Welcome to the Techmeme Ride Home for Wednesday, May 29, 2024. I'm Brian McCulloch today. A big leak at Google might be the tech equivalent of the secret formula for Coca-Cola being revealed for the first time. The X OpenAI board members are starting to explain why they tried to fire Sam Altman, did the Biden administration pass on tic-tocs concessions to avoid a ban, and remember delivery apps? How they do in these days? Here's what you missed today in the
world of tech. Weird one to start the day with. A leak has reportedly revealed pages of internal API documentation for Google Search, some of which the details appear to contradict Google's public statements about how search actually works. In other words, the black box that is the Google Search algorithms secret sauce might have been revealed. This is from noted SEO guru
Rand Fishkin, who got the documentation from a leaker. The leak appears to come from GitHub and the most credible explanation for its exposure matches what my anonymous source told me on our call. These documents were inadvertently and briefly made public. Many links in the documentation point to private GitHub repositories and internal pages on Google's
corporate site that require specific Google credentialed logins. During this, probably accidental public period between March and May of 2024, the API documentation was spread to HexDocs, which indexes public GitHub repos, and found slash circulated by other sources. I'm certain that others have a copy, though it's odd that I could find no public discourse
until now. According to my ex-Googleer sources, documentation like this exists on almost every Google team explaining various API attributes and modules to help familiarize those working on a project with the data elements available. This leak matches others in public GitHub repositories and on Google's cloud API documentation using the same notation style formatting
and even process slash module slash feature names and references. If that all sounds like a technical mouthful, think of this as instructions for members of Google's search engine team. It's like an inventory of books in a library, a card catalog of sorts, telling those employees who need to know what's available and how they can get it. But whereas libraries are public, Google Search is one of the most secretive, closely guarded black boxes
in the world. In the last quarter century, no leak of this magnitude or detail has ever been reported from Google's search division. What has been revealed here? I mean, you might need to be fairly SEO-conversant to go deep into the weeds on this. If you are such a person, please click through on the links to read everything. But for the rest of us, I'll share instead maybe the most SEO-centric headlines that normal people would understand. For example, why do you think they really created the
Chrome web browser inside of Google? It's the reason that we all thought from the beginning, apparently, quoting from Fishkin again, but jumping around a bit. Many of the leakers claims directly contradict public statements made by Googlers over the years, in particular, the company's repeated denial that click-centric user signals are employed, denial that sub-domains are considered separately and rankings, denials of a sandbox for newer websites, denials
that a domain's age is collected or considered, and more. My anonymous source claimed that way back in 2005, Google wanted the full click stream of billions of internet users, and with the Chrome web browser, they've now got it. The API documentation suggests Google calculates several types of metrics that can be called using Chrome views related to both individual pages and entire domains. This document, describing the features around
how Google creates site links, is particularly interesting. It showcases a call named top URL, which is, quote, a list of top URLs with the highest two-level score, i.e. Chrome Transclicks. My read is that Google likely uses the number of clicks on pages in Chrome browsers, and uses that to determine the most popular slash important URLs on a site,
which go into the calculation of which to include in the site links feature. Also, Google regularly employs whitelists around sensitive topics like politics and, during COVID times as well, or other health-related emergencies. In other words, they put their thumbs on the scales sometimes to make sure certain searches surface certain things at certain times.
Google has numerous ways to identify entities, sort, rank, filter, and employ them. Entities include brands, brand names, their official websites, associated social accounts, etc. And as we've seen in our clickstream research with DADOS, they've been on an inexorable path toward exclusively ranking and sending traffic to big, powerful brands that dominate
the web over small independent sites and businesses. If there was one universal piece of advice I had for marketers seeking to broadly improve their organic search rankings and traffic, it would be build a notable popular well-recognized brand in your space outside of Google search. For most small and medium businesses and newer creators slash publishers, SEO is likely to show poor returns until you've established credibility, navigational demand,
and a strong reputation among a sizable audience. SEO is a big brand popular domains game. This is almost certainly true for other creators, publishers, and small and medium businesses. The content you create is unlikely to perform well in Google if competition from big popular websites with well-known brands exists. Google no longer rewards scrappy clever SEO savvy operators who know all the right tricks. They reward established brands, search measurable
forms of popularity, and establish domains that searchers already know and click. From 1998 to roughly 2018 or so, one could reasonably start a powerful marketing flywheel with SEO for Google. In 2024, I don't think that's realistic, at least not on the English language web in competitive sectors. In a podcast interview with my former colleagues over at TedX Open AI board member Helen Toner revealed that the board learned of chat GPT's launch on Twitter.
She also criticized Sam Altman's leadership on safety and more. In a podcast called the Ted AI show, Toner gave her fullest account to date of the events that prompted her and other board members to fire Sam Altman in November of last year. In the days that followed Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman's sudden ouster and police threatened to quit, Altman was reinstated, and Toner and other directors left the board. When chat GPT came out in
November 2022, the board was not informed in advance about that. Toner said on the podcast, we learned about chat GPT on Twitter. The company's launch of chat GPT was relatively quiet. Open AI simply called the chatbot an artificial intelligence model that, quote, interacts in a conversational way. But over the following days and weeks, chat GPT's ability to generate human sounding text made it a massive hit and helped pave the way for the current boom
in AI. Open AI did not immediately provide a comment in a statement provided to the Ted podcast, Open AI's current board chief Brett Taylor said, quote, we are disappointed that Ms. Toner continues to revisit these issues. He also said that an independent review of Altman's firing, quote, concluded that the prior board's decision was not based on concerns regarding product safety or security, the pace of development, open AI's finances, or its statements to
investors, customers, or business partners, end quote. In the podcast, Toner also said that Altman didn't disclose his involvement with Open AI's startup fund, and she criticized his leadership on safety, quote, on multiple occasions he gave us inaccurate information about the formal safety process that the company did have in place. She said, meaning that it was basically impossible for the board to know how well those safety processes were
working or what might need to change. And quote, Toner said that after years of such events, quote, all four of us came to the conclusion that we just couldn't believe things that Sam was telling us. And quote, in an article in the economist over the weekend, Toner and Tasha McCulley, another former director, expounded on their thinking, saying that Open AI was not positioned to regulate itself and that governments should intervene to ensure
that powerful AI is developed safely. And quote, meanwhile, and Thropick has hired former Open AI safety lead, Jan Leaky to head up a new super-enlightenment team there. A source says Leaky will report to Chief Science Officer Jared Kaplan, quoting TechCrunch. Jan Leaky, a leading AI researcher who earlier this month resigned from Open AI before publicly criticizing the company's approach to AI safety, has joined Open AI rival Anthropic
to lead a new super-enlightenment team. And a post on X-Leaky said that his team at Anthropic will focus on various aspects of AI safety and security, specifically scalable oversight,
weak to strong generalization and automated alignment research. A source familiar with the matter tells TechCrunch that Leaky will report directly to Jared Kaplan, Anthropics Chief Science Officer, and that Anthropic researchers currently working on scalable oversight techniques to control large-scale AI's behavior and predictable and desirable
ways will move to report to Leaky as Leaky's team spins up. In many ways, Leaky's team sounds similar in mission to Open AI's recently dissolved super-enlightenment team, the super-enlightenment team, which Leaky co-led, had the ambitious goal of solving the core technical challenges of controlling super-intelligent AI in the next four years, but often found itself hamstrung by Open AI's leadership. Anthropic has often attempted to position itself as more safety
focused than Open AI. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodai was once the VP of Research at Open AI and reportedly split with Open AI after a disagreement over the company's direction, namely Open AI's growing commercial focus. Amodai brought with him a number of X-Open AI employees to launch Anthropic, including Open AI's former policy lead, Jack Clark, end quote. Lumen is the world's first handheld metabolic coach. It's a device that measures your metabolism
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YouTube's, quote, app store for games is rolling out more broadly. The company announced on Tuesday that its collection of lightweight free games dubbed playables will soon start to appear in the YouTube app for all users in addition to the YouTube homepage. Previously, the games had been made available to select users for testing before arriving for YouTube
premium subscribers last November. Because they don't monetize as paid downloads or VIA in-app purchases, YouTube's playables don't directly challenge the app store model or break Apple's rules. However, they do compete with the app stores free games, which are often downloaded by casual gamers and generate revenue via ads.
As Google is shifting its focus to integrate AI, there are questions about the technology's impact on its ads business, cash cow, driven by the sponsored links that appear above search results. Free games on YouTube and theory could become another place to serve ads further down the line. For now, though, Google hasn't signaled its intention to monetize its playables. The games could, however, provide a distraction for YouTube users in between their browsing
and viewing sessions and help keep them engaged with YouTube's app. The lineup of playables includes a handful of more popular titles like Angry Birds Showdown, Words of Wonder, Cut the Rope, Tomb of the Mask, and trivia crack among others. It also pulls in titles like Stack Bounce, a game that Google offered on its HTML mini-game service, and GameSnacks,
which had been developed out of its internal incubator, Area 120. With GameSnacks, the goal was to bring gaming to users in emerging markets, a place where Android dominates. Today, there are currently over 75 mini-games in the playables catalog, Google says. Players who use the feature will be able to save their game progress and track their all-time best scores. Not everyone will see the playables right away, but the feature should complete its rollout in the coming weeks.
Apparently, Tiktok was not caught quite as flat-footed by the threat of a ban in the US as we thought. Apparently, they had tabled a proposal to let the US pick its board of directors have veto power over hires and other concessions, but the Biden administration went for the sell your company or your banned option instead. The video app owned by a Chinese company also said it would pay an American company that contracts with the Defense Department
to monitor its source code according to a copy of the company's proposal. It even offered to give federal officials a kill switch that would shut the app down in the United States if they felt it remained a threat. The Biden administration have it win its own way, officials decline the proposal for fitting potential influence over one of the world's most popular apps in favor of a blunter option, a forced sale law signed last month by President
Biden that could lead to Tiktok's nationwide ban. The government has never publicly explained why it rejected Tiktok's proposal, opting instead for a potentially protracted constitutional
battle that many expect to end up before the Supreme Court. Since federal officials announced an investigation into Tiktok in 2019, the app's user base has doubled to more than 170 million US accounts, including Biden's reelection campaign, but the extent to which the United States evaluated or disregarded Tiktok's proposal known as Project Texas is likely to be a core point of dispute in court where Tiktok and its owner by dance are challenging the sale
or ban law as an unconstitutional assertion of power. The government essentially threw up its hands at the possibility of any kind of regulation or cybersecurity measures said Anupam Chandra, a Georgetown university law professor who researchers international tech policy. Tiktok proposed this incredible array of protections, but none of it mattered he added. In the government's thinking it wasn't can this app be protected, it was there's
a Chinese owner that became the death now. The government had a complete absence of faith in its ability to regulate technology platforms because there might be some vulnerability that might exist somewhere down the line. Finally today, let's check in on something we've not talked about in a while. Remember when delivery startups were all the rage? A new analysis says that food delivery apps deliverer, justi take away delivery hero and door dash have racked up more than $20 billion
in combined operating losses since they went public. Remember when I used to talk about these companies I would say I guess they finally solved the unit economics on this sort of thing? Well looks like that continues not to be solved though there may be a light at the end
of the tunnel. Quoting the financial times. Shares and delivery, justi take away delivery hero and door dash, the four largest standalone publicly listed food delivery businesses in the US and Europe are all trading well below their pandemic ear peaks as investors scrutinize their business models. Following a period of pandemic lockdown fueled growth, the four companies are now contending with a tougher macro economic environment that is hit consumers.
As they make a renewed push to demonstrate profitability to investors, their cumulative annual operating losses have now hit $20.3 billion. Calculations by the financial times and industry analysts, the delivery dot world found the figure covers the seven years since delivery delivery hero and door dash when public and after justi take away was created following a merger in 2020. It includes substantial write downs related to acquisitions and stock
based compensation. Investors willingness to fund losses has changed and now they want food delivery businesses to demonstrate sustainable profitable growth after a rise in interest rates said UBS analyst Joe Burnett Lam rival Uber does not break out the profitability of its each business, but marked its first full year of operating profitability at a group level in 2023 following a concerted push to boost margins. A moment the company held as an inflection
point. Nevertheless, stock market analysts are becoming more optimistic that the company's can improve financials in April the three European players said they expected this year to follow door dash in becoming free cash flow positive on an annual basis. The focus on free cash flow follows a longstanding emphasis among companies in the sector on an alternative measure of profits, adjusted earnings before interest tax depreciation and amortization.
That strips out a range of costs such as legal provisions. But many people quote don't see adjusted earnings metrics as a true level of profitability of the underlying business says Joseph McNamara and analyst at city operating losses offer quote the best standardized
view across all companies that minimized adjustments and other non cash and non operational impacts said Amanda being case a arena a partner at management consulting firm a on whether the companies could show they were generating more cash than they were spending was the next major litmus test McNamara added now that the stage of growth at all costs was over and quote song lyrics why don't you tell your dad get off my back tell him what we said about pain at black talk to tomorrow.