We have... a lot to say about yesterday’s big TikTok hearing, and everything we learned about the app’s future. And grapefruits. And your home Wi-Fi network. And eyes. Plus, we talk Bard and GPT-4 and whether text boxes are the future of the internet.
On the news of OpenAI launching plugins for ChatGPT, this is a good take from Nvidia’s Jim Fan. If ChatGPT was the device that showed people the future, plugins could turn that device into an all-consuming ecosystem. Don’t forget how early and unproven all this AI stuff still is, but also don’t underestimate how big this is all becoming.
One of the long-running tropes of these hearings is “how much does anyone in the room, including the CEOs and the members of Congress, actually understand the tech at hand?”
To that end, I submit TikTok’s Shou Chew explaining that TikTok doesn’t collect body, face, or voice data to identify users, except when it needs to know where your eyes are for sunglasses filters and such. To which Georgia representative Buddy Carter responded: “Why do you need to see where the eyes are? To see if they’re dilated?”
When Chew explained TikTok’s age-gating process, Carter interjected: “That’s creepy. Tell me more about that.” Which is a good summation of the hearing so far, really.
I’m not over the fact that Apple killed Dark Sky, the best weather app ever, and replaced it with… nothing. And this post does a great and delightfully detailed job of explaining exactly what made Dark Sky special:
Instead of conveying wind direction using text (“NW” or “Northwest”), the app uses arrows! If the wind shifts directions throughout the day, I can feel the wind direction changing using my body.
Did you know that a TV antenna is a useful thing to have, in this the year 2023? I sure didn’t. But we talked a lot about what ATSC 3.0 promises, before getting into how to fill your backpack for a 2,600-mile hike, and which iPad(s) you should buy. This episode is going to cost me a lot of money, I think.
After a few hours of chatting, I haven’t found a new side of Bard. I also haven’t found much it does well.
According to Microsoft and Google, this is the future: An AI writes your emails, which are read and summarized by another AI, and then another one synthesizes it and chimes in on the thread, which is then summarized by your AI, and round and round we go.
This week on The Vergecast, it’s AI all the way down!
