Tech News: A Chatbot Earns an MBA (Not Really)

begin with an update about open Ai. So, literally yesterday, moments after I sent the episode about open Ai, it was the story of open Ai, in case you weren't aware, I ended up seeing headlines confirming what had been rumored for a couple of weeks that Microsoft is investing big

time into open Ai. While details are a little scarce, a Microsoft blog post proclaims that the two companies are entering into the third phase of their partnership and that it would be a quote multi year, multibillion dollar investment end quote for Microsoft. The general consensus is that this is Microsoft's bid to be competitive against Google, which, through its own work and various acquisitions, is also heavily invested

in the field of AI research and development. Also, I imagine that all the folks who were recently notified that they were being laid off at Microsoft. We're talking about like thousands of people at this point are likely a little upset about, you know, hearing the company is going to invest billions into efforts around AI. Yeah, there have been a lot of stories about Microsoft in particular, but companies in general putting out big expenditures right after laying

off tons of workers. That's never a good look. Also related to yesterday's episode is another story that Professor Christian Tervish or ur Wish I'm not sure how to say his name over at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business gave chat GPT, which is the open AI powered chat bought a final exam in the university's NBA

program that's Masters of Business Administration. Now, I'm not sure if the fact that chat GPT passed that final exam, if that says something great about Chat GPT, or it confirms some sardonic opinions about m b a's and the difficulty of getting one. Apologies to any NBA's out there, but you know, y'all have a bad rep Now, I'm not saying that you earned that reputation. I'm just saying that reputation sure as heck exists and it mostly revolves

around the perceived over reliance on jargon. Anyway, according to the professor, chat GPT scored somewhere in the low B range of the final meaning it didn't ace the test, but it did perform better than average. Now I'm doing my best to resist making a lot of jokes here. I am curious how chat GPT would do if you said to the task of creating, say a dissertation. My guess is that the gaps in its abilities would become far more apparent if that were the case. For one thing,

it is absolutely terrible at citing its sources. I got a couple of Musk related topics to talk about this week. First up, Elon Musk is currently on trial for securities fraud. This is something that the SEC was onto him about a few years ago, and in fact it's over the same incident. Now the sec case that one was settled. Elon Musk agreed to pay forty million dollars to settle that matter without admitting fault, and later on he said he was browbeaten into that that course of action settling

the case. Now he's been sued by a collection of Tesla investors who say that Musk's tweets back in two thousand eighteen gave false information, namely that Musk had claimed he had secured the funding necessary to take Tesla private at four dollars per share that are not insignificant amount of time was actually spending court trying to get Musk to admit that his use of the number four twenty was a joke about marijuana. But Musk did not budge

on that. He said it was merely a twenty percent over the value of the stock at the time, which was a standard thing if you wanted to take a company private. That's what he argues is that if you're planning to take a company private, you have to increase the cost per share by to convince shareholders too to to deal to sell their stock at a premium, and then the company can go private. That's what Musk is saying, and that's just a coincidence that happened to before twenty.

But as to the actual claim of securing funding, there was a lot more back and forth in the court about that. Musk says that he received a ventially a verbal agreement from Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund or p i F that they were going to provide funding for this uh this move of Tesla from publicly traded to private company. This is the same p i F that

helped Musk by Twitter late last year. Also, the b i F represents the interests of the Saudi Prince, whom you might know as the guy who allegedly ordered journalist Jamal Kashogi to be assassinated. Anyway, Must never got any of this in writing. So the investors are claiming that Musk was misrepresenting himself in those tweets by saying that he had secured funding when in fact he had not secured funding, and that he was essentially engaging in securities

fraud and market manipulation. Should he be found guilty, Must could be fined an enormous amount of money. I'll try to stay up to date with the story as it develops. Over the weekend. He on, Musk tweeted that Twitter has too many ads. Then this will soon be addressed. Also that Twitter will have a higher tier subscription level that will be completely ad free, so if you become one of the subscribers, you'll get an ad free experience on Twitter.

Of course, a lot of brands have already abandoned Twitter, and ad revenues are reportedly way way down, so you might just want to, you know, wait around, because it sounds like Twitter could be ad free before long, whether you have a subscription or not. Sad Trombone, Alright, to be fair, I think the last report I said read that half of the Top one advertisers had abandoned Twitter. But this was early on in Musk's takeover, so this was like last November. It could very well be that

that trend has reversed. It's hard to say because Twitter no longer has a PR department, so you don't really hear about what is going on from an ad revenue perspective very much. Reuter's reports that Apple is working with several big media partners in an effort to create content for the company's upcoming mixed reality headset. It's an x R headset, if you will. Disney is said to be one of the media companies that is dealing with Apple

right now. And this is not a huge shock. Hardware, particularly mixed reality hardware, is really just a paperweight if you don't have any software to run on it. With the rumored price tag for Apple's headset being in the three thousand dollar range. I'm not sure anyone is going to be able to make a feature that is killer enough to turn this product into a best seller, Like, it has to be a really compelling use case to convince people to fork over three grand to get one

of these. If you'll recall, Apple had previously planned to release augmented reality glasses, but now reportedly those plans have been put on the shelf indefinitely due to it being wicked hard to make something that fits in such a relatively small form factor and still you know, work. Instead, Apple is going the mixed reality headset route, so it's more of a combination of virtual reality and augmented reality.

So you've got a display that you're looking at as opposed to transparent lenses, but the headset has outward facing cameras so you can get a pass through video feed, so you're looking at a live video feed of whatever is in front of you. Um, so it's kind of like you're looking at a live broadcast instead of at

the actual world around you. While the first generation sounds like it's going to be prohibitively expensive for most of us anyway, the long term plan is to release a less expensive headset later on, perhaps, though my guess is that it would still be more than a thousand dollars based upon how expensive this first one is rumored to be. So yeah, I don't know if anyone's gonna make and experience so incredible that it's gonna convince more people to

fork over three grand. I'm sure there will be some. There always are. Apple has some pretty die hard fans with a lot of discretionary income. Man, Okay, hey, remember Sam Bankman Freed a k A SBF, the co founder of former cryptocurrency exchange f t X, And you remember how f t X imploded last year and SPF was

reduced to being almost penniless according to most reports. Well, personally, I would love to experience his version of being penniless, because I just read that federal prosecutors have managed to seize around seven hundred million dollars of assets belonging to SPF this month alone. And you know, I get it, SPF had millions of dollars. It's just that none of those millions of dollars were in pennies, so nically he

was penniless. Now it all makes sense. Anyway, SPF is to go to trial over charges of securities fraud and similar charges this coming October. He has pled not guilty to these charges and he's currently under essentially house arrest at the moment, which, y'all, I've heard of folks who end up having to stay in jail after stealing less

than a hundred bucks. This guy is accused of misappropriating billions of dollars and he gets to wait his pre trial time out at his parents house, which, believe me, is not a shack in the woods. What a world. Anyway, About half a billion dollars of the seized assets were in the form of shares for the company Robin Hood, and almost a hundred million of it happened to be in an account cash in an account with a bank that's called silver Gate. One wonders how many other places

might be holding money or assets belonging to SPF. It's pretty incredible. Okay, we've got more news Rois to go, but before we get to that, let's take a quick break. Okay, we're back, and we're back to crypto currency. So Reuter's reports that Finance the largest crypto exchange in the world, and one of the factors that you know, contributed to ft x is implosion last year, has processed nearly three forty six million dollars in bitcoin transactions for a different

digital currency exchange called bits lato. And you might wonder, well, why does that matter, Well, that's because US authorities have called bits lata or latto a money laundering engine, and they have arrested that company's founder, who is a guy named Ana totally leg Kodomov. And again I'm sure I'm butchering name pronunciations. So the implication is that finance was

complicit in processing illegal funds. Bits Lato had heavy dealings with a dark market called Hydra, best known for dealing in illegal goods like drugs, and representatives at Binance say that Reuters has it all wrong and that Binance is very very alert when it comes to attempts to do hanky and or panky with the exchange. They have claimed that the company has instituted systems that check for possible money laundering schemes and the like, but from the Reuter's report,

it sounds like these claims are perhaps not entirely convincing. Anyway, Binance has been under scrutiny for a long time, even before the ft x collapse, and I suspect that scrutiny will intensify as a result of this new development. Here in the United States, the Department of Justice is expected

to sue Google over antitrust concerns. Specifically, the d o j c's Google as holding a near monopoly on the digital advertise market and that it maintains its dominant position by practicing anti competitive strategies and you know, just suppressing competition in general. Google is likely to argue, as it has in the past, that there's still a great deal of competition in the digital advertising space, with massive companies like Meta, Slash, Facebook, A, T and T, and Comcast

in the mix. And I'm not sure if this lawsuit will actually go anywhere, but it is yet another indication there is currently some momentum in the US when it comes to pushing back against big companies in general and big tech in particular. Yesterday, Spotify announced that it will be cutting six percent of its workforce, which is around

six hundred jobs. The company seems to be saying the same thing that we've heard from other companies within the tech space, namely that the pandemic drove business up, and so the company invested in hiring and growth, and then as things started to return to normal and business began to weigh along with macro economic factors coming into play, it became clear that this growth was more than what the company could comfortably sustain while also returning value to shareholders.

So now the company is cutting back, and y'all, it's getting real tough out there with all these companies cutting jobs in the tech sector in particular. If you or someone you know has been affected by layoffs, I just want to say, I've been there. It's stinks, but I do believe in you, so hanging there and good luck. I hope it all turns out well because it it's

tough and it sucks and I've been there. Yuck. So when a hacker discovers the Transportation Safety Administration a k a. The t s A has a no fly list that is on an unsecured web server, who is really to blame when they? You know published fact. The reason I ask is because Tilly Kottman, who uses the hacker handle maya Arson crime you, was tooling around on this unsecured server.

She says she was doing it because she was bored, and she discovered the no fly list on this server, and that includes around one and a half million names. These are names of people who are forbidden from flying here in the US due to being either a terrorist or suspected terrorist. Now, normally this kind of list would be hidden safely away under lock and key and protected, but Tilly says she was able to gain access to the list with no resistance, which does point to a

pretty massive security problem. U S authorities would like a word or actually probably a lot of words with Tilly, who's also suspected of being behind other massive hacks, including one that happened a couple of years ago where a hacker accessed more than a hundred thousand surveillance cameras belonging to Vercada. But y'all, you know it's not breaking and entering. If the front door is wide open, that's just entering

and maybe also trespassing. But you get my point. And finally, I would like to tell you about a new hero of mine. His name is Brian Birmingham and he's now a former lead engineer for Blizzard. So Brian is no longer employed at Blizzard because he objected to the company's

stack ranking process for evaluating employee performance. Essentially, Brian was told, as all leaders in Blizzard were told, that he had to rank the employees under his leadership along a bell curve, and that this would include about five of those employees being placed at the bottom. Because that's how bell curves work. You have to have a top percentage and you have

to have a bottom percentage. Even if everyone is kicking butt and taking names at their jobs, this kind of structure requires you to single out people and say these are the bottom performers. And presumably that would then affect those employees in the form of bonus payments, and it could also serve as sort of a black mark on their employment history. It could mean that later down the line they would be prevented from getting a promotion because it would be marked that at three they were they

were evaluated as being a bottom performer. Brian essentially called

bs on this practice. He said, it's counterproductive and it's bound to make employees try to avoid being in that bottom five per cent, not by being better at their jobs, but perhaps by engaging in stuff like sabotage, like trying to cause other employees to fall on that bottom five instead, or they might seek out a low performing group because they could stand out as a high performer if they just sought out mediocrity, and that this is all ultimately

counterproductive to the ultimate company's goals, and a lot of other companies have used and subsequently abandoned this practice, finding in fact that it is counterproductive, but Blizzard is still doing it anyway. Brian said he would not participate in this, and he was subsequently fired. He didn't intend for the story to become public news, but someone else leaked it to the media and here we are. So my hat

is off to you, Brian. You stood up for those in your department, You protested an inherently flawed management system, and you set an amazing example in a company would be lucky to have you as a lead engineer. And it's my hope that you will be able to actually return to Blizzard, where you clearly enjoy working, and that you will be able to lead in an environment that

doesn't pit employees against one another like it's the thunder dome. Okay, that's it for the news stories today to us day January. I hope you are all well. If you have suggestions for topics that should cover in tech stuff, remember to reach out to me. You can do so on Twitter or handle for the show is tech Stuff h s W, or you can download the I Heart Radio app. It's free to download and use. You just navigate the tech Stuff by putting that into the little search engine. It'll

put you right at the tech stuff page. You'll see a little microphone icon there. If you click on that, you can leave a voice message up to thirty seconds in length. Let me know what you would like to hear in the future, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Y text Stuff is an I heart Radio production. For more podcasts from i heeart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.