Welcome to the Techmeme Ride Home from Monday, June 3rd, 2024. I'm Brian McCulloch today. Computex brings a slew of announcements from AMD and Nvidia, including an AI bot to help you with your gaming. Another price hike from Spotify, perplexity launches, pages, X is now officially NSFW, and a look at Sam Altman's investment portfolio. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Computex is kicking off this week, so a whole bunch of announcements were made overnight
into this morning. Let's hit AMD first. AMD unveiled four new Ryzen 9000 series desktop CPUs set for a July 2024 release based on its new Zen 5 architecture offering a claimed 16% more instructions per cycle. They also said their new 3 nanometer epic turbine data center chips will launch in the second half of this year based on Zen 5 architecture
and featuring up to 192 cores and 384 threads. They also announced a yearly data center GPU release cycle starting with Instinct MI325X, slated for later this year and meant to best Nvidia's H200 in peak performance. Finally, two new Ryzen AI 300 series mobile chips, the Ryzen AI9365 and Ryzen AI9HX370, each with a 50 tops NPU shipping in July. Then over to Nvidia who announced RTX AI PC laptops from ASIS and MSI will have up to GeForce RTX
4070 GPUs and systems on a chip with Windows 11 AI PC capabilities. Jensen Wong said that ASIS, Pegatron, Wishtrun and others will deliver cloud on-prem embedded and edge AI systems using Nvidia Blackwell GPUs and the company plans to upgrade its AI accelerators annually. Also a Blackwell Ultra chip for 2025 and Blackwell's successor Ruben for 2026
that will use HBM4. But there was also a demo where Nvidia showed its G assist AI chatbot that could guide users through PC games based on voice queries, configure optimal settings and more. When Nvidia first announced G assist, it was an April Fools prank in 2017 that joked about an AI assistant being able to help you play a game while you ran to
the door for your pizza delivery. Now seven years later, G assist is back as a real demo of a powerful GeForce AI assistant that Nvidia might eventually bring to life for game developers and RTX GPU owners. Project G assist is only a tech demonstration right now, but it's a brief look at how AI assistants could guide you through PC games and even
configure optimal settings for you based on chat inputs in the future. In a demo, Nvidia showed G assist responding to voice queries asking what's the next early game weapon and where do I find the crafting materials for it inside ARC Survival Ascended. The assistant can even understand what's happening on the screen as you play so it can tailor itself
to how many skill points you have in a game and help guide you through. Microsoft showed off a similar demo for its vision of how its co-pilot AI assistant could guide Minecraft players through the game last month. In video zone AI assistant can also optimize and tune PC settings, including providing charts of PC latency and frames per second over the past 60 seconds. It can scan your system and notice you're only playing at 60 hertz
when your monitor supports 240 hertz. You can also ask the assistant for recommendations to increase performance in a game, hit a 60 frames per second performance target or even overclock your GPU and quote. Prices up everybody, another subscription price rise Spotify plans to raise US prices premium is going from 1099 to 1199 per month. Duo from 1499 to 1699 and the family plan from 1699 to 1999. The previous price rise was in July of just last year, quoting the verge.
That means the price of a Spotify Duo subscription has jumped by 30% in a year compared to prices before last year's hike. Spotify family has also increased by 25% over the course of a year with Spotify premium up by 20%. So that we can continue to invest in and innovate on our product features and bring users the best experience. We occasionally update our
prices says Spotify in a blog post announcing the price changes over the next month. Subscribers in the US will receive an email explaining what this update means for their subscription and quote. Spotify announced price hikes for its international subscribers last month. So these price increases aren't just affecting US subscribers. Bloomberg reported last month that Spotify also reportedly still plans to launch its super premium plan with lossless
streaming and other features. Some Spotify users have even noticed a Dolby Atmos logo on the apps now playing screen in recent months suggesting that this could be part of the super premium feature set and quote a bit of a hint as to why Spotify thinks it can do this now. According to antennas, Spotify listeners are the least likely to cancel among the major video or audio streaming services in the US with a monthly churn rate on Spotify
of only around 2%. AI search engine perplexity has launched pages which will research and create a customizable web page based on user prompts aimed at educators, researchers and others. Users type out what their report is about or what they want to know in the prompt box. They can gear the writing more toward beginners, expert readers or a more general audience. Perplexity searches for information then begins writing the page by breaking down the information
into sections, citing some sources and then adding visuals. Users can make the page as detailed or concise as they want and they can also change the image's perplexity uses. However, you can't edit the text it generates, you have to write another prompt to fix any mistakes. I tried out pages ahead of time to see how it works, pages is not geared toward people like me who already have an avenue to share our knowledge but it doesn't
seem geared toward researchers or teachers either. I wanted to see how it can break down complex topics and if it can help with the difficult task of presenting dense information to different audiences. Among other topics I asked perplexities pages to generate a page on the convergence of quantum computing and artificial intelligence and its impact on society across the three audience types. The main difference between audiences seems
to be the jargon in the written text and the kind of website it takes data from. Each generated report pulls from different sources including introductory blog posts like this one from IBM and also cited Wikipedia which drove the student report vibe home. The perplexity generated page did a passable job of explaining the basics of quantum computing and how AI fits into the technology but the research didn't go as deep as I could have if I were writing
the presentation myself. The more advanced version didn't even really talk about the convergence of quantum computing and AI at all. It found blog posts talking about quantum inflection points which is when quantum technologies become more commercially viable and is not at all related to what I asked it to write about. Then I asked pages to write a report about
myself mainly because the information there is easily verifiable. But it only took information from my personal website and an article about me on my high school's website not from other public easily accessible sources like my author page on the verge. It also sometimes elaborated on things that had nothing to do with me. For example, I began my journalism career during the 2008 financial crisis. Instead of talking about the pieces I wrote about
mass layoffs perplexity explained the beginnings of the financial crisis. Pages does the surface level googling and writing for you but it isn't research. Proplexity claims that pages will help educators develop comprehensive study guides for students and researchers to create detailed reports on their findings. I could not upload a research paper for it to summarize and I couldn't edit the text it generated two things I believe users who want to make
the most of pages would appreciate. I do see one potential user for pages and it isn't one perplexity called out. Students rushing to put out an assignment. Pages may improve in the future but right now it's a way to get easy, possibly correct surface level information into a presentation that doesn't really teach anything.
X has officially changed its adult content policies. Formally, letting users post consensual, not safe for work and AI content provided it is properly labeled and quote not prominently displayed. The company's reasoning for allowing graphic content is to let people participate
in conversations about what is happening around them and include images and videos. The social network allows users to mark their posts as containing sensitive media and doesn't allow users under 18 or those who haven't entered their birth dates on their profile to see such posts. X has never really banned porn but these clauses could let it build services around adult content, creating and only fans competitor to bolster its revenues.
About 13% of posts on the platform in 2022 contained adult content according to a Reuters report in 2022 that cited internal company documents. Adult content on X has seemingly gone up since then, especially as porn bots have proliferated on the platform and quote. How many times did I quote from our next sponsor just last week? Probably almost every day. If you do listen to the show every day, you know the great work the Washington Post does.
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quotes and filings to detail. Sam Altman's investment portfolio. Altman and his venture funds have invested in over 400 companies and his holdings are worth more than $2.8 billion according to this piece. Here's the thing. There is a reason that executives at major companies typically don't do things like this. A growing number of Altman startups do business
with OpenAI itself, either as customers or major business partners. The arrangement puts Altman on both sides of deals, creating a mounting list of potential conflicts in which he could personally benefit from OpenAI's work. For example, OpenAI is in talks for a deal with Helian, a nuclear energy startup that is chaired by Altman in which it would buy vast quantities of electricity to provide power for data centers. The 11-year-old company is planning to build
nuclear fusion power plants, a technology that doesn't exist yet in usable form. Altman invested $375 million in Helian in 2021, his largest startup check ever written. The startup signed on Microsoft, its first customer and OpenAI's largest investor last year. Altman has recused himself from the deal talks between OpenAI and Helian, which haven't been previously reported. Last month, OpenAI announced a partnership with Reddit in which it would pay to bring
the messaging site's content to chat GPT and other AI products. Altman and entities he controls own 7.6% of Reddit, making him the third largest outside shareholder and he briefly served as its CEO in 2014. Reddit stock shot up 10% after the announcement, posting Altman's stake by $69 million to $754 million. Altman didn't lead the partnership talks. OpenAI said in a blog post, Altman's more recent investments have focused on companies
that aim to capitalize on the artificial intelligence boom being driven by OpenAI. APEC security in which Altman invested in undisclosed amount last summer aims to sell cybersecurity software to companies using AI products such as chat GPT. He also invested in undisclosed amount in Exowat, a startup tackling the clean energy needs of big data centers used by AI companies. Public company boards typically bar executives from taking large stakes and outside ventures.
The worry is that executives will follow incentives and strike deals or favor partnerships that help the companies they own. Even if a CEO recuses him or herself, staff is put in the awkward position of negotiating against their boss's personal financial interests. Altman began to start investing while running Looped, the social networking startup he founded shortly
before dropping out of Stanford University in 2005. While Altman didn't have deep sources of cash, he got access to up-and-coming startups thanks to his mentor Paul Graham, the co-founder of the influential venture firm Y Combinator, which had invested in Looped. Altman had luck with his second-ever startup investment. In 2009, Graham introduced him to John and Patrick Coleson, two young Irish entrepreneurs who were dreaming up a new payments processing
startup called Stripe. Altman invested $15,000 for 2% of the company. Stripe is now the third most valuable US startup outside SpaceX and OpenAI with a valuation of $65 billion. Altman's stake, which is now smaller than 2%, marks his most successful investment to date. Last year, Stripe also announced a deal to help commercialize OpenAI's technology. In 2012, Altman sold Loop and used the small profits to help raise his first venture fund, named
Hydrazine, after the chemical use for rocket fuel. Hydrazine's largest outside investor was the billionaire PayPal co-founder Peter Teal, another early mentor of Altman's. In 2014, Altman became president of Y Combinator. By then, he had already invested in 40 companies, he wrote in a blog post, adding that five of them increased in value by 100 times or more.
Altman continued to run Hydrazine, even while running Y Combinator, an unconventional setup in Silicon Valley where venture fund leaders are typically barred from managing their own venture funds in order to stay focused on making money for their firms. Hydrazine bought out a portion of startup shares owned by Graham, a transaction that gave Altman stakes in some of the hottest companies backed by Y Combinator. The sale hasn't previously been reported.
In September 2014, Hydrazine also made a $28 million investment into Reddit. The messaging board site Altman had grown obsessed with ever since meeting the company's founders in 2005 through Y Combinator. Altman assembled the rest of the funding round bringing in investors ranging from Teal and the rapper Snoop Dogg to the venture firm Andrison Horowitz. Altman joined Reddit's board of directors and helped appoint its current chief executive,
Steve Huffman, the following year. Altman built his position over the years through various funds and holding companies giving him a stake worth $413 million when the startup went public in March. Reddit announced in January 2022 that Altman had recently stepped down from the board. Altman's arrangement, where much of his wealth is tied up in outside ventures but not open AI, pushes the boundaries of traditional corporate governance according to tech
lawyers and venture capitalists. Most startup founders have their wealth tied into their companies, fueling motivation to make their companies succeed. View are ever in a position where they stand to make more money by benefiting the business on the other side of the table. Beyond Helian, Altman has steered open AI's business to at least one other startup he
backed. In 2019, Open AI signed a letter of intent to buy $51 million worth of AI chips from Rain AI, a startup he backed the prior year, wired earlier reported on the deal. Is he going to have Open AI acquire these companies at big prices? Is he going to leverage Open AI resources to help his other companies? That's what you kind of really worry about, especially if he owns zero of Open AI, said Lewis Lehot, a partner at the law firm, Fully
and Lardner, where he advises startups on corporate governance. While not publicly addressing questions about his own outside interest, Altman discussed the issue of conflicts in a November post on X shortly after he was restored as CEO as it related to Adam D'Angelo and his efforts developing PO. We expect that if Open AI is as successful as we hope, it will touch many parts of the economy and have complex relationships with many other entities in
the world, resulting in various potential conflicts of interest, Altman said. The way we plan to deal with this is with full disclosure and leaving decisions about how to manage situations like these up to the board. So I had long suspected that Archie, the podcast beagle, was messing with my computer, but now I have proof. Archie is usually up here in the office with me all day and this morning
when I went downstairs to get coffee, when I got back, music was playing. Confirmation that Archie has gotten up on my desk and had mashed some keys on the keyboard while trying to get some pens so that he could chew them up, probably. Somehow, he hit the play button, the f8 key on my Mac keyboard, which started up Apple Music. My wife is like, you're assuming he did that incidentally, but how do you know he didn't just feel like listening to
some tunes, which, okay, fair enough. If that is the case, then this was the message that I guess Archie wanted me to relay to you. L-O-90900-0 equals sign. Talk to you tomorrow.