Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the tech are you. Well, it's time for us to look back on some of the big tech stories that shaped the last twelve months. I always like to take some time at the end of a year to reflect back on what has happened, and this year, there was an awful lot of stuff going on. So we're just going to look at some of the big stories and headlines in tech in twenty twenty four. This is by no means an exhaustive list, and of course some of these stories continue to play out. Some of them are arguably not as big as ones that I left out of this list, But these were ones that I thought were kind of interesting because I feel like they're a commentary, no just on where we are in tech, but where we're going. But that's enough jibber jabber. We got a lot to get through. Let's get started, and where else to begin but to talk about AI. No one was surprised that artificial intelligence dominated the news cycle in twenty twenty four. Everyone said it was going to happen, because it was clear that that's how it was going to turn out, and it did. The gears were already turning in twenty twenty three. In fact, in late twenty twenty two, that's when AI really started to capture the public's attention. Generative AI in particular has received a ton of focus. Though this is a good time to remind all of y'all that generative AI is just one subset of artificial intelligence disciplines. Sometimes it can be easy to forget that, seeing as how much of our attention goes to generative AI. But there are lots of other types of AI. But one company that's always at the forefront of these conversation is open Ai. That's the company that's perhaps best known for chat GPT. Open ai began as a non profit organization a few years ago, and it was dedicated to the responsible and safe development and deployment of artificial intelligence with kind of an open approach. Thus the name like this idea that they were going to share their findings and research and knowledge with others in order to ensure that the AI that the company developed would ultimately be put to beneficial use with the lowest risk of harm, but that nonprofit would spawn a for profit arm because, as it turns out, AI is crazy expensive. Yo. I mean, R and D costs a lot, but just running the stuff you've already developed also costs a huge amount. And I've talked in the past about how AI applications typically require enormous amounts of compute power, and that stuff isn't free. In fact, in September of this year, New York Times reporters Mike Isaac and Aaron Griffith wrote a piece about how much money open ai was making versus how much it was spending, and the numbers are jaw dropping. The article is titled open ai is growing fast and burning through piles of money, and it published on September twenty seventh, twenty twenty four. In that piece, the authors revealed that open AI's revenue reached three hundred million dollars in August of this past year. Now that's a lot of cash, and the company overall expected a three point seven billion dollars in sales by the end of twenty twenty four. Now that's even more cash if I'm doing my math right. Let's see three point seven billion versus three hundred Yeah, no, that's a lot. However, this same company was on track to lose five billion dollars in operating costs. Even with all that in consideration, that's how expensive it is to run a cutting edge AI company. Some of that money, of course, went to normal overhead operations that any regular business would encounter, you know, stuff like salaries and office space and that kind of stuff. But the bulk of it presumably went to running operations and R and D work. Now. I say presumably, because, as Isaac and Griffith point out in that article, there were quote several large expenses not fully explained in the documents end quote. The cash churn prompted several pieces that were speculating that without a truly massive influx of cash from investors, open Ai could spend itself out of business. But then, like literally, the next week, headlines announced that open ai had brokeered a six point six billion dollar round of new investments. Covering the spread if you will. This would put the valuation of open Ai at around one hundred and fifty seven billion dollars, and the company predicted it would hit one hundred billion dollars in revenue by twenty twenty nine. Which might be the case, and investors might be eager enough to see that happen in order to, you know, like, they'll continue pouring truckloads of cash into the company at a rate that just outpaces open AI's spending habits in order to actually get to that destination. I always get nervous about stories like these because it's hard to believe that this is all sustainable. But I guess if folks are determined enough, then if they have access to enough resources, anything is possible. Now, Earlier this month, I talked about another story involving open Ai, one that has raised many concerns. Open Ai has signed a deal with the defense tech company and a Rill, which is a total keen reference. That company was founded by the creator of the Oculus VR headset, Palmer Lucky. Now, again, the original pitch for open ai is that it was meant to be an organization dedicated to the safe and responsible development of AI. So this announcement has caused a lot of concern with people in the AI space, including people who were formerly part of open ai itself. So specifically, these two companies are working to improve US military technology in order to defend against unpiloted aerial attacks. So you can think of it as all right, they're working to create systems that can identify target and bring down unmanned drones. Now, considering that the end of this year has also brought with it reports of mysterious drones flying over places like New Jersey and Pennsylvania and other areas, you could argue that there's a growing need for this kind of technology. But critics worry that the same tech could be used to identify target and bring down normal aircraft, you know, the kind that's actually piloted by a human being in the cockpit, And that definitely does not sound like it's a safe or responsible application for artificial intelligence, especially when you consider that AI is far from perfect. It can make some mistakes. Now, there's a lot more we could say about open AI, but let's move on to some other companies that made headlines that involve artificial intelligence. Now, one of those was in Vidia, which is perhaps best known as a company that designs graphics processing units or GPUs. Those are the things that gamers and some cryptominers really want to get hold of. Well, it turns out that parallel processing, which is what GPUs really specialize in, also happens to be really great for at least some AI processes, and so Nvidia has embraced the AI industry really. In Vidia now identifies itself as an AI chip maker and has turned out lots of chip designs meant to handle large AI compute loads. This has more than doubled Nvidia's value from the end of twenty twenty three to the end of twenty twenty four, which is huge because at the end of twenty twenty three, and Video was valued at one point two trillion dollars already. That was a two hundred and forty percent increase over what it had been in twenty twenty two. However, today, in twenty twenty four, and Vidia's value is at more than three trillion dollars. In fact, it puts in Vidia in the top three most valuable publicly traded companies, and depending upon when you're looking at that list, it typically falls right behind Apple and right in front of Microsoft. That kind of depends on which day you look at that list, because these numbers do shift around a lot. But yeah, Nvidia had a pretty huge year in twenty twenty four. Now that being said, as I record this episode which is on December nineteenth when I'm recording it. Just to be transparent, Nvidia is currently recovering from an overall market dip that saw shares of Nvidia drop by around fourteen percent, And when you're valued in the trillions, any single percent represents a whole lot of money, so that that represents a considerable drop, But the estimates I've seen recently seem to say that it's a very temporary situation. One more AI related story that I would like to touch on, keeping in mind that, of course there were countless other noteworthy AI stories the unfolded this past year is that twenty twenty four is the year where we started seeing companies incorporate processors meant to handle AI applications on the device level. So Open AI's business model largely focuses on companies and other customers using an Internet connection to tap into like massive server farms that have the awesome powers of AI processing. But another approach is to dedicate processors at the device level so that you can do AI implementations on your own computer, you know, or whatever other device. Earlier this year, I did an episode about the Yoga laptop from Lenovo that's a copilot plus PC and Copilot is Microsoft's AI product, and the laptop I talked about features an NPU that's a neural processing unit. So just as a GPU is optimized to process graphics, and NPU is optimized to handle AI applications. Now, there are several benefits to having AI native on a device, and the big ones really are security and privacy. With cloud based AI computing, there's always a risk of data breaches. You don't have full control over your information because it's being handled by a third party. There's also a risk that the provider you use might train future AI models on your information, and if that data includes proprietary information or trade secrets or something like that, that represents a huge security risk. And I bring it up because we have seen examples of AI agents revealing stuff that they shouldn't, stuff that involved other users of the AI agents. Where let's say person one is using the AI agent too, I don't know, plan out their insurance and then person two, while asking questions, happens to start getting information about Person one and the situations they're in that are leading to them to seeking these solutions to their insurance problem. That's a terrible, terrible privacy problem and a security problem for companies particularly. You don't want your trade secrets to become industry wide knowledge, so moving AI applications to the device level somewhat mollifies those concerns. Now, of course, you still have to practice good security protocols. You also have to maintain control of your device so that someone else doesn't get physical access to it and then is able to see it. But that's true no matter what. But the fear of some other company profiting off of your information or potentially leaking your data to others is greatly reduced. At least, I expect we'll continue to see more on device implementations of AI, and I'm not the only one making that. Guess Gartner predicts that all aipcs rather will make up like forty three percent of all PC shipments by twenty twenty five, and you know, by my calendar, we're nearly there. So we'll have to see if that becomes truth. Now, before we go to break, I mentioned earlier that Copilot is one of Microsoft's products. Microsoft was in the news a lot in twenty twenty four for a lot of different reasons, but one story focused on a different feature found in some Copilot plus PCs, and that is Microsoft Recall. So the company announced this feature in June of twenty twenty four, and the reaction was rather critical. To put it gently, Recall takes screenshots of your activities on your PC. These screenshots are searchable, and it's intended to make it easier for users to look back on their past activities in order to find like files or data or whatever. You know, if you've ever said, gosh, what was that website I visited where I found that awesome recipe or something like that, and you didn't bookmarket or whatever, screenshots is one way that you might use to try and track that information down by searching the database that's on your machine. Now, some folks worried right away that recall would be sending screenshots back to Microsoft, which obviously would represent a huge threat to both privacy and security. So imagine being an executive at a big company and working on an internal report only to find out that your computer has been screenshotting everything and then sending it off to Microsoft servers. That would surely violate company policies at the very least, But Microsoft was quick to state that the screenshots would not be sent over the Internet to any other location. They would live squarely on the native device. However, this did not stop the criticism. Now, originally recall was apparently unencrypted, meaning it would store these screenshots essentially in plain text on the user's computer, So if someone gained access to your machine, even if it wasn't administrative access, they would be able to go back and look at all those screenshots, which potentially could include stuff like login information for various accounts and services. So again the concerns around privacy and safety were flaring up. Ultimately, these and other criticisms prompted Microsoft to delay recalls rollout and ended up turning it from a mandated feature to an opt in feature so you can actually elect to make use of this feature. So they also would go back and change it so that the screenshots are encrypted, so you should only be able to access these if you have administrative level like access to the machine. However, that also could mean that perhaps a company could have access to that sort of stuff, right like, if you have an employer provided computer as part of your work, then presumably your employer or someone at the company you work for has that administrator level access to the machine, which means they can go back and look at all the screen shots, which could potentially become a monitoring issue if some bosses decide, hey, this is a great way for me to see if you know, Jonathan over there is actually doing his work, or if he's goofing off, you know, playing Galaga or something and on his company machine, which he should not do. So there are those concerns still, but again, since it's opt in unless your company forces you to activate it, I don't think it's that big of an issue. Microsoft also enabled some security and privacy features that are meant to obscure stuff like your login credentials. You know, in theory, the screenshots will skip screens where you're filling in that kind of info, so that if someone were somehow to get access to your machine, even if they searched through for log in stuff, they wouldn't find it. However, some folks have found that this is not foolproof because sometimes, like if someone's filling out say a PDF, an interactive PDF, then they put login information on that. Well, Microsoft doesn't necessarily detect that the PDF is related to logins, and so you might end up with screenshots that show in plain text. Well, once you decrypt the screenshot but show that log in credential. So there are still some concerns, but from one to understand, it's miles better than what the company initially announced when they rolled it out. The tool is now out for Windows eleven users. I have not seen any stats on how many people are actually using it. It'll be interesting to hear in twenty twenty five if it becomes a more widely accepted feature. Okay, we're going to take a quick break for our sponsors. When we come back. More top tech stories of twenty twenty four. We're back so here. In the United States, several big tech companies have faced scrutiny from regulatory agencies such as the Federal Trade Commission or FTC this year. Microsoft, for example, has recently found itself the subject of an antitrust investigation, not for the first time, but in this case it's in businesses ranging from cloud computing to cybersecurity. Other members of the Big five tech companies, those being Apple, Amazon, Meta, and Google, have also felt the heat. As Christine Bartholomew of pro Market wrote, quote, anti trust enforcers filed new Section two claims against Amazon and Apple while continuing to prosecute older cases like the Federal Trade Commissions suit against Meta originally filed in twenty twenty end. Quote that section two that Bartholomew mentions refers to a section in a very old piece of legislation, namely the Sherman Act, which is an anti trust piece of legislation. But Google in particular could potentially face government mandates to spin off certain key business units or face massive consequences. So the US Department of Justice alleged that Google has engaged in anti competitive practices, one of which is the company's practice of paying other platforms so that Google Search remains the default search engine on those platforms. So Google spends billions of dollars, in fact, it spends billions of dollars paying Apple alone in order to be the default search engine of choice, and the DOJ has argued that Google is effectively suppressing competition this way. The case has made its way to court. A US district judge named Ahmit Meta ruled against Google, and that brings us up to what happens next. So the answer to that is that it's not going to unfold until later in twenty twenty five, and depending on how things go with the courts maybe even later than that. These things can stretch on for many years, as was indicated by Bartholomew. You know that FTC case that started in twenty twenty. But the DOJ wants to make Google divest itself of several business units, including the Chrome browser, and to stop entering into those exclusionary agreements with companies like Apple and such. The recommendations go much further, and Google, understandably has protested them all. The company has argued that it didn't really do anything anti competitive in the first place, no matter what that judge thought. And anyway, if the DOJ gets its way, it's going to have a huge harmful effect on the tech sector, nay, the very world. It definitely gets a bit over dramatic. I think both sides get over dramatic to be fair. Now, a separate judge is going to have to decide which measures should actually be enforced against Google later in twenty twenty five, so the story is far from over. One thing that was a potential concern is that the change in administration could affect the outcome. So typically when we see a big shift in power dynamics here in the United States, we also see a lot of change in practices and policies. However, in this case, pressure against big tech is something that both sides of the aisle feel is necessary, although often for completely different reasons. But that pressure actually began under Trump's first presidential administration, so there's every reason to believe that the same will be true this go around. Now, while I expect the Trump administration to stick generally to big businesses are great and they should get away with whatever they want, I think big tech companies are a potential exception to that rule, though a lot of analysts say that they'll probably face lighter consequences. They won't be forced to divest themselves of business units. Perhaps under Trump's DOJ We'll have to see Something else in tech that is a looming question mark. Is the fate of TikTok in the United States. A huge story in twenty twenty four was that the legislative branch of the US government passed a law that requires TikTok's parent company, Byte Dance, to divest itself of TikTok or else face a ban for the app throughout the entire United States. Now, byte Dance is a Chinese company, and the lawmakers share a concern that the app could serve as a way to siphon data from the United States and send it on over to China. Plus it could serve as a delivery platform for Chinese propaganda. Basically, these claims, even if they were to turn out to be one hundred percent true, are kind of moot as far as I'm concerned, because China can both collect data from other sources and deliver propaganda using other platforms without ever needing TikTok. So to me, this is kind of missing the forest for the trees sort of situation. But then TikTok is also an easier thing to wrap your head around as opposed to the whole US approach to data privacy and security, which I feel is severely out of touch. Now. President Biden signed that bill into law earlier this year, and byte Dance faces a deadline of January nineteenth to divest itself of TikTok or else TikTok gets the ban hammer now. Back in twenty twenty, President Trump at that time was all gung ho on banning TikTok, even sign an executive order ordering as much, but it got overturned. More recently, he's changed his tune for reasons that remain rather opaque, at least if you take his own statements at face value. I won't get into that, but people have been listening to the show for a wild No more about that story, But anyway, Trump doesn't come into office until January twentieth, twenty twenty five, So the deadlines of the day before that. Byte Dance and TikTok are hoping to extend that deadline so that Trump can weigh in on this and potentially reverse course before a ban is actually put in place. But that would require intervention from the US Supreme Court, and right now that intervention is are from certain. It might happen, but it might not. So it could be that one day before Trump takes off as TikTok gets banned here in the United States. Now what happens after that? I got no clue. TikTok still maintains there's no feasible way to separate from its parent company, which I also find a little hard to believe, but it may be true. I am no expert in these matters. Okay, more big stories from twenty twenty four. So early in the year, the US Senate Judiciary Committee called leaders of several social media companies to testify about how social platforms have contributed to harming children. Folks like Mark Zuckerberg, who actually offered an apology, were compelled to listen to numerous cases brought before them by parents who had tragic stories to share about their kids. The overall response from the committee side was that none of the tech leaders actually acquitted themselves very well or appeared to make any concrete plans to actually address the underlying con concerns. There was also a lot of lawmakers questioning Section two thirty. That's a law, or rather it's part of a law that provides protection to online platforms. Essentially, Section two thirty says online platforms cannot be held legally liable for the stuff that their users post to those platforms. But even those protections do have limits. So, for example, if a platform becomes aware of illegal activity, it is supposed to take action. But the thing that drove me bonkers with this hearing was that some of these lawmakers seemed to behave like Section two thirty was written by the social media companies and it wasn't. It was actually created by Congress as a way to protect companies in the Internet space from being squashed before they could even establish themselves, and to encourage investors to put money into that stuff. If an investor thinks, oh, well, I don't want to invest in that because I could be held legally responsible for something that someone else did that would have killed the early Internet. So that's why section two thirty exists. But let's then move on and dive into our Muskie segment, shall we. That means it's time to talk about Elon Musk. He continued to alienate some users of x formerly known as Twitter, and alternative platforms like Threads, Mastedon and Blue Sky benefited from Elon Musk's shenanigans because users began to bail and go to those alternatives. Blue Sky in particular, has had a heck of a year. The service emerged from beta and became available to the general public relatively early in twenty twenty four, and it has experienced a couple of bursts of popularity, including a big one following the twenty twenty four elections here in the United States. So right now it boasts more than twenty five million users, which isn't bad at all for the first year in operation. More than eleven million of those joined following the US election, and you know that that's pretty impressive. It is still miles and miles behind X, which has an estimated six hundred million or so monthly users. So it's not like Blue Sky's poised to topple X. We're not. This is not even David versus Goliath. This is Goliath and David's very short friend Dwayne or something. Upon Trump's win in the election, Elon Musk would become part of the new administration. He will co chair a new Department of Government Efficiency akadge or I can't believe I'm saying this doge. That suggests to me that Musk may have had a hand in naming the organization, knowing his past with the doge coin and other memes. Considering the Musk is also in an ongoing battle regarding his compensation package at TESLA, I imagine we're going to see a lot of Musk's fingerprints on government actions in the near future. Also, it's kind of wild that the guy who's put in place of authority over government spending is also the guy who happens to be the richest human in the world. It's just weird now, speaking of election stuff. As you are probably aware, twenty twenty four was a year of unprecedented misinformation campaigns, some of which were fueled by generative AI, and it continues to be an issue. While elections in the United States are over for the time being, other elections are around the world. They're preparing for a flood of misinformation. A lot of the effort in misinformation campaigns appears to be coming out of Russia. Pewtin has long relied on Internet channels to help push pro Russian policies and leaders and other nations. Not all of those campaigns have been successful in their goals, but they've definitely been all over the place. So we expect that that's going to be a continuing trend moving into twenty twenty five. And we're going to take another quick break right now. When I get back, I'm going to wrap this up with some more tech headlines and stories from the past year. But first let's thank our sponsors. All right, we're in the home stretch, though again I'm only touching on some of the stories that I thought were particularly interesting. I am leaving an awful lot of stuff untouched, so you know, don't get upset if your favorite tech story doesn't get a mention here, there's too much to go over. But one thing that remains untouched by yours truly is the Apple Vision Pro headset. I just don't have like more than three thousand dollars just lying around waiting to be spent on an augmented reality headset from Apple that has limited utility in my day to day life. But the long rumored technology finally emerged early in twenty twenty four. Now, the Apple Vision Pro was a far cry from like the Blue Sky early concepts, because, rather than like a sleek pair of glasses, it was a headset that could project images of the user's eyes on the forward facing side of the visor, so everyone else could see that you were wearing a big visor, but you had gigantic digital eyes projected on the back of it, apparently staring at folks. It was something that I thought was super creepy. Now, the reviews I read about the device all said it was legitimately impressive, like it's well made and it does a really good job. But those reviews also indicated there were a limited number of use cases for the technology. Now, part of that is a chicken in the egg problem that frequently happens in tech, and it happens between hardware and software. So software developers have very little incentive to build stuff for a platform that doesn't have a large install base. But customers don't have a lot of incentive to adopt a brand new technology, particularly a really expensive one like the Vision Pro, if that technology doesn't also have useful library of applications. And so, while the Vision Pro had a brief moment in the spotlight, over the course of twenty twenty four it became clear it just wasn't going to be the runaway hit that Apple was kind of hoping for in the past, so Apple rather quietly stopped mentioning it. For the most part, the company has ended production on the Vision Pro model, according to reports, and rumor has it that any plans for a second Pro unit have been scrapped. Again, that's a rumor. I haven't seen any official announcement from the company itself, but that seems to be the case now. That does not mean that Apple is totally out of the mixed reality game, and we may see a lower cost version with fewer features in the future. That was the plan at least for a while. Those rumors suggest that this newer version of the headset will be you know, wicked expensive, just not as wicked expensive as the Vision Pro. I saw one post on XR today I guess Mixed Reality Today that suggested the slim down model might go for something like one thousand, five hundred bucks, or about half of what the Vision Pro goes for. It's still awful pricey, and I'm still not convinced that the use case is there for most people. Like I think people who are curious about it might feel more tempted to get a fifteen hundred dollars headset than a three thousand dollars headset. But that's still a huge price tag for most people. And unless you're able to demonstrate that this technology is going to have a massive impact on how you get stuff done, I just don't see it really moving that far. Speaking about things not turning out the way you had hoped, twenty twenty four was another year of layoffs in the tech industry. One source I read mentioned that between companies like Tesla, Intel, Cisco, and Microsoft, there were around one hundred and fifty thousand jobs cut. It has been a brutal couple of years in the tech sector. I think this is partly because of just overall economic issues. It's also partly because of how a lot of tech companies beefed up during the pandemic, and now in the post pandemic years, they're having to look for ways to slim back down again. But here's hoping that twenty twenty five sees those trends change, because it's always rough seeing those those stories break. All right, let's talk about crypto, because ye gads, this was a huge year for crypto and it didn't start off that way really, But one thing that happened was Sam Bankman freed AKASBF found himself before a judge and sentenced to twenty five years in prison for his role in the FTX debacle. Now, in case you missed all that, FDx was a cryptocurrency exchange that apparently took customer money and used it to cover some bad investments made by a sister company called Alimator Research. Now it gets more complicated than that, but essentially SBF was arrested on charges of fraud among other things. He was found guilty and now in this year he was sentenced to prison. SBF then filed an appeal to his sentencing, arguing that the judge overseeing the case had a conflict of interest and was biased against him the very damn recording this the nineteenth of December twenty twenty four, a US court dismissed that appeal, finding SBF's claims invalid. That doesn't come as a surprise to me. There are allegations that SBF and or his legal team were allegedly, you know, engaging in witnessed tampering for example. That kind of stuff typically doesn't go over so well when matters come to a court of law. So it sounds like SBF's future will not be spent on a Caribbean island, but instead in a prison. Related to the FTX catastrophe is the failure of a bank called Silvergate Capital. So this technically happened in twenty twenty three. That's when we started to see a few banks fail that were connected to the crypto world. So one called Silicon Valley Bank failed, another one called Signature Bank failed, and Silvergate was the third. The owners at the time said that they were going to wind down operations. However, it wasn't until this passed September in twenty twenty four that Silvergate Capital Corporation filed for Chapter eleven bankruptcy protection. The filing included passages that accused regulators of interfering too much in the cryptocurrency realm, and that perhaps Silvergate would have been able to write itself if it weren't for I don't know, imperial entanglements. As Obi Wan Kenobi might say, Bitcoin itself had a heck of a year. So in January twenty twenty four, bitcoin was trading at around forty thousand dollars per bitcoin. That's a lot of money, and that was already an impressive improvement over the previous January back in twenty twenty three, when it was in the twenty thousand dollars range, but it was still pretty far off from its peak that it had hit previously in the spring of twenty twenty when it was around sixty thousand dollars per bitcoin. All of that was left behind the dust recently when the price of bitcoin skyrocketed to more than one hundred thousand dollars per bitcoin. Now, a lot of that I attribute to the outcome of the US elections, As I believe the crypto community at large views President Trump is being much more friendly to the crypto industry. So will this mean that cryptocurrency has become a viable currency alternative or will they just remain more like investment assets. I would probably guess on the latter, but I'm no expert. It is wild to me that the pizza guy in Florida bought pizzas for ten thousand bitcoin way back in twenty ten, and those ten thousand bitcoin today are worth a billion dollars, So I sure hope that was a good pizza. Also, one other thing that happened with bitcoin is that the number of coins per block mind on the blockchain reduced by half this year. Now, this is a planned feature that's built into bitcoin. In short, there's a finite number of bitcoin that will ever be released, and once all of those are mined, no new bitcoin will ever emerge. The ones that are in circulation will be the only ones to ever exist. To control the supply of bitcoin going into circulation, the system actually has the number of bitcoins awarded per block of transactions every few years. It's like approximately every four years. So it used to be that if you were to mine a block on the blockchain, you would get six point two five bitcoin per block mind now it's down to three point one point two five, which could affect the incentives for mining bitcoin. However, now that bitcoin is worth more than one hundred thousand dollars per unit, that still means the value of mining a block on the blockchain is almost as much as it would have been back at bitcoin's previous height of around sixty thousand dollars. Cause, yeah, the number of bitcoins you get is cut in half, but the amount that it's worth has almost not quite, but almost doubled, So there's still a huge incentive for mining operations to pour tons of assets into mining bitcoin. That means consuming a lot of electricity, and I have quite a bit of anxiety over how the next US administration is going to handle matters like energy consumption and where we turn to in order to generate electricity. So I think crypto is going to be in a lot of conversations about stuff like climate change for the next several years, and I'm not looking forward to that. Okay, let's finish up with some stuff about space. That's typically how I like to end my news items. First up, we have the trials and tribulations of Boeing, So the aerospace company has long been associated with the space industry, but this year Boeing has had a really rough one. It actually started quite early because on January fifth, twenty twenty four, and Alaskan Airlines Boeing seven thirty seven Max aircraft experienced a terrifying failure. At sixteen thousand feet, a door plug, meaning a plug that takes the place of what otherwise would have been an emergency door, blew out of the airplane, which meant the cabin experienced rapid, uncontrolled decompression. Fortunately, everyone on board the aircraft survived the incident. There were only three people I think who reported minor injuries, so all of that is good. I mean, it was still an incredibly traumatic experience. I can't imagine what I would feel like if I had been on that flight. So an investigation showed that the door plug perhaps was reinstalled improperly and was missing some bolts meant to secure it in place. There's still a question of whether or not the bolts had been in place, or perhaps they were ripped out during the incident, but either way, it certainly seems like a big oversight. So the Federal Aviation Administration or FAA ordered all seven to three seven Max nine aircraft that had a similar door plug to be grounded until each one could undergo a thorough inspection. Boeing would end up paying various airlines a whole lot of money due to the fact that those airlines could not operate the aircraft they had purchased while the FAA was conducting this inspection process. But that wasn't the only headache Boeing encountered this year. Another relates to the long awaited spacecraft, the Boeing Starliner. The spacecraft's purpose is to serve as a cargo and crew transport for space missions that go into low Earth orbit, and the spacecraft itself is reusable. It's also a tad roomier than the SpaceX crew Dragon capsule or the old Apollo capsules. The rollout of the Starliner faced numerous delays. Originally, the hope was that it would enter into service by twenty seventeen, but that did not happen. The first successful test flight wouldn't happen until twenty twenty two. That was an uncrewed test flight, and this was the year when Starliner finally would bring astronauts up to the space station. Unfortunately, the spacecraft would not bring those astronauts back down again because on the way to the space station, the Starliner experienced a partial thruster fail. Ye Now, NASA, the astronauts aboard both the ISS and the star Liner were collectively able to compensate for this, and the spacecraft did dock safely with the International Space Station. But after long consideration, NASA came to the determination that it would be too risky to have the two astronauts returned to Earth aboard the star Liner, and instead they would have to wait for another opportunity to come home. So what was supposed to be a short mission lasting like less than two weeks, has now stretched into one that's going to go all the way into twenty twenty five. In fact, right now, NASA says that they can get back no earlier than March twenty twenty five, and it might be later than that. The incident, along with the revelations regarding how expensive the star Liner missions are compared to alternatives like SpaceX, have really created a great deal of criticism directed both at Boeing and at NASA. Boeing's been rather cagy about the whole thing. The company was supposed to hold a press conference upon the uncrewed Starliner's return to Earth this past September. The Boeing canceled that event at the very last minute and didn't offer a reason as to why they canceled it. Starliner's future in the American space program remains another one of those big question marks that we just don't know enough about yet. Theoretically, once Boeing demonstrates to NASA's satisfaction that the star Liner is spaceworthy, Boeing will then provide the star Liner for three space missions. That's what a contract has agreed upon. There's also an option for NASA to purchase additional missions, I think three more per that contract. But as some have pointed out, we're getting closer to the retirement date of the International Space Station. We're talking like twenty thirty. So by that time it may be that star Liner has nowhere to take anybody because all the low Earth orbit space stations we would go to will be gone, all the ones that the United States has an interest in it anyway. And finally, twenty twenty four was the swan song for the Ingenuity Helicopter, the little aircraft on Mars that flew far more times than was planned. The Ingenuity was an experiment, could we design an aircraft that could actually fly on Mars. So the atmosphere on Mars is considerably thinner than what we have here on Earth, which makes it hard to fly, but Mars's gravity is about a third of Earth's, so that helps a little bit. So the Ingenuity was a test to see if maybe we could create an aircraft that could further explore the Red planet and add to our scientific knowledge to that end. While Ingenuity carried some basic sensors, it wasn't fully kitted out. It was more of a proof of concept. The plan was for Ingenuity to go on five flights when it landed on Mars as part of the Perseverance Rover way back in February twenty twenty one. The aircraft had to fly autonomously because Mars is far enough away from Earth that it takes several minutes for radio waves to travel between the two, so you can't remote control it from Earth. Rather than just complete five flights, however, Ingenuity would ultimately take off seventy two times. These flights were relatively modest, with altitudes of around ten to sixteen feet in flight times light i to around a minute and a half, but by golly, Ingenuity outperformed all expectations until finally this year. One of Ingenuity's rotors broke off in January when it came in for a landing and there was a miscalculation. So apparently the Ingenuity made an error because it was passing over what NASA referred to as a largely featureless region and it just made a miscalculation of where the ground was. That this is something the agency said will not be a problem in the future when they have a better mapped system of Mars's surface. But considering that Ingenuity was only supposed to fly five times, it's still really impressive. While Ingenuity will go sailing no more, I mean, I'm sorry, flying no more, it is still operating even as it's out of range radio communications leave perseverance. Ingenuity is serving as a stationary platform that's testing stuff like solar panel performance and battery operations. That's information that will be invaluable should we ever take the step of actually sending humans to Mars, or maybe even the grander dreams of perhaps establishing a semi permanent colony there. But that's putting the space cart before the space horse and that's it. Those are the top stories of twenty twenty four that I wanted to focus on, not saying that's all the top stories, just the ones I wanted to talk about. Hope you enjoyed this look back on some of the big events of twenty twenty four, and I look forward to chatting with you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the tech are you. Well, it's time for us to look back on some of the big tech stories that shaped the last twelve months. I always like to take some time at the end of a year to reflect back on what has happened, and this year, there was an awful lot of stuff going on. So we're just going to look at some of the big stories and headlines in tech in twenty twenty four. This is by no means an exhaustive list, and of course some of these stories continue to play out. Some of them are arguably not as big as ones that I left out of this list, But these were ones that I thought were kind of interesting because I feel like they're a commentary, no just on where we are in tech, but where we're going. But that's enough jibber jabber. We got a lot to get through. Let's get started, and where else to begin but to talk about AI. No one was surprised that artificial intelligence dominated the news cycle in twenty twenty four. Everyone said it was going to happen, because it was clear that that's how it was going to turn out, and it did. The gears were already turning in twenty twenty three. In fact, in late twenty twenty two, that's when AI really started to capture the public's attention. Generative AI in particular has received a ton of focus. Though this is a good time to remind all of y'all that generative AI is just one subset of artificial intelligence disciplines. Sometimes it can be easy to forget that, seeing as how much of our attention goes to generative AI. But there are lots of other types of AI. But one company that's always at the forefront of these conversation is open Ai. That's the company that's perhaps best known for chat GPT. Open ai began as a non profit organization a few years ago, and it was dedicated to the responsible and safe development and deployment of artificial intelligence with kind of an open approach. Thus the name like this idea that they were going to share their findings and research and knowledge with others in order to ensure that the AI that the company developed would ultimately be put to beneficial use with the lowest risk of harm, but that nonprofit would spawn a for profit arm because, as it turns out, AI is crazy expensive. Yo. I mean, R and D costs a lot, but just running the stuff you've already developed also costs a huge amount. And I've talked in the past about how AI applications typically require enormous amounts of compute power, and that stuff isn't free. In fact, in September of this year, New York Times reporters Mike Isaac and Aaron Griffith wrote a piece about how much money open ai was making versus how much it was spending, and the numbers are jaw dropping. The article is titled open ai is growing fast and burning through piles of money, and it published on September twenty seventh, twenty twenty four. In that piece, the authors revealed that open AI's revenue reached three hundred million dollars in August of this past year. Now that's a lot of cash, and the company overall expected a three point seven billion dollars in sales by the end of twenty twenty four. Now that's even more cash if I'm doing my math right. Let's see three point seven billion versus three hundred Yeah, no, that's a lot. However, this same company was on track to lose five billion dollars in operating costs. Even with all that in consideration, that's how expensive it is to run a cutting edge AI company. Some of that money, of course, went to normal overhead operations that any regular business would encounter, you know, stuff like salaries and office space and that kind of stuff. But the bulk of it presumably went to running operations and R and D work. Now. I say presumably, because, as Isaac and Griffith point out in that article, there were quote several large expenses not fully explained in the documents end quote. The cash churn prompted several pieces that were speculating that without a truly massive influx of cash from investors, open Ai could spend itself out of business. But then, like literally, the next week, headlines announced that open ai had brokeered a six point six billion dollar round of new investments. Covering the spread if you will. This would put the valuation of open Ai at around one hundred and fifty seven billion dollars, and the company predicted it would hit one hundred billion dollars in revenue by twenty twenty nine. Which might be the case, and investors might be eager enough to see that happen in order to, you know, like, they'll continue pouring truckloads of cash into the company at a rate that just outpaces open AI's spending habits in order to actually get to that destination. I always get nervous about stories like these because it's hard to believe that this is all sustainable. But I guess if folks are determined enough, then if they have access to enough resources, anything is possible. Now, Earlier this month, I talked about another story involving open Ai, one that has raised many concerns. Open Ai has signed a deal with the defense tech company and a Rill, which is a total keen reference. That company was founded by the creator of the Oculus VR headset, Palmer Lucky. Now, again, the original pitch for open ai is that it was meant to be an organization dedicated to the safe and responsible development of AI. So this announcement has caused a lot of concern with people in the AI space, including people who were formerly part of open ai itself. So specifically, these two companies are working to improve US military technology in order to defend against unpiloted aerial attacks. So you can think of it as all right, they're working to create systems that can identify target and bring down unmanned drones. Now, considering that the end of this year has also brought with it reports of mysterious drones flying over places like New Jersey and Pennsylvania and other areas, you could argue that there's a growing need for this kind of technology. But critics worry that the same tech could be used to identify target and bring down normal aircraft, you know, the kind that's actually piloted by a human being in the cockpit, And that definitely does not sound like it's a safe or responsible application for artificial intelligence, especially when you consider that AI is far from perfect. It can make some mistakes. Now, there's a lot more we could say about open AI, but let's move on to some other companies that made headlines that involve artificial intelligence. Now, one of those was in Vidia, which is perhaps best known as a company that designs graphics processing units or GPUs. Those are the things that gamers and some cryptominers really want to get hold of. Well, it turns out that parallel processing, which is what GPUs really specialize in, also happens to be really great for at least some AI processes, and so Nvidia has embraced the AI industry really. In Vidia now identifies itself as an AI chip maker and has turned out lots of chip designs meant to handle large AI compute loads. This has more than doubled Nvidia's value from the end of twenty twenty three to the end of twenty twenty four, which is huge because at the end of twenty twenty three, and Video was valued at one point two trillion dollars already. That was a two hundred and forty percent increase over what it had been in twenty twenty two. However, today, in twenty twenty four, and Vidia's value is at more than three trillion dollars. In fact, it puts in Vidia in the top three most valuable publicly traded companies, and depending upon when you're looking at that list, it typically falls right behind Apple and right in front of Microsoft. That kind of depends on which day you look at that list, because these numbers do shift around a lot. But yeah, Nvidia had a pretty huge year in twenty twenty four. Now that being said, as I record this episode which is on December nineteenth when I'm recording it. Just to be transparent, Nvidia is currently recovering from an overall market dip that saw shares of Nvidia drop by around fourteen percent, And when you're valued in the trillions, any single percent represents a whole lot of money, so that that represents a considerable drop, But the estimates I've seen recently seem to say that it's a very temporary situation. One more AI related story that I would like to touch on, keeping in mind that, of course there were countless other noteworthy AI stories the unfolded this past year is that twenty twenty four is the year where we started seeing companies incorporate processors meant to handle AI applications on the device level. So Open AI's business model largely focuses on companies and other customers using an Internet connection to tap into like massive server farms that have the awesome powers of AI processing. But another approach is to dedicate processors at the device level so that you can do AI implementations on your own computer, you know, or whatever other device. Earlier this year, I did an episode about the Yoga laptop from Lenovo that's a copilot plus PC and Copilot is Microsoft's AI product, and the laptop I talked about features an NPU that's a neural processing unit. So just as a GPU is optimized to process graphics, and NPU is optimized to handle AI applications. Now, there are several benefits to having AI native on a device, and the big ones really are security and privacy. With cloud based AI computing, there's always a risk of data breaches. You don't have full control over your information because it's being handled by a third party. There's also a risk that the provider you use might train future AI models on your information, and if that data includes proprietary information or trade secrets or something like that, that represents a huge security risk. And I bring it up because we have seen examples of AI agents revealing stuff that they shouldn't, stuff that involved other users of the AI agents. Where let's say person one is using the AI agent too, I don't know, plan out their insurance and then person two, while asking questions, happens to start getting information about Person one and the situations they're in that are leading to them to seeking these solutions to their insurance problem. That's a terrible, terrible privacy problem and a security problem for companies particularly. You don't want your trade secrets to become industry wide knowledge, so moving AI applications to the device level somewhat mollifies those concerns. Now, of course, you still have to practice good security protocols. You also have to maintain control of your device so that someone else doesn't get physical access to it and then is able to see it. But that's true no matter what. But the fear of some other company profiting off of your information or potentially leaking your data to others is greatly reduced. At least, I expect we'll continue to see more on device implementations of AI, and I'm not the only one making that. Guess Gartner predicts that all aipcs rather will make up like forty three percent of all PC shipments by twenty twenty five, and you know, by my calendar, we're nearly there. So we'll have to see if that becomes truth. Now, before we go to break, I mentioned earlier that Copilot is one of Microsoft's products. Microsoft was in the news a lot in twenty twenty four for a lot of different reasons, but one story focused on a different feature found in some Copilot plus PCs, and that is Microsoft Recall. So the company announced this feature in June of twenty twenty four, and the reaction was rather critical. To put it gently, Recall takes screenshots of your activities on your PC. These screenshots are searchable, and it's intended to make it easier for users to look back on their past activities in order to find like files or data or whatever. You know, if you've ever said, gosh, what was that website I visited where I found that awesome recipe or something like that, and you didn't bookmarket or whatever, screenshots is one way that you might use to try and track that information down by searching the database that's on your machine. Now, some folks worried right away that recall would be sending screenshots back to Microsoft, which obviously would represent a huge threat to both privacy and security. So imagine being an executive at a big company and working on an internal report only to find out that your computer has been screenshotting everything and then sending it off to Microsoft servers. That would surely violate company policies at the very least, But Microsoft was quick to state that the screenshots would not be sent over the Internet to any other location. They would live squarely on the native device. However, this did not stop the criticism. Now, originally recall was apparently unencrypted, meaning it would store these screenshots essentially in plain text on the user's computer, So if someone gained access to your machine, even if it wasn't administrative access, they would be able to go back and look at all those screenshots, which potentially could include stuff like login information for various accounts and services. So again the concerns around privacy and safety were flaring up. Ultimately, these and other criticisms prompted Microsoft to delay recalls rollout and ended up turning it from a mandated feature to an opt in feature so you can actually elect to make use of this feature. So they also would go back and change it so that the screenshots are encrypted, so you should only be able to access these if you have administrative level like access to the machine. However, that also could mean that perhaps a company could have access to that sort of stuff, right like, if you have an employer provided computer as part of your work, then presumably your employer or someone at the company you work for has that administrator level access to the machine, which means they can go back and look at all the screen shots, which could potentially become a monitoring issue if some bosses decide, hey, this is a great way for me to see if you know, Jonathan over there is actually doing his work, or if he's goofing off, you know, playing Galaga or something and on his company machine, which he should not do. So there are those concerns still, but again, since it's opt in unless your company forces you to activate it, I don't think it's that big of an issue. Microsoft also enabled some security and privacy features that are meant to obscure stuff like your login credentials. You know, in theory, the screenshots will skip screens where you're filling in that kind of info, so that if someone were somehow to get access to your machine, even if they searched through for log in stuff, they wouldn't find it. However, some folks have found that this is not foolproof because sometimes, like if someone's filling out say a PDF, an interactive PDF, then they put login information on that. Well, Microsoft doesn't necessarily detect that the PDF is related to logins, and so you might end up with screenshots that show in plain text. Well, once you decrypt the screenshot but show that log in credential. So there are still some concerns, but from one to understand, it's miles better than what the company initially announced when they rolled it out. The tool is now out for Windows eleven users. I have not seen any stats on how many people are actually using it. It'll be interesting to hear in twenty twenty five if it becomes a more widely accepted feature. Okay, we're going to take a quick break for our sponsors. When we come back. More top tech stories of twenty twenty four. We're back so here. In the United States, several big tech companies have faced scrutiny from regulatory agencies such as the Federal Trade Commission or FTC this year. Microsoft, for example, has recently found itself the subject of an antitrust investigation, not for the first time, but in this case it's in businesses ranging from cloud computing to cybersecurity. Other members of the Big five tech companies, those being Apple, Amazon, Meta, and Google, have also felt the heat. As Christine Bartholomew of pro Market wrote, quote, anti trust enforcers filed new Section two claims against Amazon and Apple while continuing to prosecute older cases like the Federal Trade Commissions suit against Meta originally filed in twenty twenty end. Quote that section two that Bartholomew mentions refers to a section in a very old piece of legislation, namely the Sherman Act, which is an anti trust piece of legislation. But Google in particular could potentially face government mandates to spin off certain key business units or face massive consequences. So the US Department of Justice alleged that Google has engaged in anti competitive practices, one of which is the company's practice of paying other platforms so that Google Search remains the default search engine on those platforms. So Google spends billions of dollars, in fact, it spends billions of dollars paying Apple alone in order to be the default search engine of choice, and the DOJ has argued that Google is effectively suppressing competition this way. The case has made its way to court. A US district judge named Ahmit Meta ruled against Google, and that brings us up to what happens next. So the answer to that is that it's not going to unfold until later in twenty twenty five, and depending on how things go with the courts maybe even later than that. These things can stretch on for many years, as was indicated by Bartholomew. You know that FTC case that started in twenty twenty. But the DOJ wants to make Google divest itself of several business units, including the Chrome browser, and to stop entering into those exclusionary agreements with companies like Apple and such. The recommendations go much further, and Google, understandably has protested them all. The company has argued that it didn't really do anything anti competitive in the first place, no matter what that judge thought. And anyway, if the DOJ gets its way, it's going to have a huge harmful effect on the tech sector, nay, the very world. It definitely gets a bit over dramatic. I think both sides get over dramatic to be fair. Now, a separate judge is going to have to decide which measures should actually be enforced against Google later in twenty twenty five, so the story is far from over. One thing that was a potential concern is that the change in administration could affect the outcome. So typically when we see a big shift in power dynamics here in the United States, we also see a lot of change in practices and policies. However, in this case, pressure against big tech is something that both sides of the aisle feel is necessary, although often for completely different reasons. But that pressure actually began under Trump's first presidential administration, so there's every reason to believe that the same will be true this go around. Now, while I expect the Trump administration to stick generally to big businesses are great and they should get away with whatever they want, I think big tech companies are a potential exception to that rule, though a lot of analysts say that they'll probably face lighter consequences. They won't be forced to divest themselves of business units. Perhaps under Trump's DOJ We'll have to see Something else in tech that is a looming question mark. Is the fate of TikTok in the United States. A huge story in twenty twenty four was that the legislative branch of the US government passed a law that requires TikTok's parent company, Byte Dance, to divest itself of TikTok or else face a ban for the app throughout the entire United States. Now, byte Dance is a Chinese company, and the lawmakers share a concern that the app could serve as a way to siphon data from the United States and send it on over to China. Plus it could serve as a delivery platform for Chinese propaganda. Basically, these claims, even if they were to turn out to be one hundred percent true, are kind of moot as far as I'm concerned, because China can both collect data from other sources and deliver propaganda using other platforms without ever needing TikTok. So to me, this is kind of missing the forest for the trees sort of situation. But then TikTok is also an easier thing to wrap your head around as opposed to the whole US approach to data privacy and security, which I feel is severely out of touch. Now. President Biden signed that bill into law earlier this year, and byte Dance faces a deadline of January nineteenth to divest itself of TikTok or else TikTok gets the ban hammer now. Back in twenty twenty, President Trump at that time was all gung ho on banning TikTok, even sign an executive order ordering as much, but it got overturned. More recently, he's changed his tune for reasons that remain rather opaque, at least if you take his own statements at face value. I won't get into that, but people have been listening to the show for a wild No more about that story, But anyway, Trump doesn't come into office until January twentieth, twenty twenty five, So the deadlines of the day before that. Byte Dance and TikTok are hoping to extend that deadline so that Trump can weigh in on this and potentially reverse course before a ban is actually put in place. But that would require intervention from the US Supreme Court, and right now that intervention is are from certain. It might happen, but it might not. So it could be that one day before Trump takes off as TikTok gets banned here in the United States. Now what happens after that? I got no clue. TikTok still maintains there's no feasible way to separate from its parent company, which I also find a little hard to believe, but it may be true. I am no expert in these matters. Okay, more big stories from twenty twenty four. So early in the year, the US Senate Judiciary Committee called leaders of several social media companies to testify about how social platforms have contributed to harming children. Folks like Mark Zuckerberg, who actually offered an apology, were compelled to listen to numerous cases brought before them by parents who had tragic stories to share about their kids. The overall response from the committee side was that none of the tech leaders actually acquitted themselves very well or appeared to make any concrete plans to actually address the underlying con concerns. There was also a lot of lawmakers questioning Section two thirty. That's a law, or rather it's part of a law that provides protection to online platforms. Essentially, Section two thirty says online platforms cannot be held legally liable for the stuff that their users post to those platforms. But even those protections do have limits. So, for example, if a platform becomes aware of illegal activity, it is supposed to take action. But the thing that drove me bonkers with this hearing was that some of these lawmakers seemed to behave like Section two thirty was written by the social media companies and it wasn't. It was actually created by Congress as a way to protect companies in the Internet space from being squashed before they could even establish themselves, and to encourage investors to put money into that stuff. If an investor thinks, oh, well, I don't want to invest in that because I could be held legally responsible for something that someone else did that would have killed the early Internet. So that's why section two thirty exists. But let's then move on and dive into our Muskie segment, shall we. That means it's time to talk about Elon Musk. He continued to alienate some users of x formerly known as Twitter, and alternative platforms like Threads, Mastedon and Blue Sky benefited from Elon Musk's shenanigans because users began to bail and go to those alternatives. Blue Sky in particular, has had a heck of a year. The service emerged from beta and became available to the general public relatively early in twenty twenty four, and it has experienced a couple of bursts of popularity, including a big one following the twenty twenty four elections here in the United States. So right now it boasts more than twenty five million users, which isn't bad at all for the first year in operation. More than eleven million of those joined following the US election, and you know that that's pretty impressive. It is still miles and miles behind X, which has an estimated six hundred million or so monthly users. So it's not like Blue Sky's poised to topple X. We're not. This is not even David versus Goliath. This is Goliath and David's very short friend Dwayne or something. Upon Trump's win in the election, Elon Musk would become part of the new administration. He will co chair a new Department of Government Efficiency akadge or I can't believe I'm saying this doge. That suggests to me that Musk may have had a hand in naming the organization, knowing his past with the doge coin and other memes. Considering the Musk is also in an ongoing battle regarding his compensation package at TESLA, I imagine we're going to see a lot of Musk's fingerprints on government actions in the near future. Also, it's kind of wild that the guy who's put in place of authority over government spending is also the guy who happens to be the richest human in the world. It's just weird now, speaking of election stuff. As you are probably aware, twenty twenty four was a year of unprecedented misinformation campaigns, some of which were fueled by generative AI, and it continues to be an issue. While elections in the United States are over for the time being, other elections are around the world. They're preparing for a flood of misinformation. A lot of the effort in misinformation campaigns appears to be coming out of Russia. Pewtin has long relied on Internet channels to help push pro Russian policies and leaders and other nations. Not all of those campaigns have been successful in their goals, but they've definitely been all over the place. So we expect that that's going to be a continuing trend moving into twenty twenty five. And we're going to take another quick break right now. When I get back, I'm going to wrap this up with some more tech headlines and stories from the past year. But first let's thank our sponsors. All right, we're in the home stretch, though again I'm only touching on some of the stories that I thought were particularly interesting. I am leaving an awful lot of stuff untouched, so you know, don't get upset if your favorite tech story doesn't get a mention here, there's too much to go over. But one thing that remains untouched by yours truly is the Apple Vision Pro headset. I just don't have like more than three thousand dollars just lying around waiting to be spent on an augmented reality headset from Apple that has limited utility in my day to day life. But the long rumored technology finally emerged early in twenty twenty four. Now, the Apple Vision Pro was a far cry from like the Blue Sky early concepts, because, rather than like a sleek pair of glasses, it was a headset that could project images of the user's eyes on the forward facing side of the visor, so everyone else could see that you were wearing a big visor, but you had gigantic digital eyes projected on the back of it, apparently staring at folks. It was something that I thought was super creepy. Now, the reviews I read about the device all said it was legitimately impressive, like it's well made and it does a really good job. But those reviews also indicated there were a limited number of use cases for the technology. Now, part of that is a chicken in the egg problem that frequently happens in tech, and it happens between hardware and software. So software developers have very little incentive to build stuff for a platform that doesn't have a large install base. But customers don't have a lot of incentive to adopt a brand new technology, particularly a really expensive one like the Vision Pro, if that technology doesn't also have useful library of applications. And so, while the Vision Pro had a brief moment in the spotlight, over the course of twenty twenty four it became clear it just wasn't going to be the runaway hit that Apple was kind of hoping for in the past, so Apple rather quietly stopped mentioning it. For the most part, the company has ended production on the Vision Pro model, according to reports, and rumor has it that any plans for a second Pro unit have been scrapped. Again, that's a rumor. I haven't seen any official announcement from the company itself, but that seems to be the case now. That does not mean that Apple is totally out of the mixed reality game, and we may see a lower cost version with fewer features in the future. That was the plan at least for a while. Those rumors suggest that this newer version of the headset will be you know, wicked expensive, just not as wicked expensive as the Vision Pro. I saw one post on XR today I guess Mixed Reality Today that suggested the slim down model might go for something like one thousand, five hundred bucks, or about half of what the Vision Pro goes for. It's still awful pricey, and I'm still not convinced that the use case is there for most people. Like I think people who are curious about it might feel more tempted to get a fifteen hundred dollars headset than a three thousand dollars headset. But that's still a huge price tag for most people. And unless you're able to demonstrate that this technology is going to have a massive impact on how you get stuff done, I just don't see it really moving that far. Speaking about things not turning out the way you had hoped, twenty twenty four was another year of layoffs in the tech industry. One source I read mentioned that between companies like Tesla, Intel, Cisco, and Microsoft, there were around one hundred and fifty thousand jobs cut. It has been a brutal couple of years in the tech sector. I think this is partly because of just overall economic issues. It's also partly because of how a lot of tech companies beefed up during the pandemic, and now in the post pandemic years, they're having to look for ways to slim back down again. But here's hoping that twenty twenty five sees those trends change, because it's always rough seeing those those stories break. All right, let's talk about crypto, because ye gads, this was a huge year for crypto and it didn't start off that way really, But one thing that happened was Sam Bankman freed AKASBF found himself before a judge and sentenced to twenty five years in prison for his role in the FTX debacle. Now, in case you missed all that, FDx was a cryptocurrency exchange that apparently took customer money and used it to cover some bad investments made by a sister company called Alimator Research. Now it gets more complicated than that, but essentially SBF was arrested on charges of fraud among other things. He was found guilty and now in this year he was sentenced to prison. SBF then filed an appeal to his sentencing, arguing that the judge overseeing the case had a conflict of interest and was biased against him the very damn recording this the nineteenth of December twenty twenty four, a US court dismissed that appeal, finding SBF's claims invalid. That doesn't come as a surprise to me. There are allegations that SBF and or his legal team were allegedly, you know, engaging in witnessed tampering for example. That kind of stuff typically doesn't go over so well when matters come to a court of law. So it sounds like SBF's future will not be spent on a Caribbean island, but instead in a prison. Related to the FTX catastrophe is the failure of a bank called Silvergate Capital. So this technically happened in twenty twenty three. That's when we started to see a few banks fail that were connected to the crypto world. So one called Silicon Valley Bank failed, another one called Signature Bank failed, and Silvergate was the third. The owners at the time said that they were going to wind down operations. However, it wasn't until this passed September in twenty twenty four that Silvergate Capital Corporation filed for Chapter eleven bankruptcy protection. The filing included passages that accused regulators of interfering too much in the cryptocurrency realm, and that perhaps Silvergate would have been able to write itself if it weren't for I don't know, imperial entanglements. As Obi Wan Kenobi might say, Bitcoin itself had a heck of a year. So in January twenty twenty four, bitcoin was trading at around forty thousand dollars per bitcoin. That's a lot of money, and that was already an impressive improvement over the previous January back in twenty twenty three, when it was in the twenty thousand dollars range, but it was still pretty far off from its peak that it had hit previously in the spring of twenty twenty when it was around sixty thousand dollars per bitcoin. All of that was left behind the dust recently when the price of bitcoin skyrocketed to more than one hundred thousand dollars per bitcoin. Now, a lot of that I attribute to the outcome of the US elections, As I believe the crypto community at large views President Trump is being much more friendly to the crypto industry. So will this mean that cryptocurrency has become a viable currency alternative or will they just remain more like investment assets. I would probably guess on the latter, but I'm no expert. It is wild to me that the pizza guy in Florida bought pizzas for ten thousand bitcoin way back in twenty ten, and those ten thousand bitcoin today are worth a billion dollars, So I sure hope that was a good pizza. Also, one other thing that happened with bitcoin is that the number of coins per block mind on the blockchain reduced by half this year. Now, this is a planned feature that's built into bitcoin. In short, there's a finite number of bitcoin that will ever be released, and once all of those are mined, no new bitcoin will ever emerge. The ones that are in circulation will be the only ones to ever exist. To control the supply of bitcoin going into circulation, the system actually has the number of bitcoins awarded per block of transactions every few years. It's like approximately every four years. So it used to be that if you were to mine a block on the blockchain, you would get six point two five bitcoin per block mind now it's down to three point one point two five, which could affect the incentives for mining bitcoin. However, now that bitcoin is worth more than one hundred thousand dollars per unit, that still means the value of mining a block on the blockchain is almost as much as it would have been back at bitcoin's previous height of around sixty thousand dollars. Cause, yeah, the number of bitcoins you get is cut in half, but the amount that it's worth has almost not quite, but almost doubled, So there's still a huge incentive for mining operations to pour tons of assets into mining bitcoin. That means consuming a lot of electricity, and I have quite a bit of anxiety over how the next US administration is going to handle matters like energy consumption and where we turn to in order to generate electricity. So I think crypto is going to be in a lot of conversations about stuff like climate change for the next several years, and I'm not looking forward to that. Okay, let's finish up with some stuff about space. That's typically how I like to end my news items. First up, we have the trials and tribulations of Boeing, So the aerospace company has long been associated with the space industry, but this year Boeing has had a really rough one. It actually started quite early because on January fifth, twenty twenty four, and Alaskan Airlines Boeing seven thirty seven Max aircraft experienced a terrifying failure. At sixteen thousand feet, a door plug, meaning a plug that takes the place of what otherwise would have been an emergency door, blew out of the airplane, which meant the cabin experienced rapid, uncontrolled decompression. Fortunately, everyone on board the aircraft survived the incident. There were only three people I think who reported minor injuries, so all of that is good. I mean, it was still an incredibly traumatic experience. I can't imagine what I would feel like if I had been on that flight. So an investigation showed that the door plug perhaps was reinstalled improperly and was missing some bolts meant to secure it in place. There's still a question of whether or not the bolts had been in place, or perhaps they were ripped out during the incident, but either way, it certainly seems like a big oversight. So the Federal Aviation Administration or FAA ordered all seven to three seven Max nine aircraft that had a similar door plug to be grounded until each one could undergo a thorough inspection. Boeing would end up paying various airlines a whole lot of money due to the fact that those airlines could not operate the aircraft they had purchased while the FAA was conducting this inspection process. But that wasn't the only headache Boeing encountered this year. Another relates to the long awaited spacecraft, the Boeing Starliner. The spacecraft's purpose is to serve as a cargo and crew transport for space missions that go into low Earth orbit, and the spacecraft itself is reusable. It's also a tad roomier than the SpaceX crew Dragon capsule or the old Apollo capsules. The rollout of the Starliner faced numerous delays. Originally, the hope was that it would enter into service by twenty seventeen, but that did not happen. The first successful test flight wouldn't happen until twenty twenty two. That was an uncrewed test flight, and this was the year when Starliner finally would bring astronauts up to the space station. Unfortunately, the spacecraft would not bring those astronauts back down again because on the way to the space station, the Starliner experienced a partial thruster fail. Ye Now, NASA, the astronauts aboard both the ISS and the star Liner were collectively able to compensate for this, and the spacecraft did dock safely with the International Space Station. But after long consideration, NASA came to the determination that it would be too risky to have the two astronauts returned to Earth aboard the star Liner, and instead they would have to wait for another opportunity to come home. So what was supposed to be a short mission lasting like less than two weeks, has now stretched into one that's going to go all the way into twenty twenty five. In fact, right now, NASA says that they can get back no earlier than March twenty twenty five, and it might be later than that. The incident, along with the revelations regarding how expensive the star Liner missions are compared to alternatives like SpaceX, have really created a great deal of criticism directed both at Boeing and at NASA. Boeing's been rather cagy about the whole thing. The company was supposed to hold a press conference upon the uncrewed Starliner's return to Earth this past September. The Boeing canceled that event at the very last minute and didn't offer a reason as to why they canceled it. Starliner's future in the American space program remains another one of those big question marks that we just don't know enough about yet. Theoretically, once Boeing demonstrates to NASA's satisfaction that the star Liner is spaceworthy, Boeing will then provide the star Liner for three space missions. That's what a contract has agreed upon. There's also an option for NASA to purchase additional missions, I think three more per that contract. But as some have pointed out, we're getting closer to the retirement date of the International Space Station. We're talking like twenty thirty. So by that time it may be that star Liner has nowhere to take anybody because all the low Earth orbit space stations we would go to will be gone, all the ones that the United States has an interest in it anyway. And finally, twenty twenty four was the swan song for the Ingenuity Helicopter, the little aircraft on Mars that flew far more times than was planned. The Ingenuity was an experiment, could we design an aircraft that could actually fly on Mars. So the atmosphere on Mars is considerably thinner than what we have here on Earth, which makes it hard to fly, but Mars's gravity is about a third of Earth's, so that helps a little bit. So the Ingenuity was a test to see if maybe we could create an aircraft that could further explore the Red planet and add to our scientific knowledge to that end. While Ingenuity carried some basic sensors, it wasn't fully kitted out. It was more of a proof of concept. The plan was for Ingenuity to go on five flights when it landed on Mars as part of the Perseverance Rover way back in February twenty twenty one. The aircraft had to fly autonomously because Mars is far enough away from Earth that it takes several minutes for radio waves to travel between the two, so you can't remote control it from Earth. Rather than just complete five flights, however, Ingenuity would ultimately take off seventy two times. These flights were relatively modest, with altitudes of around ten to sixteen feet in flight times light i to around a minute and a half, but by golly, Ingenuity outperformed all expectations until finally this year. One of Ingenuity's rotors broke off in January when it came in for a landing and there was a miscalculation. So apparently the Ingenuity made an error because it was passing over what NASA referred to as a largely featureless region and it just made a miscalculation of where the ground was. That this is something the agency said will not be a problem in the future when they have a better mapped system of Mars's surface. But considering that Ingenuity was only supposed to fly five times, it's still really impressive. While Ingenuity will go sailing no more, I mean, I'm sorry, flying no more, it is still operating even as it's out of range radio communications leave perseverance. Ingenuity is serving as a stationary platform that's testing stuff like solar panel performance and battery operations. That's information that will be invaluable should we ever take the step of actually sending humans to Mars, or maybe even the grander dreams of perhaps establishing a semi permanent colony there. But that's putting the space cart before the space horse and that's it. Those are the top stories of twenty twenty four that I wanted to focus on, not saying that's all the top stories, just the ones I wanted to talk about. Hope you enjoyed this look back on some of the big events of twenty twenty four, and I look forward to chatting with you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.