The Epic Tale of Hunter deButts! - DTNS 4919  ## Metadata - Author: [[Daily Tech News Show]] - Full Title: The Epic Tale of Hunter deButts! - DTNS 4919 - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/e3a4b423-37e7-4826-9dfb-3b6206c5fff5 ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Apple vs. Meta in the EU** - Apple and Meta are clashing over EU-mandated interoperability. - Meta wants access to Apple's tech, but Apple claims it risks user privacy. Transcript: Sarah Lane Yeah, Apple really doesn't want other companies to use its data, does it? Apple and Meta are in a dispute over interoperability requests mandated by the European Union's Digital Markets Act, or the DMA. The DMA requires major tech companies, that would be Apple and Meta, among others, to allow rivals and app developers to interoperate with their services to promote fair competition. Meta has submitted 15 those requests to Apple. Apple actually reported this today, wanting better access to Apple's technology stack. Apple argues granting such access would compromise user privacy and security, potentially let Meta access really sensitive user information, messages, emails, app usage data, And so on and so forth. Meta also accuses Apple of using privacy concerns as an excuse for anti-competitive behavior, adding that Apple's resistance to interoperability limits consumer choice. They're both obviously going to say these things. The European Commission is currently evaluating these requirements and has published preliminary Stakeholders have until January 9th, 2025 to provide feedback. You know, these are developers who, you know, have some skin in this game. With final measures expected by March of next year, 2025. Noncompliance, if Apple is found to be noncompliant, could result in the company facing fines of up to 10% of its global annual revenue, which, if it's Apple, is a lot of money. Justin, this is Meta and Apple, two very different companies when it comes to data collection. Who do you side with? Speaker 1 Well, I mean, I don't know necessarily who you side with in this particular situation because obviously it's a mediated struggle with the European Union that allows these companies To make these requests of each other. That being said, Apple will allow access to its technology at great cost and effort. If you want access to their tech stack, if you want them to make a decision that they do not want to make, they will make you go through every avenue legally to do it, at which point they will Only comply if they absolutely are forced to. And this has been very, very specifically their playbook when it comes to the European Union. Now, the meta versus Apple element of this is obviously the juiciest part of it. But, you know, without having the full understanding of exactly what meta wants to do with it, it remains kind of a he said, he said. Speaker 3 Sarah, you kind of alluded to this when you were doing the read. This is exactly what we expect Apple to do, and this is exactly what we expect Meta to do. Apple is a really, really big company that makes a really, really popular smartphone, and it is completely locked now. And the government in the European Union is saying, you need to open this up a little bit. So Meta being another really, really big company that just doesn't happen to their own phone, but says, Apple, you make really good phones. We want access to your stack so we can make our stuff work better on your stuff. Well, of course, that's what they're going to do if the law says they can do it. And then also Apple is going to say, no, we can't do that because it's going to make us less secure. I don't think that you didn't need a crystal ball. You didn't need to think deeply about this. This is exactly what I expect Apple to do. This is exactly what I expect Meta to do. And I imagine that this is going to be wrapped up in court for the foreseeable future. ([Time 0:09:00](https://share.snipd.com/snip/7a5c5510-6964-4312-9326-2c4efc2f99f9)) - **Tesla's Robotaxi Plans in Texas** - Tesla considers Texas cities, including Austin, for robo-taxi service. - First responders are being trained to handle Tesla's self-driving cars. Transcript: Speaker 3 So Tesla's looking at a bunch of cities in Texas, including Austin, to try out their long-awaited robo-taxi service. Apparently someone from Tesla has been talking to the city in Austin since May. They even had a meeting this month to teach first responders how to deal with Tesla self-driving cars. The Tesla person said Austin's definitely on the radar, but they haven't picked a spot yet because they have a lot of choices. So Justin, I know you live in Austin. So I just was thinking, you know, are you excited to see this come? Is this something you're going to sign up for soon? If Austin happens to be the first city, you know, is this something you're looking forward to? Speaker 1 Oh, I'll definitely sign up for it. I wanted to sign up for Waymo, and then Waymo wound up cutting a deal with Uber. So now it'll just be every once in a while, a Waymo will show up instead of an Uber if they ever expand it down to where I am, which is just south of the initial Waymo area. But certainly, I believe in self-driving cars, and I believe that they could more cheaply and effectively get me from point A to point B if I needed to get a ride in the times that I do desperately Need it. The question is exactly where. Now, look, Tesla has a relationship with Austin. There's no doubt about it. They've got several Tesla stores here. They're just building a brand new showroom on the Wyatt Oak Hill for Texas, central Texas locals. And Elon Musk has headquartered a few of his companies here since he decamped from Los Angeles. It makes the most sense that it would be in Austin. That being said, if it were not to be in Austin, one of the things that you do have to remember is that the dichotomy of this city is that, A, it's the capital of Texas, which is super majority Republican controlled, but the city itself is the most liberal city in Texas. So if the very much partisan now Elon Musk post-election does not get everything that he wants, it may well be because there is a democratically controlled city council here. And now he is not just an entrepreneur asking for technocratic things. He is somebody that is very much on the field as it, as it were, in terms of politics. Sarah Lane I wonder when self-driving cars and we're, you know, we're still in the early days. A lot of people don't have access to them at all. I have a lot of access to Waymo cars here where I, where I am in my part of LA and they're all over the place. I mean, truly it's like every third car now. It's kind of crazy. Maybe it's just my neighborhood. I'm not sure. But I wonder how much the experience of the robo-taxi will matter. I remember when Uber in its infancy launched in San Francisco. It was called Uber Taxi the time, you know, and had to change its name to Uber, which a lot of people don't even remember, but that's what it was called. And that was, it was a novel thing. Then you got Lyft. And so it was like, Oh, okay, you have some options. And they kind of, they went back and forth on pricing. That was just, that was kind of the only reason that you would choose one over the other, or maybe just, I don't know, you had better, uh, access with Uber where, you know, get to your house And vibes. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And, uh, and yeah, I had a variety of friends who, I don't know, for whatever reason, driving for Uber was more problematic than driving for Lyft, you know, kind of in their off hours just To make a few bucks type thing. So that was kind of, you know, you had this sort of war of the, you don't have your own car. How are you going to get somewhere besides using public transportation or a traditional taxi? And the robo-taxi stuff, you know, the Waymo experience, I've really only been in a Waymo like 10 times total. But it's very seamless, works really well. You feel safe. I mean, maybe some people wouldn't, but I do. It's like, how do they compete? I guess it just turns into a price thing again. Once you're both in the same market. Speaker 3 Yeah, I think that it would be based off of price. I mean, you're talking about autonomous vehicles. There's no one in the car. So you're not going to have like that customer service of talking back and forth with someone. There's the car working and doing what it's supposed to do. That's going to be a big thing. But I think ultimately, if these things get to where they are, we're using them just as much as we use Uber and Lyft today. It'll be because the technology works. So I think the competition ultimately is just going to try to keep the prices low. I don't know where else you're going to be able to make this appreciation. It would be fleet investment too, right? Speaker 1 It would be, you know, because ultimately the customer experience is I hit a button. How fast from when I hit that button can I get to where I want to go versus if I had a car magically and I drove it myself right now? And the reason why Uber works better in larger cities is because there's simply more cars. There's more people that are out there driving Uber at that very moment. If you have a larger fleet investment in a certain city for Waymo or Tesla, then you are going to have a faster ride from here to there. So that would be probably the biggest thing is that once you have the ability to do it, how many cars are you putting on the street? How much does that cost versus how much you are going to be able to run people hither and yon? Sarah Lane That is a good point. The rating system, again, in the early days, extremely important. I remember once, you know, I had like a 4.6 or something and I was like, what did I do? I just sat there in the back seat because you rate the driver and they rate you. And, you know, it goes both ways. Like drivers could be like, sounds like a problematic person. I'm not going to pick her up. I'm just just gonna let somebody else do it uh when it comes to autonomous vehicles you're not really arguing with anyone as long as they just do their thing so you're you're still gonna Get folks saying well here's why i like this car you know it has a nicer screen or you know it smelled better or you know whatever but uh it's sort of a different era all all around yeah all Speaker 1 That matters at the end of the day for all of it is how fast did I get there? How cheap did I get there for? ([Time 0:15:15](https://share.snipd.com/snip/f435fddf-1e19-4949-991b-4972fe36e523)) - **The Curious Case of Hunter DeButts** - Anna Navarro falsely claimed Woodrow Wilson pardoned "Hunter DeButts". - Justin Robert Young investigated, suspecting AI SEO manipulation. Transcript: Sarah Lane During a discussion of presidential pardons for family members on the TV show The View, panelist Anna Navarro claimed that President Woodrow Wilson once pardoned his brother-in Hunter DeButts. This did not appear to have ever happened, but you would be forgiven for just believing her because she said, well, ChatGPT told me. After being criticized for the error by some, Navarro claimed, yeah, I used ChatGPT. It got some misinformation and shared a screenshot of the fact that this is what happened. Wasn't her fault. ChatGPT's fault. But the screenshot she shared showed proof that maybe it wasn't as ChatGPT as she said. And Justin, I know you immediately got a spidey sense of something being a little a mess here. So walk us through it. Speaker 1 I, well, look, I know that all of the forebearers that created and run the SI Newhouse School for Public Communications, one of the best journalism schools in America at Syracuse University, Hang their head in shame knowing that I took the training that they gave me and I have dusted off these investigative fingers only so I could run down who indeed was Hunter Butts and where Did he come from. Quick correction to the setup here. She did not, Anna Navarro, say this on The View. She is a View panelist, but this was on her personal Twitter account. Right. And it went a little something like this. Hunter DeButts was pardoned by his brother-in Woodrow Wilson, back at the early part of the 20th century. That did not happen. Hunter DeButts did not exist. Despite having a hilariously funny name, that seems to be some kind of hallucination. However, either me or my friend, Andrew main, my cohost on the attention mechanism and former prompt engineer, the first prompt engineer for, uh, open AI, we were not able to replicate That hallucination. And that is one thing about llms is that you are usually able to using the exact same prompt have something along the lines of the same hallucination 100 of us not to be found the other problem With uh anna navaro's uh screen grab was that it looked like it was an old user interface for chat gpt so how is that happening at the time that she put this out, which was December 3rd? So I went down the rabbit hole. I tried my Andrew and I tried to figure this out. He tried a bunch of different LLMs. We're not able to recreate it. I tried a bunch of different knockoff ChatGPT services, like the things that when you search in the iOS store for chat GPT, the stuff that is not the official app that are dominating that Top 10. Sarah Lane It's called like chat LM or whatever. Speaker 1 Exactly. Looks a lot like it. They all use subscriptions, by the way. Please, nobody. I mean, you guys are DTNS listeners, so you know nobody ever use these. Chat GPT is free. It's fine. Could not replicate it and couldn't find the same UI. So I talked about it on the Politics Politics Politics show, and I asked the listeners, hey, if you can replicate this, please let me know. And sure enough, there was one listener who was able to do it. And indeed, had the same user interface that Anna Navarro had. Now, let me roll that back a second. He was not able to recreate Hunter DeBuds. He did have the same UI. So at least we proved that that was replicatable with the official chat GPT app. But the links that he got for the other two answers when he asked whether or not there have been presidential pardons offered to family members were from a website that was a bunch of listicles. When I looked for the author of the article that was served, it was very clearly an AI picture. I then investigated who ran that listicle site. And it's an ad tech company that says we are providing the future of AI or the future of advertising in a post cookie world using generative AI. The last time that that article was edited was the same day as the Anna Navarro tweet. So my supposition, and this is a little bit of reaching, is that Anna Navarro was fed that exact screen grab the way she showed it. And the reason why was because this chum listicle AI site invented Hunter to Butts. So yes, it was likely. Sarah Lane So Hunter to Butts is not like on a byline from the site in any way. Speaker 1 No, but it was edited that same day. And so my thought is, is that they saw a lot of inbound traffic because they were the website on the internet that had Hunter to Butts on it. They then edited it because they wanted to stay in the good graces of whatever the mojo is that's getting them surfaced in generative AI searches, which means, by the way, that SEO, that There are people who are rightly probably trying to crack AI search SEO, which is probably the tech story here, that there's a whole new world there. And exactly how, you know, chat GPT response to that is going to be up to chat GPT. There is a little bit of a bonus add on to this is that when I put out that episode where I revealed all that information, I was contacted by Anna Navarro of The View. She slid into my DMs and she clicked on the links that she was served. Yeah, she clicked on the links that she was served in that initial search. And she says that it took her to Wikipedia and Britannica. So it didn't take her to the site that I was thinking it was going to take her. Sarah Lane And so the mystery of hunter debuts remains where did you come from where did you go hunter debuts oh hunter debuts well okay so i it's also it's odd that the one person that got a hold of You on px3 said yeah yeah no i can replicate that screen that she sees. Except for 100 of us. And Andrew couldn't. Speaker 1 Well, no, except for 100 of us. So really the key with the listener was not that he was able to recreate it in the answer, but it was just the UI of that, which I thought was impossible to replicate, was possible to replicate. And he was not doing anything fancy. He just had a chat GPT. He paid for it for a little bit. He had let it lapse. So I don't know whether or not that's part of the reason why the UI was what it was. But I thought that ([Time 0:23:28](https://share.snipd.com/snip/6b465963-858e-4625-a5f7-45f944e9e1b0)) - **AI's Future in Search** - Generative AI's role as a search engine is a key area of development. - AI SEO is emerging as a new frontier with significant financial implications. Transcript: Speaker 1 This is the kind of new frontier, though. And ultimately, if you only think of AI as just like take out the idea that you can ask it anything and it will confidently answer. That's one part of generative AI. The other part is, can it be a viable search engine? Can it do better than spiders crawling the Internet to find things that would otherwise be found in what we understand as a traditional Google search. There's a lot of money. There's billions and billions of dollars riding on whether or not it can be that. And that's what I found fascinating about this, especially if my initial conclusion is true and that there are companies right now that are trying to figure out what the new field of SEO is, something that reached really full maturity with our modern search system, which I think is out and out degraded the experience. ([Time 0:33:50](https://share.snipd.com/snip/0fe0a752-b988-41d4-aa33-01246ddde51d))