More from The Code Conference 2023: all the news as it happens
Penmetsa says Monarch Tractor is licensing its technology to other tractor companies and is very open about sharing data with “everybody who works in the food ecosystem.”
“Today we know more about the DoorDash person who delivered our food than the person who grew our food,” he says.
That’s according to the company’s CEO, Praveen Penmetsa, who is onstage at Code 2023. Last month, it delivered more than 75 of its tractors to customers, he said.
He’s speaking with Verge EIC Nilay Patel.
Monarch makes an electric, autonomous tractor that runs on top of Nvidia AI tech. It’s a big day for AI convos, and Penmetsa’s company is trying to expand the tech to a very different corner of the market than everyone else.
Even though Microsoft offers AI tools that help people create content, Kevin Scott doesn’t want AI to completely take over content creation — hear him talk about it in this clip from Code 2023.
Is it a threat to creators, Boorstin asks?
Here’s Allen:
It’s a phenomenal tool it’s new to us, and we have to really work hard to make sure it doesn’t get out of control. If we handle it right we’re only going to be better.
But Allen is staying on top of Disney anyway so that when Iger is ready to sell ABC, he’ll be first in line.
“Their biggest challenge is how do you decouple it. How do you pull it out of their ecosystem? It’s integrated into everything Disney.”
Once Iger does figure it out, Allen says, “I’m gonna chase it down like a lion chasing down a gazelle.”
Allen says he isn’t worried about raising $10 billion to buy ABC. The thing that makes his offer so special: “Approval of the deal, that’s the commodity.”
He says tech companies can’t buy it because they “can’t even buy a lemonade stand today” without regulators getting upset. And the big media companies are “maxed out” in terms of broadcast assets under FCC rules.
“I’m the prettiest girl at the dance,” he says. “The best looking thing you’re ever gonna see this year.”
When he bought the network, Allen says employees wouldn’t discuss it because they “don’t want to offend certain people” — aka former President Trump.
“I said hold up, hold up,” Allen said. “You’re joking, right? ... I don’t care who we offend, we’re going to tell the American people the truth.”
I asked Craig Peters at Code what Getty would do if somebody found a way to make a photo with an AI-generated version of a known person like Joe Biden or Donald Trump using its just-announced tool, but he was emphatic that it wouldn’t be possible. I guess we’ll see!
He’s speaking with CNBC senior media and tech correspondent Julia Boorstin.
Allen just offered $10 billion to buy ABC and other TV assets from Disney, so expect some questions about what he wants to do with those networks.
Getty CEO Craig Peters describes what he thinks makes a great photo:
Whether it’s computer generated or otherwise, it’s the one that makes you stop, think, react, have emotion, engage. That’s a great photo.
Peters was asked by an audience member if copyright laws need to adapt for AI, and he very much agrees.
“If we want it just to stay stagnant, it’s going to ultimately not match up to the world we’re living in,” he says.
Peters says Getty is working with partners and newsrooms on content authenticity initiatives ahead of the 2024 election but there’s no silver bullet to solve the misinformation problem posed by generative AI.
Peters says the company looked at paying them each time their photo is used to create a specific AI image, but its models couldn’t nail the attribution. “We tested out a bunch and didn’t find them to be sufficient,” he said.
Instead, they’re using a proxy: “What proportion of the training set does your content represent, and how has that content performed in our licensing world over time?” That’s a good measure of quality and quantity, he says.
“I think that’s yet to play out,” said Craig Peters. Getty’s ultimate goal is to “save our customers time.” Getty introduced the new tool this week.
He’s speaking with Verge EIC Nilay Patel, too.
Trend alert: they’re probably going to talk about AI. Getty just launched an AI image generator — and it’s suing Stability AI for copyright infringement. Best of both worlds.
says Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott. So is he confirming that Microsoft is developing AI chips with AMD? “I’m not confirming anything,” he adds. But it sure sounds like something is in the works.
“We’re doing a bunch of interesting work with [AMD CEO Lisa Su], and I think they’re making increasingly compelling GPU offerings,” Scott says. “I think they are gonna become more and more important in the marketplace in the coming years.”
AI compute is very expensive, which has led to some expensive applications — like Microsoft’s Copilot for Microsoft 365, which costs $30 a seat. Scott didn’t commit to the cost of that going down, but said that “if the market tells us that the price for these things is too high, then the price goes down.”
— and whether everyone will stop visiting news sites once AI just sums them up.
“I don’t think that’s actually the thing anybody wants,” he says.
He doesn’t have a specific answer yet, but he says transparency will be key. “You at least understand what’s going on,” he says. “It’s not arbitrary and capricious, and you know how to viably run your business.”
Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott is onstage at Code 2023, and he said that Bing is making some marketshare improvements since the introduction of things like Bing Chat. Given how huge search is, any small gains could be pretty meaningful.
He’s speaking with The Verge’s EIC, Nilay Patel. Expect a lot of questions on AI — and probably some pointed questions about whether he’s working with AMD on custom chips.
The day kicks off with Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott, Getty Images CEO Craig Peters, and Allen Media Group CEO Byron Allen.
We’ll be in the audience all day covering the updates.
I get the sense that Robert Kyncl, the CEO of Warner Music Group, feels there’s room for the price of music streaming services to go up.
She doesn’t seem too worried.
Myself and some of my colleagues got to try Project Starline at Code 2023, and you can just watch us react to it. For me, Starline was just as cool as it was last year.