It’s that time again!

The McRib is back! November will be here in a couple of days and I can’t be happier. In just a few days, that tangy, sweet, spicy, saucy, and juicy pork ribwich will be mine. Sabrina is already preparing herself for the first sandwich of the season. McDonalds claims this is the end for the McRib, and I’ll be sad to see it go. Every year, I get all giddy and excited like daddy’s coming home.

If you’re reading this as a First News 570, lobby your local McDonald’s to create the Will & Mark Special. A McRib with fries between the ridges on top of a beef patty.

It’s another Thursday, and I’m back on the air with Mark Starling, John, and the First News 570 crew. This week’s hot and fresh tech news: DOJ charges Chinese nationals in spy case, DOJ charges Tesla in consumer lies case, and investors worry about Zuckerberg’s frivolous spending in the metaverse. You can listen to me and Mark Starling point and laugh at all things tech every Thursday at 643 am ET live on the radio or the iHeartRadio app.

DOJ ROUNDS UP CHINESE NATIONALS IN ESPIONAGE PROBE

On Tuesday, the US Department of Justice announces charges on two Chinese nationals who were trying to recruit a federal investigator to influence a government investigation into a large telecommunications company. The agent they were trying to recruit was actually a double agent working for the FBI. DOJ has also charged 11 other Chinese nationals in two other espionage cases. The telecommunications company is rumored to be Chinese company, Huawei. For its part, China has said the US is trying to smear them.

INVESTORS WORRY AS ZUCKERBERG DOUBLE DOWNS ON METAVERSE

Facebook’s, I mean Meta’s, earnings call was yesterday, and Zuckerberg had to announce the company is hemorrhaging money. Meta is banking hard on the metaverse and it’s metaverse lab division lost a staggering $3.7 billion in the last quarter, making its losses $9 billion this year. Apple’s ad privacy prompting mechanism has estimated losses of $10 billion by itself, and Zuckerberg told investors 2023’s losses will mount even higher as he pursues a dramatic push into virtual realm. He told investors, “people will look back a decade from now and talk about the importance of the work being done here.” A decade is long in Internet time.

Meta isn’t the only company reporting huge losses. After a dramatic profit run during the COVID-19 lockdown, technology companies are reporting weak earnings with Microsoft reporting losses of 6% and Google reporting a whopping 27% drop in still profits the previous quarter.

TESLA UNDER FEDERAL INVESTIGATION FOR AUTOPILOT FEATURES

Whew boy! Reuters has reported that Tesla is under federal investigation for misleading customers about it’s “fully self-driving” feature called Autopilot. Tesla, and Elon Musk, have been touting Autopilot as the safest self-driving capability while regulators have said otherwise. DOJ prosecutors in Washington and San Francisco are examining if Tesla made unfounded claims about the technology. This news is coming on the heels of the automaker removing sensors from its vehicles and Elon Musk’s ongoing court case.

The next episode of The Cloud, Autonmous Vehicles in an Autonomous Future drops this Friday. Please subscribe to The Cloud podcast and share it with your friends.

It’s another Thursday, and I’m back on the air with Mark Starling, John, and the First News 570 crew. This week’s hot and fresh tech news: UK anti-trust regulator forces Facebook to sell Giphy, Uber announces in car ad delivery, and hearing aids available over-the-counter. You can listen to me and Mark Starling point and laugh at all things tech every Thursday at 643 am ET live on the radio or the iHeartRadio app.

UK COMPETITION WATCHDOG FORCES META TO SELL GIPHY

A couple things. One, I’m still not used to calling Facebook, Meta. I can’t put my finger on why, but I don’t like it. Two, how is it that sites like Giphy make money? Anyway, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority, has ruled against Facebook’s, I mean; Meta’s, appeal and has forced them to sell the animated gif search engine. Giphy is used by social networking app users to find animated gifs to express themselves in messages. Facebook bought the company in 2020. Facebook was also fined 50.5 million pounds for not cooperating with the UK regulator. Now, it looks like they’re forced to sell. Meta/Facebook says they are disappointed with the ruling, but will comply.

UBER TO INTERRUPT CONVERSATIONS WITH DRIVERS WITH JOURNEY ADS

Yesterday, Uber introduced Journey Ads, its version of TaxiTV. Yeah, instead of falling asleep in your Uber (I’ve done that), or having a rich conversation with your driver, Uber wants to annoy you with ads featured from one of 40 brands its partnered with. Uber will be installing tablets in selected Uber driver’s vehicles and pushing ad content to riders. Journey Ads will feature promotions from NBC, United Artists and others. The company is searching for a new revenue stream as it posted a $382 million positive cash flow in the previous quarter.

OVER-THE-COUNTER HEARING AIDS AVAILABLE FOR THE FIRST TIME

Like insulin, hearing aid technology is old, stable, and repeatable. And very expensive. Until now. Hearing aids are now available, over-the-counter, for the first time. Hearing aids that once cost a thousand dollars or more for prescription can be bought for $199 at Wal-Mart. It’s taken years to get here. The advent of BlueTooth headsets and 2017 legislation making hearing aids for moderate hearing loss widely available have significantly helped consumers. Walgreens is selling hearing aids for $799 when they used to call $3,000 and $4,000. For the MTV and booming system generation this is a watershed event.

Thanks for reading.

If you have an interest in technology and want to dive deeper than the hype, check out my new podcast, The Cloud. It’s digital technology. Decoded. Explore artificial intelligence, autonomous vehicles, and smart cities. Monthly. The Cloud is available on all major podcasting platforms.

I was flummoxed this week. My wife sent me an Amazon link touting an AI-powered toothbrush. The toothbrush uses brushing data flossed from other brushers on the Internet to adjust the brush profile used to clean your teeth. I swear.

It’s another Thursday, and I’m back on the air with Mark Starling, John, and the First News 570 crew. This week’s hot and fresh tech news: Amazon offers free AWS Cloud skills training, voice synthesizing company conducts fake Steve Jobs interview, and Microsoft and Facebook bore you in the metaverse. You can listen to me and Mark Starling point and laugh at all things tech every Thursday at 643 am ET live on the radio or the iHeartRadio app.

PSA: AMAZON OFFERING FREE CLOUD SKILLS TRAINING

It’s no secret I’m a fan of Amazon Web Services, Amazon’s cloud computing infrastructure. This week, AWS announced free AWS Skills training at training centers at Headquarters in Seattle, Washington and HQ2 in DC. What’s notable here is that this training is free and in-person, Amazon is announcing more skills training centers will open in other locations in the country in 2023. It’ll still cost money to take their certification exams, but you can gain the knowledge to ace those exams free of charge. Yes, AWS is offering these courses virtually. This is an inexpensive way to get in the growing field of cloud computing and get certified.

MICROSOFT AND META BRING BORING OFFICE MEETINGS TO METAVERSE

We surely love the dystopian. Just when you think you’ve settled down for the weekend, and donned your VR headset to journey to the metaverse, you get interrupted by an avatar from the office asking you about your TPS reports. You decide to take the call, and the next thing you know, you’re whisked from an iHeartRadio Roblox party back to a boring ass virtual conference room.

Microsoft and Facebook-Meta have partnered with each other to bring office telecons to the godforsaken metaverse. Microsoft will be bringing Teams, Office, and Xbox Gaming Services to Meta’s Quest VR headsets. On the software end, Meta will allow people working in their Wookrooms product to join Microsoft Teams meetings and vice verse in-VR with their preferred avatars. Just don’t show up wearing your Bangalore avatar armor. Don’t fall asleep.

FAKE INTERVIEW BETWEEN STEVE JOBS AND JOE ROGAN LATEST AI STUNT

I know it sounds like I’m hating on the AI game, but I’m not. I’m hating on the players. AI technology abuse is just running rampant. A Dubai-based voice synthesizing company, Play.ht, is running a PR stunt called Podcast.ai to advertise its voice synthesizing services. The stunt features an interview with Steve Jobs, who is dead, and Joe Rogan. Steve Jobs’ voice was synthesized using machine learning models, and his interview responses were AI-generated using GPT-3 an AI text generation algorithm. Steve Jobs’ voice experienced digital chop in areas, but it was pulled off. It just pains me that so much time is wasted on these toys, and right now people are wondering how to synthesize elected officials’ voices for nefarious means. Imagine a synthesized Joe Biden, or Hell Donald Trump, calling up someone at DoD.

Thanks for reading, have a great weekend.

Stay safe out there.

Hey there, fans of The Cloud. Our next episode covers the possibilities enabled by autonomous vehicles. We’re joined by Eric Werner, one of our friends from US Ignite. The next episode will drop in about a week. You can check out our latest episode, STEM Isn’t the Answer, now on your local podcast platforms.

It’s a sad time in the blerd community.

A long time supporter, colleague, and friend, Hass Parrish, passed away yesterday. Hass is one of the co-founders of Blerdcon. The first and greatest Black Nerd Convention. Hass was a big supporter and booster of our projects. He and Hilton are a treasure to the blerd community and Hass was propping up in times when I was hurting professionally and personally. He will be missed.

It’s another Thursday, and I’m back on the air with Mark Starling, John, and the First News 570 crew. This week’s hot and fresh tech news: Ex-Google exec starts a rival search engine, Musk says he’s going to be Twitter…again, and Google announces a new video generating AI. You can listen to me and Mark Starling point and laugh at all things tech every Thursday at 643 am ET live on the radio or the iHeartRadio app.

ELON MUSK SAYS HE’LL BUY TWITTER AFTER ALL

In the culmination of an abusive relationship, Elon Musk has stated he will buy Twitter after all. This news is coming after he said he would, then said he wouldn’t, got dragged into court, and finally said he would. The Delaware court case has brought several interesting things to light. One of them being how so many tech luminaries have fawned over Musk and kissed his a$$ over text messages. The other being that these so called masters of the universe, really aren’t that sophisticated. Larry Ellison, the former CEO of Oracle, Marc Andreesen, inventor of Netscape and managing partner of Andreesen Horowitz, and others just said, I’ll give you hundreds of millions or a billion to Musk without even asking for due diligence. More due diligence is performed on the average person filling out a credit card application. These people live in another land.

There are a lot of questions accompanying this deal.

Who’s going to run Twitter?

Will Tesla’s value be impacted by his wild purchase? (Yes)

Does he have the money? (Maybe)

Will he have to sell more stock to raise it? (Yes)

Did Musk really delete Signal messages? (Probably)

EX-GOOGLE AD MAN LAUNCHES COOKIE FREE SEARCH ENGINE

Google’s former ad executive, Sridhar Ramaswamy, has launched his own search company after working for El Goog for 16 years. He launched Neeva because he believed Google and other technology companies have exploited consumer’s information to no end. His company was launched last year and has raised $77.5 million dollars as it launches in the UK, Ireland, and Germany. Neeva claims to not use any trackers on its consumers. It’s currently a free search service, but is offering a paid for subscription service for tracking free searching.

GOOGLE’S LATEST AI GENERATES HIGH DEF VIDEO FROM PROMPTS

The AI wars continue to heat up. We’ve waved philosophical about GPT-3’s ability to write passable text, Wall-E and Midjourney being able to generate images from prompts, and the onslaught of music generators. Yesterday, El Goog, of Alpha Go and Sentient/non-Sentient chatbots, announced Imagen Video. An AI service that can generate high definition video. Google announced Imagen in a research paper hailing how the AI can take stylistic cues from famous painters like Van Gogh and generate moving 3D objects while maintaining their structure. Google says the system works by taking in text prompts and generating ultra low resolution videos at 3 frames per second then upscaling it to high res. The training data, like most biased AI/ML tools, comes from the LAION-400M image data set. Imagen Video hasn’t been released to the public yet, and Google says it’ll be a while before it does. I know what the first thing some fool is going to generate…porn.

Thanks for reading and listening another week. Last month’s episode of The Cloud is clocking in as one of our more popular episodes. We’ll be speaking with an autonomous vehicles expert for this month’s edition. Listen out for it soon!

I’m in LIVE and in-person with Mark today!

Click, swipe, and tap on the interwebs and listen to me, Mark Starling, John, and the First News 570 crew. This week’s hot and fresh tech news: Google nerds predict AI will end humanity, Adobe announces mega deal, and Getty bans AI images. You can listen to me and Mark Starling point and laugh at all things tech every Thursday at 643 am ET live on the radio or the iHeartRadio app.

GOOGLE NERDS SAY AI WILL END HUMANITY

This is why I work with a non-profit working to bring more equitable AI outcomes. Last week, researchers from the University of Oxford and Google DeepMind’s researcher Marcus Hutter, published a controversial paper saying that a Super Intelligent AI is likely, and…the AI will eliminate humanity. The paper was published and has been peer reviewed by AI Magazine. Since the paper and story broke last week, Google DeepMind has walked back their involvement and disavowed the paper. Google has come out against the work on the paper and is stating that they make products that are within ethical guidelines. We are adopting AI and machine learning technologies at a continuously increasing rate. We should really be careful about how and where we adopt these technologies.

Me, seeing this headline after writing a reasonable paper @Google then losing my job alongside my Black female co-lead @timnitGebru: I bet the still-employed Google author referenced here is neither a woman, nor Black.
This is what disparate treatment looks like.
Prove me wrong? pic.twitter.com/b0C6q0caNs

— MMitchell (@mmitchell_ai) September 14, 2022

ADOBE TO ACQUIRE COLLAB TOOL FIGMA IN MEGA DEAL

In weekly mega deals this week, Adobe has announced plans to acquire the online collaboration and design tool, Figma, for $20 billion. Adobe announced the purchase last week as a cash and stock deal. Figma was founded 10 years ago by the creative designers, Dylan Field and Evan Wallace. Figma was competing against Adobe products since the beginning and Adobe decided to buy the company. What’s interesting about this deal is that it’s straining Microsoft’s relationship with Adobe. Microsoft developers use Figma to design the Office suite. Microsoft has moved many Office functions to the web and Adobe is trying to muscle in on that market. We’ll see what happens next.

GETTY IMAGES BANS AI GENERATED IMAGES

Rounding the AI conversation, AI generated art and images is finding its way in more and more places. Yesterday, Getty Images says it’s banning AI generated art and images from being sold on its platform. They’re enforcing the ban because copyright issues and licensing haven’t been worked out on the platform. Ordinary peoples can create interesting and even spectacular images using Stable Diffusion, DALL-E, Midjourney. Even yours truly has generated some really interesting images. Of course human artists are upset that computers are moving in on their territory. We have to figure out a balance between using AI to improve our lives and furthering the human experience, rather than cutting us out.