Twitter Serves as a Shaky Stage for a Presidential Campaign Announcement

May twenty fifth, twenty twenty three. So, first thing, I want to address our updates to a story I covered on Tuesday, which was about an incident in Cardiff in Wales where a pair of teenage boys died in a traffic accident and word had gotten around that they were in they were being pursued by police and that that contributed to this accident. It caused the accident and there

were riots that followed. Now, initially reports were that the police weren't involved at all and that this was misinformation and it spread rapidly and that ended up creating the situation that ultimately escalated into a riot. Since then, where it has gotten out that CCTV footage has shown that there was a police van that was following the boys. The police in Cardiff have said that there still wasn't a pursuit, but the footage shows that there was a

police van following behind the boys. The police have given a timeline that suggests that the van actually turned off from following them before the crash happened. I don't know what the truth is at this point, but it is important to follow up on it because obviously the initial statement was about this being misinformation that then spread rapidly throughout the community, and it may turn out that it's not misinformation at all. So we'll have to continue to

watch the story and see what happens. Obviously, if it turns out that the police were misrepresenting what was going on, it is going to make a situation where police relationships with the community are already on shaky ground much worse. So we will keep an eye out to see how this story continues. Yesterday, Twitter attempted to serve as the platform for GOP presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis as he made his announcement that he was officially launching a presidential campaign.

This had been long anticipated, yesterday was just the formal announcement. Now, I say Twitter attempted to serve as a platform because the Twitter space that Elon Musk created specifically for this event became a cacophony when audio issues made it impossible for anyone to say anything without it being a massive, incomprehensible mess. Musk later said the problem was that Twitter's

servers were overloaded. Several tech news outlets have pointed out that this event well well attended, virtually it wasn't a small event. It still didn't come close to approaching other large online only events that had, you know, several times more people in attendance, but had fewer technical glitches. Whatever the cause of the glitches, the launch did not go smoothly. Now I'm not going to comment on the political side

of this, and you're welcome. Instead, I just want to say the problems, the technical problems, really didn't come as much of a surprise to at least the grouchy people like me out in the tech space, because Musk effectively gutted Twitter over the course of his ownership of the platform, and since then, essentially a skeleton crew has had to scramble to meet whatever sometimes apparently arbitrary goals Musk comes up with, or at least that's how it looks on

the outside, And I fully admit I am looking at this from the outside. I could be one hundred percent off base with these observations and assumptions. So I don't want to suggest that my view is the the sum

total of the truth. Just from the outside, it looks like Musk keeps wanting Twitter to tackle these huge projects, but with such a reduced workforce that it's it's kind of setting the platform up to fail, which is unfortunate because I'm sure the people who are actually working on it, you know, they don't want things to fail, and they're working hard, but they're doing so with a lack of assets and resources. All right, now it's time to talk about AI again, and to talk about Sam Altman, CEO

of open AI again. Now you might remember that very recently Altman appeared before US Congress and said that AI is a field where regulation is needed. And at the time, I was kind of hopeful that this meant Altman was really sincere in that belief and that he was going to take an active role to really draft useful regulations.

But then you could also say, well, yeah, but Sam Bankman freed said very similar things about cryptocurrency and regulations, and then look where he's at right now, so that maybe you shouldn't take these these statements at face value. So over in the EU, Altman's tune is slightly different than it was in the US. So I would say that the EU has people who are far more skeptical and concerned about AI than what you typically see here

in the United States. Not to say that people in the US are totally cool with AI and they have no worries, But in the EU, I think it's it's more prominent. And in the EU, the EU has passed a law called the AI Act, which categorizes artificial intelligence into three different buckets according to perceived risks. So at the very very top of this are unacceptable risks, So these would be AI applications that would potentially violate citizens' rights.

So these would be applications that the EU would just outlaw period like these, you cannot use AI to do these sort of things, So this would be something like China's social scoring system for example. That's where each person would receive a score which really relates to how useful and loyal they were according to the state. That would be right out as a use of AI. Under this are is a category called high risk AI systems. These could potentially be useful, so they could have a social

benefit to them, but they're also potentially harmful. So because of that anything that fell into this category would need to follow a strict set of rules and regulations in order to be legal in EU. So, in other words, a high risk system would be allowable under EU law, provided that the companies that were making and using those systems abided by the rules and remain transparent and such. Altman says that chat, GPT and the GPT Large Language Model would fall into this high risk category as the

EU has defined it, and he objects to that. He says that shouldn't be the case. And he also seems to think that the rules and regulations are too restrictive and that they are going to harm small companies that wish to integrate AI. Now keep in mind those small companies integrating AI. I think Altman's looking at those small companies as customers, right, These are companies that would be essentially licensing open AI's platforms for work. So that's you know,

he has a vested interest in this. So I guess what Altman appears to be saying. This is my interpretation is that he's all for regulations if he has a heavy hand in making them so that you know, they don't actually impede his business. But if a country or a European Union creates rules independently, He's ready to take his toys and go home. Or really, to quote him, he said, quote, if we can comply, we will, and if we can't, will cease operating. We will try, but

there are technical limits to what's possible. End quote. Meanwhile, Brad Smith, Microsoft President, called on US lawmakers to form rules that would limit or prevent integrating AI into critical systems like say the US power grid or various water infrastructure, that kind of thing. He also called for AI companies to be held accountable if and when their tools cause problems.

And considering how Microsoft has really invested heavily in open AI and integrated GPT into its Microsoft Being product, this is a pretty interesting take. But Smith said, quote this is the fundamental need to ensure that machines remain subject to effective oversight by people, and the people who design and operate machines remain accountable to everyone else's end quote. So here's the thing I agree with that. I think

that is a reasonable thing to call for. I think the world in general needs to come up with rules for the design and integration of AI and limitations to that right, like where AI should and shouldn't be used, and how it should and shouldn't be used. And I think those rules need to require companies to be as transparent as possible. Just getting more and more complicated as these AI models get more and more complex, and also the rules need to make sense, they need to be effective.

They need to prevent companies from just having the protect of rules being in existence as they continue to develop AI. So by that I mean this, Okay, So if there's no rule, like there's an absence of rules, companies can

actually be a little nervous as they operate. Right, you have no rules, you have no oversight, But that means that if you do something really bad, there's going to be a big ruckus and perhaps an overreaction to the ruckus, which means that you end up harming yourself more than you would have if you just made a set of rules and abided by them. Now, when you make rules, well, that means that you do have these these rules, these restrictions,

but usually not everything's covered, right. There are often gaps or loopholes. So if you do something unanticipated but something that isn't covered by the rules, your defense is, well, there's nothing in the rules that says, you know, I can't make AI that automatically denies credit to people who come from such and such a place, because historically we know all those folks default on loans or whatever. Rules that are intended to protect the public sometimes have an

odd way of protecting the perpetrators of bad deeds. That's what I'm saying. Like, if there were no rules, then you might have a much larger reaction. If there are rules and whatever you did wasn't covered by them, then you can say, hey, I was following the rules. Yeah, this bad thing happened, but I wasn't breaking the law. So creating rules does need to be done, but it needs to be done with care and critical thinking. And it also has to be an ongoing process. It's not

something you do once and then you walk away. According to a research firm called Watchful Technologies, TikTok has been testing an AI chatbot in Apple mobile devices. In the TikTok app, the chatbot is called Taco and I don't know if it only works on Tuesdays. Oh, hang on, it's actually spelled Takoh. The chatbot is meant to help with discovery, so users apparently activate this chatbot and converse with it to help find stuff they like or to

answer questions they have. They might have a question of what does it mean if my toilet won't flush or whatever, and then the AI agent will find videos that somehow relate to that kind of thing. Now, according to the researchers, Taco's purpose seems mostly just to keep people on TikTok longer and keep them watching videos. So it's not like Taco's posing as a best friend or something like that, but rather augmenting the recommendation algorithm to find stuff that's

going to maximize users time on the app. Okay, we're going to take a quick break. When we come back, we've got some more tech news to cover. We're back, so yesterday. On Wednesday, Meta held another round of layoffs, hitting somewhere in the neighborhood of six thousand people time. The jobs affected were mostly on the business side of Meta's operations, as opposed to, you know, like the tech side. Reportedly,

morale is in pretty bad shape in Meta. There were a couple of articles I saw this morning that we're saying things like Meta employees are trying to avoid being included in a future round of layoffs by essentially creating work like they're manufacturing work for them to do. It's kind of like the bosses coming look busy kind of mentality. Others at Meta appear to have no motivation to work at all, because you know, when you don't know whether or not you're going to have a job the next day,

it can really do a number on you. I have been there, and it is tough now. According to tech Crunch, this most recent round of layoffs should theoretically be the last major layoffs for the foreseeable future. Meta has indicated that it was aiming to eliminate ten thousand jobs the spring total across layoffs, and this one was the second round of layoffs, so they have definitely hit that ten

thousand mark. And since late last year, Meta has handed around twenty one thousand staff they're walking papers and has also put a a hiring freeze on thousands of open positions. Mark Zuckerberg, Meta's CEO, has called twenty twenty three the Year of Efficiency, indicating that Meta had a bloated workforce that wasn't really representative of the actual amount of work that needed to be done. In other words, we got

more people than we have work for them to do. Also, the company continues to face some pretty hefty costs which might be motivating some of these cutbacks. That includes a more than one billion dollar fine that came down from the EU earlier this week. To learn about that, just listen to Tuesday's episode of Tech Stuff. Apple has announced a truly ginormous deal with the company Broadcom that will see these two companies making five G components in the

United States. So, according to an article in courts, Apple will invest somewhere in the neighborhood of four hundred thirty billion dollars to boost US manufacturing, largely in the five G realm, but the connectivity space in general. So over the last couple of years, Apple has been looking for ways to decrease its reliance on Chinese manufacturing for various components.

There are a lot of different reasons to pull out of China, ranging from optics because it doesn't always look good to be doing business with a country that has a pretty awful human rights record all the way to practical things like supply chain issues if you want to be super cynical. But it's not really easy to just extract from China, largely because companies like Apple depend upon the lower, the much much lower costs of labor in

China to keep production costs down. Recently, a manufacturing facility in India actually announced it would no longer manufacture Apple components because Apple's demands regarding costs of production meant that this Indian company their profit margins were nearly non existent. I mean, potentially the company would end up losing money to make stuff for Apple because Apple was saying, We're not going to pay you more than X amount, and

meanwhile it costs why amount to make the stuff. So there are companies in other places where Apple has previously tried to move to avoid working in China that have already kind of bulked because of this issue. You know, the fact that unless Apple is willing to pay the amount that is acceptable within that country for labor, then it's just not going to get done. So a move out of China is likely going to mean increased prices on items in the long run. Global economics are super complicated.

The attorneys general for several states here in the United States have banded together to level a massive lawsuit against a telecommunications company called Avid Telecom, and, according to the lawsuit, this one telecommunications company facilitated billions of robocalls to people who had previously signed up on the national Do Not

Call Registry. So that registry is supposed to protect the people who sign up to it from receiving nuisance and unwanted calls, primarily telemarketing calls, but also things like scams and stuff. Citizens can actually designate the types of calls that they are willing to receive. So if you want, you can go to and you're in the US, you can go to the Do Not Call Registry, sign up

for free, and even indicate which calls you don't mind getting. Anyway, the problem is that, at least according to this lawsuit, Avid Telecom allowed telemarketing calls and scams and such to go through when they absolutely should not have been able to. The lawyer for Avid Telecom denies the charges, saying the company acted in accordance with the law and expressed disappointment that all these Attorneys general didn't just sit down for

a civilized discussion before bringing a nasty lawsuit. We'll have to see where this goes from here. Sony held a PlayStation event this week, a PlayStation showcase event, and unveiled a new handheld gaming device that will be capable of playing any non VR game streamed from a nearby PlayStation five. So essentially, you're running the game on your PlayStation five, you're just streaming it to this handheld device that's within

a certain range of that PS five. It doesn't even have an official name yet, but the internal name for the handheld is Project Q. So Project Q will be dependent upon a console. It will not be able to play games natively. You can't just take it on the go like you would with a Nintendo Switch. It kind of looks like someone took a modern PlayStation controller, cut it in half, and then shoved an eight inch screen

in between the two halves. I'm not crazy about this design, but I'm also in the minority of folks who don't like PlayStation controllers in general. I know I'm bonkers. Anyway. That's about all we know so far about Project Q. Sony didn't have information on how much folks should expect this to cost or when it will come out. If it's on the more expensive side, that's kind of a deal breaker in my book. But then I also don't own a PS five yet. I might actually change that

next month. Because I'm thinking about buying myself one as a Berthday present, but I'm pretty sure i'll skip Project Q. Finally, South Korea successfully launched a rocket carrying eight satellites earlier today. The rocket, called Nuri, launched in the afternoon in South Korea, and according to South Korea's Ministry of Science, it achieved orbit. The office also reported that the primary satellite on board the next SAT two has already established communications with Korea's

station in Antarctica. And as for the other satellites, at the time of this recording, there was actually questions if one of them microsatellites failed to deploy properly from the rocket. I don't have more information on that just yet, but South Korea is now the seventh country to achieve a launch carry more than a ton of payload into orbit. And that's it for the tech News. I hope you are all well and I'll talk to you again really soon.

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