Transcript

[00:00:00.570] Announcer: Welcome to Tech News of the Week with your host, a very put out millipede.

[00:00:08.850] Ned: Welcome to Tacky Tech News Weeky. Weky weeky.

[00:00:13.470] Chris: I think everything you just said was wrong.

[00:00:15.890] Ned: It’s close enough. Punk rock. Whatever. This is our quick Thursday show that touches on some tech garbage that we pulled out of the morass of media that is our media landscape. That’s a lot of m’s, m’s and m’s and m’s. In case you’re wondering, there is no main show this week. You didn’t miss it. We were on vacation. Well, I was on vacation last week and Chris is terrible at scheduling, so.

[00:00:40.800] Chris: Here we are, ironically, also why I never go on vacation.

[00:00:46.510] Ned: Let’s dig into some terrible tech news.

[00:00:49.390] Chris: Super duper. So how might AI Take over Hollywood? Let us count the ways. So you’ve probably heard about the whole Screen Actors Guild Writers Guild strike thing going on, right?

[00:01:07.430] Ned: Yep.

[00:01:08.300] Chris: About how the cartel that makes major motion pictures basically wants actors to sign away their images and their voices for free forever and make writers basically be unnecessary.

[00:01:19.850] Ned: Yep. All that sounds familiar.

[00:01:22.170] Chris: Well, those aren’t the only ways that AI. Is poised to make an oh, joy so unsurprisingly. Well, I mean, I guess maybe some people will be. Surprisingly, AI. Is actually already in active use in Hollywood. In particular in visual effects houses, speeding up renders and generating fantastical backgrounds, like certain scenes in everything, everywhere, all at once. Okay, but here are a couple of other future potential AI uses to chew on. First, and in my mind, most interestingly, using an actual actor’s voice as the dubbed voice for an overseas distribution. Now, for a long time, there have been foreign language versions of Hollywood movies. These movies used separate speakers who are native to the language to dub over the original actor. In many cases to hilarious effect.

[00:02:21.940] Ned: Indeed.

[00:02:24.430] Chris: Now, in certain cases, the actors do their own dubs for foreign movies. But not all actors can be Antonio Banderas, who apparently does his own dubs in at least five languages, because, of course, he does.

[00:02:37.810] Ned: Wow.

[00:02:40.690] Chris: The value prop here, as it were, is that AI could make an actor’s voice sound the same. So it could be used for the 40 to 50 languages that movie theaters or movie distributors want movies to be released in. Not even Antonio can do that kind of heavy lifting. It’s an interesting use case, and some would argue a troubling one on the one guess.

[00:03:08.480] Ned: Yeah.

[00:03:10.030] Chris: You know, I would be fairly interested to hear Tom Hanks speak Slovakian. On the other hand, that’s a whole subgenre of work for voice actors that could disappear overnight.

[00:03:27.970] Ned: It could, yeah.

[00:03:29.730] Chris: So that’s one. Here’s another one. What about using AI to create storyboards? Not every director is James Cameron. And by that I mean to say not all directors can draw.

[00:03:46.330] Ned: True. Yeah.

[00:03:48.010] Chris: Now, this one I have more reservations about. I think it is an awful idea that some executives probably can’t wait to put into action. This is going to create repetitive and uncreative shot ideas and planning for scenes that is just repeating what is in the training material in the same way that Chat GPT creates repetitive and uncreative storylines. So we’re talking about taking the banality of AI responses and projecting it into three dimensions, all in the name of saving a buck.

[00:04:25.350] Ned: How is that any different than any modern Marvel movie in the last five to ten years? Let’s be honest, I got that reference. Of course you did. If people want to know a little bit more about sort of some of the other things have been done with AI, patrick Willems has a really good video on it on YouTube, and I’ll include a link in the show notes so you could check it out. AWS Starts Charging for Public IPV Four In a blog post set to coincide with the annual AWS NYC Summit, jeff Barr announced that the cloud titan would begin charging for public I-P-V Four addresses on February 1, 2024. Previously, you were only charged for an unattached elastic I-P-V Four allocation. But once that elastic IP was associated with another resource, like a load balancer or an EC Two instance, the elastic IP itself was free. I mean, the cost was probably bundled into the other resource in some way, but you were no longer paying directly for that public IPV Four address. The new charge will be a mere zero $5 an hour, or 0.5 cents an hour, which totals to about $3.60 a month if you keep it up for the entire month, which, I mean isn’t much if you’re being frugal about your public IPV Four addresses.

[00:05:56.220] Ned: It could be a serious chunk of change if you were hogging a few 24s, with each of them costing you about $900 a month. Now, the justification, of course, is the scarcity of public I-P-V Four address space and the need for AWS to continue to purchase more addresses at an ever rising cost. What’s a poor, poor cloud architect to do about all this? Well, go I-P-V six. Of course, Duh and AWS does provide some guidance in the blog post around enabling I-P-V Six in your AWS environments. That is not a trivial task, which is perhaps why they’ve given six months notice about the price hike. Reaction from the Hoy Poloi has been mixed with most people understanding that the public IPV Four address space is a dwindling resource, while rightly pointing out that AWS has not exactly embraced I-P-V Six for all of its services, perhaps that will change in the next six months as the price change looms ever closer. Or more likely, most organizations will simply pay the extra cost and move on with their lives. I think I know which way it’s going to go.

[00:07:13.530] Chris: Speaking of which, companies are setting up cloud services for private AI instances for quite the pretty penny. So one thing about online AI services like Chat, GPT or Dali is that the data that you put into them becomes someone else’s property in these specific cases that someone else is OpenAI. But there are hundreds of these services, so insert whatever name you would like and the result is going to be the same. Right, so that’s a problem. Enterprising companies are starting to run private instances of AI services to get around this particular concern, and companies like Nvidia are all too happy to help them to do it.

[00:08:05.600] Ned: Chaching, for a price to run private.

[00:08:10.760] Chris: Instances on the latest and greatest GPU laden systems in the Nvidia DGX cloud, companies can expect a starting price of $37,000 per instance per month, emphasis on starting price.

[00:08:30.600] Ned: I mean, no one pays list, but yes.

[00:08:33.990] Chris: Now, to be fair, these are the bleedingest of the bleeding edge instances hosted by Nvidia themselves, so it makes sense that they’d be crushingly expensive. Also probably has nothing to do with the GPU shortage that we’ve seen in the marketplace. Now, AWS and Azure have their own options, but if you want to get something close to enterprise grade, you’re still looking at a healthy five digit monthly bill for companies like Samsung, who, you’ll remember, had a bit of an oopsie when their engineers gave OpenAI proprietary code. That cost is going to be a drop in the bucket after all. Can you truly put a price on peace of mind or I guess to rephrase, can you truly put a price on protecting intellectual property?

[00:09:26.710] Ned: Yes.

[00:09:27.430] Chris: Anyone? Think of the data.

[00:09:30.390] Ned: Think of the data. Yeah. Isn’t it funny how GPUs were in a shortage because of the crypto boom, and then that went bust, and immediately something else arose to make GPUs really hard to find and expensive.

[00:09:47.470] Chris: Hang on a second, let me just get this tin hat out of the there we go.

[00:09:52.110] Ned: Get it situated. Okay, fire away. All right. FCC is updating their broadband Internet standard to match reality. The reality of ten years ago, I should say. It has been nearly a decade since the FCC formally adopted the metric of 25 megabits down and three megabits up as broadband Internet, a standard that was hilariously outdated even at the time. The standard has become increasingly pathetic as the years have marched on and gigabit Ethernet has become increasingly available outside of major metropolitan areas. Hell, I live just shy of farm country, as Chris Will attest, and I get one gigabit per second from Verizon. So, FCC chairperson Jessica Rosenwarsel. Close enough. Has proposed a new standard of 100 megabits up and 20 megabits down with a goal of bringing affordable broadband Internet to all Americans. She rightly points out that Internet is now a requirement of daily life, like running water or electricity, and it needs to be widely available and affordable to US residents. It’s almost stick with me here. It’s almost like it should be treated as a utility and not a for profit industry.

[00:11:20.010] Chris: Talk crazy talk.

[00:11:22.650] Ned: Sit on that for a moment. Anyway, America and all that. Consummate Jackass and besmircher of Reese’s peanut butter cups. Ajit Pie served as the previous chairperson of the FCC and chose not to raise the standard and instead hoped the, quote, free market would fix everything. It turns out the free market doesn’t fix anything except the lack of a second yacht for ISP executives with a Democratic majority in the FCC board as of two weeks ago. Woohoo. There’s a good chance that the new proposal might actually make it through.

[00:12:03.750] Chris: Fingers crossed.

[00:12:05.120] Ned: Fingers crossed. And they might roll back that net neutrality decision that Ajit made as well. That’s also on the docket, and they actually have the majority to do it at this point.

[00:12:18.810] Chris: Interesting.

[00:12:21.050] Ned: All right, well, that’s it for Tech News of the Week. Thanks for listening. We’ll be back to our regularly scheduled main episode, Cadence, next week. Good luck out there, and may dinu, bless and keep you. Bye.