Linked List: February 6, 2023

Monday, 6 February 2023

Matthew Panzarino Interviews Apple Execs Tim Millet and Bob Borchers Re: M2 Macs ★

Matthew Panzarino, writing at TechCrunch:

The M1 whacked a big old reset button on those restrictions, putting portable back into the power computing lexicon. And with M2, Millet says, Apple did not want to milk a few percentage points of gains out of each generation in perpetuity.

“The M2 family was really now about maintaining that leadership position by pushing, again, to the limits of technology. We don’t leave things on the table,” says Millet. “We don’t take a 20% bump and figure out how to spread it over three years…figure out how to eke out incremental gains. We take it all in one year; we just hit it really hard. That’s not what happens in the rest of the industry or historically.”

The conversation turns to gaming:

Millet also is unconvinced that the game dev universe has adapted to the unique architecture of the M-series chips quite yet, especially the unified memory pool.

“Game developers have never seen 96 gigabytes of graphics memory available to them now, on the M2 Max. I think they’re trying to get their heads around it, because the possibilities are unusual. They’re used to working in much smaller footprints of video memory. So I think that’s another place where we’re going to have an interesting opportunity to inspire developers to go beyond what they’ve been able to do before.”

Bard: Google’s Conversational AI Chat ★

Sundar Pichai, writing for Google’s blog:

We’ve been working on an experimental conversational AI service, powered by LaMDA, that we’re calling Bard. And today, we’re taking another step forward by opening it up to trusted testers ahead of making it more widely available to the public in the coming weeks.

Bard is still in very private beta testing, but at the moment, I’d be hesitant to describe this as Google “playing catchup” to ChatGPT, etc. For all we know, Google is way out ahead of them, but have been playing their cards close to their vest.

Update: On the other hand, Google has announced a lot of AI vaporware in recent years. Ship a real product or shut up.

Getty Images Sues AI Art Generator Stable Diffusion in the U.S. for Copyright Infringement ★

James Vincent, reporting for The Verge:

Getty Images has filed a lawsuit in the US against Stability AI, creators of open-source AI art generator Stable Diffusion, escalating its legal battle against the firm.

The stock photography company is accusing Stability AI of “brazen infringement of Getty Images’ intellectual property on a staggering scale.” It claims that Stability AI copied more than 12 million images from its database “without permission ... or compensation ... as part of its efforts to build a competing business,” and that the startup has infringed on both the company’s copyright and trademark protections.

The fact that Stable Diffusion occasionally produces output with Getty Image’s watermark makes this about as open-and-shut a case of copyright infringement as I can imagine. It’s like a plagiarist who copies the byline of the piece they’re stealing from.

Yours Truly on ‘All Consuming’ With Noah Kalina and Adam Lisagor ★

Noah Kalina and Adam Lisagor are back for season 2 of their delightful podcast All Consuming. This season they’re doing a topic per episode, and for “computers”, they had me on. Somehow it isn’t 10 hours long.

Lisagor:

It feels good to get excited about technology with others.

Yes, it did.

Listen in your favorite podcast app here.

Feeling Blue, but Not Smelling Green ★

Erin Woo, reporting for The Information:

Around 180,000 people in the U.S. were paying for subscriptions to Twitter, including Twitter Blue, as of mid-January, or less than 0.2% of monthly active users, according to a document viewed by The Information. The tiny number signals the challenge Elon Musk faces in turning the subscription product into a major source of revenue.

The U.S. number is about 62% of Twitter’s global subscriber total, the document says, which implies Twitter has 290,000 global subscribers. Twitter is charging $8 a month for Blue Verified on the web and $11 a month for those who sign up via Apple’s iOS, although Apple keeps 30% of that fee.

All together, the global number of subscribers would equate to around $28 million in annual revenue — less than 1% of the $3 billion Musk has said Twitter aims to make in revenue this year. In November, days after assuming control of Twitter, Musk told his new employees he wanted half the company’s revenue to come from subscriptions.

Hard to believe people aren’t jumping at the chance to pay $8/month for a website that is crumbling before our eyes. Lucky for Musk, advertising is down too, so maybe if ad revenue keeps dropping, subscriptions will account for half of Twitter’s revenue.