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.”
— 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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
He’s speaking with The Verge deputy editor Alex Heath, who writes the Command Line newsletter.
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.
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.
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.
She’s being interviewed by The Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel.
Scaringe said he doesn’t like the BMW model of charging for heated seats — a feature that’s just flipped on or off.
But for something where there’s “ongoing R&D efforts,” he thinks it makes sense and consumers are willing to pay. “We’re certainly planning that in future products,” he said.
For Rivian, that probably looks like some sort of autonomy features.
Scaringe says Rivian is still working on its months-to-years long backlog and ramping up production to meet it.
“It’s an incredibly high-cost problem to have,” he said. But he doesn’t want to get rid of it entirely. “It’s good to have some backlog.”
He questioned whether it should be six months of backlog or more like a year and a half. I heard an audible “Yiiiiick,” from a woman behind me.
He’s being interviewed by Verge EIC Nilay Patel and CNBC senior media and tech correspondent Julia Boorstin.
Day one kicks off with Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe, AMD CEO Lisa Su, Roblox CEO David Baszucki, and Warner Music Group CEO Robert Kyncl.
The Verge’s editor-in-chief, Nilay Patel, is cohosting, and naturally we’ll be there to cover the big interviews.
The event starts later today, so tune in then for live coverage. The first interviews start a bit after 6PM ET.
“It’s not just a country issue. It’s a whole world issue,” says Diana Sanchez, a coordinator with the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, who joined the march. “You have hurricanes, you have natural disasters, and it causes people to migrate over. And then they come to this country in search of work, and then they overheat while they’re working ... So it was very important for us to be here representing all the voices that are not being heard.”
Judge Mehta interrupts Google’s opening statements to ask an important question: there’s all this talk about the power of defaults, and about how easy it is or is not to switch search engines, but does anyone actually switch? Google evidently doesn’t have good data on whether people do, so we might not get hard numbers here. But it’s a good question!
The conventional wisdom, of course, is that nobody switches. Mehta says he knows that.
The big-picture “is Google crushing all possible search competitors” question will dominate US v. Google, but there’s another allegation in here as well: whether Google prevented Microsoft from getting access to SA360, Google’s search marketing tool. The state attorneys are deep in that argument now, arguing that it’s yet another way Google manipulates the search market for its own gain.
Google opening up its tools to its competitor? “It’s like waiting for a Yankee fan to invite you to a Met game,” the attorney said. “Not gonna happen.”
One key question of the US v. Google trial — and any antitrust trial, really — is the size of the market. Google will argue that everything from ChatGPT to TikTok is a real threat in the space, and competition is everywhere. The government is going to try and argue, as attorney Kenneth Dintzer already has, that the market is “general search,” and that that’s really only Google and Bing. Which means it’s really only Google.
Judge Mehta is already poking at this argument, though — it sounds like he’s not convinced that “general search” is a wholly unique thing. This is going to be important.
Bitcoin mining eats up a lot of electricity, which can put a lot of pressure on power grids. During heatwaves, mining companies can earn energy credits from the Texas grid operator for powering down. That’s supposed to help prevent blackouts when energy demand rises for air conditioning. After the price of Bitcoin crashed, Bitcoin miner Riot is depending on those credits to keep itself afloat, CNBC reports.
I can’t imagine what dog L. Ron Hubbard’s religion has in this fight.
Experts say the petition covers Scientology’s “E-Meter,” a “religious artifact” and electronic that is core to Scientology.
(If you’re not subscribed to 404 Media, the new, independent publication from former Motherboard heavyweights, now’s a good time!)
Wear OS 4 debuted earlier this month on the Samsung Galaxy Watch 6, and now it’s coming via a One UI 5 Watch update to the Galaxy Watch 5 series in the US. In a nutshell, Wear OS 4 adds cloud backups and supposedly improves battery life. (Meanwhile, you can read about the One UI 5 Watch updates here.)
Right now, it appears this is limited to the Galaxy Watch 5 series though 9to5 Google says it’ll also come later to the Galaxy Watch 4 watches. We just don’t know how much later.
Google Workspace admins can now track the impact their work on Google Meet, Gmail, and Google Docs has on climate change. Google announced a new Carbon Footprint reporting tool today that’s available in the admin console. It shows carbon dioxide emissions over time and by service. Google still has a lot of work to do to cut down the greenhouse gas emissions; it has a goal of running its data centers on carbon pollution-free energy sources by 2030.
[Google Workspace Updates]
Plaintiff Alex Morales said he believed that he’d bought the Apple Watch believing its blood oxygen feature would work “without regard to skin tone.” However, the class action lawsuit was dismissed with prejudice, meaning it can’t be brought forth against Apple again.
However, there is bias with light-based sensors. That’s because they determine your metrics based on how light reflects off the skin. Melanin (and tattoo ink) impacts that, though companies try to make up for it by fine-tuning algorithms. It’s well-known that even pulse oximeters aren’t as accurate for non-white patients.
Reminder: Apple wasn’t required to get FDA clearance for its blood oxygen feature because it’s for general wellness, aka just for fun. It also clearly states that in its apps. If you want better accuracy, stick to pulse oximeters.
Russia lost its Luna-25 moon lander after it “ceased to exist as a result of a collision with the surface of the moon,” according to Russian state space corporation Roscosmos. Mission planning began in 2015, and a landing would’ve been the country’s first since 1976.
Next up: India’s Chandrayaan-3, which made lunar orbit this month, will try for a landing this week.
Congrats to Katie, who has had many notable gigs but none more important than being The Verge’s first-ever science editor, during which time she published this Phil Collins playlist. No, I do not remember why. Go get ‘em, Katie.
I’ll be helping run Polygon’s streaming rig during the 8pm to 12am ET block tonight, where they will be playing a bunch of Nintendo stuff for charity, like Mario Kart and Pokémon.
The stream’s donations go to Foster Love, a non-profit dedicated to improving the lives of children in foster care.
You can donate here and watch the stream on Polygon’s Twitch channel.
