Hunting data center vampires with Paris Marx

This week, we’re joined by tech critic Paris Marx to discuss Data Vampires, his latest Tech Won’t Save us podcast series. We chat about how data centers suck up vast amounts of power, water and other resources, and why the AI boom is exacerbating those issues. Also, Devindra and Ben dive into a few news stories, including the DOJ inching closer towards a Google antitrust breakup; Nintendo’s adorable motion sensing alarm clock, Alarmo; and why Google’s Deepmind AI head won the Nobel Prize for chemistry.

Listen below or subscribe on your podcast app of choice. If you’ve got suggestions or topics you’d like covered on the show, be sure to email us or drop a note in the comments! And be sure to check out our other podcast, Engadget News!

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Topics

• Interview with Tech Won’t Save Us host Paris Marx on his new series, Data Vampires – 2:09

• U.S. regulators continue to float the possibility of breaking Google up in antitrust ruling – 25:54

• Nintendo announces new hardware…Alarmo, a motion sensing alarm clock – 39:33

• Apple Intelligence likely arrives October 28 – 42:27

• 343 Industries rebrands as Halo Studios and shows off Unreal Engine 5 demo – 44:46

• Pop culture picks – 50:36

Livestream

Credits

Hosts: Devindra Hardawar
Guest: Paris Marx
Producer: Ben Ellman
Music: Dale North and Terrence O’Brien

Transcript

(Produced together with Descript’s AI transcription.)

Devindra: What’s up, Internet? Welcome back to the Engadget Podcast. I’m senior editor Devindra Hardawar. This week I’m joined by podcast producer Ben Ellman. Hey, Ben.

Ben: Hello. Let’s talk about Nintendo. And also Google. Google more important.

Devindra: And also all sorts of things. Let’s talk about data centers. We’ve got special guest on Paris Marx, the author, podcast host, and tech critic.

He has a new series at his podcast, Tech Won’t Save Us, about data center vampires. So, um You know, we will talk a bit about that. But first folks, if you’re enjoying the show, please subscribe to us on iTunes or your podcatcher of choice, leave us a review on iTunes and drop us an email at podcastinggadget.

com. You can also join us Thursday mornings around 10 45 AM Eastern on our YouTube channel for our live stream. This week we did a fun Q and a, which is actually not in this not in the recorded episode at all. So if you want to join us for that fun or go check that out, go take a look at our YouTube channel.

All right. So. I sat down with Paris Marx, who I think has been doing great work over at Tech Won’t Save Us, which is a much more, it’s a critical look at the tech industry, and Paris has the time and energy to really focus on what the industry is doing wrong. His most recent series, Data Vampires, is pretty much all about data centers and the, The impacts they have on our environment, the resources they use when it comes to power, which is obscene.

They’re requiring more and more power from our grid, which is already kind of a mess. You’ve probably seen the news. We’ve talked about this too, I think, about Microsoft re upping Three Mile Island, like turning it back on just to power AI data centers. A lot of other companies are thinking about this too.

Water is a big thing. There was a story a couple of years ago about Google essentially hiding the metric crap ton of water they were using from a town in Oregon. And because they didn’t want people to know like how much it took to cool those data centers down and things like that. So anyway, Paris and I.

Had a really good chat about this series. So, take a listen, and I’m sure you’ll learn a thing or two about data centers and cloud computing. Paris Marx, thank you so much for joining us on the Engadget podcast.

Paris: Absolutely, great to join you.

Devindra: Can you tell us briefly, what are you trying to cover with Data Vampires, and why you’re specifically focusing on data centers right now?

Paris: Yeah, it’s a really good question, right? And I feel like data centers have gotten more in the public’s consciousness through the generative AI moment, but also to a certain degree crypto as well, right? Remember when we were talking about how much energy use crypto was having and, you know, the impacts of these major miners as they were setting up in places around the world and the concerns about them keeping like fossil fuel energy online or even reviving fossil fuel plants.

We’ve seen a lot of those similar concerns with generative AI. But the thing that really stood out to me is that in certain places where a lot of data centers have been being built for some time, places like Northern Virginia or Ireland, for example, we were seeing these concerns in the communities for some years now, pre pandemic and kind of well before, right?

But what we’ve seen in the past few years is that as the number of these, especially hyperscale data centers that these major cloud companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Google have been building around the world, have You know, accelerated. What we’ve seen is not only those issues in, say, Northern Virginia and Ireland get more acute, but that in more and more communities around the world where these things are being built, we’re seeing similar concerns and similar opposition.

And so it felt like something to really want to tap in and pay attention to. So the series, you know, looks at why. We’re building all these, you know, hyper scale data centers. Looks at some of that community opposition in different parts of the world. You know, the growing kind of climate impacts of something like this and the broader potential harms of generative AI and the types of things that these data centers are powering.

And then, of course, looks at the broader ideology behind all this, that these tech billionaires are trying to push.

Devindra: This is actually really good timing Paris, because I forget if it was during our live stream or a recent podcast episode our listeners were asking the questions about AWS, you know, where did AWS come from kind of, how did we get here?

And I had to like, just pull back from what I remember from reporting over the last few years, but I’m very glad you guys covered that in the first episode because I feel like that sets the stage for. Kind of where we are, right? Like AWS, an offshoot of Amazon trying to figure out its own infrastructure, but basically coming up with the idea that they could rent servers time and server space to two other companies rather than those companies building their own server infrastructure.

Can you talk a bit about that and like how that plays out? basically helped get us here.

Paris: Yeah, definitely. Cause it’s such a key moment, right? Not just for what I’m talking about with the series, but for so much of how, you know, digital technology and the internet have developed in the years since, right?

Because so many of these you know, online services and things are built on the cloud now and the cloud really comes out of Amazon web services. So, you know, you go back to the early two thousands and you’re starting to have these ideas percolate within Amazon itself, the company, right? Because they’re trying to make their processes more efficient, you know, because they’re, they are an e commerce company, you know, generally a quite low margin business.

And so they want to do things like as efficiently as possible is, you know, how the story is told. Right. And so, you know, at a certain point these particular people at the company, Chris Pinkham is one of them starts to develop this proposal for something that would, you know, basically create this web service for Amazon itself, you know, by so that all these different teams working on these different projects wouldn’t have to spin up their own servers or, you know, figure out their own kind of web services and, and whatnot.

And then what happens then is they say, okay, this, you know, Isn’t just something that would be useful inside of Amazon, but it’s something that we can then sell to other companies. And I think even in that moment, so this is around you know, 2004, 2005, they’re, they’re really working on spinning this up.

And Chris Pinkham gets permission to go back to South Africa, where he’s from to put a team together to work on this. Cause he wanted to go, you know, back to the country where he came from. And Amazon wanted to keep him. So they said, you go back there, you work on this, you know, you kind of figure it out.

Right. And, and then. You know, they kind of come up with this proposal. I think, you know, they have an idea that this is probably something that’s going to be useful. But then there’s this interview I found with Jeff Bezos in 2008 where, oh, Malik, you know, the, the tech journalist was asking him about, you know, Whether he was expecting like cloud startups to, to, you know, be built on AWS.

And even at that time, he was like, the venture capitalists are all pushing them to, and we’ll serve them if, you know, that’s going to be helpful. So even then it’s you know, it’s still quite nascent. You know, if you think back now, like it’s so hard to, to, you know, think of a time, like pre smartphone, like that’s even you know, the iPhone is just kind of like getting launched, you know, this is like early days for the transformations that are going to come with like Web 2. 0 and the mobile internet and all this sort of stuff. So it’s really like the smartphone and cloud computing that really set the stage for what happens through the 2010s. I think,

Devindra: yeah, this is the birth of cloud computing as we know it.

Because yeah, before companies, if they, they wanted data storage or other, other sort of processes, they had to set up their own servers, which they did. But. I feel like for the likes of like maybe Dell or HP, there’s less of a reason for them to do that when they could just get space from Amazon, especially if like usage is is like volatile, like you don’t know how much people are going to need.

So you don’t want to build out too much hardware. I want to say I’ve been reporting on startups since 2009, 2010, and like clearly the cloud. Computing element is a big reason why so many of these startups were able to become a thing, right? They didn’t have to worry about infrastructure.

They could just have an idea. Instagram didn’t need to build a ton to data centers to store photos. They could just get some Amazon time, just a couple of dudes to build a photo filter app and then get bought for a billion dollars. So it all kind of led to that. And Amazon is not the only one we’ve talked about Microsoft and Azure and everything.

And Azure is doing gangbusters for Microsoft. Like when I write up their earnings, it really is just, yeah, Azure money just keeps coming in and it doesn’t look like it’s slowing down anytime soon. It’s really funny to draw that line, I guess, because I also remember Paris, like when I was doing it work in college, right.

That was like, Oh, one to Oh five. I remember like our email service was an exchange server on site. That is how people used to do computing. Then 05 hit and Gmail came about, right? And then, oh, all of a sudden, viable web email became a thing. And I don’t think I’ve configured an email client since then. So we also shifted a lot of our computing to the cloud just as users.

I guess it makes sense that the companies did that too.

Paris: Yeah, absolutely. Like it was so much more convenient to do that. Especially as these companies made it the convenient thing to do right to try to incentivize that to happen. But even with the companies, as you’re saying you know, I talked to Dwayne Monroe, who’s a cloud technologist, who’s been doing this for 20 years, over 20 years, you know, for the for the series, and he was kind of like giving me these different examples of like, why different companies move to the cloud and things like that.

And in some cases, he was like, you know, the company itself. Was resistant to moving to the cloud. You know, this is like kind of back in the early days, say late 2000s, early 2010s because they didn’t want to be dependent on you know, Amazon’s infrastructure or one of these major tech companies infrastructure,

Devindra: but

Paris: they but they also didn’t want to spend the money on like the capital expenses.

to build out the server infrastructure that they actually needed. You know, as the demand for their website and stuff was growing, right? Like he talked about a book business in particular that was seeing like orders be lost at, at peak times because you know, there was so much demand on, on the servers there.

And so the people at the company itself, like spun up this cloud solution, taking advantage of Amazon web services and then presented it to like management later and was like, look, this works. This is solving our problem. Either we do this or you give us the money for the servers and management was just like, okay, I guess we’re going to, you know, use this solution.

And it’s one way that these companies got onto it. But then of course the other way was that Amazon and Microsoft and Google all told these companies that if you come onto the cloud, it will be cheaper. You know, you’ll save money by not having. You know, so much of your own server infrastructure.

And, you know, that was partly the case. But it has certainly become more expensive over the years as they’ve sold them more you know, AI tools and all that kind of stuff that you get by being on one of these cloud services. But, you know, I think for a lot of these big companies, there’s still plenty of reason to be on you know, one of these cloud providers because of the benefits that it provides and because then they don’t need to keep up with their own you know, Microsoft Mechanics infrastructural servers and all the costs and concerns that come along with that.

And they can focus on the things that are much more core to their businesses.

Devindra: It’s kind of, it’s kind of like, it’s a very smart, smart business strategy, right? Like you’re telling people, we’ll make you, we’ll do this cheaper than if you did on your own, but also it makes you dependent on them. And then it’s a closed ecosystem.

So you continue to use other products that they have. And that’s kind of Microsoft’s whole deal with Azure too. Like they’re tying co pilot and everything into all of that. So it is kind of a vicious circle of I dunno, of just money and a commitment to these specific companies.

Paris: I think that’s an important point you make though, right?

Because earlier you were, you were talking about how, you know, in the early days, all these startups were founded on the cloud and how you know, without the cloud being there, without Amazon web services and Google cloud and Amazon Azure. You know, being these options for these companies, it would have been much more difficult for this kind of startup boom in the post recession times to have really happened.

Right. As we were seeing all this excitement in like the early 2010s about all these companies coming out of the tech industry and whatnot. And so that’s one element of that. And then you fast forward to the past few years and Without that massive centralized computational infrastructure that Amazon, Microsoft and Google have built up, it would have been very difficult to see this kind of generative AI boom and generative AI hype that we have, you know, been experiencing for the past year and a half or so or almost two years now, really because, you know, These massive models that use that require so much data and so much computation to train and to use are basically not possible without the centralized infrastructures that these companies have built up.

And so that’s another piece of this, too, right? Even when you look at these stories of, like, how open I had this agreement with Microsoft and when Microsoft made its further 10 billion investment, Semaphore reported that a lot of that investment was actually in cloud credits for the company. Cloud computing platform, right?

Because they need all this to make it work. So it’s really fascinating to see these connections and how the cloud has been so central to these developments, you know, like I was saying that we’ve seen over, you know, basically for the past two decades,

Devindra: I feel like we don’t talk about the, the term big data anymore, but big data was the idea that, yeah, you just have a lot of your systems.

stuff, your information in the cloud. And then, you know, everybody just kind of wave their hands. Yeah, we will do some sort of processing on that. I think the dream of generative AI is that, Oh, Oh, actually now there is something that could do something with all this data, we can build these models on them.

We just saw the news that Jeffrey Hinton one of the like originators of the idea of the transformer model was just where the Nobel prize too. So and he’s somebody who’s out there saying is actively speaking against. AI now too, like after making millions from it. They’re a very interesting fellow, that man.

But it is hard to I’m both skeptical of the idea of a lot of these companies saying AI will really transform the way we lives. I’m certainly from I do, you know, movie movie criticism and things like that, and artists specifically are really worried about what these tools can do, because they’re just kind of deploying them things that can, Replicate someone’s face or voice or something or generate entire actors out of thin air.

They’re worried about what that could mean for them. But I think looking at the infrastructure of it is a, is a really important thing too. Paris, you bring up a lot of good points in terms of like just resources. That these data centers need thinking water, but also power is certainly going to be a big part of all of this now to can you tell us like, just give us like a surface level of what you’ve learned and what you’ve been most surprised about by covering this stuff.

Paris: One of the most surprising things to me was just how much energy and how much water these, these infrastructures require. Right. And how. You know, there’s a certain scale there that makes this all really difficult, right? Because you think about data centers of the past and you know, data centers have been around for decades.

Like the creation of a data center and a collaboration of servers is like not a, not a brand new thing. It’s the scale that these companies are operating on. That is the more novel thing that we’ve seen arise over the past couple of decades in particular. Right. And in particular How quickly they are building more of these hyperscale data centers around the world.

And thus, when they build these things near these communities, and often they target these kind of, you know, smaller communities, maybe more rural communities you know, places that maybe had industrial industries in the past and have now been left behind. So they’re kind of desperate for something else.

What these communities start to find is that. It creates these real strains on the other, the energy grid or the water system. Right. In the sense of you know, the, the dows in Oregon, where Google built its first company on data center and, you know, has built other ones since they became really concerned about the water use and, you know, listeners probably have.

Seen this in the past few years, but there was this lawsuit that was launched to try to stop the amount of water that Google was using in the city to even be shared with the public, right? Because Google considered this a trade secret and eventually relented in 2022. But then they found that Google was using like almost a third of the water of the whole city.

And that that had significantly increased over the years previous. And even more recently you know, reporting in Ireland showed that now over 21 percent of all of the energy that, you know, the whole country uses all of the electricity from the grid goes to these data centers. And that’s not only making it so that in the winter they have these amber alerts where they ask people to reduce their energy consumption because the grid, you know, might not be able to supply everybody and they might have to do rolling blackouts.

But is also making it so that, you know, as they’re building more renewable energy to try to displace the fossil fuels, they’re not actually able to do that, right? Because they need so much more energy. And we’re seeing stories like this across the United States as well where fossil energy is staying online, or there was even a report.

I can’t remember who was in the Financial Times or Bloomberg last month. But that the United States is investing in new fossil infrastructure at the fastest rate in, in like years. That’s not

Devindra: surprising. There was also the report about Microsoft basically just reviving three mile Island to, to kind of bring that back.

I do want to. It’s always tough when I talk about nuclear power with people and I’m kind of unsure where people land, but I’ve put this out there. Personally, I do think we kind of made a mistake by just completely giving up on the idea of it like decades ago, because what that ultimately led to was far more of a reliance on coal power plants and then eventually natural gas.

There are certainly dangers with nuclear. We don’t know what would have happened if we kept building out as much as we were before, but I, at the, on the flip side, what we have is like clearly coal. And all of its you know, all of its refuse in the air has led to asthma for people who live nearby.

It’s it’s all led to certain issues. But now we’re looking back at nuclear because these companies are just kind of desperate to get more power. It’s have in your like discussions has nuclear been a thing more people are talking about when it comes to data centers to

Paris: Oh yeah, absolutely. You know, you hear Bill Gates say it, you hear Sam Altman say it, like they’re all in on nuclear now, right?

Because they want to power these data centers and generative AI with nuclear. But of course the flip side of that is someone like Sam Altman, of course, saying that he thinks we’re going to need a ton more energy and to supply that we’re either going to need a technology breakthrough in nuclear energy or to geo engineer the planet until we figure it out.

Or you know, you probably saw this interview with Eric Schmidt that’s been going around where he basically says, we’re going to miss our climate. targets. So, you know, we may as well bet on on AI and give it whatever the energy it needs and, you know, just hope it solves the climate crisis for us.

This is all deeply disheartening. Social suicide. Yeah,

Devindra: it’s very, Eric Schmidt is also the guy who was like, yeah, just steal stuff, you know, steal stuff if you’re an AI company and then we’ll, we’ll deal with it later. Your investors will help you out. I feel

Paris: I feel like when you’re thinking about nuclear energy though, like I feel like my position on it is we’re, we’re in the present.

present right. And we need to think about how we’re going to address this you know, as quickly as possible. And I feel like the thing with nuclear is that building new nuclear just takes so long. I live in Georgia,

Devindra: Paris, and it took like almost 20 years to build up a new nuclear plant here. And it went way over budget.

Georgia regulators barely even exist. So it seems like a lot of that costs went into building The pockets of people, you know, supporting the nuclear plan. Georgia power is basically a monopoly down here and also all the customers power bills basically rocketed up. We’re paying like at least an extra 30 a month because of that.

That’s a bad way to do nuclear. Maybe there’s a way to do it, but what is truly sad to me is that we’re at a point now where clearly like we need to start thinking about being more efficient, start trying to think about meeting some climate goals. And instead of doing that. What the like capitalist drivers in our, in our world have been doing is a betting on fake money with cryptocurrency and just using up tons of power and resources for that.

And also now generative AI, which is a really cool party trick. But I think it’s still like genuinely unproven as a technology that so many of these companies should be like basing their entire businesses around. I am generally, I am just shocked at what Microsoft has done because I have covered this company for so long.

They are so conservative. They barely. Barely change things up. And then as soon as open AI and that partnership happened, they’re ready to just flip the table and be all in on co piled and everything. It’s a big bet. I don’t know if it’s going to pay off for them at all. Do you, do you find that reality just kind of sad Paris?

What are you thinking about this? Like we need to be better about this. In fact, no, it’s just more power, more power, more resources. That’s kind of the road we’re going down.

Paris: Like I, I find it very disappointing, right. Which is part of the reason that I made the series. You know, and, and what we see is that, you know, the emissions of Microsoft, the emissions of Google are like through the roof.

There was this reporting recently in the Guardian that said that even the emissions numbers, these companies are providing are like very deceptive because they’re relying on offsets to make it seem like they’re emitting a lot less than they really are. So like the real story is even worse than the bad story that, That we’re getting from them, right?

And I feel you know, I feel like when we talk about data centers and when we talk about AI, and when we talk about the costs of say, cloud computing and things like that, the companies often come back at us and say, well, if you challenge this, then you’re not going to have Netflix anymore. And you’re going to lose your.

Email and all this kind of stuff, right? The things that you rely on that you expect from digital technology, the things that are convenient. And I think that the thing that they want to distract us from is that the things that are using the most computation and the most storage are, you know, the generative A.

I. S. Of the world, but also this broader model that they have developed over the past several decades that relies on mass data collection on everybody in order to create these advertising profiles to target us with these you know, different things to target us with product ads and all this kind of stuff.

That is actually like hugely determinative to the amount of computation that we require, the amount of storage that we require, why we need to build all these data centers in the first place and why everything needs to become so much more computationally intensive, right? If you’re a company like Amazon, Microsoft or Google, you are incentivized now to do that.

To make sure that we are collecting more data on everybody to make sure that we are making everything that we do more computationally intensive because that drives demand for cloud infrastructure. Right? And these businesses need to grow year on year. They always need to be, you know, building more. And as you were saying earlier, they are really Yeah.

Often the profit centers or, or some of the key profit centers of these businesses, you know, less so for Google, I think, because they rely so much on the digital ad money, but like Amazon in particular, a ton of its profits come from Amazon web services. And those profits have fueled its growth into all these other industries, you know, the kind of the monopolization concerns and oligopolization concerns that we’ve been talking about for the past few years now with Amazon in particular, a lot of that has been driven by corporate Cloud profits and their ability to basically not make any money or make very little money.

And so many of these other businesses. And so when we think about the concerns of this model, it’s not to say we need to choose between having the internet or not having the internet. It’s is this version of the internet that these major tech companies have created for us? The one that is best serving the public and best delivering what we want to see from digital technology and the benefits that it can provide.

Or can we imagine a different way of doing this that would be far less energy intensive, far less computationally intensive than the one that they are, they are trying to create because that works for their bottom lines and their vision for how this should work. And, and that’s kind of the message that I’m trying to get across with the series less so than let’s just burn everything down, you know, which also sounds appealing sometimes.

Devindra: I mean, when you go on vacation, you can disconnect a bit. Like it is possible to survive without constant access to all these cloud services. It’s much harder. And I don’t know if we’re like, we can ever really step back, but it is, it’s a funny thing to point out because a lot of these companies are like pushing for more computing, you know, usage, more resource consumption, even though that I feel like that has gone at odds with the way computing has tended to go, which is make our chips more efficient, make the data centers a little more efficient, make our mobile devices and everything.

faster, but also trying to reduce less power. We’re also seeing devices do things like like the new iOS 18 has really smart charging features so that there’s a mode where you could just like charge when I’m, you know, when my grid is using renewable power, it’s trying, they’re trying to do smart things like that.

And But it is, it feels like all those little tweaks for efficiency are dropping the bucket when these companies are just like, yeah, we’re just going to burn power and water and everything to, you know, create a generative AI search that you can’t even tell is, is fully accurate or not. It feels like we have.

Just missed the boat on something here. I’m sure you’re going to have some sort of follow up series, Paris. So I’m looking forward to seeing maybe if you dive deeper onto generative AI or cryptocurrency these are all topics like we’re bringing up this stuff all the time, but you have the ability to go deeper.

I appreciate that. So yeah. Congrats on the work in the series so far. Where can people find Data Vampires and what else should people know about your work?

Paris: Yeah, definitely. You know, if they just find Tech Won’t Save Us, my podcast on whatever podcast platform they listen to it’ll be coming out on that feed every Monday for the rest of October.

You know, it’ll be a four part series and, you know, I’m on all the social media platforms and everything. If people want to find me at Paris Marks, but it was great to talk to you and thanks so much for having me on the show. Yeah,

Devindra: great. I also want to point out like a Patreon subscribers, right? They can listen to the whole series.

Straight up. That’s

Paris: right. Yeah. Thanks for the, yeah, I’m always thinking about that too. So yeah, if, yeah, if anyone wants to support on patrion. com slash tech won’t save us, they can get the full series today instead of waiting for it to continue to drop through the month.

Devindra: Awesome. Awesome. Yeah. We’re looking forward to chatting again, Paris.

Thanks so much. Thanks so much.

Let’s move on to some other news, and I think the most interesting story that hit this week is more details about the Justice Department’s plans for Google after it found that they were a monopoly for its search engine. There’s still nothing firm happening yet, but the latest news is that the Justice Department has submitted a court filing.

Saying it’s considering quote behavioral and structural remedies that would prevent Google from using products such as Chrome play and Android to advantage Google search and Google search related products and features. And it’s currently considering the company from considering limiting or prohibiting Google from signing contracts with other companies like it did with Apple to prioritize its search.

And it really seems like the government is genuinely floating the idea that maybe some parts of Google should be broken up. We are not. anywhere further along than we were when we last talked about this thing. But it is interesting to see the government still talking about this. Ben, has your thinking around this changed at all since then?

Because I’ve been looking more and more at other situations where the government forced a major monopoly to kind of break apart. The biggest example is like AT& T. Which held a stranglehold on phone service across America for a long while, it was broken up into smaller baby bell services.

And the, from everything I’ve read, like those services ended up flourishing. Like they were all successful on their own. Some of them were reabsorbed back into AT& T as an entity, but Verizon, Verizon started out as a baby bell and now is like a legitimate competitor. And this whole, that whole thing lowered prices for consumers.

gate, like just the idea of having more competition out there. Just generally made the consumer market a bit better. There were arguments that maybe it delayed the development of high speed internet. Because all these different companies then had to manage their own lines and everything. And if AT& T was its own thing, it could just push high speed service lines and things much faster.

So that was maybe the cost, but I do think the overall consumer benefit was better. What’s your thinking now?

Ben: So the thing that struck me in this article was that Of course, like Google’s public policy head said, Hey, this is going to stifle innovation, just like what you were saying with maybe internet rolling out a little bit slower because it wasn’t run by a monopoly, but the same logic has been used for saying we can’t not have workers work 12 hours a day.

That means the factories will shut down. So you don’t really know what would happen if you break up. A company until it actually happens. It’s possible that Android or like in the entire pixel division, if it were broken off, could be come like a really interesting company that does smart home and phones and, you know, maybe TVs and stuff we haven’t.

Let them really spread

Devindra: their wings and fly and I will also say I have complained a lot about Google as a product company I think they are very bad as a consumer product company, especially when it comes to hardware And just making things that they just kind of kill off and Google as a company didn’t start out doing that, right?

Google was a search company. That was their thing. Then they became an advertising company. And then the mobile web started becoming a thing. And they saw what Apple was doing. They were like, okay, yes, let’s start making devices too. Initially, that was through partners. That was through like Motorola and LG and everybody.

So they have been really, really late to making their own hardware. I don’t think they ever got the hang of it. Look at what happened to nest and just kind of a disaster. That was Fitbit kind of got absorbed into the whole Google thing. There is a good argument to carve out the device side of the company, or carve out what Android is, and let the search and advertising part of the company be its own thing.

Yeah, I think that could ultimately be better for consumers, because then And then they can, then the hardware people can actually do some good user interface and user experience work without being like, be beholden to what middle managers and the other higher ups want, which from all the reporting is the constant problem with Google.

And would we

Ben: be more likely to see those cute little marshmallow cars actually on the road if Google were only focusing on Google stuff rather than absolutely everything under the alphabet umbrella.

Devindra: Yeah, yeah, and also I don’t think yeah, Google’s alphabet, but even that rebranding never really took, right?

It was more of a conceptual thing, whereas when Facebook rebranded as meta and became its own thing it was very much Okay, this is actually the guiding force of what the company is going to do say what you will about Facebook and meta Like at least Mark Zuckerberg’s crazy idea to rebrand itself for the metaverse actually put them in a good position for VR AR maybe AI stuff.

What is alphabet? It’s just a soup of companies. Like that’s really, that’s really all it is. It doesn’t, it doesn’t really actually mean anything. So yeah, we’ve talked about Google search getting worse. We’ve talked about so many experiences getting worse, Chrome eating up all your RAM. There, there is a good argument that just by having these people focus on their own things without building in interoperability between all their different fingers that we’d ultimately have better products.

So. We shall see. I do want to bring in a good legal expert to talk about this too. Yeah.

Ben: Also we haven’t seen a actually huge antitrust case in a while. The people who watched Ma Bell be broken up, they’re in nursing

Devindra: homes now. They are. Well, I watched the Microsoft antitrust trial, which was the other big tech one, and that led to nothing.

Yeah, nothing happened with Microsoft. It was a slap on the slap on the wrist fine. And it was like, okay, Microsoft, you gotta make people choose their browsers, right? Yeah. 10 years later, basically over 10 years later, after that happened, I was a young blogger writing up the news in like 2010 ah, yes, Microsoft is finally responding to the end of the antitrust inquiry where they were, you know, determined to be monopolizing with their Explorer and having that bundled by the time any action happened.

It didn’t make a difference. I do wonder if the D. A. J. Has Taken all this in and it’s just maybe we should be a little more proactive and a little more forceful about how we push these things. It is, we don’t know what will happen. We don’t know how it’ll affect like the free market or whatever.

But I also think like we have seen these services degrade so much because of Google’s own monopoly on search and also like now they’re just so focused on AI. Are they going to be caring about fixing these other product issues? I don’t really think so. I don’t know. Okay. Speaking of Google, by the way, like there’s a bunch of other news going around.

Two

Ben: Nobels were Google related this year. Demis

Devindra: Hassabis the head of Google DeepMind that is their AI arm. So it’s the Google AI stuff essentially Google’s DeepMind AI head, this is a guy not directly working on physics, is one of two people who won a Nobel Prize chemistry award.

Ben: Help the development of A modeling program for protein folding.

There you go. So, the really funny thing about this is that hopefully in the next few weeks, we’re going to have a segment on the show about protein folding and distributed computing. Because months ago, someone emailed us asking a question about whether or not folding at home is still relevant in the age of AI modeling of similar biological processes.

And I was like, Hey, that’s really interesting. Like I did a little bit of research on it and then we just ended up getting pulled away from that question by, you know, the tides of following weekly news. Now, since we had a. Episode where it seemed like we had a space for another subject. I was like, okay, let’s look into this again So I started looking into it this week and then literally yesterday, Wednesday, October 9th They announced that DeepMind founders and and higher ups won the Nobel Prize for protein folding.

So this is really interesting I hope to get someone to talk really knowledgeably about this on sometime soon The prize was Demis Hasis John Jumper, and then a guy who is a professor at the University of Washington who has done similar work with like machine learning, figuring out protein folding, the, these,

Devindra: these all really seem like Nobel prizes for ai.

We also saw the news that well, one of somebody who used to work at Google. Also won a Nobel prize in physics. That’s Jeffrey Hinton, who he left Google last year. We talked about, there were a lot of articles about him talking about the dangers of developing AI, but he and his team, I believe were one of the first to start doing the inherent.

The initial technology around machine learning, or at least was it neural nets? Like the idea of building for a neural net was something they, he had worked on. What is interesting here, both so really AI being highlighted in the Nobel prizes. Does everybody remember why the Nobel prizes, why the Nobel prize is the thing?

At all.

Ben: Because the guy who invented dynamite said, Hey, maybe I’ve done more harm than good, So I’d like to award people doing more good than harm.

Devindra: So, anyway, those examples of AI Certainly could be used for good. Better chemistry modeling, better protein folding modeling. But it does feel a little weird now that we’re like, Yeah, yeah, give AI all the things.

Surely this will be a net good for humanity.

Ben: Something that really strikes me about this is that the Nobel Prizes are usually really okay with being a bit behind the curve. So, a scientific discovery might have happened and then 10 or 15 years later, the Nobel Committee will look at it and say, at, you know, everything that happened in the wake of this scientific breakthrough.

Let’s say it’s in, you know, x ray crystallography a long time ago, or gene editing with CRISPR like 10, 15 years ago, they are totally okay with not like giving the. Award to like the newest hottest thing which makes me wonder. Do they know something that we don’t? I is this like a way of heralding in okay Yeah, guys, we are in a new era.

Like we are giving out a couple of Nobel Prizes for Artificial intelligence related stuff because it is

Devindra: that big a deal It’s it feels like an early like they just don’t want to be left out You know, just so that they’re doing this. Can you, you should read the description of why These two guys were awarded the the prize in physics

Ben: Yeah, so the royal swedish academy of sciences said that it awarded the prize to john hopfield and jeffrey hinton This is the nobel prize in physics Because they used tools from physics to develop methods that are the foundation of today’s powerful machine learning It is revolutionizing science and engineering Engineering and daily life.

That is a very interesting stretch. Again, like the Nobel prizes are usually given out for a new method of figuring out how like a subatomic particle moves or something like a really novel approach to some tiny little thing that usually comes out of CERN does not come out of Palo Alto or Mountain View.

Devindra: It’s just I do feel like, yeah, we would have maybe waited a little until generative AI and a lot of the, the machine learning tools genuinely did more for our society, but I feel like they’re just trying to get ahead of themselves. Okay, but on the

Ben: other hand generative AI, that’s like a relatively new thing, so, the Nobel Prize is not being awarded for that.

It’s being awarded for maybe all of the advances that have been happening in machine learning for the last 25, 30 years.

Devindra: The, the neural networking stuff, the stuff that has kind of gotten us to this point or the idea of training computer like this, I’m, you know, we have talked a little bit about quantum computing and what that could mean.

And to me, that feels like the thing that could actually be really useful for science is if we could ever get a handle on it. But that is the idea of you know, information, you know, points existing as like super states, you know, where it’s not just binary bits.

Ben: And my not so hot take is that we’re not going to get anywhere close to AGI until we actually have a quantum computer that works.

And we barely can get qubits to work right now.

Devindra: We can barely get qubits to work. That’s the, that’s the whole thing. But I do feel like those two may be interconnected. I don’t know about AGI, but I’ve written, I’ve read enough about the singularity in my lifetime, Mr. Michio Kaku, who was on the show at one point too, was a big like proponent of that.

To think like people have been kind of hoping for this thing. I just don’t know if it’s legit or if it’s like people waiting for the second coming of Jesus. Or something like it feels a little bit of like it

Ben: is pretty religious But you know what other people feel religious about nintendo and nintendo released a new piece of hardware But it’s not the switch to tell us more about it.

Devindra: It’s not the switch to I don’t know if you all saw this because this just dropped last well yesterday But nintendo unveiled alarmo a 100 motion sensing alarm clock It looks like a cute little it’s round has like nintendo fonts You On it, like for, for the time and everything, you can choose different themes from different games, like Super Mario Odyssey, Legends of Zelda, Breath of the Wild, Splatoon 3, Pikmin 4, and Ring Fit Adventure.

You can set wake up time. So what’s kind of cool, it’s similar to the Amazon motion sensing alarm clock we’ve talked about before. It starts to make the noise of, of the like game you choose. And as you move, as you like, you know, toss and turn in bed, trying to wake up. Okay. It’ll start making noises.

So like the Mario theme makes like ring makes like coin noises as you’re like tossing around and when you get up and leave the bed, There’s like a big celebratory noise, at least according to the video. So that’s,

Ben: yeah. And as I understand it, it’s not just making coin noises as you roll around in the middle of the night.

It’s like kind of trying to get you out of bed. So the more that you’re moving, it’s rewarding. It will, it

Devindra: seems like it also does track your, your sleep cycle a little bit too. So like there, there is like some data that’s happening there.

Ben: It doesn’t have integration with Pokemon sleep. That seems like a missed opportunity.

The article on Engadget talks about Hey, if you want like Nintendo themed sleep tracking, use Pokemon sleep. It seems like such an easy slam dunk to just put those. You had one job, Nintendo. You had one job.

But otherwise it’s just. Feels like surprisingly Nintendo, like every now and then Nintendo comes out with just a thing out of total left field. You know, Labo what’s another example of something that came out before Labo because Nintendo has been doing this

Devindra: for

Ben: a long time.

Devindra: Just like a standalone.

I mean, you know, the game and watch stuff. Those were like little portable tiny things, but I think it’s something like Ring Fit Adventure where Nintendo does the thing and you just look at it and go huh. Okay, that’s, that’s weird. But then like it sort of percolates in your brain a little and you’re like, that’s actually pretty cool.

I would actually like that. Remember the whole it was at least two or three months then where people were really hot on Ring Fit Adventure. Was that around the time of the pandemic? It might’ve been. It was like early pandemic too. It was like good timing of us just all being stuck at home.

Okay, Nintendo made this weird squishy circle thing. That’s cool.

Ben: But also people were wondering like, how do I work out if I’m not at the gym? It feels very Japan just to be a game company that just comes out of left field and does an alarm clock. Intelligent, kind of intelligent clock to Apple intelligence, Apple intelligence finally arrives on October 28th.

What do you think about that?

Devindra: I mean, I just want to bring it up because, Hey, we have a time. We have a, you know, a general sense of when it’s coming. I’ve been testing out these features for a while. And I think a lot of them are really cool. The notification summary has been is it’s so good because sometimes.

Friends would just be like texting, right? Like you get five or 10 texts all at once. And you’re like, what, what is happening? And you take one look down. It’s somebody is mad about this. Yada, yada, yada. Like the summaries have generally been very good for me. And I think that stuff is good. Removing background objects from photos.

Good stuff just really really helpful in the moment. What’s that feature called on pixel phones? I forget what Android in general about Android specifics. But yes, there there was like a magic erase option there, too Yeah, I was going to say magic eraser, but that is a that’s a clean thing it’s something like that too, but It works really well like in terms of highlighting a specific object and removing it there are instances where it’s too big and it can’t like extrapolate like what should be a background so it looks really messy but sometimes like it just like smooths out a bright ugly object in the background was just like general unfocused stuff and that actually may be better.

For a particular photo. So, and you know, I like those things. I think people are really gonna enjoy this. If you want to try them out early, you can just go install the public, the public test release. That’s better than the developer candidates stuff I’ve been using. So. You can, you can get a good look at this.

We’re not getting the series stuff yet. The features will all be rolled out piecemeal. I do have the new Siri that I’ve been testing just in terms of the look of it. And also that is very cool. I’ve talked about that being cool. So I don’t know. I’m looking forward to it. Ben, like this is probably a good year for you to upgrade your poor little iPhone SE to see what you can get for that, or that could, that could just be your China phone.

You know, whenever, whenever that happens.

Ben: Yeah, whenever I bring it to China and I don’t want to get spied on. But I’m also thinking like it’s just good to have kind of like a backup phone knocking around because I also have like my old iPhone SE. I actually still have every iPhone that I’ve gotten to date.

Like up until, or like I officially switched in 2014. So I have a five C an se, an SE two, and you know, it might be time for a big boy phone sometime soon. Okay. So let’s talk about Halo. Let’s talk about Halo Three Four. Free Industries is now Halo Studios. How do you feel about that?

Devindra: I feel good about that.

I’m gonna start playing this video too.

Ben: I’m pretty sure that the reason that they rebranded from 3, 4, 3 to Halo Studios is only because 3, 4, 3 industries. Has become known as the one that released the bad Halo games and they want to distance themselves from that.

Devindra: I mean, yeah, there, there is sort of that too, but I think like the sometimes.

A rebranding is good, because I don’t think the people who were initially at 343 when the whole like Bungie break off happened, like that was when Bungie left, right? And then they went off to do Destiny and do their own thing, so Microsoft kept the Halo brand, kept the Halo stuff. That team became 343 Industries.

They had a bad run. Because they were so trapped in terms of doing what Halo did in an era where Call of Duty was coming up. Shooters were getting faster and more dynamic. So basically, I just want to say we saw this news that 343 has talked about rebranding to Halo Studios. But also, more interestingly, it’s moving to Unreal Engine 5, and they produced a demo video that shows us like what Unreal Engine 5 was.

It is very great. And it’s very, it’s very, Pretty. It looks very un Halo. It looks almost it’s just so detailed and photorealistic and lifelike. The engine they were using before. People were saying there is stuff in there going back to Halo Reach. Going back to, like, when 343 initially started working on the game.

So that made it really

Ben: Was that their own engine?

Devindra: That, that was. That was a custom engine, too, which is No developer wants to do that. Everybody goes to unreal or other things like because they want to, they want to have a platform that’s easier to maintain and manage, and they don’t want to do all that work themselves.

I think Capcom is one of the rare ones to have a good hit with its own RE engine, which started with Resident Evil seven, right. And that ended up being used across so many other things. But the, the footage we see here. Looks good. They don’t look like Halo environments. They look like more detailed There is they talked about several games being made in the Halo universe right now I’ve got a lot of feelings about Halo because I I spent a lot of my time in college playing the first Halo in like Local, you know LAN matches with other people at college and that was before Xbox Lives That was before online multiplayer was just people gathering around TV You You could hear shouting and other dorm, like other dorm rooms down the hall.

When you beat somebody, there was like a fun, visceral element to

Ben: that. I really wonder what master chief is going to look like with that much detail. Is it going to look a little bit unreal? Unreal Tournament? No.

Devindra: Unreal Engine? Wow. The show gives you, it gave you a pretty good look at what a super realistic Master Chief could be like.

The, the main thing is New engine’s good. I think it’s a good thing to have a fresh start and also being able to use more modern technology. Yeah, Brie brand is good. And also,

Ben: why don’t you decentralize the master chief? I know that the master chief is going to be like your big thing. And that’s what sells like all of the other merch, the shirts, the like little statues of John one, one seven and all of that.

But you know what the people actually want? Unreal T2.

Devindra: I mean, yeah. Let’s talk about ODST, which was a cool experiment of a game. Kind of novelistic, had a cool jazz soundtrack, that’s like very late era Bungie. No Master Chief. No Master Chief at all. Was, it told a very specific story. No Spartans at all, right?

No Spartans, yeah. That was about humans, right? ODST was mainly humans.

Ben: That was the Helldivers of the or the Starship Troopers of the Halo universe. This

Devindra: is, this whole thing is sort of like the Star Wars problem, right? Where the franchise became so big, it is really hard to steer the ship into doing new things and exciting things.

And Microsoft is not a company that’s really known for taking chances too, especially with a flagship franchise. But maybe things have gotten so bad because Halo Infinite took so long to develop, was such a mess to develop. I actually really like that game. I think the single player campaign is a lot of fun.

It’s very open world. I’ve done almost a hundred hours of multiplayer in that game. Like it’s just a good experience. Cause I miss Halo. I like Halo quite a bit as like an experience. So. Infinite was good, but it was not the success they needed. It was delayed by a year. It didn’t arrive when the new Xboxes arrived.

So Microsoft needs something that can kind of help them. Listen, open it up. Don’t just do Halo, like CG tactics like that. What were, what were those called? Oh yeah. That it was, I think it was

Ben: literally just,

Devindra: Halo tactics, but you know. If you’re going to do tactics experiment a little bit with the forum, give us give us something that looks like a 2d tactics games, because that is what that’s what people want right now between like stuff we’ve seen, like project triangle give us like a halo, you know, visual novel of some kind, because one thing that really pulled me into that universe were the early books, which really gave us some background that the games didn’t really cover.

So there’s a lot of, oh yeah. So there was halo tactics and then there was, I think, Halo Wars too. Yes. Halo, Halo’s good stuff. I think this is a good sign. It will be years before any of this actually leads to anything. I don’t know. Halo Infinite was supposed to be this thing where they existed for a while.

Forever Halo, right? Halo that you keep playing, you, you keep doing the the battle pass. Maybe they add more content to it or something. I don’t know if the idea is that they will eventually change the engine for Halo Infinite. That seems like too much work for a game that they’ve already spent, poured too much time into.

But I would love to see like what they do with this. I don’t know, like a classic normal Halo game starring Master Chief just seems like the worst thing to do at this point. So Yeah, let’s move on to our pop culture picks for the week. What do you got Ben?

Ben: So a couple weeks ago, I saw this documentary called set exclamation point it’s about a table setting competition at the California State Fair And it’s not like classy table setting where you’re using like fine China and everything It is like its own world of God, the taste is honestly just so bad.

It feels like a lot of these people are, you know, grown ups doing high school dioramas or something. It was an interesting look into a very specific world, just you know, any other documentary about, you know, Competitions, especially, you know, there’ve been a bunch on dog shows. Sideways was a fiction movie, but it was about, you know, the wine industry.

Right. But I feel like it didn’t go deep enough into the actual personal lives of the people who were competing. Why are they doing this? What is their like? overall life background. Some of them say that they spend like thousands of dollars on setting these tables every year, and they might do multiple competitions a year too.

So what’s going on here? There was this one couple the wife was, you know, a yearly competitor in the table setting competition. And her husband was just like, Yeah, I participate. You know, whenever they had him in the sit down confessional interviews, it seemed like he was really gritting his teeth, but I wanted to know so much more about that.

So, if you want a fun documentary that’s a little bit like reality TV, check out Set. I think it’s on Travel Channel or something? It’s also, it, it is from the Travel Channel. I know that it’s on Apple TV. Travel Channel’s

Devindra: still making stuff, huh? I, I only started watching them for Bourdain’s thing at that point.

That was no reservations. Good stuff. Okay. Thank you. Thank you for that, Ben. I would never think of watching a table setting documentary. I want to quickly shout out the new Uzumaki show. This is the latest Jinji Ito adaptation after we’ve had so many bad adaptations. This is one like co produced by Adult Swim too.

So it has a higher budget or like supposedly. Supposedly like more went into this than the other ones, like the Junji Ito series on Netflix, which was terrible and really crummy. This is only going to be four episodes. It’s already mired in controversy. I love the very first episode. Uzumaki is a story.

About a town that’s infested with spirals. I don’t know if you’re aware of this story, Ben, but it is. Junji Ito goes full horror, you know, in fun, cosmic, creepy body horror ways. And Uzumaki is like his, his masterpiece, right? The first episode covers I think some of the more like well known the early stories of the of the manga.

I’ve not seen the second episode yet, but immediately people were like freaking out because the first episode is really well animated. It has the stark black and white style of his, you know, his illustrations.

Ben: Yeah, it looks like the manga page just became animated, which is really, really cool.

Yeah,

Devindra: just moving and really nice flow, like hair moves, character moves. There’s a lot of like nice detail to it. From what I’ve seen, there was a big fall off, wasn’t there? It was a huge fall off in episode two. People are freaking out about it. I’ve also seen some people say, it’s not as bad as you say, but even, I think the, even the showrunner was talking about yeah, they were doing the best they could with what they had.

And I think the first episode took forever, took a lot of money to make and they had to move it along much more quickly. And I don’t think the studio wanted to give them more time to work on it faster too. So once again, another like Jinji Ito adaptation, that’s like going through kind of a mess, but the first episode is good.

So at least go check that out. It’s streaming on Max, the one to watch for HBO right now. Or if you have a Delta Swim, it’s there too. So yeah, I was going to play the trailer and then I thought, thought better because I don’t want to, don’t want to inflict Jujito’s imagery on people if they don’t, if they’re not ready for it.

Ben: Thank you so much, everyone. Our go to Theme music is by game composer Dale North. Our outro music is by our former managing editor, Terrence O’Brien. And the podcast is produced by me, Ben Elman. You

Devindra: can find Devindra at Devindra on Twitter, BlueSky, Mastodon, all the fun places. Oh, I also did a guest spot on the Extra Hot Great Podcast this week.

So check me out there. I talked about the new HBO of the new Mac series, The Franchise, which is the superhero spoof sort of thing. It’s, it’s a lot of fun to check out that. That’s a podcast about movies and TV at the filmcast, thefilmcast. com.

Ben: The best way to reach me is sending us an email at podcast at engadget.

com. I’m the one checking that inbox the most often leave us a review on iTunes and subscribe on anything that gets podcasts that includes Spotify.

Devindra: Thanks folks. We’re

Ben: out.

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