DeepSeek Explained, AI Arms Race, iOS 18.3 Updates, Rube Goldberg Email Machine
Download MP3A 45 foot shark, and you hit me. Nice. Welcome to Primary Technology, the show about the tech news that matters. Big week. We're gonna have an entire section on deep seek, what it is, the ramifications on the AI companies here in the US, distillation, what even that means.
Stephen Robles:We're gonna explain all of it after the break, but we're gonna start out with some Apple news talking about iOS 18 dot 3, visual intelligence updates. I'm gonna ask Jason about the sports app because I don't know anything about sportsball, iPhone SE, 4 rumors, and more. This episode is brought to you by Notion and you, the members who support us directly. I'm one of your host, Steven Robles, back in my studio. And coming at us from a different studio this week, my friend Jason Aiten.
Stephen Robles:How's it going, Jason?
Jason Aten:It's been an interesting morning. It's been an interesting few days. I use some Chinese AI took over my my office at home, so I had to vacate. No. That's not what happened at all.
Jason Aten:No. I know you I wish that I could blame it on someone else, but it's my own fault.
Stephen Robles:So you you cut an Ethernet cable? Is that what happened?
Jason Aten:Okay. So our listeners, if you've been around, you know that my internet situation in my office, which is a shed in our backyard, is was for a long time an ethernet cable just run across the yard. Finally, my wife made me bury the ethernet cable because it was, you know, the neighbors were talking and so I buried the ethernet cable. But what I had not yet done because it didn't care this much is finished that whole thing. So it was buried, but then it comes out of the ground at the shed and it was literally just running in the door and it was fine.
Jason Aten:It was fine for a very long time until it was negative 15 degrees out last week. And I started putting, like, towels and stuff on the inside because it was drafty. And at some point, I must have shifted the point at which the cable comes in the door, and it was, like, to the corner. So when I shut it and when it was that cold, it just snapped the Ethernet cable. So I have now bought a crimping tool and jacks and all the things to do the rest of the work that I should have done months ago.
Jason Aten:Instead, the my punishment is I'm gonna have to do a lot of 35 degrees out. But I the Internet in my office, we're back to the situation where I can either have heat or Internet, and I need heat at this point. Podcast studio. This is actually at our church, has this very, very nice podcast studio with lights and everything, and and so this is where I am.
Stephen Robles:This is great. Our viewers might say this is Jason needs to record here all the time. I don't know. But, no. It's the office
Jason Aten:I feel I like my office. No.
Stephen Robles:Office looks good. You got the colored lights over there, and then we match. So, big news. Deep seek, we're gonna explain it. Been doing a ton of research, and that'll be after the break.
Stephen Robles:First, some 5 star reviews. RU for reals from the USA gives us a 5 star review. He titled his review ice cubes and toilet, which is a point for Jason.
Jason Aten:These are my people.
Stephen Robles:That's it. Also, battery percentage on. Headphone in dominant pocket, and it's the oldest piece of tech, and I have there's a few of our listeners who shared their oldest piece of tech is a 16 year old Samsung monitor, and then after that, the Apple smart keyboard that uses double a batteries. Jason just won
Jason Aten:this game. Talking about. Yeah.
Stephen Robles:I know. That's the one you
Jason Aten:I won this episode. Mark this one down for me.
Stephen Robles:You you are. We're gonna get to another thing you won. This is so fresh. Mike from New York City said battery percentage on.
Jason Aten:Yeah. You're winning this one. People. Definitely wanted to make sure you got that in. But I think next week, we should I I we might have done this at one point.
Jason Aten:I can't remember, but we did talk about the oldest piece of tech and the the qualifier was that we still use. Right. I started exploring the backroom of our basement, which is just dangerous, by the way, as a general rule.
Stephen Robles:Leprechauns back there.
Jason Aten:And there were lots of yes. To look and find the oldest piece of Apple hardware that I still own even if we don't use it.
Stephen Robles:That's good.
Jason Aten:And I will tell you that one of them is an original Apple TV.
Stephen Robles:Oh, the big white one?
Jason Aten:But I yep. But I have something older, and I'm gonna I'm gonna show you next week.
Stephen Robles:I was so excited. Well, listen. We had listeners reaching out in the community and via email about their oldest tech, and so I think we should do this for another week. Richard sent us an email, said his oldest piece of tech, it's an Ipod nano series 3, which was, like, the fat nano, like, the wide one. Yeah.
Stephen Robles:Yeah. And it was sold in September 2007. So that's pretty old. Like, say, 18 years? Yeah.
Stephen Robles:18 years old. And, also that he has the TuneBuds lanyards, so he can wear it around his neck, which is amazing. Apple used to make a bunch of stuff to wear on your neck. The iPod shuffle used to be, like, around the neck thing. That's hilarious.
Stephen Robles:Yep. And then, also, Mike Eli in the community, he shared a picture. He has a older iPad mini, which was reminiscent because this is basically the iPad mini that was in my hotel room last week. Yeah. Old school one.
Stephen Robles:So listen, keep sharing your old tech, either old tech that you still use or just your oldest tech that you can find, and you can email us podcast at primary tech dot f m, attach the image or just write us an email and let us know, that'd be fun, or comment on the episode post when it goes up in the community at social.primarytech.fm. And before I forget, did you know what movie I was talking about?
Jason Aten:Okay. I have a guess, but only because of the way it relates to one of our topic.
Stephen Robles:That's correct.
Jason Aten:I'm gonna go with deep blue sea.
Stephen Robles:Jay, I don't know how every time you say, I'm gonna take a wild guess, and then you nail it.
Jason Aten:Well, here's the thing. I don't think I would have got it except for I was like, it's not Jaws.
Stephen Robles:Not Jaws.
Jason Aten:It's like it's like sharks. What else is there a shark? And I was like, yeah. So
Stephen Robles:I'm always surprised too. So Deep Blue Sea came out in 1999, and I'm always surprised when you see, like, the video games and the movies that came out that year. It was a massive year for like all of me. It was like The Matrix and another big anyway, just throwing that out there. Alright.
Stephen Robles:A couple quick things before we get into like the news news. Last week, I was reporting live from Miami because I was at the Apple store opening and I wanted to share the second video that, I published after that, which was this. Not only was it the grand opening, which I was there for the store opening, we're gonna talk about in our personal tech, Apple Store openings, things like that. But I got to interview senior vice president Deirdre O'Brien. She's over retail and people.
Stephen Robles:She reports to Tim Cook, like, she's very high up there, and I actually got an opportunity to interview her shortly on it. So I'll link that video in the show notes. The most disappointing thing of that day is my last question for her was, does she have the battery percentage on or off on her iPhone?
Jason Aten:And the part about that was the disappointing is that she told you that I convinced her she should have it on.
Stephen Robles:No. She did not say that.
Jason Aten:She's pretty close to that. She just didn't say my name. I appreciate that she didn't say my name, but she said she's a recent convert.
Stephen Robles:She said she's a recent convert,
Jason Aten:which is even What else can that mean?
Stephen Robles:Well, that is true.
Jason Aten:Protect. Deidre, we appreciate you. Thank you.
Stephen Robles:Yeah. Thank you for listening. But, yeah. So my my secret goal now is to, interview every senior vice president at Apple in some short capacity at least so I can ask about battery percentage. That's that's that's the goal.
Stephen Robles:Also, Eddie q was there at the opening. Eddie q, like, opened the doors with Deirdre O'Brien. I had no idea he was gonna be there, and I really wanted to get a selfie and maybe ask him about battery percentage. He was out so fast. He, like, opened the door.
Stephen Robles:He waved, and then I turned around, and he was gone. Poof.
Jason Aten:He he would you thought he was opening the door to let you all in. He was just opening the door because he was leaving. He's, like, I gotta go.
Stephen Robles:He's, like, I'm out of here. But like
Jason Aten:a phantom. He just vanishes into the Miami Miami streets.
Stephen Robles:He did. I mean, maybe he had to catch a flight. That's fine. Also, while I was down there, one of the big updates so iOS 18.3 was released publicly earlier this week on Monday, so everybody can download all your devices on your iPad, macOS 15.3, plus Apple TV and HomePod. You wanna update your HomePods.
Stephen Robles:That takes me 3 hours for some reason. But when it comes to, like, changes and updates, if you have an iPhone 16, one of the biggest changes was Visual Intelligence got some new features. You can also Apple Intelligence is also on by default now if you have a 15 Pro or iPhone 16, and so let us know how your experience with that has been. If you didn't enable it before because you didn't want to, now it's on by default. I did an entire video just on visual intelligence, because I was in Miami.
Stephen Robles:There's a bunch of landmarks down there. I was, like, let me go walk around and try it out. And I even did the thing where I tried to identify dog breeds, and I asked people to take pictures of their dogs, and it was super weird. But I did it. I did it for the video.
Stephen Robles:And so I'll link that video down in the description too. Turns out visual intelligence is not great, as far as recognizing things, and, yeah. That's that's correct.
Jason Aten:So But what you should have done, this is this would have been good, is then save the photos and see if the photos app could identify them. Because my experience with the photos app is that it's actually really good at this. So it's sort of shocking that that why just use the same technology. Come on.
Stephen Robles:It is really yeah. It is weird. And so it the 2 new features in 18 dot 3, to be clear, is if you take a picture of a date or if you have Visual Intelligence up and it sees a date on screen, it will prompt you to add it to the calendar. It doesn't really, like, pull other information, like, so you typically have to title it manually, and, you know, it just it's still pretty cumbersome to to actually add it to it. But the other one was recognizing animals and plants, and the animal recognition is interesting.
Stephen Robles:Like, I actually did dogs in real life. It recognized a multi poo, like, when I actually took it. Every other dog it was like just didn't show me anything. But if you just, like, Google image search different animals and point visual intelligence at it, it does a pretty good job recognizing those. Like, it did cheetah, it'll do kangaroo, it'll do alligator.
Stephen Robles:So if it's, like, pristine photos that you're just pulling from Google search, it's doing it. All the information is just from Wikipedia. It just has a Wikipedia article link at the bottom of every one, but it it can it can do it. Landmarks stinks at it. It just stinks at landmark.
Stephen Robles:And one of the weird things was I could literally be standing, like, 30 feet from a landmark. Apple Maps has a special pin for it. It has all the information in the Apple Maps app, and I'll do visual intelligence on it, and it just doesn't do anything. And then if I get up closer to it, it might pull up the card and show me information. And it really seems like Visual Intelligence is leaning on your location for what the information it provides rather than what it's seeing on the camera, which is a strange thing for something called visual intelligence.
Jason Aten:Yeah.
Stephen Robles:And in the same way, like, for a restaurant, I was able to do visual intelligence on, like, Bubba Gump Shrimp Co and Starbucks. It nails those, like, gives me all the you know, pulls up where you can order from. But there were other restaurants where I literally be looking at the restaurant, the name of the restaurant is on the store, and I do visual intelligence, and it's, like, nothing. It doesn't show me anything. And it's, like, okay.
Stephen Robles:So you're clearly not reading the text, which it can. You can literally, like, take a visual intelligence picture of a book page, and it will OCR the text, and even even offer offer to summarize it. But for some reason, like a restaurant in front of you, just not gonna do it. And if you get really close-up to it, maybe it will, maybe it won't. So still has a long way to go.
Stephen Robles:Mhmm. Have you used it? I mean, do you ever
Jason Aten:Nope. But I did just when I was going to plug in the iPhone 16 to use as a camera, it had to do the thing where, like, you've updated your software. And I'm like, I didn't even know that it that had happened on that phone because I only use it as a camera. And so it has 8 so I'm excited. I won't do it now because that would be a weird experience for the people watching this video right now since it's serving as a camera.
Jason Aten:But, yeah. I'm gonna do that later.
Stephen Robles:Yeah. Play around with it. I would be curious, your experience. I'll probably never use it in, like, day to day life, but, you know, it's there. It's it's helpful if, like, there's a number on, like, phone numbers and email addresses.
Stephen Robles:It's really good at recognizing. So if you see a phone number on a building and you just wanna call it real quick for some reason rather than walk in, you can do visual intelligence and it will just have the one button to call it. So it could do that, but, yeah. The the landmark stuff, business information, it's it's hit or miss. Now, I want I need to ask you about Apple Sports because I know nothing about sports, Sportsball.
Stephen Robles:Although, I did during the Bills playoff game, or it was born in the what was it? The AFC or NFC?
Jason Aten:The the Bills were in the AFC championship game.
Stephen Robles:C c, I don't know. But, okay, the NFC. So I have a friend who's, like, Super Bills fan, and I just wanted to know they were going to the Super Bowl. And I had enough tangential sports knowledge to know if they won this game, they were going to the Super Bowl. And so while the game was going on in the evening, I said, well, I wanna find out the score.
Stephen Robles:What's the fastest way for me to see the score? And I was like, well, let me try to just open the sports app on the iPhone and see, like, what happens. And turns out it knew exactly what it wanted to see. I opened the sports app, and the score of the Bills game was right there big on top with the info, like, the live clock, the quarter, and I was like, okay. I opened Apple Sports app maybe twice a year, and it did did what I wanted it to do.
Stephen Robles:And now they added new features to it, which is, like, where you can broadcast games. It's gonna include that info, at least where to watch national games in the app. So my question to you, because you're a sportsball person, have you been using the sports app?
Jason Aten:No. Never.
Stephen Robles:Is it?
Jason Aten:The, the reason I don't like the sports app is I I'm actually surprised that you got what you wanted out of it because it isn't designed for you to just do what you did, which is literally just like, oh, there's a game happening. Let me look it up.
Stephen Robles:Mhmm.
Jason Aten:What it's designed for you to do is to follow certain teams, and then it will surface information when those teams are playing. So if you wanted to look for a game and the team you're not following because you don't care about the Bills the rest of the year, right, then it's it's it's not really meant to do that. Like, I just pulled it up and searched Bills, and the only option it gave me is follow like, to follow that team. It didn't tell me anything about any like, if I search for the bills, it doesn't even let me, like, tap on the word bills to see, like, what the recent games were. It just all I can do is favorite it.
Jason Aten:So it's like, no. I just wanted to see their I don't wanna favorite them. They're not my favorite team. I just want so I just would search Google. Like, if you type any team name in the Google, it'll instantly bring up a card that shows you recent game scores, schedule, that kind of stuff.
Jason Aten:That's it's still way a better experience.
Stephen Robles:And I and I've done that before. And I will say I'm actually not following anything because I didn't wanna get notifications. So I think just because it was a big game It was
Jason Aten:the AFC championship game. Yeah. That's the reason why.
Stephen Robles:Yeah. It's a bit it just it showed up. Lastly though, I was showing we were watching, the Hunger Games movie the other night, introducing it to to the kids which
Jason Aten:Also basically the AFC championship game. That's fine.
Stephen Robles:So and and it was like the climax of the movie and I got a big old notification on the Apple TV saying, like, the war Golden Warrior state, it's a heated game. Click here to watch. Big old notification covering the top right corner. I said, I don't I never ever want that, and I know there's a way to turn it off. Do you know how to turn
Jason Aten:it off? But this is good, Steven, because this is how you know that Apple is not tracking you. Because if it was, it would know that the last thing Steven cares about is the golden warrior State whatever is is what I think you just called them.
Stephen Robles:That's right. That's exactly what I
Jason Aten:But it's not nearly as bad as when I'm actually watching a a game and then on YouTube TV and the notification that pops up in the corner is you should watch this game. It's close. I'm, like, yes. I know. Leave me alone.
Jason Aten:I'm watching the game right now.
Stephen Robles:It'll notify you of the game you're watching.
Jason Aten:He has no idea. Exactly. Amazing.
Stephen Robles:Yeah. I know there's a way to turn off those things. I I forget how to do it, so maybe I'll look it up for the next week. Let's see what we that was annoying. Apple Vision Pro, real quick.
Stephen Robles:It also got Vision OS 2.3. I put it on to charge it. I also put it on to watch the, season 2 episode 1 of severance. It's a good show. It's a good show.
Jason Aten:I'm about to start Severance because I I need to be able to, you know Wait. Hold on.
Stephen Robles:Where I can You not see the first season?
Jason Aten:I've never seen any of Severance.
Stephen Robles:Show's over.
Jason Aten:Severance is over or this show?
Stephen Robles:No. No. No. No. I'm just kidding.
Stephen Robles:Jason, yes. Have you
Jason Aten:have you made it through Silo yet?
Stephen Robles:I'm on episode 7 of 10.
Jason Aten:Okay. Then get back to me when you're done, and then you can give me a hard time about not Listen. Watch Severance.
Stephen Robles:I got mixed feelings about Solo. He's making me feel all kinds of ways. I I was liking him, and then I was, like, this dude's a little unhinged.
Jason Aten:That's exactly the way you're supposed to feel about Solo.
Stephen Robles:I could tell.
Jason Aten:It's fine.
Stephen Robles:I could tell. Okay. Well, if you Jason, severance. You gotta watch severance. I I've I've we might have to do a whole bonus episode just talking about Severance, because that's I need to know what you think.
Stephen Robles:And the second episode the second season started out, and I'm, like, it's amazing, like first of all, Ben Stiller, the director, I I forget where if the story came from somewhere, or if that's a story that he and and I'm not sure where it came from, but just so interesting, so compelling. And the the acting in the the first episode of season 2, there's just so many long shots and conversations that in so many other shows, like, you get bored, and, like, I'm tempted to reach, like, to look at Instagram or whatever, and Severance just I don't know. It just captures you. It's just it's really engrossing. So please start Can
Jason Aten:I ask can I ask a, a rabbit hole question real quick?
Stephen Robles:Of course.
Jason Aten:We don't have much to talk about today. I'm just kidding. Are you I've realized there are 2 types of people. That's a terrible way to start.
Stephen Robles:You put the ketchup on the side. You put the ketchup on the fries. That's
Jason Aten:a totally different topic we should talk about sometime. But when you were watching a show, do you sit there with, like, the Wikipedia summary of that episode in for long to know what's happening? Okay. I was just curious. Do you?
Jason Aten:I mean, a 100%.
Stephen Robles:Wait a minute. Why are you why aren't you just watching the episode?
Jason Aten:I I can't. I don't know. I have a hard time. I have to I have to, like, follow along to see what's I need to know what's gonna happen. I don't have to do it, man.
Stephen Robles:Wait a minute. So when you're watching Silo, do you know what's gonna happen in the episode before it happens?
Jason Aten:Silo is based on a set of books, and I've read 2 of them. So
Stephen Robles:Okay. Fair enough. But but, like, for for most, you're gonna you can't do that with severance. Don't do that.
Jason Aten:I won't. Alright.
Stephen Robles:I won't do that
Jason Aten:with severance. Severance How long is it gonna take for me to like severance? Do I have to watch, like, 4 episodes first?
Stephen Robles:It's gonna be so weird, but by the end of the first episode, you're gonna wanna watch you gotta you're gonna keep watching. Like, it's not gonna be hard to watch the second episode. So Okay. Yeah.
Jason Aten:Great.
Stephen Robles:I'm not sure if I mean, I I don't know your wife that well. I don't know if she'll be into it, but it's super weird.
Jason Aten:Yeah. I wasn't planning to to make her watch it. She's not gonna
Stephen Robles:watch it. It's super great though. And I I did put on the Vision Pro to watch Severance because it's I think it's how you intended to do it, as the Lord intended. But anyway
Jason Aten:So they really only want 80,000 people to watch Severance
Stephen Robles:is what you're saying. No. No. But also so with Applevision Pro, so 2 dot 3 came out. Not really a bunch of features, but probably Nvidia now supports cloud gaming with over 2,000 games for Applevision Pro, and I immediately went to I didn't understand exactly what this was.
Stephen Robles:So I was in Vision Pro last night searching the App Store for NVIDIA and GeForce. That's not what this is. You just you have to go on Safari for the cloud gaming. I was going to try it, but I couldn't figure it out last night. And then I missed I missed this one line in this 905 Mac Mac article.
Stephen Robles:All of this happens through Safari's native Vision OS app.
Jason Aten:Then this is not really an announcement. Like, this is not really, we made a thing for a thing. This is, like, Internet browsers still work. Like, I don't I don't understand.
Stephen Robles:I do I do think we should do a retrospective because February 2nd is going to be the 1 year anniversary of the VisionPRO launch.
Jason Aten:Yes. And and it's and I and I've it's my motivation to finally write the article that I've been working on now for 9 months, which is I use the VisionPRO every day, and here's how much time it saves me.
Stephen Robles:Okay. Yeah. Please. Yes. You should do that so that we
Jason Aten:can cover this. I just had to time it for, it came out a year ago. I guess I might that's a good day to do this.
Stephen Robles:There's there's also a new immersive piece of content coming out Friday, so tomorrow as we record, which is about, like, bull riding and rodeo stuff. It's like man versus beast is what it's called. So anyway, there's that. That's that should be fun. I like all the immersive stuff.
Stephen Robles:I watched the, the ice swim. Did you see the ice dive?
Jason Aten:No. Because I'm I'm not using it for entertainment.
Stephen Robles:Wow. I'm using it to do work on. The best use case.
Jason Aten:No. The best use case is that virtual Mac display. Let's be honest.
Stephen Robles:That I will give you that. I did that while I was in the in Miami to edit video. It is pretty great. Not in the lobby. I did it in the room.
Stephen Robles:But anyway, last little, like, rumor thing. I just wanted to mention it. It seems pretty clear that the iPhone SE 4 has leaked in the design. This is what it supposedly looks like. Single camera, looks very similar to the iPhone 16 lineup, you know, flat edges, things like that.
Stephen Robles:But notably, it looks like it's going to do away with the home button, and it's gonna have a notch, not a dynamic island. So it'll be a notch, face ID, iPhone. Doesn't look like again, can't really tell from these pictures, it's like early, maybe renders or mockups, but if it'll be touch ID in the sleep button or if it'll be face ID, I'm thinking face ID, But this might be it. This might be the year, Jason, a home button goes away for good.
Jason Aten:On the phone. I mean, because there are still iPads that have a home button. It's just not at the bottom.
Stephen Robles:Not the base model, though.
Jason Aten:The touch ID button, I guess, is what I'm saying.
Stephen Robles:Touch ID. Yeah. Touch ID. But a home button, specifically, this was the last product with a home button that Apple sells. I think it's gonna go away.
Stephen Robles:I think it's it. Do you think that?
Jason Aten:I'm surprised. I I'm I am surprised that they don't have a phone that has touch ID. I just feel like I I guess it can't I I don't really know this for a fact, but it feels to me like there's some kind of an accessibility feature there. Right?
Stephen Robles:Like but they would know
Jason Aten:I mean, Apple definitely pays a lot of attention to that sort of thing, and so I I'll just take the word for it. But I I think the most interesting thing about that story, and I I actually just realized this when I was listening to upgrade, that was probably yesterday or something. There must be some kind of, like, lotto, which is basically someone comes along and pays off someone that works at one of these because it's always the case companies. That's where all of these leaks are coming from is the case companies. It's, like, one person gets offered, like, $300,000 to share the CAD files, and then they get fired, and no one cares because that you you it's enough.
Jason Aten:Good. Yep.
Stephen Robles:They're good. Yeah. It is it is interesting, but we should be seeing that. We didn't really talk about this, but looking at Apple's releases this year, we talked about, you know, wanna see a HomePod with a screen, things like that. It seems like the iPhone SE 4 is a sure thing.
Stephen Robles:An M4 MacBook Air, very likely to come. I think we we'll probably see that before WW, you think? M4 MacBook Air?
Jason Aten:Oh, that's an interesting question. Because, like, they launched the 15 inch at WWDC.
Stephen Robles:Right.
Jason Aten:And then they launched the m threes in I guess it would have been, like, the spring. No. Yeah. Was that right? I think so.
Jason Aten:I don't know. I bet you we'll see them. I bet we'll see them before. It the question is just, like, are they do they have enough of them? Because they're gonna sell a lot of m three MacBook or m 4 MacBook Airs.
Jason Aten:I will get one.
Stephen Robles:You're gonna get it?
Jason Aten:I will get an I'll get an m 4 MacBook Air and I'll get a lot
Stephen Robles:of those. Macbooks in m 2, threes, and fours.
Jason Aten:No. I only have threes and fours at this point.
Stephen Robles:But Right. Exactly.
Jason Aten:I don't think I have any
Stephen Robles:any 2. What how many MacBooks do you have right now? You got your including the review units.
Jason Aten:Right now I have I only have 3 right now, but I have
Stephen Robles:a mini
Jason Aten:a Mac mini and an Imac. So
Stephen Robles:But but but how so but you have a MacBook Pro and a MacBook Air, don't
Jason Aten:you?
Stephen Robles:I have 2 MacBook Pros and a MacBook Air. And how many are actually your personal ones?
Jason Aten:Of those, one. One of those things. I don't have any review MacBook Airs. I'll say that much right now.
Stephen Robles:So the MacBook Air is yours?
Jason Aten:Yes.
Stephen Robles:Every time I think about, should I send this Imac back to Apple? I think, you know what? Jason has MacBooks from, like, 18
Jason Aten:years ago. Me and he's, like, wait. Let me know when you send back the Vision Pro and I will I get a label for this.
Stephen Robles:Which is, like, I mean, isn't it isn't it past the date? It's okay. Never mind. Sorry. Sorry.
Jason Aten:Isn't it past the date? It was listen. I'm gonna publish an article on, whatever, Tuesday, and it's gonna be fantastic.
Stephen Robles:It's all been leading up to this.
Jason Aten:Then I can send it back. It's actually weird because I keep seeing people say, like, 1 year with the VisionPRO, and I'm like, I mean, other than the fact that you got one as a review unit, there's no way that you've had it for a year because the thing didn't come out until next month. So I don't understand.
Stephen Robles:It's I mean, it's close.
Jason Aten:It's YouTuber time.
Stephen Robles:It's
Jason Aten:you gotta do it first to get the views.
Stephen Robles:YouTuber time dilation. That's what's good.
Jason Aten:The thing is there's no there's no embargo on a 1 year with story because Yeah. Who's gonna say?
Stephen Robles:It's it's been long enough, and I'm I'm actually using it a little more, meaning, like, actually once a week instead of twice a month. So it's a You
Jason Aten:charge it once a week is what you're saying.
Stephen Robles:I mean, I gotta update the software. So Alright. We need to do a deep dive. I didn't mean to do the pun, but on deep seek. I'm gonna try to explain all of that.
Stephen Robles:Deep seeking. And the ramifications. But before we do, I wanna thank this week's sponsor, which is Notion. We've been using Notion this entire episode because that's literally where the notes for every episode of Primary Tech live. They're all in I'm literally staring at Notion right now, and Notion is an incredible way to keep track of all the things.
Stephen Robles:Your notes, your personal stuff, your projects, and Notion AI can do a bunch of stuff with that data and help you be more productive and work faster. Literally, we've even been using it since the beginning of primary tech, keep track of every episode. We have a huge database and the sponsor information, everything is there. So listen, Notion does it all. Notion combines your notes, docs, and projects into one space that's simple and beautifully designed, then you can leverage the power of AI right inside Notion, which is one of the huge benefits, you know, rather than having to copy and paste into Sky GPT or something else, you can literally just use Notion AI right in your docs without jumping back and forth.
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Stephen Robles:I I learned that like several months ago, but you could literally just have a link copied on your clipboard, select text in Notion in the app on your iPhone or iPad, and you just paste it, and then it creates a rich text hyperlink. And once I learn how to do that, I'm sold. Notion has just been the one place where we just put everything. So try Notion for free when you go to notion.com/primarytechnology, that's all lowercase, the link's in the show notes, you can just click it there. Notion.com/primarytechnology to try the powerful easy to use Notion AI today, and when you use our link you're supporting our show.
Stephen Robles:That's notion.com/primarytechnology, and if you're gonna use it solo, like I've used it for, like, personal video projects for a long time, you can just do it for free, and that's been really useful for me for a long time. So notion.com/primarytechnology. Our thanks to Notion for sponsoring this episode. Speaking of AI, Jason, you could not go on the Internet this past week without seeing the word DeepSeq. Deep seek is everywhere.
Stephen Robles:Deep seek took me a while to care about it. I had to realize what is this about? What is this for? So I'm going to try and boil down what is deep seek, why it matters, and we can talk about the ramifications, then Jason has a great article talking about like Sam Altman's response, Meta's response, NVIDIA. NVIDIA lost $600,000,000,000 of market value because of this deep seek announcement and what came forth.
Stephen Robles:So what is DeepSeq? DeepSeq is a Chinese created and developed LLM, AI product. It's very similar to ChatChippity. It's an app you can get on your phone, at least for now, until it gets banned, a la TikTok. I mean, for real, we'll talk about privacy and security ramifications in a second, but it's an app.
Stephen Robles:It's also a website, and it is a chatbot like ChatGPT that you can use to do your AI queries. So it's led by CEO Liang Wing Ting. It's 2 year old and it originally was a Chinese hedge fund which then out of it grew, DeepSeq as this AI company. It is focused on AI, trying to build artificial general intelligence like OpenAI and all that kind of stuff. But the biggest things are this kinda it seemed to come out of nowhere, but it has been being developed over the past couple years.
Stephen Robles:I think it was back in 2021 or 22. They did purchase a bunch of like NVIDIA GPUs and used it to to build DeepSeq. But the biggest, thing or the biggest, point of information about deep seek is what it costs to train and develop, which seems significantly cheaper than what American AI companies has been claiming it takes. So for instance, I believe Sam Altman in OpenAI has said it took something like a $100,000,000 or something like or much more to train Chat gpt4 or whatever to to to create that foundational model. And deep seek is claiming it created its reasoning model, which is r one.
Stephen Robles:There's also a secondary model called v 3. Think of that as, like, ChatChippity 4, because they're version 3, and ChatChippity 0 1 is deep seek r one, reasoning model. That it took him just about $6,000,000 to create this large language model, which is a massive difference. And if true, if it is true that deepseek created, trained, and has developed this model, which is seemingly as useful ish, we'll get into some details in a second, as chatgpt, then the amount of money that AI companies here in America have been saying it takes to develop these models is way blown out of proportion. Sam Altman has been out here for the past year saying, if we just dump 1,000,000,000 of dollars, we can create whatever, And DeepSeek seemingly did it with about $6,000,000 way less than the kind of funding rounds that OpenAI has had and the kind of money they're saying it takes.
Stephen Robles:This is also in light of the new Trump administration supposedly partnering with OpenAI and others to create Stargate, the AI initiative that sought to spend 500,000,000,000 with a b dollars over the next 4 years to develop AI models and security and all of that. And again, $500,000,000,000 is a lot of money, seemingly, again, compared to a very small amount that DeepSeq used to develop its model. So it seems like it was much cheaper and faster to develop, way seemingly faster than models like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Gemini and things like that. So it's a bit of an arms race. Now, with this news, NVIDIA stock took a huge hit, 17%, which that stock has been pretty inflated over the last year.
Stephen Robles:We've talked about that a lot, and some are saying maybe that was just a correction for the market, and this was an opportunity for that to just kinda, like, go down or whatever. But, and the final piece of news before I hear I wanna, Jason, hear your thoughts. OpenAI claimed that China's deep seek might have used results from ChatGPT and OpenAI to help train its model faster. This is a process called distillation, which was a new word for me. Apparently, this is in the AI world, but basically, when, I'll just read this, this is from a Financial Times article.
Stephen Robles:The technique distillation is used by developers to obtain better performance on smaller models by using outputs from larger, more capable ones, allowing them to achieve similar results on specific tasks at a much lower cost. The OpenAI is claiming DeepSeq might have used outputs from OpenAI to help train its model and allow it to be developed for much less money and happen faster. Sam Altman has a problem with this obviously, saying that DeepSeq might have, quote unquote, stolen, some things from OpenAI, which the biggest irony bell rung as everyone said, wait a minute, didn't OpenAI train JWT on the entire Internet and all the content that, you know, OpenAI did not produce? So there's that. And and finally, this is a Chinese company.
Stephen Robles:This is a Chinese owned company, DeepSeek, and with it comes the same implications of things like TikTok, privacy and security issues there. And also, because it is a Chinese company, it is limited in how it will respond and what it will talk about. If you try to ask deep seek about Tiananmen Square, you're not gonna get a lot of information there. Some users have reported asking questions even about, like, President Xi Jinping, and they will see responses start coming from deep seek and then start disappearing in real time because, again, being a Chinese AI startup, there is some censorship there about, about what it can say and what it can do. So that is what DeepSeq is, why, AI companies here in the States are a bit up in arms about it, and they've all been saying things, which we'll talk about in a second, like Sam Altman posting selfies with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella being like, we're cool, like, don't worry about us.
Stephen Robles:And, Mark Zuckerberg is, quote, unquote, not worried about it. We'll go into their direct reactions, but tell me, what has been your, just knowledge of deep syncing this past week, and and correct anything that I might have gotten wrong, please.
Jason Aten:I don't know that you got necessarily a lot anything wrong. There's a lot there. A lot there's a lot there. I think so there's probably a couple pieces here that are worth maybe unpacking for a minute. 1, why is everyone freaking out?
Jason Aten:Right? We can talk about that for a second. And 2 and by freaking out, I mean, like, why did NVIDIA lose a half $1,000,000,000,000 worth of its market cap? Right? And the and the answer there is actually relatively simple.
Jason Aten:You're right that the sort of common wisdom has been that the, you know, NVIDIA makes basically all the chips that do all of this, and the h one hundreds were a part of were restricted by the Biden administration when they did the chip ban that you could not send these chips to China. And so there are reports that DeepSeq still had h one hundreds. We don't know. Like, that's whatever. But semi analysis, I think, was the publication that estimated that they had some number of them, maybe 50000 or 11000 or something like that.
Jason Aten:But DeepSeq has said that they trained the entire thing on h eight 100, which essentially are a version of NVIDIA chips that have reduced memory bandwidth. And that has been, like, the important piece of this is if you think about the number of tokens that you have to use to train one of these models, you need like, NVIDIA secret sauce has been essentially, like, its backhaul of memory, like, the way that it is able to do all that. And so that's sort of, like, the shock to the system is, like, you could train a model just using these much lower capability chips. So that's why NVIDIA stock went down because it's like, well, maybe maybe there's something else here. What's interesting about it is I think what this really revealed is that the entire AI industrial complex is based on this idea that more compute equals better results.
Jason Aten:And to some extent, that has has proven true. But we've talked on this show in the past about how it seems like LLMs are just, like, reaching a plateau point, and they're not necessarily increasing no matter how much compute you throw at them. And I think that with one interesting thing from the whole deep seek situation is that the these this startup had to get very creative in ways that American companies do not have to get creative because they literally just spend $100,000,000,000 and stick more GPUs in Iraq and they just brute force it. Right? Whereas when you can't do that, what do you have to do?
Jason Aten:So they were able to be much, much, much more efficient in the way that they scaled the training. Now the cost, like the $5,500,000 cost, deep seek has been clear that that was just the cost of the final training run. They're, you know, they had to buy GPUs. They had there there's a lot more involved in it. But the but that's still an order of magnitude smaller than what has happened.
Jason Aten:Now one of the keys to that is the distillation piece. Yes. It is ironic that OpenAI is very mad that people might have used their intellectual property to train a model. Hello. Welcome to the way the rest of us have felt for the last several years.
Jason Aten:Like, either it's fine or it's not, but you can't have it both ways. And it's like it's a they're, like, saying it's a violation of OpenAI's terms of, you know, terms of use. And I was like, what about my terms of like, I never said you could change yourself. Whatever. It's It's a
Stephen Robles:good idea. I wanna come up with my own terms. Agreement.
Jason Aten:Exactly. It's time for me to let people post on Facebook, and they're like, I hereby revoke the right for Facebook to use any of my data. Yeah. Exactly. Like, apparently, that that's a real thing, apparently.
Jason Aten:So now I should I should make it.
Stephen Robles:So if you wanna reply to my email or my tweets or my post on threads, you need to agree to my terms of service.
Jason Aten:By replying to this email, you need
Stephen Robles:to agree. Yes.
Jason Aten:Yes. So I think, you know, deep seek got very creative in some of the ways that they train their model. And when I say creative, I mean, they worked within the constraints that they had
Stephen Robles:Right.
Jason Aten:In ways that made their their process much more efficient and in ways that open AI, Google, Meta, whoever has not had to do. Like, it's interesting how, like, creativity thrives in in with constraints. We tend to think of, like, oh, the more resources you have, the more whatever you have, the more creative you'll be. No. Like, the if you wanna make a team creative, like, give them nothing and tell them to build, like, a rocket ship or something.
Stephen Robles:I I love that con I harp on that concept a lot. Even as, I studied music in college, and a lot of times you're just given a blank staff paper, you know, like compose something. It can be like it's very difficult even to get started and where to go, but constrained of like you can only do it in this key signature, you can only use these 7 notes, or you can only use these chords. And it's amazing how creativity can blossom given even extreme constraints. And so that's, like, what it appears that happened here.
Jason Aten:Yeah. And there are a lot of people who are skeptical of DeepSeq's claims. Like, you clearly just had 50,000 h one hundreds, whatever whatever. But, you know, they published a white paper, and the the process that they detailed, you would not do if you had access to 50,000 h one hundred. Now I'm not suggesting that they do or don't.
Jason Aten:I have no idea. I don't know. I'm not even I'm not even an expert on any of this stuff. I'm just saying words, and I don't even know what they mean. But the point is, like, it they could very well just be lying.
Jason Aten:Sure. It doesn't really make sense that they would be lying, partially because if they did get access to 50,000 h 100, like, it's illegal for them to have them. But, like, it's not like the justice department can just show up in China and be like, give us them back. Like, they would the people who would have broken the law would have been the people who sold them to them in the first place kind of a thing. So it's like it it's just
Stephen Robles:Would you have an American company, basically?
Jason Aten:Named NVIDIA. Like, I mean, that's where they're made. Right? It's like some guy at a case company got ahold of a bunch of NVIDIA. It's kinda like the guy the what was it?
Jason Aten:The m 4 MacBook Pro that showed up somewhere in
Stephen Robles:Oh, yeah. In Russia. Yeah. The guy in Russia. Yeah.
Stephen Robles:Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.
Jason Aten:It's probably the same guy has a truck full of h one h one hundred. I don't even around. Definitely not true. But the difference is it's still going to take the the massive amounts of compute to develop what they call, like, the leading edge of the frontier models. Right?
Jason Aten:It's these, it's it's you've which is r one is a it's similar in comparison to o one from OpenAI. I hate that we have to use all these weird names because OpenAI just ruined everything for everyone. It's just ridiculous. Right? But r one is based on v 3.
Jason Aten:So everyone freaked out with r one. The stock market tanked basically on Monday. But do you know when v 3 came out?
Stephen Robles:Wasn't it like it was last year?
Jason Aten:It was it was the day after Christmas.
Stephen Robles:Day after Christmas. Yeah. Yeah.
Jason Aten:This has been out for that long, and it took this long for the freak out to happen because just no one was paying any attention. Like, no one cared. I mean, there were some things that happened in the inner room. Like, there was the holidays, and then there was an inauguration, and there was, like Yeah. All kinds of stuff going on.
Jason Aten:And suddenly, it's like, oh, look what they did over there. So there's there's a lot of moving pieces. I think that the the two most interesting things are, 1, it's going to force American companies to adapt in ways that they wouldn't have otherwise, and I think that that's a good thing. Because these the Chinese startup, like, you put all these restrictions on them, they have to come up with this this way. And it's almost like shooting, the American companies in the foot.
Jason Aten:Like, the chip ban, which we thought was going to be a way to to limit China's capabilities to develop this kind of AI clearly just, like, didn't work in that way. Right. Right? Because they're gonna just find out find different ways to do that. And so and then the second thing I feel like that this is really, like, an indicator as we start it is bringing back to people's mind the fact that there are a lot of privacy implications even when you're using American, like, the Gemini chat gbt whatever.
Jason Aten:I mean, I use chat gbt 30 times, 40 times a day. Like I'm using it constantly. I've been using it this whole time that we've been talking because there's things that I'm like, oh, yo. Well, because for example, I fed their white paper into chat gbt. I read the white paper, didn't understand any of it.
Jason Aten:I I like the title. That was it. That's the only part of the white paper I understood. And so then I loaded it into chat gbt. I'm like, explain this to me.
Jason Aten:And it does. It does a very good job. And then it'll be like, did you wanna ask me questions? And I I did. So I I'm giving a lot of information to chat gbt.
Jason Aten:Would I wanna give that same kind of information to a Chinese start up that I really have no idea what's happening? I don't know. Probably probably not.
Stephen Robles:Right. And and the 2 more factors, deep seek is claiming to be profitable, which again, these are all claims, have to verify it. But profitability is not something that AI companies have achieved yet. Mostly because they're dumping 1,000,000,000 and 1,000,000,000 of dollars in developing these models. So even with a $200 a month pro subscription, ChatGPT is not a profitable product, or a OpenAI is not a profitable company yet.
Stephen Robles:I will say I'm sure OpenAI is glad they had not gone public yet, because I imagine if they had a stock on the market on Monday, it'd have taken a huge hit. So profitability is something else, it seems, like DeepSeq is winning on. And, also, correct me if I'm wrong, it's open source or at least partially open source.
Jason Aten:Correct. Well, so they're making it so that you can inspect, like, the code or whatever. And then, also, if I remember correctly, they're lice they're making it available to license to so that other people can build products on top of it.
Stephen Robles:Right. Which, again, something that OpenAI has not done. And so it is
Jason Aten:Wait. You mean they're not open? OpenAI?
Stephen Robles:Not open source.
Jason Aten:So, you know, that's actually an interesting point, though. Most of this you can blame. You can put at the foot of open AI's decision that when they was it 4.5 or 4, whatever whatever one they came out with, I guess it's not 4.5. They're 3.5 and then 4 when they're like, yeah, we're not open anymore. Had they been open, things would look a lot different.
Jason Aten:And and wouldn't if there's going to be an open source l o m capability out there, I think we would want it to be an American company, not a Chinese company. And so it's kind I think it was Joanna Stern. This was in context to Sam Altman's complaints that how dare someone scrape the Internet of information or scrape our information and feed it into their thing where she talked about Karmazah something. And I think that, like, on this at the same time, like, you make these decisions, decisions have consequences. One of those consequences is there is now a Chinese owl, that's willing to be like, yeah.
Jason Aten:We're open source. Like, have at it.
Stephen Robles:Right. And so that's, again, a new question as, do are these large language models and AI companies, would it be better if they were open source? Would development happen faster? Could it be cheaper? Now, notably, Mark Zuckerberg over at Meta, their LLM, codenamed Llama, is open source, and that is one of the reasons why Mark Zuckerberg says he isn't worried about deep seek.
Stephen Robles:He also plans to incorporate, whatever they find in DeepSeek back into Llama. Now, Meta doesn't have as much, I will say, skin in the game when it comes to their LLM, meaning it's not a product that they monetize. You know, you don't there's no subscription for Meta Llama. You know, it's basically in your Facebook Messenger and Instagram app and creating clones of creators for Instagram DMs or whatever. So he has less to lose than a company like OpenAI, whose entire business is ChatGPT and large language models that are generating stuff, and they monetize by having people pay for either API access on the commercial side or for their Chat GPT Plus, or Pro subscription.
Stephen Robles:So again, raises the question, is an open source LLM the future we want? And that goes against how OpenAI is running. Now you wrote an article about Sam Altman's response. Can you tell me about that?
Jason Aten:Well, so this was, just to be clear, not the response where they're mad. This was, you know, when it first came out, he he posted on x that he found it impressive and that it was invigorating. And it is impressive. Sure. But it was interesting to me that it took this to motivate the CEO of a company that is taking money from customers.
Jason Aten:That this is what it took for them to be like, we should make our stuff better and we should release things faster. I was like, maybe the fact that you're taking money from people should motivate you to make the products faster. And but, again, we've talked about this a million like, a bunch of times. There's a difference between when you are building products in order to attract investors and when you're building products for customers. And even though you might be doing the 2 things at the same time, there's definitely a shift in the mode.
Jason Aten:And right now, they're still building stuff to get more investment, not necessarily to please their customers even though they have people paying 20. Now one thing they did do that, and this is not I didn't even reference this in the article, but they did say and this happened, like, so fast. It was amazing because they talked about they're gonna make some of the o one capabilities available, like, on their free tier. And then they came out after this after r one came out, and they're like, and we're gonna make it for our for the plus plan, which is I think that's what they call the plan that you pay $20 a month for Yeah. That you will now get, like, is it, like, a 100 queries a month or something with o one?
Jason Aten:Like, basically, what they're saying is they're like, we please don't go use that. Please, please don't go keep keying us the money. We will do like, but if you ask yourself, like, if you can afford that inference, why weren't you doing that anyway? So, like, like, I I know that there were probably people who listen to us who are like, please don't use the line, like, this is what competition does, but this is what competition does.
Stephen Robles:Literally. Yeah.
Jason Aten:This is what you get.
Stephen Robles:Literally. Now using deep seek so you can go on the web to deepseek.com, drive v one and r one, basically for free. Just try it out. I went to sign up via the web this morning. There's a big banner on the top of the page.
Stephen Robles:It says, due to large scale malicious attacks on deep seek services, registration may be busy. And I was like, Okay. Well, that sounds great. So I went I went to the app because you can download the app, at least for now, and, you can download it for free. You can use it like you use ChatGPT.
Stephen Robles:And I will say, you know, one of the things I do with chatgpt very frequently is give it a transcript of a YouTube video and ask it for a title, description, and tag ideas. I just ask it to do that. And its response to that judges how useful I find it, and DeepSeek did a pretty good job. I gave it a whole video transcript. It was really long.
Stephen Robles:Gave me a title, description, gave me some chapter markers, which I'm like, I don't know how you got time stamps from a transcript, but there's no there were no time stamps in the transcript. It's just plain text, no numbers or times, but it seemed to guess. I what the time might be and gave me a list of YouTube tags, typically I have to ask ChachipT to give that to me in a comma separated list, but deep seek, they do it automatically. They just gave it to me exactly how I want it and, bottom line it's not bad. It's pretty good.
Stephen Robles:You know, if you use TFTP for things, you could replace with deep seek right at least right now, and it seems like it would give you on par responses. Have you and you've used it a couple times?
Jason Aten:Yeah. I used it some and I just fed it, the article I wrote, an article I published. And one of the things I've noticed is it does a it does a good job of summarizing, but it also gives you a significantly, like, longer summary than chat g p t. Like, a lot of chat g p t summaries are, like, 3 sentences. Yeah.
Jason Aten:Yeah. You know? And this was, like, 3 paragraphs. Now it was only, like, a 9 paragraph article, but the point is, like, it so it's, like, I'm not sure how much you actually summarized it, but I said I didn't have time to read the whole thing, but it actually, like, did a pretty good job explaining the points of that article
Stephen Robles:Right.
Jason Aten:And in recapping sort of the takeaway. And, I mean, like, I it's it's good. It meets the standard of, like, yep. It did the thing I asked it to. So
Stephen Robles:Exactly. Now, finally, the privacy and security concern. Again, this is a Chinese owned company, a Chinese developed AI. Again, if the TikTok fiasco recently has been any indication, the US government might have some things to say about that. It's under investigation right now in the US and Europe, DeepSeq is, and it was actually removed from the App Store in Italy, right now.
Stephen Robles:And so if you wanna download it, now is your opportunity, I guess, to see Oh, it'll be in the US, App Store, at least on the iPhone and and Android devices. And side note, people were asking on social media what's gonna happen to TikTok. I think we're still in a we don't know phase. Right? Like, we don't know.
Jason Aten:The latest news apparently is that, Oracle and Microsoft are going to buy it.
Stephen Robles:This is so
Jason Aten:weird. Which is the here's the thing. That's exactly the scenario we were looking at, like, 5 years ago was that Oracle and Microsoft are going to buy it. And then we ended up with this weird project Texas where Oracle manages, like, the servers in the US, and Satya Nadella went on stage, and he's like, that was the weirdest weekend of my whole life. Like, they tried to get us to buy to now, apparently, they're back to it.
Jason Aten:I don't I don't know. I I think still the most likely scenario is that there's some kind of a weird deal, but that weird deal isn't actually going to meet the the requirements of the law. And so there's going to be an attempt to get the House of Representatives to change the law and then pass the Senate so that it meets the form of the deal, but that's not going to work. And this and eventually, it's gonna end up in the Supreme Court again. And I I think the most likely scenario is that TikTok is is gonna end up going away still.
Jason Aten:I know people are gonna be mad at me for saying that. I think that's still the most but, again, I don't think it's the only scenario. I think it's still the most likely scenario. I don't think that Microsoft can buy TikTok and have that actually again, the world is weird right now. So in a normal world, I don't think it would pass, like, regulatory antitrust scrutiny.
Stephen Robles:Yeah. We'll see. But anyway, that's that's DeepSeek. Hopefully, that has explained what the big deal has been this past week, how it has shaken up American AI companies, and going forward, what it means for open not open AI, but open source LLMs, a price to train these models, and where the money might go in the coming year. But stay tuned.
Stephen Robles:We'll cover it, as it develops. Real quick, couple quick things. Mark Zuckerberg, Meta had its earnings call earlier this week, and he wants to make Facebook great again. He wants to bring the platform and make it feel like it did back in the day, and it seems like it's talking about Facebook specifically, not just all the things, you know, because Meta is now the company, but Facebook. So I guess, maybe they'll bring the Poke back.
Stephen Robles:Remember the Poke?
Jason Aten:Well, you know, they are bringing like, if you look at Instagram, they just added the feature where you can see all of the reels that your friends like. And by the way, the teens, not happy about this at all. And it just Wait.
Stephen Robles:Why are they happy about it?
Jason Aten:They're not happy about it.
Stephen Robles:Right. Why not?
Jason Aten:Nobody you don't okay. Do you remember when the news feed came out on Facebook?
Stephen Robles:Yeah. Are
Jason Aten:you too young for that? Okay.
Stephen Robles:No. No. No. I was there.
Jason Aten:People were furious because now there was this public thread. Because it used to be that if I wanted to see what Steven Roboz did, I had to go to your page. Right? Sure. But now Facebook just started aggregating all of that stuff.
Jason Aten:And all of a sudden, all of your friends could see all the posts that you liked, all the photos that you liked, all of this stuff. It just came up. So now it's like, I don't necessarily want my friends to see that I like that reel or whatever. Like Right. You know, it it just became maybe you just wanted to like maybe you're a teenage boy, and you just wanted to like the reel posted by the teenage girl that you like, and you didn't want everyone else to know that you did.
Jason Aten:Like, it's it's a weird thing that's happening. Like, we went through all of this a long time ago, and now we're going through the whole thing again with a generation of people who don't remember what that was like, and they're not happy.
Stephen Robles:Yeah. Okay. I get that. Can you turn it off? Can you turn
Jason Aten:off? No.
Stephen Robles:Nope. Oh, you can't turn it off?
Jason Aten:Does Instagram let you turn anything off?
Stephen Robles:You can turn off notifications.
Jason Aten:Could you turn off the stupid vertical grid, which is the thing that's really making people laugh.
Stephen Robles:A whole article about that on Instagram.
Jason Aten:Made me so mad.
Stephen Robles:It does I don't it looks weird. It it
Jason Aten:went. It was the only thing left from original Instagram. Oh. I mean, I guess, technically, filters are left, but they're not the same, obviously.
Stephen Robles:No. Yeah. I mean, I don't think people use filters anymore.
Jason Aten:Nobody uses filters.
Stephen Robles:No filters.
Jason Aten:But that's because no one wants to use them anymore. But the square grid, everyone wanted like, it's the thing people probably thought about the most. What will this look like in my grid?
Stephen Robles:Right. Well, people used to design, like, posts so that they would look like a complete now that's broken. It's all broken now. Okay. And you have you have one last article here about Zuckerberg talking about, what he said on the earnings call.
Stephen Robles:What was that?
Jason Aten:I went out on a limb. I went out on a limb because Zuckerberg said on the earnings call, basically, that, they're they're excited about working with an administration that'll have their back. He says this is gonna be a big year for redefining our relationship with governments. We now have a US administration that is proud of our leading companies, prioritizes American technology winning, and that will defend our values and interests abroad. And I'm sure that every the the instant reaction to that was he's just pandering to Trump, which is yes.
Jason Aten:Also, he's right. Because the the biggest beef that all of these tech companies have had, and part of the reason that you saw them line up behind Trump, is that over and over and over again, the tech companies are being told, here's how you have to build your products. Here's how you have to design your products. Here's how you have to compete, not by American regulators, but by Europe. And over and over again, like, Meta especially faced 2 major issues in the EU.
Jason Aten:One of them over how it, stores and processes user data. The I think it's the Digital Markets Act maybe requires it's either that or the Digital Services Act. I don't remember the difference between them, but it requires that they only store data for European users in data. But that's just not how the Internet works, really. Like, it's very hard.
Jason Aten:Like so if you if someone in Europe likes a post of someone in the US, where's that metadata stored? Like, it's just not possible. And so they got fined a whole bunch. And Meta has tried to negotiate with Europe, needs the White House to help them. And the Biden administration is like, we don't who who are you again?
Jason Aten:We haven't have we met? We we don't we're sorry. We there's no one here who knows what you're talking about. Like, just totally pretended like nothing happened. And it's like arguing that the administration should stick up for American tech companies abroad is not the same thing as saying that those tech companies, everything they're doing is good.
Jason Aten:I think my record is pretty clean on my views on Meta and Mark Zuckerberg. I don't think you can argue me argue that I'm, like, a meta evangelist. Right? Like, no one will ever accuse me of that. But in this case, I think he has a point.
Jason Aten:I think the what he sees is that there is a very transactional president that as long as he's in the right position, he's going to be able to influence the administration to do things that the last administration wouldn't do. And, again, I think that, like, the Department of Justice in the last administration was filing antitrust cases. Fine. Like, I don't know that I think all of that makes sense, but I think that that's where that should happen. The EU determining that the iPhone should have USB c everywhere, that seems weird.
Jason Aten:Like or that you can't, you know, AirPods should automatically work just the same with everywhere else. Like, all that stuff is just kinda kinda ridiculous.
Stephen Robles:Can I just say the picture you chose, that article too, I think really encapsulates the Zuckerberg look which it's just Yeah? It's amazing. But Yeah. I like it. I saw on that clip from the Lex Fridman podcast, I guess Zuckerberg was on it a while ago, and Lex Fridman asked him to do a real life CAPTCHA.
Stephen Robles:He handed him a piece of paper with a CAPTCHA printed out, and he said, Can you circle all the bicycles? That was pretty genius. Alright. Personal tech. Talk to me about your email situation because I think you're gonna make a grave mistake here.
Jason Aten:You think I'm gonna make a grave mistake?
Stephen Robles:That's right.
Jason Aten:Okay. There's 2 pieces to this email situation. 1, I'm curious how people are managing their email. I'm I'm curious what apps people are really enjoying. I'm still mostly using Spark.
Jason Aten:I play with a lot of different apps. I have used Superhuman. Really like it. Superhuman has a killer feature of of AI. You can it has an AI feature built in where, essentially, you can talk to it like you would chat g p t, but it can answer based on your emails, which is actually super useful.
Jason Aten:You can be like you just ask at what time does my flight leave for wherever I'm going, and it'll look in your emails and it'll tell you the answer. That kind of thing is great. It's like sort of the promise of what Apple has been saying Apple Intelligence is gonna do to Siri, but you can actually just do it with superhuman. Right? Right.
Jason Aten:So that's great. But I, for many, many years, have had a personal email at which is a dot Mac email. Should I even tell people that? Whatever. It doesn't matter.
Stephen Robles:Well, don't tell them the email address, but I
Jason Aten:won't tell them the email address. But I I was I was an og.mac user before there was Mobile Me, before there was Icloud.
Stephen Robles:I paid for
Jason Aten:I win. Part of
Stephen Robles:I win.
Jason Aten:Best part yes. The best part is when you walk into an Apple store and they're like, do you want me to email you this receipt? And you're like, yeah. Here's my email address at mac.com. They're like, wow.
Jason Aten:Like, they're jealous. I'm like, dude, your your email address is at apple.com. Like, come on. You can't be jealous of this.
Stephen Robles:I try to I try to play that card sometimes if I'm in the Apple store and it'll be like, at mac.com, and I shoot them a look, and they just keep typing away on their thing. They don't get
Jason Aten:They probably are used to it now, but, also, it's funny because the reason none of them have it is they're all 26 and weren't weren't didn't have email addresses when it came out. Although, the funny the the best part is if you have a dot mac email address, you also have a dot me or an at me.com Yeah.
Stephen Robles:You have a lot.
Jason Aten:Aticloud. Yeah. You get them all.
Stephen Robles:And also, I said Iweb before, which I did use Iweb back in the day, but the service, it was a dot mac account that you would pay for. And I remember I I paid $99 a year for dotmac, I think which gave like, allowed you to publish a website through Iweb to, like, Apple's whatever. And Right. That was, like, one of my first websites. Whatever.
Stephen Robles:So but anyway, it was the dotmac account you would pay for.
Jason Aten:So what I wanna do though is I have been slowly trying to like, I don't give out that email address anymore. Right. I give I have a Gmail address that I give out. And part of that's because Gmail has better filtering, and I can just you know, I just want anything. I have to, like, give someone an email address.
Jason Aten:I give them my Gmail address. But what I wanna do is, like, find a way to stop using my Mac address for anything other than, like, my family, my kids. So what I wanna be able to do is, like, like, if I'm getting an email at that, I know that it's a priority automatically. Like, because of the people who have access to emailing that. And this has been a nightmare because, like, ultimately, what I'd like to do is have my dot mac email or atmac.com.
Jason Aten:It's not dotmac. I don't know why I keep saying that. My mac.com email using the mail app on the phone. And the only notifications I get from that app are from that means that those are people who should be emailing me. And everything else is gonna be in a separate email because everything else is a Gmail address.
Jason Aten:And so I can just put it in Superhuman or Spark, and I'll just know that I'm never gonna have personal emails in there. So when I'm doing personal stuff, I'm I'm never gonna even be in the same app. And I don't know. Is this futile, Steven?
Stephen Robles:So you could I mean
Jason Aten:Or is the dream let me ask you this question. Does the dream make sense? I wanna have an email address that only certain people can email so that I know. Because here's the thing, I get so much email every day. Like, hundreds and hundreds of messages, and what I want is to be able to open a different app and know this app just has the emails I care about.
Stephen Robles:So here's the thing. I'm gonna tell you how I use my email, and maybe it
Jason Aten:will Okay. Good.
Stephen Robles:Give you a tip. So my mac.com Apple address, it's also my Apple ID, and I always tell people when they set up a phone or if they're creating an Apple ID, just use Apple's default mail, cause it gets messy when you use, like, a personal Gmail or whatever for your Apple ID email. Anyway, that's just the thing. I don't do anything with that email address. All it is is my Apple services stuff, like my Apple ID and then like Apple purchases, whatever, and that's it.
Stephen Robles:I don't use it for anything else. And then I don't even have it, like, syncing mail, to some of my devices. Like, because it's just receipts from like iTunes or whatever. So Mhmm. I don't do anything with that.
Stephen Robles:Then personally, I like to consolidate everything where I don't have to go to multiple places, which is gonna seem contradictory in a second. But what I've done is I've I have a Fastmail account, which is my personal and business email, but I prodigiously filter my emails, and I do that in a couple ways. In Fastmail, I have many rules set up. I talked about this rule a lot of times, but I have a rule where if the word unsubscribe or manage my email preferences, if either of those phrases are in the body text of an email, an email immediately gets sent to a folder rather than hitting my inbox. So that one filter alone cuts down on a ton of spam.
Stephen Robles:Now I check that folder pretty much every day, but I just scroll through it quickly and see if there's anything there. And that allows me to not feel like I have to do things with those mails, but I can still see it. And then I also they sponsored my videos a long time ago, but I pay for it now. I use SaneBox. And I use SaneBox both on my Icloud email and my Fastmail account, and SaneBox does a really good job of filtering things, and then you can train it.
Stephen Robles:So you can give it a white list of people you know, or even when you get emails, you could tell it, this person I wanna put on my white list, always send them to my inbox. And doing that for, like, the past 6, 8 months, my inbox is really clean. I'll only get a couple new emails in there a day, and they're ones that actually matter. And then, typically, what I will do is I'll jump into the mailboxes. I'll go to my newsletter mailbox, which is where that unsubscribe filter goes, see what's there just for a second, a quick flip through it, and then I go to the SaneBox folders, one is like SaneBox later, one is SaneBox news, just to see if there's anything there and I needed to do anything.
Stephen Robles:And for me, I know that seems, like, redundant. Like, why don't you just have that all in your inbox and just deal with it all there? For me, I operate on inbox 0. I really try to get to no emails in my inbox at the end of the day. And if those were all hitting my inbox, then I would have to take action on all of them, either deleting or sending them to a folder proactively or or manually.
Stephen Robles:Whereas, in the system I have now, I can jump into those folders, quickly see the emails, reply to one if it warrants that, and I don't feel like I have to do anything after that. Like, those emails are living in archived folders that I just don't think about, and then I can live in my inbox where I really just see emails that I that I wanna see. And then thirdly, I use the VIP feature, like, pretty significantly, which I don't know if Spark has a VIP type feature. But that's one of the main reasons why I use the native mail app because I can mark people as VIP. 1, I'll get notifications just for those people, and I'm very selective on who's a VIP, and there's a VIP mailbox.
Stephen Robles:So if you really wanted to, you can go to the VIP mailbox in mail and just see messages from the people you've marked as VIP. And so rather than have, like, 2 apps or 2 different accounts, I basically put everything to my Fastmail and then filter it both with my unsubscribe, manage email preference filters, SaneBox also filtering it, and thirdly VIP to really mark the important people, and that has been a good system for me recently.
Jason Aten:I think if I had just if I hit this the only way this works I've been thinking about this as you've been talking, which I was listening to what you were saying.
Stephen Robles:No. No. No. Yeah.
Jason Aten:But I think that the only way this works is if I created a new email address and only gave that to the people I actually wanted to be able to get a hold of me personally all the time and then just left everything else alone and said whatever. Same idea. Whatever happens, whatever happens happens. Because what I want is to not have any email in that inbox that's not from a person that I actually feel like is important to hear from not work related.
Stephen Robles:Like So here I think the the one false presupposition you might have with that, that even if you created a new email address today, and only gave it out to people that you want to be in your inbox, enough time passing, that will get out there.
Jason Aten:Mhmm.
Stephen Robles:Like, you will get spam to that email address. At the very least, someone adds that email to their contact, to your contact on their phone, and they download an app that asks for access to their contacts, and they say allow all, your email's gonna be out there. And so I I do not believe that even if you are super careful that it can't like, it'll get out there eventually, just give it enough time. So the other two things I I do my dot mac email address, it's I've had it for a long time, and so one of the things I I did was I actually forward I have an auto forward that sends all my email from that Doc Mac email to my Fastmail. So and then that can it still goes through all the filters because it's going through the Fastmail stuff, but then I can still get, like, my Apple receipts or whatever in the one place, and I can filter them how I want.
Stephen Robles:And I also have forwards from my personal Gmail that I had for a long time and that I attached to my Google, like, YouTube stuff, and I will forward certain emails from there into Fastmail. And so I'm still getting the email from my long standing email addresses in one place, my Fastmail, but they still go through all the filters. Now the one bug that has been bothering me, and again, this is something you would have to deal with. When I buy something through Apple Pay, either on the web, in an app or whatever, like on my phone, I've told it so many times, when you go to settings app, you go to wallet and Apple Pay, you can set the email and phone number that is sent to a merchant by default when you make a purchase, and it does not stick. It does not stick.
Stephen Robles:It always goes back to my dap Mac because it's my default Apple ID, and I just made a purchase yesterday. It was to renew my stupid license tag. It was it was, like, Hillsborough County, and they actually had Apple Pay. I was, like, oh, I can Apple Pay my registration renewal. Let's do it.
Stephen Robles:And I didn't take the 2 seconds to look at what email and phone was being sent through the Apple Pay transaction, and it defaulted back to my dot mac.com address. And I was so mad, and I was like and then I got and then the receipt eventually came to my inbox because it hit my Apple ID, like, email. It was forward to my Fastmail, and I saw it, and SaneBox put it into a folder, and I saw that it was there, and I was like, okay. Well, I have it in my Fastmail, so it's fine. But I do I was that part, I try to be very careful about to make sure, because it keeps going back to my dot MAC address for whatever reason, but that's the only monkey wrench in my system.
Jason Aten:Alright. Listeners, email the other guy at pow at primary tech dot f m, and and I wanna hear what you do. I wanna know.
Stephen Robles:Yes. Let us here tell us your elaborate Rube Goldberg email machine. That's what I
Jason Aten:have. Yeah. Or or we could just go select all delete. That's what I might start doing, just every day.
Stephen Robles:Listen. I'm not opposed. My mother-in-law thinks she has a 100,000 emails in her, Hotmail, and I'm like.
Jason Aten:In her Hotmail. Well, that explains it right there.
Stephen Robles:That's You gotta declare bankruptcy on that. You can't even. You can't even. Well, let us know. You can email the other guy at primary tech dot f m or email email us your old tech too, podcast at primary tech dot f m.
Stephen Robles:We wanna see it, or you can join the community at social.primarytech.fm. That's a website, and you can go there, and there's a new post every time we publish an episode, and you can comment on it. And if you have a picture of your old tech or just tell us about it, we'd love to do that, share it on the next episode. Now we're gonna go record a bonus episode about my grand opening store experience, and Jason, he has an interesting Mac Mini story. So we're gonna talk about that.
Stephen Robles:And if you wanna listen to the bonus episodes, you can support the show at primarytech.fm, click bonus episodes and support us there, or you can support us directly in Apple Podcasts. Leave us a 5 star rating and review in Apple Podcasts too, and you get a shout out at the top of the show. Thanks for watching. Thanks for listening. We'll catch you next time.
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