artificial intelligence has now Advanced to the
point where it can create really good video clips but the technology still continues to have some
incidents where it seems to go berserk we're going to talk about these and other Tech news on this
episode of today and [Music] Tech hi everybody Welcome to today in Tech I'm Keith Shaw the guy
behind the monitors is Chris hey Chris hey how's it going it's going well and we are also happy to
have our latest guest co-host join us for the next few w
eeks uh Paul Desmond is the principal and
co-founder of Saratoga B2B group and a veteran it journalist and editor uh welcome to the show
Paul thank you Keith pleasure to be here all right so it's it's going to be it's going to be a
fun four weeks I can I can tell you now uh talk a little bit about kind of what you know what you
bring to the the world of technology journalism and and Analysis sure uh well currently I actually
have two companies one uh they're both focused on helping it compa
nies develop marketing content so
I'm writing about it day in day out the oldest one is is PD edit which is pure writing blog posts
white papers that kind of thing and the other is Saratoga B2B Group which I formed about four
to five years ago with a partner Charlie Spectre who has a SEO expertise so you know we can help
companies actually ensure somebody reads all the content that we produce and uh before all that
I spent 11 years at Network world as a reporter and editor which is where I
I first learned
about that's how I know you I'm just kidding that's how I know you that's right I met lots of
fine people there there you go there you go all right let's jump into the the news this week I'm
I'm sure you were pretty impressed by this as I was um open AI uh introduced a new technology that
uses artificial intelligence to create highquality videos from text descriptions the company released
short clips that showed Vivid seemingly realistic videos including woolly mammoths trek
king across
a snowy field ocean waves crashing against against the cliff Shoreline and people doing everyday
things like reading a book or walking down a city street open AI calls this new system Sora
where it takes a written prompt and through AI renders a richly detailed video open AI is one
of many companies like alphabets Google and meta platforms that are looking to capitalize on new AI
video developments uh when we were approaching the world of AI video last year when we were seeing
some early efforts it was all very morphe and very nightmare fuelish it was uh people I think there
was a a a bud you know someone tried to imitate a Budweiser ad or like at a barbecue and those
you know and like the fingers were wrong and and people were Downing beers in the wrong direction
um but now a lot of this stuff seems to be uh a lot better looking if um Chris if you go to that
open AI site the the second link I sent you um if you scroll down there's a lot of new uh videos
that aga
in yeah there's there's the the person walking down the city street that looks really
good compared to what was going on um what's interesting too is that after the news came out
every tech journalist site every media site was like oh my gosh this is the end of civilization as
we know it maybe on the video creation side people were getting worried uh what were some of your
thoughts uh Paul when when you saw a lot of this stuff I guess first you know before we delve
into all the evil that's
potentially working behind this I think we should just Revel for a
minute in just how amazing it is that that AI can do this I mean to me it it really shows the power
of AI and and the promise I mean it's it's almost like you think something and the next minute you
know you got a video of it so I mean I don't know you know who knows how close to the finished
product it will be to what you're picturing in your mind but still I mean to me the whole idea
is pretty impressive but but it does it
raises some questions I mean first one how much compute
power is this going to take I mean it's it's got to be significantly more than the chat GPT does
sure sure and these are small Clips too these are not these are not full length movies um but
again some of the imagination that went through it I think Sam Alman tweeted out a bunch of things
like hey you know give me some ideas and you know everyone was like oh we'll try this and then boom
it worked um the company is not releasing this t
o the general public yet uh they are doing this they
are I guess choosing you know specific researchers and and people cuz they want to make sure that
it's going to be safe because obviously what they saw with the image generation where they were
just flat images uh people tended to try to say like let's what's the the weirdest and stupidest
thing we can show but also can we create deep fake images and we started seeing things like the pope
and a puffy jacket we saw the whole Donald Trump u
h being arrested uh meme that went out there
and so they've got there's there's definitely political implications that have uh that you have
to think about and then if you combine the video stuff with the AI voice cloning issues uh you
start to start seeing the ability to create some some really potentially uh misleading kind of kind
of videos Chris you know as you watch these what what what what enters your mind that you're out of
a job I'm going to be out of a job soon um I mean honestly
like think about it like just a year ago
um you know AI video was wasn't looking good right right right uh everything looked muddy you could
you could tell that the AI was trying but it it really wasn't getting there you could definitely
tell that it was an AI thing because of the morph effect and so from what I've seen here it these
look like these could have just been CGI created uh I mean not even not even like I'm looking at
these for the first time and I'm looking at this one right her
e uh it's like a looks like it's like
a rocket man or something yeah and that could be a commercial right that could be a car commercial
and this landscape shot right here uh you know of this uh Cliff edge with the ocean that's uh
that's pretty realistic uh looking and um yeah I mean it's I'm kind of worried about it yeah I mean
because we've already seen other AI apps out there that can you know in a way somewhat replace some
light jobs of an editor right right and now like I'm looking at
this these AI generated clips
and it's like wow this could totally replace stock images yep in stock stock images in stock
video so and and you know people who don't know stock images like that's actually that's an actual
industry out there especially for video creators and you know cinematographers who are trying to
create a little extra on the side and stuff like that like yeah I'm kind of worried I'm kind of
worried you know a little bit those people that that contribute that kind of a t
hat video to a
stock image site could take these tools and start creating their own unless you think that you would
skip the and go right to it yourself and yeah but that's not why people do that right people want
to create P people want to you know use their brain and come up with their own original idea
and at the end of the day they want to say hey I did that yeah I I I I spent all this time
and effort in doing that and I think this is it's going to replace the the paintbrush so to
spea
k yeah you know um and I can see even in in in Hollywood people doing this for storyboarding
or you know people creating storyboard apps now um if they could do it faster than what you would
hand sketch something uh or or or the short video You Know influencer YouTube Instagram type people
I would not be surprised if this gets released to see a lot of those features being embedded into
all of those platforms yeah and and like look at it this way real quick real quick um look there's
people
out there saying yeah this it's not going to replace jobs and yeah companies aren't going to
use this and stuff like that but it's like we've already started to see just a a a glimmer of it
yeah um especially with that uh that Marvel show that came out um oh secret Invasion that whole
intro animation was AI generated now imagine if you could do that without the animation part
and actually create you know video like look if if there if look if companies and corporations are
going to say no w
e're not going to use it they're going to use it yeah right yeah absolutely I
can see companies using it lots of companies spend a lot of money creating promotional videos
for different products and so forth yeah I mean this can help them do that a lot cheaper I can
definitely see that happening but I think it also raises the same copyright issues that you know
absolutely times raised with chat GPT I mean these images have to come from somewhere absolutely you
know they would they were trai
ned you know this this this tool was trained on apparently tons
of images so those came from somewhere right it raises a bunch of issues they I don't know if
they've actually revealed where the training set came from but I'm sure that they're aware of I
mean this is a drone shot this is a drone shot yeah but is that a is that a real place or is that
you think that was procedurally generated like was that generated by the AI my gut feeling is this
probably is a real place but someone could l
ook at it and be like Oh AI came up with that but it
looks it looks convincing yeah that is like 100% convincing yeah Paul any any other thoughts on
this like again should we be worried from the deep fake uh implications and the the misinformation
that could come out again when you see when you see all these different angles you could then
start combining all of these things a little bit you have to be worried about deep fakes and it
it was interesting I saw the first story I read about thi
s you know brought that up and they they
mentioned watermarks I got a feeling we're going to need more than watermarks yeah you're gonna
need a lot more know yeah you're gonna have to we're gonna have to be definitely on our toes on
some of this stuff but the other thing I thought about was you know I think with with j in general
it's all about the prompt really and I I think the prompts here are going to be huge prompts could
become an art form to craft videos that are you know useful or a
rtistic or whatever adjective
you want to use so I think we're gonna see a lot of that yeah yeah I I mean I'm looking at this
right here Pixar is looking at this right now and Disney's looking at this they're just thinking
dollar signs ch- Ching like but the thing is the three animated furry guy here the thing is about
well I guess you could take this from a starting point and and it and it creates that image for you
but if you want to put that thing in a movie you can't like in a full leng
th movie like if you did
the same prompt over and over again don't you get different ver you know you get different versions
at least with pictures I have a feeling they would use that as a Baseline and then they would go into
their existing uh process and workflows and Design characters like that I have a feeling and this is
a gut feeling they're going to find a way to make it work for them I'm I'm serious they're going
to find a way yeah um all right so I think the next step would be to s
ee when open AI decides if
they want to release this to the general public or not um uh it certainly kind of throws down the
the uh all the terms the gantlet or The Gauntlet it's one of those um they've basically said or hey
everybody else this is what we can do uh time to start you know getting your act together and and
let's see what you've got because again we saw the same thing in the image space where it was it
was awful for a while and now the dolly 3 stuff is really good mid Journey
you know up its game
and and they can produce some really good stuff um I I'd be worried about Google I don't think
the Google stuff is very good at this point so all right but now we've said that we're all you
know with the video stuff but then there's there was another story that happened this week where
apparently chat GPT went berserk overnight on it was like from Tuesday to Wednesday um the the
service started throwing out unexpected responses on Tuesday night according to an open AI s
tatus
page users posted screenshots of their chat GPT conversations that were full of wild nonsensical
answers from the AI chatbot um let's see open AI said the issue was resolved about 11:14 a.m.
Wednesday morning and and this is a quote an optimization to the user experience introduced
a bug with how the model process language said open Ai and a stats update labeled postmortem uh
large language models use probabilities to figure out which word comes next in a sentence open AI
said the bu
g was located in the step where the model chooses these Pro probabilities this ended
up producing word sequences that made no sense um there were some like if if there's a Twitter
page there uh Chris um they were basically yeah yeah where it was just like they started repeating
words see if you can zoom in on some of that stuff um some emojis there were a mix of English Spanish
and straight gibberish in some cases Chad GPD was simply repeating the same phrase over and over
again um it even
affected Chad GPT Enterprise according to one user's post on X and a user
posted a video of Chad GPT writing a lengthy manic essay and responses to a s simple question
um there was some other speculation going on on the article that I read from it was on giz motto
uh they you know figuring out trying to where went but then other people were just kind of making
jokes about it I was like wow that's a really cool song with this gibberish you know language
so see even even AI needs to take a va
cation you think it was just they were tired could have
been they just needed to turn on and off like could you turn on and off J GPT again to Paul
you know what what's your what's your thoughts on this uh I think it's something of a warning
signal for you know AI run a mck I mean if if I was a business counting on geni you know for
something important right i' raise an eyebrow for sure you know all those hallucinations we
always hear about with chat TPT could have real world repercussions
you know when they're in the
wild I mean I I think of like one client we have uses um gen AI for in the insurance industry and
the idea is to help like Underwriters or claims folks you know process things more quickly which
it does a great job at but you know if you look at kind of The Next Step um they don't use it for
chat Bots like this but I could see it would play a role um gen I mean in like generating quotes for
an insurance company and what if it generates a quote that's just wildly
off base right right he
picks up on it you know and and we've we've had guests on the show before that have told told us
about I guess there was a a a car dealer somewhere that the chatbot allowed someone to buy a car for
a dollar uh there was another story this we week in the Washington Post uh that that you would sent
us Paul about um Air Canada had a chatbot that basically promised the user a discount um this
user his grandmother had died and so he visited the website to book a flight f
or the funeral and
the chapot told him oh sure you have 90 days to uh ask for the refund um you know once you get
back but then when he tried to get that discount they were like oh no that you have to you have to
ask for the discount before you go on the flight and not ask after and it turns out that the chat
bot was wrong and so they they went to litigation some kind of like Canada um tribunal type thing
and and they agreed with the the guy and not and not Air Canada so they had to actuall
y give
them give him the money back but it's incidents like this that that should raise uh the eyebrows
and the ears of of of especially businesses that are using this Tech to try to provide accurate
responses if it's not you know if you're going going to have some of these glitches um it might
not be ready yet for prime time and that that's what you were you were saying too with with some
of your clients right well I think yeah that and any anybody who's really deep into this will tell
yo
u at this point at least you need a human in the loop as they say yeah and to just do a check on
exactly for things like that you know I mean it's easy enough to pick up like in the underwriting
example if something is wildly out of out of whack a human will pick up on that yeah you know
yeah it definitely makes you no no go ahead oh no I was just going to say like it definitely makes
you wonder like how it actually happened like did someone just kind of make a typo and an update you
know a
n updated piece of code or maybe it was just overloaded I just think wonder I just think it
was some kind of hallucination with this chatbot where it may have inferred or may have made an
assumption about when the policy was versus the actual policy yeah I mean again you get you get
policies at these companies and sometimes it's confusing um it reminds me of trying to play some
of those um like magic the Gathering card games or those those training card games where you have a
card that says
one thing and then the other card contradicts that card and then you have to figure
out well which rule is correct and uh I think humans eventually can figure it out but again
this chatbot it was probably a case where they forgot to have a human check to see if this this
this answer was correct yeah we get that a lot so uh yeah these things will still pop up every now
and then and it it's great fod for us to discuss so um I'm I'm always happy with it so all right
we're going to move on fro
m uh AI to security the other big story this another big story this week
uh law enforcement agencies including the FBI and the UK's National Crime agency have dealt a
crippling blow to lock bit which was one of the world's most prolific cyber crime gangs whose
victims include Royal Mail and Boeing among others the 11 International agencies uh were behind
this operation Kronos they said this week that the uh ransomware group many of whose members are
based in Russia have been locked out of t
heir own systems several of the group's key members have
also been arrested indicted or identified and its core technology seized including hacking
tools and its dark web homepage um all right there's a quote about uh the the infiltration and
basically this guy his name was Graham bigger the NCA director General uh he said lock bit has
caused enormous harm and cost no longer as of today lock bit is effectively redundant and then
he does this really stupid quote which goes lock bit has been
locked out I see what he did there
yeah uh so five defendants have been charged in the US including two Russian Nationals two of the
five are in custody and other two alleged members of the gang were arrested in Ukraine and Poland
uh with the law enforcement officials promising more to come in fact the state department put
out a press release um asking basically offering rewards for more information on make like who some
of these leaders are and some of the people that are involved in it um
I'm I'm actually very
happy that this this finally came out because for the better part of the last couple of years
we have not heard a lot around law enforcement in ransomware and it did feel like that the the
ransomware gangs were winning we've done a couple of episodes on this show talking about the the
problem of ransomware and how it continues to to to happen and I was starting to think that
companies are basically ignoring the advice to not pay the ransom uh and they're just paying
ransoms now if if if they have critical system um Paul you were interested in this story too what
what you know what's your take on does this mean that there's still hope for the rest of us in in
this fight I'm not so sure you know anytime bad guys get taken down it's a good thing obviously
whether it makes a dent in the whole ransomware landscape means to be seen because I mean normally
these ransomware groups they sort of fold up their tent you know before that gets to this point when
the
y they kind of feel the heat coming and they'll just close up shop and then crop you know crop up
later under a different name a couple months later um so that could still happen here you know the
fact that they made arrest is a good thing um they they got some I guess intellectual property you
might say I I I have to believe the perpetrators probably have copies of all that you know and they
can just like I said start up again in a couple of months yeah within the last couple of years thoug
h
I we we've had some people on the show talk to us about how Brazen some of these groups are and that
and have been getting uh when we talked about the big MGM hack last year uh in Las Vegas there were
groups that basically came out raised their hand and they said oh yeah we did it and here's how we
did it um this was through the I think they did social engineering through Linkedin that they were
able to find um key it help people to basically give them the passwords um and it was weird to
me me about how how they were bragging about it and there was like well yeah because they're
probably in all these different countries and law enforcement can't reach them so it was interesting
to see that there was this cooperation that you saw in in in a lot of these countries um but some
of the five of the people that were arrested were in the US I'm like what are you doing in the US
like if you're going to do all this bad stuff get out of this country because they're going to C
you kn
ow you're like do you think the chances are those two Russian Nationals are ever going to get
you know extradited to the US well they probably yeah they probably won't but I don't know it does
feel interesting that at least there was some cooperation that was going on um but you're right
I mean it just feel like is this just a small dent uh in the in in the whole big picture yeah like I
said it remains to be seing that you know this I don't know if you read much about this business
model th
ey had but it seemed like it would be pretty effective because but it was basically
like a franchise model so the guys you know doing the work on the ground kept like something
like 80% of the ransom and they kick up 20% to the you know up the ladder so that's pretty good
yeah you know those guys making the 80% you know you got to believe they're just going to look for
the next thing I mean they're not going away if they weren't caught like do you think that these
people that were caught we
re part of the lower part of the organization or were were more that's
a good the upper a good question yeah I I got the sense they were higher up but you know I I don't
know that for sure what when I put on my tin hat I start thinking that like you know once these guys
get caught by the government that they get put to work for the government doing um state-to-state
uh type of of and maybe that's why there has there hasn't been a lot of these big announcements about
criminals being taken do
wn um but that's probably my tin foil hat well that's Leo DiCaprio and catch
me if you can right yeah yeah exactly exactly um you know you know I'm I'm pretty sure that that
that's why we didn't see anything in the MGM thing but maybe again maybe maybe we'll we'll we'll see
something down the road um all right so uh yeah I guess I guess we'll just wait and see to see if
more of these things are coming down the coming down the pike um do you have an opinion on you
know whether companies shou
ld should pay ransom for ransomware attacks or like where do you stand
on that Paul that's a tough one I you know I can't say I have an opinion it probably depends on the
situation um I think you know the government I think tells you not to but you know it depends
on how much they're asking for one thing oh it it does seem like once you pay it you're just
going to keep paying it because you know right once you pay it and the bad guys know you paid
it why wouldn't they come back again and ag
ain you yeah there was some question about whether the
uh I think now that the government has se seized the inform you know seized these servers there
was the potential that they didn't know if they could get their money back the people that paid
the ransom um but there was also an implication that they might be able to get their data back
as well um so it did feel like maybe that the the lock bit people weren't kind of following
through on what they had promised or it does feel like maybe
they ticked off someone and that's
how the government went after them like they they they went past the normal operating procedures of
what ransomware groups are supposed to do again May I'm just assuming all a lot of this stuff I
will say you know I do have a number of clients in the security space and I mean I'm convinced if
you just take a fraction of what you might have to pay in a ransom and use it for defensive or or
even offensive security like pest you'll be much better off because
I mean if if you're harder to
get into than the next guy they're just G to move along you know they're not going to spend a ton of
time on you so to me that was make the most sense you know invest in some some decent security you
know whether it's manage detection and response kinds of things can detect things before it gets
to this point where forc to pay our answer okay uh we're going to we're going to shift gears from
this story to uh another one we uh are there's a couple of Tesla stori
es that were in the news uh
The Washington Post had a story about it was a pretty impressive story about a worker who worked
for Tesla uh was killed in a uh crash in 2022 uh but apparently this might be the first fatality
around full self-driving which is the the Tesla autonomous feature before this happened there were
a lot of accidents um where it was the automated assisted driving but people assumed that it was
full driving and a lot of people got in trouble because they were not you kno
w they didn't they
had their hands off the wheel and for whatever uh but this this accident uh The Washington Post
writes um they feel like this is the first one of this full self-driving uh fatality so what
happened was was that there were two people that were on their way to play golf uh in 2022 when
uh the the guy Tesla suddenly swerved off of the road the cars driver assistance software full
self-driving was struggling to navigate um some Mountain curves forcing this guy to repeatedly
yank it back on course and then so on the way home the Tesla Model 3 barreled into a tree and
exploded in Flames killing the uh his name was uh Hans Von Ohan oan a Tesla employee and a devoted
fan of CEO Elon Musk um the other guy in the car his name was uh Eric Roser he survived the crash
but to and told emergency responders that Von oan was using an autod Drive feature on the Tesla that
just ran straight off the road uh and basically this this story goes through and and explains
the whole
situation um it's not a good sign for for Tesla in this case whether they you know
ad there there's other parts of the story where they kind of took like his widow they you know
they interview his widow and um there's a lot of other features of this story apparently the two of
the the two guys had been drinking as well and so there that that comes up into the conversation as
well but um does not look good again we've talked on the show a couple times about uh problems that
autonomous vehic
les are having so um yeah like what what you know should should Tesla just back
off of this feature or admit that this still might be having problems Paul uh maybe because yeah this
was just an awful Story I mean this guy you could sort of picture it you know he was very proud
to work for Tesla proud of his company trusted the technology you know to a fault apparently
um so you know I've I've tried it a friend of mine has has a Tesla and um Keith you know we we
live in Massachusetts so we'r
e we're on Cape Cod for July 4th weekend right very busy weekend and
we're coming up to the Bourn rotary which is you know rotary in Massachusetts uh you sort of have
to live here to you know it's a competition when you get Massachusetts yeah there's a lot a lot
of people that understand what to do yeah when you he was using the I think the driver assist
or whatever they call not not the fullon the car but even then you know as soon as we get to the
rotary he's like yeah forget it you know
this thing can't handle this this rotary and and he
was right because there was no way so you know I certainly wouldn't trust the fullon you know
self-driving uh bid at this point um but you know that's not to say you should give up on the
technology you know on the other hand like you said these guys have been drinking so maybe the
car was was better off than than than they were you know in some instances you could see how a
self-driving car would be better than a drunk driver right right
that's the whole that was
that's one of the points that a lot of these technology people are are are saying is like you
won't have drunk drivers because you know the the car will take over or the car the car will
do all the driving for you but it still feels like there's too many other obstacles out there
including other drivers and you know humans on the road doing dumb things as well that um but it
it's weird that something like that would just be like okay a glitch off the road um a lot
of this
technology relies on Lane markers and um again you and I live in in New England when it snows there's
no good way for a car to determine where the road is I mean even a human driver sometimes has to
figure out what Lane you're in if if it's if you're out there and it's snowing and the snow's
covered um some of these Lane markers um I I I visited a couple of companies that are trying to
do like groundbased radar to figure out where the the road is versus um the surface so there are
there are some interesting Technologies out there but they have not yet been fully uh commercially
developed and applied um yeah and the reason I wanted to bring this story up is because there was
another story about Tesla and this is the cyber truck where owners are reporting that um this the
stainless steel frame on the uh their vehicles are developing and and they use this in quotes either
corrosion or rust they're starting to find some orange spots uh and apparently um there's a guy
nam
ed will who posted on the Cyber Tru Owners Club that he began documenting the corrosion on his
new Cyber Tru he noticed his vehicle had developed rust marks just after 11 days of ownership he
said he had 381 Mi on it when he first developed the odd when he first discovered the odd specs
and basically he said uh throughout the LA rain I noticed that the corrosion was forming on the
metal like other people have noted so I decided to start documenting it and bringing it to Tesla's
attention I
figured it was already on their radar but he wanted it he wanted it attended to under
the warranty and so that this became a big deal where you know is this really stainless steel
is this rust Chris have you been following this at all yeah actually heard about this I think
a week ago um from what I can tell or or from what they say online um it uses uh 300 series
stainless steel and the reason why they chose that is because it's corrosion resistant um but
not corrosion proof I guess would t
hat be the the the right the leg e that the that Tesla would use
I I think what people might be noticing and again I'm not I don't know anything about Metal right
I'm not like a you know an engineer or anything like that but it could just be surface rust
okay Stu you know it's rust that just forms on the surface um there might be like you know
it also depends I think on how the stainless steel is coated if it's coated with anything um if
there's any contaminants underneath the coating it co
uld just be at oxidizing I I don't know um but
that would be really sucky if if the Cyber trucks just started to just rust after being out in the
rain that would be well yeah I mean you know with with regular cars and again I'm going to bring up
the fact that we're from New England there's you know the under the under part of the car with all
of the salt that gets put on the road to to melt ice on on roads you know there's always a concern
that you're the bottom of your car the longer you h
ave it you're going to have start having rust
and corrosion right um you know I've got a a car that's now 14 years old and they've got it's got
rough spots on different parts of the car where like i' it's been dented and then you start to
see corrosion on the on the dent like once you get into that part um yeah do you think that
stories like this are just being done just to try to like to make Elon Musk look bad and no no
I don't think so a coordinated attempt by media people no I don't thi
nk so I think that's a Val
I think it's a no honestly it's a Val that sounds really like sarcasm from you Chris no I'm serious
no you're driving a from what looks to be a plain steel car right yeah and you're noticing rust on
it that would be a big concern yeah scroll up a little bit more because you're you're getting
an ad there oh yeah can I CH in here I had read something where some engineer said it wasn't rust
at all it it could be easily cleaned off one of those hot scrubbing brushes b
ut you know still I
don't know to me I think if I paid $80,000 and I started seeing something like this I'd be a little
concerned right and that's probably where the the owners are are be like you know am I seeing this
are other people seeing this and that's where he goes on the Forum and but to for this for this to
be then blown up to a bigger bigger story I start to think that maybe there's people that just want
to go after Elon Musk because they don't like him maybe but you know it's als
o this is what you
get for buying a truck it's that ugly well I mean how you know does anyone remember were they
basically saying this was rust proof or or were they just be like there's an assumption that if
it's made of stainless steel it will never rust or or you know yeah yeah that was the Assumption
and it's not even painted which kind of astounds me I don't know well yeah that's the other thing
because typically cars today it's primed and then it's cated with paint yeah for the very r
eason of
protecting yeah protecting the metal from being rusted but yeah I don't know I mean you know
to what you were saying you know it's probably nothing it's probably just surface related and
that's it okay you know maybe it's I don't know hey it's a new design it's a new concept of a
car we'll find out in a couple years I wonder if any of these owners have gone to the car wash
yet like those automated car washes and and paid the extra $3 for the the rust proofing under the
car um yeah
the car washers are GNA have to have scotch scrubbing brushes apparently well do you
think that that like a one of those cyber trucks would even fit in one of those automated it might
actually break the automated machines like if it's on like one of those trolley kind of you know
rails yeah because it weighs a lot right I figure those guys are probably just then handwashing
all this stuff right yeah maybe I'll join that forum and see how people are washing these cars
if they're washing it
at all uh all right hey speaking of speaking a great segue speaking of
of water and and washing stuff and Technology uh apparently there was a story this week uh from
maor our friends at macor uh I I'm going to give them the original credit but uh apparently if your
iPhone gets wet now putting it in a bag of rice is a bad move according to Apple um ever since cell
phones were a thing we've been dropping them in water and while today's iPhones are resistant to
splashes dips and dunks there a
re still times when they get too wet and the dreaded liquid detection
alert appears on the screen I didn't even know they had that I guess newer newer models might
have this detection alert um but then you know at that point everyone it's it's almost like an urban
legend or now it's apparently an urban myth where you take a bag of rice and you stick it in there
and apparently the rice absorbs all of the wetness and you can be saved from the frying the internal
parts of the iPhone I think I'
ve tried it with two different devices one time it worked and one
time it didn't um but now apparent Apple says that this is not a great idea uh because uh you know
a new 2024 support document says actually advises against using rice to dry out the iPhone because
it could make matters worse because you could be allowing small particles of rice to damage the
iPhone um what's interesting is that this story went viral like to every other Tech media site
maybe it's just because it's so easy to
write about but I I felt like it was like wow you you
know we're we're telling or or they've detected that Apple has now switched its stance or or maybe
finally made a a statement about this whole bag of rice thing it's bad news for the rice industry I
guess I guess well it's probably not more people are probably eating rice than putting you know
their wet iPhones in there five or 10 years too late I mean I thought this issue was kind of
put to bed because the the phones can handle water be
tter than they used to you know right so
I don't get why this is coming up now but have you ever have you ever done the bag of rice thing
Paul with with any of devices no I I've never drop my phone in water I drop it on the floor in the
driveway all the time that to me is a bigger issue but yeah Chris any well you don't have an iPhone
but you have you have other phones yeah I have a pixel I mean I just don't drop my phone period
it's usually how I roll you you've never stumbled in and and t
ripped and had it fall anywhere well
actually firm grip firm grip I I think I did it a couple times only because the kids have done
it I now I've spilled soda on my Mac keyboard um and that freaked me out and that and that I did
that and was able to get everything except for the monitor graphic card to start working again um but
I can then hook it to an external Monitor and the the computer would still work this was a personal
one not not this not this official one um yeah I felt like that
as they were making improvements to
water resistance that you wouldn't have to do this bag of rice trick out there but apparently there's
enough phones out there where this still happens but um maybe Apple could you know allow people
to uh repair their phones and open them up rather than this whole bag of rice trick anyway no they
don't want you to do that I know you're not going to repair your own phone that's a radical idea ke
I know I know all right uh one uh another story that came out
this week was that um Walmart uh has
basically they are agreed to acquire Vio uh in a $2.3 billion deal and they uh basically are saying
the acquisition is official and a move to boost its ad business uh what's interesting about this
is that this is a quote the acquisition of Vio and its smartcast operating system would enable
Walmart to connect with and service customers in new ways including innovative television and
inhome entertainment media experiences uh it would create new opportunit
ies to help advertisers
connect with consumers empowering brands with differentiated and compelling opportunities to
engage at scale and to realize greater impact from their advertising spend with Walmart Vio has more
than 500 direct Advertiser Partnerships thanks to its Vio platform plus business which the company
says now accounts for a majority of the company's gross profit their smart tvos smartcast is also
used by more than 18 million active accounts what's interesting to me on this fr
ont there's
two there's two parts I when I went and read the comments on the story most people felt that Vio as
a brand had been kind of downgraded over the years uh other budget TV brands like high sense and TCL
I believe is the other one uh you know have grown in in importance versus Vio so and then when with
with Walmart acquiring them they they were like well that means you know they're just viio is
going to be just like this budget budget brand um but I started thinking about like this
whole
story means that it's more about what's inside the TV than maybe the features of the TV itself and
I felt that was weird because I always felt like especially when you talk to TV guys the people
that are really into TVs um it was always about the hardware the technology the you know however
many pixels were in the screen and you know OLED and I don't even know what kind of phone again
I know nothing about the hardware parts of the TV um I also know that I have to buy TVs more
often
than I used to um that's something that you know the quality keeps getting downgraded
in the hardware part um but now it's all about the software and and that was surprising to me
um like what does this mean is it TV basically now just a platform for software interactivity
and advertising which you know kind of irritates me Paul are you seeing this too or is am I just
coming out of this from like outer space uh I don't think you're coming from outter space but I
guess I've insulated myself
from this whole issue because I use Apple TV so I just connect the TV to
the Apple TV and that is an effect the operating system if you want to call it that I mean that's
my interface to everything else oh you're one of those Apple TV guys okay all right yeah I mean it
goes back years before could do all this stuff and I just never in fact I just bought a new Roku TV
before the Super Bowl we're having people over so I used to upgrade my TV and it worked yeah well
so yeah I mean Roku Roku st
arted its existence as a as a little box that you would plug into
uh a TV and and and again I love the company because they've got the world's greatest remote
for navigating the system and their software is really good and um someone figured out was like
why are we building this little external device when we could just put it inside a regular TV and
again that's why you know you see that I think we have a sharp Roku TV as well um sharp makes the
hardware then Roku does the software you s t
his story I got to thinking I'm really just using the
TV as a monitor because I I have it connected to some Sono speakers which are great like I said I
got it connected to the Apple TV so I turn it on I you know I switch it to the Apple TV and that's
it or the cable I'm just I'm just worried about and again maybe I'm not noticing this either
but I I guess when I when I turn on my TV there are through the inter interace and the you know
when you're deciding what you want to watch and again I
don't have cable so I'm going through the
the operating system on the TV and it's whatever channels you know Netflix Hulu uh you know peacock
whatever the streaming services that I'm using and I just navigate that way but there are ads that
pop up and I don't realize that there are ads or there ads for other shows on other channels
so it hasn't hit my brain but but this this announcement means that again users are just
going to be inundated with ads before they can even decide what they're
going to be watching
or playing and that's a little disturbing to me as well yeah I mean I'm sure if Walmart has
anything to say about it that's exactly what's going to happen yeah you're going to see a lot of
like hey click here to get another deal or sign up for Walmart Plus or whatever and um you know
is that going to I'm wondering if that's going to drive down the cost of the TV as well I I I think
it's going to drive uh more people away from using the actual smart aspect of the TV um
I I think
a lot of households these days you're going to have a console connected to your TV whether it's
a Playstation Xbox or whatever and yeah like I we have our PlayStation connected and I never use
the smart aspect of our TV because the console's just so much more faster you know okay so that's
interesting yeah CU I don't do that on my like I I only use my PlayStation to basically play games
and I know they've got all the different apps on there but I just never made that leap because
I
had that maybe it's cuz I had the ren and I I just I just love that interface so much that yeah Roku
Roku is you know using a Roku is convenient um or if you have that what is it like Amazon fire
thing oh oh that Amazon Fire TVs are awful I I despise those but like at the end of the day the
other thing the other thing too you know the other benefit you have with you know using a console is
you get the Blu-ray player that's built in so you watch Blu-ray movies if those exist anymore gez
b
ut I uh I I think if you're going to buy a TV today you're going to look at the panel the
software how the software maximizes the the quality of the panel and stuff like that you know
whether it's OLED qled I mean there's so much yeah I can't think of some of the new TV tech out there
but they're really really pushing the quality of those panels yeah and also the size price has gone
down and and size of screens because manufactur the manufacturing process has gone easier yep
so I think my m
y brother he he just bought a uh I think it's a 80in OLED TV a couple weeks ago
wow and man was I jealous that was a that's a TV for for probably I I think he I don't know it
was around like, 1500 something like that okay that's cheap yeah I mean think about it an 80 in
so for, 1500 so Paul when you bought this TV for the Super Bowl what were the factors of what made
you choose the the TV that you ended up getting like did you have a list in your mind of of what
you wanted mainly size I mea
n where it's go it goes over a fireplace and it's kind of there's a
there's a wood you know sort of encasement to it so I can only go so big right so I wanted to get
a little bigger than I had and the one I had was pretty old so it had still the the things on the
side you know took up space and now that's that's kind of gone away so for the in the same size I
was able to get like a 5 inch bigger screen it's like a 50 inch now okay fact I was a little pissed
because I could have gone bigger
but so size was the factor and then then after that was it was
it price or brand or like because yeah it was and picture quality really um and you know and I just
looked through the the Roku was cheap I think it was like 250 260 something like thatuh did you did
you go into the store did you go into the store to buy it or did you buy it online I bought it
online and just picked it up who wow did a bunch of reviews and I mean it's fine it's definitely a
better picture than the one I had yeah
little bit bigger so yeah because so you know in the early
days of of when TV started getting bigger and bigger I bought this was before we had kids and
when we actually had money uh we bought a like a Toshiba rear projection and this thing was like
massive um and it took up about 30% of the room and when we finally got sick of that one or when
Technologies got better and they started getting thinner and thinner and thinner then we we went
to a smaller version and we rearranged the room a
little bit but now we're stuck in this like 40
to 50 in rectangle diagonal thing and we can never go to that like what Chris was saying with this
80 inch thing I'm I'm a little jealous too only because I don't have the room for it um I don't
have a dedicated home theater area like some of my friends have and I'm jealous of them as well but
yeah I guess it's I guess there's still I guess maybe now size is the biggest is the biggest
Factor over price and form and unless you're into you're rea
lly into that that that technology
resolution um didn't they say like at this point you're the human eye can't perceive all of these
new KS that keep coming out right yeah it's it's it's it's marketing like look like after after
4K like 4K is really all you need but it's like if everybody has a 4K TV if you're LG Samsung Sony
Vizio whatever TCL and all the other companies how are you going to sell more TVs right well need to
create something new right and so change the 4K to an 8K yeah it's
twice the amount but you're really
not going to know you're not going to notice and then there was the whole 3D thing that was that
was popular for a couple of years or marketed for a couple of years you don't see that anymore
of the people that are trying to push 3D I think the biggest thing this year at CES were these
transparent screens now so now you've got a piece of glass and then you're watching TV but then when
the TV's off it becomes that's glass that's really cool the transparent
see what was it son LG Sony
or Samsung I think it was LG yeah one of those guys I mean that that's that's really cool could
you see that in your house at some point though uh when it becomes affordable to us peasants out
there yeah the first thing I think of was all the thumb prints that are going to go on that thing
no no I hope my wife doesn't find out about that okay well don't show her don't show her the end of
the show uh one more you know there was one more TV related thing I wanted
to get to um YouTube is
now dominating TV streaming in the US according to neelen uh they released their January report
on viewing usage across linear TV and streaming uh basically revealed that YouTube is once again
the overall top streaming service in the US with 8.6% of viewing on television screens Netflix
is at 7.9% and the new data points to YouTube's dominance in the TV streaming Arena and marks 12
consecutive months of the platform being in the top spot um wow this is news huh well
there was
something that I think what was interesting to me in this was they also then announced that viewers
watch a daily average of over 1 billion hours of YouTube content on their televisions oh yeah which
could indicate that there's a preference for user generated videos Among Us consumers rather than
traditional TV shows 61% of Generation Z reported that they favor user generated content over other
content formats um I have noticed anecdotally that I I will watch a lot of YouTube on m
y TV I'll
still do it on the phone and every now and then I'll do it on the computer if if if I have one
in front of me but that little YouTube app on my Roku TV that gets a lot of usage and and and
I watch um my favorite show which is um the tech talk channel of course but other app you know I
do watch other other programs and other shows but um I just way the like the way that they look on
the TV versus on a smaller screen on my phone or or uh but my kids are still on their phones so
the
y they haven't made that move yet so um I I I thought it was interesting that um they had that
Generation Z uh demographic number yeah I mean it's got the same experience as UK like you know
I got two kids yeah 19 and 21 and they they watch YouTube you know almost endlessly on their phones
or maybe the laptop but I've never seen them put it on the TV yeah do they do they do they take
their the something that they're watching they try to like streamcast it or they try to cast it
from the pho
ne over to the to the TV cuz I know a lot of those newer phones have that ability I mean
they could but they don't they're happy with the phone or whatever they don't care the only time it
happens with us is when someone inadvertently does it and they make a mistake and then I'm watching
TV and of a sudden someone else some other video will pop up and I'm like who the hell is watching
YouTube on on their phone and I have to kind of like tell them to stop so that it or stop doing
that cuz so
metimes uh that feature will take over um but you know those are some stats I I like
throwing in stats every now and then um but Chris you feel like this is not really surprising to
you yeah no it's kind of you know to be expected I just like it because we're on YouTube as well
and so yay YouTube I guess is what I'm saying at the moment uh all right so Paul thanks for joining
us on the show this week this was a a good start and we'll uh and we'll see you next week when uh
we talk more about
some other Tech news so thanks again my pleasure Keith thanks for having me all
right that's all the time we have for today's episode don't forget to like the video subscribe
to the channel add any comments you have below join us every week for new episodes of today and
Tech I'm Keith Shaw thanks for [Music] watching
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