Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. He there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio. And how the tech are you. It's time for the tech news for Thursday, February second, twenty twenty three into February. Already on Tuesday, I mentioned that this week has a lot of tech companies holding earnings calls and sharing with their investors news about the company's performance. Tuesday's episode went out before Snap, the company behind Snapchat, held its call. But once that call did happen, things did not go so well. Also, things will start to sound a little bit topsy turvy as we talked through these first couple of stories. All right, so what did Snap have to report? Well, first, it's twenty two Q four results, because these earnings calls are for the end of last year. Showed that revenue was up slightly compared to Q four twenty one, So year over year earnings were slightly up or revenue was slightly up. That's good, right, But Snap has also phase challenges when generating revenue, largely due to the digital ad market decreasing as companies across all industries are watching costs. This is what happens during periods of economic uncertainty and recession. And while revenue grew year over year, it was at a rate of twelve percent, which was slower than what the company had estimated for two. So remember, it's not good enough for a company to generate one point three billion dollars in revenue. You also have to make sure you're generating more revenue than you did before, and that you're doing it at a significant rate if you want to keep your investors happy. Now just to drop the snark for a bit. If your revenue isn't growing quickly but your costs are, that does actually become a really big problem. And Snap reported that it had a net loss last quarter of two eight million dollars. So it generated one point three billion in revenue, but it operated at a loss of two eighty eight million. Now you compare that to the net gain Snap had of twenty two point five million dollars a year previous. So at the end of one they had a twenty two point five million dollar net profit. Then you know this past quarter it was a two million dollar net loss. That is bad. And what Snap had to say next really made investors unhappy that as of right now, Snap is seeing revenue for the first quarter of twenty three at a seven percent decline compared to last year. It's really bad news when the number doesn't go up enough, but even worse news when the number actually goes into negative territory. So Snap is hitting a real rough patch right now. Last year saw four straight quarters of losses, and you can't deny that Snap faces fierce competition in the social platform space, both from enormous, well established companies like Meta and relatively younger juggernauts like TikTok. We have more to say about both of those companies anyway. Snapstock dropped from around eleven dollars fifty cents per share on Tuesday two below ten dollars per share by Wednesday, although as I was writing this episode, there was a little bit of a recovery and it was trading at about ten dollars thirty six cents per share when I started to record this episode. Then on Wednesday yesterday, we got Meta's earnings call, and things went a little differently for Meta than they did for Snap. Now. On the news front, it was kind of a mixed bag. Meta post declining sales for the third quarter in a row and a twenty two Q four revenue of thirty two point two billion dollars. That's how much they brought in in revenue at last quarter. However, that was down four point five from but even though it was down from one, that thirty two point two billion dollars in revenue was still higher than what Wall Street investors had estimated it was going to be. So Meta didn't do as well as last year, but it did better than what investors had predicted, and I guess that makes all the difference. Now, the company did also post a profit of four point seven billion dollars for last quarter. That's a heck of a chunk of change. It is still below what some analysts expected were some who are thinking it was going to be as much as six billion, But the company also revealed it had drastically reduced spending and has cut its estimation for its three expenses. So originally Meta estimated that it was going to spend somewhere between ninety four billion and one billion dollars this year. Now the company says no, it's gonna be closer to eighty nine billion to nine five billion now I've got to admit I cannot wrap my head around even just one billion dollars, let alone these astronomical amounts, So it starts to just get conceptual to me. I can't I can't really apply any meaning to it. If you told me that I was going to lose eighty nine billion dollars versus ninety four billion dollars, I'd probably be like, that's more than I will ever see in my lifetime. So it really doesn't matter between the two. But for a company like Meta, obviously it does matter, and were over to the investors it does matter. Zuckerberg also mentioned that Meta is pushing AI innovation that will have a big impact on business in the future, and Meta saw growth in its user base. They passed the two billion daily active users in Q four. That is phenomenal. Remember for a while, well specific platforms have been seeing a decline, and I don't know if they broke it out, if this was just Facebook that saw two billion daily active users, or if this was across the company. I didn't see that in the little earnings report I was reading. I'm sure they did break it out in the call, but the article I read did not Zuckerberg also said that three will be a year in which Meta focuses on efficiency that can be code for cost cutting measures, including more layoffs. It's definitely going to include a change in their data center strategy because Meta has announced it's going to cancel a multiple data center projects. In that earnings call and after hours trading, the company stock price increased by twenty percent. So yeah, dramatic difference between Snap. Snap saw a drop in its stock price, met Us saw a big boost after its earnings call, even though both companies reported disappointing results for the last quarter. It just shows that people view this very, very differently. Today we're gonna get more earnings call reports from Amazon, Alphabet and Apple, so I'm sure I will mention a little bit of that next week. Now. I did mention TikTok earlier, and that has often been cited as one of the biggest players and biggest competitors in the social platform space, but it's also been facing increasing scrutiny and criticism from various US leaders, including Senator Michael Bennett from Colorado. Bennett's sent a letter to Apple and to Google as both companies to remove TikTok from their respective app stores. And you might wonder why, Well, Bennett wrote, quote TikTok's vast influence and aggressive data collection pose a specific threat to US national security because of its parent companies obligations under Chinese law end quote. So what Bennett is referring to is a law in China that places obligations on all Chinese companies and citizens to assist in matters of intelligence gathering espionage work. In other words, if you have a way of getting details on one of China's um adversaries, maybe rivals other nations, if you want to just be really generic, you're supposed to pass that on to the Chinese government. And so Bennett's argument is similar to other ones we have heard in the past that because TikTok's parent company, which is Byte Dance, is a Chinese company, and because you have this policy in China, then it stands to reason that Bye Dance could use TikTok to further Chinese intelligence operations, and that perhaps that has already been happening. Generally speaking, the government of one country it's never too keen to open the doors to another country's intelligence operations. That's considered bad if you just open up the door and let all the spies come in and steal all the info, or at least get a good look at it. Meanwhile, the Biden administration has been in negotiations with TikTok business leaders to try and craft away from the company to operate within the US while still assuring the US government that it's not funneling tons of information to Chinese intelligence and other U s leaders meanwhile are proposing or passing legislation that is banning TikTok, at least from government owned devices, and I've heard that there are a few schools that have done this as well. So we're not at a point where it's like a nationwide ban on TikTok full stop, but we're kind of dancing close to that. And if you end up, you know, compelling Apple and Google to remove TikTok from their app stores, then it's it's not technically a ban on TikTok, but if you can't get it, then it amounts to very much the same sort of thing. All Right, we're gonna take a quick break. When we come back, We've got some more news stories to talk about. We're back, and I've got a couple of Google related stories to cover. One is that a collection of workers whose job is to rate search results are protesting their pay. So Google does this where they pay really the contract with another company to have people review search results in order to improve Google's performance over time so that search results become more relevant and compelling. And Google guarantees its own employees and contract workers who are working thirty hours or more a minimum wage of fifteen dollars per hour. But the folks who are doing this search results rating are technically working for another company called Appen Limited, and it contracts with Google in order to provide this this work to the company, and these contract workers are getting less than fifteen dollars per hour. Plus they are frequently finding themselves scheduled for less than thirty hours, and that means they dip below the cut off where they would receive the same benefits of a Google temporary contract or vendor employee also known as TVC workers. TVC benefits include stuff like healthcare and tuition reimbursement. So not only are these contractors receiving less than the minimum wage of other Google contractors, they also find themselves ineligible for these Google benefits. Many of these workers have traveled to Google HQ in order to protest this situation. They've received some support from other contractors who work with Google, and I hope it all works out. But we're also in an economy where companies like Google are famously laying off thousands of employees right now, so it might be very much an upheld battle. Alphabet, Google's parent company, has some AI projects in the works that appear to be at least in part a response to the rise of chat GPT, So we'll talk more about chat GPT later in this episode as well. But there's this general concern that chat GPT can make web searches moot, you know, irrelevant, at least for a lot of different topics. So instead of searching for a web page that might be able to answer a question you have, you instead just ask something like chat GPT and you would get the answer directly. That would be cobbled together by all the different sources on the web that this particular tool uses, and that would have a massive impact on Google because Google depends upon ad revenue in its search results for a lot of the overall revenue for the company. Reportedly, Google is developing its own chat bot called apprentice Bard. It hasn't been released to the public, but according to c NBC, Google employees are testing out apprentice Bard internally. These AI projects don't actually sound like they're that new inside Google, but rather now Google is putting a new emphasis on specific projects, including apprentice Bard, potentially as a response to the rise of chat GPT that that chat GPT represents a potential existential threat for Google's business. Now, all of this is interesting, and it's also kind of concerning to me in many ways. It's a manifestation of the concept of the semantic web. So the semantic web I idea was this concept of a futuristic version of accessing the web where your experience is totally unique to you. It's not you going to the same web pages as everybody else. Instead, your web browser actually learns more about you the more you use it, and it learns how to gather information and present it in a way that grows increasingly more relevant and digestible to you as you use it. So ultimately, instead of using your browser to search topic and then visit specific web pages to get an answer, it curates and arranges information from across the entire Internet in order to present it to you in a way that works best for your needs. Now, this is a much less complex level of of answering questions with chat GPT, but it is a similar idea. It's just not nearly as sophisticated as the concept of semantic web is. But it's doing a similar thing. It's pulling information from across the web and then presenting it to you generatively. It is creating that answer as you ask questions, and presumably apprentice bar is doing a very similar thing. But this comes with some really big potential problems. Uh. One of them is that, as I said, Google relies on those digital ad spends in search result in order to get revenue. So if Google ends up supplying its own alternative to the traditional web search, then the company has to figure out a different way to generate income. Do you serve ads against responses? I guess you could do that. I mean, there's nothing saying that you couldn't, but I don't know if that would end up generating the same kind of revenue that the traditional ad search ad income does. But even bigger than that problem is a wider ranging issue of web page owners. So if no one is being listed in search results anymore, and there are no more users that are clicking on links in order to visit your web page, then you might see your own ad revenue drop incredibly low. Right, Because a lot of websites out there depend upon search engine traffic to bring visitors in. I mean, there's this whole area of marketing called search engine optimization that's all about getting that that sweet position in search results so that more people visit your site. Well, if search results just go away because people aren't using search anymore, they're asking questions directly to a tool like apprentice bard or chat gpt, then they're never going to any of these sites. They're not even seeing the links. They don't even know where the information they're getting came from, right because chat gpt at least doesn't cited sources, So you wouldn't even know to go to this specific web page to learn more about the thing you just asked. You would just keep asking the tool to get you more information and to clarify things, which then means that these web pages, if they get a huge drop in revenue, maybe the companies go out of business and then the web pages ceased to exist. And if that happens, then tools like chat, GPT, and apprentice bard will have fewer and fewer sources to pull information from, which means those tools will actually get worse over time if all this happens, so it becomes a really big domino effect. At least that's one potential possibility. That's how I see things possibly evolving if this continues. Now, there are a lot of people who are way smarter than I am who are are presumably working on this, So it may very well be that all of my concerns are completely unfounded. It's just my first reaction. Two learning more about what's going on here, and then one more Google story. Actually this is for both Google and Apple. Both companies are facing renewed pressure from the US government to change how they handle their policies around their respective app stores. The Biden administration has recommended Congress order these companies to change. There's those app store policies, and they range from things like how Apple and Google typically required developers to use their respective in house payment systems. Like Apple requires that iOS apps if they have in app transactions, that they have to go through Apple's payment system in most cases, and then Apple gets a cut of every transaction. Similar thing for Google now. Apple in the past has sort of complied with this kind of request, and I say sort of because Apple's m O was to try and make it as inconvenient and as expensive as possible for a developer to use an alternative payment system rather than use the one that Apple relies upon. And while Google has allowed Android users to side load apps, meaning that you could go into your Android devices settings and you could change some options that would allow you to download Android apps that are offered outside of the official Google store, Apple has resisted doing that for a very long time. But even as Apple has shown moves to budge on that front. The argument is that these two companies are overwhelmingly dominating the app marketplace for mobile and the Biden administration argues that there needs to be some increased competition and that would be a very good thing. Like if other companies could have their own app stores where iOS or Android users could go to this alternative app store and get innovative apps that aren't covered or are carried by either Apple or Google. That would be a good thing. It's increased consumer choice. Apple and Google both argue that this introduces dangers with malware, which is true it does um although we've also seen malware creep its way into official Apple and Google um UH operations, so you know that's a thing. There's also the matter that Apple in particular has a rather mysterious process for evaluating and approving apps before allowing them in the App Store, and that there is a lack of transparency in how Apple does this, and both Google and Apple have faced criticism in the past that the companies have promoted their own in house apps over those from independent developers who have created apps that do something similar to an official Apple or Google app. Now, it is important to remember that Biden, while he is the President of the United States, is not allowed to make laws himself. He can't do that. That is Congress's job. That's why the Biden administration has sent this recommendation to Congress. And while we've seen some proposed legislation from folks like Senator Amy Klobuchar that addressed some of these concerns in the past, those proposals never actually progressed to the point where leaders put it up for a vote. Now that might change. With the President weighing in on this. We'll have to see. Okay, we're gonna take another quick break. When we come back, I've got a few more news items to cover. We're back, and we're gonna chat about chat GPT a little bit more so. Open Ai, which is the company behind chat gpt, has now launched chat gpt Plus. It's in a limited launch program right now, and this is a subscription service that charges twenty bucks a month. And seeing as how the basic version of chat gpt is free to play with, what does that twenty dollars a month actually get you. Well. According to open a I, subscribers will be able to access chat gpt anytime they like, even during times of peak demand. Whereas people who are using the free version may occasionally encounter a message that tells them the service is too busy to accommodate them and they need to try again later. Subscribers will not get that message. They will be given priority. Subscribers are also supposed to see better response time from the app with viewer delay, so it's kind of a a new and improved version of the service, and in the future, when open ai introduces new features, the subscribers are supposed to be the first to get a chance to use them. Now, I'm not sure if these benefits are going to be worthwhile to the average chat GPT user. But the folks who are in the field of AI research, or they're in just R and D in general, or some developers out there, I could see this being a justifiable expense. PC World reports that despite the fact that PC sales have dropped drastically in recent months, a m D S CPU and GPU chips have not dropped in price, And you might wonder why is that. If DeMay and has dropped, why aren't these chips, why are they getting cheaper? Well. In an earnings call with investors earlier this week, a m D S CEO revealed that it's because the company is purposefully holding back on shipping more chips to the market. That they've manufactured lots more chips, but they're just holding them an inventory and they're really controlling the supply that gets out two retailers, so they are keeping the supply low. If a m D doesn't ship the stuff they make, then they can try to counteract the drop in demand by obviously limiting supply, and apparently the company plans to continue this strategy through the beginning of this year, though reportedly not quite as as strict as they had at the end of last year, and it makes good business sense, but it is likely to be frustrating to consumers, particularly gamers, who are hoping that the decline and cryptocurrency mining and the drop in peace SEE sales would mean that they would finally be able to get their hands on a great GPU for a great price. Instead, due to several factors, including in Vidio's most recent generation of GPUs, which underperformed in the market, last generation hardware is still pretty expensive. I should also add, it's not as ridiculously expensive as it was back when folks were still using GPUs to mine ethereum. Ethereum has since migrated to a proof of steak model instead of a proof of work model. Anyway, with all the various factors that play, it's very difficult to predict where prices are going to go. So I guess you'all out there who are looking to buy a new CPU or a new GPU really should just keep your eyes peeled because you never know when companies will release more inventory in order to drive more sales. Um It's hard to say, so just be patient, or if you can't wait, just know that, yeah, this was all done by design. Last year, Netflix revealed that one of its strategies to help deal with some corporate setbacks was to cut down on account sharing. Netflix has already introduced away for account holders to add kind of like a secondary account that they can then share with someone outside of their immediate household. They pay a slight increase in their own monthly subscription fee, but then they can share an additional account to someone. But how is Netflix actually going to detect and stop account sharing? Well, according to sky News, Netflix plans to associate Netflix accounts with things like IP addresses and device i d s, So as people connect to their account, Netflix wild monitor what the IP addresses and what the device i d s are for the devices used to connect to Netflix, and then use that to establish where the home base is for that specific account. Then, should someone attempt to access this account from an unrecognized device I D or IP address, Netflix will send a essentially a two factor authentication login prompt to the primary account holders phone or email. Now that means that they're going to receive a message with a code that has to be entered before you can access that Netflix account. So the thought is this will make it inconvenient for say that slacker college student to log into their parents account, because it also means that that college student has to call or text mommy or daddy to get that authentication code. And it also means mommy or Daddy is going to be getting these notifications whenever that slacker kid is trying to watch stranger things or whatever. Now, I think this is a decent approach to addressing the situation. For folks who have say more than one home, they can just make sure that they put in the authentication code when they get the prompt when they're I don't know, summering in the Hampton's or winnering in the keys or whatever it is. Rich people do. I want to know what rich people do. Please make me a rich person. And now for a dramatic story that unfolded in Australia. A mining company that contracted with a different company in order to ship some equipment across part of Australia UM found itself in a spot of trouble, which is putting it lightly so. The equipment included a density gauge and this thing was going to travel nearly one thousand miles from pick up to two uh storage. This particular device contained within it a pellet of caesium one thirty seven, or if you prefer kaisi um one seven, if we're going to pronounce caesar as kaiser as we should. But anyway, it's it's radioactive. Caesium one thirty seven is radioactive, and it's in fact it's radioactive enough to cause superficial damage if you have brief exposure to small amounts of it, and much more serious issues with prolonged exposure. So this is dangerous stuff. According to Andrew Robertson, the Chief Health Officer for Australia, being exposed to trace amounts of caesium one seven is like getting ten X rays in an hour. That's crazy. Well here's the even crazier thing. Alright, So during transport, this device, this density gauge apparently broke, and it broke to the point where the pellet of caesium one seven tumbled out of not just the device but the transport vehicle and fell out of the vehicle. And remember this journey was nearly one thousand miles long. This pellet is the size of a p like is a tiny, tiny pellet of radioactive material. Then we got this big search effort where vehicles that were outfitted with radiation detection equipment traveled the route this one thousand mile nearly one is a mile route in order to try and track down this tiny piece of radioactive material. And surprisingly enough it worked. One of these vehicles actually picked up some readings and began to narrow in on the location and found that tiny little piece of radioactive material. Like this astounds me. It just really shows how sensitive that that radiation detection equipment is in order to start picking up on something while the vehicle that was traveling and searching was going up like almost like maybe a little bit more than forty miles per hour, So that's phenomenal. And yeah, they found it. So now it's being uh encased in safe material and then it'll be transported for long term storage. And there's a chance that the mining company and the transportation company could face some fines for uh improperly handling hazardous material. However, in Australia, such violations carry a maximum fine of seven hundred dollars per day in which it happened, and it may have happened over the course of a couple of weeks, so it's really not that much money when you look at it in a big picture, I mean, especially when you consider the nature of what was misplaced. But I mean that's the law in Australia, which maybe will see change in the future as a result of this particular incident. At least it all turned out okay. And finally, an article in the a V Club alerted me to a ridiculous twitch stream that's been going on since December of last year, and it's called Nothing Forever. It is an AI generated, animated and endless Seinfeld episode. Uh so it's it's like a simulated Seinfeld episode. It's not taking actual Seinfeld episodes as these little computer generated characters who are stand ins for characters from the sitcom Seinfeld. And it's using GPT generated dialogue and also at a computer generated laugh track. So I checked it out, um, and the anime characters are very low polygon crudely kind of animated characters. You know who is supposed to be who. They also have different names from the official Seinfeld characters, So you have Larry instead of Jerry, You've got Fred instead of George, You've got Yvan instead of Elaine. I hear that Kramer is in there too. I don't know what his alternate name is because he did not show up when I was watching the stream. Um. They also include little bits of Larry's stand up routines, so it's like Jerry's stand up routines in early Seinfeld episodes. And most of the time what is being said makes very little sense, like the sentences are coherent, but the situations are simultaneously banal and absurd. And then you get that laugh track sound that pops up, usually right after something not at all funny has been said, which just makes it even more bizarre. The cynical of those out there may say that this is just like a modern sitcom. You get laugh tracks that spike after things that are not funny have been said. I think my favorite bit from when I was watching was a scene where Larry told Fred about how the pet store down the street had supposedly sold a unicorn, and they wondered if that was true, and then they wondered what kind of conversations they would have with each other if they had bought the unicorn, and then we got a laugh track. And I don't know if I love it or hate it, but yeah, it's up on Twitch. It's called Nothing Forever and you can watch as much of it as you like um and maybe your tolerance will be greater than mine. I only sat for about maybe five or ten minutes, and then I was like, I got I've got work to do. I can't I can't just gawk in awe at this thing. All right, that's it for the tech News for Thursday, February second three. I hope you are all well. If you have suggestions for future topics on tech Stuff, reach out to me. You can do that on almost a Twitch, but no on Twitter, and the handle for the show is tech Stuff h s W. Or you can download the I Heart Radio app for free. Navigate over to the tech stuff page by putting it in the little search field and you'll see a little microphone icon. If you click on that, you can leave a voice message up to thirty seconds in length. Let me know what you would like to hear in a future episode, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an I heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio up, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. He there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio. And how the tech are you. It's time for the tech news for Thursday, February second, twenty twenty three into February. Already on Tuesday, I mentioned that this week has a lot of tech companies holding earnings calls and sharing with their investors news about the company's performance. Tuesday's episode went out before Snap, the company behind Snapchat, held its call. But once that call did happen, things did not go so well. Also, things will start to sound a little bit topsy turvy as we talked through these first couple of stories. All right, so what did Snap have to report? Well, first, it's twenty two Q four results, because these earnings calls are for the end of last year. Showed that revenue was up slightly compared to Q four twenty one, So year over year earnings were slightly up or revenue was slightly up. That's good, right, But Snap has also phase challenges when generating revenue, largely due to the digital ad market decreasing as companies across all industries are watching costs. This is what happens during periods of economic uncertainty and recession. And while revenue grew year over year, it was at a rate of twelve percent, which was slower than what the company had estimated for two. So remember, it's not good enough for a company to generate one point three billion dollars in revenue. You also have to make sure you're generating more revenue than you did before, and that you're doing it at a significant rate if you want to keep your investors happy. Now just to drop the snark for a bit. If your revenue isn't growing quickly but your costs are, that does actually become a really big problem. And Snap reported that it had a net loss last quarter of two eight million dollars. So it generated one point three billion in revenue, but it operated at a loss of two eighty eight million. Now you compare that to the net gain Snap had of twenty two point five million dollars a year previous. So at the end of one they had a twenty two point five million dollar net profit. Then you know this past quarter it was a two million dollar net loss. That is bad. And what Snap had to say next really made investors unhappy that as of right now, Snap is seeing revenue for the first quarter of twenty three at a seven percent decline compared to last year. It's really bad news when the number doesn't go up enough, but even worse news when the number actually goes into negative territory. So Snap is hitting a real rough patch right now. Last year saw four straight quarters of losses, and you can't deny that Snap faces fierce competition in the social platform space, both from enormous, well established companies like Meta and relatively younger juggernauts like TikTok. We have more to say about both of those companies anyway. Snapstock dropped from around eleven dollars fifty cents per share on Tuesday two below ten dollars per share by Wednesday, although as I was writing this episode, there was a little bit of a recovery and it was trading at about ten dollars thirty six cents per share when I started to record this episode. Then on Wednesday yesterday, we got Meta's earnings call, and things went a little differently for Meta than they did for Snap. Now. On the news front, it was kind of a mixed bag. Meta post declining sales for the third quarter in a row and a twenty two Q four revenue of thirty two point two billion dollars. That's how much they brought in in revenue at last quarter. However, that was down four point five from but even though it was down from one, that thirty two point two billion dollars in revenue was still higher than what Wall Street investors had estimated it was going to be. So Meta didn't do as well as last year, but it did better than what investors had predicted, and I guess that makes all the difference. Now, the company did also post a profit of four point seven billion dollars for last quarter. That's a heck of a chunk of change. It is still below what some analysts expected were some who are thinking it was going to be as much as six billion, But the company also revealed it had drastically reduced spending and has cut its estimation for its three expenses. So originally Meta estimated that it was going to spend somewhere between ninety four billion and one billion dollars this year. Now the company says no, it's gonna be closer to eighty nine billion to nine five billion now I've got to admit I cannot wrap my head around even just one billion dollars, let alone these astronomical amounts, So it starts to just get conceptual to me. I can't I can't really apply any meaning to it. If you told me that I was going to lose eighty nine billion dollars versus ninety four billion dollars, I'd probably be like, that's more than I will ever see in my lifetime. So it really doesn't matter between the two. But for a company like Meta, obviously it does matter, and were over to the investors it does matter. Zuckerberg also mentioned that Meta is pushing AI innovation that will have a big impact on business in the future, and Meta saw growth in its user base. They passed the two billion daily active users in Q four. That is phenomenal. Remember for a while, well specific platforms have been seeing a decline, and I don't know if they broke it out, if this was just Facebook that saw two billion daily active users, or if this was across the company. I didn't see that in the little earnings report I was reading. I'm sure they did break it out in the call, but the article I read did not Zuckerberg also said that three will be a year in which Meta focuses on efficiency that can be code for cost cutting measures, including more layoffs. It's definitely going to include a change in their data center strategy because Meta has announced it's going to cancel a multiple data center projects. In that earnings call and after hours trading, the company stock price increased by twenty percent. So yeah, dramatic difference between Snap. Snap saw a drop in its stock price, met Us saw a big boost after its earnings call, even though both companies reported disappointing results for the last quarter. It just shows that people view this very, very differently. Today we're gonna get more earnings call reports from Amazon, Alphabet and Apple, so I'm sure I will mention a little bit of that next week. Now. I did mention TikTok earlier, and that has often been cited as one of the biggest players and biggest competitors in the social platform space, but it's also been facing increasing scrutiny and criticism from various US leaders, including Senator Michael Bennett from Colorado. Bennett's sent a letter to Apple and to Google as both companies to remove TikTok from their respective app stores. And you might wonder why, Well, Bennett wrote, quote TikTok's vast influence and aggressive data collection pose a specific threat to US national security because of its parent companies obligations under Chinese law end quote. So what Bennett is referring to is a law in China that places obligations on all Chinese companies and citizens to assist in matters of intelligence gathering espionage work. In other words, if you have a way of getting details on one of China's um adversaries, maybe rivals other nations, if you want to just be really generic, you're supposed to pass that on to the Chinese government. And so Bennett's argument is similar to other ones we have heard in the past that because TikTok's parent company, which is Byte Dance, is a Chinese company, and because you have this policy in China, then it stands to reason that Bye Dance could use TikTok to further Chinese intelligence operations, and that perhaps that has already been happening. Generally speaking, the government of one country it's never too keen to open the doors to another country's intelligence operations. That's considered bad if you just open up the door and let all the spies come in and steal all the info, or at least get a good look at it. Meanwhile, the Biden administration has been in negotiations with TikTok business leaders to try and craft away from the company to operate within the US while still assuring the US government that it's not funneling tons of information to Chinese intelligence and other U s leaders meanwhile are proposing or passing legislation that is banning TikTok, at least from government owned devices, and I've heard that there are a few schools that have done this as well. So we're not at a point where it's like a nationwide ban on TikTok full stop, but we're kind of dancing close to that. And if you end up, you know, compelling Apple and Google to remove TikTok from their app stores, then it's it's not technically a ban on TikTok, but if you can't get it, then it amounts to very much the same sort of thing. All Right, we're gonna take a quick break. When we come back, We've got some more news stories to talk about. We're back, and I've got a couple of Google related stories to cover. One is that a collection of workers whose job is to rate search results are protesting their pay. So Google does this where they pay really the contract with another company to have people review search results in order to improve Google's performance over time so that search results become more relevant and compelling. And Google guarantees its own employees and contract workers who are working thirty hours or more a minimum wage of fifteen dollars per hour. But the folks who are doing this search results rating are technically working for another company called Appen Limited, and it contracts with Google in order to provide this this work to the company, and these contract workers are getting less than fifteen dollars per hour. Plus they are frequently finding themselves scheduled for less than thirty hours, and that means they dip below the cut off where they would receive the same benefits of a Google temporary contract or vendor employee also known as TVC workers. TVC benefits include stuff like healthcare and tuition reimbursement. So not only are these contractors receiving less than the minimum wage of other Google contractors, they also find themselves ineligible for these Google benefits. Many of these workers have traveled to Google HQ in order to protest this situation. They've received some support from other contractors who work with Google, and I hope it all works out. But we're also in an economy where companies like Google are famously laying off thousands of employees right now, so it might be very much an upheld battle. Alphabet, Google's parent company, has some AI projects in the works that appear to be at least in part a response to the rise of chat GPT, So we'll talk more about chat GPT later in this episode as well. But there's this general concern that chat GPT can make web searches moot, you know, irrelevant, at least for a lot of different topics. So instead of searching for a web page that might be able to answer a question you have, you instead just ask something like chat GPT and you would get the answer directly. That would be cobbled together by all the different sources on the web that this particular tool uses, and that would have a massive impact on Google because Google depends upon ad revenue in its search results for a lot of the overall revenue for the company. Reportedly, Google is developing its own chat bot called apprentice Bard. It hasn't been released to the public, but according to c NBC, Google employees are testing out apprentice Bard internally. These AI projects don't actually sound like they're that new inside Google, but rather now Google is putting a new emphasis on specific projects, including apprentice Bard, potentially as a response to the rise of chat GPT that that chat GPT represents a potential existential threat for Google's business. Now, all of this is interesting, and it's also kind of concerning to me in many ways. It's a manifestation of the concept of the semantic web. So the semantic web I idea was this concept of a futuristic version of accessing the web where your experience is totally unique to you. It's not you going to the same web pages as everybody else. Instead, your web browser actually learns more about you the more you use it, and it learns how to gather information and present it in a way that grows increasingly more relevant and digestible to you as you use it. So ultimately, instead of using your browser to search topic and then visit specific web pages to get an answer, it curates and arranges information from across the entire Internet in order to present it to you in a way that works best for your needs. Now, this is a much less complex level of of answering questions with chat GPT, but it is a similar idea. It's just not nearly as sophisticated as the concept of semantic web is. But it's doing a similar thing. It's pulling information from across the web and then presenting it to you generatively. It is creating that answer as you ask questions, and presumably apprentice bar is doing a very similar thing. But this comes with some really big potential problems. Uh. One of them is that, as I said, Google relies on those digital ad spends in search result in order to get revenue. So if Google ends up supplying its own alternative to the traditional web search, then the company has to figure out a different way to generate income. Do you serve ads against responses? I guess you could do that. I mean, there's nothing saying that you couldn't, but I don't know if that would end up generating the same kind of revenue that the traditional ad search ad income does. But even bigger than that problem is a wider ranging issue of web page owners. So if no one is being listed in search results anymore, and there are no more users that are clicking on links in order to visit your web page, then you might see your own ad revenue drop incredibly low. Right, Because a lot of websites out there depend upon search engine traffic to bring visitors in. I mean, there's this whole area of marketing called search engine optimization that's all about getting that that sweet position in search results so that more people visit your site. Well, if search results just go away because people aren't using search anymore, they're asking questions directly to a tool like apprentice bard or chat gpt, then they're never going to any of these sites. They're not even seeing the links. They don't even know where the information they're getting came from, right because chat gpt at least doesn't cited sources, So you wouldn't even know to go to this specific web page to learn more about the thing you just asked. You would just keep asking the tool to get you more information and to clarify things, which then means that these web pages, if they get a huge drop in revenue, maybe the companies go out of business and then the web pages ceased to exist. And if that happens, then tools like chat, GPT, and apprentice bard will have fewer and fewer sources to pull information from, which means those tools will actually get worse over time if all this happens, so it becomes a really big domino effect. At least that's one potential possibility. That's how I see things possibly evolving if this continues. Now, there are a lot of people who are way smarter than I am who are are presumably working on this, So it may very well be that all of my concerns are completely unfounded. It's just my first reaction. Two learning more about what's going on here, and then one more Google story. Actually this is for both Google and Apple. Both companies are facing renewed pressure from the US government to change how they handle their policies around their respective app stores. The Biden administration has recommended Congress order these companies to change. There's those app store policies, and they range from things like how Apple and Google typically required developers to use their respective in house payment systems. Like Apple requires that iOS apps if they have in app transactions, that they have to go through Apple's payment system in most cases, and then Apple gets a cut of every transaction. Similar thing for Google now. Apple in the past has sort of complied with this kind of request, and I say sort of because Apple's m O was to try and make it as inconvenient and as expensive as possible for a developer to use an alternative payment system rather than use the one that Apple relies upon. And while Google has allowed Android users to side load apps, meaning that you could go into your Android devices settings and you could change some options that would allow you to download Android apps that are offered outside of the official Google store, Apple has resisted doing that for a very long time. But even as Apple has shown moves to budge on that front. The argument is that these two companies are overwhelmingly dominating the app marketplace for mobile and the Biden administration argues that there needs to be some increased competition and that would be a very good thing. Like if other companies could have their own app stores where iOS or Android users could go to this alternative app store and get innovative apps that aren't covered or are carried by either Apple or Google. That would be a good thing. It's increased consumer choice. Apple and Google both argue that this introduces dangers with malware, which is true it does um although we've also seen malware creep its way into official Apple and Google um UH operations, so you know that's a thing. There's also the matter that Apple in particular has a rather mysterious process for evaluating and approving apps before allowing them in the App Store, and that there is a lack of transparency in how Apple does this, and both Google and Apple have faced criticism in the past that the companies have promoted their own in house apps over those from independent developers who have created apps that do something similar to an official Apple or Google app. Now, it is important to remember that Biden, while he is the President of the United States, is not allowed to make laws himself. He can't do that. That is Congress's job. That's why the Biden administration has sent this recommendation to Congress. And while we've seen some proposed legislation from folks like Senator Amy Klobuchar that addressed some of these concerns in the past, those proposals never actually progressed to the point where leaders put it up for a vote. Now that might change. With the President weighing in on this. We'll have to see. Okay, we're gonna take another quick break. When we come back, I've got a few more news items to cover. We're back, and we're gonna chat about chat GPT a little bit more so. Open Ai, which is the company behind chat gpt, has now launched chat gpt Plus. It's in a limited launch program right now, and this is a subscription service that charges twenty bucks a month. And seeing as how the basic version of chat gpt is free to play with, what does that twenty dollars a month actually get you. Well. According to open a I, subscribers will be able to access chat gpt anytime they like, even during times of peak demand. Whereas people who are using the free version may occasionally encounter a message that tells them the service is too busy to accommodate them and they need to try again later. Subscribers will not get that message. They will be given priority. Subscribers are also supposed to see better response time from the app with viewer delay, so it's kind of a a new and improved version of the service, and in the future, when open ai introduces new features, the subscribers are supposed to be the first to get a chance to use them. Now, I'm not sure if these benefits are going to be worthwhile to the average chat GPT user. But the folks who are in the field of AI research, or they're in just R and D in general, or some developers out there, I could see this being a justifiable expense. PC World reports that despite the fact that PC sales have dropped drastically in recent months, a m D S CPU and GPU chips have not dropped in price, And you might wonder why is that. If DeMay and has dropped, why aren't these chips, why are they getting cheaper? Well. In an earnings call with investors earlier this week, a m D S CEO revealed that it's because the company is purposefully holding back on shipping more chips to the market. That they've manufactured lots more chips, but they're just holding them an inventory and they're really controlling the supply that gets out two retailers, so they are keeping the supply low. If a m D doesn't ship the stuff they make, then they can try to counteract the drop in demand by obviously limiting supply, and apparently the company plans to continue this strategy through the beginning of this year, though reportedly not quite as as strict as they had at the end of last year, and it makes good business sense, but it is likely to be frustrating to consumers, particularly gamers, who are hoping that the decline and cryptocurrency mining and the drop in peace SEE sales would mean that they would finally be able to get their hands on a great GPU for a great price. Instead, due to several factors, including in Vidio's most recent generation of GPUs, which underperformed in the market, last generation hardware is still pretty expensive. I should also add, it's not as ridiculously expensive as it was back when folks were still using GPUs to mine ethereum. Ethereum has since migrated to a proof of steak model instead of a proof of work model. Anyway, with all the various factors that play, it's very difficult to predict where prices are going to go. So I guess you'all out there who are looking to buy a new CPU or a new GPU really should just keep your eyes peeled because you never know when companies will release more inventory in order to drive more sales. Um It's hard to say, so just be patient, or if you can't wait, just know that, yeah, this was all done by design. Last year, Netflix revealed that one of its strategies to help deal with some corporate setbacks was to cut down on account sharing. Netflix has already introduced away for account holders to add kind of like a secondary account that they can then share with someone outside of their immediate household. They pay a slight increase in their own monthly subscription fee, but then they can share an additional account to someone. But how is Netflix actually going to detect and stop account sharing? Well, according to sky News, Netflix plans to associate Netflix accounts with things like IP addresses and device i d s, So as people connect to their account, Netflix wild monitor what the IP addresses and what the device i d s are for the devices used to connect to Netflix, and then use that to establish where the home base is for that specific account. Then, should someone attempt to access this account from an unrecognized device I D or IP address, Netflix will send a essentially a two factor authentication login prompt to the primary account holders phone or email. Now that means that they're going to receive a message with a code that has to be entered before you can access that Netflix account. So the thought is this will make it inconvenient for say that slacker college student to log into their parents account, because it also means that that college student has to call or text mommy or daddy to get that authentication code. And it also means mommy or Daddy is going to be getting these notifications whenever that slacker kid is trying to watch stranger things or whatever. Now, I think this is a decent approach to addressing the situation. For folks who have say more than one home, they can just make sure that they put in the authentication code when they get the prompt when they're I don't know, summering in the Hampton's or winnering in the keys or whatever it is. Rich people do. I want to know what rich people do. Please make me a rich person. And now for a dramatic story that unfolded in Australia. A mining company that contracted with a different company in order to ship some equipment across part of Australia UM found itself in a spot of trouble, which is putting it lightly so. The equipment included a density gauge and this thing was going to travel nearly one thousand miles from pick up to two uh storage. This particular device contained within it a pellet of caesium one thirty seven, or if you prefer kaisi um one seven, if we're going to pronounce caesar as kaiser as we should. But anyway, it's it's radioactive. Caesium one thirty seven is radioactive, and it's in fact it's radioactive enough to cause superficial damage if you have brief exposure to small amounts of it, and much more serious issues with prolonged exposure. So this is dangerous stuff. According to Andrew Robertson, the Chief Health Officer for Australia, being exposed to trace amounts of caesium one seven is like getting ten X rays in an hour. That's crazy. Well here's the even crazier thing. Alright, So during transport, this device, this density gauge apparently broke, and it broke to the point where the pellet of caesium one seven tumbled out of not just the device but the transport vehicle and fell out of the vehicle. And remember this journey was nearly one thousand miles long. This pellet is the size of a p like is a tiny, tiny pellet of radioactive material. Then we got this big search effort where vehicles that were outfitted with radiation detection equipment traveled the route this one thousand mile nearly one is a mile route in order to try and track down this tiny piece of radioactive material. And surprisingly enough it worked. One of these vehicles actually picked up some readings and began to narrow in on the location and found that tiny little piece of radioactive material. Like this astounds me. It just really shows how sensitive that that radiation detection equipment is in order to start picking up on something while the vehicle that was traveling and searching was going up like almost like maybe a little bit more than forty miles per hour, So that's phenomenal. And yeah, they found it. So now it's being uh encased in safe material and then it'll be transported for long term storage. And there's a chance that the mining company and the transportation company could face some fines for uh improperly handling hazardous material. However, in Australia, such violations carry a maximum fine of seven hundred dollars per day in which it happened, and it may have happened over the course of a couple of weeks, so it's really not that much money when you look at it in a big picture, I mean, especially when you consider the nature of what was misplaced. But I mean that's the law in Australia, which maybe will see change in the future as a result of this particular incident. At least it all turned out okay. And finally, an article in the a V Club alerted me to a ridiculous twitch stream that's been going on since December of last year, and it's called Nothing Forever. It is an AI generated, animated and endless Seinfeld episode. Uh so it's it's like a simulated Seinfeld episode. It's not taking actual Seinfeld episodes as these little computer generated characters who are stand ins for characters from the sitcom Seinfeld. And it's using GPT generated dialogue and also at a computer generated laugh track. So I checked it out, um, and the anime characters are very low polygon crudely kind of animated characters. You know who is supposed to be who. They also have different names from the official Seinfeld characters, So you have Larry instead of Jerry, You've got Fred instead of George, You've got Yvan instead of Elaine. I hear that Kramer is in there too. I don't know what his alternate name is because he did not show up when I was watching the stream. Um. They also include little bits of Larry's stand up routines, so it's like Jerry's stand up routines in early Seinfeld episodes. And most of the time what is being said makes very little sense, like the sentences are coherent, but the situations are simultaneously banal and absurd. And then you get that laugh track sound that pops up, usually right after something not at all funny has been said, which just makes it even more bizarre. The cynical of those out there may say that this is just like a modern sitcom. You get laugh tracks that spike after things that are not funny have been said. I think my favorite bit from when I was watching was a scene where Larry told Fred about how the pet store down the street had supposedly sold a unicorn, and they wondered if that was true, and then they wondered what kind of conversations they would have with each other if they had bought the unicorn, and then we got a laugh track. And I don't know if I love it or hate it, but yeah, it's up on Twitch. It's called Nothing Forever and you can watch as much of it as you like um and maybe your tolerance will be greater than mine. I only sat for about maybe five or ten minutes, and then I was like, I got I've got work to do. I can't I can't just gawk in awe at this thing. All right, that's it for the tech News for Thursday, February second three. I hope you are all well. If you have suggestions for future topics on tech Stuff, reach out to me. You can do that on almost a Twitch, but no on Twitter, and the handle for the show is tech Stuff h s W. Or you can download the I Heart Radio app for free. Navigate over to the tech stuff page by putting it in the little search field and you'll see a little microphone icon. If you click on that, you can leave a voice message up to thirty seconds in length. Let me know what you would like to hear in a future episode, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an I heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio up, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.