More from The Code Conference 2023: all the news as it happens
Really though, what about the wiper?
We’ll be back bright and early tomorrow (at least, early on the West Coast) with coverage of Code day two, featuring Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott, X CEO Linda Yaccarino, and more. The show kicks off around 12PM ET / 9AM PT.
WMG CEO Robert Kyncl jokes about the price of music services like Spotify. Basically: he’d like to see them go up.
“The price elasticity is generally high around it,” he says. He floats $20 per month for a music family plan — the same price as Netflix for four.
Robert Kyncl estimates that within the next year, you’ll see lots of evolution in AI technologies and music. “You have to embrace technology,” he said.
The short answer seems to be no. But in his response, he talked a lot about file formats and how they might differ for things like a pair of virtual shoes and wheels that fall off a virtual car. That might make any interchangeability would be a tricky problem to solve; companies like Roblox, Meta, and Epic Games would have to agree on file formats that could sync across systems. My sense is they might be reticent to do that right now.
He’s talking about the rapid advancement of AI and history of visual storytelling.
The company has shown off some impressive text-to-video tech.
“I wouldn’t say it’s a distancing. We have evolved the terminology we’ve used,” Baszucki says.
He prefers the term “human co-experience” or “communication and connection platform.”
I have to wonder if a certain brand’s renaming has anything to do with it.
The company shut down the Chinese version of its app that was operated by Tencent in early 2022, but Roblox co-founder and CEO David Baszucki says that the company is still working on something for the Chinese market.
The idea would be that Roblox can “literally print a copy of Roblox in China and bring it to market there” and that Roblox would have less and less data going back and forth between the US and China.
David Baszucki, Roblox’s co-founder and CEO, mentioned that while physical shopping is “not yet really announced or promised,” it could be something that brands do within Roblox at some point. But it’s on the roadmap — the company included a goal about physical shopping in its big predictions for the next five years of the company.
Baszucki said Roblox was growing headcount by 50 percent back in Q1 and needed a lot of recruiters. That hiring is just slowing down, he told The Verge’s Alex Heath.
“We’ve done this amazing job of growing steadily over the last two years,” Baszucki said.
The platform is hugely popular with kids, but the company is making a huge push into attracting older players, too. According to David Baszucki, Roblox’s co-founder and CEO, the growth is good enough (33 percent year-over-year with the 17-24 year-old demographic) that the company is ok not saying that they’re trying to age up.
He’s speaking with The Verge deputy editor Alex Heath, who writes the Command Line newsletter.
I asked Su if she’s worried about Apple’s recent push to prove that its devices and M series chips are good for triple-A gaming. I get the sense she’s not.
“We’re gonna continue to push the envelope on the highest performing PCs and consoles’ chips, and I think we’re gonna be pretty good,” she added.
(I recommend reading the IGN interview where Apple made that claim, by the way. It’s by Verge alum Taylor Lyles!)
We ran an excerpt from his book earlier today. It’s a fascinating section about how the First Amendment protected someone who lied about military service.
Why the First Amendment protects liars
AMD’s Lisa Su somewhat dodges a question about whether a cloud gaming shift is underway: “I see PC gaming strong, I see console gaming strong, and I see cloud gaming also having legs. They all need similar types of technology but they obviously use it in different ways.”
CEO Lisa Su says you can’t limit the chips alone, but...
I can make the combination of the chip and the model have some safeguards in place, and we’re absolutely willing to be at that table to make that happen.
She was responding to a question from Verge EIC Nilay Patel about whether she’d accept government restrictions on AI chips, such as stopping them from being used to develop chemical weapons.
That was Su’s response to Nilay asking if it would be possible. Microsoft and AMD are reportedly working together on an in-house AI chip for Microsoft. Su also confirmed that it would be possible to make AMD chips available to Azure customers in an invisible way — but she suggested asking Microsoft’s CTO Kevin Scott asking that question as well. Fortunately, he’ll be starting Wednesday’s show!
But she says she’s looking at AI on a 10-plus year cycle — not just over the next four quarters. And there’s still a lot of room to improve our current models with higher performing chips.
“Generative AI, you know, is kind of the killer app for high performance computing,” she says.
That’s AMD CEO Lisa Su’s take on that Huawei’s 7nm chip, which have raised some questions.
AMD’s Lisa Su is happy with CHIPS subsidies, but thinks we’re maybe a teensy bit behind the curve.
But Su says the company is putting “a tremendous amount of effort to getting the entire supply chain ramped up.”
She’s being interviewed by The Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel.
I asked Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe how long it might be until we get to a truly affordable EV, and he thinks it could happen in a not-to-distant future.
Right now, many EVs are very expensive, and a huge part of the cost is because of the batteries. The company launched its vehicles at the higher end of pricing, and Scaringe says that the company hopes to keep driving down costs over time.
Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe said that the forthcoming switch to NACS will not only mean that Rivians can charge at Tesla’s Supercharger stations, but Teslas can also charge on Rivian’s own charging network. Hadn’t thought about that — nice perk!