NevermindNoMind

Plan is to reinvent the smartphone with AI, in the same way the touchscreen on the iPhone reinvented the smartphone.

Particularly interesting given ChatGPTs latest move to have voice recognition and an AI voice respond. If you haven't tried it, it's kind of neat. This morning I had a conversation with ChatGPT with my phone in my pocket, all done overy Bluetooth headphones like I was on a call. It was actually a lot more natural then I expected. I wonder what it would look like if that kind of tech was front and center in a smartphone.

I've included a few snippets from the article below, but the TLDR is, big names and big money are behind brainstorming plans to make an AI first centered smartphone, a plan to reinvent the form factor. The article also points to declining smartphone sails as evidence that the public is tired of the same old slab every year, so this could be an interesting time for this to come out.

I guess it's relevant to mention whatever the fuck the Humane AI pin is: The Humane Ai Pin makes its debut on the runway at Paris Fashion Week https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/30/23897065/humane-ai-pin-coperni-paris-fashion-week

From the article: After rumors began to swirl that Apple alum Jony Ive and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman were having collaborative talks on a mysterious piece of AI hardware, it appears that the pair are indeed trying to corner the smartphone market. The two are reportedly discussing a collaboration on a new kind of smartphone device with $1 billion in backing from Masayoshi Son’s Softbank.

...according to the outlet, the duo are looking to create a device that provides a more “natural and intuitive way” to interact with AI. The nascent idea is to take a ground-up approach to redesigning the smartphone in the same way that Ive did with touchscreens so many years ago. One source told the Financial Times that the plan is to make the “iPhone of artificial intelligence.” Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son is also involved in the venture, with the financial holding group putting up a massive $1 billion toward the effort. Son has also reportedly pitched Arm, a chip designer in which SoftBank has a 90% stake, for involvement.

While it’s still not clear what the end goal of the product talks will be (or if anything will come of them at all, really), it does seem like the general public has become fatigued with the same-y rollout of a slightly better smartphone slab year after year. Tech market analysis firm Canalys revealed in a report earlier this month that smartphone sales have experienced a significant decline in North America. The report indicates that iPhone sales have fallen 22% year-over-year, with an expected decline of 12% in 2023. The numbers are pretty staggering, especially fresh off the release of the iPhone 15, and could be an indicator that people are getting fatigued of the hottest new tech gadgets.

Google is coming under scrutiny after people discovered transcripts of conversations with its AI chatbot are being indexed in search results.

You can replicate what others are seeing by typing ‘site:bard.google.com/share‘ into the Google Search bar.

I tried this out for myself, and as one example found a writer brainstorming story ideas and using her full name. It seems that when you hit "export/share" on Bard, while you might think only people with access to the link that's created can view the conversation, in fact Google makes the conversation public and searchable. This is far more problematic than the vague privacy threat of your prompts being used to train the models and later being spit back to some random person in a reply. This lets you read full conversations. AI in general has a privacy problem, but this is a good reason not to use Bard in particular (if it sucking wasn't enough reason for you)

“Based on your consent, we may collect and use your biometric information for safety, security, and identification purposes,” the privacy policy reads. It doesn’t include any details on what kind of biometric information this includes — or how X plans to collect it — but it typically involves fingerprints, iris patterns, or facial features.

X Corp. was named in a proposed class action lawsuit in July over claims that its data collection violates the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act. The lawsuit alleges that X “has not adequately informed individuals” that it “collects and/or stores their biometric identifiers in every photograph containing a face” that’s uploaded to the platform.

Starting August 7th, advertisers that haven’t reached certain spending thresholds will lose their official brand account verification. According to emails obtained by the WSJ, brands need to have spent at least $1,000 on ads within the prior 30 days or $6,000 in the previous 180 days to retain the gold checkmark identifying that the account belongs to a verified brand.

...

Threatening to remove verified checkmarks is a risky move given how many ‘Twitter alternative’ services like Threads and Bluesky are cropping up and how willing consumers appear to be to jump ship, with Threads rocketing to 100 million registrations in just five days. That said, it’s not like other efforts to drum up some additional cash, like increasing API pricing, have gone down especially well, either. It’s a bold strategy, Cotton — let’s see if it pays off for him.

Anas Haqqani, a senior leader in the Taliban, has officially endorsed Twitter over Facebook-owned competitor Threads.

“Twitter has two important advantages over other social media platforms,” Haqqani said in an English post on Twitter. “The first privilege is the freedom of speech. The second privilege is the public nature & credibility of Twitter. Twitter doesn't have an intolerant policy like Meta. Other platforms cannot replace it.”

Twitter has fallen out of favor with many people since Elon Musk took over the company last year...The Taliban, however, seems to love it. Two Taliban officials even bought blue verification check marks after Musk started selling them in January.

Haqqani noted that the biggest draw of Twitter was this lax moderation policy...Facebook and TikTok both view the Taliban as a terrorist organization and disallow them from posting. It’s a ban that persists to this day.

Add it all up, and the social web is changing in three crucial ways: It’s going from public to private; it’s shifting from growth and engagement, which broadly involves building good products that people like, to increasing revenue no matter the tradeoff; and it’s turning into an entertainment business. It turns out there’s no money in connecting people to each other, but there’s a fortune in putting ads between vertically scrolling videos that lots of people watch. So the “social media” era is giving way to the “media with a comments section” era, and everything is an entertainment platform now. Or, I guess, trying to do payments. Sometimes both. It gets weird.

As far as how humans connect to one another, what’s next appears to be group chats and private messaging and forums, returning back to a time when we mostly just talked to the people we know. Maybe that’s a better, less problematic way to live life. Maybe feed and algorithms and the “global town square” were a bad idea. But I find myself desperately looking for new places that feel like everyone’s there. The place where I can simultaneously hear about NBA rumors and cool new AI apps, where I can chat with my friends and coworkers and Nicki Minaj. For a while, there were a few platforms that felt like they had everybody together, hanging out in a single space. Now there are none.

I’d love to follow that up with, “and here’s the new thing coming next!” But I’m not sure there is one. There’s simply no place left on the internet that feels like a good, healthy, worthwhile place to hang out. It’s not just that there’s no sufficiently popular place; I actually think enough people are looking for a new home on the internet that engineering the network effects wouldn’t be that hard. It’s just that the platform doesn’t exist. It’s not LinkedIn or Tumblr, it’s not upstarts like Post or Vero or Spoutable or Hive Social. It’s definitely not Clubhouse or BeReal. It doesn’t exist.

Long-term, I’m bullish on “fediverse” apps like Mastodon and Bluesky, because I absolutely believe in the possibility of the social web, a decentralized universe powered by ActivityPub and other open protocols that bring us together without forcing us to live inside some company’s business model. Done right, these tools can be the right mix of “everybody’s here” and “you’re still in control.”

But the fediverse isn’t ready. Not by a long shot. The growth that Mastodon has seen thanks to a Twitter exodus has only exposed how hard it is to join the platform, and more importantly how hard it is to find anyone and anything else once you’re there. Lemmy, the go-to decentralized Reddit alternative, has been around since 2019 but has some big gaps in its feature offering and its privacy policies — the platform is absolutely not ready for an influx of angry Redditors. Neither is Kbin, which doesn’t even have mobile apps and cautions new users that it is “very early beta” software. Flipboard and Mozilla and Tumblr are all working on interesting stuff in this space, but without much to show so far. The upcoming Threads app from Instagram should immediately be the biggest and most powerful thing in this space, but I’m not exactly confident in Meta’s long-term interest in building a better social platform.

In response to chip export restrictions from the US and Europe, China has retaliated by imposing export controls on two essential semiconductor manufacturing elements, gallium and germanium, adding another dimension to the ongoing global battle over chipmaking technology control.

• China has announced export controls on two rare elements, gallium and germanium, which are essential for semiconductor manufacturing. This move is in response to the US and Europe restricting chip exports to China.
• Starting August 1, exporters of these raw materials will require special permission from the state to ship them out of the country, according to China's Ministry of Commerce.
• Both gallium and germanium are used in several products, including computer chips and solar panels, and are listed as critical raw materials by the European Union. China is the world's largest gallium producer and a significant producer and exporter of germanium.
• The Dutch government recently imposed new restrictions on exports of some semiconductor equipment, provoking a harsh reaction from Beijing. Consequently, ASML, Europe's largest tech firm, will need to apply for export licenses for products used to manufacture microchips.
• Japan, the US, and Italy have also taken measures to restrict Chinese companies' access to chips and chipmaking equipment. This has been seen as an attempt to limit the Chinese government's access to sensitive chip technology.
• The new policy was interpreted as retaliation by a state-owned newspaper, China Daily, which suggested that critics should question why the US and the Netherlands have taken similar actions against China.
• China's announcement comes just before US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen's visit to Beijing from July 6 to July 9, where she will meet with senior Communist Party officials.

Elon has responded to the criticism and is increasing the limits to a whopping:

Verified accounts: 8000 posts/day
Unverified accounts: 800 posts/day
New unverified accounts: 400 posts/day