Howdy👋🏾, last week, as folks transitioned from feasting to geeking out, over 50,000 attendees converged at AWS Re: Invent in Las Vegas – Amazon’s mammoth dev conference. The conference was packed to the gills with five keynotes and gazillions of product releases. Still, one thing became abundantly clear: Amazon is doubling down on its generative AI bet, and they’ve honed in on what makes them unique.

Roughly 40 minutes into the keynote, Adam Selipsky, AWS’s CEO, steered the conversation toward AI. In light of the recent OpenAI developments, he stated with certainty, “There’s not going to be one model to rule them all,” pointing out that various models excel in different scenarios, especially after “the events of the past ten days have made this very clear.”

Just two weeks ago, I touched on OpenAI’s issues, including the ousting of CEO Sam Altman and the hiring of two interim CEOs, all followed by his rehiring, which sent ripples through the tech world. This drama, while popcorn-worthy, brought pause to many professionals facing the sudden possibility of a future devoid of OpenAI’s tools like ChatGPT and DALL-E. This event forced a crucial reflection on the risks of over-reliance on a single AI provider. Amazon capitalized on this moment at Re: Invent by showcasing its diverse suite of foundational AI models, aiming to give users the versatility they need and signaling a strategic move beyond single-vendor solutions.

Amazon’s narrative is straightforward: a diverse ecosystem where developers can avoid lock-in by using several foundational models with unique strengths to achieve their specific AI goals. This approach acknowledges that flagship models like ChatGPT possess remarkable capabilities, but cost and complexity might outweigh their benefits for more straightforward applications such as basic queries.

Amazon is pushing to make this simpler by expanding its own model, Titan, to use embeddings that reduce the complexity of multi-model searches and queries with one interface that sits on all of these foundational models, choosing the best and bubbling up results – something I expect to see more and more of.

Amazon also highlighted its partnership with Athropic, whose CEO and founders parted ways with OpenAI over security issues and have raised billions from both Google and Amazon. This is a testament to AWS’s intent to foster a secure, robust AI environment for developers. In a week that saw the AI world reeling, Amazon delivered a vision for a future where businesses can leverage a versatile array of AI resources, ensuring they’re well-equipped for any task at hand.

Amazon didn’t stop there. They also managed to release a ridiculous number of product and service upgrades, but these are my highlights:

Amazon Q: The Omniscient Office Oracle

Amazon Q could very well be a nod to the omnipotent being from ‘Star Trek,’ designed to be a powerhouse in handling company data. This robust system is slated to integrate with an assortment of tools such as databases, source code repositories, CRM platforms, as well as Zoom, Google Docs, and Microsoft 365, morphing into a continually learning, company-specific LLM ready to answer any query thrown its way.

A stand-out feature is that Amazon Q is crafted with a core named guardrails that understands security and roles. The data funneling into Q respects boundaries and adheres to role-based or IAM policy-driven rules, preventing the AI from disclosing information meant for a select few. These rules limit access to proprietary data, limit the focus of some chats, prevent access to privileged data, and prevent hate speech or inappropriate language regardless of the prompt—something many security and IT executives feel is essential to a broader rollout.

Code Whisperer and Code Transformation: Reviving the Digital Past

Inheriting an existing codebase is a familiar challenge for developers; wrestling with tangled spaghetti code or dated structures can sap the efficiencies promised by AI. AWS’s Code Whisperer aims to address this, promising to decipher your repositories and serve as an on-call expert for your unique coding landscape while ensuring your proprietary data stays yours.

But what blew my mind is Code Transformation—an AWS tool that reads older code and rewrites it for modern platforms. For those undervaluing this, consider the immense costs that could be saved when updating old, unsecured legacy systems previously deemed too expensive to touch. AWS claims Code Transform upgraded 1,000 Java apps in just two days. If this feat’s replicable across tons of legacy systems, we’re looking at an overhaul that could catapult countless enterprises into a nimbler, more secure future, financially within reach. This single feature could upturn billions in IT budgets that could suddenly shift to product and innovation.

Call Centers: Amazon Connects with AI Precision

Amazon is taking AI integration in customer care to new heights—far beyond the now commonplace summarization, real-time translation, and sentiment analysis. Enter Amazon Q bot, an advanced real-time interface that can listen in on calls or chats and arm representatives with immediate, accurate responses to customer queries. Amazon Connect does this by leveraging natural language processing to not just comprehend but also intelligently draw from those same vast data sources that power Amazon Q to provide informed responses right when they’re needed.

QuickSight: Amplified BI with a Touch of Q

Amazon isn’t merely content with revolutionizing chatbots and codebases; they’re supercharging business intelligence with QuickSight, an AI-infused powerhouse capable of delivering insights at warp speed. Building on the foundation set by Amazon Q, QuickSight transforms the business intelligence landscape with dynamic, context-aware charts, diagrams, or dashboards generated from text.

Picture a BI tool so responsive and interwoven with the latest AI advancements that it becomes an extension of your strategic thought process—seeking a breakdown of sales trends or market forecasts. It queries your accounting system and sales tool and is there with a snap.

Model Mastery: The Core of AWS’s AI Strategy

A commitment to model flexibility is at the foundation of every significant advancement that Amazon Web Services (AWS) brings to the table. In his speech, Swami Sivasubramanian, VP of AWS, crystallized this sentiment, affirming that the true power lies in the models. AWS is extending an open invitation to developers, offering the freedom to engage at any level of the tech stack.

Whether you’re a hands-on developer eager to craft unique models from bare silicon or a strategist looking to harness the capabilities of existing foundation models, AWS caters to every approach. They even go a step further by providing a suite of applications that build upon these models, each potentially unlocking new realms of possibility. It’s a tech playground where you’re encouraged to ‘Choose Your Own Adventure,’ orchestrated by Amazon’s robust AI framework.

With such a buffet of tech innovations at our fingertips, it’s impossible not to be excited about what’s to come. Now, on to my thoughts on Tech & Things:

⚡️GM has had a challenging year with EVs and self-driving cars, but thankfully, they’re progressing in their coast-to-coast build-out of an EV charging network with a group of partners. Let’s hope this puts us on the road to reduced range anxiety.

⚡️The future of gaming is here, with subscription platforms challenging traditional consoles. Dive into how app stores might respond to this shift and Xbox’s potential mobile store plans. Read my thoughts on my blog.

⚡️IBM and Meta lead a powerful new ‘AI Alliance’ with 50+ organizations to champion open-source AI, marking a bold step away from closed systems like those from OpenAI and Google. Explore this collaborative force for open AI innovation.

⚡️Struggling with the idea that your digital purchases might not be yours forever? Click here to talk about the reality of digital ownership and what it means for all our stuff online.

November was CRAZY—and naturally, it’s my birthday month when I’m least prepared for drama. Still, we can’t overlook that OpenAI Dev Days kicked things off, followed by Humane releasing a new product. Then, in a plot twist, OpenAI fired Sam Altman and hired two CEOs before we all hit pause for some Thanksgiving downtime. But the tech show went on with Altman returning to OpenAI (definitely watch this) and Amazon’s biggest event of the year, but keeping on trend, Stability AI has its own leadership saga. And just when you thought I covered it all, nope—I left out the Tesla Cyber Truck announcement with the Cyber Truck’s racing a Porsche 911 and a spate of Elon Musk’s awkward and horrible racist statements, all while Amazon asks him to send satellites into space. There are ongoing questions about a certain whipper, and that’s just in the tech world. Here’s to December—can we hope for a bit of calm?

-jason

p.s. Android users celebrated the possibility of sharing images and videos with iPhone friends via green messages, but the harsh reality remains: gifting an Android seems impossible when not even a criminal will steal an Android. Crime, especially armed robbery, is no joke, yet perhaps we can find a silver lining in even the worst situations.

Howdy 👋🏾, as we kick off a new year, it appears that we’re in for one of the most exciting years in technology we’ve encountered in quite some time. AI rocked our worlds in 2023 and began to come into its own, but it’s still in its early days, and 2024 stands to be a year that brings crystallization to the many seismic shifts impacting everything from passwords to VR.

Stability AI Stable Diffusion XL with the prompt: “A black guy with glasses and big hair dressed as a gypsy looks into an all-powerful magic 8-ball to glimpse 2024 and the technology it may bring.“

To get the year going, I’m going to glimpse inside my crystal ball at trends poised to take the tech world by storm in 2024:

🔮 Passwords Dethroned: Let’s start easy – PassKey and other passwordless methods have finally gotten the momentum they need, and this is the year that more websites will begin to make it standard practice. Let’s do our part to make our web apps and platforms more secure.

🔮 Matter Standard Comes Together: I’m sure it’s no surprise that I love smart home technology and that my home is decked out with everything from smart light switches to curtains. The smart home ecosystem is a mess; it requires many hubs, incompatible standards, and bridges, which the new Matter standard was supposed to solve last year. But that rollout has been bumpy. Companies will finally get their act together this year so Matter can become the standard we need.

🔮 New Digital Assistants Arrive: Two minutes into using ChatGPT, it was obvious that our digital assistants like Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant paled in comparison. The big tech firms had a year to figure it out, and this is the year we should have voice assistants from at least Apple and Google with a very different set of smarts – assistants that can be conversational, handle complex chained tasks, remember state within a conversation, and very possibly persist knowledge.

🔮 Post-Phone Devices Emerge: A digital assistant that can process complex human language and text in your ear changes how we use our devices. This ushers in the next evolution beyond phones to  “post-phone” devices. Humane’s AI pin is one of the first devices pushing to make audio our main interface for most common activities like texting or booking restaurants by voice. Screens save necessary visuals, but audio-first interaction takes center stage.

🔮 Mixed Reality Steps Into the Spotlight: The wait is almost over – Apple’s Vision Pro headset becomes available for order as soon as January. And that’s just the start, with Meta’s Project Cambria and Samsung poised to heat competition in extended reality tech. I have no doubt that a combination of smart glasses, AirPods, and an AI assistant represents the future interface. This year, we will dive deeper into envisioning the futuristic user experience.

🔮 Web3 Submits to Web4: Fresh off Web3’s faceplant in 2023, the internet’s next evolution in user empowerment – dubbed Web4 – shows early momentum. It allows for an open yet people-first web built on data mobility through concepts like decentralization and the fediverse.

🔮 The New Buzzword is “Multi-Model” AI Systems: One foundation model alone has limits. Combining a conversational model like Meta’s LLaMA with cheaper narrow models trained on niche tasks enables more versatility and quality responses. Every ChatGPT deployment shows that general knowledge doesn’t equal specialized domain expertise.

🔮AI Models Keep Getting Better: Major developer conferences will cycle through annual AI unveilings as this space heats up. We will see impressive strides from Google, Apple, Meta, OpenAI, Microsoft, and Amazon advancing assistant realism.

Imagine using Meta AI using the prompt: “A black guy with glasses and big hair dressed as a gypsy looks into an all-powerful magic 8-ball to glimpse 2024 and the technology it may bring.”

This year feels like a convergence point where seismic breakthroughs like robotics, AI foundation models, EVs, increased battery research, mixed reality, and increased cloud computing are now intersecting to unleash immense technological change we can’t yet fathom. Just over the horizon in 2024, we’ll start witnessing revolutionary real-world impacts – with augmented workplace tools, deeper AI assistants tightly integrating with daily life, and fluid human-computer partnership at work and beyond, reaching towards science fiction-esque realism daily. The prospect of personalized AI technologies like Iron Man’s Jarvis assisting our productivity and goals is not just science fiction anymore. Still, it stands on the cusp of practical mainstream product availability. While we imagine 2024, here are today’s thoughts on tech & things:

⚡️Driverless cars are getting off the hook for driving violations in California, bringing into question how do police vehicles with a human behind the wheel get off the hook. What is interesting about a world where the driver and driverless cars share the road is this quote: “It seems like while they make fewer of the kind of mistakes that we see from human drivers, they make interesting new kinds of mistakes,” which poses a question of how the rules of the road should change or adapt for this new type of vehicle.

⚡️Over the past year, companies have released impressive voice cloning AI that replicates human speech with increasing accuracy. For celebrities and public figures sharing vast amounts of public data, this innovation risks enabling convincing bot replicas using their data and voices, as called out in an intriguing Politico piece. Current laws remain unprepared to address threats like identity replication through perfect AI representations produced from public data and freely used without approval or rights safeguards.

⚡️Speaking of replicating humans – before 2023 ended, I wanted to test Meta’s new conversational AI chatbots and see if they could pass my customized Turing test. So I asked Bru, their sports chatbot visually modeled after Tom Brady, for a friendly chat. Read the full chat here.

OpenAI DALL-E with the prompt: “A black guy with glasses and big hair dressed as a palm reader looks into an all-powerful magic 8-ball to glimpse 2024 and the technology it may bring.” if you’re wondering, OpenAI refused to accept the word “gypsy” do to its content policies.

As always, I can’t wait to spot embryonic examples of these trends at upcoming showcases like CES 2023. Follow my CES Adventures here next week.

-jason

P.S. If you ever need to catch a car thief in glittery, gassy glory, this engineer created the ultimate glitter and fart bomb tracking device. Equipped with GPS, cameras, and microphones, his vengeance-ready backpacks record criminal activity. When unzipped, they unleash epic clouds of glitter and noxious fart spray! 💨✨

Howdy👋🏾, my kids and I are packed and hopping on a plane traveling south to Orlando for Christmas. I’m crossing my fingers for warm days under palm trees and late evenings with a beverage of choice in the hot tub. I hope everyone has an amazing holiday and you get a chance to get in some much-needed relaxation before we dive into 2024.

So, I’m doing my version of Spotify wrapped for the first end-of-year edition newsletter and revisiting some of 2023’s newsletters with an update on current events. Share this newsletter if you’ve enjoyed reading it and want to get me something for the holidays. So now, onto some past thoughts on tech and things, along with some AI-generated images from Meta AI:

⚡️ Newsletter #25: At least they let Ceasar know in person

In Issue #25, I delved into the chaos at OpenAI as Sam Altman was fired and rehired after bringing on two new CEOs in just ten days.  What’s crazy is that no one knows what Sam Altman did, even a group of folks on a pretty exclusive billionaires WhatsApp group chat (can someone please invite me and thank you). Things might be over, but the damage was done, including concerns about how much power Microsoft wields over OpenAI, a board that seems unwilling to say what caused the disruption, and Ilya Sutskever – the former Chief Science Officer – is still left in the wind. Amazon responded with a multi-foundation model approach, which I covered in Issue #27, and I showcased the benefits of various models in Issue #28.

⚡️ Newsletter #06 Welcome to the Fediverse

This summer, I wrote a piece on Fediverse in Issue #06 that explored the possibility of a new post-Twitter world – and hey, y’all, maybe it’s happening. I love Threads, and as Twitter, now X, continues a downward spiral, the idea of a federated social media platform feels like the correct answer to moderation and free speech. Facebook has avoided being the villain in 2023 and is starting to roll out features that connect its social platform Threads with the greater Mastodon fediverse. WordPress also made a huge move to make the Fediverse a first-party element of the blogging platform that powers 40% of the Internet. It even took things further by acquiring an open text messaging platform that feels like it could play into this larger open fediverse world.

⚡️ Newsletter #05 Passwords suck

Also, way back in issue #05, I went on a bit of a rant on just how much Passwords Suck. They continue to suck, but more and more companies are taking action and ditching passwords for PassKey. Look at all the folks who have dropped or made passwords optional. The list includes many major companies like Google, Amazon, Apple, Shopify, etc. Let’s keep the momentum going and be done with passwords in 2024.

⚡️Newsletter #03 WWDC 2023

Keyboards are one of the oldest, most antiquated ways we interface with technology, and I can’t help but feel that we’re in the dawn of a post-mobile and post-laptop world. This will not happen overnight, but in Issue #24, I spoke of how post-mobile devices like Humane’s AI pin are starting to imagine a new way we interact with computers. I didn’t cover a pair of Ray Band glasses from Meta that allow you to snap photos and videos or listen to music. They introduced some crazy cool AI features, allowing them to do autodetection and translation.

Apple is placing its bets on the way we interface with the future and, in June, announced the Vision Pro mixed reality headset, which we covered in Issue #03. Rumors say a release happens around March of 2024, and every single review I’ve read of the product makes this thing sound amazing – but at a $ 3,000-a-unit price tag, it better be! The most recent news is that iOS 17.2 turned on the ability for anyone to capture spatial video with an iPhone, which looks amazing on the Vision Pro headset.  I’m a huge believer that this is just the start, and a product with the name “pro” means we’re 1-3 years from something cheaper and closer to Meta’s Ray Band glasses that will truly start the introduction of a new and very different way we interface with computers.

⚡️ Newsletter #07 Are you ready for the EV🔌 Rental Car surprise?

Some of the most loved posts and newsletters have been around my adventure of buying an EV. Two that you all seemed to really enjoy was Issue #07 on the EV surprise, as rental companies like Hertz tripled down on their EV investments. Sadly, the charging infrastructure isn’t there to support them, but I can say Tesla’s Superchargers did me well over the Thanksgiving break in Issue #26, where I took my car on the road and offered some real-world thoughts on range anxiety. I’m prepared to embrace a future where automobiles autonomously navigate like Waymo vehicles did while I was in Phoenix, an exciting self-driving experience I aspire to relive – covered in Issue #19.

Let’s hope next year has tons of new and exciting things to dive into, and please share this newsletter with anyone you think might enjoy it. Next up in 2024 is CES, and I can’t wait to share all the cool and exciting things from EVs, robotics, and AI. Mindgrub CEO Todd Marks and I will be live on the show floors and sharing tons of videos and content on all the exciting things to look out for while in Las Vegas. If you plan to be there, let’s connect.

Why’s the guy with glasses smaller than the dude without? So not fair! Meta has some definite bias here! Anyway – I’m taking next week off for some much-needed relaxation, but the newsletter will be back in 2024. Until then, have a great holiday and a wonderful New Year.

-jason

P.S. A car dealership added an AI chatbot to their website, and pranksters had a field day! The whole thing is a bit crazy, but it’s a reminder that you can’t JUST toss an AI chatbot on a webpage.

Howdy 👋🏾, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, is way too nice. I told him not to worry about my birthday, but he surprised me and released a ton of great new OpenAI features just for me (+ some other developers).

The event, OpenAI Dev Day, is the first developer-focused conference from OpenAI, and the keynote delivered, helping the AI firm further its lead over the competition. You’ll be able to watch the entire keynote on YouTube, which clocks in at under an hour, but read along for my quick thoughts and highlights.

At the center of the AI war is the battle of the foundation models. What is a foundation model, you ask? A foundation model is an AI model based on tons and tons of data, like ChatGPT, allowing a company or individual to skip the immensely expensive costs of training a custom model from scratch. With ChatGPT as a foundation model, you can leverage data it’s already trained on and focus on fine-tuning it. I like to imagine a foundation model as a shiny new college graduate educated with tons of general knowledge, ready to start his or her career at a company. The model knows the general stuff, so we can focus on training it on the data that is unique to our organization.

OpenAI wants to be everyone’s foundation model, and many of the tools it released today make it easier for developers and non-developers to train its models with your proprietary information while sandboxing it from others and keeping safety and security in mind. As OpenAI does this, it creates a moat around its services, making it harder to leave its ecosystem. You can compare it to the stickiness AWS creates within its cloud ecosystem. With that, the announcements and highlights:

🚀Microsoft: As Altman unveiled these new AI products, he brought out Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella to reinforce the strength of their partnership and plan to integrate these AI services deeper and deeper into all of Microsoft’s products. As he put it, Microsoft is not only a strategic partner and reseller of OpenAI’s services but also one of their biggest customers.

🚀Copyright Shield: We have a lot to figure out regarding AI and copyright law. Still, OpenAI followed IBM, Microsoft, Amazon, Getty Images, Shutterstock, and Adobe in announcing they would provide umbrella protection for any company sued for copyright issues using their foundation models. For some companies standing on the sidelines with fear of litigation, this move could be just what we needed to convince the corporate lawyers to open the AI floodgates.

🚀 ChatGPT 4 Turbo: A few months ago, OpenAI released its ChatGPT 4 model to their paid and enterprise users, but today it released GPT 4 turbo, a speedier version of the model that also has been updated to include data from April 2023 and before. The new model will also allow multi-model calls that provide combined text and image responses from the same prompt.

The model has also expanded the size of its context window, allowing more than 300 pages of content, making the supported tokens for calls on par with Anthropic’s Claude 2.

Last, and possibly the most important, OpenAI slashed the API pricing for the new turbo model and older models.

‘We optimized performance so we’re able to offer GPT-4 Turbo at a 3x lower price for input tokens and a 2x lower price for output tokens compared to GPT-4”

🚀GPTS and the Marketplace: OpenAI is doubling down on making fine-tuning a model dead simple and accessible to developers and non-developers alike. To do this, it released GPTs or trainable AI agents that you can customize with a name, personality, and purpose. The GPT will do what it can to learn from the data in its foundation model, but you can make these GPTs smarter by feeding it your information to further fine-tune it.

Live on stage, Altman created a startup advisor GPT and trained it by giving it transcripts of his previous speeches from YCombinator. With this, the GPT, powered by his data and description, could pull from his publicly shared knowledge to provide advice. The demo was impressive, especially considering the app took minutes to make using a web interface without writing any code.

Later this month, OpenAI will unveil a marketplace that allows GPT creators to share their models for a revenue share (which has yet to be announced). The possibilities here are endless. Large non-profits and associations could collect information from members to create powerful industry AI engines that could be starters for both corporate functions. Can you imagine a SHRM bot trained on the collective archives of its magazine and industry data? Or a medical bot that pulls from anonymized patient records?

🚀 AI-based Assistants: OpenAI simplified the development needed to create chatbots using AI models with an assistant builder. This tool creates a stateful API interaction, allowing OpenAI to remember the context between API calls without a developer needing to code it. The assistant also improved its interaction with AI functions, enabling your chatbot to interact with other elements in the browser.

For example, a utility mobile app could receive a question about an outage or restoration times and trigger a function to render the outage map. The assistant could also take files like a copy of a bill, parse the information, and render pieces of it in the application’s interface. These functions or actions can spawn operations with external tools triggering Zapier, Salesforce, Hubspot, or other enterprise systems.

This level of integration opens the door for internal bots that speed up employees’ work by doing complicated tasks with human language. Imagine a Human Resources employee onboarding a new hire by simply speaking to an assistant who can trigger calls to an HRIS, onboarding emails, and assign roles in an SSO. These assistants can also use OpenAI’s code interpreter, allowing the bot to create and execute its generated code to solve a problem. To repeat that, to make sure you’re equally mind-blown, the bot can write code to trigger an API or consume data from a system it was not built to interact with.

🚀New Voices: Interactions with these assistants and GPTs are not limited to text. ChatGPT has supported dictation and both text-to-speech and speech-to-text for a while, but today, it rolled out six synthesized voices that sound human and can allow users to trigger the power of these fine-tuned AI bots and assistants using our voices.

📌 In conclusion, the possibilities here are staggering, and Altman was quick to remind us that they have a lot planned over the coming year. The tech OpenAI laid out today represents the start of a monumental shift in our relationship with computers. Just don’t forget, it’s early days, and we’re in the AOL days of AI. Now, on to some thoughts on tech & things 🔗:

⚡️Have you tried the Apple Touch Bar? I wanted to like the Touch Bar, but it didn’t work. I value the tactile feel of buttons, which the Touch Bar lacked, but that’s the same argument the crackberry keyboard folks made about the iPhone keyboard. 

⚡️🪦Goodbye, Mint! I loved Mint and started using it a year before the Intuit acquisition. I loved the app then but failed to keep up with the times and never evolved into the budgeting app I hoped it would become.

⚡️Some cities see AirTags as a solution to car theft. Washington, DC, plans to offer free Apple AirTags to make it easier for you to find that stolen car, and they’re not the only city looking for inventive ways to combat car theft.

It’s hard to believe this is issue 23 of the Thoughts on Tech & Things newsletter! The support and growth are amazing and as of today, we’re shy of 1,000 subscribers🚨. Since this is my birthday week, I get to be a bit extra selfish, so if you’re enjoying the read, please share, forward, and recommend this newsletter to co-workers, friends, and family and help me blow past 1000 subscribers.

-jason

P.s. The Rumor is that Humane, the stealth startup founded by ex-Apple employees, is nearing a product release this month. Altman is a significant investor in Humane, and it’s been suggested that the device makes heavy use of AI with aspirations of being the best AI assistant on the market. I’ve been skeptical, but seeing the evolution of OpenAI’s GPT and assistant services makes me wonder if they will pull off the first in a new category of portable AI devices mainly controlled by voice input thats stylish enough to shine at Paris Fashion Week.

Howdy 👋🏾, Apple announced new phones and watches last week and celebrated its environmental accomplishments with a surprise cameo appearance by Mother Nature herself. If you missed the event or want a quick recap Rob Koch, Mindgrub’s Director of Mobile, and I sat down and talked about the event, iOS 17, and hints of what is to come from Vision Pro.

I’m excited to get my new iPhone 15 Pro Max (in blue titanium, if you’re wondering), but I’m dreading the now-yearly process of transferring MFA (multi-factor authentication) codes from my old device to the new one. MFA keys have become a necessary burden at pretty much any company these days. The idea is pretty simple, by using a generated secret code, a new 6-digit code is generated every 60 seconds that adds additional security to a password. The thing is, MFA keys do a great job of validating access to a device, but cannot determine if you are who you say you are, something that MGM became very aware of after social engineering brought the company to its knees.

Social engineering is exactly what it sounds like; it’s using information you can glean from the Internet or other sources to coerce people into doing something you want. We share so much information these days that we forget how much about us, and the companies we work for can be found on social media. For instance, things like an executive’s assistant’s name, where a colleague went to high school, names of hometown friends, or a co-worker’s nickname can be found easily from sources like Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. The focal point of MGM’s attack was a 10-minute phone call to an IT person whom the hackers had identified through a LinkedIn search. They persuaded this individual, likely through a combination of pressure and a sense of urgency.

This poor IT worker was convinced to remove the MFA requirements from an account with high access and permissions these hackers already compromised, allowing them to add their own device as an MFA key giving them access to everything the user had access to. Once in, they manipulated MGM’s SSO (single sign-on) provider into granting additional user access to a false identity provider allowing them to impersonate higher and higher access leveled accounts. If all that sounds like a foreign language, the key is that once they got in with a privileged account, they used it as a Trojan horse to quickly move through other systems and compromise more and more parts of MGM’s infrastructure. Vox explained it in more detail here.

We go through great efforts to create giant technical walls and to build defenses into our systems to make them feel impenetrable, but in the end, it’s us, the humans that are the weak link of the most secure of systems. MGM is a reminder that we must be vigilant about the increasing number of attempts by hackers to trick us with phishing, smishing, and deep fakes. So with that somber note, here are my thoughts on tech & things:

⚡️If you love video games, regardless of the device or console, some of those games likely depend on the Unity game engine. Unity provides tools that accelerate game development and make it easier to do complex tasks like hit detection or complex 3D rendering, and they’re under fire for retroactively changing their pricing model. In the gaming world, it’s been quite the drama.

⚡️Speaking of games, two mega-game events happened last week. Nintendo Direct and PlayStation State of Play unveiled plans for the next few months of gaming console releases, mega remakes like Super Mario RPG, and the next installment in the remake of Final Fantasy 7. I can’t wait!

⚡️I’m looking forward to trying Automattic’s new Fediverse plugin that makes a WordPress site a first-class ActivityPub citizen. If you missed this in my past newsletters, read up on the Fediverse, but this bakes sharing directly into millions and billions of websites.

⚡️MGM’s recent issues remind me of a great piece by Matt Honan on how a hacker pitted Amazon and Apple against each other to social engineer his way into Matt’s iCloud account and destroy his entire digital presence. It’s worth the read and a reminder of why all those annoying annual security reviews and phishing tests matter.

-jason

P.S. If you’re reading this on a device with under 10% battery life, how do you do it? I found myself nodding and saying “yep” out loud while reading this op-ed from Jim Gaffigan on how hard it is to keep his kids’ phones charged. As he says, “The outlet is right there! With a phone charger plugged into the wall!” all you have to do is plug the device in. Also, if you’re unfamiliar with Jim Gaffigan, please do yourself a favor and watch this video about hot pockets.

📺 Have you watched any of Apple TV’s original shows? Silo, Hijack, and the Morning Show are fantastic, but Foundation Season 2 just ended and OMG is this show amazing! Season 1 started slow and took a few episodes to get its footing, but the payoff is worth the time. I can’t wait for the next season! Give it a watch, ya’ll.

Howdy, Meta is back in favor with investors after the successful launch of Threads, and quarterly revenue is up by 11%. With a rosy report months after Meta’s first quarterly decline, you might be surprised that its Reality Labs, known for Virtual Reality (VR) products like the Meta Quest, brought in $276 million in revenue on a $3.7 billion loss for the quarter. Mark Zuckerberg says AI is the number one focus at Meta, but he is unshaken by the mounting losses to build his vision of the “Metaverse.”

“We’re here to build awesome experiences that help people connect. I think helping to shape the next platform will unlock that in a profound way for decades to come.”

Meta has had zero success with hardware, its phone was a flop, and it recently discontinued its Portal product. Still, Zuckerberg realizes Facebook and Instagram have been relegated to apps on a platform, forcing them to play by the rules of those platforms. Apple’s increased focus on privacy has shaken Meta to its core, costing it $10 billion, and has made owning the next platform crucial for its long-term future. Under that lens, you can quickly see why Meta invests so heavily in Oculus and VR. Meta’s goal is to cement a foothold in the platform wars to come. Apple’s launch of Vision Pro injects fresh competition into the market, and for Meta to succeed, it doesn’t necessarily have to outperform Apple. It simply needs to secure the second position.

Is the Metaverse dead? This week I’ll dive into what’s happening in that space, share our experiences moving to the Metaverse, and I’ll invite everyone to visit our virtual office and listen to some AI-generated music, but first, here are a few of my thoughts on tech & things in the news:

⚡️Last week, Amazon hosted AWS Summit in NYC, and the Mindgrub team and I were in attendance. In addition to great sessions, AWS used the keynote to make some AI-focused product announcements. I’m excited about adding new foundation models to AWS’s Bedrock product and entity resolution. Foundation models allow you to sub out the Large Language Model (LLM), powering Bedrock with those from Stability AI, Anthropic, or others. Entity resolution uses AI and pattern matching to connect data across large enterprises and can help build a better footprint of whom a customer is across a distributed set of systems.

⚡️Porsche’s new CarPlay app looks amazing! The app expands the features of CarPlay by extending what you can do in its own native CarPlay application, and it also adds enhanced Siri support for controlling the A/C or the vehicle’s internal lights. Apple is expanding CarPlay with some automakers, but this seems like a great way to expand beyond what Apple supports. Hopefully, others will follow this lead for CarPlay and Android Auto.

⚡️The BBC joined the Fediverse with an experimental new Mastodon server. Each node or Mastodon server owner in the Fediverse sets their own content moderation rules, giving the BBC greater ability to moderate its reporters and comments directly. Could this become a model for others to follow?

🥳One more week! I’m hosting an AI-generated concert with the musicians of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra on August 9th at the Meyerhoff in Baltimore. Check out some recent coverage on WJZ and WBAL, and more importantly, buy tickets! I can’t wait to see you.

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Back to virtual reality…

Virtual reality is an incredible experience that feels revolutionary. The first time I placed a headset over my eyes, I was instantly transported into a new world and could feel in my soul that this technology would change everything. I’m also an early adopter with thick skin for bugs and am always willing to overlook the growing pains of technology.

Like the science fiction that inspired it, VR and the Metaverse can blend IRL (in real life) and virtual spaces ranging from whimsical fantasy worlds to alternate recreations of our world. The appeal for this virtual escape is not new, Second Life has existed for 20 years, and if you play video games, MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Role Playing Games), and World of Warcraft (WOW), a 19-year-old game with 8.5 million monthly players. Each platform combines gameplay, shopping, and social interaction to create a world you can mold to your interests. The Metaverse takes these same worlds and adds immersion to trick the mind into feeling that you have warped or transported into this fantasy land.

When Mindgrub moved to the Mindverse, we chased the dream of immersing our team in a different world, but doing that required us to overlook the realities of VR. Headsets felt heavy and bulky and quickly became sweaty, tasks like typing got old quickly, and many gestures tired your arms. The experience could be excellent in bursts, but the hardware did not work for an 8-hour day. Worse, many of the Metaverse worlds are exclusive to VR or favor users in a VR space over mobile or desktop. This led us to Mozilla Hubs, a mixed immersion world that allows users to join using a web browser and interact at various levels of immersion. You can zip around on an Oculus VR headset or just as quickly on a phone’s web browser or desktop.

Apple’s vision of mixed reality (XR) aligns with these ideals helping you stay present but allowing you to move into deeper levels of immersion. Services like FaceTime allow you to interact with users across device types but still offer enhancements to collaboration for those in a shared virtual space. Apple understands that a productivity device you wear for hours must be comfortable, and I’m hopeful it feels like wearing glasses. Apple also added downward-facing cameras to allow gestures and interactions without holding your arms and appears to make it easy to connect an external Bluetooth keyboard and mouse.

This approach of inclusiveness seems to have influenced Meta, as Horizon World’s mobile app will make its VR social platform available to all types of users, hopefully expanding its reach. This inclusion is key to expanding Metaverse support and reducing entry barriers. The more users can jump between levels of immersion, the easier it is to promote increased collaboration, and naturally incentivize the potential gains that arise when teams fully commit.

So is the Metaverse dead? 100%.

Apple calls XR spatial computing, and even if that name does not stick, the word Metaverse has quickly gone out of vogue. The word Metaverse is dead, but what’s not dead is the ideals of the Metaverse. Spatial computing and our ability to merge IRL and augment it is unquestionably the future. Today Apple and Meta are laying down a foundation that may take years to catch on. Still, both are committed to investing and creating something attractive to businesses and developers. The Metaverse was never meant to be a singular place but a world of connected apps or universes, similar to the Apple App Store or distributed group of social networks, like the Fediverse. Long live the Metaverse, the Metaverse is dead!

-Jason

p.s. Could the Fediverse become the new Metaverse? Meta’s interest in using the ActivityPub protocol to bring its Threads social media application to Mastodon makes you wonder if it could be the core of a virtual social network that lets you take your things from VR space to VR space. I’m not alone with these thoughts, as Immers Space and several others are exploring what that could look like.

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X Marks the Spot

Elon Musk changed the name of Twitter to X, and to celebrate by erecting a large x sign atop the headquarters. Of course, this all happened without the correct permits, and now faces threats of fees or removing the sign altogether. (Guess what sign has been removed)