Newly unsealed court filings show that Microsoft tried to sell its Bing search engine to Apple – but Tim Cook didn’t bite. CC-licensed photo by official_powerset on Flickr.
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A selection of 9 links for you. Search harder. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
Humane pushes Ai Pin ship date to mid-April • TechCrunch
Brian Heater:
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Hardware is difficult, to paraphrase a famous adage. First-generation products from new startups are notoriously so, regardless of how much money and excitement you’ve managed to drum up. Given all that, it’s likely few are too surprised that Humane’s upcoming Ai Pin has been pushed back a bit, from March to “mid-April,” per a new video from the Bay Area startup’s Head of Media, Sam Sheffer.
In the Sorkin-style walk and talk, he explains that the first units are set to, “start leaving the factory at the end of March.” If Humane keeps to that time frame, “priority access” customers will begin to receive the unit at some point in mid-April. The remaining preorders, meanwhile, should arrive “shortly after.”
Humane captured a good deal of tech buzz well before its first product was announced, courtesy of its founders’ time at Apple and some appropriately enigmatic prelaunch videos. The Ai Pin was finally unveiled at an event in San Francisco back in early November, where we were able to spend a little controlled hands-on time with the wearable.
The device is the first prominent example of what’s likely to be a growing trend in the consumer hardware world, as more startups look to harness the white-hot world of generative AI for new form factors. Humane is positioning its product as the next step for a space that’s been stuck on the smartphone form factor for more than a decade.
Of course, this will almost certainly also be the year of the “AI smartphone” — that is to say handsets leveraging platforms’ GPT models from companies like OpenAI, Google and Microsoft to bring new methods for interacting with consumer devices. Meanwhile, upstart rabbit generated buzz last month at CES for its own unique take on the generative AI-first consumer device.
For its part, Humane has a lot riding on this launch. The company has thus far raised around $230 million, including last year’s $100m Series C. There’s a lot to be said for delaying a product until it’s consumer ready. While early adopters are — to an extent — familiar with first-gen bugs, there’s always a limit to such patience. At the very least, a product like this will need to do most of what it’s supposed to do most of the time.
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Hard to keep the tech buzz through a delay. The usefulness is still undemonstrated.
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Google says Microsoft offered to sell Bing to Apple in 2018 • CNBC
Jordan Novet:
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Microsoft offered to sell its Bing search engine to Apple in 2018, Google said in a court filing earlier this month. The document, from Google’s antitrust case against the US Justice Department, was unsealed on Friday.
The legal battle over whether Alphabet has a monopoly in web search advertising touches on key agreements Google has in place with Apple and Android phone makers to ensure exclusivity of its search engine. In 2021, Google spent more than $26bn to keep its search engine the default, according to a slide shown during the trial in October. Google has been trying to prove in the case that it competes fairly.
In the filing earlier this month, Google argued that Microsoft pitched Apple in 2009, 2013, 2015, 2016, 2018 and 2020 about making Bing the default in Apple’s Safari web browser, but each time, Apple said no, citing quality issues with Bing.
“In each instance, Apple took a hard look at the relative quality of Bing versus Google and concluded that Google was the superior default choice for its Safari users. That is competition,” Google wrote in the filing.
…Google said in its filing that when Microsoft reached out to Apple in 2018, emphasizing gains in Bing’s quality, Microsoft offered to either sell Bing to Apple or establish a Bing-related joint venture with the company.
“Microsoft search quality, their investment in search, everything was not significant at all,” said Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of services, according to the filing. “And so everything was lower. So the search quality itself wasn’t as good. They weren’t investing at any level comparable to Google or to what Microsoft could invest in. And their advertising organization and how they monetize was not very good either.”
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$100bn (which the DoJ says Microsoft had invested in Bing) isn’t “significant”. Easy to forget how gigantic Google’s business and capex is.
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The paradox holding back the clean energy revolution • The New York Times
Ed Conway:
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In the 1990s, when multicolor LED lights were invented by Japanese scientists after decades of research, the hope was that they would help to avert climate catastrophe by greatly reducing the amount of electricity we use. It seemed perfectly intuitive. After all, LED lights use 90% less energy and last around 18 times longer than incandescent bulbs.
Yet the amount of electricity we consume for light globally is roughly the same today as it was in 2010. That’s partly because of population and economic growth in the developing world. But another big reason is there on the Las Vegas Strip: Instead of merely replacing our existing bulbs with LED alternatives, we have come up with ever more extravagant uses for these ever-cheaper lights, from immersive LED art installations and carpets that glow to basketball courts that can play video. As technology has advanced, we’ve only grown more wasteful.
There’s an economic term for this: the Jevons Paradox, named for the 19th-century English economist William Stanley Jevons, who noticed that as steam engines became ever more efficient, Britain’s appetite for coal increased rather than decreased.
We’ve known about the Jevons Paradox for years, but it’s becoming a more troubling problem now that governments have pledged to eliminate their net carbon emissions to slow global warming. A significant part of that carbon reduction is expected to come from using more efficient products, be they electric motors instead of internal combustion engines, or LED lights instead of traditional bulbs. But the logic of Jevons is that instead of banking the efficiency savings we make as technology advances, we go out and spend it.
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This is, indeed, a worry – unless the energy that we so wastefully use is generated by green means. This is why we need the wind farms, solar farms, and nuclear power stations. Especially in view of the next demand source…
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Generative AI’s environmental costs are soaring — and mostly secret • Nature
Kate Crawford:
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Last month, OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman finally admitted what researchers have been saying for years — that the artificial intelligence (AI) industry is heading for an energy crisis. It’s an unusual admission. At the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, Altman warned that the next wave of generative AI systems will consume vastly more power than expected, and that energy systems will struggle to cope. “There’s no way to get there without a breakthrough,” he said.
I’m glad he said it. I’ve seen consistent downplaying and denial about the AI industry’s environmental costs since I started publishing about them in 2018. Altman’s admission has got researchers, regulators and industry titans talking about the environmental impact of generative AI.
So what energy breakthrough is Altman banking on? Not the design and deployment of more sustainable AI systems — but nuclear fusion. He has skin in that game, too: in 2021, Altman started investing in fusion company Helion Energy in Everett, Washington.
Most experts agree that nuclear fusion won’t contribute significantly to the crucial goal of decarbonizing by mid-century to combat the climate crisis. Helion’s most optimistic estimate is that by 2029 it will produce enough energy to power 40,000 average US households; one assessment suggests that ChatGPT, the chatbot created by OpenAI in San Francisco, California, is already consuming the energy of 33,000 homes. It’s estimated that a search driven by generative AI uses four to five times the energy of a conventional web search. Within years, large AI systems are likely to need as much energy as entire nations.
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Fusion. Bah. And we haven’t got rid of the colossal waste of bitcoin either.
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Trials and tribulations of 360° video in Juno • Christian Selig
Christian Selig wrote an app called Juno to play YouTube videos natively in Apple’s Vision Pro. But some video, such as 360º video, won’t play, because, well..:
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if we want to play back a 4K YouTube video on our iOS device, we’re looking at a VP9 video plain and simple. The catch is, you cannot play VP9 videos on iOS unless you’re granted a special entitlement by Apple. The YouTube app has this special entitlement, called com.apple.developer.coremedia.allow-alternate-video-decoder-selection, and so does Safari (and presumably other large video companies like Twitch, Netflix, etc.)
But given that I cannot find any official documentation on that entitlement from Apple, safe to say it’s not an entitlement you or I are going to be able to get, so we cannot play back VP9 video, meaning we cannot play back 4K YouTube videos. Your guess is as good as mine why, maybe it’s very complex to implement if there’s indeed not a native hardware decoder, so Apple doesn’t like giving it out. So if you want 4K YouTube, you’re looking at either a web view or the YouTube app.
(Given that no one could agree on a video format, everyone went back to the drawing board, formed a collective group called the Alliance for Open Media (has Google, Apple, Samsung, Netflix, etc.), and authored the AV1 codec, hopefully creating the one video format to rule them all, with no licensing fees and hopefully no patent issues.
Google uses this on YouTube, and Apple even added a hardware decoder for AV1 in their latest A17 and M3 chips. This means on my iPhone 15 Pro I can play back an AV1 video in iOS’ AVPlayer like butter.
Buuuuttttt, the Apple Vision Pro ships with an M2, which has no such hardware decoder.)
So the tl;dr so far is YouTube uses the VP9 codec for 4K YouTube, and unless you’re special, you can’t playback VP9 video directly, which we need to do to be able to project it onto a sphere. Why not just do 1080p video?
Because even 4K video looks bad in 360 degrees.
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So Apple needs Google to develop the YouTube app to make 360º video useful on the Vision Pro headset. Probably fortunate for Apple that Google isn’t working on a VR headset. As far as we know, anyway.
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Samsung has big ambitions for the Galaxy Ring • The Verge
Allison Johnson:
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The Galaxy Ring prototypes I was able to try out were presented in three colors: platinum silver, ceramic black, and gold. I wasn’t allowed to take any photos during that session, but gold looked right at home next to my wedding ring. The Galaxy Ring is lighter than it looks and doesn’t feel as dense as I thought it would. It has a slightly concave shape, and each color was offered in sizes from 5 to 13, which is a slightly wider range of options than usual, with sizes marked as S through XL on the inside of the band.
Samsung’s VP of digital health, Dr. Hon Pak, didn’t specifically say what sensors are in the ring but mentioned sleep insights based on heart rate, movement, and respiratory indicators. Pak says that Samsung’s partnership with Natural Cycles (which already brings period and fertility tracking to its Galaxy Watch series) will extend to the ring, too — putting it in direct competition with the Oura Ring. On the Galaxy Ring, battery size increases slightly in the larger band sizes, though Pak couldn’t share any exact battery life estimates.
The Galaxy Ring will help inform a new metric Samsung is introducing to the Health app in the near future called My Vitality Score. It’s based on a model from the University of Georgia that incorporates four factors: sleep, activity, resting heart rate, and heart rate variability.
The Vitality Score will be a feature of Samsung’s Galaxy Watches, too, coming first to the Watch 6 later this year — but will require a Galaxy S24-series phone to work. Ring owners will also be able to specify certain health goals and receive related updates and tips in the form of something called Booster Cards, which are also coming to the Galaxy Health app later this year.
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It’s always telling which things they don’t want to tell you. In this case: the battery life. The Oura ring, which is a lot more chunky-looking, claims four to seven days. Wonder what Samsung will manage.
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We each have an average of 100 online accounts. Here’s how to make sure they aren’t a nightmare for your family if you die • CNN Business
Samantha Murphy Kelly:
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When Rebecca Bistany’s 40-year-old husband Paul died suddenly of a heart attack in November 2022, she didn’t know what kind of assets he left behind for her and their infant daughter.
Compounding her heartache, Paul didn’t leave a will. Bistany wanted to access key business and financial accounts by resetting passwords but found herself in a spot many who lose loved ones encounter: She couldn’t get into his phone, leaving her locked out of everything from personal photos to critical estate information.
Her story is tragic and increasingly common. With password management company NordPass saying each person has an average of 100 online accounts, the deaths of loved ones have become ever more complicated.
During already-difficult grieving times, figuring out how to get into, maintain or shut down accounts can range from the personally difficult to financially necessary. And while digital legacy planning can ease some of that burden, experts say far too few people take advantage of those tools.
“He had a four-digit passcode and I literally tried everything I could,” Bistany, who lives on Long Island, New York, told CNN. “I kept a list of what I tried because the more you got it wrong, the longer it would lock you out. I did it so many times, I can’t even try anymore.”
Although she contacted Apple, AT&T and even the police asking for help unlocking the phone, companies do not allow family members access unless the owner lists them as their legacy contact. Still, she keeps his phone number active, paying a monthly plan and holding out hope she’ll one day be able to access not only financial accounts but years of photos and videos of their life together.
And even for some people who can access their loved one’s accounts, the process can be daunting. Laura Orrico, a widow from Chicago, said she had to hire an IT professional to help go through everything on her late husband’s computer. “I had widow brain,” she said. “I couldn’t even organize a drawer let alone figure out his computer.”
Experts recommend people of all ages develop a digital legacy plan, from putting passwords in one place to deciding what happens to your social media presence.
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You could put your passcode and essential passwords in your will, I suppose? Besides the electronic method of legacy contacts.
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Cycling UK hails “clever” policing after bait bicycle used to track down £130,000 bike theft gang in one shift • road.cc
Dan Alexander:
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Cycling UK has urged more police forces to consider the “substantial results” that can be yielded from “sensible, clever policing” to tackle bike theft, without needing “massive intelligence or money”. The comments come after City of London Police managed to track down a bike theft gang in a single shift, the thieves found with a huge collection of stolen bicycles totalling £130,000 in value, the haul believed to be the biggest of its kind in the force’s history.
Last week we reported that four more men had been jailed for their role in the organised crime operation which saw the prolific theft of bicycles in the City of London during 2020, police ultimately bringing the gang down in November of that year by tracking a bait bicycle, left in the area with the intention of getting it stolen so officers could track the thieves back to their base.
…Detective Constable Matt Cooper this week spoke to the Daily Mail (link is external) and recalled the moment they tracked the bait bike back to a plant hire business in east London where £130,000 worth of stolen bikes were discovered.
“I was just shocked,” he said. “We had tracked one stolen bike to a plant hire business in East London — and found about 60 more. Bikes in the office, bikes in the toilet, bikes hanging up on rails, bikes stacked up everywhere. There was about £130,000 worth. It was hard to take in.
“We bought a relatively high-value bike and left it locked up in Rood Lane, off Fenchurch Street. This is an area targeted by bike thieves — but there is also a lot of CCTV coverage. We left it there in the morning and it was stolen by thieves, who cut through the lock with an angle grinder, at 2.30pm.”
Once the gang had been tracked to a warehouse on a business estate in Tower Hamlets, two members were arrested at 3.12pm on the same day, with stolen bikes and mobile phones seized.
“It took three of our biggest police vehicles to transport all the bikes to Bishopsgate police station — and colleagues in the property store are still emailing me to ask when they can go,” the detective constable continued.
“The CCTV footage shows some of them arriving four or five times a day, from first thing in the morning to last thing at night, each time with a new bike.
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Stolen with an angle grinder in central London, in the middle of the day, in full view of multiple offices.
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Climate techno-fixes raise concerns among the UK’s civil servants • Climate Change News
Joe Lo:
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British civil servants have grave doubts about their government’s favoured techno-fixes for climate-polluting industries like meat production and air travel, new documents show.
In risk assessments made public because of an ongoing court case, officials warned that technology to reduce methane emissions from cow burps is “nascent” and there might not be enough plants or hydrogen available to power the world’s planes more sustainably.
Yet despite the uncertainties surrounding these and other climate solutions like carbon dioxide removal, the UK government is relying on such technologies to meet a big chunk of its climate plans.
Internal government documents disclosed in court show civil servants had “low” or “very low” confidence in about half of the planned emissions reductions up to 2037 and “very high confidence” in just a tiny fraction.
In court, the government’s lawyer said that these categories should not be taken out of context – and that certain measures could be rated “very low confidence” just because it is “early days”.
The risk analysis was put together by unnamed civil servants at the UK’s Department for Energy Security and Net Zero in 2022 and was supposed to help shape the government’s latest carbon budget delivery plan, aimed at keeping the country on track for net-zero emissions by mid-century.
The plan was published in March 2023 along with a sanitised version of the risks and uncertainties that civil servants foresaw in meeting it.
But the full risk tables were made public this week as environmental campaigners took the government to court, arguing that civil servants did not give then climate minister Grant Shapps enough information to judge whether the UK’s climate plan was sufficient.
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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
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