Welcome to the TechMainRide home for Friday, October 6, 2023. I'm Brian McCullough today. Looks like Microsoft is inches away from getting the Activision Acquisition over the line. Hardware ambitions are one thing, but OpenAI might also design its own silicon. Microsoft's new version of Teams is finally not the most resource hungry piece of software on your computer, and of course, the weekend long-read suggestions. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech.
Looks like we might be able to close the loop on this one at long last. A source is reporting that Microsoft plans to close its $68.7 billion Activision Acquisition a week from today, October 13th, with a final decision from the UK's CMA allowing the deal expected to come down next week, quoting the verge. That date will still depend on the UK's competition and markets authority, though, a regulator that blocked Microsoft's deal earlier this year.
Microsoft recently restructured the deal to transfer cloud gaming rights for current and new Activision Blizzard games to Ubisoft, and the Xbox maker secured preliminary approval from the CMA late last month as a result.
The CMA has a deadline that expires today on gathering opinions over whether it should grant consent to Microsoft to proceed with the merger, a final decision from the CMA is expected next week, and barring any surprise last minute changes should allow Microsoft to close the deal.
Microsoft and Activision extended their deal deadline to October 18th recently, but if Microsoft is able to close the deal next week, it will bring to a close a 20-month process of regulatory approvals and battles across Europe and the US a little earlier than expected. Here in the US, the FTC is still appealing an outcome of a hearing with the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, and a decision on that is due in early December.
The FTC is also planning to resume its own administrative case against Microsoft's proposed Activision Blizzard acquisition. The administrative case will commence 21 days after the 9th Circuit rules on the FTC's appeal with the hearing held virtually. The FTC could attempt to undo Microsoft's deal, assuming it closes on time, but it would face an unprecedented uphill battle. I find the rumored ambitions of OpenAI to be hella interesting.
We've heard of them thinking they need their own hardware platform, but what if they also started doing their own chips? Quoting Reuters. OpenAI, the company behind ChatGBT, is exploring making its own artificial intelligence chips and has gone as far as evaluating a potential acquisition target according to people familiar with the company's plans. The company has not yet decided to move ahead according to recent internal discussions described to Reuters.
However, since at least last year, it discussed various options to solve the shortage of expensive AI chips that OpenAI relies on according to people familiar with the matter. These options have included building its own AI chip, working more closely with other chip makers including Nvidia and also diversifying its suppliers beyond Nvidia. The effort to get more chips is tied to two major concerns, CEO Sam Altman has identified.
A shortage of the advanced processors that power OpenAI software and the quote, I-Watering costs associated with running the hardware necessary to power its efforts and products. Since 2020, OpenAI has developed its generative artificial intelligence technologies on a massive supercomputer constructed by Microsoft, one of its largest backers that uses 10,000 of Nvidia's graphics processing units or GPUs.
Building ChatGPT is very expensive for the company, each query costs roughly $0.04 according to an analysis from Bernstein-Analyst Stacey Raskin. If ChatGPT queries grow to a tenth the scale of Google search, it would require roughly $48.1 billion worth of GPUs initially and about $16 billion worth of chips a year to keep operational.
It's not clear whether OpenAI will move ahead with a plan to build a custom chip doing so would be a major strategic initiative and a heavy investment that could amount to hundreds of millions of dollars a year in cost according to industry veterans. Even if OpenAI committed resources to the task, it would not guarantee success. An acquisition of a chip company could speed the process of building OpenAI's own chip as it did for Amazon and its acquisition of Anna Perna Labs in 2015.
OpenAI had considered the path to the point where it performed due diligence on a potential acquisition target according to one of the people familiar with its plans. The identity of the company OpenAI examined purchasing could not be learned. Even if OpenAI goes ahead with plans for a custom chip, including an acquisition, the effort is likely to take several years, leaving the company dependent on commercial providers like Nvidia and advanced micro devices in the meantime.
You might have noticed this, but Microsoft has rolled out its new version of Microsoft Teams, which has been improved since March, rebuilt from the ground up to be less resource hungry on Windows and Mac OS. quoting the verge The new version of Teams is up to two times faster while using 50% less memory according to Microsoft. That's good news to anyone who uses Teams already, which has been particularly resource hungry on older laptops and PCs.
Installing the new Microsoft Teams app should be three times faster and launching or joining meetings two times faster with the app now taking up 70% less disk space. All of these performance improvements are thanks to Microsoft ditching the electron foundations of Teams and moving toward Microsoft's Edge WebView 2 technology.
Microsoft has also moved to the React JavaScript library and focused on improving the Microsoft Teams design with the Fluent Design Language System for several UI improvements. The new Teams has been in preview for months, but during that time it was missing some features that Microsoft has now added to the final version. We have made notable progress since the launch of new Teams in public previews said Microsoft product lead a new Pam Patnick.
Quote new Teams now has full feature parity for almost all features including custom line of business apps third party apps breakout rooms seven by seven video call cues, PSTN calling contextual search in chats and channels cross post a channel conversation and more end quote new Microsoft Teams features will now be delivered exclusively on this new Teams client. So businesses will need to upgrade. There's no migration required though. So upgrading should be as simple as an update.
Microsoft says classic teams users will be automatically upgraded to new teams in the coming months. The new teams client also wasn't available initially for Mac users earlier this year in preview, but with the final release for macOS. There are also improvements for Apple's devices.
We're also seeing significant performance improvements on Mac, including the ability to switch between chats and channels faster and access relevant information quickly and efficiently with a faster scrolling experience says Microsoft teams works natively on all Mac devices, including those with Apple Silicon, giving Mac users an improved app experience. This new Microsoft teams client is also the foundation for the company's AI powered co pilot push in teams.
You'll be able to use co pilot in teams to summarize meetings, read action items and avoid long threads of conversations to get to the key points. You've got the best Wi-Fi on the block, smart lights in every room, a fitness watch, and you've had them all since the dawn of their existence. But if you're still sleeping in the past, using a clunky, jarring alarm clock, let me tell you about the Hatch Restore.
The Hatch Restore is your bedside sleep guide engineered to help you build more restful routines and natural sleep habits. For all in one, Dream Machine is a sophisticated sound machine. It's a light and alarm clock, a seamless blend of innovation and functionality, beautifully designed for your bedside table. Good rest allows you to be the best version of yourself, which is why the Restore was engineered to help you form healthy sleep habits for life.
Your Hatch teaches your body when it's time to sleep and when it's time to rise with light and sound cues. It coaches you through meditations and mindfulness exercises that transform the time before and after sleep into restful rituals. Right now, Hatch is offering our listeners $20 off your purchase of a Hatch Restore and free shipping at hatch.co-slashride. Sleep deeply and wake gently with the restore. Go to hatch.co-slashride to get $20 off and free shipping. That's hatch.co-slashride.
Selling a little or selling a lot. Shopify helps you do your thing however you caching. Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business from the launch your online shop stage to the first real-life store stage. All the way to the, did we just hit a million orders stage? Shopify is there to help you grow whether you're selling scented soap or offering outdoor outfits.
Shopify helps you sell everywhere from the all-in-one e-commerce platform to their in-person POS system wherever and whatever you're selling. Shopify's got you covered. Shopify helps you turn browsers into buyers with the internet's best converting checkout. 36% better on average compared to other leading commerce platforms. And sell more with less effort thanks to Shopify Magic, your AI powered All Star. Shopify runs my 23 year old e-commerce company and my little side experiments.
It can power whatever you're doing. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash ride. All lower case. Go to shopify.com slash ride now to grow your business no matter what stage you're in. Shopify.com slash ride. Time for the weekend long read suggestions. First up, the New Yorker has a deep dive into a question we keep coming back to.
If AI has been trained on the web, but the web is going to be run over soon by tons of AI content, where will AI go to teach itself in the future? A major leap in AI may come when LLM starts seeming curious or bored. Curiosity and boredom sound like they belong to an organic mind, but here's how they might be created inside an AI. As a rule, chatbots today have a propensity to confidently make stuff up or, as some researchers say, hallucinate.
At the root of these hallucinations is an inability to introspect. The AI doesn't know what it does and doesn't know. These researchers begin to solve the problem of getting their models to express confidence and cite their sources. They will not just be making chatbots more credible. They will also be equipping them with a rudimentary kind of self-knowledge. An AI will be able to observe from reams of its own chat transcripts that it is prone to hallucination in a particular area.
It will only be natural to let that tendency guide its ingestion of further training data. The model will direct itself toward sources that touch on topics it knows the least about, curiosity in its most basic form. If it can't find the right kind of training data, a chatbot might solicit it. I imagine a conversation with some future version of chat GPT in which, after a period of inactivity, it starts asking me questions.
Perhaps having observed my own questions and follow-ups, it will have developed an idea of what I know about. You're a programmer and a writer, aren't you? It might say to me. Sure, I'll respond. I thought so. I'm trying to get better at technical writing. I wonder if you could help me decide which of the following sentences is best. A.I. might ask my sister who works at a construction company about what's going on in the local lumber market.
It could ask my doctor friend who does research on cancer, whether he could clear up something in a recent nature paper. Such a system would be like stack overflow, Wikipedia and Reddit combined. Except that instead of knowledge getting deposited into the public square, it would accumulate privately in the mind of an ever-growing genius. Having the web collapse into a single gigantic chapot would be a little like watching a galaxy spiral into a black hole.
Then fast company takes a look at an interesting question, why is Bandcamp profitable, but Spotify, after all these years, still isn't. Quote, Bandcamp bakes heterogeneity into its platform in a way that Spotify's one-size-fits-all-service erases. So, while Spotify has created a technically complex platform for simple transactions, Bandcamp has created a technically simple platform for complex transactions.
The result is that Bandcamp is able to reap the benefits of what's known as fat-tailed distributions, in which a minority of individuals comprise the majority of sales. The same logic followed by venture capital firms, whose bets on one or two unicorns, make up for all the other portfolio companies that go bust. As I found in a recent analysis, about 20% of Bandcamp customers account for 80% of the site's total revenue.
And within this 20%, the sale of physical goods becomes increasingly important. More than half the objects that the very top spenders buy on the site are physical. And among those objects, vinyl records are more popular than all others, including CDs, tapes, and miscellaneous merch combined. On average, artists who sell the most physical stuff make the most money on the platform, and among the different kinds of physical stuff they sell, the association is strongest with vinyl.
Among the highest selling artists on the platform, 30% of all the items sold, including all non-musical merch like T-shirts, are vinyl records. Among the lowest selling artists, vinyl was roughly 5%, downloadable albums and tracks move in the opposite direction, with top selling artists moving fewer digital goods as they move up the sales rankings. Here's your history hit of the week from R.S. Technica, a deep dive look at digital equipment corporation.
Note, unless you use a Mac, your computer's CPU has its roots in a deck processor that failed in the market. In the late 1980s and 90s, deck was looking to change with the times and evolve its Vax line. In 1992, it introduced the Alpha AXP, later shortened to just Alpha, a risk-based processor designed to compete with the other risk chips on the market, such as Sun Microsystems Spark and Hula Packards PA Risk.
Pack was getting its lunch eaten by the risk guys, particularly Sun, but also to a certain extent, Silicon Graphics with their MIPS products, both of which were based on this newfangled risk environment, says John Culver, a CPU historian and operator of the CPU Shaq. Alpha went up them all by being 64 bits at a time when everything else was 32-bit. Bits don't change the processing power, they just change the amount of addressable memory.
Back in 1992, no one was worried about the 4GB theoretical memory limits of 32-bit computers, in that regard the Alpha was way ahead of its time. Everyone was like, why would I need more than 4GB of RAM? It was the right thing to do, but it was too early. You see that in a lot of things where they're ahead of their time and people don't know what to do with it, said Culver.
And finally, this is not tech, but from the New York Times, a look at Hollywood's set guru, the guy who designs the sets for a ton of movies you've seen for decades, now including the upcoming killers of the Flower Moon. Since the 1970s, Fisk has been one of Hollywood's most sought-after collaborators, legendary among author writer-directors for his ability to help them realize their most ambitious projects.
He has built boundless, intricately conceived worlds for Terrence Malik, the thin red line. Paul Thomas Anderson, there will be Blood, David Lynch, Mohaum Drive, Alejandro Inari 2, The Revenant, and others. He is the artist that filmmakers hire to bring the American past to the screen at the impossible human scale at once existed. Jack belongs to one of those now rare species of filmmakers who understand film from almost a renaissance-like tradition in Arutu, says.
He knows photography, nature, architecture, drama. When Scorsese began planning killers of the Flower Moon, a lengthy process in which the director radically revised the script from a story centered on the murder investigators to one following the victims, Paul Thomas Anderson told him, you have to get Jack. But Fisk, who is 77, can be notoriously difficult to entice to a film. Since 1970, he has designed relatively few, at one point, he took nearly 20 years off.
When Scorsese approached him, Fisk was excited by the opportunity to collaborate with the director, but also by the chance to excavate a world rarely depicted on screen. The film takes place in a sliver of lost time, one wedged between more familiar depictions of Native Americans in the 19th century, and the well-worn imagery of the roaring 20s. Following this moment of cultural collision back to life, would represent as sweeping a challenge as Fisk had ever faced.
The story unfolds in about 40 sets, as varied as Masonic lodges, Osage funerals and federal courtrooms, spread over a million acres and costing about 15 million of the film's $200 million budget. The sets would represent a kind of culmination of Fisk's career-long obsession with reclaiming the rough contours of American history.
More than any one aesthetic vision he has sought over half a century to scour away the visual clichés that mar films seeking beneath them the vivid wood grain and forgotten colors of the past. Alright, a ton of show news for you. First up, I will be in San Francisco from Sunday through Wednesday.
We're going to try to hold the listener meetup on Monday night at 7pm at Johnny Follies, which is at 2430 Ferrell Street, right around the corner from Union Square, Monday night at 7pm at Johnny Follies, 2430 Ferrell Street. That's also right across the street from where the conference is, so if we spill over, I guess we can head to the hotel lobby.
Anyway, in order for you to make it easier to recognize me this time, I think I'm going to try to remember to pack and wear my arsenal jersey, which is red, in case you were not aware, so hope to see some of you on Monday night look out for the arsenal jersey with Saka on the back. I know it is a Monday night, but what can we do? And frankly, NYC, we've never done a listener meetup, so we should plan one of those soon.
Next, Monday is a bank holiday here in the US, so I will not be doing a show on Monday, but I do have a bonus episode for you this weekend, so I think I'll release that on Sunday night, so it'll be waiting for you on Monday morning, look for that, another great portfolio profile episode, and if you're attending the AI Engineer Summit, which is the conference I'm in town for, please make yourself known to me.
I can't promise I'll be wearing an arsenal jersey all week, but you'd be surprised how often people recognize me from my voice. So talk to you on Tuesday, unless I talk to you in person first.