinking about getting into VR, but then you hear that one of the more praised titles is getting shut down later this year, you might find yourself, you know, reviewing the situation, as Vegan would say. John Carmack, who until recently was a consultant for Meta on All Things VR, voiced his disappointment with this decision. He said that Meta is taking something away from the community and that never really goes over very well. And I agree with that. If you want to learn more about this, I recommend the article in The Verge titled Here's why Meta is shutting down Echo VR. The ViRGE also reports that Amazon is phasing out fifty three games and it's Luna cloud streaming service this month. So it's got this video game streaming service called Luna, and fifty three titles are going to leave in February over different dates. Back in December, Luna rotated out another forty titles. Amazon says the game strategy is to consistently switch out titles to keep the service fresh. That makes sense to a degree to me, but it does mean that gamers might find themselves focusing more on titles that are good for short sessions and don't involve long protracted storylines because you never know when that title is gonna go away. There's nothing like being halfway through saving the world and then finding out you can't access your game anymore, and what happens to a world y'all think of the world. Well, according to game Rant, Luna Plus has around a hundred ninety titles on its service, so fifty three games. That means we're looking at around a little more than a quarter of all the the game titles leaving the service this month. I'm curious how popular the services. I'll try to look into it. I'm thinking about doing an episode about the different cloud based gaming services out there and any information we have about how well they're performing. In some cases, we don't really have any information at all, but we've definitely come a long way since the Uyah. Finally, last week I talked about Nothing Forever. That's the AI generated Seinfeld episode simulator that was broadcasting on Twitch. It uses GPT to create the dialogue. Well, they had a real problem recently in that uh, the character Larry, the standing for Jerry Seinfeld, was doing his stand up and started spouting off transphobic and homophobic thoughts as part of his stand up routine. This should not have ever happened and twhich banned the channel for fourteen days as a result of It turns out the issue was that the GPT model they had been using, which was codenamed Da Vinci, had problems at some point, and the the model just stopped creating content, so you just had these empty rooms. So the team decided to roll back to an earlier version of GPT called CURI, and this one lacked the content moderation blinders that the Da Vinci model had, and so CURI was more lax and allowing problematic content to come through, and that's when we got the transphobic and homophobic content. So the creators say they do plan on coming back. They're going to put more content moderation features in place to prevent this sort of thing from happening, because obviously they don't want harmful content to come out from their little fun diversion. Uh, And that this was just a mistake based upon going to an earlier version of this language model. So it was really unfortunate. I'm glad that they're addressing it, and hopefully we don't see anything like this in the future. But it is one of the the downsides to AI that's pulling from across the internet to generate its content. All Right, that's it. That's the news for Tuesday, February seven three. Hope you're all well. I'm doing pretty well myself. If you would like to contact me with some future ideas for shows that I should do, you can do so on Twitter. The handle for the show is tech Stuff hs W, or if you prefer, you can download the I Heart Radio apps free to download, spree to use. You can type in tech stuff in a little search bar. It will navigate over to the tech stuff page and there you'll see a little microphone icon. If you click on that, you can leave a voice message up to thirty seconds in length and request your topic of choice and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.