Welcome to the Techmeme Ride Home for Friday, May 17th, 2024. I'm Brian McCulloch today. As telegraphed for the last year, Reddit is going all in on being an all-you-can-eat buffet for AI companies. Will new batteries give iPhones longer battery life like I want or will they just make the phones thinner again? A subtle but important improvement to chat GPT and in the long reads, a deep dive into what happened at Cruise. Here's what you missed today
in the world of tech. Open AI and Reddit are partnering to bring Reddit content to chat GPT via Reddit's data API. This deal also brings new AI tools to Reddit and makes Open AI a Reddit ad partner, quoting Reuters. The deal underscores Reddit's attempt to diversify beyond its advertising business and follows its recent partnership with Alphabet to make its content available for training Google's AI models. Ahead of Reddit's March IPO, Reuters reported that Reddit struck its deal with
Alphabet worth about $60 million per year. Investors view selling its data to train AI models as a key source of revenue beyond Reddit's advertising business. The social media company earlier this month reported strong revenue growth and improving profitability in the first earnings since its market debut, indicating that its Google deal and its push to grow its
ads business were paying off. Reddit shares rose 10.5% to $62.31 after the bell. As of Wednesday's close, the stock is up nearly 12% since its market debut in March. Redditers have been vocal about how Reddit's executives manage the platform before and remains to be seen how they'll react to this announcement. More than 7,000 subreddits
went dark in June 2023 after users protested Reddit's changes to its API pricing. Recently, news of a partnership between OpenAI and the programming messaging board stack overflow, people were suspended after trying to delete their posts there. No financial terms were revealed in the blog post announcing the arrangement and neither company mentioned training data either. The last detail is different from the deal with Google where Reddit explicitly stated it would
give Google, quote, more efficient ways to train models. There is, however, a disclosure mentioning that OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman is also a shareholder in Reddit, but that quote, this partnership was led by OpenAI's COO and approved by its independent board of directors. We have a date for the launch of Grand Theft Auto 6. Kind of. Well, actually not really at all quoting the verge. In Take 2's Q4 2024 earnings report, the company stated when gamers can expect
the next entry in the GTA series. What was previously a nebulous calendar year 2025 for Grand Theft Auto 6 is now a more specific but still a bit vague fall 2025. Quoting this paragraph from the earnings report, as we enter fiscal 2025 with positive momentum, we expect to deliver net bookings of $5.55 to $5.65 billion. Our outlook reflects a narrowing of Rockstar games previous
established window of calendar 2025 to fall of calendar 2025 for Grand Theft Auto 6. We are highly confident that Rockstar games will deliver an unparalleled entertainment experience and
our expectations for the commercial impact of the title continue to increase. And quote, in other GTA related news, the company reported that GTA 5 has sold 200 million copies, a staggering feat making the game the second best selling title of all time, but still 100 million copies short of the number one entry minecraft.
Manechi Quo says Apple will use higher energy density battery cells for iPhone 16 Pro Max and stainless steel battery cases for better replaceability, which is an EU requirement now. This is directly relevant to my longer battery life bigger devices rant possibly. Quoting Apple Insider. In his full post about the report on medium, Quo says that this could mean a longer battery life. However, it could also mean the same battery life if Apple has decided to
use a smaller battery. Seemingly based on information from his sources in the supply chain, Quo says that Apple is redesigning the battery to use a stainless steel case. Reportedly, stainless steel is poorer at dissipating heat than aluminum, but is stronger. Consequently, Quo says that the new case will provide better protection for the battery and for the iPhone as a whole. Plus, this new battery case design is said to make it easier to remove the battery, which is to help Apple comply with EU
requirements. Quo says that it is solely the iPhone 16 Pro Max that will get this new battery, but the intention is that it will then be used throughout the lineup in 2025's iPhone 17 range. This report may back up a claimed leak in November 2023, although that was said to be for the iPhone 16 Pro. Photographs in the purported leak showed the same J shape battery as in the current
model, but it appeared to be in case in what was described as a frosted metal shell. Separately, a dubious rumor in February 2024 claimed that there was to be a redesign battery for the iPhone 16 Plus. However, in this case, it was specifically claimed that the battery life of the phone would be reduced. OpenAI says Chatchee PT can now directly import files from Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive,
available now to Plus team and enterprise users. Quoting Venture Beat. Users can find the new integration by clicking the tiny paperclip icon to the left of their prompt slash text entry bar at the bottom of the Chatchee PT default interface on desktop. You'll need to grant access from your Microsoft OneDrive or Google Drive accounts in order to make use of the feature, but once you do, you can select a range of file types including spreadsheets, presentations, and documents to
import directly into Chatchee PT. Then OpenAI has updated the Chatchee PT interface to allow you to see spreadsheet files in particular in a full screen view and with an interactive interface showing any changes you make to them using the underlying AI model in real time. Once you're finished, you can also download a copy of your Chatchee PT edited spreadsheet or document directly from the Chatchee PT interface. As OpenAI writes on its blog, you can now customize and interact with bar,
line, pie, and scatter plot charts in the conversation. However, over chart elements asked additional questions or select colors. When ready, download to use in presentations or documents and quote. For privacy-minded users, OpenAI notes in its blog that quote, we don't train on data from Chatchee PT team and enterprise customers and Chatchee PT plus users can opt out of training through their data controls which are available in the settings menu and quote.
X has officially adopted x.com for all of its core systems, but testing shows some Twitter.com URLs still do not redirect depending on the browser and login status. The social network formerly known as Twitter has officially adopted x.com for all its core systems. That means typing twitter.com in your browser will now redirect to Elon Musk's favorite domain or should. At the time of publication, we're seeing a mix of results depending on browser choice and whether you're logged in or not.
A message now also appears at the bottom of the x login page that reads, we are letting you know that we are changing our URL but your privacy and data protection settings remain the same. The domain transition has been one of the more awkward aspects of Elon Musk's move to rebrand the company, although many aspects of x migrated to the new branding long ago, including its official
account, its mobile apps and its x premium, fka blue subscriptions. The platforms URLs have remained twitter.com ever since Musk officially initiated the switch to x. The URLs started to change way back in August of last year when some Verge staffers were able to copy x.com links from the share sheet inside of x's iOS app. The clumsy transition has been a gift to fishing attacks said brand crabs last month. Musk has a long history with the x.com URL launching a business under
that name in 1999 that eventually merged with what would become PayPal. For this modern day version of the company, Musk envisions that it will become a weChat like everything app. Maybe, but one thing for sure, it's not twitter anymore. With everyone fighting for attention, how can your business stand out and connect with customers?
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checkout for $100 off. Thank you Lumen for sponsoring this episode. Time for the weekend long read suggestions and first up, I can't do better than this lead to this fortune piece I'm about to tell you about. In a single night, self-driving startup crews went from sizzling startup to cautionary tail. Here's what really happened and how GM is scrambling to save its $10 billion bet. In exhaustive internal investigation, reconstructed nearly every detail of the accident, but it couldn't
clear up exactly what crews' remote assistance team saw that evening. One thing is certain, the incident, while not fatal, was the most serious in crews' history and it immediately thrust the robot taxi company and its 80% owner, General Motors, into a spiral of federal scrutiny and investigations as well as public outrage and condemnation. Before the end of October 2023, regulators were alleging that crews had withheld important details of the incident from them.
California's Department of Motor Vehicles had rescinded crews' operational permit,
leading crews to voluntarily pull its vehicles off the streets across the US. GM, which had largely let the company run independently, despite its close communication with senior leadership and operations, swept in to replace nearly all of crews' management, shuffled up its board and lay off nearly a quarter of its almost 4,000 employees in a bid to salvage crews' reputation and preserve the more than $10 billion that GM has plowed into the company
over the last eight years. Crews, once a crown jewel of General Motors CEO, Crews Chair, Mary Barras, broader strategy to rival electric competitor Tesla, suddenly had become an outsized liability, just as General Motors was simultaneously trying to manage the six-week union strike by workers of the Big Three US automakers that was threatening its business. Those labor strikes were unprecedented, but the revelations around crews' back and forth
with regulators were also unnerving GM shareholders. As a financial analyst put it during GM's first earnings call that mentioned Crews' permit being revoked, the company's handling of the whole debacle was very un-GM-like. I agree with you, Barras, responded. It was uncharacteristic, and it definitely is something that we're working to manage well. But unlike a startup that implodes and then closes its doors, GM is unfurling the full force of a Fortune 500 giant to resuscitate
the project, whereas GM had previously taken more of a backseat approach with Crews. It is now intimately hands-on in its subsidiaries day-to-day and in the sensitive task of rolling Crews' robot taxis back onto the streets. To report this story, Fortune spoke with 11 former Crews' employees or contract workers in addition to Crews' investors, analysts, and San Francisco politicians.
Fortune also interviewed Crews' newly-appointed chief safety officer, Steve Kenner. What is clear, the move GM and Crews' new leadership team make next will be a roadmap of how a giant corporation can rescue an innovative startup or be driven off course trying to save it. Then one of the areas the combination of AI and robotics has people excited are for things like education of young children and elder care. On the elder care front, MIT Technology Review
looks at how cuddly robots could change dementia care. Quote, as robots go, golden pup is decidedly low tech. It retails for $140. For around $6,000, you can opt for Perro, a fluffy robotic baby seal developed in Japan which can sense touch, light, sound, temperature, and posture. Its manufacturer says it develops its own character, remembering behaviors that led its owner to
give it attention. Golden pup and parro are available now, but researchers are working on much more sophisticated robots for people with cognitive disorders, devices that leverage AI to converse and play games. Researchers from Indiana University, Bloomington, are tweaking a commercially available robot system called QT to serve people with dementia and Alzheimer's. The researchers
two foot tall robot looks a little like a toddler in an astronaut suit. Its round white head holds a screen that displays two eyebrows, two eyes, and a mouth that together form a variety of expressions. The robot engages people in conversation asking AI generated questions to keep them talking. The AI model they're using isn't perfect and neither are the robot's responses. In one, awkward conversation, a study participant told the robot that she had a sister.
I'm sorry to hear that, the robot responded. How are you doing? But as large language models improve, which is happening already, so will the quality of the conversations. When the QT robot made that awkward comment, it was running OpenAI's GPT-3, which was released in 2020. The latest version of that model, GPT-40, which was released this week, is faster and provides more seamless conversations. You can now interrupt the conversation and the model will
adjust. The idea of using robots to keep dementia patients engaged and connected isn't always an easy sell. Some people see it as an abdication of our social responsibilities. Then there are privacy concerns. The best robotic companions are personalized. They collect information about people's lives, learn their likes and dislikes, and figure out when to approach them. That kind of
data collection can be unnerving, not just for patients, but for medical staff. Lilian Hung, creator of the Innovation in Dementia Care and Aging or Idealab at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, told one reporter about an incident that happened during a focus group at a care facility. She and her colleagues popped out for lunch. When they returned, they found the staff had unplugged the robot and placed a bag over its head. They were worried
it was secretly recording them, she said. On the other hand, robots have some advantages over humans in talking to people with dementia. Their attention doesn't flag. They don't get annoyed or angry when they have to repeat themselves. They can't get stressed. What's more, there are increasing numbers of people with dementia and two-few people to care for them. According to the latest report from the Alzheimer's Association, we're going to need more than a million additional
care workers to meet the needs of people living with dementia between 2021 and 2031. That is the largest gap between labor supply and demand for any single occupation in the United States. End quote. And finally, Sherwood News has a piece up that is absolutely full of great graphs and charts. We talk about the freeze these last few years has had on IPOs. IPOs, of course, create more publicly traded companies. That mainstream investors can get a piece of not just
insiders and early investors. Frankly, publicly traded investible companies are an increasingly scarce resource. In 1996, there were more than 8,000 publicly listed companies on US stock markets. Today, there are just 4,642, a decrease of 43%. Why? Consolidation. Companies swallowing other companies in search of growth. And this includes our own tech industry. Quote. Just a handful of giant, financially powerful technology companies have snapped up literally
hundreds of smaller firms since the late 90s. Data from CrunchBase shows that Google, Microsoft, Apple, Meta, Amazon, and Nvidia have together acquired in eye-watering 875 companies. Google under its parent alphabet has been the most inquisitive. Alphabet gobbled up 263 companies, 8 more than cloud rival Microsoft, which has done 255 deals. Apple, Meta, and Amazon have all had similarly sized appetites while Nvidia.
The newest member of the Mag 7 has done relatively few deals, acquiring just 25 companies. Tesla has done just 10. Of those 800 and plus deals, lots were acquisitions of small companies, but many of them were not. YouTube linked in Instagram Fitbit Whole Foods DoubleClick Skype, Audible, GitHub, Beats Electronics, Zappos. Absent their acquisitions by the aforementioned tech behemoths. They would almost certainly all be tradable stocks today, or at least knocking on the doors of
the public markets. It's not impossible to imagine that some YouTube and Instagram, especially, could have posed a major competitive threat to their current parent firm if they were operating independently. It stands to reason that such competitive dynamics are a big part of the reason these companies get purchased in the first place, even if execs don't characterize their thinking
quite that explicitly. Mark Zuckerberg, for example, even went out of his way on an email chain to distance himself from any implication that they were buying Instagram, quote, to prevent them from competing with us in any way. The broader question is whether the calling of the public markets is a good thing or a bad thing. And of course, it really depends on where you stand. If you're a shareholder in Meta, it's undoubtedly a good thing that it bought Instagram.
If you're a company looking to place your digital advertisement, you probably would have been better off with an independent Instagram as an option outside the Zuckerverse. If you're a consumer, you still have access to both, though it's likely there are some innovations in independent Instagram and slightly threatened Facebook wouldn't have been
incentivized to come up with that you're missing out on. As for the economy as a whole, Santee recently co-authored a research paper looking at the potential effects of the drop in publicly traded stocks, suggesting that public companies are better than private equity firms at turning investment into higher revenues and innovations, quantified via patent filings. It suggests the shrinking universe of publicly traded stocks might be a problem.
The growth rates in the economy, Santee said, kind of depend on the existence of healthy public markets and quote. No weekend bonus episodes for you this weekend, but some are coming down the pike so either next weekend or the week after, until then, talk to you on Monday.