Tech News: SpaceX's Starship Gets Off the Ground, Then Explodes

A frozen valve was the reason behind the earlier cancelation. But today the world's largest, most powerful launch vehicle in our history of space exploration lifted up off its platform in South Texas to hurtle toward orbit, though it did not actually get there because around four minutes after launch,

things got spicy. The first stage engines cut off as planned, but the second stage failed to separate from the first stage and the launch vehicle began spinning, and then there was a burst of flame and an explosion, with a vehicle breaking apart in the process. Or, as SpaceX's Twitter feed put it, Starship just experienced what we call a

rapid unscheduled disassembly. The SpaceX team stressed that the main goal of this test was to clear the launch tower, you know, to actually get a launch and a lift off, and to clear the launch tower, which the starship did. So with that in mind, the test was a success. It's easy to say otherwise because subsequently it then exploded, but it was clearly a disappointment that the spacecraft was unable to deliver the payload into orbit as hoped. Regardless,

the launch vehicle has more tests in its future. Even if the test had been completely successful, it still would have lots more tests in the future. As to what caused the failure, I'm sure there will be a full accounting of it later. I saw early speculation that several engines on one side of the first stage cut out early.

I've seen other speculation that SpaceX chose to detonate the spacecraft, but as of the time I'm actually recording this, I haven't seen official word, so I'm sure by the time you listen to this that will have been cleared up. But as a recorded that has not yet happened. Now, he may as well get the other Musk related stories out of the way, because Elon Musk, obviously head of SpaceX.

He appeared at an advertising conference yesterday Wednesday with a message for the crowd that Twitter is a safe place for advertisers to do business. Also, he doesn't plan to restrict the types of speech that brands may want to try and avoid, So he's saying Twitter's safe, but there's also no guarantee that a brand's messaging won't appear alongside objectionable speech, which probably isn't much of a selling point for many advertisers out there. He also sent the message

don't tell us what to do. He essentially said, don't try and dictate what Twitter should do. That's my job. I'm not really sure if the strategy is going to work. The company has seen some pretty drastic drops in revenue from advertising anyway. A bunch of the regular customers with advertising on Twitter dropped the platform entirely. A lot of others stuck around, but they also reduced their spending on

the platform by as much as eighty percent. Of course, some of that may have nothing to do with Twitter as a platform. The decision might be more due to the overall economic situation where a lot of companies have rained in marketing expenditures. Meanwhile, Microsoft announced its Smart Campaigns with a Multiplatform Ad Service, which is a way for advertisers to use a tool to plan out their advertising strategy on different platforms. They said that they're actually dropping

Twitter starting April twenty five. Other platforms will still be available through this tool, but Twitter will not, So advertisers who use Microsoft platform for things like ad strategy and placement are going to have to rely on something else with regard to Twitter. I'm sure that this will lead to more speculation about if or when Twitter will fold. I'm not ready to make any kind of prediction like that.

I'm not even going to predict that it will fold, let alone when it will fold, because as I look back over all the things that have happened with Twitter since Musk first announced his intent to buy the company, there is no way I could have anticipated all the stuff that followed. So I sure as heck am not going to try and predict the future on this one.

In Tesla News, the company issued a Q one update letter in which Elon Musk announced that collectively, the beta program for Tesla's full self driving service, which I feel I need to mention, is not really full self driving has now logged more than one hundred and fifty million miles, and that really is an incredible achievement. You know, I give Tesla a lot of flak, but credit where credits due.

One hundred and fifty million miles traveled is a lot. Also, with so many miles traveled, Tesla has gathered a truly enormous amount of data that can then be fed back into systems to improve performance. So theoretically, with more miles traveled, the system gets more reliable and safer. You can kind of think of every car that has full self driving act as being kind of like a student driver, only

these students all share the same brain. So as one car learns a lesson, the benefits of that lesson go to the entire fleet of cars. Now, I say theoretically because there are actually other factors we have to take into consideration. So, for example, Tesla has made changes to the hardware in the construction of their vehicles, such as removing ultrasonic sensors in favor of optical ones, and these

hardware changes also affect performance. So it's not just the brains of these vehicles, it's the actual sensors as well. It really doesn't matter how smart your vehicle is if it can't sense an obstacle for example. Still, it is a legitimately impressive achievement. That being said, Tesla's investors are not so happy with the company right now. Also in that letter was the revelation that the company's gross margins are below twenty percent. The net income for the company

is two point nine billion dollars. That's a big old chunk of change. But this time last year, the company's income was seven hundred million dollars more than that, so it is a drop in year over year net income. Tesla has cut vehicle prices several times since the start of the year because demand has been low, so in order to try and you know, stimulate demand, they've cut

some prices. And my guess is the tough economy is really playing a part in this, although another big part is that other car companies are starting to finally make up ground on Tesla, which for years had the advantage of being all in on electric vehicles and most other car companies were just kind of dipping their toe in the water at the time. Well that's starting to change now and now Tesla's facing greater competition in the electric vehicle market. So Musk tried to get ahead of a

negative investor reaction. He said, quote, you're taking a view that pushing for higher volumes and a larger fleet is the right choice here versus a lower volume and higher margin end quote. And honestly, I'm not sure he had much other choice, because if not enough people are buying Tesla's right now after several price cuts, they sure as heck wouldn't be buying cars there were priced even higher.

Investors still weren't happy, though, and the stock price is down by around six to seven percent six ' two seven. As I was working on this episode, it was hovering just under a seven percent drop from the day before. Okay, now it's a high time, everyone's favorite time of the news, and first up is a story I found more than a little upsetting. I mean, like this one genuinely disturbed me.

All right, First, let me give some backstory. There's a Formula one racer named Michael Schumbacher who was in a terrible accident while skiing, not racing, and this happened a decade ago, back in twenty thirteen. He was severely injured in that accident. He received a brain injury in the process, and since then he's been out of the limelight. His family has stressed the need for privacy. They continue to help him day by day. And that story alone is

a very tough one. Right to see someone have that kind of injury, that's just terrible. But then we get to something that is really hard to believe. A German weekly magazine called De Actual was running a supposed interview with Schumacher. Only it wasn't an interview with Schumacher, he has not given any interviews since this accident in twenty thirteen. Rather, it was an AI agent that had been instructed to

respond to questions as if it were Michael Schumacher. So this weekly magazine published a quote unquote interview with an AI chatbot impersonating an athlete who is still coping with the effects of a brain injury. So to call it tasteless and unethical seems to be a gross understatement, And it kind of harkens back to what I was saying earlier this week about concepts like right to identity and

right to personality. I mean, imagine if some news outlet there out there ran a supposed interview with you, but it wasn't with you. It was with a chatbot that was told to impersonate you, and then it's presented to people as if it's a legitimate interview. That would be an incredible violation. Schumacher's family are pursuing legal action against

the magazine and y'all. A lot of the concerns around AI may be a little premature, Like the worry that AI is going to doom the human race might be a bit of an overreaction as things are right now. But when you see media outlets willing to go to these kinds of links to generate a story, you realize that AI could be dangerous. Sure, it is dangerous in several ways, but human beings can be downright diabolical. Okay, we've got a lot more stories to go to, but

first let's take a quick break. Okay, we're back. Let's talk some more about AI. So, Reddit's CEO Steve Huffman has a message to AI companies out there. If they want to scrape content from Reddit as part of creating large language models and training AI agents, they're going to have to pay for that privilege. He spoke with The New York Times and said Reddit plans to make an exception in its API, its Application programming interface that if an AI company wants to access this tool, they'll have

to pay first. Now, if you're a developer who needs access to that API for something other than training artificial intelligence, good news, no charge for you. You get to use the tool. As intended. As for how much AI companies will have to pay to get access, that really hasn't been hashed out yet. Reddit has already served as a treasure trove of human centric data for companies like Google and OpenAI while they were developing their respective artificial intelligence

large language models. Personally, I like this move by Reddit. I mean, we all know that information has value. Now if only the Reddit users could get a cut of the action. But that's probably taking things a little too far. In a kind of similar story, Google is leading the charge in petitioning the Australian government to allow AI projects to crawl Australian websites and to be used in Australian implementations.

So currently Australia's copyright laws are potentially a barrier, creating pesky legal restrictions on what Google and other companies like open ai would consider to be information that's free for the taking and applications that should be fully open to them.

Google framed its request by saying Australia could really be missing out, with one spokesperson stating quote, the lack of such copyright flexibilities means that investment in and development of AI and machine learning technologies is happening and will continue to happen overseas end quote. That's according to the Guardian.

So Google essentially is saying, hey, if you don't relax those laws, my dude, you're going to have to import all those useful AI tools from somewhere else, because ain't no one going to be here to do it in Australia because your laws are whack. Now. I have no clue if Google's approach will be effective, particularly in an environment where there's an increased wariness surrounding AI and its development in the first place. I think the tide in public opinion on a I is starting to turn sour.

Bloomberg has published an article titled Google's rush to win in AI led to ethical lapses employees say, and the article sites Google staff using language like cringeworthy or calling its aichatbot a pathological liar. They were using these words to describe Google Bard while it was still in development, before it had been pushed out into a beta program. They said the tool would frequently give unreliable or sometimes outright dangerous information, while doing so in an authoritative voice,

so it sounds like it knows what's talking about. So one example given in the article is about scuba diving procedures and that supposedly Barred gave answers that would quote likely result in serious injury or death end quote. So that's really not good. This was during the testing phase, as I said, for Bard, and my guess is that Google had planned to keep Barred under wraps and continue to work on it within development for much much longer.

But Open AI's release of chat GPT late last year convinced Google's leadership to try the old move fast and break things approach, or else the company would risk getting left behind in the AI chatbot wars. And you know, Google really hates it if it is not the dominant player in whichever markets it's competing in. It likes to

have that comfortable sixty to ninety percent market share. So the article reads kind of as a warning about AI in general, that this push to create a snazzy tool could result in harmful consequences, and that the resources required to make certain that the development and deployment is following really good, strong ethical guidelines those just aren't in place or they're being ignored. Google reps told Bloomberg that quote

responsible AI remains a top priority at the company end quote. Now, in my opinion, company's across the board have been far too aggressive with these tools. Open AI's leadership has even warned media outlets about its own chat pots, saying it's not reliable. But by that time the cat was already out of the artificial bag and it was too late

to issue cautionary messages Anyway. The Bloomberg article is well worth a read and goes into much greater detail about the conditions that led Google to Rushbard in to a beta test, arguably prematurely. Yesterday, Meta held another round of layoffs, one of three batches the company plans to spread out across the next few months, which will ultimately see another ten thousand Meta employees cut. This is after Meta had

already cut eleven thousand jobs late last year. This time, the layoffs affected engineers and tech teams, and as you might imagine, the cuts have delivered another blow to employee morale at Meta. I mentioned in a previous news episode that some Meta employees have become discouraged over recent months due to several reasons. First, layoffs are demoralizing. To the push to return to office has created a hardship on

a lot of employees. And see that hardship doesn't appear to be shared by Meta's top executive leadership because a lot of them seem to be absent from Meta's HQ. Some of them have moved thousands of miles away while still serving as executives, and yet the employees are forced to go in. So yeah, news continues to be rough

for the staff of Meta. By the way, if you were a Facebook user with an account any time between May two thousand and seven and December twenty twenty two, you can claim your share of a huge class action lawsuit settlement. Now this has to do with Cambridge Analytica, that scandal that rocked the tech world several years ago

and we still talk about it today. So in case you don't remember that whole kerfuffle, a company that catered to political campaigns, a data analytics company leveraged a survey app to gather a huge amount of information about Facebook users without their consent. The app was taking advantage of large gaps in Facebook's API, gaps that the company would subsequently close, but the damage had already been done anyway.

There were a lot of legal proceedings that followed in the discovery of this transgression, including this class action lawsuit that I mentioned, and the settlement was for a whopping seven hundred and twenty five million dollars. Though Meta was let off the hook in a sense because the company didn't actually have to admit any wrongdoing as part of this settlement. But then I think it's kind of hard to say with a straight face, Hey, I didn't do

anything wrong and no one was hurt. I'm just paying seven hundred and twenty five million dollars out of the kindness of my heart. Anyway, the settlement itself is actually old news. The company reached an agreement late last year. The news now is that you Facebook users out there who had an account that was active during those times, you can actually submit a claim, and you have until August twenty fifth to do so if you want to do it online. The website is Facebook User Privacysettlement dot

com slash hashtag, submit, dash claim. Finally, mark September twenty ninth, twenty twenty three, ondred calendars. That's when Netflix will officially stop sending DVDs out by mail. For some of y'all, what I said might actually sound strange, but not that long ago. Netflix's business model was really just renting films

out through the mail. You would sign up for the service, you would make a watch list of films and shows you wanted to see, and then, based on what was available, Netflix would mail you the DVD and then you would watch it and you would put it back in its envelope and drop it off in the mail and wait

for your next one. Or if you were like just about everyone I know had the service, you would do this a couple times, and then on your third DVD you just have it sit on the coffee table in the little red envelope, unopened and unwatched, and then you would just continue paying for the privilege of giving this DVD a temporary home. Or in fact, you might ultimately get charged for the DVD because he kept it so ding dang long. But anyway, Netflix's main business was all

in this male centric model. The company was founded back in nineteen ninety seven, and it didn't start streaming until two thousand and seven, so for a decade and some change, that's just how folks use Netflix. Now we're at the end of an era, and it's funny because I've actually kind of gotten back into buying DVDs and Blu ray discs. I got tired of titles disappearing off various services, sometimes popping up on other services that I don't subscribe to,

So now I'm back to purchasing physical media. I guess I'm just a human being, lost in time and lost in space and in meaning. Hope you're all well, that's it for this episode. I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.