Tech Rollbacks, Deepfake Solutions, and SpaceX's Bold Moves

[00:00:05] Alright, back with you live with another incredible edition of Tech Watch Radio. We keep an eye on Tech Seed on half two. My name is Sam Bushman. I work for NetworkProviders Inc.com. Check it

[00:00:28] out. Jay Hill is the CEO of the organization. I'm a consultant with NPI. We do NPI TechGuys.com. That's the website for the show NPITechGuys.com. It's a weekly one hour show on the weekends

[00:00:43] for radio stations across the country, and then it's divided up into two podcasts. One goes out on the weekend. One goes out midweek. So you get to NetworkProviders Inc. NPITechGuys.com podcasts per week. And we talk about AI a ton. Artificial intelligence. They always make

[00:01:04] the joke government intelligence is kind of an oxymoron. In this case, artificial intelligence becomes an oxymoron as well. Over the last many weeks, we've talked about all the advancements in AI and how incredible it is. And that's all true. However, there's more to that

[00:01:19] picture than meets the eye because AI is being forced to take massive steps backwards as well. So even though AI is very capable, very incredible, very unique and neat and cool to follow, it's

[00:01:32] not ready for prime time. And it's got a long way until it is. Example, Google ops to basically pull AI feature for their search engine. So what happened is it says Google is it appears

[00:01:46] that they've turned off their new AI functionality for a number of searches as it works to minimize errors. So this guy Sundar Pichai, I don't know. Anyway, this executive for Google, he rolled this out last month adding AI to their search engine. They had six examples

[00:02:11] of things that you could ask it and they thought it was really cool. Well, they've had to disassemble virtually the whole thing, Jay. And the reason they have is because the bot would just lie and go out in the weeds and recommend bad things. For example, it

[00:02:25] recommended putting glue in your pizza recipe, Jay. Yes, it did. Don't do that. Non-toxic glue though. I mean, you know, so I guess but you know, they say the company has made more than a dozen technical updates

[00:02:40] to the system. The bottom line is it babbles, it doesn't, you know, give people the truth. They thought it was going to be incredible, but now they're being forced to back off big time on this, Jay. Well, the problem is it's a large learning language model and some

[00:02:57] of the stuff that they are using to learn from I mean, if it's reading Reddit postings and stuff and obviously people are sarcastic and trying to be funny. And so they'll say things like, oh, your cheese and your sauce isn't sticking to your pizza. So put some

[00:03:13] non-toxic glue in there. And so it's just regurgitating this world except for see the bot doesn't know that. Yeah. And so the bot just says, Hey, put glue in the recipe. That's the recommendation. Well, okay. Anyway, they're really being forced to step back

[00:03:29] here. And what they're going to find over time, Jay, is this large learning model of the whole world ain't going to work because you're going to have to build too many filters and things that it can't understand and know. And they're going to

[00:03:40] have to create instead of these tiny learning models, they're going to have to create something kind of in between. That's like, okay, let's create a learning model of just trusted information that we know how to nuance and then we know how

[00:03:51] to deal with. So let's just take Wikipedia or anything that's that they can format and keep track of. They're going to have to leave out a lot of that you know anybody and their dog can add or contribute to because how

[00:04:04] accurate is that information? Right. And so that's a big, big deal. But Google of all people backing off a ton. I mean, virtually they roll this out with six examples. What do they end up with one example that they kept? Yeah, but I mean,

[00:04:15] where do you find trustworthy information? Even Wikipedia has issues sometimes with people trolling it and, you know, problems. So how do you bet that way better than a read it? What it's going to really take, I think

[00:04:27] is is a dual layer of AI. You're going to need some AI to be smart enough or to have enough context to know when something is satire or irrelevant or purposely being trolled so that it can eliminate that from its training data.

[00:04:44] Yeah. Anyway, I don't really know where to go with this, except for they're going to have to spend a lot of time really tweaking the model so that it doesn't go out in the weeds and do those kind of things. Another

[00:04:58] example is these audio deep fakes, you know, not to make this political, but Joe Biden said, Hey, people are making cheap or deep fake videos of me. Turned out not to be true, but there are deep fakes that are happening and

[00:05:10] audio is one of the great deep fakes. They're having, you know, audio, say in Sam Bushman's voice calling family members. Now, this is just an example, but you know, you don't know who's who. You don't know what's

[00:05:20] real. You don't know what's not real. Well, they say here's the true solution to the problem of audio deep fakes according to the CO of 11 labs. They say companies at the forefront of AI technology are grappling with how do you deal with deep fakes without stifling innovation? And

[00:05:39] really, it's the same question as Google's challenges. And that's why I bring these stories together because we've got a lot of experience, but the principles are the same. Okay, they say it's going to be a cat and

[00:05:50] mouse game. We see that with the, you know, malware and the viruses and all this kind of stuff. It's a cat and mouse game security. Well, the same thing is true here with the deep fakes. I guess 11 labs is kind of

[00:06:03] one of the four runners in this. And they've really done a great job at making these voices happen and all that. But lawmakers are worried that the technology has a potential for abuse. Oh, you think? I mean, it's

[00:06:18] great to worry about that now, but it's a little late because it's been rolled out. So they're way behind the eight ball is the problem. Advances in AI have correlated correlated with the rise in supercharged scams. You know, you pretend you're a government

[00:06:33] official or a family member of this or that. And this one guy says, Hey, voice cloning keeps me up at night because it's so real, you can't tell the difference. Anyway, they've exploited this promoting racist and all kinds of content as celebrities and

[00:06:51] everything else. But they're idealists as well, these people that develop this technology, they believe that they can solve it all day. They think that there's a lot of value to this and I agree. So for example, people that might lose the ability to

[00:07:06] speak or then use their AI generated voice and still be able to speak. I mean, it could be really cool, right? Yeah, that would be bad. But there's a problem with the concept though. There is. Let's talk about it. Well, the problem

[00:07:21] with it is when somebody loses their voice, they need a bunch of training data to replicate somebody's voice. So you would have had to have already set down or recorded, you know, at least three hours worth of clear dry by driving

[00:07:35] with no music, nobody's talking about it. Yeah. So by the time you're trying to replicate somebody's voice that or they need to have made speeches or something that was recorded to try to rebuild that from and that can be difficult after

[00:07:47] somebody's lost their voice. Now they claim that they can get a handle on this and have all the benefits of the new cool technology and they claim that they've got a way that they can solve this. I want to talk about this suggestion

[00:07:59] they have and see what you think, Jay. It's called a need for a watermark. So you're familiar with the watermark in pictures where it's got this little whatever that you can see and you can remove it if you pay or whatever else

[00:08:10] they're using it for that now but they're talking about audio watermarks here, Jay. This is a whole different ballgame. Yeah. And in images so you can have a physical watermark that people will see oftentimes when you search for an image. You'll see this from Getty

[00:08:24] Images or whoever stock photography. They're just doing it saying you gotta pay for it and we'll remove it. This is our way to get paid. Yeah, but that can be visual. From the visual ones we're talking about that you can't see

[00:08:33] though, right? You can also have hidden ones in a watermark in a JPEG where the data is encrypted in such a way into the image itself. You can't see the watermark but you can tell you can use a program

[00:08:45] to look at that JPEG and tell there's a watermark behind it and that's the kind of thing they're talking about with this audio. They want to put a watermark on the audio that you wouldn't necessarily hear but could be decoded and deciphered and prove

[00:08:56] that this audio came from this engine or this AI or etc. That they could link it back to where it was generated. Yeah, and they want it to be related to copyright protection, content recognition, multimedia data management. They want

[00:09:14] to have a basically it would be a key. It's something that you couldn't see or notice but you could like you say confirm it with the right program that oh um and they say you know it's hard to tell whether things come from

[00:09:26] recording or a specific voice. This would hopefully be able to tell. I think that they're on the right track with this but if you're not very careful, it's going to be a nightmare in and of itself Jay because when you look at how a

[00:09:39] watermark works, they say the watermark is embedded into the audio with a message to the embedding module then it's transmitted through a channel before releasing then you know hey determines if there's an audio mark in there and then decodes the final message.

[00:10:00] That's a lot of stuff to go through and it won't take long until people will be able to fake the marks. They say there's three dimensions to this audio watermarking. Imperceptibility, capacity and robustness. Well I get it they say imperceptibility is the basic requirement for watermarking

[00:10:22] which means you can't hear it with the human ears otherwise it'll be it'll ruin it. I agree with that for sure. The performance capacity limits the amount of information that the watermark carries over a determinant amount of time so you know how do you make that watermark

[00:10:38] cover all the audio? The robustness is the syndicator about possible damage in practical applications in other words has somebody tampered with this audio and all this kind of stuff. It sounds like they've got it in theory but I'm telling you right now the

[00:10:55] implementation of this is another matter Jay. Yeah and I think very difficult to do. I think I don't think that it'll be that difficult. I think they'll be able to embed it in. I mean you'll have a certain amount of bandwidth that you

[00:11:06] can put in in order to tell like if audio has been edited you can or you know your question was how do you put it in like more than once. I think you just loop it in a slow loop and have some time markers

[00:11:19] in there and if somebody cuts things out or changes things you would see that that time marker disappeared or whatever but also. Or it's off. Yeah and also you could tell even if you only had a small piece or if there was some

[00:11:31] damage to a piece of it with that with that watermark looping in the audio in the background of the audio or in the imperceivable part of the you know the digital coding of the background of the audio you would still be

[00:11:43] able to figure out who it went to and what and read that watermark also. Yeah let me tell you where the problems are going to arise eventually you'll get these players or these decoder modules made by very few people just so you know there's very few

[00:11:56] decoder modules made for the some of this audio stuff if you're not very careful it's going to be if you don't have a watermark we want to play your stuff. Right. So now you're going to be forced to put a watermark in something even if it's

[00:12:06] legitimate it's just part of the data stream which I mean that becomes problematic because then all of your old recordings that don't have the watermark unless you go through and apply the watermark they're all going to become over time worthless so there's a

[00:12:17] lot of a lot of complications here and they'll be like you said there'll be more of that cat and mouse or arms race sort of thing where people will figure out how to add the watermark to their old thing to their

[00:12:27] old audio on the fly and then they'll figure out how to detect that and then they'll figure out a way around that and it'll just keep going. The other thing of interest is how do we know there won't be competing watermark people so this you know

[00:12:39] 11 labs they're trying to get a bunch of people on their idea for a watermark or to back their kind of watermark consortium I don't know if that's a term but I just made it up to kind of illustrate they're trying to get people in their camp well somebody

[00:12:49] else gets in there it'll be kind of the the beta vcr debate of yesteryear or whatever yeah let's hope an open standard wins out we're gonna go with IBM or Windows you know or whatever so that's kind of going to

[00:13:02] be a battle too and if we're not very careful and some of these technologies get you know kind of rolling out before I don't know if you want to say consensus gets developed or whatever else if you're not very careful you can find yourself in the

[00:13:13] situation where it's like hey I have an Amazon account and so I have Amazon watermark and I can deal with all those but I can't deal with you know whatever other watermark or whatever and if they're not careful they're going to create a mess and they've done this

[00:13:27] over and over and over with hardware and stuff now my iPhone doesn't even work with half the new cords anymore because that you know I don't know I'm very concerned about that the reality of this especially when there's so much audio content already out there yeah

[00:13:46] anyway I thought I'd bring that to your attention what do you got Jay well there's some of the cool interesting things in the news and one of those is SpaceX and I find it interesting that NASA has contracted with SpaceX and they're going to pay

[00:14:02] SpaceX to destroy the international space station for them why do they want to destroy it well I guess it's out of service they did and they spent a lot of money on it too by the way so the the cost of it is estimated to be

[00:14:18] 150 billion dollars that they put into it it weighs almost a million pounds yes we all know travels around the earth at about 18,000 miles an hour and right now it's costing NASA about three billion dollars annually that's 1.3 billion for operations and another 8 point or sorry 1.8

[00:14:36] billion for crew and cargo transport and so they've decided they're going to de-arbit it and they're going to instead of I guess I can't do it cheaply enough and SpaceX is going to be the one to do this this is Elon Musk company and they're going

[00:14:50] to they've started with an opening bid of 843 million dollars to develop the US de-orbit vehicle and they're going to burn it up they're going to push it into the atmosphere and shared up I just find it fascinating that NASA is going to pay SpaceX to

[00:15:08] destroy the ISS and I think that's funny well it's very strange the other thing that I find weird about this is this thing's not even like that high into space is it uh it is I don't know exactly what it you know the height that it orbits at

[00:15:23] but it's going to be at least around 100 kilometers you know that's kind of the edge of space um or maybe that's 100 miles 100 kilometers like 30 miles up no no I'm sorry that would be 100,000 kilometers right yeah okay so it's like um or maybe

[00:15:40] would that be like 30,000 uh that's where planes fly right yeah let me see something's not we gotta figure this anyway all I'm telling you is it's very interesting to see this stuff because I find the space station not really even a space station I mean like I don't

[00:15:58] see what I'm totally for miles really is where it uh travels all right 254 miles up so it's like you know when you fly 40,000 feet you're uh what eight miles up about yeah okay so any edge of space is considered like around 100 miles up so it's about double that

[00:16:16] little more yeah but but compared to the moon or somewhere else like that it's not even oh yeah not even close at all the moon you know I've seen this it's 238,000 miles up right as as far as the moon is away from the

[00:16:30] earth you could fit all of the other planet side by side in between that distance it's so far yeah so how many miles up is it again the ISS 254 yeah you say 254 miles right 250 miles and the moon is 238,000 miles jay yeah so

[00:16:49] when I appreciate that we got something 250 miles up but that's not all that impressive really it took a lot of man power and a lot of time to build that in a lot a lot of money too and I wonder down my wonder what are the

[00:17:03] going to put up next yeah what are they gonna what's going to replace it what's uh what's the next project you haven't heard they would need to use the current one to stage something further wouldn't you you would think you know but I don't

[00:17:15] think so I think they're going to start from scratch on the next one and just have it if there's going to be one 500 miles up the problem is NASA has gotten so bloated being the government organization and stuff his SpaceX is kicking their butt we talked about this

[00:17:30] in the previous shows um as far as financially and how they're lifting things that's always in the case jay this is nothing new this is just a free market at work baby yeah I know and so I don't think they can compete I don't

[00:17:40] even know if they have another project I mean I'm sure there's some things being kicked around but as far as anything that's uh really on the books I don't know maybe SpaceX will be the one to put the next orbital platform in well we'll find out we'll

[00:17:55] keep an eye on that ball that's for sure all right now speaking of uh SpaceX and Elon Musk and everything else I guess they're doing some pretty cool stuff with starlink too right they are they are indeed um they've got some

[00:18:09] a new thing coming out and it's called the starlink mini have you heard about this m a little bit so it's going to be a compact design you're gonna it's going to be basically a starlink satellite dish that uh you only have

[00:18:22] to orient kind of pointing it around you don't you don't have to do this as far as um it's just a flat surface that you kind of angle up there's a little like kickstand on it it's about the size of a laptop um like

[00:18:34] a bigger laptop you could put it in a backpack and carry it around with you it's about 12 inches in diameter significantly smaller than the original standard starlink dish and it's made for portability and what it is is you you take your regular connection you

[00:18:49] know you're paying whatever 120 bucks a month for you can add a $30 a month you can buy the hardware the hardware cost $600 and with this hardware you can go anywhere and you have a mobile version of your starlink system and you can use them both

[00:19:04] simultaneously and you can set this up set up your computer you just need open view of the sky there's some software in there that may tell you to like you know rotate or point a few different directions but it's it's very general

[00:19:17] maybe in the direction of where you have the most coverage but this is set to cover the entire united states or it could be anywhere i mean you might need a slightly different roaming package for that but theoretically anywhere in the world

[00:19:31] and you set it up plug it in plug it into your computer and it's got wi-fi built in the so the router is built into this hardware piece this dish and it allows you to just have a mobile starlink system and it's pretty cool i think that's

[00:19:46] my question is why have the old one then if the new one's that much smaller and portable and anything else the miniaturization of things is always great in tech is there any advantage to the traditional one versus this yes there's a lot of advantages

[00:19:57] i think to the to the traditional one especially if for an install number one you've got a ethernet jack that you can get out on that one you can hardware install it it's more robust it has better signal so you can it points itself it automatically rotates and

[00:20:12] moves up and down and all that kind of stuff it also has a de-icer in it so it melts snow and all that kind of stuff for if you want to stand alone or if you're going to be in a one spot you know for a long time

[00:20:23] i think that you're the standard install is going to be your best bet of course but it but this is like a starlink hotspot where you can carry it around you can set it up in a few minutes and have your laptops and your devices

[00:20:34] connected anywhere in the middle of the desert middle of a national park anywhere no matter if there's cellular am i going to get one i'm thinking about it yeah i'm thinking about it i think it's a good idea six hundred bucks it's kind of expensive

[00:20:47] for a one-time hardware layout but thirty bucks a month on top of whatever your bill is is that what they're saying right that's right and how much limits on bandwidth will there be uh i don't know i i know that the regular starlink is it says it's

[00:21:00] unlimited but it's really not there are some throttling at certain speeds or certain you know capacity overall but it's it's pretty generous as far as the the home one and if this will have it i don't i don't have the specs on

[00:21:15] it of what the bandwidth limits and do they say what the speed will be in stuff compared to say your you know installed version they're getting business now in a home version and now the portable version and you know there's a lot of bandwidth and capability differences right

[00:21:29] yes it's supposed to use uh 30 to 40 watts of power so you could run it from uh like a battery bank or anything like that so 30 40 watts of power about half what a computer is right yeah in general that's right i know it

[00:21:43] depends on the computer and all that i'm just trying to give people a general quick understanding and it says delivering speeds of um up to 220 megabits download and up to 20 megabit upload that's pretty incredible to set up anywhere ladies and gentlemen yeah and that's something and for these

[00:21:59] people that have motor homes and kind of some of that kind of stuff they may not want to be able to mount it or whatever but they could pop that out anywhere they're at whatever camp sites wherever they're traveling and you know the van life becomes real now

[00:22:09] for people yeah absolutely and they they make a uh a flat dish is what they call it it's a little bit bigger and it's made not to point around and rotate you can just mount it to the top of a vehicle um but that's

[00:22:20] a little bit more expensive i think and and you know you may have also different restrictions and what i like about this is so starling also makes they make a um a version for aircraft they make a marine version to mount on

[00:22:35] a boat you know that accounts for yeah the boat rocking around and stuff on there and just all these different options i think is is really cool that they're rolling all this out amen i agree 100 percent you know you just got to decide which application

[00:22:48] makes the most sense for you if you're saying hey i only want internet on my mobile home or whatever else then you can do that on the top of it or whatever uh if you say i want the portable one because a lot of times i'm

[00:22:58] you know i park my mobile home here but i'm over here at the park or i'm this you know wherever there's all kinds of options for some of these things and i think the flexibility is key what do you think about cruise lines are they starting to use

[00:23:09] starling more too i don't know i would imagine that they are but um i don't know that i know cruise lines have for years have had internet options and yeah and it's been satellite and it's been slower than molasses i've been on them

[00:23:22] they work but they're not very good yeah and hopefully this will change that game too i would think so i would think that starlings probably the number one provider right now of internet satellite um deliver i mean i know you have hues and you've got

[00:23:36] what is the competition they're a totally different technology i mean these they are these satellites that are um for starlink or how high um they're not very high no they're they're low earth orbit they're not geostationary like the other ones are

[00:23:49] and so they um you have a much better latency a much better two-way connectivity um and it's nothing compared to the older generation stuff well there you have it now you have the home version right now right jay i do yep and how pleased have you

[00:24:06] been with it very um that's all we use for our our houses starlink is our main home internet connection probably been that way for a couple years now and um you know i think if you're if you're in that where you're using

[00:24:19] starlink anyway um to add for 30 bucks a month to add a starlink hot spot maybe a good deal you know aim into that starlink continuing to gain ground ladies and gentlemen we'll keep an eye on all things tech so you don't have to that's who we are at

[00:24:32] network providers ink dot com npi tech guys dot com the website for the show and more thanks so much to you from us make it a great tech day william hey thanks